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.

One of the oft-overlooked aspects of PHP is that you can write scripts in PHP to execute from the command line. I fell into the habit of writing data munging scripts in Perl, and web pages using PHP; I realized I was keeping alive two types of code needlessly.

How do you do this on a Linux machine? Let’s say you have a script called make-ducks.php…

First, find out where your PHP engine is:

whereis php

You’ll get back an answer that looks something like this:

php: /usr/local/bin/php /usr/local/lib/php /usr/local/lib/php.ini

The /usr/local/bin/php is your PHP engine. Now simply insert the following at the top of a PHP script you want to run from the command line:

#!/usr/local/bin/php -q

Make sure this is the first line in your PHP script. You can then leave everything else in the PHP script as you would have it otherwise. Mark the PHP script as executable:

chmod +x make-ducks.php

Now you can go ahead and run the script like it was a regular Linux command:

./make-ducks.php

The only difference is that output that normally goes to the browser, including error messages, will now be printed in your terminal window.

Neato!

Big news on the Formosa front: the couple that runs the venerable University Ave. restaurant in Charlottetown has purchased the former Big Mommas location on Prince Street, all 3000 square feet of it, and plans to either move there entirely, or keep the existing location open and open a new branch there. The menu will be expanded on Prince St., and they plan to open one floor to start, with others to follow. Expect an opening date of next spring.

Let’s hope they can break through the curse on that building: it’s been so many restaurants, from so many owners, over the time we’ve been on the Island that we’ve stopped counting (and, a couple of owners ago, stopped going, just because we expected the worst). Apparently this isn’t a new curse, either: I talked to someone today who’s got 15 years on me, and he said the same has been true all his life as well.

If anyone can make that location work, it will be the tenacious couple at the Formosa. Here’s hoping they make a good go of it; I know that our family will be regular and enthusiastic customers there, especially as they’ll be only 2 blocks from our house.

Amazing, isn’t it, the explosion and success of interesting food in Charlottetown in the past year. I remember reading a fantastic column by Len Russo in the Eastern Graphic several years back: he was writing about the arrival of the Just Juicin’ juice bar to Queen St., and compared it to the arrival of pizza on the Island in the early 1970s in importance and earth-shakingness. I think we’re into another quake now.

I really miss Len’s column in the Graphic; he’s a fantastic writer, one of the best columnists I’ve ever read regularly. Our loss in Canadian Tire’s gain.

This week our Canadian neighbours celebrate Thanksgiving while our American cousins celebrate Columbus Day. And, what’s more, the leaves, on both sides of the border, are changing colours, so the so-called “leaf-peeping season” is in full swing, especially south of the border (leaves, it seems, aren’t such a big deal here in Canada).

While the tourism season ended on Prince Edward Island almost two months ago, after Old Home Week in mid-August, there’s a huge fall tourism market (see Seasons, an excellent, beautiful new product from my colleagues in New Hampshire at YANKEE).

I’m off at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning to spend a week in New England; as a direct result of the leaf craze there, I couldn’t find a hotel, B&B or other room to save my soul within 50 miles of rural, leaf-drenched Dublin, New Hampshire.

Fortunately, my friend, and former YANKEE, Lida, who swapped houses with us last summer, came to my rescue and hooked me up with two friends of hers from leaf-drenched Harrisville, NH (home of Harrisville Designs, for you spinners and weavers in the readership), so that is where I’ll be based from tomorrow evening until the end of next week.

The irony is that in this most colourful of seasons, I’ll be spending most of the next three days readying a couple of new servers for installation at new colocation facility, totally unmindful of the leafy heaven swirling outside. I’m just thankful to have found a place to rest my head at night.

I’m still searching for someplace to spend a couple of nights in Boston on the flip side of my trip; rooms seem to be tight and expensive, so something must be going on there that weekend.

Back in town on Sunday, Oct. 19. Take care of the Island for me; regular updates from the road to follow.

Here’s a recent note from the CBC’s Corrections Page:

In a news story on September 27 about the earthquake in Japan, CBC News Online said “Hokkaido is home to 16,000 people.” The population of Hokkaido is actually closer to 5.6 million.