We headed over to the Dairy Bar in Victoria Park tonight, unable to resist any longer the allure of the Wild Blueberry Smoothie, which is being heavily advertised on the CBC. They’re very good, and are available without dairy if you like.

Back in September of 1994, I placed a call to the Prince Edward Island Department of Economic Development and Tourism. I was running the Island’s first website, for the PEI Crafts Council, and we were getting requests for tourism information from [the still relatively few] Internet users around the world. Not a flood of requests, but a good steady trickle. I figured if I could get the PEI Visitors Guide on disk, I could place sections of it online, stanch the requests, and help to promote tourism in my new province.

The Department happily handed over a floppy disk with a WordPerfect file of the Visitors Guide and shortly thereafter the tourism section of www.crafts-council.pe.ca went online. (Historical sidenote: that webserver was running a very early version of Slackware Linux, and was connected to the Internet over a 14.4Kbps leased line modem connection to PEINet using a $300 Practical Peripherals modem. Our 14.4 service cost us $350/month.)

The tourism pages had attracted visitors — again, not a flood, but a healthy trickle — so when my contract work with the PEI Crafts Council was finished in January of 1995, I approached the Department about building on what I’d started, and creating a bona fide online version of the Visitors Guide.

What resulted was a three-month trial balloon, running on PEINet’s webserver (aka bud.peinet.pe.ca for those of you who were around). Perhaps the most novel thing to come out of that trial was the listing search system, still in place today (albeit heavily evolved); this was a unique tool at the time, as similar tourism sites simply offered a long laundry list of accommodations, attractions and so on, and we let users search for things like “cottages, on the beach, that serve breakfast, and allows pets.” The search system was written in Perl and, because there weren’t any open-source database systems at the time, used plain ASCII files to hold the data.

When the three month trial was over, the project was judged successful enough to proceed with development of a full-blown website for the province, and so I signed on for an additional year to put this into place. When it came time to get paid for the first time under this expanded arrangement, I got a call from the person who was responsible for making out the cheque: “who should we make the cheque out to,” they asked. “Uh, hold on a second…,” I replied, “I’ll get back to you.” That afternoon I registered the trade name Digital Island. And that’s who they made the cheque out to.

In the early days of www.gov.pe.ca, we were still running on PEINet’s webserver. My relationship with PEINet, going back to my work with the PEI Crafts Council, was somewhat strained, and so our tenancy on their webserver was never a completely happy arrangement from either side. Things came crashing to a halt in December of 1996 when we launched one of the web’s first “electronic Christmas card” applications. From November to Christmas we had hundreds of thousands of users from around the world taxing PEINet’s servers with their Christmas card sending. A couple of days before Christmas, we got a call from PEINet saying, essentially “get off our server.” Their request was not unreasonable, as we were generating a lot of traffic, and causing their other customers grief.

The solution — and we had to be quick about it — was to take a relatively low-powered desktop workstation from the desk of someone who was on early Christmas vacation, install Linux on it, and turn it into the new webserver. It stood up brilliantly, and was the province’s webserver for a couple of months until new equipment arrived.

The “three month trial” and the “extra year” have evolved into an eight year arrangement to oversee the province’s web efforts. From the tourism beginnings the site had grown to encompass almost everything the provincial government does: users can renew vehicle registrations, register frog sightings, pick up soil test results, search historical elections results, find their basketball courtand apply for a business development funding.

As the project has expanded, there’s been an ever growing team of people working inside Government on the project. Carol Murphy and Teressa Richards came on board as GIS specialists when we moved into online mapping; Carol has stayed focused on GIS while Teressa has taken on the task of wrangling government services and programs information together. Darren Hatfield came on board to edit the contents of a business directory, and has stayed to manage content for the site. Nick Grant has taken on more and more of the programming responsibilities for the site, and developed many of the systems that drive content management. And there are hundreds of other public servants working behind the scenes, using web-based content management systems, keeping information about their particular aspect of the public service up to date.

On a political level, the web project has always received support: Minister Robert Morrissey in the Callbeck government, and Ministers MacAleer, MacKinnon and Currie in the Binns government, have each, with their deputies, been 100% behind us.

From the beginning, the primary believer in and facilitator of the web project in the public service has been Carol Mayne. She handed over the floppy disk containing the Visitors Guide in 1994, and has been a tireless promoter of the website ever since. Not only wouldn’t the site exist without her, but she deserves the credit for most of the innovative and novel aspects of it, both because she said “yes” to what initially might have seemed far fetched, and because she wrangled together the funding to pay for new initiatives. Carol’s assistant, Janice Thompson, has also played an invaluable role, not only assisting Carol, but also maintaining content, and answering thousands of user questions.

And now, for me, it’s time to move on.

As of July 1, 2003, my little company will recede into a purely advisory role, and day-to-day operations, design, and development of the province’s web efforts will be assumed by the very capable in-house staff.

As you might imagine, the decision to leave the project hasn’t been an easy one — www.gov.pe.ca truly has been a labour of love for eight years, and a unique opportunity to work at the very beginning of a new medium. I owe the project a great debt, personally and professionally; leaving it behind, in some ways, feels like giving a child up for adoption. Fortunately, its adoptive parents have been around for a while, and will, I’m confident, take the project in new and interesting directions on their own.

Reinvented Inc., the company I founded as Digital Island in 1995, is expanding its relationship with Yankee Publishing, publishers of YANKEE magazine, and of The Old Farmer’s Almanac. I’ve been working with Yankee almost as long as with the province — indeed Steve Muskie at Yankee, who originally contracted with me, found me because of the Visitors Guide search — and I’m excited about the new projects we’re preparing with them. My brother Johnny has been working with Reinvented for almost two years now, doing a lot of work with Yankee; it will be good to be able to focus all of our efforts on helping Yankee contribute to the web.

The new setup also leaves me with a little more free time. Time to spend with my little family, to do some more writing, and to explore around at the fringes again for a while. It also makes us slightly more mobile, and we hope to do a little more travelling — “working vacations” you might call them — before Oliver starts school.

And so begins a new chapter…

Islanders looking for a respite from the summer heat or rain (or from mid-afternoon work blahs) can again take advantage of matinee shows at Empire Theatres. Not a substitute for a good independent film or a night at the drive-in of course. But when you need a movie in the afternoon, it’s the only way to fly.

About 8 feet from where I type this note, there is a huge tree. As I rarely go outside, and when I do, rarely look up, this tree is something that I really didn’t notice the hugeness of until recently. This is ironic, because the tree is by far and away the largest single object in my life. To give you some idea of how huge this tree is, here is a picture:

That puny little blue house with a red roof to the left of the tree is our house. And inside that puny house, behind the left-most window on the first floor, is my office. A rough calculation suggests that the tree is about 30 times taller than I am. And about three and a half times taller than our house. If the tree fell on me, I would die. If the tree fell on my house, my house would be crushed.

My friends will tell you that I am the person least likely to wax eloquent about the wonders of nature. But it’s hard not be impressed, awed even, by a force that can produce something so impressive and majestic.

So, on this Canada Day, let’s all hail the tree.

From my friend Stephen comes a link to whichbook.net, a site that claims to give “readers an enjoyable and intuitive way to find books to match their mood.”

There have been many other kicks at this can, perhaps most famously the firefly project that came out of MIT.

Unlike commercial services that seek to use aggregated reader/listener/viewer preferences to drive sales, whichbook.net is a non-profit setup, run by librarians.

While I’m sure this service will be useful to some — Stephen says “I threw in some criteria and got books that i had read that fit the bill perfectly and some books i hadn’t read.” — I’m perplexed by this set of selections. Do people really choose books this way? Do you say to yourself “I could use a good read, something extremely gentle, a little disgusting and very bleak?”

I realize that my random “books that have interesting covers” method is prone to failure, but this seems a little too intentioned for my tastes. Like genetic engineering for books.

I think the Charlottetown let’s hold a very loud rock concert on the waterfront era is coming to an end; there’s simply going to be too much public pressure from disgruntled downtown residents to allow it to continue for another year.

I’ve heard reports that last night’s Nickelback concert could be heard in Brighton and Sherwood; here on Prince St., 5 blocks north of the concert site, I could have sworn that the band was playing in my front yard.

Sources tell me that City Hall received a lot of complaints on Monday morning after the equally loud Blue Rodeo concert Sunday night, as did the City Police.

It now seems clear that the tourism mandarins at The Capital Commission, whose attitude towards downtown residents is mostly “deal with it,” will be forced to either shut down completely, or scale back heavily to quiet, daytime-only concerts.

If you live downtown, and think things have gotten out of hand, here’s a handy list of email addresses you might use to let your feelings be known:

• The Capital Commission (general email)
• Holiday Inn Express (concert series sponsor)
• ATV (concert stage sponsor)
• Harry Gaudet (City Hall CAO)
• City Police
• Nancy McMinn (City Parks Superintendent)
• Donna Hurry (City Tourism Officer)

The term 1xRTT is a new, needlessly complex term that means “faster data on cell phones.” If you’ve ever tried to use the “wireless web” on your cell phone, you’ll recall that it was slow: slow to set up, slow to browse, slow to navigate. This is because the prevailing method for getting bits and bytes from phone to web and back is clunky slow.

1xRTT is a new standard for sending data over cell phones that’s supposed to be much faster — Aliant says “at speeds of up to 86 Kbps”. That might not seem very fast (and, in the grander scheme of things, it isn’t). But in cell phone terms it is fast. And that gives you some idea of how slow the current mechanism is.

Now, if you cut through the marketing bullshit (full of phrases like “Now you’ll enjoy richer graphics, and advanced features such as customization and faster Internet connections”), it’s not such a bad thing to be able to grab data from the air through a phone. WiFi is good, but so far it’s far from everywhere. Whereas 1XRTT is everywhere (at least on PEI, so Aliant claims).

In theory, this should mean that with a 1xRTT-equipped cell phone, and, optionally, a laptop, one should be able to use the web anywhere on the Island at speeds roughly approximating somewhat more than those one would obtain with a 56K modem over a phone at home.

And, indeed, look at the cool guy, lying on the beach, on this page (model is either Rick Schroder or Jonathan Torrens): he’s lying there, surfin’ around, enjoying the richer graphics, the advanced features, the customization, all without the nuisance of wires.

So far, so good.

And then we get to the question of rates, which start at “$10/month for 1MB and $10/additional MB” and go on up to “$100/month for 100MB and $3/additional MB.”

Now back in the 1970s, and even on into the 1980s, we used to think a megabyte was an pretty huge amount of information, the sort of data equivalent of “the distance to the moon and back.”

But I just linked to a 46MB QuickTime video, and didn’t think twice about it. The 1xRTT cost of downloading that video from the beach? $460 with the basic plan down to “only” $100 with the $100/month plan.

And that’s one file.

Imagine the amount of data that flows in and out of your PC in an average day — email with attachments, web browser, streaming audio, streaming video, file transfers. I’d hazard a guess that an average day of being online sees 10 to 15 GB go in and out of our line here. Or, in Aliant 1xRTT terms (using the cheapest 1xRTT rate package), approximately more than $30,000/day.

Now perhaps if I was lying on the beach, and not working as intently as I would hear in the office, I could chop that down to, say, $10,000. A relaxed 5-day beachside work week, and my wireless data bill comes out to about $200,000 a month.

I simply can’t imagine what normal person would utilize 1MB/month of anything — that’s 33KB a day, on average. Or roughly enough bandwidth to download the Reinvented logo up there in the corner of this website about 4 times. What kind of richer graphics, advanced features, and customization is the RickJonathan enjoying there on the beach?

This would all be much less absurd if this was typical North American pricing. However, for example, Verizon’s 1xRTT service starts at $25/month for unlimited usage.

Hello, Aliant, is anybody in there?

FOAF stands for Friend Of A Friend. There are two things you need to drink in to understand what FOAF means. First, watch this Ben Hammersley video [46MB QuickTime]. Second, read this introduction for parsing FOAF in PHP (even if you’re not a PHP programmer, it’s a useful and well-worded description).

Once you understand FOAF, here’s mine. Now, go make your own and send me your FOAF address.

I realized today that I use NetNewsWire every day almost as much as I use my email client and my web browser. Although I’m happy with the free “Lite” version of the product, it seemed like a good idea to support good software, so I upped for the real thing (on sale until the end of today for $29.95US).

One of the great new features of the “Pro” version is the “Combined View,” which is best described with an example:

Here I’m looking at the silverorange labs reader responses in Combined View. Along the left-hand side of the window you can see the list of RSS feeds of weblogs that I use NetNewsWire to read.

Truly a great product, with a imaginative and talented author. If you have a Mac, and you read weblogs, you should have it.

Referenced many places elsewhere, and posted here mostly so that I’ll have a place to refer to myself: video from reboot6.