It just dawned on me: when the tourismocrats do crazy things like this, it’s because don’t actually like Prince Edward Island and feel that the only way to effectively promote tourism is to try to hide the real Island behind a freaky faux Island trucked in from away.

Here’s a freaky example:

The pinnacle of the Festival will be the Canjet Snow Kingdom, the home of Jack Frost.

Then, of course, there’s the “Family Concerts in the Park featuring Tributes to Shania Twain and Hilary Duff,” the “TechnoMedia Snow Maze” and the “Treehouse Live Outdoor Stage.”

In the freaky tourism dream-Island, everything has to have corporate sponsorship because nobody in their right mind would actually support this kind of thing without corporate cocaine to fuel it.

It might as well be Red Deer, Brandon, or Moncton at this point, they will have so effectively sucked the Island out of the Island.

Good-bye Charlie Town, we hardly knew ya…

Dan asked me if my IAXy can be used with WiFi. I said “no.” And it can’t, really: you need to plug it into a hard-wired Ethernet.

Which got me thinking about a product that would be a small device, not much bigger than a deck of cards, that would have an Ethernet port and enough guts inside to bridge that port to a nearby WiFi network.

It turns out that these things exist: this gizmo from Netgear is an example. It talks to your WiFi access point, and has an Ethernet jack. They pitch it as a device that can “[b]ring it all together - your PC, gaming console, Internet Radio, and wireless network.”

It also turns out that a plain old Apple iBook laptop can be used for the same thing using the OS X “Internet Sharing” feature (found under “System Preferences” and “Sharing”). If you select “Share your connection from: Airport” and then click “On Built-in Ethernet,” then you can plug other devices into the Ethernet port on the iBook and they’ll be “on the network.”

I just tried it — plugged my iMac into the Ethernet on the iBook — and it works. Neato. This means that, in theory, I could bring my iBook, my IAXy and a plain old telephone to the Formosa Tea House and run the entire operation from there. Perhaps I’ll try that tomorrow.

One of the neat things you get to do if you run your own server hardware is to give your servers a name.

There is a great tradition behind this, and each system administrator has their own approach. Upstairs at silverorange you will find servers called “tangerine” and “navel.” The old CA*Net server at UPEI was called “atlas” (my first email address on the Island was caprukav@atlas.cs.upei.ca). The main PEINet server was “bud.” The servers that run the Province of PEI website are called, somewhat mundanely, “web1,” web2,” and so on.

When it came time to name the servers here at the Reinvented Data Centre, I chose my grandfathers’ first names, and thus you’ll find “dan” and “ross” in our server farm.

Just over two years ago, I installed two new servers for a local client, and named them “edward” and “wallis” after Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom he left the throne.

Unbeknownst to me, my client had been calling the second server “wallace” for two year, until I disabused him of this notion today.

Now that I have run out of grandfathers, I’m not sure where I’ll turn next. I have “nettie” and “louise” as grandmother names. And of course I also have 13 new great aunts and uncles to draw on now.

I just came back from lunch at Interlude.

Beside me were a couple, apparently from New York but temporarily resident on the Island. They were having an argument. A persistent, complex-sounding argument that went on and on and on. And at voice levels such that it was impossible for me to not get dragged into it, yet quiet enough so that I had no real idea of the substance. There were lots of exasperated statements like “I try to communicate, but you never listen.”

All of this was made more disturbing by the antagonists dropping out of inward-argue mode and into outward “cold enough for you?” mode as their friends and aquaintances walked by. For some reason, seeing this public, private, public, private flip was quite stressful for me (let alone them, I assume): it was as if I suddenly came to realize that everyone has an inward an outward facing personality.

It’s amazing, too, how unimportant and insubstantial other people’s arguments sound when you have no personal involvement with them or their subject matter. I came halfway towards slamming down my chopsticks, turning to them, and shouting “why can’t we just all get along.” But I didn’t.

I’m left thinking that everyone should argue in the public arena. Or that we should take great pains to never do so.

In any case, Interlude temporarily ceased to be an urban oasis for at least this afternoon.

The CBC is reporting a protest from the Public Service Alliance about the moving of jobs to Halifax. Vaughan Davies, representing the union, is quoted as saying:

“The employer is unable to fill the manager position in Charlottetown because no one wants to move to Prince Edward Island, which is extremely tough to buy seeing as Prince Edward Island is the most beautiful province in Canada and is the finest province in Canada to live in.”

Johnny has spent the past little while transitioning the Elections PEI website to its new home at www.electionspei.ca. New server, new organizational scheme, same black-and-white look and feel. My favourite features:

• Candidate Search: search a database of candidates nominated for provincial elections from 1900 to the present.
• Find Your District: quick way to find out where you vote.
• Chief Electoral Officer Reports: reports of every election from 1966 to the present. My favourite is the infamous election of 1966.

There is a wealth of information there about Prince Edward Island elections. As always, our colleagues at Elections PEI have been a pleasure to work with.

It seems that the Shoppers Drug Mart in at University Ave. and Allen St. in Charlottetown will be open from Noon to 5:00 p.m. on Christmas Day this year. Remember this when you need a quart of milk, some emergency hair dye, or a tasty bottle of Honest Tea.

The Formosa Tea House will be open regular hours this week up to Friday, when they will close at 3:00 p.m. for the holiday. They re-open at the regular time on Monday morning.

Oliver woke Catherine up at 5:00 a.m. this morning, wondering when we were going to get the Christmas tree. He wouldn’t go back to bed. He could have tried with me, but he knew I would have ignored him; Catherine is the better, or at least the more waking-hours-flexible parent.

I expect he will be awake just as early next Saturday morning. I believe I’ve been nominated, in absentia, to get up with him.

Our house is now equipped with a freshly-cut tree.

Anyone who has ventured outside of the quiet confines of North America will have encountered “touts” — local residents who gather at bus and train stations, airports and other tourist-intensive locations to hawk their hotel, private room, taxi service, or other tourist service. Touts can be helpful or annoying, depending on the situation and how relentless they are.

On our first solo international travel of any great length, to Prague in the fall of 1998, Catherine and I made the mistake of trying to ignore a man who seemed like a tout but who was actually a bona fide transit “honour system inspector.” We survived.

In the Dominican Republic the next spring, we had a taxi tout spirit away our luggage to a waiting cab before we noticed; once Catherine had climbed inside, he moved between me and the door, looking for a tip. When I offered $5 Canadian — essentially worthless outside of Canada, but all I had — he wasn’t impressed, and quite a flurry of exasperation ensued.

But there have been situations where we’ve arrived in a strange city late at night, needing a place to stay, and having a “lodging tout” present themselves has been a very valuable service.

Until this week, I’d never seen a tout in North America. On Thursday, though, at the SMT bus station in Charlottetown picking up G., I saw my first: a man was approaching all “look like they’re not from around here” types getting off the bus asking if they were looking for a place to stay.

We’re slowly joining the international community…