We’ve been in Boston for two suppers now, and have had two very different restaurant meals.

On Saturday, on the way back from the Children’s Museum, we stopped at Legal Sea Foods at Park Square. I’d always had good experiences at Legal, and although it’s a chain, it has at least the veneer of being local, and I knew the service would be excellent.

I was wrong.

We were shown to our table, our order was taken. And then we never saw our waiter again. We waited too long for our appetizers, too long for our main course, and nobody ever bothered to ask if we wanted dessert or coffee. The check never came, and I was forced to hunt down a manager to get it; even then, she left immediately and I had to hunt down someone else to actually pay. While the food was excellent, the abysmal service ruined what would have otherwise been a very good night out. Mindful of [[Johnny]]’s dictate that one should always report problems like this, I sent a full report to Legal by email; I can only hope that we caught them on a bad night.

Last night was as different as you could hope for on the service spectrum.

It was [[Catherine]]’s birthday yesterday, and mindful of her love for “small plate eating” — dim sum, tapas, etc. — I made reservations for us at Tapeo on Newbury Street after reading generally favourable reviews online.

The service at Tapeo was excellent, from the host at the entrance through to our server who was patient, helpful, aware of children, and just generally a pleasant person to interact with. She made the meal memorable.

While it’s difficult to recreate the vibrant “belly up to the bar for whatever’s available today” experience of a bar in Spain, Tapeo’s food was great too: somewhere in there we had baked goat cheese, battered shrimp with green sauce, salmon balls, garlic potatoes, duck with berry sauce and grilled asparagus on toast with an olive/anchovy tapenade. I’m not entirely sure what a tapenade is, but man was it ever good. The bill, at $71 with drinks, was perhaps five times what one would pay in Bilbao, but for a birthday night out in Boston, it was well worth it.

I’ve posted the slides for my presentation at the CRMA Annual Conference. They’re image-heavy, and I didn’t do anything to optimize the size, so the download is 19.1 MB, for which I apologize. I’ll work to convert to a more web-friendly format as soon as possible. Thanks to all who attended. Miracle of miracles we ended with a final question right on time at 5:00 p.m. It was lots of fun.

A blurry photo of my audience at the City and Regional Magazine Association Annual Conference. I took the photo from the podium to demonstrate “live blogging” in action.

We arrived in Boston on Friday night and checked into the Marriott Boston Copley Place. We’re here — or at least I am — for the annual conference of the City and Regional Magazine Association.

These are the people who make, well, magazines for cities and regions. Looking down my list of attendees I see Jayson from Honolulu Magazine, Hudd from Memphis Magazine, Cindy from Plano Profile and Mary from Bangor Metro. Because they’re all making magazines in their own little area, they’re an oddly cooperative bunch.

My session, at 3:45 p.m. today on the “Production” track is billed “Web 2.0 — an introduction to web technologies that publishers can take advantage of now or in the near future.” Which amounts to what must be the most generic and mundane title for one of my talks yet. I’m up against sessions titled “The Interview,” “The Future of Media, Part II,” “Special Sections/Ancillary Products/Best Ideas,” “The Power of a City/Regional Magazine,” and “Developing Circulation for Companion Titles.”

I’ll post the slides here when I’m done.

Back in April I posted about a little project to scrape the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission website and make an RSS feed out of their Lands Protection Act database search.

This project was one of those that I mentioned in my presentation on public data at reboot.

To my surprise and delight, I received a message this afternoon from Don Sutherland, (Director of Technical & Regulatory Services at IRAC) that they’ve developed their own RSS feeds for this data.

This is doubly wonderful: it’s excellent that IRAC realizes the potential of RSS to aid in their public service role, and it’s excellent that they’re willing to listen to — and implement — ideas from their constituency. Thank you.

Although I’m still doubtful that it’s possible for humans to flit about the surface of the earth so quickly, we woke up yesterday in Dublin, Ireland and as I type this I’m sitting here at [[Yankee]] in Dublin, New Hampshire — 3013 miles away and 24 hours later.

Our travel day, while exhausting, was thankfully uneventful — no puffy eyes or other disasters. U.S. Airways took off from Dublin on time, landed in Philadelphia on time, and then did the same for the Philly to Boston leg of our trip.

We picked up another Volvo from Hertz for the trip up to Keene (leaving out the brutal environmental damage caused by automobiles, the XC70 is a beautiful driving machine).

This Volvo has Sirius Satellite Radio in it, so we ended up listening to CBC Radio 3 for the entire trip. Please allow me to take back anything bad I’ve ever said about CBC Radio 3 (well, not everything — those Flash-o-matic websites were, and are, truly dreadful): they play an excellent mix of “modern Canadian music.” It’s only a shame you need a satellite receiver (or the Internet) to pick up the signal — [[Catherine]] and I agreed that we would happily jettison Shelagh Rogers for a bit of main network time.

We arrived at the E.F. Lane Hotel in Keene around 9:30 p.m. at the approximate end of our mental and physical limits; we all three went straight to bed, and we didn’t wake up until this morning at 7:00 a.m.

We’re here in New Hampshire until Friday, then down to Boston for the weekend and back to the Island, with a Halifax overnight (thanks, Aeroplan!) on Tuesday morning.

Frank Meeuwsen helpfully shot video of the Pecha Kucha presentations by [[Guy Dickinson]] and I at [[reboot]]. You can watch them on Frank’s website. Man I was talking fast!

That’s Guy’s head you see there in silhouette — he was my timer.

My [[Nokia N70]] has a built-in voice recorder that lets me tape 60 seconds of audio (the one minute limit is an annoying but sometimes useful feature). Over the past month I’ve pulled out the phone at various soundful times and recorded a minute here, a minute there. I’ve pasted all of the clips together, and you can listen to the entire 11 minutes, 11 seconds in one go. Audio is relatively low quality, there are only a couple of bona fide podcast-like bits and otherwise you should just treat it as a sort of raw audio montage of euro-audio.

Among other things, you’ll here lots of buskers, a ride on an antique trolley, roller coasters at LegoLand, an ambulance siren, the bells outside our window in Copenhagen that rang every morning at 8:00 a.m., a minute inside a Porto coffee shop, and a little tour of a water wheel.

A Ryanair re-scheduling about a month ago left us with two nights in Dublin, and the coincidence of concerts by The Eagles, Metallica, Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris, and Robbie Williams all on the same weekend left the city centre without a hotel room available for less than 500 EUR a night, so we’re out here on the outskirts in the Tulip Inn by the airport.

It’s actually a rather pleasant hotel in the “late modern business hotel with restaurant” class, and the staff are extremely helpful. For 11 EUR they serve a “full Irish Breakfast buffet” and once we removed the macabre parts thereof it was a pretty decent feed.

Having already done the whole “6 hour tour of central Dublin” on the swing through here on the way over, we opted to head out into the countryside rather than downtown for today’s free day. Turns out that Swords Village, a pleasant little place, is only 15 minutes walk up the road, and so that’s where we started our day.

We’d a vague idea that we wanted to head out to the coast to Skerries to see Skerries Mills, billed as an “industrial heritage museum showcasing wind and water energy.” When bus connections from Swords proved too difficult to manage, we found a helpful cabbie who ferried us out to Skerries for 23 EUR — a little dear, but a good investment for the time and frustration it saved us (we learned a lot from the cabbie too).

The trip to Skerries took us through rolling green hills; but for the thatched roofed cottages, we might just as well have been driving out through the hills of New Glasgow, PEI.

Skerries Mills proved to be a thoroughly wonderful place. An early arrival meant we had the place — and the tour guide — to ourselves. And so over the course of an hour we received an excellent introduction to the world of flour milling, an education that picked up exactly where our visit to the Iron Age left off two weeks ago.

We got to see the waterwheel and the millstones and follow the path of grain through the system into flour. Then a walk up the hill to see the “backup power system” — two centuries-old windmills:

Our visit to the Mills finished with a lunch in the tea room where both [[Catherine]] and I had the “salad sampler” — three salads and hearty brown bread. Lunch was accompanied by the vocal stylings of a lounge singer rendering the hits of the last century — from Frankie Valli onwards. [[Oliver]], true to form, stood up and danced and was the hit of the room.

After lunch we walked into Skerries proper and found it to be a town very much in the “place that the people from Ballykissangel go to when they go to town” model.

We walked the main street, stopped for a few rides at a beach-side amusement park, had an excellent snack at a coffee shop called Olive (where, among other things, we had a plate of olives), and eventually got the double-decker bus #33 (1,80 EUR each) back to Swords Village.

Catherine’s only demand for the Irish leg of the trip was to drink a real Guinness in a real pub, and so we stopped for supper at The Old Boro Public House, and she got a couple and we had a nice supper.

Sitting in the pub I suddently realized that the contribution of my Irish DNA to my makeup is my “widow’s peak” — all the other men in the place were losing their hair in exactly the same way I am. Thanks, Ireland.

As I write we’re relaxing in our room, gathering our energy for the long travel day tomorrow. See you in North America.

I’ve written about this before, but it’s hit me again: after a month in non-English speaking countries (2 weeks in Portugal, 2 weeks in Copenhagen) we’ve re-entered the world of our native language here in Dublin, and the effect is occasionally overwhelming. Who knew that it took so much effort to process the background chit-chat in public spaces — coffee? no, that’s too big! Billy, come here right now, and take that frog out of your mouth.

The characters in the 3D movie at LegoLand, being citizens of the world, speak a sort of Sims-like rumble that’s not in any language that anyone speaks; for two weeks our background noise has been just like that: a pleasant foreign singsong that means nothing to us. Now, all of a sudden, we understand everything. It’s weird.

Meanwhile, I’m sneezing up a storm. [[Catherine]] maintains that I’m simply allergic to bad airplane air, but I think I’m allergic to the European spring, as my symptoms started a couple of days ago in Copenhagen. Usually I can get a respite from the ick by drinking a strong cup of tea, but Irish tea, at least in my limited experience, is dreadful. I’m not sure whether it’s the water or the bags (universally Tetley) or the milk or the sugar, but they form a toxic brew together.

We’re here in Dublin for the day, then flying to Boston, by way of Philadelphia, tomorrow morning at 11:00 a.m. With any luck the pollens of North America will be different enough to let me slide back into my regular healthy state; in the meantime the endless din will continue.