One of the things I didn’t figure into planning for the life of a digital nomad was the ergonomics of the situation. At home base I have a body-contured Obus Forme chair, a desk that flies up and down at will, appropriate task lighting, and a nice quiet green cube in which to work.

The last 24 hours I’ve spent most of my work time either hunched over a “crash cart” in the Peer1 colocation room, or contorted into the confines of a makeshift desk in my hotel room that involves an easy chair, pillows, and a lot of anti-ergonomic positions. Club Quarters is a great, clean, cheap hotel, and it’s only 2 minutes walk from Peer1. But I can’t imagine how their marketing staff could write “latest workstation design with task lighting” on their website, as the desk in this room is 12 inches above reasonable typing height, the desk chair looks like it came from the Lido Deck of the Love Boat, and the “task lighting” is a brass table lamp with one light bulb burnt out.

My body is starting to feel the effects of this: lower back pain, wrist tingles, and the like. Fortunately the worst is over: two servers have been upgraded, and I’m halfway done the reinstallation of the content. In the meantime, Almanac.com and YankeeMagazine.com continue to be available for your viewing pleasure.

I’m taking the night off tonight to go and see More, the Yeardly Smith one-woman show. I’m a sucker for the one-woman show.

Imagine the movie Bullworth. On television. In America. With every swear word “bleeped.” It’s like morse code. I’m watching right now. It’s part of “Movies that Rock Week” on VH1.” Sigh.

This morning in the Globe and Mail I read a story about a fast ferry called Spirit of Ontario that is to offer service between Toronto and Rochester. I paid attention to the story both because the ferry had suffered a gash in its side, and also because Rochester is my birthplace.

Today I was wandering around aimlessly in lower Manhattan looking for a place to have dinner, and I rounded a corner and, by complete coincidence, stumbled across the selfsame Spirit of Ontario, gash and all.

For some reason, my compatriots in Rochester are taking this all very seriously (who would have ever thought the prospect of people from Toronto boating across the lake could be so compelling?), to the point where a mobile news truck from WHEC-TV, the local NBC affiliate, is live on the scene.

For the record, the gash is very, well, gash-like. It looks like God took a misshapen can opener to the side. They’re doing their best to hide the hole with a big tarp, but you can see the gnarled edges around the sides. The operators of the boat are downplaying the accident, but you gotta think that “gash” and “boat” are two concepts you don’t want associated with each other.

Here are the things I learned today about New York City.

New York City, or at least Manhattan, or at least Lower Manhattan, is really rather small. I am working on Broad St. this weekend, and staying around the corner on William St. I can easily walk to both sides of the island, and Brooklyn (or what I assume is Brooklyn, it looks like Brooklyn) seems so close that I could reach out and touch it.

For some reason there are large liquid nitrogen tanks located all over this neighbourhood, with rubber hoses running from the tanks down into the earth. A quick Google suggest that this might be a fix for leaky steam pipes causing problems with fiber optic cables.

Every city has its Faneuil Hall, Peakes Quay, Spinaker’s Landing, Harbourfront, Granville Island, etc. Here it’s the South Street Seaport. And they are all the same: expensive stores that sell things nobody really needs, food courts selling generic food, a little bits of ye oldieness scattered around for “ambience.” I fled as soon as I wandered in by mistake. Who is the customer for this stuff?

And finally: I’ve realized that there are more people in New York that don’t plan to kill you than do. Growing up in flaccid Canada, and experiencing New York mostly through Law and Order reruns and urban legends about “Bob and Milly down the street who got mugged,” it’s easy to understand why I would assume that the city is made up mostly of gun-wielding killers. I’m sure they exist. But none of the people I encountered today in Lower Manhattan did, in fact, try to kill me. Or if they did, they didn’t do a very good job of it because I didn’t notice.

If work proceeds as well tomorrow as it did today, I might have extra time to head out to the theatre tomorrow night; I welcome recommendations.

Often I find that when I’m trying to access hotel WiFi, I get assigned a TCP/IP address that starts with 169. The Apple network setup complains that this is a “self-assigned” address, and it don’t get any Internet access in any case.

The universal solution to this problem appears to be simply to power the WiFi access point off and on. Sometimes this is easy to do yourself (hint: often the access point is hidden under the desk in the hotel room); other times you have to ask the hotel staff.

I just had to do this at Club Quarters in New York: there’s a little SMC access point on the desk in the lounge; I unplugged the power, plugged it back in and, presto, working WiFi.

Off to New York City to kick off an American tour. Expect much scatterbrained, U.S.-influenced posting.

Update: In the Air Canada lounge in Montreal. Stale bagels, free Internet, Bran Flakes. Who could ask for anything more!

Update: Newark Airport (now named “Newark Liberty Airport” apparently, in a bold move of oxymoronicism) is the worst airport in the world. I gave up trying to find buses, trains, or other non-taxi transport after 30 minutes of trying and took a cab. As I type this, I’m sitting on the second floor of 75 Broad St. in Manhattan, which is the former headquarters of ITT. There is so much Internet flowing through this building, that if you plugged an Ethernet into your ear, I assume you would become all-knowing and all-seeing. I haven’t tried this yet.

Update: There are many, many, many places to eat lunch in and around wall street. There are police everywhere here, and where there aren’t police there are private security. But everyone is very nice.

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.