Due to negative market reaction to the news, the Aliant acquisition of Reinvented has been cancelled. We’re cast out, flying on our own.

Who knows what could have been…

We’ve had to keep this one under wraps for a while until all of the details were worked out, but it’s now official: Reinvented is being acquired by Aliant.

This move may come as a surprise to regular readers of this site, accustomed to my occasional critique of Aliant and its services. But it was in the writing of those selfsame critiques that I came to understand the latent value within Aliant: there’s a great bunch of people there, waiting to become an excellent bunch of people, and I think “getting Reinvented” is the ship they can sail to make that happen.

Aliant and Reinvented will remain separate operating entities, focusing largely on our existing corporate areas of excellence. Reinvented will take over responsibility of the design and demographic repositioning of the messages delivered to telephone subscribers when the number they have dialed is out of service, and of that loud clangy sound that subscribers hear when then leave the phone off the hook. To strengthen its own brand, Aliant will be rebranded “Aliant: A Reinvented Company”.

While we’ve enjoyed being independent for the past 10 years, we’re equally looking forward to the enfolding warmth of the Aliant corporate family.

The $900,000 “interactive theatre” at the Atlantic Technology Centre has attracted the attention of the Auditor General. In their annual report, they say, in part:

We noted that an independent consultant was engaged to conduct a study of the interactive multimedia theatre. The study concluded that this type of cinema required high traffic volume in the form of paid admissions to be financially viable. The study also concluded that other revenue sources, such as businesses and research organizations using the technology for development purposes, did not appear to offer a volume and price combination which would justify the capital investment.

They were additionally critical that the process of approving the addition of the theatre did not receive proper oversight:

We noted that in the Treasury Board submission of August 2002 there is no reference to the consultant’s report on the feasibility of the interactive theatre. The submission does not request approval to add the interactive theatre rather it is stated that the theatre area has been upgraded. No evidence of approval beyond the level of the project team was provided to us.

Which sounds an awful like “rather than asking for permission to build the theatre, the project managers simply pretended it was already there, and asked for money to make it better.”

At this point you may be wondering, as I did, what exactly an “interactive theatre” is.

I called the Atlantic Technology Centre and asked. They directed me to the website of Immersion Studios, the Toronto-based company that provided the technology for the theatre. The company says this is what they do:

We blend entertainment with real life concepts through mind-boggling graphics, simulations, interactive games and other tools to engage the audience.

Specifically, an “immersion theatre” is described like this:

The Immersion Cinema is the top of the line product in our family of group interactive solutions. The experience takes place in a high definition digital panoramic environment with ‘blow your socks off’ content and a high impact Dolby Digital surround sound.

The audience interacts with the large screen through touch-screens through group cooperation, competitive games and personal exploration. Typical installations include 25 to 50 consoles, each seating two people. Consoles can be added.

We can configure the Immersion Cinema with one or three screens to accommodate your budget. You’ll be surprised to find out how cost-effective the Immersion Cinema is for the quality experience it provides. For perspective, a single-screen Immersion Cinema with 25 consoles to sit 50 people per show is US $275,000.

Immersion Studios’ installation in the Atlantic Technology Centre is highlighted on their website as a “Client Sucess Story”:

This year we have also installed a 30 - console Immersion Cinema experience at the Atlantic Technology Centre in PEI, bringing high-impact interactive entertainment to the smallest Canadian province.

We Islanders paid $900,000 for those 30 seats, which is $30,000 a seat (and $9.25 per elector).

I asked the Atlantic Technology Centre whether I could actually go to the theatre and experience for myself. They told me that regular programming, run by summer students, is set to begin around July 1, and run all summer long. In the meantime, groups can rent the theatre for $3.50/person for one show, or $5.00/person for two shows.

Is it any wonder that the economics of this theatre were described by the initial consultant as not appearing “to offer a volume and price combination which would justify the capital investment.” At $30,000 capital cost per seat, and a $3.50/seat cost for a show, each seat has to be sold 8,751 times to recoup the capital cost.

Assuming a wild runaway success of 100% occupancy for every day of the 60-day tourist season, 4 shows a day, the payback would take 36 years. Assuming that the “blow your socks off” content is so awesome as to still be blowing socks into 2040.

As controversial as the decision making and financial issues are surrounding the interactive theatre are, it strikes me as more worrisome that anyone in the technocracy thought this was a good idea in the first place. I hope against hope that there’s a good reason for its existence, that, somehow, someone thought it would lead to economic development for the Island.

What I fear, however, is that “immersion theatre” was a way of “sexing up” the Atlantic Technology Centre; that because it involves lots of screens, and lots of complicated buzzwords and gear, and costs a lot, it was reasoned that it must have something to do with “the future,” and there for must be a Good Thing.

Kind of like the New Media Development Centre that we paid $640,000 for in 1998 and the $3.2 million PEI Broadband Network we bought in 1997.

We have none to blame about all this folly but ourselves. Worst case scenario, the development of the technology industry is being led by spendthrifty cheerleaders employed by people we elected who faithfully believe everything they’re told; looked at in a more positive light, we’ve not done our collective part to educate the technology bureaucrats and their political masters about our industry, leaving them no choice but to randomly throw buzzword-laden spaghetti against the wall, with hopes that some of it will stick.

CBC is reporting that overdue fines are coming to PEI libraries. For the longest time, we’ve been fine free, with charges only if you lost or destroyed the materials you borrowed. While I’m sympathetic to the “As a result, a large number of books are not returned on time, officials said.” problem, it makes me sad that the only solution to this is to align with the rest of the world. One would have liked to have hoped [naively, of course] that the honour system could continue. Sigh.

Being an almost completely meatless family, we are longtime consumers of Maritime Soycraft tofu. It wasn’t until I read this post on Hope’s blog that I came to know they’re now based in Alberton (!). Cool.

My friend Stephen Southall is one of my favourite people in the world, and one of those “pick up the conversation where we left off three years ago” kind of friends that are so rare in this life.

Stephen has been calling me every Monday for the past several weeks, and our conversation has concerned the dueling phenomena of focus and dynamism.

I think both Stephen and I, and many people of our generation, consider one of the defining characteristics of our lifestyle is the ability to pick up and change course at the drop of a time. This ability to, say, move to Morocco for a month, or to suddenly stop eating orange-coloured vegetables, or to start a rock band before Wednesday night is sometimes more possibility than reality. But it’s an important possibility. A possibility without with we can quickly begin to feel hemmed in, trapped, and unable to function.

While some of it is personality-related — Stephen and I are both naturally easily distracted, easily made claustrophobic, and [sometimes unthinkingly] anti-authoritarian — I think there’s also a case to be made that this is a byproduct of our upbringing.

Our generation’s parents were raised in the stricter confines of the 1940s and 1950s, hits the late 1960s in their early 30s (meaning it wasn’t quite the “summer of love” for them, but something was certainly going on), and so by the time it came around to raising us, their general life philosophy was an odd mix of “you can be anything that you want to be” liberation with a healthy dose of old-style “eat your vegetables” discipline.

My parents, for example, would never in a million years dream of telling we sons what we should do with our lives. But they’ve always been pretty insistent that we do something, especially something that both requires hard work, and that we’re good at and enjoy.

I’m not complaining about this: the “you can be anything that you want to be” part of this equation was enormously powerful, and has taken me places that I could never have dreamed of going if I was one or two generations older. And I’ve even come to appreciate the “eat your vegetables” ethos, at least once I hit 30 myself, for the common sensibility of it. Consider the two put together a sort of “enlightened pragmatism.”

Put another way, the defining characteristics of our breeding are focus (“eat your vegetables,” “hard work is good”) and dynamism (“be anything you want to be,” “follow your bliss,” “be flexible”).

Scaling this all down to a very practical, day to day level, is where things start to get interesting because these two qualities are sometimes at odds with each other.

Going to bed and getting up at the same time every day, and aligning this timing with conventional community practise, is a good thing for focus. But it seems at odds with dynamism. Sticking with a one project from start to finish, and completing it on time, is a focus thing. But what if you move to Morocco half-way through?

How do you get the benefits of focus, without the boredom of focus, and how do you get the thrill of dynamism without it’s dangerous life-muddling aspects?

Perhaps it’s through dynamism containers.

Structure life within more rigid guideposts or waypoints — getting up, going to bed, eating, working — but leave the containers between those waypoints open to dynamic interpretation.

For example, for the past two weeks, I’ve been running an experiment: I’ve gotten up at roughtly the same time (and generally and hour or two earlier than usual, which isn’t saying a lot for me), have walked exactly the same route to work, and have stopped for a the same smoothie at Nature’s Harvest on the way. I’ve also endeavoured to eat lunch at roughly the same time every day, and to take a break in the afternoon when my energy has felt wiped out.

Such rigour would have been anathema to me a month ago, outside of the confines of this experiment: going to work at the same time every day would have seemed too much like catching the school bus at the same time every day. Eating something healthy every morning to ensure sufficient energy would have seemed boring and not “risky” enough.

But I’ve stuck with it.

And inside these rigid waypoints I’ve left myself free to, well, do whatever I want to do. In other words, I’ve created a series of dynamism containers. Within a walled garden of focus.

Results so far are promising. I have felt oddly comforted by the structure of the focus. I’ve benefited from the increased energy of regular eating. And by walling off the focus portion of the day into a well-defined area, thus allowing me to leave a lot of anti-authoritarisn knee-jerks at the door, I’ve found that my creative life has improved significantly as well.

If this all sounds insane, it’s quite possible that it is. Or at least that you, the reader, are sufficiently enough inside another generational plotline that you have no way of grasping the weirdness of my own.

Oops, time for focus…

From a New York Times article on the islands of Lamu and Zanzibar:

Why islands, when there’s a continent to look at? Because my time is limited, and islands are like short stories: compact, quickly taken in, but, if they’re good, complete in themselves.

Aggreg8 is a beautiful, simple RSS reading/managing application that runs inside Mozilla-based browsers. It’s a great example of Mozilla software acting as a sort of “cross platform operating system.” [pointer from Scripting News]

At the start of Oliver’s Kindermusik classes there’s a short time of free play with squnchy inflated balls. The end of this period is signified by the singing of the song “Balls Away,” the words to which are as above. It is Oliver’s favourite song (before I took him to Kindermusik myself, I was convinced that he wrote it himself) and is flexible enough to be used for many tasks (“Toys Away,” “Dishes Away,” and so on). Earlier this week I transcribed the melody into GarageBand and emailed the result to my mother; by now I’m sure she’s built a symphony around it.

All of which is a tangential route into a pointer to the newly-redesigned Province of PEI website. This is the first iteration of that site since 1994 that doesn’t bear my design stamp (you can take an archeological dig through earlier designs here, back to 1996).

I feel like a father whose son has gone off to college for the first time: part of me wants to go fetch him right back home; part of me realizes he’s got to fly on his own.

We had a good nine-year run working with the Province, and left the project on good terms (my old YMCA leader Bill Difrancesco told us to “always stop the game when everybody’s still having fun”); the project is now in the hands of a great team working inside Government, and I wish them well as the new design evolves and matures. Having gone through this same process five or six times, I know what a Herculean task it is to redesign such a large and complex site; it’s like repainting an ocean liner while it’s sailing across the Atlantic.

Balls away, Balls Away, Time to Put the Balls Away.

Let me briefly sing the praises of the open source MapServer project. If you’re interesting working with web-based maps, you should give it a look: it’s powerful, well-documented, well-supported and let’s you create very powerful mapping applications.

We’ve used MapServer to built the YankeeMagazine.com Foliage Map, and the Explore PEI tool. I’ve spent the last week building an intranet mapping application for Elections PEI and at every corner I’ve been heartened to find the sort of “hey, they already thought of that” goodness that typifies mature open source efforts.

Having spent many years struggling with closed source, proprietary web-based mapping products, I can’t tell you how great it is to have the hood open and my hands on the engine.

There’s a Canadian angle, by the way: DM Solutions Group is an Ottawa-based company that’s contributed tremendously to MapServer, including maintaining the PHP MapScript module and the ROSA Java applet that is a marvel of functionality and simplicity. Kudos to them for a job well done, and for contributing to the open source ecosystem.