Last week I had the word gestalt at the tip of my tongue for days. I asked Johnny and Mom — usually they can track down almost anything in the corners of my mind — but to no avail.

I described the word to them as meaning “mindset” or “worldview” or “personal zeitgeist,” none of which was entirely accurate. I like this definition of gestalt, from WordNet:

a configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that it cannot be described merely as a sum of its parts

I remember when I first discovered the word: it was the perfect word to describe whatever it was I was thinking or writing about at the time. I write about it here simply to reinforce those neural pathways.

The relationship between Bruce (anchor) and Boomer (weather) on Compass, our local CBC television news, one that I characterized in its early days, has graduated to a new level: they’re now vacationing together — in Rimouski of all places!

Boomer did the weather live from Rimouski tonight, with Bruce making a cameo appearance. They are there for a hockey game with father (Bruce) and son (Boomer) in tow.

The nature of Islanders’ relationship with their weatherman provides a fascinating look into Island sociology: despite our better judgment, we find him endearing, and look forward to watching him on Compass every night. It makes no sense.

Travel well, boys.

By the way, if you’re looking for a way to keep the Compass in Compass, you now need look no further.

This Frommers.com article shows you “where you’ll get the most bang for your buck” for international travel by pricing common items like a cup of coffee and a movie ticket. Suddenly Argentina is looking very attractive.

I woke up this morning to the news that JetsGo has ceased operations. Oddly, I first heard the story on the 9:00 a.m. CBC news just as I woke up. In my sleepy haze, I didn’t recognize the reporter’s voice. It was my brother Steve, live from Trudeau Airport in Montreal.

The JetsGo website has either been taken off the air, or is overwhelmed with [angry] traffic.

Oliver and I took our first JetsGo flight almost three years ago. It was great. It wasn’t so great for others.

Oliver and I are heading to Ontario again in a week. I came close to booking us on a JetsGo flight, but decided, in the end, that it was more convenient (and cheaper) to fly WestJet from Moncton to Hamilton, which is closer to Mom and Dad’s house.

Having taken a European trip in the middle of the last Air Canada strike, I’m familiar with the chaos that airlines shutting down causes for passengers: if you’re stranded on the other end of a JetsGo flight, you have my sympathy.

For the record, given my history of killing airlines with my patronage, I have not flown JetsGo at all in the last two years.

This video, which talks about Second Life, provides a pretty good explanation of what it is. I’m still at a loss, however, as to why this is attractive to anyone. Maybe I a “virtualist,” but I think real life (first life?) is really excellent and I can’t imagine the need for a pretend one, especially one that costs money and time, and involves playacting with poorly rendered disembodied people on a computer screen.

That said, there’s something to be understood and examined here: the success of this sort of thing either means that I’m missing something about the joys of virtual worlds, or the virtualoids are missing out on the pleasures of the flesh.

From time to time, our upstairs officemates will take time out of their busy schedules to engage in rousing rounds of various video games. When we first moved in it was Super Mario Cart; in recent months it has been some variety of football.

Today, while deep inside the minutiae of the aforementioned art website, busily cutting and pasting French over English, I heard evidence of the latest tourney wafting down. Except, because I was deep “inside the zone,” I temporarily forgot where I was, and thought to myself “wow, there’s some pretty wild sex going on up there.”

Work, alas, will never be the same.

We’re working on an art education website. It’s in English and French. My there are a lot of art-related works with the letter (letters?) œ in them!

Now that I have a pod upon which to catch the casts, I’ve been listening a lot as I walk home, or as I fall to sleep. Here are three podcasts from IT Conversations that I really enjoyed:

• In Bill Gross: Snap, the founder of idealab! discusses their new [in October 2004] snap.com search engine. The podcast is interesting mostly because it provides a quick overview about the rationale for the new site; I was most intrigued by the references to “transparency,” which include this statistics application that lets you look at everything from what snap.com advertisers are paying per day to what keyword are popular.
• Merriman and Fitzroy: Real-Time Filmmaking on OS X is an extended-play session that walks through the process of creating a film in 48 hours as an entry in the 48 Hour Film Project. The speakers, Sean Fitzroy and Vikki Merriman, winners of the 2003 contest for their film Pie In The Sky are interesting and tech-savvy. The film, which you can watch here, is played on the podcast, so I heard it before I watched it. Interestingly, it was much, much better than I thought it would be once I actually saw it.
• Stewart Copeland: The Think Different Drummer is a presentation by the former drummer of The Police. Copeland is a good speaker, and he covers a lot of territory: digital music, MIDI, scoring films, upgrading to OS X. There are some interesting questions from the audience.

Another podcast I really enjoyed was the March 2, 2005 Daily Source Code from Adam Curry. The podcast was recorded “live” as Curry took his daughter to school. I’m a big fan of “live radio in odd locations” (I once wrote a letter to Pierre Trudeau, Joe Clark and Ed Broadbent asking them to appear in a radio series I called “Radio by Canoe;” they all said no) and so I found this interesting. Curry and his daughter are both compelling personalities, and the character of their father-teenager relationship is enough to give any parent hope.

One year I gave my mother a spatula for her birthday. Except that it wasn’t a real spatula, it was one of my own construction — made of masonite and floor tiles. I expect that if you actually used it to spatulanate something, it would have disolved into a mass of sticky goo.

Although this gift, with the blue toilet seat, and the popsicle maker, has entered family lore as “one of those crazy gifts,” at the time I don’t remember Mom being anything but grateful.

It’s only been in recent years, since Oliver joined in, that I’ve come to realize my mother’s sheer fortitude. Catherine and I are often overwhelmed by the enormity of what it takes to manage Oliver’s day to day life: things like “leaving the house” that used to take 30 seconds are now a extended 15 minute drama of mit location and boot application. My mother did the same things. Except she had 2 boys. And, in a year from now relative to where I sit now, she had 4 boys.

Whenever Catherine and I take Oliver to the dentist, or grocery shopping, there’s always a part of us thinking “how did Frances ever do this with four?!” I mean, how did she keep me from eating molases while Mike was being buckled into his car seat? Or how did she keep John and Steve from wandering off into the basement when she was dressing me down for calling Mike names? What happened when the phone rang and we were all eating lunch?

Miraculous more is that when we were all still relatively little — I think I was 14, Mike 13, and the twins 8 — Mom went off and got another university degree. And then a masters. And then started a career as a librarian.

Net result: not only were we all somehow miraculously prevented eating poison, but smack dab in the middle of our formative years we bore witness to a real demonstration of “oh, and by the way, women go to university and learn Pascal and have fulfilling careers too.” I’d like to think that we’re all better men because of her example.

It’s Mom’s birthday today. I just wanted to say thanks.

Whenever my fellow bloggers talk about how their weblogging activities have placed great stresses on their “regular” lives — ruining friendships, causing family breakdown, creating difficulties at work — I’ve always looked on in silent wonder that something as ultimately frivolous as a blog could wreck wreak such havoc.

I mean, here’s me, ruminating on movie trailer music and television shows; who could take offense at that?

And so, short of a passing reference from my father to the effect that “there are no secrets in our family anymore” when I mentioned some family event from the past in this space, and that whole Sandy Peardon thing (oh, and this whole thing), I’ve remained a carefree happy-go-lucky blogger, unravaged by critics, with all relationships intact.

Until this post.

In A Mediated Approach to Disintermediation, I wrote about a new university course by Rob, something he’d written about on his own weblog.

I called into question the approach and setting for the new course. And, it could be argued that (without intending to), with the rhetorical question “Why do we need Rob?,” I called into question Rob.

When I wrote what I wrote, I truly was doing so in the same carefree ponderous spirit that you will find in evidence elsewhere here. I was being rhetorical. I was trying to stimulate conversation. I was taking a internal musing and working it out by writing about it in public. If I were to adapt a screenplay from the post, and set it in a bar with Rob and I present, I would be looking all sarcastic, and would look over at Rob, wink, and say the line. Rob would laugh knowingly.

And when I wrote a follow-up post, it was in the same spirit. I read what others, including Rob, had to say, and wrote back. My follow-up wasn’t a “retraction” of my original thoughts, simply an evolution in my thinking.

That’s the spirit what I do here.

Now I’ve known Rob for, what, 7 or 8 years. I like Rob. He’s invited me to his house. I’ve met his family. We’ve worked on some good and interesting projects together. And in a way that few others have managed, he’s groked the way I work and, what’s more, he has had the patience to deal with me petulantly saying “well, why are we doing this at all anyway?” right in the middle of a project, often at the most inconvenient moments.

Rob and I don’t always agree, but I think our disagreements, when they’ve surfaced and been hashed out have allowed us both to mature our own positions and open our minds to the others.

Rob is a rare bird on Prince Edward Island: a consultant who came, and stayed. Anyone who spends any time here on PEI quickly comes to learn about those “high priced consultants from Upper Canada” who come down to the Island with lots of big ideas, lots of intellectual piss and vinegar, ready to remake the province in their neatly ordered image. They generally last one winter, and then move back to Toronto or Ottawa or Montreal when they realize there’s no opera here.

Rob (and me, before him) certainly got tarred with that brush: the assumption when you move here as “an idea person” is that you’ll fall into that group that leave soon after arriving.

But Rob didn’t. He lived out in the hinterlands of Montague. In the winter. He survived changes in government. He saw good ideas, ideas that would really change things for the better, die for personal or political or “just because” reasons. He moved his extended family here. He bought a house and improved it. He’s laid down deep roots. He has a lawn tractor. And he’s now been here for so long that most if not all (you’ll never get everyone) accept that he’s here for good. And maybe someone to listen to.

The Island is a better place for Rob. And I’m a better person for knowing him.

Now I say all this because some — including perhaps Rob — took my post as some sort of coded way of working out a grievance with him. As a personal attack. As a public ridicule of Rob, himself.

It wasn’t. At all.

And so, without retracting the substance of my original musing, and the follow-up post that came later, I wanted to take a moment and apologize to Rob for what appeared to him and others to be harsh words, and to try and explain how they weren’t intended as such.

My general approach is if you’re living your life as a “public figure” — whether as an artist, a filmmaker, a business person, a restauranteur, an organizer of public events, a politician, a newspaper columnist, a weblogger — then I consider your output, your words, your work, your ideas, your personal zeitgeist to be worthy of comment, and of open and public debate and discussion.

That said, I never intend criticism of output, words, work, ideas, or personal zeitgeist to be taken as an ad hominem argument against a specific person.

For example, I write a lot about The Capital Commission here in Charlottetown. Like this. Or this. I figure if a public body is going to spend my tax dollars doing things in my city, it’s fair game — even necessary — for there to be critical examination of their activities. Sometimes I do this seriously, sometimes mockingly. But never in a way that is meant to say “this specific person is evil.”

The same goes when I review a movie. Or a restaurant. Or talk about the phone company. Or point to a magazine article.

I think criticism — in the spirit of “the art of judging with knowledge and propriety of the beauties and faults of a literary performance, or of a production in the fine arts” — is important to the conduct of a fruitful life.

And I think it’s even more important in a small, isolated, insular community like ours, where close quarters and social interconnectedness mean that many are loathe to do anything but offer empty praise.

The problem with this ideal, of course, is that most people — myself included — take their output very personally. It’s hard to read “your play was boring” and not hear “you are boring.” It’s hard to hear “that idea you have sucks” and not understand it to mean “you suck.”

And so I imagine that Rob read my original post and didn’t take it as a lighthearted discussion opener (as it was intended) but rather more as “That Rob’s an idiot, eh, doing stupid things with his elite buddies — ha ha!”

I’m not sure what to do about this.

Words assembled are interesting because they have power. How do I keep doing this without causing personal harm and hurt to others? Is that an impossible goal? An inevitable result?

I could stop writing about other people entirely. Or I could only comment about “good news.” Or I could stop writing about friends, family and neighbours. That would probably avoid a lot of hassle in future. But I’m not sure that wouldn’t cause more problems, and leave me unable to write anything at all. I don’t want to be the “Body Break” of the blogosphere.

I could attempt to exercise more propriety. But impropriety is sort of central to my world view. And I think trying to write with a propriety gremlin looking over my shoulder would render my writing contrived (or more contrived) and lifeless. It’s hard enough writing for an audience that includes my mother, my mother in law, my clients and my son.

Although I sent a note of apology to Rob earlier in the week, I thought that, because the “scene of the crime” was out here in public, it would be equally important to try to offer additional explanation out here in public too.

Rob: I think you’re a good guy. Really. Readership: give me your thoughts.