When in doubt, ask!

I am a newly minted New Yorker subscriber. Since Tweels closed this summer, I’ve had a hard time re-establishing a New Yorker buying system, so I finally decided to move from “regular newsstand purchased” to subscriber.

My first issue arrived yesterday, and because it was the Sept. 22, 2003 issue (and yesterday was Sept. 17), I got curious about when the New Yorker is actually published relative to its cover date.

So I emailed the publisher. And 45 minutes later, he emailed back (this is one in a series of events that proves that the magazine has a great publisher).

Here’s what he told me:

The magazine arrives on newsstands one week prior to cover date (9/22 issue, arrives on stands 9/15), and subscribers get it the Mon, Tue, or Wed of that week. The cover date is really the date that the magazine comes off sale, not goes on sale.

So the issue I received yesterday was published two days ago, which is pretty amazing, and makes me almost feel like I’m actually living in New York (but not quite).

For reference, the magazine is generally available on the cover date here in Prince Edward Island on the newsstand. Which means that the magazine that I received yesterday, Tuesday, in the mail won’t be available otherwise until next Monday, which is the date it goes off sale in New York.

I note, with some irony, that pretty well the only spam I receive these days (what with SpamAssassin killing things on the server-side and Apple’s Mail deleting a good amount of the rest) is Viagra-related. Even virtually, the stuff can make things go where they’re not otherwise intended by nature.

There’s no doubting that “dick unhardness” (the official Pfizer term is “erectile dysfunction”) is a valid problem, and something that Viagra can help with. It’s unfortunate that the spamsters have taken this on as their latest cause.

Pfizer, makers of Viagra, have a helpful page on their website called “Tips for Talking to Your Doctor.” They include some helpful opening lines that you can use to break the ice. For example:

“Doctor, I’m having some trouble getting erections and I’m concerned.”

and:

“I need to talk with you about my sex life.”

Fair enough: as I can’t even imagine talking to my doctor about Viagra (or anything nether, for that matter), I can see how these might be helpful.

But what about:

“Have you seen the VIAGRA commercial with Winston Cup Driver Mark Martin?”

and:

“Have you seen the VIAGRA commercial with Major League Baseball Star Rafael Palmeiro?”

Must we really turn our lives into branded parodies of themselves to overcome our discomfort with talking about sex [or not]?

The Zap Your PRAM Conference now has a conference blog. I’ll move most conference-related discussion over there now.

Synesthesia and synchronicity have got to be two of the greatest words in the English language.

Synesthesia was the name of the radio program that used to come before mine on Trent Radio in the late 1980s. It was the creation of a woman named Leah Tremain who quickly became, and remains, one of my favourite people in the world. Our friendship was sparked by radiophonic proximity, and kept burning by a sort of double-reverse cuckold maneuver that we both unknowingly participated in, only learning the details of which when she was in Switzerland (or was it Sweden, I can never remember) and I was in Texas years later.

One dictionary definition of synesthesia is:

a sensation that normally occurs in one sense modality occurs when another modality is stimulated

In other words, “hearing colours” or “tasting sound.”

I told you it was a good word.

Synchronicity, on the other hand, means:

the relation that exists when things occur at the same time

That’s a far less dramatic definition, but the concept is interesting when you overlay reality on it. Like The Police did.

I had a small outbreak of synchronicity this weekend. I suddenly had a need to produce well-formatted reports, as PDF files, from a webserver. For two different clients. Elections PEI needed a nice-looking Supplementary List of Electors for the upcoming election, and Yankee Publishing needed nice-looking credit card transactions reports.

Fortunately, a smart bunch in Romania came to the rescue.

Interakt is a Bucharest-based software development house that produces a very sharp tool called PDFReports that happened to fill two voids for me this weekend almost perfectly (for those of you more techincally inclined, I’ll follow on with a more detailed review over on the Reinvented Labs website).

So I spent half the weekend lining up the last names of untold Gallants, Macdonalds and Doirons, and the balance lining up VISA, MasterCard and Discover payments. Synchronicity.

Next week: symmetry.

Here’s what happens when you have a bad website.

Dico went to the Dr. Hook concert on June 11 and hasn’t updated his weblog since. Is he okay?

I’ve worked in and around the Provincial Government complex — the Shaw, Sullivan and Jones buildings here in Charlottetown — for almost a decade now. It only just dawned on me today that none of the offices or other rooms in any of those buildings have numbers on them. If you want to know where someone works, the best they can tell you is “Shaw North, fifth floor, down at the back.”

It’s only in the past year or two that people even had their names on or beside their doors.

There is a simple, small-scale elegance to this absence that I enjoy, even if it does make finding people difficult sometimes.

And I think it’s another example of how, traditionally, Prince Edward Island has been a relative rather than an absolute society. On PEI, the relationship of something — person, building, whatever — is almost always described in terms of its relationship to other things.

So I live in “Bill Reid’s old house,” which is “around the corner from Province House.” Our old house was “on the Kingston Road across from the church.” And so on.

I would hazard a guess that the decay graph of “the Island way of life” would parallel a graph of the move from relativism to absolutism.

Hey, guess what! There’s another conference happening on Prince Edward Island the same week as Zap!

Now it’s obvious from the nextMedia conference website that they’re working on a whole different level than we are with Zap Your PRAM. They’re well-funded, expensive ($450), pretentious (okay, we’re pretentious too), and have a website entirely contructed from PDF files.

We’re self-funded, cheap ($100), just as pretentious, and have a website that actually uses text and HTML like real websites do.

It will cost you $5,000 to sponsor the nextMedia official opening and luncheon plenary. We’ll let you sponsor a lunch for, say, $400, and we won’t make you say the work “plenary.” Ever.

If you go to next nextMedia, you’ll probably get to hang out with all sorts of people from Technology PEI. We can almost guarantee a completely Technology PEI-free event! We also promise not to use the word cyber. At all.

But I jest, as I’ve set up a false dichotomy: conferences like nextMedia are Prince Edward Island at its deluded “we can play in the bigs leagues” worst. They’re the Newfoundland cucumber factories of the cyber age. All we’re trying to do with Zap Your PRAM is to get some interesting, interested Islanders together with some interesting, interested people from away for a weekend of good conversation, good food and good fun.

So if your life is a PDF file, by all means nextMedia yourself. If you’re RSS, then get Zapped. And if you’re neither, well, feel free to watch from the comfort of home!

I’m happy to announce that New York filmmakers Tessa Blake and Ian Williams will be speaking at The Zap Your PRAM Conference in October.

Ian and Tessa were here on Prince Edward Island in August, on their honeymoon. Catherine and I took them to dinner at Shaddy’s Shwarma Palace, and we had a great time. They’re a welcome addition to the conference.

One important note about the conference: although we’re using the shorthand of “technology and design” to describe the conference, we’ve all felt that’s sort of a misnomer. Yes, we organizers are all, in a way, “technologists” and designers. And so that’s our starting point. But we also read books and write weblogs and watch films and mow our lawns (well, I actually don’t mow my lawn, but that’s another story…).

Which is to say that we’re not going to be talking, at least not in a long, boring, formal way, about geeky topics like “installing Windows 95 on a dual boot partition system” or “fun with RAM, ROM and RJ-45s”. We mean to talk about the tools we use, the world we live in, about new media and old media, about good design and bad design, about how systems work (and why they don’t), and about where to buy good chocolate. We’ll talk audio art, digital film, and streaming text. We’ll talk about six degrees of separation, and how you represent them on a screen. We’ll talk about weblogs and politics. And weblogs and private lives. And weblogs and travel.

So if you fear attending a geekfest, don’t. Read the [growing every day] list of people coming, read their blogs, and if you find them interesting, come and interact face to face.

We’ll have good food, a great location, and lots of good things to talk about.

If I’ve convinced you, email me and I’ll get you an invite.

Some of the friendly and wise fellows from silverorange and I have mistakenly concocted a fall technology and design conference here on Prince Edward Island for late October. You can read the story of conception here. Suffice to say that it was an inside joke that got out of control, and took on a life of its own, and, now that people have purchased non-refundable airline tickets from faroff places to attend, has become a Real Thing.

The conference is called The Zap your PRAM Conference. That’s prounounced “Pee RAM” for those of you who haven’t encountered this phrase, which is a piece of Apple Mac voodoo chanting (again, all is explained here).

I’m excited that we’re getting such a range of interesting people attending: Art Rhyno is coming from the University of Windsor, Tom Hughes (who designed the Reinvented logo, who I’ve never met in person!) is coming from the US, as is Buzz Bruggeman. Stephen Regoczei and John Muir, two cohorts of mine from my days in Peterborough are coming. And more names are being added to our roster every day.

The conference is “by invitation only” which is less a way of trying to deify ourselves and more a “we only have 40 spaces and want to get a good mix of people” mechanism. And we don’t want to fill the room with a bunch of technocrats. TED charges $5000 to do the same thing, but we don’t want to exclude interesting non-millionaires.

If you’re interested in attending just ask and we’ll try to accommodate you.

What’s the conference actually about? Honest answer is “we’re not exactly sure yet.” Only slightly less honest answer: technology, weblogs, design, people, ideas, and the mixture of all of those. The conference will be largely defined by the people speaking. And we’re working to have the “speaker” and “audience” distinctions somewhat blurry so there’s more of a rolling structured dialog.

In other words, this is all an experiment: gather some interesting people in Cavendish in the off-season and see what happens.

Stay tuned for more info.