After having ignored instant messaging for many years, I got the IM religion when brother Johnny on the opposite coast (of Canada) started working with me last year. We use a combination of MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and Jabber to stay in touch on a daily, and sometimes hourly basis. It’s saved us a lot of long distance telephoning, and has made it possible to work together.

That said, I have remained sceptical of the whole “group chat” thing — everything seems to go to hell in a handbasket when you get more than one person typing at a time.

If you need proof of this, witness this small lightly edited snippet of a longer instant messenger conversation between my brother , my mother and I:

Peter Rukavina says: Hello?

John says:  hello… its johnny

Peter Rukavina says:  Where did you get birthday photos?

John says:   Fran sent to me

Peter Rukavina says:   Mom, where did you get then?

Frances says:   Catherine sent them to me.

John says:   I saw God with the aubergine coat

Frances says:   Where has he been?

John says:   who?

John says:   God?

Frances says:   God.

John says:  in the sky, I suppose

Frances says:   no no

John says:  aubergine means eggplant

Frances says:   Did he live up to your expectations?

John says:   courgette means zuchinni

Peter Rukavina says:   Who?

Frances says:   I knew that too.

John says:   and cilantro means coriander

Frances says:   God.

Peter Rukavina says:   in the Aubergine Jacket?

John says:   yes

Frances says:   yes.

Frances says:   I thought cilantro was celery.

John says:   nono… coriander

John says:   celery is celery

Frances says:   I knew that.

Frances says:   How long has god been on the island?

John says:   ok

Peter Rukavina says:   For about 3 years.

Frances says:   Okay. You guys can go to work now. oo

Tonight was the season premiere of Amazing Race on CBS. It looks like it’s shaping up to be another barnburner of a race, and I will again have to contort my life to always be withing CBS range on Wednesday nights.

As you may recall, Rob and Brennan were winners of the last Amazing Race. What are they up to now? Well, here’s one recent event, from the official Rob and Brennan Website:

Brennan (along with Alex Boylan, co-winner of AR2) will attend Movieline Magazine’s Beauty on the Beach party to benefit Ted Danson’s American Oceans Campaign/Oceana and to celebrate the launch of the Mermaids for Clean Oceans campaign.

You’d think with $1 million, you’d be able to avoid the Ted Danson benefits, but I guess fame is addictive.

Stay tuned: Oswald and Danny’s website is coming soon.

I walked into the Telus store on Kirkwood Drive this morning.

“Hello there, ” I said, “do you sell any of the Ericsson cell phones?”

“No, we don’t have them,” the clerk replied.

“What if I was able to get one somewhere else: would your network support it?”

“No, our agreement with Island Tel doesn’t let us activate their phones, it’s part of our agreement,” he replied.

“But what if I got one somewhere else?”

“Well, it would have to be a Telus phone.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said, heading out the door.

Oliver’s day, or at least the part I was awake for, started with a visit to Dr. Champion for his annual checkup. Oliver used this occasion to provide us with a full-on introduction to the “terrible twos” and conducted a cosmic freakout, complete with writhing and screaming, that effectively prevented the good Doctor from doing anything more than looking in his ears and weighing him.

We returned home to gifts in the mail from Brother Mike and the Carlisle grandparents. Oliver was especially intrigued by Mike’s present of a “shapes cage” wherein the goal is to place the appropriate shape in the appropriately shaped hole. He was very frustrated at the lack of universality in the game — i.e. that round peg would not fit in square hole. This seems like a Good Sign to me.

Tonight, Oliver’s small birthday gathering was graced with many luminaries from near and far.

First there was Catherine Hennessey, host of the gathering, and gifter of a prized pink piggy bank with promises to fill same with toonies as the years progress.

Catherine’s sister Mary Clare (or Marie Claire; I can’t get her to tell me) was there as well, and as well as marshaling together a fantastic salad, was her usual charming self.

Just as the night was reaching a fever pitch — candles lit and me ready to teach Oliver how to blow — who should walk in by AE Thurlow and her crew.

This included not only God in Aubergine Jacket David, but also an exotic guest star from away: Bob Henson a meteorologist from Boulder and author of The Rough Guide to Weather.

Candles were blown, stories told, and a good time was had by all.

Onward and upward to the threes.

Aside from the panic and the waiting and the worry, endless worry, the things I remember most about the day Oliver was born are the sounds.

Oliver was born by a C-section that was convened in a hurry at the last minute after his heart rate started diving into the low 60s the day before he was to be induced out.

I remember the unearthly quite of the surgery waiting room where I waited with Dr. Peter Noonan, the wonderful paediatrician who attended the affair.

I remember the constant beep, beep, beep of the machines in the NICU that helped keep Oliver alive. I remember being scared to death that they would stop beeping their “he’s still alive” beeps.

But most of all I remember the sound of his emergence from Catherine. It is a hard sound to describe, and I’m fairly certain that I was the only one in the world to hear it clearly (Catherine and the medical people being distracted by other things, obviously).

The sound was sort of exactly like you would think it would be, a sort of schlorpt sound. To approximate it as you read this, you can put your tongue on the roof of your mouth, then pull your tongue quickly back and down and back while taking a quick breath in.

But that will be only an approximation. I will never forget that sound.

Oliver was born on Sunday, October 1, 2000 and by Tuesday he had bounced back from near oblivion and has been a happy healthy boy ever since.

My friend Stephen Good says that becoming a parent is like joining a club that, before you join it, you can’t understand why you would ever want to join, and after you join it you can’t imagine why you didn’t join sooner. He’s right. Oliver is a joy to be around, and has changed my life in untold ways.

So please join me tomorrow in wishing Oliver a happy second birthday. It’s the end of free airfare and the start of the really exciting years.

HBD2U, O.

Last week’s television week wrapped up on Thursday night with the season premiere of er. Careful readers will note that I have abandoned the television sitcom entirely in favour of crime, politcal and medical dramas, so if you want my take on 8 Simple Rules or Life with Bonnie you’re out of luck.

When er started I was a big fan; I watched religiously for the first several seasons and found many of the episodes gripping.

Then I stopped watching for a couple of years, only tuning in for the “character X leaves the show because they are dead \| going fishing \| moving to Baltimore” episodes. I found the lack of some characters, and the introduction of others confusing, especially because the show is somewhat driven by the personal lives of its characters, so it’s mildly important to keep track of the broad arcs of their lives.

Last year I tuned in more frequently, and although it was milked for everything it was worth, and accompanied by a full-on onslaught of “a very special episode of er” promotional commercials, I found the “death of Mark Green” plot very compelling, especially the closing episode, shot primarily in Hawaii.

The season opener was a continuation of last year’s “smallpox hits the er” storyline, and featured the usual panic, helicopters, kissing, etc. Besides a shocking rotor blade amputation, there was nothing to distinguish the episode and, I fear, that is the show’s problem now: there are only so many things that go go wrong in a hospital emergency room, only so many combinations of characters who can date or want to date, and the show has run through pretty well all of them.

In the world of er there’s simply nothing left to be done.

Downloaded iSync. Synced iBook to iPod to PalmPilot 5000 (which is 7 years old!). All went according to plan. Couldn’t sync with dot mac as it appears to be completely off the air tonight. iSync is slower than I would like, but it does exactly as promised.

By the way, Piloting Palm is an interesting read, especially if you’ve had a PalmPilot for a long time like I have. It’s an interesting look inside a Silicon Valley start-up, and if nothing else I learned that Big Companies work just about the same way that Little Companies do, but with more money and people’s jobs on the line. The other interesting thing I learned is that Palm hasn’t actually had a product called the Pilot for over 5 years; interesting because I’d say the at least 95% of references to a Palm device I hear day-to-day are still to PalmPilot or some variation. There marketing, viral and otherwise, was too good.

Oliver’s uncles Johnny and Steve were, for a period of their youth, comic book kids. Which is to say that every Saturday after going to the YMCA and before catching the Canada Coachlines bus home, they would stop at Silver Snail on James St. and load up on New Teen Titans, Justice League of America, etc. While I wouldn’t go as far as saying they were full-on geeky comic kids, I believe they did have acid free plastic bags for their comics, which is certainly an indication of something. And even now I have heard them both emit the phrase “low-level tachion pulse.”

This was all great for me and mid-level brother Mike, as we got to enjoy the fruits of the comic book purchasing and delivery systems without having to bear any of the expense or the shame.

Today wee Oliver and I (who in truth is getting less and less wee everyday) went to the Formosa Tea House for iced tea, stuffed buns and sushi. It was our first Big Trip together without the benefit of stroller, and although there were a couple of “I think I’ll just sit down now in the middle of Kent Street” episodes, he performed remarkably well.

One of the things that being bipedal affords Oliver over being wheeled around is some voice in the direction that our travels take. Often a louder and larger voice than my own. Which is how, post Formosa Tea House, we found ourselves inside Comic Hunter, the “gaming, comics and anime” store that is just down the street.

Now I have been walking by this store for as long as it’s been there, and I’ve never set foot inside the door. This is mostly due to latent fear that I will emerge to find one of my teenage bully arch nemeses outside, and I will get beaten up and have my knapsack thrown all over the schoolyard.

But, with Oliver’s help, I managed to get over this fear and while I don’t think I’m going to become a regular customer, I must say I was intriged by the breadth of the merchandise in the store, much of which, beyond comic books, I had no idea existed. I was intrigued to find, for example, that the have a “super cool lounge/gaming area” where they host a schedule of events for the geeky community.

If this sort of thing keeps up, Oliver’s going to have be inside the Sport Page Club and J. Redshoes before long…

At long last, Island Tel has turned on the SMS features — short message service — for digital cell phones on their network. In traditional Island Tel fashion, they couldn’t just call it SMS like the rest of the world, the had to have the marketing department come up with a catchy name, so we have CH@T with Two-Way Text Messaging.

Goofy name aside, it’s pretty cool: from a digital cell phone you can send short text messages to anyone else with a digital cell phone, and that anyone can have a phone on the Aliant, Microcell, Rogers AT&T, Telus, or Bell Mobility networks.

This means, for example, that I can SMS my brother Johnny in Vancouver for the standard 10 cents per message. Cool.

Messages to SMS-enabled phones can also be sent from any PC email client (to the unfortunately complex address style number@wirefree.informe.ca, where ‘number’ is the 10-digit cell phone number of the recipient), or from the Aliant web-SMS gateway.

It’s a long time coming, but it looks like they’ve done it right.

You probably recognize the name Charles H. Joffe, even if you can’t remember where from. So I will remind you: he has been the producer or executive producer of almost every one of Woody Allen’s films, starting with Take the Money and Run in 1969. You see his name, along withat of Jack Rollins, in the opening credits.

Few of us — myself included — know what most of the people credited on a movie actually do. We’re pretty clear on the actors, and know (or think we know) that the Director is nominally in charge. We may have heard about grips, and know about gaffers from the tape they’ve named after them, but deeper down into the list I know I lose focus pretty quick. Young Dave Moses, the closest thing Charlottetown has to a movie mogul, tried to explain all of these positions to me in the Delta Airlines lounge in Boston in July, but I soon forgot everything he told me.

But this is all tangential to my main point.

When we Rukavina boys were wee, we spent a lot of time on Saturday mornings getting shuttled (and, later, shuttling ourselves) back and forth between our country home in Carlisle and the Big City of Hamilton were were devotees of the YMCA’s Saturday morning programs.

During these trips back and forth, Mom and Dad’s radio was inevitably tuned to the CBC (it was just called “the CBC” then). And on Saturday morning, that meant that it was tuned first to Fresh Air, with Sy Strange and Bill Macneill, and then, in later years and later in the morning, to Basic Black with Arthur Black.

We knew of Arthur when Basic Black came along, of course, because he was “Arthur Black in Thunder Bay” in guest spots on the Fresh Air show. I think we actually thought that was his real name — Arthur Black in Thunder Bay.

At the end of every Basic Black, Arthur would, with much vigor, read the names of the “behind the scenes” people on the show. And in these credits, no name was read more forcefully, and thus burned more inextricably into our young minds, than that of David Joseph Malahoff.

Although we didn’t know what David Joseph Malahoff did, we imagined — or at least I did — that his role was something like that of Perry White on the Superman cartoons. That is to say a loveable but crusty taskmaster that kept the enterprise afloat.

Fast forward many years. I am walking along scenic Victoria Row in downtown Charlottetown and spy my newfound friend Ann Thurlow sitting out on the patio at the Black Forest Cafe. Sitting beside her is a mysterious tall man. I stop to say hello, and Ann introduces her tablemate as David Malahoff. “Not DAVID JOSEPH Malahoff?” I exclaim. “Yes,” says Ann, “David Joseph Malahoff.” The shock of the situation being too much for my swirling mind, I quickly made haste.

Fast forward several more years. Basic Black has moved west, and David Joseph Malahoff has stayed in Toronto. He is working on an ill-fated project with one of the Richler boys for Newsworld. I believe it was called either “Big Life” or “Big Hair.” Aforementioned Ann Thurlow puts me in touch with David to see if my wacky Internet ideas can bear fruit inside this show. Shortly thereafter either the show implodes or David does or both. No fruit born. Probably best for all concerned.

And finally, fast forward to the present day. The Black Forest Cafe lunch obviously worked its magic, as David Joseph Malahoff is now co-resident with Ann Thurlow in her spacious mansion in the NoHo district of Charlottetown, has been usurped into the Campbell Webster Entertainment empire, and can regularly be spotted walking the streets of Charlottetown, newspaper in hand, making his way from home to GrabbaJabba to work and back.

So the next time you see the sandy-haired tall guy with sun glasses and an aubergine windbreaker walking the Queen - Kent - University route with a copy of the Globe and Mail in hand, realize that you are walking among one of Canada’s cultural treasures, the Charles Joffe of our national morning show.

Gods walk among us.

The next thing you know, Catherine Hennessey is going to start dating Lister Sinclair.