Finally people are starting to speak about the heretofore unspeakable: Islanders can produce cultural crap with the best of them.

Read RIFF: Rather Intolerable Films Festival from Rob and Crap-ola from Cynthia to see the early leaves on this tree.

Until such point as there is a vibrant and active artistic criticism movement on Prince Edward Island (i.e. one that is more than a cheering section which treats all artistic production on the Island as an amazing miracle simply for existing), we are doing a disservice to our artists. And, ultimately, a disservice to ourselves, because we’ll just keep getting served more of the same.

I think the important break that has to happen here is the ability, at least on some level, to separate art from self. Which is not to say that art and self aren’t inextricably linked. But there is a difference between saying “your art stinks” and “you stink,” however difficult that may be to imagine if you are the “you” in question.

As Reinvented slowly becomes a tenant and officemate of silverorange, the “you guys are so young” and “you guys are so old” comparisons are in danger of getting tired (who wants to feel young or old enough to have it be worthy of special mention every day anyway?). To the extent that we might have to ban all such discussion shortly.

However please beg my indulgence on a related matter, and that is that I have found the pop cultural grafting point that separates my world from theirs, and it is Remington Steele.

This program aired on ABC from 1982 to 1987. Which were my prime teenage television watching years. My new colleagues were, by my calculations, in early elementary school at the time, presumably well early of the Remingston Steele demographic.

I know all this because at the big blogger orgy on Thursday, I made a sarcastic suggestion that I would simply hang a sign and maintain an office at 84 Fitzroy St., but never actually go there. “Sort of like Remingston Steele,” I said.

The reaction to which was some combination of blank stares and empty looks.

The conceit of Remingston Steele was that Laura Holt, played by Stephanie Zimbalist, was a female detective who found herself in need of a male “front” to attract business. So she hired a British gadabout, played by Pierce Brosnan (revently of James Bond fame) to play the role of her boss, Remington Steele.

Not deep drama, I admit. Somewhere south of Hill St. Blues and north of Wonder Woman. But I was a fan. To the extent that my friend Chris Nicolson and I used to watch episodes again that he had taped on his VCR (he had a rather complete collection).

Two or three years later, the young lads would be 11 or 12, and our demographic would sync up a little more, and after that our pop culture Venn diagrams intersect more fully. Though never completely, as I discovered when I revealed my amazement that all video games in arcades are now killer death games and recalled fondly the days of Tron; that revelation was revealed more with disdain than bewilderment.

Tron… those were the days.

Irony night. We headed to the show, with love actually and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World on the radar. I was leaning Russell Crowe, Catherine leaned Hugh Grant.

But the timing worked out better for love actually, so that’s what we saw. The irony: Catherine found it complicated and slow and ultimately unsatisfying. Me? I cried three or four times, and thought it an almost perfectly constructed romantic comedy.

Who knows what this bodes for next week.

I’m in the process of upgrading the servers here, in anticipation of their move to the new silverorange/reinvented data centre.

The server that powers this website is far, far less powerful than you might imagine it to be: it’s a generic 233 MGHz Pentium II with a 4GB hard drive. Not greased lightning, in other words.

I’m preparing to replace it with the machine that used to be my Windows 2000 desktop, which is a 500 MGhz Pentium III bona fide IBM machine. It’s a trusty piece of iron that has served me well, and has a lot of life left in it. Although it isn’t a greased lightning server either, it’s more than up to the task of running the operation here.

But it only had a 4GB hard drive, which isn’t really enough space to store everything that I’d like to store.

So I went out to Future Shop today and bought a 160GB Western Digital hard drive. With rebate (the standard Future Shop “price is lower than you think” trick), the price was $169 before taxes. Or about a dollar a gigabyte. And it came with a free UltraATA controller card.

The irony is that this price makes it both cheaper than the generic “Cicero” brand 160GB drive, and cheaper than the 80GB Western Digital drive of the same series.

It installed in the old IBM machine easily, and RedHat Linux is chugging away at its installation right now.

I can’t actually conceive of a drive that’s 160GB — my first IBM machine had a 20MB drive, and I thought that was basically infinite.

I’m sure, however, that I’ll fill it up in short order.

The $169/160GB drive is on sale this week at Future Shop. Be prepared for the usual “would you like an extended warranty with that?” routine.

Although I’m on the record as being oppposed to the lights-o-rama that afflicts our neighbourhood every November, I’ve got to say that the recent flap over the “geese pecking down the Empire State Building” is completely overblown.

I suppose, if you squint your eyes, it does look like the animated geese in front of Province House are pecking down the upper reaches of that grand New York building. But suggestions that this somehow represents a slight by Prince Edward Island against our neighbours to the south are absurd.

Yes, the lights are ugly. But I can’t imagine that their designers intentionally included anti-New York imagery, especially in the post-9/11 climate.

How can we put this public relations debacle to rest?

I love ellen, the new daytime talk show from Ellen Degeneres. Its got a great aesthetic, a brilliant host, and an attitude that elevates it above the Letterman/Leno/Rosie level. It’s not Charlie Rose, but, thank goodness, it’s not The View either. The show plays locally on NBC over the noon hour.

Good flag and credit card icons are gold in the web design world (or at least in my little obscure oart of it). Daniel Von Fange found a good source for free flag graphics, in Estonia, of all places.

Between the flags from Estonia, and the PDF tools from Romania, coutries formerly under Soviet control are looming more important in my digital life.

BBEdit, the excellent text editor for the Mac, has long spoken FTP. Now it speaks SFTP too, so you can open/edit/save files sitting on an SFTP-enabled server simply by selecting File \| Open from FTP/SFTP Server from the menu.

BBEdit has long had the ability to talk to external SFTP clients, like MacSFTP. Bringing this feature “into the family” means it works faster and more cleanly.

Available in the 7.1 update released on Friday.

A commercial under the tagline “It’s not what you think, it’s what you know” has been running on the local CBC station here for the last while; the commercials drive traffic to a website with the same messages.

The campaign is funded by the Canada/Prince Edward Island Labour Market Development Agreement which is “co-managed by Human Resources Development Canada and the Provincial Department of Development and Technology.” (Disclaimer: Reinvented was under contract to the Department of Development and Technology until earlier this year).

While the tagline — “It’s not what you think, it’s what you know” — is presumably intended to be some sort of tricky double reverse entendre, I can’t help but feeling that it’s a deeply wrongheaded message about career planning. Indeed, if I was running my own campaign, I might use the tagline “It’s not what you know, it’s what you think.”

The message appears to be “don’t treat yourself as an intelligent, thinking human being, treat yourself as a vessel waiting to be filled up with career skills so you can be an effective automaton for the trade economy.”

The irony is that to excel in the trades — and I consider my work to be a trade as much as any other — requires the ability to think — to imagine, innovate, solve problems, improvise, ponder and solve — much more than the ability to execute a robotic series of tasks. As a prospective employer, I ultimately don’t care at all what skills you have going in (“what you know”), I care about what kind of person you are, whether you have learned how to learn, whether you care about your work, whether you can work as a member of a team, and help to solve new and unique problems (“what you think”). Compared to those qualities, whether you can write elegant PHP code or not is, relatively speaking, irrelevant.

This is not to say that training, with the specific technical skills it allows one to develop (“what you know”), isn’t important. But to suggest that those technical skills are more important than, indeed more important enough to supersede, “thinking” skills seems irresponsible. I’ve been through an apprenticeship, and learned a trade: I learned a lot of very specific (and now, alas, woefully out of date) technical skills. But my ability to thrive in that workplace, and my ultimate value to my employer, had much more to do with my ability to think than with my ability to know.

Perhaps I’m living in some idealized little bubble world where thinking is important. Perhaps I misunderstand the message of the campaign. Or perhaps I misunderstand the way the world of employment actually works. But on the surface, the message I’m getting from this campaign is “stop thinking and start working.” Is that the kind of world we really want to build?

The CBC Disclosure special Political Animal that aired this Tuesday was actually quite informative and entertaining. And, unusually for the CBC, the website for the special is simple, well-designed, and contains the complete video, in three formats, of the entire television program. Bravo, CBC.