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.

Air Canada has a special on to Maui (in Hawaii): $468 from Halifax. Pay $212 more and you can go from Charlottetown. Oddly, it’s $530 Toronto and Montreal, which, if memory serves, are closer to Maui than Halifax.

Deal expires April 22.

Hewlett-Packard goes after the quilting market. We are a world of a billion niche markets.

A lot of the work we do involves image resizing — taking JPEGs that users submit on a web form, for example, and making a thumbnail.

We’re currently using the convert application, part of ImageMagick, to do this under Linux, but we’re finding that it’s rather slow and processor-intensive.

Perhaps this is simply an inately slow and processor intensive process, but I’m wondering if others can suggest alternative Linux applications or utilities that we should look at.

A little-explored branch of the Reinvented universe is the Reinvented Online Store. Fabulously unsuccessful (we have sold a grand total of nothing in three years!), I nonetheless continue to hold on to the notion that, someday, someone will buy something.

To spur this on, I’ve redesigned all of the products this evening. They now sport the bold headline i am reinvented, with the Reinvented logo riding underneath.

Perfect giftware for friends and family in a rut — “Dear Sis, I know you’ve been feeling down lately, so here’s a lovely lunchbox to cheer you up. Reinvented yourself! Love Bobby.”