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.

I’m sad to report that Rob Trowbridge, Chairman of Yankee Publishing, the father of my friend and colleague Jamie Trowbridge, CEO of Yankee, has died at 71.

Our condolences go out to Jamie and his family.

Two years ago I was down at Yankee for the annual company meeting. During a break in the proceedings, I happened to find myself out on the lawn, alone with Rob and Jud Hale. Rob and Jud, along with Robb Sagendorph, are responsible for Yankee’s existence as much as anyone (learn more about this here). They were an interesting pair to spend time with — a scant 10 minutes as it turned out. I learned how they’d lived as veritable neighbours in Boston, but had never met until many years later. I learned something about how they’d run the magazine together, and of the families behind them.

Jud is still alive and well (you’ll be seeing him, no doubt, on television early next week talking about the 2004 Old Farmer’s Almanac, which is Yankee’s sister publication). Rob will be missed.

The New York Times reports: Warren Zevon, Singer-Songwriter, Dies at 56. This is very sad: Warren Zevon was a great artist.

Being one of only two Rukavinas on Prince Edward Island, sometimes it can feel a bit lonely. On a lark, I looked for Rukavinas in the Internet Movie Database. Whatdayknow — there’s a whole bunch of us working in film, including Vlado on Gladiator.

Then there’s the mysterious television program Akcija inspektora Rukavine, which I think roughly translates as “the work of Inspector Rukavine.”

Kings County, especially north-eastern Kings County (using the traditional Island compass rose of “north-east equals up and to the right”), truly is an undiscovered country. There’s just so much of it, relatively speaking, and, at least compared to the rest of the Island, so few houses and communities. You can drive for hours — well, okay, for at least 10 minutes — without encountering a single outcropping of people.

There are villages up there that I’ve never heard of. After you get past the relatively familiar Mount Stewart and Ten Mile House and St. Peters, you encounter places like Hermanville and Marie, and it almost feels like you’re on the bridge of the Enterprise making First Contact.

Oliver and I and our friend Gary went up to remotest Kings Country on Sunday for the big Rose and Snake Tour. According to the CBC, we were joined by 750 other curious people.

The “tour” part of the tour didn’t actually work — there was one poor tour leader and about 100 people following her around the hills and dales. Only the 10 or 15 people closest could really hear anything. I’m not complaining — they obviously had no idea the project would be so well attended.

Before and after the formal tour, we were free to traipse about the set of the film ourselves. It was very interesting. Made up to look like a 1960s-era hippie commune on the coast of Maine, the set had three or four quirky-looking houses of the type you might expect to find at Findhorn, complete with earthen roofs, geodesic dome greenhouses, and treehouses large and small.

Of course it was all mostly just a thin veneer — inside the houses was absolutely nothing, in most cases, other than supporting two by fours to hold up the earthen roofs. The veneer was compelling though — the houses truly did look like they had been there for 20 years, even though there was nothing on the site until May when construction started.

Rumour was the currency of the day. Most of the rumours seemed to involve Daniel Day Lewis, Sam Sniderman, and Teresa Doyle in some combination. There was much talk of the “on the screen they might be start, but in person they’re just real people.”

The RCMP provided excellent traffic direction and parking guidance.

We arrived at a good time, a lull in the proceedings. On our way out were about 50 cars lined up for parking. Nice to know we all got to experience the joys of driving through outer Hermanville to get there.