A pleasant, uneventful trip from Boston yesterday. Got a chance to visit the North Bennett Street School, which was amazing. Also got Catherine’s whole-bean espresso coffee at Polcari’s which, for my money, is the best place to buy coffee in the entire world. And I don’t even drink coffee.

Air Canada is back in the “minimum possible snacks” frame of mind: current offerings are Ruffles potato chips, Clodhoppers graham cracker chocolate glorbs, and some bizarre almond/pretzel/sesame mixture. Kind of makes me nostalgic for the “some grapes and a sandwich” days.

Suggestion for Boston: if you’re flying Air Canada from Terminal C, don’t wait until you’ve gone through security to eat, as there’s only a Burger King and Pizza Hut on the other side. If you have time to spare, go to Legal Sea Foods, if you don’t, then go to Au Bon Pain, which has a nice colleciton of freshesque wraps, a decent fruit salad, and a good selection of baked goods and drinks.

Warning for Boston: from check-in to waiting room, now that Air Canada’s in Terminal C, can take up to 45 minutes. So if you’re used to the quick 5 minute breeze through Terminal E, make sure you leave yourself lots of additional time. I left North Boston at 4:00 p.m. to head to Logan for a 6:35 p.m. flight, returning a rental car in the process, and, with time for a snack, didn’t have a lot of waiting around time.

Another warning: the formerly wonderful outpost of the Boston Children’s Museum in Terminal C has been drastically scaled back, and while it’s still there, and still a place to take kids, it’s no where near as wonderful as it once was.

And one final Logan tidbit: rental car shuttles no longer stop at the ‘T’ station. So if you’re returning a rental car, and then going back into the city, you need to take the shuttle one of the airport terminals, then get the Massport shuttle to the ‘T’.

It’s a beautiful fall day in Charlottetown; nice to come home to.

If you’ve got a RedHat box, with X11 set up, and you’re moving the box to a new location (like I did yesterday), with new IP addresses, and you want to use the GUI tools (like redhat-config-network) to set the new network settings, you might be disappointed to find that typing startx to start up X11 won’t work — the machine just sits there doing nothing.

The root of this appears to be that missing, or incorrect network settings (and/or DNS settings) give the X startup process problems.

The solution?

Just turn off your Ethernet interfaces temporarily:

ifdown eth0

Then you can startx as normal, set up your network, and then either activate the interfaces with GUI tools, or, from the command line:

ifup eth0

Since my iMac’s hard drive came crashing to a halt three weeks ago (it’s in the shop, care of little mac shoppe, right now), I’ve been using my trust 2001-era iBook as my only computer.

And it has been rather pleasant. There’s almost nothing I miss, save for the large 17” screen. Things are marginally slower on the iBook, but not in a way I notice most of the time. I benefit from having everything in one place, especially handy when I travel. And it’s got a battery, which is a big help when the power goes out.

I think what I’m going to do when I get back to civilization is to pass this trusty iBook on to brother Johnny, sell the iMac (either using the vestibule method, or on eBay), and buy the upgraded 15 inch iBook, which has a bigger screen, a faster processor, and more memory.

In a move that you can’t help but admire, and that ranks up there with the best counter-programming moves the television networks can muster, our colleagues at that other conference (warning: insano-site), after having their life as a PDF folly pointed out to them (note: they’ve reinvented their website as a gigantic, equally non-functional Flash application), have added Dave Winer, UserLand Founder, RSS pioneer, and Berkman Fellow, as a keynote speaker.

It’s nice that Dave will get a chance to see the Island, and good that the sizzling mediaheads attending nextMedia will get exposed to his message. We’ve invited him to come up and Zap His PRAM after he’s done with nextMedia, and I think there’s a plan afront to get an informal blogger dinner or lunch up and running in Charlottetown regardless.

While I continue to think that a smaller scale, more modest and sustainable approach to technology and development (and conferences) is the sane way to proceed, I can’t help taking some perverse joy in the fact that Prince Edward Island is home to two technology conferences in one week.

I am being punished, of course. I’m sitting here in the Yankee offices in Dublin, New Hampshire, with no power, save for that here in the laptop. No Internet. No washrooms. No telephones. After being in New York City yesterday, this blackout here in New England — word is that a lot of the region is without power — has taken me from the centre of the universe to its very fringes in less than 24 hours.

I’m being punished because, ironically, the last visit I made to Dublin happened to be the same day that a blackout struck New York City, Toronto, and most of the northeast. Except for New England. I poked fun at, or at least pointed out the “hey, I’m here on the fringes and I have power” irony of, the situation. My chickens have now come home to roost.

At the risk of repeating much of the sentiment that was expressed by others during the Big Blackout in August, I’ll point out that a company like Yankee simply cannot operate, at all, without power. Everyone has a computer on their desk, from mailroom to CEO. The phone system needs power to run. The washrooms need power (because Yankee has its own well). To say nothing of lights, fax machines, slide tables, and all the other trappings of the modern office.

So everyone has gone home, as of 2:45 p.m. I’m left, almost alone, in the middle of the afternoon with one of the only working machines, albeit one that’s not connected to the Internet, after the UPS battery powering the Internet switch went out.

I might go out and catch a matinee. But it’s hard to know which direction to travel to find a movie theatre with power. Wish me luck.

Update, two hours later: The power is back on. Everyone except Jamie, the CEO, and Ken the PR wizard, have gone home. It’s quiet here. But daylight, so no ghosts.

The simple version of my Tuesday: got up at 6:00 a.m., drove to New York City, installed two servers, drove back from New York City, arriving back at 10:30. Total time to completion: 16.5 hours.

Lesson learned from Tuesday: driving down into New York City from the east side, following Hutchison River Parkway and then Rte. 278 towards Manhattan, you come to this turn in the road and, all of a sudden, Manhattan’s skyline opens up like a picture postcard in front of you. Somehow, at that exact moment, the entire position of New York City in my head changed: it ceased being a sort of exotic, removed, magical Neverland, and snapped into focus as a real place, obviously connected by road to place where I work and, from there, to the place where I live.

It’s difficult to to justice to this repositioning. But somehow spending the 5 hours on the road to drive to the city — right past New Rochelle, where Rob and Laurie Petrie lived! — rather than flying in (which is magical, exotic and removed in its own way) made New York real for me. That we then drove into the heart of Wall Street and met a real person, and did some real work, and ate a real slice of pizza, made it even more so. Wow.

Experience in the New York Internet world: starting from this recommendation from Joel Spolsky, and from there to research on pricing, network and facilities, we choose Peer1 as a new colocation facility. While only time will prove whether they match or beat their reputation, I was very impressed with their facility, their approach, and how quickly we were able to get in and out. Mike, their man on the ground in New York, is a skilled and friendly tech: other technology companies should study Mike to see what we customers want in effective, helpful front-line staff.

The Peer1 colo site is at 75 Broad St. in the solid, over-built building that was originally ITT’s headquarters in New York. It’s the kind of building that has two brass slots between the elevators with MAIL embossed on them where you can slide letters down to the basement mail room and where the freight elevators are run by full time freight elevator operators.

The install went well, we had our slice of pizza, and then we drove back through the evening traffic to Dublin, NH.

An interesting day.

My pleasant and accommodating hosts for this week — friends of my friend Lida — are an intriguing pair. They are heritage preservationists and organizational development consultants, work for themselves, and are two of the nicest people I’ve ever met. They live in a rambling house on a hill above Harrisville, New Hampshire, the kind of house that has a kitchen with a large island surrounded by comfortable bar stools with backs. Their view of the foliage is unparalleled, probably in the world.

They have a passion for their choosen community, and were able, in a short 10 minutes, to convey to me the roots of that passion. To summarize: Harrisville, a former mill town — some say the most beautiful village in America — is remaking itself as a place where people — many different types of people — want to live. It has decided not to prostitute itself at the alter of tourism (which would be easy, given its beauty, its location, and the collection of ready-to-boutique-ify mill buildings), but rather to build on its natural qualities, its compact size, and the collegiality of its residents. The mill buildings will be renovated into offices, small businesses, studios, workshops, not Ye Olde Fudge Shoppes.

Harrisville had a town dinner last summer: to buy a ticket, you had to live in Harrisville. They had 400 people sitting at tables running the length of Main St., which was closed for the occassion. Can you imagine the tourism-addled City of Charlottetown ever holding an event where no tourists were invited or desired? Amazing.

I have come to truly understand the meaning of the work peak this weekend, by observing its usage on the ground. Peak, when applied to foliage, describes some sort of optimal, heavenly quality of leaf colour, reached only momentarily. It involves some sort of undescribable shade of red. Apparently it’s not yet peak here in Dublin nor Harrisville yet, but it will be soon. Either that, or we’re going to skip right over peak, the after-stage of which, I believe, is either “grey” or “falling off the trees.” I’ll let you know what happens.

In the meantime, I’m busily copying and pasting and shovelling data from city to city to ready the servers that power Yankee’s operations to a new ISP. It’s going well, so far, and if the trend continues, I might even be able to take a little time off tonight. To see the leaves. In the dark. Probably peaking, invisibily, before my eyes.

Note to world: I am working here tonight in rural Dublin, New Hampshire. I’m all alone in the rambling Yankee offices. There are lots of rumblings and hissings and ghosty like sounds. If am consumed by the ghosts and taken off to the basement, land of the undead, please send my love to Catherine and Oliver.

Later: Okay, so it was only a fly buzzing around the light fixture, not a ghost. Or maybe a ghost dressed as a bee. It’s 11:24 p.m. and I should really leave so I can sleep. But I’m afraid to turn the lights off. Wish me luck…

Neil Postman died on Sunday. He was 72.

In the fall of 1984 I was living in Toronto, attending Grade 13 at the Ontario Science Centre Science School. One day I found myself in the Bob Miller Book Room on Bloor Street browsing through the remainder bin, and there I stumbled across a book called Teaching as a Subversive Activity, written in 1969 by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. I was intrigued by the title, and bought the book. I think I paid $1.99.

I went home and read the book from cover to cover in one weekend. For a young mind like mine, coming off the back end of 12 years of mostly dreary formal education, it was a compelling, mind-expanding read, unlike any book I’d read before. Here were two guys writing about an entirely different approach to education and learning, an approach designed to outfit students with what they termed “crap detectors,” grounded in real world experience. I was hooked.

The next week I was scheduled to present a “book report” in my biology class. Reasoning that people were biological as much as anything else, I conspired to use Postman and Weingartner’s book as my topic. I believe, if memory serves, I received a failing grade, my choice of topic not being sufficiently biological to sync with the curriculum.

I did learn, however, that my biology teacher, the excellent Judy Libman, had read Teaching as a Subversive Activity herself at a similar time in her life. And so, despite the failing grade, our common experience, and the discussion that followed, forged a friendship beyond the borders of curriculum and biology, and we keep in touch to this day.

I read and re-read the book many times that year, and from there read Ivan Illich, and learned about Rochdale College, and Summerhill, and other “different” approaches to education. And the lessons I learned were enough of an inspiration to get me enrolled in the teacher training program at Trent University the next year: I was ready to take Postman and Weingartner’s theory and turn it into practice.

That idea didn’t pan out: I realized within weeks that becoming an elementary school teacher was doomed to destroy me, if only because I was going to be forced to adopt a peer group of teachers who loved their own school years and were poised to keep the fun on going. I truly couldn’t imagine spending a career making small talk in the teacher’s room with my status quo loving fellow students. My fate was sealed when I was invited into my teacher education professor’s office one afternoon and asked if I could be, well, a little less iconoclastic about things. Apparently my contrarian nature was getting in the way of others’ learning. I think it was my suggestion that we reconsider teaching children how to read, and instead teach them how to watch TV, that pushed things over the edge. And so I drifted out of teacher education.

That same year I was also enrolled in Computer Studies 100. The professor for that course was Stephen Regoczei, a quirky Hungarian in his first year teaching at Trent. At the end of the first lecture — a massive hundred-person affair, uncharacteristic for Trent — I approached him and, now infamously, told him that I thought taking his course might “get in the way of my education.” To my surprise — iconoclasts don’t often have their icons invite them for coffee — he invited me back to his office to discuss this idea, and what resulted from that encounter was a collegial friendship that’s lasted almost 20 years now (Stephen is coming to the Zap your PRAM conference later this month).

Stephen too, it turned out, had read Teaching as a Subversive Activity, and its effects on him had been similar to its effects on me. At this point, I knew I was on to something.

Postman went on to write many more books, including Teaching as a Conserving Activity in 1979, which many, most of whom didn’t actually read the book, took as a recanting of his first book. It wasn’t: it was more a sequel.

I left university after a year and, in a way, have spent the time since then carving out for myself a kind of self-education based on the principles that Postman and Weingartner espoused: learning from experience, following my curiosities, taking different paths, meeting different people, exploring the vocabularies.

About 5 years ago I found myself at something of a life impasse. I had been working for 15 years as one form of computer programmer or another, and while I was earning a good living, working on interesting projects, I wasn’t sure I could go on working in a field the core beliefs of which — “better living through technology” — I didn’t actually, in my heart of hearts, believe. And yet what else could I do?

I decided to write Neil Postman a letter. I went on at some length about how I’d read his books, and followed his thinking, and thanked him for his inspiration. And then I laid out my personal situation, and finished by asking if he might offer any advice.

And he wrote back!

I received in the mail, several weeks later, a well considered reply to my request. He said, to paraphrase, that although he generally hesitated to offer advice, he would, in my case, make an exception. He suggested that, rather than abandoning my work with technology, I seize the opportunity, as someone both versed in the use of tools and aware of their dangers, and write about, learn about, and otherwise explore my technological world. In short, he suggested that I try to leverage my skilled doubts into some valuable, helpful criticism.

And so that’s what I’ve tried to do.

This weblog is one result. My work on the radio is another. And the approach I take with my clients, which urges a gentle, sensible application of technology rather than a frenzied, religious adoption of it, has Postman’s stamp on it as well.

If you read one piece of Postman’s writing, I would suggest it be Informing Ourselves to Death, the text of a speech he gave to a group at IBM in the early 1990s. In it he summarizes his own views of our technology-drenched society, and talks about where “information,” our current drug of choice, fits in. No other document I’ve ever read so closely mirrors my own views and doubts about my choosen field.

I always thought that, someday, I would get a chance to thank Neil Postman in person for the tremendous influence he’s had on my life. I didn’t get that chance, alas. And so, although it’s a pale imitation, I’ll say thank you one last time here.

Neil Postman will be missed.

I saw one of these trailers at a dealership today. It was one of those “holy shit, look at that” moments. Wow.