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,

CBC reports that “Maritime Electric says it needs to sign a deal to buy a new 50 MW electric generator by next month, or P.E.I. could run short of electricity by the fall of 2005.”

The alternative is that we simply use less, isn’t it? I’m up for it.

I’ve managed to figure out a way of getting down to Boston, and I’ve found place to lay my head at night.

It will be an abbreviated trip: I’m flying down Monday and flying back Wednesday; I think this will give me enough time to get a good sense of things — including Carter, Gore, and Clinton on Monday night and Teresa Heinz Kerry on Tuesday night.

At the same time, I’m not ripped from the womb of my home and family for too long (5 or 6 days away from PEI, especially in the middle of the summer, seems like an absurd waste of a precious commodity).

I’m leaving early, early on Monday morning and driving to Moncton where I’m flying Air Canada to Boston, via Montreal, arriving Boston at around 10:30 a.m. This cost me $146 on a special “Tango” fare.

I’m returning on Wednesday afternoon to Moncton, via Halifax, getting in around 7:30 p.m. This cost me $282.

I’ve booked a room at the Sheraton Braintree for $199/night (US). Although the hotel isn’t “right on the red line,” as the DNCC press office suggested, it’s pretty close, and there’s a shuttle that runs to the Quincy Adams ‘T’ around the clock.

So the total cost, so far, is just over $1000, with taxes and currency differences factored in.

All that’s left are the technical logistics.

My iBook’s battery is showing the same symptoms it did last year; it would be nice to be able to rely on a fully-operational battery; Johnny has offered the lend of his iBook if I can’t get mine repaired in time.

Our digital camera, a PowerShot S100, is showing its age: the zoom in/out toggle gets stuck from time to time, which throws the camera into a tizzy. And it will only take about 150 pictures on its existing memory card (that seems like a lot until you factor in a 12 hour day of taking pictures). So I’ll look at what’s available as an alternative this week.

And, as a member of the “unassigned media,” it remains unclear as to whether I’ll have Internet access onsite at the convention, so how frequently I’ll update here remains to be seen; at the very least it will be every night.

Now all I have to do is to prepare myself to get up at 3:00 a.m. on Monday for the early drive to Moncton.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve received credentials to cover the Democratic National Convention in Boston next week. Here’s an update on this project.

I started applying for credentials very early on, almost as soon as the New Hampshire primary was over. I initially applied to the House Press Gallery. Shortly after I applied, I received an email:

The Press Gallery has determined that your request for credentials would best be directed to those offices handling “Special Press Credentials” for the conventions.

The next day, I heard from the DNCC Press Gallery (the DNCC is the “Democratic National Convention Committee”):

Thank you for your interest in covering the 2004 Democratic National Convention. In April the DNCC Press Gallery will begin processing applications for press credentials.

In early May, after more than a month of radio silence, another message from the DNCC Press Gallery:

To apply for credentials from the DNCC Press Gallery, ONE contact person from your organization must complete the DNCC Application Form.

Which I did. After which I had to mail them a security form, with copies of identification and other background information.

A month after that, a follow-up came:

Thank you for your application to the DNCC Press Gallery. Though we are currently still accepting applications until June 15th, we request that you send us more information to aid in our decision-making process. It would be helpful to include any work you have done and tell us what work you look to accomplish here at the Convention. Again, we appreciate your interest in the Convention and we look forward to hearing from you.

I did that:

I operate a Canadian weblog — www.reinvented.net — that reports on local, national and international issues. I was in New Hampshire for the primary season, and blogged several events. I hope to continue and expand this reporting from the DNCC.

And then another month went by. Finally, last Monday, came a phone call from the DNCC Press Gallery, confirming that I was receiving credentials.

My assumption was that I was being credentialled as a weblogger: I’d been pointing to this website as my “medium” from the very first application. A followup exchange of email with the Press Gallery, though, revealed that my credentials class me as a “news service.” I’m still not sure what the distinction is, but it seems that I won’t have access to the special facilities being set aside for bloggers. This appears to leave me to share facilities with the rest of the “unassigned media.”

Which brings me to the matter of whether I’ll actually be able to attend or not.

There are two big issues to overcome: getting there, and finding a place to stay once I’m there. Both issues loom somewhat larger for me because, although I’m a “news service,” I’m not Reuters or the AP, and so this project doesn’t have a budget. In other words, air and hotel would come out of my own pocket.

It looks like I can get to Boston for less than $1000. Perhaps less than $500 if I drive to Halifax first. Or I could drive for about $100 in gas (plus 24 hours of driving time). So that’s not an insurmountable hurdle.

The big stumbling block is finding a place to stay that’s within reasonable distance of the convention site in downtown Boston.

There are plenty of hotel rooms available in places like Lowell, Danvers, Peabody — suburbs of Boston which would take some clever commuting to get to. Which might be impossible late at night. Any rooms closer to the city are selling at an insane premium right now. I do have a possible line on a media hotel in Braintree, which looks like it might be on the ‘T’ red line, which would mean I could subway in and out.

Laying over top of all of this is that if I go it will mean 4 or 5 days away from actual paying work. Which is not insignificant, given that I’m one half of a two man shop.

Assuming I do pull this off, there are a couple of interesting side developments.

The National Post emailed last week asking for the option to pick up items from my weblog to include in their convention coverage. And they’re willing to pay (although not a lot).

CBC Main Street here on Prince Edward Island, for which I filed items from the New Hampshire primary and from Super Tuesday in California, is willing to do a hit or two from Boston.

All of which raises the question: why would I do this?

There are many of answers to that question:

First, although resident in Canada since 1966, I was born in New York state, and I’m still an American citizen, entitled to vote in the election. So I have a personal need to know more about who I’m voting for. This may seem a little crazy, but if I’m going to vote (as I did in 2000), I can’t not take it seriously.

I have a fascination with large-scale political spectacle. Ever since I covered the Liberal party convention in 1984 for my local paper (and I use “covered” in the “I was 18 years old and got the editor to let me use his letterhead” sense and not in the “actually wrote anything” sense), I’ve loved watching large groups of people gather to do politics.

After experiencing and writing here about the New Hampshire primary — the larval stages of what flowers at the Convention — I feel like I should follow on and see the process through to its conclusion (I’ve already made tentative arrangements to be in the U.S. on election day in November).

And despite my protests every time someone talks about how “blogs are changing everything,” I actually do have some interest in finding out how an amateur, self-published, instant medium like this can be used to communicate about events like the Convention.

I’m not sure whether what might happen here would be “news” or “opinion” or some murky combination of the two. I’m not sure if being a weblogger means I’m simply play-acting as a journalist, or if there’s actually something valuable to come out of amateur writers covering events from “a different perspective.” I’m not sure if once at the convention I would be able to maintain the sort of off-the-cuff writing style I prefer here, or whether I would feel some sort of obligation to adopt a contorted pseudo-journalism style (“the mood of the convention is enthusiastic but subdued as delegates prepare to enter into a new chapter of the electoral process”). But it seems like it might be an interesting experiment to find out.

Stay tuned.

Catherine is a big fan of the CSI shows on television (the original, CSI, and its spin-off CSI: Miami). And so often when I stumble in from the office late at night, that’s what I find on the television.

I find myself fascinated by one specific aspect of the shows, something I’ll call “CSI style writing.”

The nature of the shows — each show takes the viewer through a crime from the point of view of the crime scene investigator (hence ‘CSI’) — means that there’s a lot of forensic science happening. And because there’s nothing more deadening than watching machines whirr, or people hunting around picking up bits of some important foreign substance relevant to the crime, especially if you don’t know what they’re doing, what generally happens on CSI is that the actors, in a way that would never happen in the “real” world, talk in a very expository manner.

So rather than saying “Let’s stick the sample in the X-22 analyzer,” they say “Let’s stick the sample in the X-22 analyzer” and then their crimefighting buddy says “Ah yes, the X-22 will analyze the blood stain and compare it to millions of other samples in the crime database so we can match it to the killer.”

In other words, the show provides its own footnotes, and tries to do so in a way that seems sort of natural, especially if you squint your ears a little.

Once you get over the vague sense that these people talk too much, this is a pretty compelling trick, and once that I think the world outside of CSI television might profit from. Especially my little corner of the world, the techno-writer-geek space.

The AIMRelay perl script, from Eric Andresen is scratching my itches in all the right ways.

I was looking for a way to have various servers send me alerts through iChat (Apple’s instant messaging system that uses AOL’s instant messaging network). I wanted iChat to pop up a message when, say, a call was coming in for me on the Asterisk PBX. Or when the load average was high. Or when someone posted a comment on my weblog.

I started with Net::OSCAR, which is a Perl module that implement’s the AIM OSCAR protocol (AIM has two protocols, an old one called TOC, that is used by Net::AIM, and OSCAR, which is newer and more functional).

The problem with simply running a Net::OSCAR process every time I want to send a message is that AIM quickly protests if you signon and signoff too quickly in a short space of time — you start to get error messages when you attempt to signon again.

This is where AIMRelay comes it. It creates a sort of “Net::OSCAR daemon” that signs in to AIM once, and then accepts incoming commands (via AIM, telnet, or a Perl client provided) and relays them to the AIM network.

I ran into some problems when initially setting things up: Net::OSCAR was complaining when AIMRelay commited the buddylist:

You must use a tied Net::OSCAR::TLV hash! at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/Net/OSCAR/Utility.pm line 139

I solved this problem, for the moment, by commenting out the line:

$oscar->commit_buddylist();

Doing this hasn’t caused any problems so far, but I understand there may be some ramifications if I try to send messages to AIM screen names that aren’t signed on.

Be aware that AIMRelay has some problems with handling iChat screen names: because they contain an ‘@mac.com’, AIMRelay thinks they’re email addresses and tries to handle them as such. This is trivial to fix, mostly because it simply involves making AIMRelay ‘stupider.’

I’ve been running an AIMRelay-based system for a couple of days now, and things have been working well.

I just mistakenly stumbled across this feature of BBEdit: if you drag-and-drop an image (either from the Finder, or from a browser window) into an open BBEdit document, you’ll get a pop-up dialog of options, and the result will be an HTML tag for the image in question. Cool.

In the middle of a torrential downpour, I headed out this afternoon to experience Leo’s Thai Food and Dimsum Palace, a 4-day-old restaurant on Pownal St. in Charlottetown, just south of Grafton, just north of the Legion [MAP].

Wow.

After a lunch of spicy basil chicken and rice, heading back to the office in the rain I almost started to cry. I love Thai food.

Leo’s is not a “restaurant” in the traditional sense of the word: there’s a serving counter and an eating counter. You sit on rickety stools facing the window. The menu is limited. And the food — or at least my spicy basil chicken and rice part of the menu — is fantastic.

In all of these respects, then, eating at Leo’s is not unlike eating in Bangkok. There was even a stiffling, humid feel to the air.

The staff were friendly and helpful (and brought back many happy memories of friendly, helpful restauranteurs we met in Thailand).

Leo’s is just the kind of Thai restaurant I would order up in my dreams.

I am very, very happy.

Total bill, $7.75. Open daily from 10 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. 119 Pownal Street, Charlottetown.