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.

Way back in April, Rob Paterson was kind enough to make me a gift of an iTunes gift certificate. I’m a slow shopper, so it’s taken me this long to make my way through $35 of purchasing, but today I dropped down to a balance of 21 cents, so I’m all spent out. Here’s what I got:

• Delusions of Klezmer, The Alexandria Kleztet
• Slumber My Darling, Alison Krauss, Edgar Meyer, Mark O’Connor & Yo-Yo Ma
• Dress Rehearsal, Carolyn Dawn Johnson
• Hard Times, Eastmountainsouth
• Hard Times, Eastmountainsouth
• Winter, Eastmountainsouth
• Ghost, Eastmountainsouth
• Interlude, Eastmountainsouth
• You Dance, Eastmountainsouth
• So Are You to Me, Eastmountainsouth
• Show Me the River, Eastmountainsouth
• Rain Come Down, Eastmountainsouth
• Still Running, Eastmountainsouth
• All the Stars, Eastmountainsouth
• Father, Eastmountainsouth
• Too Soon, Eastmountainsouth
• The Ballad of Young Alban and Amandy, Eastmountainsouth
• Mark’s Song, Eastmountainsouth
• On Your Way, Eastmountainsouth
• Russian Rag, Elena Kats-Chernin
• Mushaboom, Feist
• Gilgarry’s Glen, J.P. Cormier
• Shame on Us, Jonatha Brooke
• Ten Cent Wings, Jonatha Brooke
• They Framed a Guilty Man, Leslie Nuchow
• Apology, Leslie Nuchow
• Nearer, My God to Thee, Mahalia Jackson
• Ten Kopeks/Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious/The Hokey Pokey, Mandy Patinkin
• Teardrop, Massive Attack
• Hava Nagila, Scott Merrick and the Last Frontier Band
• You’re Still the One, Shania Twain & Alison Krauss and Union Station
• (I’ll Never Be) Your Maggie May, Suzanne Vega
• Songs in Red and Gray, Suzanne Vega
• Solitaire, Suzanne Vega
• Owner of a Lonely Heart, Yes

Some of these have obvious immediate use — Hava Nagila for example — others, like Suzanne Vega, are old favourites. Thanks, Rob.

It occurs to me that because the Plazes Launcher API returns the time zone of the current Plaze, I could add functionality to my primitive little Ruby launcher that would automatically set my OS X time zone as I move about the country.

Problem is that I can’t seem to figure out how to programmatically set the time zone using OS X. Does anyone have information on how to do so, either from the command line, or using Applescript?

File this bug in the “very specific” folder:

Some Adobe applications can’t start in Mac OS X v10.3 if the time zone isn’t set or it’s set to Cardiff. Setting the time zone to a setting other than Cardiff resolves this conflict. After you’ve changed the time zone and restarted the computer, you can reset the time zone to Cardiff (or any other time zone) without encountering this conflict.

Emphasis mine.