Prince Edward Island: We're Big in Europe

You would think that a small place like Prince Edward Island, 130,000 small as we are, would escape any recognition at a conference like reboot, with people from 20 countries, but only two Canadians (me and him).

But you would be wrong.

Guy Dickinson from Manchester found and watched the entire set of Zap Your PRAM videos over a series of long train trips.

Dina Mehta is a blogging colleague of Rob Paterson. Although they’ve never met, Rob’s daughter Hope stayed with Dina in India and they became good friends.

Johnnie Moore from London is a blogging colleague of Rob’s too (“oh, Prince Edward Island… you must know Rob Paterson!”). Johnnie’s game to come to the Island.

Danish organic farmer Thomas Harttung has had meetings with the Island’s Foodtrust organization.

Tonight on the way to the after-party, I had a great conversation with Mark Wubben a reboot attendee and high school student (name, alas, unknown)Germany The Netherlands. When he heard I was from PEI, he said “oh, you must know Steven Garrity.” Turns out he is a regular listener of Steven’s Acts of Volition Radio show, and has bought many CDs based on hearing new artists there.

Here I was thinking that I’d have to fall into the usual “small Island province off the east coast of Canada” routine at reboot; little did I know that our reputation precedes us.

Happily, I also got the chance to spread a little Island love outwards: I told Dragos Novac, from Krogos Software in Bucharest, Romania to thank his countrymen at Interakt for their excellent PDFreports product which we used to generate the lists of electors in the 2003 Provincial General Election.

Similarly, I told MySQL co-founder David Axmark the story of how we used MySQL installed on an Apple iBook to help us process the election returns after the unfortunate coincidence of a hurricane with election day, and the attendant loss of power.