I went to Shoppers Drug Mart yesterday to buy shampoo. I had only one consideration in my choice of brand: a bottle that clearly indentified its contents.

I am amazed at how shampoo makers obscure the actual word Shampoo on shampoo bottles, especially when shampoo bottles look almost identical to conditioner bottles.

Given that most people use shampoo in a bleary-eyed early morning state while not wearing glasses possibly required for reading and other basic eyesight, it would seem that a logical design consideration for shampoo bottles would be the word Shampoo in very big letters on the side of the bottle. However what we usually end up with is something like shampoo, located under a Big Brand Name.

To assist in the alleviation of this problem, I offer the simple graphic here to any shampoo maker who would like to download it and plaster it on the side of their bottles. If you do this, I will buy your shampoo forever.

It is impossible to do justice in words to the many wonders of MacAusland’s Woolen Mills in Bloomfield, PEI. But I will try. At least a little.

MacAusland’s has been producing woollen blankets since 1932. And they do produce these blankets. From scratch. They take raw wool, card and spin it, then weave blankets from the thread. These are blankets that will last forever. They are soft and warm and so unlike what most people think of as a woollen blanket (scratchy, rough, etc.) as to be a breed apart.

A visit to the factory in Bloomfield is an experience in itself. There is no “factory tour” — you just walk right in the side door and are immediately in the midst of all of the amazing belt-driven machinery used to produce blankets. You are free to poke in and around anywhere, and there are no “warning, don’t go here” signs at all (note: as a result, of course, you should watch where you step, and where your young children stick their arms/noses/legs).

Walk up the steep wooden stairs to the “showroom” and you can select from a wide array of blankets in different colours and sizes, as well as a good select of yarn.

When you buy a blanket (and you should buy a blanket), it will be wrapped in paper and tied with string. They will ship anywhere.

This week or next, or the one after that, you cannot do wrong to take the afternoon off and drive up to Bloomfield. It’s about an hour and a half from Charlottetown, just past the O’Leary turn, right on Route 2. You can stop in Kensington at the Frosty Treat on the way up for an ice cream, and at the Richmond Dairy Bar on the way back for another.

There has been quite a bit of controversey about Windows XP, Microsoft’s next generation of Windows. Most of the discussion has centred around Microsoft’s nefarious new ways of detecting the guts of your computer and attaching your copy of XP to that computer and that computer only. A lot of people think they’ve Gone Too Far in the name of anti-piracy efforts, to the point where these “features” are going to interfere with legitimate users.

All that controversey aside temporarily, I’m happy to report that Windows XP is beautiful. Microsoft is running a preview program where, for $9.95 USD you can download a “work in progress” version of Windows XP over the Internet, burn a CD with it, and install it on your computer for 180 days.

So I bit, and took the new operating system for a ride. It is, indeed, still a work in progress, and is a little rough around the edges. However it is a much, much more sensible, well-designed and, yes, beautiful operating system than any that preceded it. It makes Windows NT and Windows 2000 look like amateur efforts.

I’ll be an upgrade customer when the time comes, nefariousness or not.

We switched our Internet connectivity for this server over to Island Tel’s OfficeConnect service a week ago today (hint to Island Tel: if you want people to link to your website, don’t use frames — you lose your brand identity!).

The transition went smoothly. The Island Tel installer was crackerjack: he was in and out in about 20 minutes (could have left sooner, but he was pleasantly thorough). We installed a switched hub, he made a call to the central office and, kazaam, we switched from dynamic IP to static, and everything flowed just like it did before.

The next day I moved the server up from the old Okeedokee data centre to its new home in our basement here on Prince Street; that transition, after the usual wait for new DNS information to propogate, went smoothly too.

So, all in all, I’m happy with the change, with the service I’m getting, and with the price point ($129.95/month for 1Mbps).

I am, however, dogged by constant technical problems, apparently unrelated directly to the Island Tel network: I maintain a webserver in Boston, which requires a lot of connection, over the Internet, to the server for upkeep, development and maintenance. In the run of an average day, I might be connected to the Boston server 5 or 6 hours. So I notice when things go wrong.

This traffic travels from my workstation over the Island Tel, Aliant, BellNexxia, and InterMedia networks before reaching Xensei in Quincy, just south of Boston.

For the past three days, I’ve been experiencing the oddest problem with this connection: every 6 minutes, like clockwork, the connection seems to “disappear” for about 10 seconds. Then it comes back, and everything is okay. For another 6 minutes. And so on. As you might imagine, this makes working on the Boston server somewhat frustrating: it’s like talking on a cell phone that cuts out every once in a while.

My problem is that the technical problem seems to lie either with BellNexxia or with InterMedia. I am a customer of neither, directly, and so I’ve no avenue for technical support.

The folks at Island Tel have opened up a trouble ticket on the matter, and have apparently escalated it to Aliant (note: Island Tel, Aliant and BellNexxia are all part of the same corporate family, although it seems a somewhat distant family most of the time, the kind where you lost your Uncle’s phone number a year ago and haven’t been able to find it since). As the “old” Island Tel wouldn’t have taken this step, I can only be grateful that they’ve at least gone this far. Alas to date it’s produced nothing in the way of results.

This week in the midst of the Code Red scare, there was a lot of hot air talk about the supreme importance of maintaining the unimpeded flow of Internet traffic because it’s now being using by doctors to do remote operations, banks to conduct online banking, etc. etc. More serious than Code Red is, I think, the fact that Internet Service Providers and backbone operators haven’t yet figured out the streamlined business practices and communications systems needed to take care of nagging little problems like this.

I certainly know that when the doctor in Milan is removing my appendix over the Internet, I don’t want him to lose contact with the e-scalpel every 6 minutes!

Just found that CDnow has the best quality sound clips of Cry Cry Cry.

Imagine if you didn’t lose the keys to your car, but rather lost the ignition switch. This is what happened to me last night around 11:30 p.m.

Working on too little sleep with too much work to do, I was procrastinating by doing some housecleaning on the server that runs this website and some others in our oeuvre.

This server started off life as a Windows NT workstation, and gradually had a Linux server grow up around it. A byproduct of this slow creeping evolution was that the hard disks were littered with several Windows NTFS and DOS partitions (i.e. parts of the hard disk that “speak Windows” as opposed to “speak Linux”).

And so, last night, I thought to myself “why don’t I clean up those old partitions, copy off what I need, and free them up to use under Linux?” I should have stopped right there.

In an unfortunate series of wrong steps, I managed to render said server dead in the water. I did this mostly by forgetting that although it was mainly a Linux machine, its boot process was controlled by Windows NT. When I removed Windows NT, well, it’s like I removed the ignition switch.

Fortunately I was able to boot from an emergency floppy (yes, they are useful and worth that extra 5 minutes at install time!), copy from the existing partitions what I needed. And then I decided “hell, I might as well start from scratch and give the system a good purgative.” Unfortunately I decided this at about midnight.

I can conclusively report now that it take, once all is said and done, about four and a half hours to take a raw computer and turn it into a Linux-based webserver. About half that time was taken formatting hard drives (I mistakening selected the “thorough” option here), another 1/4 of the time waiting for MySQL to compile, and the last hour or so was spent on the relatively light work of installing Apache, PHP and getting all the web content files and databases back in the right place.

Because the server is located in the 175 year-old basement of Reinvented World HQ here on Prince Street, with me perched on an overturned dying pot huddled in front of a monitor perched on a log, the entire exercise brought back memories of the endless hours spent with Kevin O’Brien in the sub-sub-basement of the Confederation Centre during the early days of ISN. But that’s another story.

Tonight I’m thinking I might go down to Charlottetown Harbour and throw my socks in the Hillsborough River.

As it seems de rigueur to mention one’s former musical dalliances in places like this, I would be remiss if I didn’t pay heed to my own brief musical career, which lasted only for one hot summer in Peterborough, Ontario, a decade ago this year.

I was living in a room about 8 foot square fashioned out of the attic of an older house on George Street, north of the downtown. One reached said room by entering the upstairs hall closet and climbing straight up 10 feet. It was all very much like Lucy’s experiences on the way to Narnia. Although in my case all that was through the closet was a cramped little room where I couldn’t stand up, not a magical world.

My roommates were the resilient Richard Hamilton, who went on to social work in Halifax, the sprightful Diane Gallagher and her now erstwhile husband the musical Tim Piper and their lovely daughter Cassia. We were an unlikely lot, but got along quite well nonetheless. My strongest memories of that house are of scraping endless reams of wallpaper from the livingroom wall, of sitting on the back porch drinking Richard’s homemade beer, and of meeting and falling in love with the girl next door, who is by my side to this day.

Aforementioned Tim was handy with a guitar, and I had been given a guitar by my parents for my birthday several years earlier and so made a go of tagging along behind Tim on the porch. Eventually I started writing “songs” (inverted commas to indicate approximation) and, although I am at a loss to understand how this happened, Tim and I eventually ended up on stage together several times over the summer at the once-famous Tuesday Night Acoustic Potluck at the old Red Dog Tavern.

These evenings were a folk music “open mic,” hosted by the Laurel and Hardy like duo of Dan Fewings and musical partner Chris Lackerdas. With our guitars blazing (meaning mostly Tim leading the way and me hammering away trying to keep up), we sang songs of our own composition. These nights were among the most thilling of my life.

The most infamous song to emerge from my musical collaboration with Tim was one I started off and Tim finished and polished called Michael Landon is Dead. [Warning: if you like Michael Landon, or feel a soft spot in your heart for him, stop reading here]. It went something like this:

When we were very young,
There was a Man
Who launched himself into our lives
with Carefree Abandon.

Who was this man?
You may well ask…
Well in this song
we’ll tell you that…

Michael Landon is dead
He won’t be around to bug us anymore
Michael Landon is dead [so dead]
He won’t be around to bug us anymore

We watched him on Bonanza
And on Little House
And even on Highway to Heaven

Little Joe Cartwright
and Pa Ingalls
and an Angel named Jonathan Smith.

…and on and on from there. More than once we ran afoul of rabid Michael Landon fans who accused us [justly] of sacrilege. Other favourites of those times were songs like Kitchen Utensil Love, George Street and The Parkway (which contained the classic line “Oh the Parkway is a beautiful spot / I’d rather be there, than not”).

And then the summer ended. Tim and Diane got divorced (but remained happy and amicable), Richard followed his lady love to Halifax, and Catherine and I moved into a lovely apartment downtown, only to pick up a year later and most east to Charlottetown.

It was quite a nice surprise to receive a clipping in the mail last fall from Tim from the Peterborough Examiner highlighting the fact that he was one of the headliners at the Peterborough Folk Festival. My guitar is in its case upstairs in our Situation Room. Soon I’ll take it out again.

Cry Cry Cry is an ad hoc musical collaboration of Dar Williams, Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky, all interesting artists in their own right, and even more interesting together. And it is also an album. Or the other way around. The second track on the album, Cold Missouri Waters, is by James Keelaghan, a strong Canadian artist I first saw at the Winnipeg Folk Festival and later at Mike Barker’s Folk Under the Clock concert series in Peterborough, Ontario.

You can year sound clips from the album at Barnes & Noble, Chapters and Amazon.com (Chapters has the most samples and the worst quality).

Kellaghan, who plays on PEI on occassion (next on August 6 as part of the Victoria Playhouse Concert Series, recorded the song on his 1995 album A Recent Future. You can read the lyrics on the Norman Maclean website, where we also learn:

Part mystery story, part investigative history, and part autobiography, Young Men and Fire was Norman Maclean’s last book. In it, Maclean examines the history of the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire in Montana, in which twelve of a fifteen-man crew of Smokejumpers died.

From an interview with Eric McCarthey, senior vice president of national sales an marketing for Coca-Cola in the August 2001 edition of QSR magazine:

QSR: At what age to you want a kid to know the Coke brand, to ask for a Coke by name?

McCarthey: Actually to request a Coke?

QSR: Yes, to know that Coke tastes like Coke, and Coke isn’t Pepsi. How young do today’s strong brands want kids to be when they make these brand preferences and begin brand loyalties?

McCarthey: Well, if you’re talking about it from a quick-service restaurant operator’s standpoint, it is probably more important to establish a brand connection at a young age. This whole explosion of kids’ marketing, kids’ meals, the branded alliances that a lot of customers are trying to do to make their kids’ meals relevant, that’s all about starting at a pretty young age. But if you’re asking the question from a soft-drink perspective, you’re talking about a different age: around twelve years or thirteen years old.

Here I am sitting in front of my computer in Charlottetown, writing an entry on my website while, at the same time, listening to my brother Steve hosting the CBC Saskatchewan afternoon show while, at the same time, using MSN Messenger to chat with our brother Johnny about how Steve is doing, and about the Code Red Worm, which I have to get up tommorrow morning at 7:00 a.m. (assuming, of course, the world still exists post-Code Red) to speak to CBC Prince Edward Island about. Perhaps I should rub my belly and chew gum. But I might explode.