The Trent University Archives holds the 8 m of textual records and other material from Peter Gzowski. The collection includes items like “Advance Galleys of Books Not Written by Peter Gzowski” and “table napkin with signatures of Sid Abel, Ted Lindsay, and Marty Howe.” I imagine that spending a week (or two, or three) sifting through it all would make for an interesting education.

You may recall that two years ago I touched on the foaming soap situation (i.e. “suddenly it’s everywhere”). Since that time we have become regular customers of the method brand of foaming soap sold at Shoppers Drug Mart.

Ironically, for a company that says that it “looks at the world through green colored glasses, it doesn’t seem possible to buy refills for the method-brand foaming soap dispenser. Meaning that one must, all other things being equal, throw away a perfectly good dispenser to get more method soap.

Except that you don’t. Thanks to some instructions I found attached to a china foaming soap dispenser at Backyard and Veranda in Halifax (to say nothing of the comment on my original post), I now have the secret formula: combined 60% regular old liquid soap with %20 water and 20% air in the empty foaming soap dispenser, shake it up, and you’re ready to foam.

Senator Barack Obama sat down with the Chicago Tribune editorial board. The paper reports:

The most remarkable facet of Obama’s 92-minute discussion was that, at the outset, he pledged to answer every question the three dozen Tribune journalists crammed into the room would put to him. And he did.

There’s an audio file of the entire session available. It’s a worthwhile listen to get a sense of Obama’s intellect when he’s not engaged in full-on change rhetoric.

Thanks to Dave Winer for the pointer.

Apple’s iPhone SDK Prohibits Real Mobile Innovation. I agree completely.

You may recall that when Kevin O’Brien and I talked about the sale of ISN to Eastlink back in January, Kevin suggested that ISN customers with “@isn.net” email addresses would be able to take them forward to Eastlink. I’ve talked with Kevin since, and he’s confirmed that this was his understanding at the time, based on conversations he’d had with Eastlink about this specific issue.

Over the years that ISN was an independent ISP, Kevin often needed to convince prospective customers that they weren’t taking a risk by moving to ISN, and one of the ways he did this was by reassuring them that, even if they left ISN, the company would forward their email for them. ISN didn’t have to do this — indeed locking customers into an email address is one of the tricks that many ISPs use to ensure they retain their customers. But Kevin’s sense of fairness trumped any business need to ensnare customers, and so the policy stood (I think if Kevin were writing this he might say something about “not wanting to have customers that didn’t want to be customers.”)

The sale to Eastlink went through, and the transition is now rolling out. And this week ISN customers got an email telling them, contrary to what they may have understood, their “@isn.net” email address is going to be deactivated and replaced with an “@eastlink.ca” address. As I understand it, the deadline for this is April 15, 2008.

There’s nothing on the new Eastlink-branded ISN home page about this.

This morning at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market I had conversations with two vendors, both longtime customers of ISN, who were up in arms about what to do about being forced to change their longstanding email addresses; one of them was in a situation where his ISN email address is one of the cornerstones of his business, and is printed on brochures and business cards and has been widely distributed for a long, long time.

While it may be unreasonable to expect Eastlink to keep the ISN domain alive forever, expecting customers, many of whom have had an “@isn.net” email address for more than 10 years, to change their address with 30 days notice is simply bad customer service. There’s no technical reason they need to do this: while it would make their transition more difficult technically, keeping the isn.net domain alive to receive and forward email is an essentially simple technical exercise, and something that Eastlink should, if only as a matter of common courtesy and a gesture of goodwill to the ISN customers they’re adopting, proceed with.

If you’re a former customer of ISN, and it’s going to cause you problems to give up your email address with such short notice, here’s what I recommend you do:

1. Call Eastlink’s office in Charlottetown (367-2800) or Summerside (724-2800) and ask to speak to a Manager, and let them know that you think it’s unreasonable for them to ask you to change your email address with 30 days notice.
2. Send an email to Eastlink expressing your displeasure: Mike Corkum is their “Director of Consumer Sales.”

In either case, you can let Eastlink know that, if you’re going to have to change your email address anyway, you might as well consider changing your Internet provide to Aliant while you’re at it.

You may also want to start the process of getting your own domain name for your email just to ensure you don’t get stung this way again. I’ve had a few questions about the specifics of this process, and I’m considering offering a brief lunchtime seminar next week for those interested in seeing the process walked through and getting any questions answered face to face; let me know if you’d be interested in this.

I have every confidence that, if they hear loud and clear from ISN customers, Eastlink will come to their senses and realize this is bad customer service and not a way to treat the devoted customers they’re inheriting.

I’ve just booked a two-week trip to Copenhagen for the spring, in part for reboot, a conference that hasn’t yet even been formally announced (I’m hoping that my having committed to non-refundable air tickets will magically conjure reboot into being).

This year I am safe from the clutches of Air Canada, as I’m taking advantage of Icelandair’s flights from Halifax, which start up again this April. Total return fare, taxes in, from Halifax to Copenhagen, with a day in Reykjavik on the way back, was $933.

While making the booking I was presenting with this weird warning message, in blazing red:

NOTICE: You must type in your last name before your first name. If a name is spelled incorrectly, or the last name/first name format is reversed, do not hit the back button - you must start over! Either use the Start Over button at the bottom of this page or close the window and open a new one. If you hit the back button and change the names, the changes will not take and a correction fee of USD75 or equivalent will be charged. Name changes (i.e. Mary Smith to Cynthia Anderson, etc) are not permitted.

This seems like an obvious case of humans being slaves to the eccentricities of technology. We can make computers do anything we want; why not make them do sensible things, like allowing us to correct our mistakes?

Things have not started off well today.

It began at 3:00 a.m. when Oliver came into our room complaining that his feet hurt. He insisted that I turn the light on to look at them, and would take no “well, everyone’s feet hurt sometimes” explanations to get back to bed. Ultimately the issue was solved by the application of socks, which didn’t seem to make his feet stop hurting, but at least changed the subject for long enough to get him back to sleep. (Kelly reports that her daughter complained of hurting feet earlier this week too, and that other kids at her school had similar reports; perhaps there’s an childhood epidemic going on with this as a subtle symptom?).

The 3:00 a.m. wake up, combined with a late hour to bed the night before (damn you Lost) and the start of March Break meaning no pressure to get Oliver to school, left me sleeping in until 10:00 a.m.

Just before I headed off for coffee I checked my email on my iPod Touch, only to find that our mail server here at the office offline. Further investigation revealed that our server was dead in the water. And so I changed my vector to point to the office instead of Casa Mia and set out to find out what the problem was.

Into the server room, a quick reboot, and we seemed to be back in business. Then, 10 minutes later, everything went black again, and this time the server wouldn’t power back on.

It’s times like these when you wish you already had a strong coffee and a banana muffin in you. But I didn’t, and so was operating on fumes.

Thankfully, Computer Dynamics, our local computer shop, and the source of the server itself four years ago, is just around the corner, and a quick phone call and they agreed to let me bring it in to see what was the matter.

So I lugged the machine over there (they are housed in the old movie theatre on Grafton Street, at the end of a rabbit warren’s worth of passageways) and dropped it off. They promised to phone my mobile when they had a diagnosis (the office phone system being offline as it too is run by the same server).

Over the Casa Mia where I was happened upon by Rob and then Sebastian and then Cynthia, thus providing me with enough entertainment and distraction to wait out the dark period.

An hour later and I called over to Computer Dynamics: dead power supply, it seems (first time for me in 25 years of PC ownership, which is not a bad batting average). Around the corner to pick it up ($65 for the power supply, $15 for the install, man am I ever happy to have these guys in my neighbourhood), lug it back to the office, and turn it on.

So at 2:00 p.m. the server came back to life, the email started to flow again, this website lit up, the phones were back in business, and all was right with the world.

I am the least spiritual person I know, and yet I am convinced that there are mischievous ripples moving through space that, if we live life Koyaanisqatsi style, conspire to fiddle with the knobs on the human operating system enough to shake us back to our senses.

Now, back to work.

Historic Places of Prince Edward Island is an interesting website that heretofore had escaped my gaze. Although I played no direct role in its creation at all, under the hood it’s using the code that drives the Province of PEI website, code that was once near and dear to my heart (no doubt it has has been significantly evolved and enhanced since my days). It’s intriguing to see the code extended to use in such a different visual environment.

I ended up there looking for information about Isaac Smith, who built our house at 100 Prince Street. Turns out that he rates a page of his very own; it says, in part:

People with [Smith’s] skills were in short supply in the Island capital and this became more acute with the death in 1820 of John Plaw, another Englishman who had come to PEI and left his mark designing public buildings. Plaw’s courthouse/legislative building was standing proud in the centre of town on Queen Square. He had also drawn plans for a round market to be built next to it, but this was left undone at the time of his death. By 1823, Isaac and Henry Smith were given the task of completing Plaw’s market. They also were building private homes in the City, including one that still stands at 100 Prince Street (1827).

Interestingly, every Saturday morning Oliver and I eat our smoked salmon bagels at the modern Charlottetown Farmer’s Market with a painting of that selfsame round market hanging on the wall beside us. I’d no idea that the brothers Smith had played a role in its construction.

Another interesting Island heritage resource I’ve stumbled upon lately is Architectural Plans at the Public Archives and Records Office, an online exhibition of digitized architectural plans.

Included in the set are Smith’s 1856 plans for Government House and a set of drawings for Province House.

When in doubt, ask the wise all-knowing readership: where did Milton Acorn go to elementary school? Please add a comment if you know. Or know who might know.

Lori Joy Smith and Paul Lopes and their daughter moved from Vancouver to Charlottetown. Seemingly just because. When we in the intelligentsia have our secret meetings to talking about building out the creative class in Charlottetown, I think this is what we have in mind. Neato.