Thanks to some PHP rigor from Olle, I’ve updated the code example I threw together yesterday to allow access to your current Plazes location from PHP. This updated code doesn’t do anything new, it’s just better documented, and more standardly formatted.

Sometime this spring I passed the half million mark in the “words I’ve written on this blog” counter. That’s half a million words in six years. Some interesting statistics:

• Most popular proper nouns:
• Island (478 times)
• Oliver (452 times)
• Charlottetown (347 times)
• Catherine (334 times)
• Internet (312 times)
• CBC (258 times)
• Canada (231 times)
• Number of mentions of Aliant: 159
• Number of uses of word compelling: 60
• Number of uses of word nifty: 12
• Number of uses of word shit: 17
• Number of uses of word fuck: 9
• Number of uses of word love: 65
• Most prolific month: June, 2003 (22,787 words)
• Most prolific day: July 27, 2004 (4,018 words)
• Words written by year:
• 2005: 69,818 words
• 2004: 139,390 words
• 2003: 155,547 words
• 2002: 100,924 words
• 2001: 71,778 words
• 2000: 10,428 words
• 1999: 676 words
• Most popular links to other websites:
• Island Tel (58 links)Yankee (35 links)
• Air Canada (22 links)
• Steven Garrity (21 links)
• The Old Farmer’s Almanac (21 links)
• Zap Your PRAM (20 links)
• silverorange (19 links)
• Maritime Electric (13 links)
• ISN (12 links)
• Brackley Drive-in (12 links)
• Number of graphics and photos: 618

I received the following email today, presumably in response to this sort of search result:

What a shame that, when I typed in the name of the Charlottetown festival, I came up with your rant. Not very welcoming for us tourists… or our money.

Here’s how I replied:

Thank you for your note.

The web is a rich and diverse place; that’s what makes it so great.

It means that if a well-funded organization, like our Capital Commission, pours money into promoting and advertising an event that will take over our neighbourhood, “we the people” have an outlet to shout back.

In this light, I’m extremely happy that you found my blog post: it means the shouting back is working.

In terms of your tourism dollars: I’m curious to know why you don’t welcome the opportunity to learn more about how your dollars will impact the local community you choose to visit.

You are, of course, welcome to visit Charlottetown — we would love to have you (and your money). But *how* you visit is important: if you visit to support a rock festival that adversely affects our neighbourhood, then I would argue that your tourism might be doing more harm than good.

I think I have a *responsibility* to tell you that you might annoy me, and adversely affect the quality of life of my family and I, through your actions.

My correspondent replied (bless her heart):

All very true. And well said. Food for thought.

Next step in my Plazes experimenting: getting PHP to find out “where I am.”

Grab this PHP script, edit with the value of your Plazes username and password, and then run. The result will look something like this:

The script assumes the presence of XML-RPC for PHP, which is easy to grab and install. All the script does it to dump an array reflecting what’s returned, via XML-RPC, from the Plazes server, but the code should give you enough to go on to do many more interesting things.

Stefan sent me the API documentation for Plazes yesterday, and I’ve been fooling around with it today.

The first product of my experimenting is a demonstration of how to look up your current “plaze” from AppleScript.

To try this out for yourself, download AppleScript code, paste it into Script Editor, update with the values for your Plazes username and password and run. Assuming you’ve already run the Plazes Launcher, the result should be something like this:

If you click on the “Go to Plazes” button, then your Safari should open to the Plazes page for your current location.

This isn’t intended to be a useful or complete application — and there should probably be more error checking — but it should be enough to get you started in Plazes development using AppleScript.

Charlottetown: images of change, a show at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, has been around since mid-May, but I’ve only just visited today. It’s an interesting tour through the history of the city through painting, photography and objects. I was able to find our house on many of the mid-1800s city plans and I found the original of this Robert Harris watercolor that includes our house. There’s even an original Mark Butcher chair from the C.G. Hennessey collection — perhaps the selfsame chair that I managed to destroy by sitting on it around her kitchen table (something she has never let me forget; I’ve been allowed to only sit on solid modern-era chairs at her house since then).

Tonight the Centre hosts the opening of two new shows: Curb Appeal and Cities of Canada: The Seagram Collection.

The Curb Appeal show is particularly interesting. It’s a Shauna McCabe creation (Shauna is arguably the best thing to happen to the Centre in years) and includes large-scale urban imagery, video, an online land use datgabase project, a sonic installation, and a weirdo “psychogeography” installation that seems almost impossible to understand. Overlaid on the images of Charlottetown below it’s a good antidote to the ye olde conception of the city.

The Gallery now has WiFi, so I’m live-blogging this from the middle of the exhibition, which is cool both in nerdly and artistic ways too. I just ran into Shauna, and we talked about the possibility of having the Plazes guys drop in by video later in the summer to talk about their system (which is both about real world “where the hell can I find WiFi” geography and also, abstracted and re-mixed, very similar to some of the themes here).

The reception is tonight at 7 p.m.; the shows run all summer long. Even if you’re not an artophile (and I am most decidedly not), or perhaps especially if you’re not an artophile, I think you’ll find this season’s stuff here interesting. If nothing else, it’s a free, air conditioned, WiFi-enabled space in the heart of the city! Recommendation: grab your laptop and just come and sit in the middle of all of this for an afternoon.

On July 17, The Chieftains are performing in Charlottetown, produced by the Confederation Centre of the Arts, on something called the “Outdoor Plaza - ATV Mainstage.” I had the good fortune to run into Confederation Centre CEO David Mackenzie this morning here in Mavor’s and we had a good chat about the concert.

The “Outdoor Plaza - ATV Mainstage,” it turns out, covers a large swath of Charlottetown’s downtown core, up and down Queen Street and along Grafton. The tentative plan is to erect a fence around this area, closing off the affected streets, and limiting access to the area to ticket holders during the late afternoon and evening. Tickets are $28 before July 7 and $35 after that. The stage itself is to be mounted in front of the CIBC bank building, with the audience set out onto the street and the Centre’s plaza.

I mentioned some misgivings about putting a chunk of downtown Charlottetown behind a “pay wall” — taking public space out of the public realm and making it only accessible to people who can afford to pay for access (and offering it up to ATV to wrap their brand around). This has always been my problem with the Festival of Lights on the waterfront: setting aside their acoustic assault on the neighbourhood, for almost two weeks they take our local public park out of commission.

To his credit, David took my concerns seriously, and we had a good talk around how the Centre might work to mitigate the problems the concert is going to create for downtown residents. I suggested, for example, that a simple note from David explaining the concert details, the rationale for holding it, and so on, dropped in the mailbox of residents in the Centre’s neighbourhood might be a good idea.

Now I must admit that I’m a lot less worried about this concert than I am about the “insert hit rock band of the moment” concerts on the waterfront; that’s a simple, entirely subjective aesthetic judgement. I like The Chieftains and I think it’s a good idea to have them come to Charlottetown. And I know that to afford that, the Centre needs a big audience, the kind of audience they can’t shoehorn into the main stage. And I think that having art happen outside, in public view, is a good idea. I think the Centre should bust out of its walls more often.

At the same time, I think carving out a large important chunk of public space — space we’ve all paid, with our tax dollars, to construct and maintain — and saying to a family of four that they need to come up with $112 to participate in the cultural life of that public space is problematic. It doesn’t feel right.

Of course public spaces are set aside for private events all the time — the Winnipeg Folk Festival, for example, takes over Birds Hill Provincial Park. The New Bedford Summerfest takes over their entire downtown. You could argue that the Confederation Centre itself is a piece of public infrastructure with a pay wall around it — we’ve all got to pay to go inside and see Anne of Green Gables.

So, in other words, I come down on both sides of this issue. The Centre is talking about the concert internally this week, and going forward to City Council shortly. If you’ve got thoughts on the issues, I’d love to hear them (you can add comments to this post), and I’m sure David would value them as well.

Criticism never stings as much as when it comes from those you love. In this case Catherine, who was following my nascent attempts at podcasting on the road, told me that my podcasts sounded like the audio equivalent of my father’s travel diaries (which are famous in our family for including entries like “7:34 a.m. - Had a pee”). In other words, I prattled on.

Upon hearing this review from Catherine I realized that all my pronouncements about the value of criticism, about how how artists and actors should be able to separate “the art” from “the self” and use criticism as objective feedback to better themselves was, well, deluded. Or at least overly optimistic.

Honest creation is the self. So hearing “your art sucks” is hard to differentiate from “you suck.” But we can try.

At this point I have three choices: claim that I wasn’t prattling at all (hard), claim that prattling was the point (tried, didn’t work), or take her comments to heart and prattle less. I’ll try number three.

Thanks Catherine. I love you.

New Hampshire Business Review picked to the Judcasting story in an article titled Meet N.H.’s trend-setting podcaster: ‘Yankee’ magazine (article behind registration wall). Here’s a sample:

If you were looking for a New Hampshire example of podcasting, that buzz-worthy, supercool paradigm-shifter, where would you look?

Somewhere new, somewhere hip, somewhere edgy. Somewhere like … Yankee magazine.

Yankee magazine?!?!

That’s right: As far as I can tell, one of the very first regular podcasts in New Hampshire was launched in mid-May by that Dublin-based home to all things old-timey.

I was tickled when I discovered this, and even more tickled when I realized that the podcast distributes “Jud’s New England Journal.” These journals are the monthly musings of Editor-in-Chief Jud Hale Sr. — who, at age 72, is about 71 years older than podcasting itself, and who once started a column with the anti-buzz philosophy “In New England, old is good while new is, at best, suspect.”

You can subscribe to Jud’s podcast on YANKEE’s website.

My ears, used to hearing Danish, were extra attuned to street conversation today as I walked the streets of Charlottetown. Here are two excerpts that, between them, offer a representative slice of the everyday conversation of Islanders:

Guy One: How’s she going?

Guy Two: Oh, same old…

Guy One: I hear yah.

Woman: Isn’t Shane’s mother you father’s sister?

Man: Who’s Shane?