We the family are headed off on vacation on Friday. The vacation was inspired by a long, cold, dark winter of gallbladder infused hell, plus a well-timed Air Canada seat sale that gets us all from Halifax to London return for $2000.

Mindful of the fact that Europe is one big relatively cheap airline spiderweb, our plan going in was to jump off from London to somewhere “on the continent.” We solicited suggestions from friends and family, and the most compelling response came from Rob Paterson, who sung the praises of Spain, and especially Barcelona and Sitges.

Alas when we dug into the issue of finding a hotel in Barcelona starting this weekend, we kept running into brick walls. It seemed, through the fog of the Internet, that there wasn’t a hotel room left in Barcelona. It wasn’t until I received a helpful reply from the City of Barcelona that we came to understand the reason for this.

With Barcelona out of the running, at least for the early part of the vacation, we set our sites west towards Bilbao.

Given our sucess travelling as Frank Gehry groupies in the past (Fred and Ginger in Prague in 1998 and EMP in Seattle in 2002), Bilbao, with its Gehry-designed Guggenheim, seemed like a logical destination. Stories I’d heard from Islanders who travelled to the Basque area of Spain in the 1980s to investigate the co-op movement there only confirmed that this was a good destination.

And so we land at Heathrow on Saturday morning at 8:25 a.m., and then up and fly to Bilbao the same day at six in the evening. We plan to spend 4 or 5 days in and around Bilbao, and then, somehow, gradually make our way back to London, flying back to Halifax on the 17th.

Stay tuned for updates from the road.

This website was crawled yesterday by the servers at TurnItIn.com, which bills itself as “the world’s leading plagiarism prevention system.” Their Technology FAQ explains their crawling as follows:

We have compiled a massive database of digital material by continually cataloging and indexing the entire Internet using automated web robots. Our robots retrieve millions of documents from the Internet every day— Turnitin.com has one of the most current and extensive crawls of the Internet available.

Using this Big Database, they can then compare academic papers submitted by professors or students, and create what they call an “Originality Report” which rates the possibility that the paper was plagiarised.

Not only that, but they say that they:

…archive all papers submitted to our database by registered users. Extended use of our service builds a comprehensive archive of papers and ensures that students will never recycle papers from previous classes.

I’m not a plagiarism advocate, but this sort of thing strikes a chill into my bones. If education has sunk so low that teachers need robotic assistance to gauge originality, then teachers have ceased to know their students, students have ceased to know their teachers, and education has become something akin to a chicken grading line. I can’t imagine why this approach to education is a benefit to society at large.

Back in the day, when libraries were classified in the public mind in the same aesthetic headspace as prisons, sanitoriums, and hospitals, the public library in Charlottetown moved into the Confederation Centre of the Arts.

The result was an giant room painted off-beige, with walls occasionally broken up with modern art circa 1964. The effect was not, shall we say, enlivening.

On Monday I got a call from one of the librarians there, announcing the arrival of Peter Coyote’s autobiography on inter-library loan. I was bemused by a Monday call — the library is closed on Mondays — and the librarian explained that they were all working overtime to get ready for the Big Paint Job.

Yes, the Confederation Centre Public Library is getting painted!

And not only that, it’s getting new carpet (the existing carpet being of a vintage and condition usually reserved for “on the garage floor to prevent the oil drip from the car from staining the floor”).

I went in to pick up the book yesterday, and you could already see evidence of the work: the back walls are painted an off green. The librarian at the desk told me there’s a rather vibrant rust colour coming as well, and what she characterized as a “very vibrant colourful carpet.”

Life will never been the same. Welcome to the new century.

Searching around for Pucinni recordings on Apple’s new music service, I happened across the Jussi Bjoerling album, a collection of opera arias, pictured here:

Notice that the album bears a Parental Advisory: Explicit Content warning “sticker.” The Recording Industry Association of America says this means:

The Parental Advisory is a notice to consumers that recordings identified by this logo may contain strong language or depictions of violence, sex or substance abuse. Parental discretion is advised

The mind boggles.

This news from the [excellent] Telecom Update from Angus TeleManagement:

ALIANT RETIRES PROVINCIAL TELCO NAMES: The four Atlantic telcos, NewTel, IslandTel, MT&T, and NBTel, merged in 1999, but kept their separate provincial identities. That’s now changing: the telco will operate as Aliant in all four provinces, and has launched a region-wide campaign to promote the brand.

The most obvious change is the new Island website for Aliant, which, confusingly, exists in parallel with the website formerly known as islandtel.pe.ca. Hopefully this mess will clear up, and we’ll have a clearer source for Aliant-related information in future.

I got a call this morning from Terry Allen at FutureLearning. I’ve known Terry for a while — I first met him when he was one of Don Glendenning’s disciples, and our paths cross every one in a while. He’s a good guy.

Terry was calling because he’s involved in the launch of something called E-Town this week, and he wanted to know if he could show this weblog as an example of “blogging in business.” I told him that was fine, as long as it was made clear that there was no relationship between Reinvented and E-Town or Virtual Charlottetown. He promised to do that, so I told him I was happy to have him go ahead.

Then I went to look at E-Town.

It’s not immediately clear to me what E-Town actually is. The site itself says it’s “A one-stop destination for e-business information” but it doesn’t appear to actually be that. Right now, at least, it’s a “clickable map of a pretend town with links (sort of) to e-business information elsewhere.”

Now I’m not smart enough to say whether or not we the people actually need a “one-stop destination for e-business information” created for us. But I can certainly offer some suggestions for improving E-Town as a web project.

When you “enter” E-Town, you are presented with a map that looks like this:

The “image” is not, in fact, an “image,” but rather an interactive Flash presentation.

Strike one, thus, is that all of the content in E-Town is effectively hidden from the web in a closed, proprietary world. Google won’t index it. I can’t link to it. And I won’t even start into the accessibility problems that this approach brings with it (hint: try closing your eyes and navigating the site with a screen reader).

Strike two, also Flash-related, is that E-Town doesn’t work like a normal web page: there are no hyperlinks (at least not in the normal sense), and when you hold your house over one of the “e-buildings,” a pop-up menu pops up, but you can’t click on anything in that menu (you have to click on the building itself). And then when you figure out what to click on, more pop-up windows pop up, but you can’t move them around. And then other pop-up windows pop up underneath these pop-up windows. To live in E-Town requires that you learn a new navigational metaphor, and that can’t be a Good Thing when you’re trying to teach people.

Strike three, again Flash-related, is that not everyone has the Flash player on their computer. We did some testing on www.gov.pe.ca and found as much as 15% of all web traffic coming to the site was not Flash-enabled. That’s almost 2 people in 10 who get automatically exiled from E-Town before they’re through the town gate.

The most noticeable organizational problem (can you have a strike four?) with E-Town is that the streets are in the wrong place. Look at the map above: in the virtual bizarro e-world, Prince St. and Grafton St. are parallel and Euston runs into Water, and Water into University. Now I’m not saying that E-Town should be a geographically perfect reflection of “R-Town,” but if you’re trying to make people comfortable with new concepts, why introduce this new layer of confusion? (And you just know, Islanders being Islanders, that this is something that everyone is going to notice).

In developing a Flash-based, non-accessible, confusingly presented site to deliver the e-business gospel, I fear that E-Town will create more confusion than clarity. The project is not unique in this regard: as I’ve mentioned here before, the CBC likes to create similar sites. And the problems with them are the same: in the name of “sizzle over steak,” these sites are not particpating in the web, but rather overlaying themselves on top of it. This isn’t an ecological approach, and that’s too bad.

Here is a fascinating article from the London Review of Books about escalators, how they work, and why they are so hard to repair.

I have no idea who Bruce Dalzell is, and there’s scant information about him available online, but I love the opening verse to his song On Becoming An Adult:

I was bouncing on a mini-tramp,

in the middle of my kitchen,

pondering the difference between cynicism and bitchin’.

I’s waiting for the dishes,

drying there in the rack.

Then I find the right cupboard,

and gently put them back.

How much joy can one boy take?

Does it make a sound when my heart breaks?

If nothing else, the song deserves an award for “best (perhaps only?) use of the word mini-tramp in a folk music song.”

The mini-tramp figured prominently in my childhood: first, it was a key piece of gymnastic apparatus at the Hamilton YMCA; second, it was a key plot device in an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati.

To give you some idea of how far behind I am with spring cleaning: I just got around to cleaning out the address and phone information for my contacts at Strait Crossing, added 6 years ago when we had the IslandCam based out in Borden. Give me a couple of months, and I’ll be dealy with some Y2K issues.

SkyScanner is the first website I’ve come across that offers a new take on flying: enter a departure point and a destination, anywhere in Europe, and see a graph of budget airline prices.