Better late than never. Here’s a photo I took on Election Day here in Canada, back on June 29th at our “watch the election results at 84 Fitzroy party:”

You see Steven Garrity on the left and CBC TV reporter Ian Petrie on the right.

I taped an interview with Matt Rainnie this morning up at the CBC that will air on this afternoon’s edition of Main Street [4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. ADT, Live Stream]. We talked about my trip to Boston next week for the DNC, how it came about, and why I’m going. We’re going to talk again, from Boston, sometime next week.

In related news, I had a very strange dream about Roger Younker last night.

In the spirit of this photographic muscle flexing from David Weinberger in advance of the DNC, I present this:

I’m debating as to whether my Canon S100 camera has still got it; I’ve got my eye on a shiny new Canon S1 IS, the primary allure of which is its 10x optical zoom and its image stabilization.

The S100 was our first digital camera — we bought it the month before Oliver was born have have probably taken 10,000 photos with it over four years.

This was in the window of the Tim Hortons on Kent Street this afternoon:

Despite my frequent customer service criticism, this slogan makes me feel sort of creepy. I’d be more comfortable with something like “Guest Courtesy: We’ll Always Try To Do Our Best.”

Here’s my official DNC portrait, created by Catherine on Oliver’s high-tech magnetic drawing board:

If you are so-moved, you can buy the T-shirt.

I’ve moved to a set of static XML files for all the RSS feeds on this site (it didn’t seem to make much sense to go through all the database grinding every time someone loaded the file). Redirects are in place, so if you have a relatively intelligent RSS reader, everything should automatically update (I’ve tested in NetNewsWire, and redirects work like a charm).

Here, for reference, are the new URLs:

• Main Weblog
• Posts: http://ruk.ca/rss/index.xml
• Comments: http://ruk.ca/rss/discuss.xml
• Reinvented Labs Weblog
• Posts: http://ruk.ca/rss/index.xml
• Comments: http://ruk.ca/rss/discuss.xml
• Reinvented World Weblog
• Posts: http://ruk.ca/rss/index.xml
• Comments: http://ruk.ca/rss/discuss.xml

The XML files are updated whenever the site is.

Our server here at Reinvented HQ is starting to groan under the weight of the myriad tasks it’s performing: it’s our phone system, our webserver, our mail server, our DNS server and more.

A new server will shortly be on order, probably online in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, especially to ensure that things don’t implode while I’m away next week, I’m paring down some of the resource-intensive parts of this site for the time being. First victims were the “Items Since Your Last Visit” and “Discussion Since Your Last Visit” collections in the right-hand side bar. These will return once things are on a more even keel, but loading those dynamic chunks of data on every page load was a resource hog, so I’ve turned them off for the moment.

If you’re not praying to the RSS religion yet, now might be a cool time to look into experiencing this website through an RSS newsreader. One of the nice features of most RSS readers is that they keep track of what you’ve read and what you haven’t read for you.

For the last week I’ve had my robotic phone system here in the office set up so that when a call comes in for me (meaning that a caller follows the “Press 1 for Peter” instruction), an iChat box pops up on my desktop with the CallerID information.

About 2 seconds later, the telephone rings beside me.

All technogeek preening aside, I’m surprised by how pleasant it is to have a 2-second warning of an incoming call. It lets me quickly shift out of work-focus mode into pleasant telephone conversation mode.

For gory technical details, see here.

Over the past week I’ve received email from two major American newspapers asking me to respond to a series of questions about how I plan to “blog the convention.” One of them was Newsday; the other, a major daily, asked not to be identified until after their story had run, which I will honour.

Here are the Newsday questions:

1. What is your general strategy for covering the convention? Where and how will you spend your time?
2. Is there a particular gap that you are trying to fill with your coverage?
3. Please list five questions you would like to have answered in your coverage of the convention, in order of importance.
4. Who is your readership?
5. Will your blog be reviewed by anyone before it goes out? If so, how will that process work?
6. What will you do at the convention that a mainstream journalist would not do?
7. Are there any ethical rules that you plan to follow?
8. How long will your dispatches be? How will you decide that?

Here are the questions from the other “major daily newspaper:”

1. First, the basics: Names of all people from the blog who will be there; ages; occupations; hometowns.
2. Describe your blog in 10 words or fewer.
3. How do you plan to cover the convention? What kind of content can readers expect?
4. Why should people read your coverage?
5. What’s the biggest gap in convention coverage by mainstream media in prior election years?
6. Moment/speaker/event you’re most looking forward to covering.
7. Who did you support in the Democratic primary? (Or, if it’s not applicable, who do you plan to vote for in November?)

I think the questions are interesting in and of themselves: they give a little bit of insight as to how mainstream working journalists view the webloggers. Once both pieces have run, I’ll post my answers to their questions here.

As a a blogger with “news service” credentials, (as opposed to a blogger with “blogger” credentials) I won’t have access to the special secret “blogger room” in the Fleet Center, described on the convention blog as “an awesome workspace in the hall.” Which left me wondering where I will be able to work. So I asked the DNCC Press Gallery, and they quickly responded:

There is unassigned press filing space located in the hall as well as across the street at 239 Causeway. The space in Causeway is open 24 hours a day with internet access that you can plug in to. I believe that the press filing space within the Fleet Center is available whenever there is access to the Fleet Center, which also has internet that you can plug in to. The unassigned press filing space is first come first serve, and there will be about 150 desk set-ups for you to write articles, stories, etc.

There are 15,000 journalists said to be covering the convention. While no doubt many of them will have luxury suites with dedicated resources and swanky chairs, it will be interesting to see what the size of the “unassigned press” is, and how many of us are sharing the 150 desks,