On August 11, 1999 a bunch of piss-and-vinegar filled nineteen and twenty year olds incorporated a company. We called it silverorange.

Yesterday both the Prince Edward Island CBC and the Charlottetown Guardian reported on a near-drowning incident of an older man. In both of their reports they said that a few teens who aided in the rescue were:

The teen youth were suffering from nervous exhaustion. - The Guardian

The three teenagers who tried to help the man in the water were also taken to hospital. They were being observed for signs of nervous exhaustion. - CBC PEI

I had never heard of "nervous exhaustion" so I looked it up. It's medically called neurasthenia. A few interesting points about it:

• Coined in 1869 by George Miller Beard
• Beard believed the condition was brought on by "excessive masturbation"
• No longer an acceptable diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association
• It was nick named "Americanitis"
• It is a chronic stress thought to be brought on by the stress of urban life and: "Typically, it was associated with upper class individuals in sedentary employment."

I think what the Guardian and CBC were probably trying to say was that the teens were being monitored for Acute Stress Reaction. It was probably the excessive masturbation that threw off the teen's diagnosis...

Here at silverorange we have two naming schemes for our servers/public computers. Our servers follow a citrus theme (Ruby, Pomelo, Rind, Mandarin, Blood, etc). Any MacOS computers owned by the company follow a similar apple based scheme (Cortland, Gala).

Most of us at silverorange have followed suit and have taken on a naming scheme for our personal computers. The schemes are as varied as the people:

• Nathan - Rocky and Bullwinkle characters.
• Steven - Guitar equipment brands (i.e. Fender, Marshall, Gibson).
• Isaac - Greek Gods (OS X), Roman Gods (Windows). Attempts to match computer use to god's purview, and uses matching gods on dual boot systems.
• Dan (me) - Significant mountains (i.e. Everest)
• Mike - Space missions (any nationality).
• Nick - Mushroom related. (i.e. portabella)
• CharlesP - Comic book characters that take into consideration processing power and capacity. ( i.e. Superman is a much faster computer than Spider-Man).
• CharlesW - Names non-work servers after planets from Dune.
• Keith - A focus on popular TV, movie, or video game characters. (i.e. venkman, strangelove, staypuft, sydney, elvira, vohaul, venus [from WKRP], zissou)
• Stephen - Weird Al Yankovic related names.

Feel free to add yours to the list.

From the CBC comes the report that PEI is now in a battle with Nova Scotia over a 23 person game development shop that is currently located in Charlottetown.

I'll sum up the situation for you. The province of Prince Edward Island offered a sweet deal 18-24 months ago for this company to come to PEI. Longtail took it. The deal is now up so Longtail is moving out to the next sweet deal (Nova Scotia). PEI is now extending/counter offering the sweet deal in an effort to have the company stay.

As someone in a similar industry and similar sized company in the exact same province I have two questions:

• What is the value of that type of company on PEI? They bring no long term value to the city/province. It is painfully obvious that they will just move on after the next deal expires no matter where they end up. Good riddance, thanks for leaving, and shame on them for forcing their employees to move every 18 months while they chase the green monster.
• If you're throwing out incentives why not give the incentives to those who have decided to form/stay on PEI for the long haul? Make the incentives progressively better the longer a company stays around.

Allan Campbell needs to be very careful in this situation. Yes, keeping 23 jobs is good, proving to all other companies that you just have to threaten to move to get incentives is very, very bad.

I've heard that a few people have been asking why we would have left the front of our building at 224 Queen Street until the very end to finish. Here's why:

• The front is the most intricate. It takes the most time to do well and right. We are saving the best for last.
• Being more intricate it takes much more planning, development, and thought. That takes time.
• The sides and the front are inter-dependent and there is a certain order you need to do things to make it all come together correctly.
• We don't really care that it is the front. We see the whole building as a project to do well The 22.3 feet that people walk by is just another side to us. To put it into perspective the building has 200+ linear feet of wall. 10% of it is the front.
• When we "do" the front it will render the front entrance unusable for an amount of time. We had to build a side entrance to facilitate building access while the front is unusable. That side had to be done first.
• We have worked on the front. You might notice the completely rebuilt porch roof, the seven installed windows, or the completely scraped and primed trim, overhangs, and decorative brackets.
• There are 2.5 of us working on this project on top of our full time jobs. It's done evening and weekends to not disturb the building during business hours. We're doing it as fast as we can.

When ripping apart a 100+ year old building you become keenly aware that the work you are doing lasts longer that your own lifetime. As a result we want to do it right. We have a strong desire to do things well, as they should be done. We want this building to be done correctly, to be efficient, and to be well built. The art of craftsmanship is something we hold near and dear to our hearts and feel that that art is starting to be lost for a quick visual fixes. Everyone is a fan of Mike Holmes until the motto "make it right" affects a building they work in or a renovation budget they are in charge of. "Making it right" takes longer, is more expensive, and often requires work to be done in a way that most would see as illogical. Also, sometimes you have to undo some of your work when you discover something new.

We're excited to be nearing the end of this project. Finishing the highly visible front will be a very dramatic and climatic end to a 4-5 year project. It will be much more satisfying for us to step back from the front and say "we are finished" than to step back from the rear corner by the parking garage and say the same.