The waste of the residents and businesses is gathered and disposed of at the Crapo Hill Landfill. Really.

Here’s a free suggestion for Island Tel: the computer I’m using to type this in the Charlottetown Airport in the Business Centre that you sponsor is an ancient, slow, IBM Aptiva. It makes your high speed Internet service — which is presumably what you’re trying to show off here – seem very sluggish and unappealing. An investment of less that $2,000 could get you a brand new sexy computer that would make the Internet fly, and make people used to dial-up connections go “ooh, ahh” and much more likely to upgrade at home. Just a thought.

My friend and erstwhile colleague Dave are off this week on a pilgrimage to New York City.

For Dave, despite his living large, take no prisoners, bravado, this is is very first trip to the Big City (or at least to this Big City). And it’s only my fourth trip (and my first was when I was 8 years old, so I don’t remember much) to the City. So I’m certain a wacky and exciting time will be had by all. Stay tuned for developments as they happen.

I’m heading off this morning for a circuitous via-Boston and New Hampshire route to New York; Dave is joining me at Logan on Tuesday. We’re flying Delta for the first time, which should offer an interesting comparison to the recent dreckly service I’ve been getting from Air Canada.

With time to kill because of my cheaper Saturday-stay fare, I’m heading to the New Bedford Summerfest Folk Festival tonight and Sunday — who could resist a stellar lineup of folk greats with an admission fee of $7?

Watch this space for more.

Tonight I’m introducing a new concept of time/distance measurement, MT2DBU. This is short for “Mean Time To Drunken Break-up” and it describes precisely the time it takes to walk (stagger) from bars south of Grafton St. and west of Prince St. to exactly in front of our house.

South and west of us, you see, is a collection of bars and pubs: The Merchantman, Rum Runners, Peakes Quay, The Olde Dublin, Gahans, where couples go to drink and make merry, especially on these wonderful summer evenings.

While alcohol sometimes brings couples closer together and introduces uncommon amounts of amouressness into a situation, in other situations, and perhaps with greater amounts of alcohol applied, it has the reverse effect, symptoms of which are much screaming, yelling, crying, use of extremely foul language and so on, all culminating in the at least temporary break-up of the relationship.

In front of our house.

You see the nature of the MT2DBU is such that the time between leaving the bar and said alcohol-induced frazzle reaching maximum intensity places said couple right along our stretch of Prince St., while they’re making their way through the downtown to their home to the north and east.

We have witnessed (and more often just heard) all manner and style of these sort of break-ups, and two summers of research has taught us a lot about the human condition. If nothing else, our ribald vocabulary has almost doubled as a result.

So if you and yours happen to find yourselves overindulged and ornery in the downtown heart of Charlottetown, you may wish to take my advice, nip any troubles in the bud, and take separate cabs home. You’ll thank me in the morning, and I’ll thank you.

Although I stand by my earlier comments about Island Tel Mobility, shortly after I posted them came a fly in the ointment.

I pay $4.50 a month for Mobility’s InforMe text messaging service. This lets me receive short text messages on my digital cell phone, and I use it with server and network monitoring tools as an alerting mechanism (“Pete, Pete, the network’s down, we need you…” cries the server).

Earlier in the week I was upgrading this monitoring system, and this involved some testing of the email to cell phone system. It was working well and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Nothing had changed on my end, but the messages I was sending myself as a test weren’t getting through to my phone.

This went on for several hours before I gave up and went to bed, but not before I wrote an email to Island Tel’s customer service folks to inquire about the outage and, further, to seek their advice on whether I could excpect this sort of outage to occur in future.

Today I received the following response:

Thank you very much for your recent inquiry.

We were having isolated problems with our Text Messaging service starting last Friday. The problem occurred in the Bell network which our SMS system is linked to.

The system should now be restored.

This service, along with all of our wireless services, are not guaranteed, and can on occasion develop problems whether they be system problems, or simply coverage problems.

So sorry for this inconvenience.

Their website says: “Text Messaging gives digital cellular and alphanumeric paging customers the capability to receive and view text messages on the display screens of their phone and pagers.”

I think they should add “sometimes” to the sentence. Sigh.

One of the consistent bright spots on the Island Tel (err, Aliant) front is the company at least formerly known as Island Tel Mobility.

I have consistently found the staff at Island Tel Mobility to be friendly, knowledgeable and helpful, whether in person at the Phone Centre or on the telephone. They know their products and services, they know their internal systems, and I’ve never asked a question that they haven’t answered fully and quickly.

Interestingly, and perhaps contrary to what you might assume, Island Tel Mobility’s services are priced competitively with the rest of North America, and most times their service plans are cheaper and require less commitement than comparable plans on carriers like Verizon and Sprint in the U.S. (especially when you factor in the U.S. exchange).

The latest development is their unveiling on an online billing system that lets you view, download, report on, and pay for your cell phone service. In traditional Island Tel style the interface is clunky, and entirely unrelated to any of their other systems. But it works, and the ability to download call detail records as an ASCII comma-delimited file is wonderful.

A note from Angus Orford at Maritime Electric:

The current number of customers that have signed up for ‘Green Power’ is 445. The total number of 50 kWh blocks being purchased per month is 1141. The average number of blocks a customer is purchasing is 1141/445 = 2.56 or 128 kWh.

Sitting outside on Victoria Row on a blustery but otherwise very pleasant summer day. The Cameron Block provides sufficient shade so as to make on-street laptop use possible.

Today I finally decided that it was time to recover from the loss of The Black Forest Cafe and visit its replacement, Meeko’s Mediterranean Cafe and Grill.

Experience was as follows: falafel was presented unusually in a 1/2 moon pita; it was overloaded with filling, and thus something of a challenge to eat without spilling all over myself. It was, nonetheless, quite tasty. My heart was truly won over when my request for unsweetened herbal iced tea was greeted by my server without the usual scorn that such a request brings; the resulting peppermint iced tea was fantastic.

To finish, the dessert, which had the words chocolate, hazelnut, orange and torte in some order in its name, was very good — a nice balance of the components and not too sweet; the only downside was a backend crust that was too solid to easily fork.

Server was quick and professional.

If you are a parent of children under 12 (and probably even over 12), you should really go and visit King’s Castle Provincial Park, near Murray River, Prince Edward Island.

It’s hard to exactly describe this place in a way that does it justice. Suffice to say that it’s a big playground, a forest with walking trails populated by concrete storybook characters, a pleasant beach, a wonderful place for a picnic, and has a canteen, washrooma and showers to boot.

It’s one of those rare summertime finds: a place on PEI that’s designed almost entirely with real everyday Islanders in mind, not as a demographically programmed tourist sponge.

You will enjoy yourself, and your children will thank you.

Important note: you may wish to prepare your children, if they are especially sensitive, for the fact that Papa Bear, leader of the Three Bears clan, has had his concrete arm amputated, and that Baby Bear, his son, is missing most of his ears and nose.

Karin LaRonde runs a small business delivering meals to homes and offices in and around Charlottetown. She also has a stall at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market.

I first tasted her food at the Uncommon Grocer (which I insist on calling the Urban Grocer for some reason) when it first opened out on University Avenue: they carried her sushi there, and especially in that day, this was something of a culinary revolution.

Later I heard raves from friends who were customers of her lunchtime meal delivery service.

And recently Oliver and I have gotten into the habit of stopping by her market stall on Saturday mornings to pick up something for a mid-morning snack (Oliver loves her sushi and I’ve become very partial to her iced tea, which is probably the best iced tea you can get on the Island).

This past Saturday Oliver and I showed up as usual for a snack on Saturday morning (and also to pick up some rabbit hair from across the aisle, but that’s another story). I reached for my wallet only to realize that I only had American money. Sigh, I thought, no snack this week.

Upon hearing of my plight, Karin, without skipping a beat, told me to take the sushi and pay her next week.

Now this is probably because Karin’s a nice person, and knows me a little, but mostly I think it’s just Good Business. Good business because when you trust your customers, treat them as a part of your community, and engender a symbiotic relationship with them, everyone wins.

The frightening thing is how rarely this happens in business, and how it almost never happens at all with companies that are bigger than Karin’s company of one. As soon as you get big enough to have policies about things you become a slave to procedure and we all become less human.

In other words, if we were happy customers of Karin’s before, we are devoted customers now.

Disclosure: After hearing through the grapevine that I’d said nice things about her business before in this space, Karen offered Oliver and I a free plate of sushi on our fist visit to the market this spring, which I happily accepted and Oliver happily devoured.