It’s amazing the things I remember from childhood. I can’t remember how to calculate the circumference of a circle (or, for that matter, I can’t remember if circles even have circumferences), but I do remember that when you are placing a ladder against the side of a building, you should go one foot out for every four feet up.

I know this from a campaign from the Construction Safety Association of Ontario that must have run in the 1970s and 1980s on television in Ontario.

I also remember, from an Ann Landers column I read a long, long time ago that when you are driving at night and are approaching a car coming the other way, you can focus on the white line on your side of the road to prevent your eyes from focusing on their headlights (and, presumably, therein increasing the danger that you will drive right into them).

And although I didn’t have a farm upbringing (something my farm-raised partner Catherine often points out), I know that you’re supposed to avoid getting your hair caught in the PTO shaft. I learned this, of course, without knowing what a PTO shaft (I figured that out later).

Finally, I have avoided for many years buying gas at Sunoco (which is easy to do here in PEI, admitedly, as the brand doesn’t exist here) because I have a foggy memory of my Dad telling me that his friend Tony said not to buy gas there because they sold “bad gas.” My Dad has no memory of this, and claims it’s not true.

The corporate history of Island Service Network is a valiant one. Started by Kevin O’Brien and a ragtag bunch of supporters, along with a loyal and ever-growing customer base, Kevin has, literally out of nothing, and with no Government money, created a successful, responsive Internet Service Provider from nothing.

In an environment where there are very few independent ISP’s left standing, ISN has survived and thrived. Kevin built the business on personal service, and has always stood behind it. His customers know that they can call 892-4ISN and ask to talk to Kevin, and he’ll take their call. This is unprecedented customer service for any business, and especially for the Internet business.

No matter where you are, as an independent ISP one of the Big Challenges you face is dealing with the telephone company.

The root of the challenge is that while one half of the telco is providing service to you — loads of incoming telephone lines — the other half is competing with you by offering Internet service of its own. This has been ISN’s challenge, and I’ve heard the same story from others, including, ironically, Downeast.net in Ellsworth, Maine, who have to compete not only with their local telco, Verizon, but also with Prexar, the oddly-named New England outpost of Aliant, Island Tel’s parent company. Prexar had its own dance of sucking up many independent ISP’s in Maine and New Hampshire in Borg-like fashion.

Kevin details his latest battle with Island Tel cum Aliant in a recent post on his website. Not one to “go public” with his frustrations until there is no other choice, Kevin relays the political and technical details of a problem which suggests that, at best, Aliant is being ungentlemanly and, at worst, they are behaving in a strongly anti-competitive fashion.

I would urge anyone from the Aliant family reading this to assist in bringing this matter to a quick closure. The Internet cannot work without cooperation, and the survival of ISN is too vital to the Island economy — to say nothing of the survival of Kevin and his employees and their families — to let “turf battles” prevent this.

I am willing to give Aliant the benefit of the doubt in this regard, and will assume that this entire issue is the result of a procedural or technical oversight on their behalf. If it turns out that the company is doing exactly what Kevin suggests they are doing — playing dirty ball — I’ll have no choice but to immediately terminate all of my Island Tel accounts, as I simply can’t conscience dealing with a company that doesn’t play fair.

Not many things surprise me. Well, actually, many things do surprise me. But not many things when it comes to the minutia of U.S. - Canada differences — the Z/Z thing, the different Thanksgiving Days, miles vs. kilometres, honour vs. honor and so on.

As you might imagine, then, I was flummoxed to learn this afternoon, courtesy of my all-seeing, all-knowing colleagues at Yankee Publishing that in America they don’t have Boxing Day.

In America, the day after Christmas, it seems, is known simply as “the day after Christmas.” It isn’t a holiday.

I was therefor embarrassed when said American cousins asked what exactly Boxing Day is and why it’s called that. I didn’t really know. And so here, for their benefit, is the best answer I can find:

The day after Christmas, the Feast of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, is better known as Boxing Day. The term may come from the opening of church poor boxes that day; maybe from the earthenware boxes with which boy apprentices collected money at the doors of their masters’ clients. Nowadays, we often see, in certain families, gifts (boxes) given to those who provide services throughout the year. “Boxing Day” is listed in the Canada Labour Code as a holiday.

So, Canadian readers, think of your poor American brethren on December 26, as you gaily celebrate the festival of the cardboard container, and they trudge back to work, ever so wishing that they lived a couple of hundred miles to the north.

Geraldo Rivera gets a lot of flack. I find him essentially unwatchable, but mostly because of his subject matter rather than his approach. However I also count myself as among the few that have read his [now out of print] interim biography Exposing Myself. If you ignore the “and then I slept with [insert name of alluring beautiful powerful woman]” references which litter most of the book’s chapters (or perhaps don’t ignore them), he’s actually had an interesting life. He is not someone to be dismissed.

Following on the successful transition from plain old Island Tel to Island Tel: An Aliant Company (it appears as though there is a corporate dictate that the An Aliant Company bit must always be present), I have decided to transition Reinvented’s corporate identity.

Henceforth we will be known formally as Reinvented Inc. - A Reliant Company.

Disclaimer: This change is subject to statutory and regulatory approval in the jurisdictions where Reinvented Inc. - A Reliant Company does business. Reinvented Inc. - A Reliant Company is in no way associated with DaimlerChrysler AG and no such association should is implied by our repositioning. Similarly, there is no corporate connection (other than rhythmic) between Reinvented Inc. - A Reliant Company and Island Tel: An Aliant Company. A 1985 Plymouth Reliant gets 26 mpg city, 33 mpg highway.

I sent a message to the friendly folks at the Google Catalogs last Saturday. It occured to me that as they’d already scanned and converted to text all of the catalog pages, the next logical thing to do would be to make that text available to people with screen readers (i.e. visually impaired and those who don’t read).

Today I received the following reply:

Dear Peter,

Thank you for your suggestion. Unfortunately, this type of feature is not in our near-term product plan. While the OCR quality is acceptable for search, it is not good enough for reading, which is why we prefer to show the image of the page rather than making available a text view.

Thanks for using Google’s catalog search!

The Google Catalogs Team

I’ve written here before about the Noodle House. The funny thing is that in almost 9 years of going there at least once a month, I’d never actually had noodles there until today. Today I ordered the Hot Szechuan Noodles with Tofu (from the special purple vegetarian menu page) and they were transcendent. If you haven’t had Noodle House noodles before, I highly recommend them.

Just to avoid recriminations, I will insert here that it was Kevin O’Brien who took me to the Noodle House for the first time. Indeed is was there that the idea that became ISN was hatched (it received full power at the now-defunct Kelly’s on Victoria Row).

I met Colleen Peterson in the early 1990s when she played a Christmas concert at Artspace in Peterborough, Ontario. I was working as programme director at the local community radio station, and we broadcast the concert live. It was a wonderful evening, and Colleen was a wonderful performer.

One of the songs she played that night was called 1942. I liked the song so much that I wrote to Colleen’s mother, who lived just north of Peterborough in the small village of Lakefield, inquiring whether it had been recorded. She wrote me back a very nice note explaining that it hadn’t, but that if it ever was, she would be sure to let me know.

In 1993 Colleen joined with Caitlin Hanford, Cindy Church, and Sylvia Tyson for form a “Canadian country and folk music supergroup” called Quartette.

Colleen died of cancer on a Wednesday in 1996.

There’s a lovely Book of Remembrance on the Quartette website that’s worthy of a good read through.

The year 2002 is the International Year of Mountains, so-designated by the United Nations. According to this page on the IYM website, “Canada has not yet established an IYM National Committee.” I would suggest that we should get started soon! Azerbaijan, Gabon and Kyrgyzstan are already ahead of us in this regard.

As initially absurd as the idea of an International Year for mountains might seem, the IYM website makes a pretty compelling case for why it’s important.

I will follow up with the Government of Canada to see what we can do about moving this along.

From our traffic logs, it looks like twenty-nine people have ended up at this site after entering the query “what does sic mean?” into a search engine. As an aid to others following in their tracks:

Thus; so. Used to indicate that a quoted passage, especially one containing an error or unconventional spelling, has been retained in its original form or written intentionally.

Date: ca. 1859 : intentionally so written; used after a printed word or passage to indicate that it is intended exactly as printed or to indicate that it exactly reproduces an original <~said he seed [sic] it all>