If you thought saying “www” was hard, try saying it in Spanish [30K RealAudio] or Italian [58K RealAudio] (voices courtesy of the Bell Labs Text to Speech system).

If you’re looking for something to listen to while computing, I recommend: Trent Radio (my old stomping grounds; community radio in Peterborough, Ontario); WNAN (affiliated with WGBH; broadcasting from Cape Cod, MA); 680 News (used to be CFTR, a top-40 station, when I went to summer camp; it was the only station you could pick up on Beausoleil Island); Radio Netherlands (if only to hear Dutch announcers speaking Spanish; very mellifluous).

Tune in this week to Off the Beaten Track on CBC Prince Edward Island (Friday, Dec. 15 at 4:30 p.m.) to learn more than you ever thought possible about the world of MICR and cheque clearing. (You can listen live via RealAudio, or find an archive link here late Friday).

Okay, so Island Tel Advanced Solutions [sic] doesn’t send paper bills for High Speed Internet — my only option is to receive my bill by email. But they don’t accept electronic bill payment from my credit union. This leaves them as the only bill that I can’t pay online (and this includes everything from electric and oil to my little insurance broker down the street). Oh, and they don’t even print their mailing address on the invoice — where am I supposed to send the cheque?

I try to say good things about Island Tel, really I do. But they’re at it again. Every time I reboot my system, Island Tel’s DHCP server gives me an IP address. This is fine and normal. Today, they opened up a new class of IP addresses, so that while I used to always get a 142.176.* address, now I get a 142.177.* address. That’s fine and normal too. Alas they didn’t update their SMTP server at the same time, so smtp1.islandtelecom.com thinks that when I try and send email from my new IP address I’m some evil outsider, and rejects my email. So I haven’t been able to send email today. Who’s running the show over there, and how could something so crazy, yet so simple, occur?