Pointer from Alexander O’Neill: Island Eye for the From Away Guy from Sketch 22. Brilliant.

I’ve been dabbling in the Ruby programming language of late, after years of Perl and PHP and Visual Basic and dBase. I’ve been finding it really fun to program in Ruby — more fun than I’m used to. It occurred to me that as much as I like Ruby, even more so I like the person I become when I use Ruby. In a sense, then, Ruby is programming me.

The title of the post, by the way, is taken right out of a [[Curtis Driedger]] song, a great one. You can hear Curtis, ‘though not singing about horses, in this found sound. Want more [[Peterborough]]? Here’s a list of the 100 Greatest in the Performing Arts in the city.

Let’s take a break from all the pithy commenting and remember an earlier, simpler time. Here’s me. When I was little.

Now if you want to see a really, really cute kid, go look here.

It’s obvious now that Tim Banks gets all of his ideas from me.

Listening to Ben Cerveny’s talk at reboot 7.0 last night on my iPod, I kept hearing him use the word ludic, which I’d never heard before. It means:

Ludic (adjective) means literally ‘playful’, and refers to any philosophy where play is the prime purpose of life. Ludic derives from the Latin and conotes anything that is “fun”.

This is interesting (a) because it explains the name of Ludicorp and (b) because it gives a name to the philosophy of [[Oliver]]’s pre-school.

I promised [[Olle Jonsson]] that I would release an updated version of the code I wrote to allow PHP to grab my current Plazes location. This update outputs a blog-friendly string, and also better handles the situation of “plazelessness.” You can grab an unzip PlazesPHPBlog.php.gz to see the details. Comments welcome.

[[Johnny]] and [[Jodi]] and I headed off to [[Interlude]] for lunch this afternoon only to find it closed (for today only). Suddenly Jodi remembered a new restaurant, called Queue, had opened beside the Pilot House on Grafton St., so we walked over and had lunch there instead. (Don’t ask me how a major new restaurant can be open for 4 weeks, a block from my house and two blocks from my office and I don’t hear about it…)

Queue is in the space at the end of the Pilot House parking lot formerly used as an office and storage space by The Two Sisters. In its new incarnation, however, it bears little resemblance to a warehouse: it’s been refreshingly renovated into a large open space, with bright colours, Karen Gallant paintings and lots of light. There’s a very pleasant patio outside — perhaps the nicest patio space in the city; the owners deserve credit for investing in high-quality metal patio furniture (pictured here) instead of the default “buy whatever’s cheapest at Canadian Tire” that is the norm.

Although the waitress suggested that Queue is the “healthy” cousin to the Pilot House — they don’t serve french fries, for example — the menu was pretty straight ahead “family dining” style: crepes, pizza, pasta, salad. Think [[Piece a Cake]] but without the bravado.

I had high hopes for Thai Peanut Pizza, but it ended up being an uninspiring crust topped with french onion soup-style mozzarella and only the vaguest hint of thai spice or peanuts; more “cheese on toast” than “tasty spice explosion.”

Jodi had crepes and Johnny had a steak cheese wrap, and both seemed to quite enjoy their meals, so perhaps if I set my sights on less of a transformative experience (always the trap I fall into in new restaurants) I would have been happier with the results.

Non-alcoholic drink selection (another “must-have” for me) was as poor as any other restaurant in Charlottetown; I settled for an apple juice when my lips were crying “non-sweetened iced tea.”

Service was pleasant and prompt.

Final verdict: excellent location, very pleasant space, don’t expect to be moved by the food.

The CBC is reporting that [t]ourism numbers down again on Prince Edward Island this summer. And like last year, the air is thick with speculation as to why.

But here’s a thought: what if tourists visit Prince Edward Island “just because.” What if they don’t pay attention to advertising or marketing or the weather. What if it’s not about “effective golf packaging” or “powerful family-themed vacation opportunities?” What if it’s not about the 1-800 number or the website or the ease of the bridge or the romance of the ferry?

What if tourism on Prince Edward Island is mostly just the result of a whole bunch of irrational, unpredictable, largely non-influencable decisions? And so sometimes lots of people come, and sometimes not so many.

Or what if the more we try to make people visit, the less likely they are to do so.

I’ve no evidence to suggest that either of these theories is correct. But it seems to me that we’re shoveling a lot of money into tourism marketing and advertising and packaging based on a largely untestable assumption that it has a chance of actually working.

So here’s my idea: let’s take a year off. Shut off the website. Stop the TV commercials. Pull the colour supplements from the Toronto Star. Cancel the subsidized rock concerts and golf tournaments.

And see what happens.

Maybe people would visit anyway. Just because.

I’ve given the weblog another small aesthetic adjustment, all relating to the display of various information at the bottom of every post. The goal was to make it all less obscure without making it visually overbearing.

I’ve also revamped the various category-specific pages in the weblog archives. Look at the iPod category page, for example, and you’ll see links to “related categories” like Podcasting and iTunes, and a bunch of pre-packaged links to other websites for the same category. And of course, just to be contrary, I had to create a tag cloud:

Based largely on this testimonial from David Heinemeier Hansson and seeing it in action in this Ruby on Rails video, I’m making an experimental switch this week from editing in the venerable BBEdit to using new entry TextMate.

TextMate doesn’t have the feature weight of BBEdit (which can seemingly do anything with text), but it loads faster, has collapsable blocks, and neater syntax completion. I’ll let you know if I stick with it.