Jacques Hébert, a great Canadian, has died.

When we last talked we were outside of Florence pondering which way we should head. We headed south, to San Gimignano, drawn in by the cover of our travel guide and a vague memory of scenes from Tea with Mussolini.

Our route San Gimignano from Savigliano took us down SS429, a wonderful country road that was a welcome change from the monotony of the super-highway. Along the way we stopped at Castelnuovo d’Elsa, a pleasant small village that afforded stunning views of the surrounding area. No matter what anti-Tuscany biases you may harbour after Frances Mayes et al, it is a stunningly beautiful countryside.

We arrived in San Gimignano around 1:00 p.m. and immediately set about trying to find a place to stay. With the tourist office closed until 2:00 p.m., we took a brief detour for lunch (resulting in the best cheese + eggplant + tomato sandwich I’ve ever had). Once the tourist office opened, we took the friendly clerk’s recommendation, and booked two nights at Fattoria Poggio Alloro, an agriturismo — farm vacation — just 4km away.

It was a good recommendation: Fattoria Poggio Alloro turned out to be a working sustainable farm with cattle, pigs, chickens, and rabbits as well as vineyards, olive groves, and a saffron crop. The accommodations were anything but rustic, and they put on a nice breakfast in a room with a roaring fire. To say nothing of its hilltop location affording a stellar view of San Gimignano and environs. It was the perfect place to spend a few nights.

Thursday night we headed just up the road to the small village of Ulignano to Zaghe & Doicce to have, and I do not exaggerate, the best pizza of our lives.

On Friday we headed south to Monteriggioni, a walled village just north of Siena, the highlight of which was the small civic museum where we got to try on pieces of armour (the whole “walled village” thing was neat as well).

We returned to San Gimignano on Friday afternoon and had a good tour around, punctuated by a climb to the top of the Torre Grossa, the tallest of the 13 towers (of an original 72) in the town, another in the continuing series “brave Oliver drags his father, against his better judgment, to the top of a very tall thing.”

After a chilly Friday night back at the Fattoria, we headed north this morning, skirting Florence and driving up high enough to experience a small blizzard before heading south again toward Bologna where we then turned left to Milan. The super-highway along the stretch is a beautiful piece of road: straight as an arrow, newly-paved, four lanes in each direction; I didn’t slow much below 120 km/h from Bologna to Parma, and I was among the slowest cars on the road.

When it seemed possible that we might actually make it all the way to Milan in one fell swoop, we stopped at a rest stop just outside of Modena to consider our options. Finding wifi in the air (6 EUR/hour), I hotel-surfed and found Hotel Del Corso. They didn’t have a room for tonight, but they did have space for us on Sunday and Monday, so we reserved and made tentative plans to spend tonight in Parma, just up the road.

Twenty minutes later we were checking in to My Hotels Villa Ducale, a hotel selected primarily because it looked so weird — a sort of cross between an old Italian village and a space ship. We ended up with a huge two-room suite with a bathroom larger than our house.

As we were getting settled in the room, I set about looking for excitement in Parma with a simple Google search for “parma kids” that led me to Xmas Children, an event described as follows:

Children will be the unchallenged protagonists of everything contained in Xmas Children… namely mountains of every kind of product invented, designed and manufactured for them. Plus an abundance of open playspaces where they can run, paint, construct, mess about, dirty themselves and play in total freedom. Conjurors, clowns, jugglers, acrobats, puppets and puppet booths, storytellers, musicians and dancers, films and cartoons to set off their fantasy. Nine marvellous days overflowing with surprises and entertainment.

Was it even possible to not check out such an event? As it turned out, Xmas Children was a sort of “trade show for kids” sponsored by the Kinder Surprise Egg people and consisting of a combination of exhibitors showing the latest in baby gear (fantastic 900 EUR buggies, etc.) and the aforementioned “abundance of open playspaces.” For the commercialness of it all, it was actually pretty fun, and there was lots for Oliver to do, from making Christmas decorations out of recycled materials to learning the dance steps from High School Musical. And of course Kinder Eggs were in abundance. We spent a frenzied two hours taking it all in.

Around 6:00 p.m. we headed into Parma proper, which turns out to have a very pleasant downtown filled with pedestrians and bicycles and in the midst of its civic Christmas tree lighting just as we arrived.

We wandered about for an hour, waiting for restaurants to open, and then found ourselves in an emergency “Oliver needs to pee” event, which paniced us all over the place looking for a cafe with toilet; after 15 minutes we found one, and when all that was over we decided to settle for a quick meal of spinach pizza and headed back to the hotel. Where I sit right now.

All in all three very good days that all just sort of spilled out at random in the way that things sometimes do. Tomorrow we’ll drive into Milan where we’ll spend Sunday and Monday nights; Tuesday night is a a hotel closer to the airport, and Wednesday we fly to Boston, overnight there, and then fly home to Charlottetown on Thursday.

We are apparently in Savigliano tonight. Truth be told we are not entirely sure where Savigliano is.

We reached here by driving south from Genoa along the coast and making our way to Pontedera, home of the Piaggio Museum. After an afternoon of lusting after their amazing collection of Vespas (my favourite was the 1965 90 Super Sprint in red) we fumbled awkwardly towards Florence.

We fumbled as our commitement to Florence is weak; we enjoyed Genoa, and lucked into a hotel that worked, but are reluctant to do battle with another Big Confusing City so soon (the counterpoint, of course, is the “massive collection of amazing art” argument).

And so we have fumbled to Savigliano. Which, it turns out, is 47 minutes west of Florence. And just a little bit south of Vinci, “Leonardo’s home town.”

Appropriately enough we are staying in the Hotel Da Vinci, a completely modern hotel with frosted glass sinks, hardwood floors, and excellent restaurant, and a perverse attachment to sans-serif pop typefaces from the 1960s.

Whether we will take 47 minutes to see the cradle of Western Art, or head off into the Tuscan countryside tomorrow morning depends on our mood after breakfast. Stay tuned.

We settled on Genova for our first stop. Found an inexpensive, central hotel that lets us park for 5 EUR a night (in a garage the drive down to which boggles the mind) and has a pull-out bed for Oliver and Alice and Forest Rangers (in Italian) on the TV. Spent this morning at children’s science museum, and off into the windy old streets of the city this afternoon. If I get my way we’ll drive south tomorrow to the other side of Pisa to take in the Vespa museum. It’s 19 degrees and sunny here — I can’t believe our luck with the weather so far.

Little time to write, as my typing hours are taken up with dealing with practical career-related issues back home. To make a long story short, olives got picked and turned into olive oil, tremendous meals were consumed (Oliver has eaten more species over the past two days than he did in his first 7 years), we’ve done the laundry, and today we drove high up into the hills through the next valley to the east to visit Castelvecchio di Rocca Barbena:

At day’s end we drove into Albenga for some urban action, and happened upon the Christmas market: one long street of all the Italian wine, cheese, meat, bread, preserves, cookies and chocolates you can possibly imagine in one place. With samples. While Oliver chafed at the bit — exotic cheese only holds so much allure for the young set — we did our best to cover it all.

We returned home to Colletta, Catherine made a meal of all the leftover food in the fridge (supplemented by highlights of the Christmas market, including perhaps the best chocolate cookie, ever), and I’m hurrying around trying to squeeze out the last bit of reliable wifi I might see for days.

There’s more photographic evidence in the Flickr. Tomorrow we get in the car and head off into points unknown: we fly from Milan on the 12th of December, until then our road is open.

The wind has died down, the sun is out, and there’s no need for jackets. More photos in my Flickr.

Well, that was a long trip. When we last joined each other we were in Montreal. Since then we’ve been all over the place.

To make a long story short, we flew to Boston, took the water taxi to the Moakley Courthouse wharf, walked to the Boston Children’s Museum where we had three hours of maximum fun. Water taxi back to Logan Airport for an Alitalia flight to Milan overnight.

Our flight was near-empty, so we were able to stretch out and get some sleep (albeit with seatbelt buckles jabbed into our backs), and so when we landed in Milan at 6:50 a.m. the next morning (1:00 a.m. Charlottetown) we were marginally less catatonic. Although still pretty groggy. Alitalia, by the way, was great: efficient, friendly without pretense, and on-time (the 150 km/h tail wind helped).

In Milan we waited with about 500 people — seemingly all of them ahead of us with complicated visa issues — for passport control. And then we were in Italy. The local agent for our super-cheap easycar rental was Locauto and they opened their doors just as we arrived. Our “smallest possible car available” rental magically upgrade itself into a Lancia Musa, a very pleasant hatchback cum mini-mini-van. Formalities were quick, the agent friendly, and the booster seat I’d ordered for Oliver was waiting for us.

Catherine, four days into a wicked head cold, devoid of sleep, and prone to carsickness, was nonetheless able to navigate us out of Milan Malpensa airport, onto the Autostrada, and south to the Mediterranean. This took us first through the interior plains around Milan, and then through a series of tunnels through the hills around Genoa until we emerged into the sunshine near Crevari.

We headed west along the A10 to Savona where we stopped for lunch (a disappointing and expensive pasta lunch at an empty Egyptian restaurant) and then followed the SP1 — the coast road — along the shore to Finale Ligure (an amazing piece of roadwork that) where we re-joined the main highway.

Forty-five minutes later we were shopping for groceries in the Coop in Albenga, my old haunt from last year’s trip. Truth be told we had no idea what we were buying, true catatonia having set in — it appears that we bought a lot of chocolate, a lot of juice, and little else. And an hour later we were in the bar being greeting by Massimo and 5 minutes later we were installed in our apartment.

Soon we were asleep, and when Oliver came into our room to wake us up we thought it was 7 a.m. and it turned out to be almost noon. I guess we were tired.

Up at 4:45 a.m. this morning (though I didn’t sleep a wink). Friendly Coop Taxi man right on schedule at 5:15 a.m. Breezed through Air Canada checkin in Charlottetown and catatonically slumped into our seats for an on-time 6:00 a.m. departure. Greased through customs and security at Dorval in about 10 minutes, and currently lounging in the Air Canada Lounge and feasting on gherkins and All Bran waiting for our plane to Boston.

Meanwhile, back at Reinvented, the New Hampshire Cookie Primary we crafted for Yankee shows an early lead for Apricot-Coconut Balls (from Ron Paul’s wife Carol). If the other candidates get wind of this the server may well catch fire. And it will likely do this as I’m flying somewhere over New England. Or the Azores.

One piece of travel advice: 1-800-GOOG-411 is a traveler’s best friend. I just used it to book a water taxi for later this morning from Logan Airport to Rowes Wharf.

The stuff of my work life for the past month has largely been the migration of Yankee’s web infrastructure from Peer1’s colocation facility in New York to Peer1’s managed servers in Miami.

We’ve been happy customers of Peer1 in New York since 2003 when we first moved in (a process that started, in part, from this hearty recommendation). Mike, the facility manager, has been great to work with, and the two or three times over 4 years that I’ve had to haul someone in on the weekend to do a hard reboot they’ve always been smart and helpful. The bandwidth has been rock solid, and with the exception of one “unplanned power event,” the facility has been all we could have hoped for. If you’re looking for colo, I have no hesitation in sending you their way.

When it came time to refresh Yankee’s hardware this fall, we looked at simply purchasing another fleet of Dell PowerEdge servers — they’ve served us well for almost 10 years — but also decided to look at “managed hosting” as an option.

When we started the process, the whole “managed” vs. “self-managed” vs. “colocation” was a mystery to me; I assumed that “managed” meant a return to the old PEINet days, with a server controlled by overlord go-betweens.

As it turns out, that sort of regime is called “shared hosting.”

Managed hosting involves, in essence, leased hardware (which they take care of, repair when needed, etc.) over which you have complete control, supplemented by a various a la carte services like managed OS package updates, backup, and service monitoring. It’s more like “renting part of a sysadmin” than it is like “installing a troll to guard the bridge.”

In other words it’s a good fit for a situation like ours where on one hand we want to be able to have complete control over the iron but, on the other, could benefit from an extra pair of hands.

And so we dove in.

So far the process has gone very well: tech support responds quickly to tickets and answer the phone on the first ring. The servers they provisioned for us — 2 Intel 64-bit machines and 3 32-bit ones, all running RHEL5 — were ready 3 days after we placed the order.

In 2003 the migration to colocation in New York meant buying servers, getting them delivered to Dublin, NH, flying to Boston and driving up to Dublin, spending 4 days installing RHEL on the servers and then migrating over our data and content, then loading the servers into a car and driving to lower Manhattan to install them.

In other words, a lot of physical work, supplemented by considerable pizza.

This time there was no physical work at all, just a lot of scp from server to server over the last month.

Not content to simply do a straight migration, I decided that it would be a good opportunity to move our development process into the 20th century, so most of my work of late has been as much about installing Subversion and Trac and moving our 44,000-odd pieces of code and related objects into the repository. Among other things this has been akin to an archaeological dig through coding-past for me, as this is a project that, in one way or another, I’ve been involved with for 11 years now.

Today was the final “flip the switch” day. This meant coming into the office early this morning, taking the old servers offline, copying about 18GB worth of MySQL data over the wire, changing the DNS to point to the new servers, and then bringing each of 7 websites back only in step, dealing with any niggling migration issues as I went along (somewhere in there I learned how to make a built-in PHP module into a loadable PHP module so as to add dBASE support — dBASE support! — to our PHP).

The switch is now fully flipped. We’ve got a few more days worth of power and bandwidth in NYC to let me pull over anything I missed in the process, but now all the action is in Miami.

Time to go home and get some sleep…

The episode of Spark that includes my interview with Nora Young about my rabbit is now online in its official “edited down for broadcast” form.

Interestingly, the episode was supposed to air on CBC Radio One this morning, but was pre-empted, and so will only air in its Saturday, Nov. 24th time slot. Which is only appropriate, as the episode is all about “on demand lifestyle.”