Hey again.

OK, I am now back in Sweden. At work, doing my job. Getting to know PEI in person was a fantastic experience.

In the aftermath, I have noticed a few things. Being away from my own keyboard for a long time gives me a different outlook. (By keyboard, I mean things like Facebook, the programming community at large, and instant messaging with friends back home.)

Coming back to curiosity: now being more immersed in the research of solar and wind power. I was recently introduced to the amazing Open Farm Tech idea. And maybe PEI needs a FabLab?

(I hate to brag, but the tapwater at home just tastes better. I don’t even need to filter it.)

Am in the office to burn all Luisa’s images. Quite a lot of those.

The non-conference (nonference?) Zap your PRAM at Dalvay-by-the-sea starts this afternoon. (Geek bonus: Apple article about PRAM-resetting.) Peter usually explains the idea behind the conference that it is for “digital folks” who don’t want go to yet another technical conference. We can talk about other things this weekend.

Me and Luisa got a slot in the schedule, before or after a lunch. We did some thinking about what to use the presentation slot for; would want something other than “us telling people a story, they sitting down listening”. A roomful of attentive and relaxed people can be used for so much more than information-dissemination.

Oh, and I got a bit of praise from Polish reader Marcin:

By the way, I love your Hello PEI blog. I’m planning to live in another country for a bit myself and reading something like that is really inspiring. And cool

I should try writing more about the “go somewhere and approximate daily life there” aspect of this journey. What we did to have that ‘we will live here’ thought experiment in our heads.

Olle planning our talk, originally uploaded by Luisa Carbonelli.

Tonight we will be giving a talk at the Confederation Centre of the Arts. The talk will be about seeing a place with fresh eyes. How the strange becomes familiar and how the subjective perception of a place, a community changes over time.

We had guests over for a minor living-room party Saturday night. I had got it in my head that we should have metallic-finish tinsely party-hats. Bad idea.

Did you know that these things fell out of fashion decades ago, and that Wal-Mart, Hallmark, Dollar Store, Dollaroo, [insert any hardware store], Michaels, none of these sell such hats. Maybe it’s seasons-oriented, so that come New Year’s, they’re all over the place.

During this long tour, which was sometimes directed by GOOG-411 calls, we talked about huge current department stores, and those of the past. Wal-Mart is the very definition of huge. No tinsel-hats, though. At its entrance, an employee who looked a lot like that white-haired gangster in The Sopranos pointed me the way to the party supplies shelf. He cut a sad figure in his blue vest when he said: “They won’t let me leave this area here, so I can’t walk you to the shelf.” Reminder: got to see those documentaries around that chain of stores.

Our party came out just excellent. A newborn infant plus her parents who popped in for a moment were the youngest of the bunch. I heard some fine stories.

Sarah, artist, said: ‘Me and Roy met in the very same bar my grandfather met my grandmother. They also fell in love right there.’

Beaconsfield, originally uploaded by Luisa Carbonelli.

Here is what I remember from the tour of the house: Once upon a time, when Charlottetown ship-building was at its peak, the local millionaire Peake built a dream home overlooking the harbor inlet. Five years later, that whole line of business had fallen through, and the Island had no more lumber for building ships: Peake was bankrupt. The house was sold. All inventory was auctioned off.

Another rich family moved in, then out. Nuns used the building for years. (Later I heard that when the nuns used the house, they removed a statue of a half-naked lamp-holding Venus. It was in its original location when I saw it.)

Next to the building is an annex, Carriage House, which is still used for meetings and concerts and the like. When we visited, and got a personal tour, there was a Heritage Association (?) meeting in progress in the annex.

In the picture above, you can see how the rooms are now presented: sealed off with a ribbon, you look into these recreated milieux, guided by a storyteller, who may or may not know the details of the items in the rooms. Fact we got to know: The wallpaper is after-the-fact installed William Morris designs. All rooms have that. Must have cost a fortune. Looks stunning, though.

Luisa’s audio-guide idea could work well in this place; lots of items to hook a story to, simple to get the user to stand in the right place for a story. And, having several stories for the same room could give the user more interpretation than would be possible from a tour guide.

Got me a good book at the Bookmarks bookstore in the Confederation Centre Mall. It was the 600-page collection of stuff written at the Worldchanging.com web community. They compared it to the Whole Earth Catalog, and I think that holds water.

Lots of info on green energy. Small and huge solutions. Today I read about biomimicry, Stirling engines, and stove innovations that improve quality of life in third-world countries. The book also had a chapter on Finnish school systems and such.

Bonus link to : Nick Taylor’s blog IkoStar is very much about those “fix the world” issues. Also: reflections on music (using lots of YouTube videos) and life in general. The green tech posts are the most factsy ones, though.

Farmers Market, originally uploaded by Luisa Carbonelli.

Every Saturday, there is a Farmers Market event, out in a building with a huge parking lot. “It was 500 cars here when we counted once” said Peter, as we turned to park.

Lots of people mill around this rotunda, and we got the feeling that folks come here as much to talk to each other as to actually buy stuff. We got introduced to (rather shown off to) all of little Oliver’s regular friends. These included a spinner, and the vegetable guy (“This spot here in the stall is reserved for Oliver. Sometimes I tease him by putting a sack of potatoes where he’s supposed to be.”).

We got Mr Kim’s customary salmon bagel (Mr Kim was absent this particular day, though), coffee and smoothies, and hung out, talking to people. This place is a bit like going to organic church: the weekly meeting and catching up.

We got some interesting details on windpower, from Cynthia Dunsford, a local politician, who is also one of the three Plazes users on the Island. (Actually, at that moment, all three were within a 2 meter radius of one another.)

The aforementioned PEI heritage study is available in PDF, should you want to read it.

There is a comics shop in Charlottetown. No, there are two shops for comics here. We went downstairs to Lightning Bolt, one of them. A small room, full of comic books, trade paperbacks, and plastic figures of unknown-to-me franchises. We were greeted cheerfully by the proprietor, Daryl (who is really called Dylan; see below in comments), who some online reviewer called “stereotype comic book guy”, and that would not be off the mark. Asked to show his comic books, and perhaps recommend something, Daryl proceeded to expertly guide us through his merchandise. Further into the dungeon, a trading card game was in full, silent swing.

I have many friends in the role-playing game/comic book subculture. They all like “the same things” on their pop culture plate. Talking to this guy was like talking to someone I already knew. Uncanny. But very friendly, homely.

(The US dollar influenced the prices in a customer-friendly way, too. In Europe, buying these comics costs twice as much. But people still do; it’s still excellent literature. We bought some good ones.)

privilege, originally uploaded by Luisa Carbonelli.

Our residency project is about the curiosity awakened in us as visitors to the Island. We are strangers, and the Island is strange to us. We want to know what shapes daily life here, and what shaped it 150 years ago.

We document this exploration by taking photos and blogging about it here (and on Flickr).

Our talk is more about the process, how we sate our curiosity, and less about what facts we gather. We can not tell the story of the Island, we can only tell our own story.