Oliver and Sophie got married. It was fun. Details to follow. Speak preview:

It’s only when you’re far away that you realize how important the CBC’s web efforts are to keeping you in the loop about what’s happening in Charlottetown, the Island and Canada. I’m left to rely on the disaster that is the The Guardian website to keep up to date.

Which got me to thinking: this lockout is going to result in a sort of “dark ages” in terms of the digital fossil record. Our ancestors (or even ourselves, in a year) will go the CBC website to search for stories about things that are happening now and will find nothing. Worse, when our friends at the CBC are allowed to work again, they will have no audio or video record of news that’s happening now. Which means that, in essence, nothing that is happening now is actually happening at all.

Think what you will of the CBC, they are, among many other things, the Canadian news source of record. When they’re not recording, what happens?

As best man for [[Oliver and Sophie]]’s wedding I have been placed in charge of the music for the reception. As those in my [[family]] will attest, I am not a musical savant, and my musical tastes, though broad, are not particularly sophisticated. So it is with some perverse pride that I take on this task. When pressed, Oliver provided the following description of their musical neighbourhood:

Sophie really likes the Oh Brother soundtrack and old folk and German language folk and cabaret. I like that stuff and klezmer and crazy Balkan brass bands (e.g. the music from the movie “Underground”, the soundtrack for which I mail ordered from Europe) and traditional Romany and funk and Cuban and early-to-middle period Beatles (Rubber Soul, Magical Mystery Tour, Help, Hard Day’s Night).

He also added that I could “feel free to disregard” this layout.

If it weren’t for the iTunes Music Store I would be crawling around the Jewish Cuban music stores of San Francisco looking for dusty klezmer albums. As it is, I’m squirreled away here in the washroom while [wee] Oliver and Catherine have a nap finding all sorts of bands and music I never knew existed. Bands like the Yiddishe Cup Klezmer Band who do a mean rendition of I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow.

There was a brief panic earlier in the week when some crossed signals suggested that the officiating Rabbi might have to review the set list, but this turns out to have been not the case, and after assuring Oliver that, no, I wouldn’t be playing Mahalia Jackson, all seems to be good going into the event tomorrow. I’ll post the set list here after it’s all over.

The City of Berkeley has a Cool Things to Do in Berkeley page on their website. Cool.

More and more it is appearing that my little hotel here in San Francisco may, in fact, be located at the centre of the universe:

Well, at least that sub-section of the universe concerned with bits, bytes and all that.

The big expedition for today was to make our way to the Exploratorium here in San Francisco. Essentially the mothership for the interactive science museum genre (“push buttons to make magents move water” trumps “look at musty dioramas of beavers”), I was last there 25 years ago with my father, now it was time for Oliver to dive in.

For such a cool place, the Exploratorium is surprisingly difficult to get to. In fact when I called this morning for directions the woman who answered the phone seemed to doubt her own ability to guide me there by public transit (she succeeded: her directions — take the #30 bus to the end of the line and walk 2 blocks — were on the button). We arrived just before opening at 10:00 a.m., which turned out to be an excellent time to arrive as we had the place essentially to ourselves for the first hour or so.

While the strict “learning” part of the balance of the exhibits was beyond Oliver’s comprehension, he was happy just to pull, push, prod and run around and we were happy to follow him and try to insert so “well, Oliver, you see they are inert gasses and that’s why” at appropriate moments. Oddly enough, Oliver’s favourite part of the entire visit seemed to be a documentary film about the Cold Spring Harbor Lab and James Watson; he’d just fallen off the spinning bicycle tire aparatus, though, and bumped his head, so he might have been delusional.

The Exploratorium being literally “at the end of the line,” we had a fair hike back to civilization, and Oliver decided to use the opportunity to have a complete meltdown. When we arrived at Fort Mason for lunch at Greens, he immediately fell asleep on Catherine’s lap, and remained so throughout our meal. Which was a very good meal indeed: Catherine had a melange of Mexican-inspired things, and I had organic potato pancake with a salad.

Oliver woke up, right on cue, at the end of the meal, and we hiked off over the edge of Fort Mason into the chaos of Fisherman’s Wharf (think “Peakes Quay” times 1000 if you’re from Charlottetown). Our main reason for this wade was to find a rumoured merry-go-round on Pier 39. Which we found. And it was delightful (and, I think, priced exactly the same as the merry-go-rounds in France) and Oliver was back in the game as a result.

We packed ourselves onto a F-line bus to head back downtown (packed being the operative word as there were literally people hanging out the doors, it being 5:00 p.m. and all) and were back in our room for 6. After a little time for re-composure, we found the excellent Thai Stick a few blocks away and had a tasty Thai supper.

As I type, it is 9:30 p.m. Pacific, 1:30 a.m. Atlantic, and who knows what time in Copenhagen. Catherine and Oliver are prematurely asleep; I’m trying to stay awake to avoid waking up at 4:00 a.m. tomorrow as I did today.

So we’ve arrived in San Francisco, and [[Oliver Baker]] has renewed acquaintance with his namesake [[Oliver]] over an unexpectedly pleasant meal at a restaurant in Chinatown. The [other] Oliver went above and beyond the call of duty, and popped down from Davis just to see us.

The flights on Northwest from Charlottetown were efficient and uninspiring and ultimately uneventful, which is what you want when flying. The new Detroit Northwest terminal is stunning. The $3 “snack boxes” on the Detroit to San Francisco leg were moribund. We arrived 14 minutes late after a spectacular ride over the mountains from Utah through California.

Our hotel is very central, and quite pleasant: think slightly down-market (and certainly cheaper) Ian Schrager. We asked for a larger quite room to accommodate [our own] Oliver, and they obliged.

I’ve souped up the little [[Plazes]] “Where is Peter?” plug-in that runs in the right sidebar of the web version of this blog so that once I go offline it displays the last place I was, so you can follow me around virtually if you’re so inclined. Speaking of [[Plazes]], it’s the first time since [[Reboot]] that I’ve been somewhere with people in my “online within 2km” list that I don’t actually know personally (although, ironically, I read their blogs…). Cool.

My old friend [[Stephen Good]] has written a chapter in the book Last one out turn off the lights : is this the future of American and Canadian libraries? from Scarecrow Press. Thanks to a friendly western librarian, I was faxed a bootleg copy, and I’ve scanned the fax and turned it into a PDF so that it can reach a wider audience in the library that is the web.

Stephen is one of the smartest people I know. About ten years ago, though, he went off and Found God. As I related earlier in this space:

At times it’s been a challenge— it’s hard to be a Godless heathen when you’re corresponding with someone who is prone to starting sentences like “I remember what Jesus said about bowling…” But we’ve worked out a common ground (he leaves out direct God references and I leave out my constant questioning as to the actual existence of God), and I’m sure we’ll be friends until we die.”

When the fax arrived a few weeks ago, I started to read it, but when the heavy “prophet” talk started, I set it down — oh oh, I thought, here comes the God Stuff. Today at lunch I picked it up again and read it all the way through.

I’m glad I did.

Stephen’s chapter turns out to be one of the best essays on libraries, technology and the web I’ve ever read. Here’s how he concludes:

Add to that a desire to be fashionable, the self-loathing of the middle-class elite, and the desire to act as if technology itself is liberating when in fact it perpetuates privilege under the guise of pulling the dispossessed into a bold Star Trek future and you have librarians who are willing to destroy the reality and destiny of libraries so that no one will think they aren’t “with it.” We need to fight for our right to be traditional, to acquire books and copyright-free electronic information, and to have a building with comfy furniture, chess sets, peace and quiet, and of course, story time.

Every librarian, library patron, and, for that matter, technology-obsessed politician, should read the entire chapter.

Stephen has achieved a remarkable feat, synthesizing the best of his secular self with the best of his religious self; it’s a compelling read.

Over on Dan Misener’s weblog there’s an interesting discussion going on about the merits of locked out CBC employees making “alternative radio” through podcasts. Dan’s blog is a good place to hang out and learn about the lockout.

Closer to home there’s a CBC Lockout BBQ on Friday. We won’t be here (we’ll be busy breaking the NWA strike instead), but we’ll send happy thoughts.

If you’re up late tonight, go and look at I’m on Google Talk right now. If you can get things to work, you can “GoogleTalk” me at reinvented@gmail.com.

Update: David Richardson from Calgary just “GoogleTalked” me, using his GMail account to login to the talk.google.com server. We were able to have both a regular text chat as well as an audio chat, all of which was happening Jabber-only, as David switched off his regular iChat account. Neato.