Flipping through the channels earlier this week I stumbled across an old episode of Venture, CBC’s business program. The episode focused on the competition amongst Canadian provinces for a piece of the video game making market, and featured the Island’s own John Eden, Technology PEI’s “Account Executive New Business Investment” in a cameo role trying to drum up video gaming business for PEI.

Apparently the province has decided to focus on the video game market; at least that’s what it says in this Atlantic Business Magazine article:

“A couple of years ago, we identified video game development as an opportunity to grow a cluster in our IT sector” says John Eden, account executive with TechPEI – a Crown corporation established to advance the growth and development of Prince Edward Island’s technology sector. “We looked at what was hot, and decided game development was a way to provide new jobs for similar skills from the technology sector.”

Like the Marshall Medias, the ISPs (Cycor et al), the call centres, and the Atlantic Technology Centre, this effort seems pre-destined to be another crazy grab for business that’s not going to come. Or if it does come it won’t be sustainable nor organic and will simply pack up and leave when the money runs out.

Contrast this insanity with a post today on Island expat Amber MacArthur’s blog:

The Island’s capital city (POP approx. 30K), has come a long way. Now there are no signs of party lines, but there are signs everywhere for open WiFi… everywhere… and I mean everywhere. I’m spending my days working at the high-tech community centre (Queen Street Commons), wandering a block to Timothy’s for more surfing/coffee, stopping by Baba’s Lounge for tea (and more WiFi), and yesterday we shot commandN at ITAP (the Island’s technology centre).

They even have an Apple reseller in town, The Little Mac Shop. There are web designers, bloggers, and tech enthusiasts working and headhailing (AKA brainstorming) on new and exciting projects all over this town. It is so nice to be part of such a tight community. I never want to leave…

None of what Amber mentions has anything to do with the approach the province takes to the “IT industry” (save the technology centre, which was useful mostly for its comfortable chairs).

The real engines of the Island’s IT economy aren’t the simulacrums that the technocrats try to conjure up with bribes incentives, they are the Perry Williams and the Dave Moses and the Peter Richards and the Derek Martins and the silveroranges and the Cynthia Dunsfords and the Kevin O’Briens and the Rob Patersons and the many, many others building small-scale, sustainable, nimble, loosely-coupled businesses. Businesses that don’t have big capital needs. Businesses so small that you might not even notice they exist. Businesses that don’t make good photo opportunities or news releases but that will be here for years after the hepped up droids enticed to move here from Toronto have gone back home.

Let’s just stop allowing our money to be used to fund desperate boneheaded tech megaprojects and focus instead on the elegance of the IT industry we already have. Let’s stop trying to go head-to-head with Toronto and Montreal in the incentives game and realize we have something that they can never duplicate: a quality of life, an interconnectedness, and a strong tradition of nomadic freelancers running a networked economy (read farmers, fishers, builders, weavers).

Let’s stop “growing clusters” and rebuild our approach to managing our IT economy around Amber’s words: “It is so nice to be part of such a tight community. I never want to leave…”

I appeared in my first “vidcast” this afternoon: Amber MacArthur interviewed me about [[Plazes]] for commandN. The episode should “air” on Monday.

From [[Oliver Baker]] comes the sad news that Scharffen Berger, a small Berkeley-based independent maker of very, very good chocolate has been consumed by Hershey’s, which is about as close as you can come to getting assimilated by the Borg in the world of chocolate.

There’s news of the acquisition on the Hershey’s website but the Scharffen Berger news page lacks any mention of it.

The purchase is ironic given that the Scharffen Berger factory tour, at least when we took it last year, contained a lot of Hershey’s-slagging — lots of talk about the low cacao content in the crap chocolate that Hershey’s turns out.

Why is this a bad thing? One quote sums it all up for me; in this story:

“We view it as a great opportunity,” said Stephanie Moritz, a spokeswoman for Hershey. “Scharffen Berger is very on trend.”

I transcribed my best man’s speech, delivered last Sunday at [[Oliver and Sophie]]’s wedding.

On Sunday, August 28th, 2005 my friends [[Oliver Baker]] and [[Sophie Petersen]] got married. Catherine, [wee] [[Oliver]] and I were, through the magic of high-speed air travel, able to attend, and I had the added pleasure of being Oliver’s best man (yes, it is confusing that there are two Oliver’s in this post; it’s also delightful).

That their wedding was to be an Orthodox Jewish wedding was somewhat daunting to me during the days leading up to it; I’m irreligious at the best of times, and my knowledge of Judaism is even worse than my knowledge of Christianity (I live in a place where “Jewish” doesn’t appear in the list of top 10 religions and the number of self-identified Jews is 55 out of 132,910). But Oliver was a helpful guide, and the officiating Rabbi, a Canadian no-less, was pleasantly improvisational and expository, so I needn’t have worried; once I got the kippah to stay on my head, I was set.

We arrived a little early at Beth Israel in Berkeley, taking BART over from San Francisco to the North Berkeley station and walking 5 or 6 blocks south.

Beth Israel was also the site of Oliver’s Bar Mitzvah twenty-five years ago, and was coming to the end of a substantial renovation as we gathered for the wedding: Oliver and Sophie were the first couple to be married in the new configuration.

Our kippah nervousness was sated quickly by the presence of a helpful basket of loaners; [wee] Oliver and I found a couple that fit us and the fear of heaven was upon us.

As I was in charge of the music for the reception, I busied myself with hooking up my iPod to Oliver’s stereo system. Rabbi Silverman arrived a few minutes later, and I was whisked away to an impromptu run-through with Oliver, Sophie, and the chuppah holders.

It wasn’t until this point that I learned that my best man’s speech was to be delivered not in the rollicking atmosphere of the reception, but rather under the solemn cover of the chuppah mid-way through the festivities at a point where, historically, there would be a month-long break while the bride and groom considered their options and gathered resources to make a home. I had a brief panic, thinking the my casual, breezey, irreverent tone wouldn’t be under-chuppah suitable, and that I was going to take up too much time in the proceedings. So I darted out the back door to try to make quick revisions. Ultimately I decided to just deliver the speech as-is; how many times in life to you get to hang out under a chuppah and say whatever you like, I asked myself.

As it turns out, my dash outside left me locked out of the building, and so as to not disturb the bride during her wedding pre-flight, I walked around to the front, appearing to [wee] Oliver as if by magic through the front door again.

Around 1:30 p.m., almost on time, the formal proceedings began. With Sophie squirreled away in a secluded antechamber, Oliver signed on for the Ketubah and its secular equivalent; the party, minus Oliver and supporters, then moved to Sophie who did likewise. Oliver and Sophie then joined each other in the antechamber for a blessing by Oliver’s mother Judith and various other ministrations after which we all repaired to the main part of the hall for the main part of the ceremony.

The four chuppah holders came in first, each holding up a pole that, in turn, held up the large piece of fabric on top. Oliver and his mother and step-father walked in next, and finally Sophie and her mother. The formal ceremony was divided into two parts, with the aforementioned best man’s speech acting as a sort of intermission. I won’t try to do justice to the details of the ceremony suffice to say that Sophie had to walk around Oliver seven times, there was a lot of Aramaic recitation, some wine, and a glass got crushed. My speech (transcript) seemed to have been well-received — the jokes were laughed at and I even made an unintended “all over Oliver” pun.

And so Oliver and Sophie became Oliver and Sophie.

Afterwards we all repaired to the reception hall for kosher champagne and hors d’oeuvres, the cutting of the cake, some ritual singing in Hebrew, and lots of photo opportunities.

Around 4:00 p.m. things came to an end, and we joined Oliver and Sophie at his mother’s house high in the Berkeley hills for a snack and then returned, happy but exhausted, back to our hotel just before darkness fell. For their part, Oliver and Sophie had no time to honeymoon, as Oliver is at the start of law school and Sophie at the start of a veterinary residency, so they’ll honeymoon sometime in 2008.

If you are an aficionado of the [[Confederation Centre of the Arts]], you will remember the striking Armand Vaillancourt installation Song of the Nations that was mounted in the upper gallery several years ago.

Earlier in the week we were walking down the Ferry Terminal end of Market St. in San Francisco and [[Oliver]] spotted a large water fountain in the plaza (truth be told, he called it a “water mountain,” which it sort of is). It’s an impressive, immersive piece of fountain cum sculpture that you can walk right inside. Oliver insisted on exploring every nook and cranny and we willingly obliged.

Turns out that what we had happened upon was the Vaillancourt Fountain, created in 1971 by the selfsame Armand Vaillancourt. And that we’d come at the right time because the fountain was, in fact, turned on again last summer after a 4 year period during which it was left fallow.

You can see the photos I took of the fountain or watch a video clip.

Talk to any veteran of the CBC for a while, especially CBC expats, and eventually you’ll hit the deep well of vitriol that lurks within. It seems that while CBC employees love their jobs, and may even believe deeply in the “institution,” they hate their employer.

The dominant workplace metaphor at the CBC appears to be “hearty bands of dedicated workers making good shows despite their employer.”

Listen to the lockout podcasts and you’ll hear this hatred loud and clear: much of the commentary is simply about the indignity of the lockout, and it’s not unlike what you’d hear from the archetypal spouse whose partner leaves them for a younger lover despite their years of selfless toil.

It’s certainly not unusual to hate your employer — when I worked for a Thomson newspaper there was certainly no love lost for Mr. Thomson (I once received applause at a union meeting for saying I’d rather have Ken Thomson down on his knees in front of me rather than the other way around). But I think that it’s rare to have a situation where employees are, generally speaking, passionately interested in and involved in their jobs while simultaneously seething about the conditions of their employment. At best this leads to helpful “creative tension.” But at worst it’s just plain unhealthy.

Even it the CBC and the Media Guild work out their immediate differences and the CBC unlocks the doors, I can’t imagine this problem can be negotiated away. If anything, the lockout is, by getting employees out on the streets with nothing to do but talk to each other 20 hours a week, going to deepen the gulf.

Despite the several layers of democracy and bureaucracy between us, “we the people” are the real employer of the 5,500 locked out workers, and the CBC is, in theory, negotiating on our behalf. What can we do to change the employment dynamic at the corporation so that we’re not employing public broadcasters who, well, hate us.

If everything for miles around was flooded and most of my city destroyed and my family was hungry with no prospect for help from others, would I loot the local grocery store to feed them? Damn right I would.

Here are a some things that Oliver seemed to really enjoy here in San Francisco:

• The Kidpower Park, in the Mission district, is a children’s playground that’s really nice. One one side there’s an area for younger kids, on the other one for older kids; Oliver (almost 5 years old) had fun on both sides. The entire play area is underlaid with a very bouncy rubbery surface that makes the gravel or wood chip protection of other playgrounds look barbaric. There’s lots of parent seating, a water fountain, and the entire playground is surrounded by a tall fence. There’s a community garden (for adults) that shares the same lot. Ride BART to the 16th/Mission station, walk one block down 16th to Hoff (you can see Hoff from the station), turn left and walk halfway down the block: Kidpower is on your left.
• There are very nice carousels (aka “merry go rounds”) on Pier 39 (take the F-line street car or trolley bus from Powell St. BART), Golden Gate Park (take the 71 bus from Powell St. BART, down Market and Haight until you get to the head of the park; get off and walk towards the Sharon Meadow) and Tilden Park (further afield in Berkeley, you’ll need a car to get there, but it’s arguably the nicest of the bunch and Tilden Park is a neat place in its own right).
• The Exploratorium is an interactive science museum that Oliver spent two very happy hours in. It’s a little hard to get to: from Powell St. BART walk east to Kearny and get on the #30 Stockton bus and ride to the end of the line; the driver can point you in the right direction from there — a short 2-block walk). Once you’re there, the bay is only a block away, and there’s a pleasant walk along the water to Fort Mason, and, if you’re enthusiastic, over a hill to Fisherman’s Wharf.
• FLAX Art and Design is the queen of all art supply stores, and it has a good collection of kid-specific stuff (crayons, paints, paper, markers, toys) plus lots of other stuff that Oliver really liked (handmade paper, myriad boxes, bags and portfolios). Think “Home Depot” but for artists. Right next door is Delessio Market & Bakery, a buffet-style restaurant with a selection of food that will please everyone (they even have a “chocolate bar” — think “salad bar, but with chocolate”). Take the MUNI M-line to Van Ness and walk two blocks west.
• Of course the cable cars are lots of fun. I think they’re best at night, when you get a great view. Remember that you can ride the cable cars with a multi-day MUNI pass: a $9 one day pass, for example, is a great deal if you’re planning to ride the cable cars both ways ($6) and do a little MUNI-ing around ($1.25 a trip).
• The Ferry Terminal has a great selection of (somewhat expensive) places to eat laid out food-court style. There’s also Book Passages, a nice little bookstore, and a Scharffen Berger outlet. You can catch the ferry to Sausalito for a cheap tour of the city from the water. To reach the Ferry Terminal you can ride the F-line streetcar or trolley, or take BART to Embarcadero.
• Although there are literally thousands of places to eat in San Fransciso and, in our experience at least, most will welcome kids, we did have one experience worthy of particular mention: Puccini & Pinetti, near Union Square on Ellis Street, advertises kids-friendliness and it delivered. They have the usual booster seats, high chairs, and colouring crayons that are entry-level requirements for kid-friendly status, but they co beyond that and have a real childrens’ menu that includes more than just the usual chicken fingers and fries. Oliver selected the “make your own pizza” (with my urging, visions of Maximum Fun dancing in my head) and, true to its name, the server brought Oliver a crust and little goblets of ingredients, sauce and cheese to make it up and, once his creation was completed, it was taken away to be baked and returned 5 minutes later ready to eat. On top of all that, they have free Wifi. Recommended.

Derek pointed out that the Race About Charlottetown Results have been posted — we came 11th (out of 56 teams), only 1:59 behind our spry young colleagues from silverorange.