So it’s been three days since I expanded the public wifi at 100 Prince Street using a mesh of three Meraki Minis.

In that time there have been 17 users of the network. Of those, 3 have been us — my iBook, Catherine’s iMac and our trusty rabbit. Of the remaining 14, the machine name identifies an Amanda, a Kritin, and an Ann; Amanda was the biggest user, transfering 176 MB. Bandwidth usage peaked on Friday morning at almost 450 kb/s, but has generally hovered in the 0-150 kb/s range.

Three users connected to the Meraki at the back of the house, 4 users connected to the one in the Coles Building, and the remaining 10 connected to the front of the use unit. A total of 1 GB has been downloaded and 62.9 MB has been uploaded.

I have MySQL table that has an email address field, and I want to sort the table by the domain of the email address. I went looking for some complex substringy way of doing this when I came across this elegant solution: just sort by the reverse of the email address.

While this doesn’t actually sort the addresses so that, say, AOL addresses come first followed by Bellsouth, Comcast, Dartmouth, etc., it does group all the email addresses for the same domain together in order, which is all I really needed. If this is all you really need, then it’s as simple as:

select * from table order by reverse(email)

The old AE 976 Anne of Green Gables license plate that saw us through a Ford F-100 pickup, a Nissan Sentra wagon, a Honda Civic, an Eagle Summit and a VW Jetta over 10 years got retired this morning, replaced with a new La province verte du Canada model (I opted for the French model simply for solidarity’s sake):

Ironically, once mounted on the Jetta under the plastic Sherwood Volkswagen holder the slogan and the website address are covered; I have to get some shorter bolts before I can rectify that.

This craiglist ad is one of the most compelling offers of accommodations I’ve read. It starts:

I need a granny for my granny flat, I have to rent a 30sqm apartment that is fully self contained with new kitchen and bathroom. The room has its own entrance, but there is also a door onto my studio for those late night Rendezvous (actually I’m taken sorry) You will have your own separate flat but with some cool neighbors, namely me and my house of 20 somethings not quite professional champagne socialists come artists etc etc we wont be the quietest neighbors but nor the loudest.

It’s been 24 hours now since the Rogers Wireless network has been down, leaving anyone with a Rogers mobile phone without service for more than a day. I just phoned the local Rogers store at the Charlottetown Mall and they have no information about when service will be restored; navigating the seemingly endless telephone tree on the theoretical 1-877-764-3772 service number reveals no more information, although I’ve been attached to the “ticket,” whatever that means.

This can be added to the list of reasons why we need more wireless competition here in Canada. Rogers has the only GSM network in the country; when they go down, so does GSM.

I’ve coded up a Quicksilver Plug-in for Plazes. If you grok Quicksilver and want a seamless way to updated your Plazes status that bypasses the regular Mac Plazer, then give it a try. Of course there’s a Plazes Group where you can offer comments, suggestions and bug reports.

I began the day yesterday with a call from Johnny alerting me to the fact that Yankee’s web and database servers were offline. I piled Oliver into the car and we sped off to the office to see what there was to be seen. Turns out that the venerable Peer1 New York colo facility, famous for powering through the 2003 blackout, had an “unexpected power loss.” They were awfully good about communication — I got a call both from the NOC in Vancouver and from their man on the ground in New York — and we were back online in about 30 minutes.

Servers running smoothly we piled back into the car and sped off to the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market for our usual, and then spent a few hours prowling the suburban retail jungle, emerging with a new wired Mighty Mouse (the wireless one has been too sluggish for my tastes), a 50-pack of CD-R and a box of 15 ballpoint pens. The cap off our suburban experience, we took in the 1:00 p.m. showing of The Simpsons Movie at the mall.

Which turns out to have been a good show to go to, given that as soon as we got back home the thunderstorm started and the power flickered on and off for several hours.

I left Oliver at home and spend a couple of flickering hours at the office, punctuated by one complete blackout that lasted only a few minutes, and I was back home at 6:00 p.m. to pick up Catherine to drive out to the Trailside Café for the Gordie Sampson.

We had a great meal before the show — I had a spanakopita that rivaled any I’ve ever eaten — and while we had the place almost to ourselves at 6:30 p.m. when we arrived, by 8:00 p.m. showtime the small room had filled with an audience.

Judging from the makeup of the audience, the heart of the Gordie Sampson demographic on PEI is the married mid-50s male with a predilection for hooting once fueled with a few beers. They were mostly harmless and certainly enthusiastic, especially as the night played on. One does have to wonder where all the young rockers were, however.

The storm that had circled over Charlottetown in the afternoon followed us to Mount Stewart by the time the show started and so the evening was peppered with the occasional brownout. All of which only heightened the intimacy of what is ultimately an absurdly good room in which to hear live music, especially of the ilk that in other circumstances would fill, if not stadia, at least big theatres.

The only stain on the evening was the lurking presence of Lord Voldemort (you remember, this guy) at the next table. And thus the ever-present, if completely irrational, fear of imminent disembowelment. Lucky for me, Lennie Gallant was sitting on the other side of us, and so my scenario-planning included situations where Lennie would leap to my defense with some freaky Rustico-style jujitsu should I be assailed.

In the end Voldemort kept to himself, no eye contact was made, and I lived to fight another day.

Gordie Sampson is certainly a virtuoso, and he put on an entertaining couple of sets. If you ever have the opportunity to take in his show, especially at a venue like the Trailside, do so. We capped the night be staying just long enough after the closing credits to hear the aforementioned Lennie Gallant play a tune.

We piled into the car and sped off home, watching the flashes of lightning move east over Kings County.

If you’re keen to know the current status of the 100 Prince Street wireless network, tune in to the live XML file with network status information on all the nodes in the network.

Oliver and I had just returned home from watching The Simpsons Movie this afternoon when the heavens opened up and dropped buckets of rain on downtown Charlottetown. Here’s the tape:

Rogers Wireless mobile phone service has been down in Charlottetown since at least 2:30 p.m. today. A call to the local retail store confirms that their entire network is down on PEI because “a tower got fried.”