At the tail end of September, my old friend Stephen Southall visited us in New Hampshire, and we took a day trip to MassMOCA. I’ve just been sorting through some of the pictures of the trip…

North Adams, Mass is a mill town, and as such it has a lot of abandoned industrial space. This space is gradually being recycled into MassMOCA’a gallery space.

The top-left picture is arguably MassMOCA’s most well known installation. It’s called Tree Logic, and was created by artist Natalie Jeremijenko. Read about the installation.

If you are in western Mass. (or southern Vermont, or eastern New York), take a day or two at MassMOCA: you will not be disappointed.

I had a multi-timezone orgy of fun this morning.

In the living room Oliver was asleep in front of the television, tuned to KTLA, the Los Angeles affiliate of the WB network. In LA, it was 7:30 a.m..

Meanwhile, here in my immediate reality, it was 11:30 a.m.

And I was in the middle of a conference call with the folks at Zend, in Ramat Gan, Israel, where it was 5:30 p.m.

If I could have conferenced in someone from Taipei, where it was 11:30 p.m., I could have covered the entire world like the dew.

Time for breakfast \| lunch \| dinner.

Here are some cools things I’ve been able to easily do with my Mac this week that would have been more difficult, or in some cases impossible, using my PC:

1. I wanted to copy 4GB of files from my iBook to Catherine’s iMac quickly. I connected the two computer together using my iPod’s firewire cable, and my iBook became a disk drive on Catherine’s desktop. Copied the files by drag-and-drop. Blammo.

2. I wanted to run the GnuCash open-source personal finance program. I simply installed XDarwin and ran the program from the Linux server in my basement (the same one that serves this website). The program “ran” on the server, but all of the windows, dialog boxes, etc. were “on” my computer, so it seemed like a local program.

3. Catherine wanted all of the addresses from my Address Book in her Address Book. I used iSync to sync my Address Book with our .Mac account, then did the same on Catherine’s computer. Blammo.

4. I wanted to take a bunch of data files from Elections PEI, process with with Perl, then produce a report as PDF file of the results. A combination of Perl (built-in to OS X), AppleWorks (included with my iBook) and OS X’s built-in ability to print to a PDF file from any application made this quick and easy.

As I’ve written in this space before, I moved my old PC into the basement, and have been using my iBook as my work machine since September. I placed an order for a new iMac, with a 17” screen, this morning because this trial period has gone so well. I guess I’m a Mac user now.

With fall ending in 3 days, it’s time to look back at the season.

In my family, it’s been an autumn of dramatic change.

The season began with Brother Johnny and sister-in-law Jodi returning from their honeymoon in Europe after a late summer wedding on Vancouver Island.

Brother Mike has a new woman in his life, Janine, and Oliver and I were happy to meet her on our whirlwind visit to Ontario two weeks ago. She’s very nice, and an excellent match for Mike.

And Brother Steve has a new city, Montreal, in his life. Mom and Dad made the drive out to Saskatoon in late October to pick him up, and they drove back from Saskatoon to Ontario at 80 km/h towing a U-Haul trailer behind an ancient Honda Accord. If you’re in Montreal, you can hear Steve reporting for CBC Montreal now.

Meanwhile, here in Charlottetown, Oliver is entering the heart of his “twos” and, at least so far, there’s no evidence of terribleness. There is, however, something new every day. This week he learned how to growl like a bear. Last night, while on the phone to Brother Steve, he learned how to click his tongue. And he now has paroxysms of joy every time Santa Claus is spotted, which mystifies us, but perhaps proves the power of the media to carry cultural viruses (not that Santa is a particularly bad virus to catch). Oliver’s “Santa” sounds more like “Dante,” and he has started to use the word to describe both Santa and me. I’m not sure whether this is a good thing or not.

Christmas gifts have been arriving all week from across the country (we caught Oliver trying to unwrap them last week and I had to explain to him the concept of “later”). We will be making excellent use of Canada Post this week to send our own parcels winging west.

All in all, a good fall.

Regardless of your political stripe, you’ve gotta say that Wayne Easter as Solicitor General is proof positive that democracy works.

As everyone and their brother is reporting today, Al Gore is not running for President of the United States in 2004.

This brings to mind a recent discovery: I was delighted to find that, now that I am 35 years old, and as I was born in the United States, I am eligible to run for President but Arnold Schwarzenegger, being born in Austria cannot.

Article II, section 1, clause 5 of the United States Constitution says:

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.

My only problem is this regard is that I am not yet “fourteen Years a resident.” So if I moved to the US today, I couldn’t run for President until the 2016. Gives me plenty of time for preparations, though.

I’ve tried very, very hard to resist commenting again on the garish Christmas lights display which again this holiday season pollutes the streets of my neighbourhood. But I can no longer do so.

I’ve reconciled myself to the notion that the “creating a garish lights display will prevent people from shopping in Moncton” meme cannot be extinguished — it’s simply too powerful, in some crazy viral way that I can’t understand.

What makes me depressed, however, is this: after thousands of years of modern culture, of developments in architecture, design, art, craft, after the Renaissance, the Bauhaus, Impressionism, in a world of Frank Gehry and Jasper Johns and Georgia Okeeffe and the Group of Seven, why is it that the expensive centrepiece of our primary secular and religous holiday consists of a illuminated duck drinking from an illuminated champagne fountain?

Is this the best that we can do? Is this really who we are?

Words to live by from our friends at Disney:

People are not always as nice, cute, or funny as they may sound online.

Were truer words ever spoken?

Every time there’s a crime, accident, or other matter worthy of police attention in Charlottetown, you can expect to see Deputy Chief of Police Richard Collins on Compass telling the police side of the story.

Richard Collins has very obviously not been to media school. He’s prone to sometimes using the wrong word in the right place, and sometimes he laughs at times when he shouldn’t. He tends to be more honest then he probably should, and then sometimes tries to take it back. In short, he’s not a polished media player. And that’s okay by me: Richard Collins appears on television like a regular everyday person who happens to work for the police department. He’s “one of us” and he approaches interviews, within the bounds of his job, just like that.

It can’t be an easy job, and he does it well. Thanks.

Somewhere in the world tonight, a good friend of ours is playing host to a dinner party for a world leader. I’m under strict orders not to reveal places, times or identities. Someday the world will know; tonight, I can only write in these hushes tones.