I reported earlier in this space about my experience ordering prints of digital photos from Shutterfly. At the time, I promised to compare their services to our local provider of digital prints, Prism Digital Imaging. And so I did.

The table below summarizes the process of ordering an 8x10 print from a digital picture taken with my Canon Powershot S100 camera. I uploaded the digital image to each website’s ordering system, and ordered exactly the same thing.

It’s difficult to compare the quality of the two photos, as the Shutterfly print was on glossy paper and the Prism Digital Imaging was on matte paper (I didn’t appear to have the ability to request paper type on either website). Aesthetically the Shutterfly print has more “snap,” but that’s mostly because it’s on glossy paper. Generally I’d have no complaints about the print quality in either case.

While the Prism Digital Imaging website is very well done, and easy to use, it doesn’t have the maturity or flexibility of Shutterfly’s. For example, on the Shutterfly site I can view my complete account history — what I ordered, when it was shipped, etc. — whereas on the Prism Digital Imaging I cannot. The Shutterfly site also has allowances to connect easily to third-party sites. You can, for example, connect your own home-brew photo gallery to their system for print ordering; the Prism Digital Imaging doesn’t have allowances for this. Perhaps these sorts of feature will come in time as the Prism site matures.

In the end, I’d have to call this a draw. Other than the positive benefits of supporting a local business, Prism Digital Imaging doesn’t offer anything more than Shutterfly in terms of delivery speed or quality. Their pricing is slightly better, but then Shutterfly’s customer experience is slightly better. I’ll continue to experiment with both in the days and prints to come.

I have had a digital camera for just over a year now. We bought it primarily so that we could take pictures of wee Oliver and we have done that in spades.

When you don’t have to think about film and processing costs, it’s amazing how different photography becomes. I was inspired to “go digital” by my friend Steve, a professional photographer turned web designer. Steve had all but stopped taking photographs until he got a digital camera, and when he did, he started taking photos again, and he hasn’t stopped. You can see the results on his Outtakes and New England Seen websites.

Since my own conversion to digital, I’d been happy to view my photos on the computer, and to print out the occassional one on our colour printer. By chance last week I installed an application on our server called Gallery to let me share photos with my family on the web. One of the nice little features of Gallery is that it makes it easy to order prints of your digital photos from a company called Shutterfly.

So I did.

My first batch of prints arrived today, and I am amazed: the quality is fantastic. I had no idea that my little camera was capable of producing such photographs. And so digital photography has, for me, entered another realm. Or rather re-entered the realm of print.

I gather that Prism Digital Imaging here in Charlottetown offers much the same service. My next step will be to give them a try. And if that works out, I’ll have to get the silverorange wizards who built their website to construct a Gallery plug-in for it.

I’ve received email from about half a dozen people in the last month who are victims of the shutdown, or impending shutdown of the @Home network, which was providing cable Internet branding and technical services to Rogers, Cogeco and Shaw cable systems across Canada.

All of my correspondents had email addresses @home.com, and all of them were forced to change to @rogers.com, @shaw.ca, and so on.

This is annoying. Not annoying to me — it’s just a quick change in my email address book — but annoying to them, I’m certain. You have to send out an email to everyone you know, and you’re certain to miss some people, so you’ll lose track of them or they of you. In some ways it’s worse than having to change your phone number — at least the phone company will forward your calls for 6 months.

I’ve had to go through this myself: I started out Internet life as caprukav@atlas.cs.upei.ca, then was peter@crafts-council.pe.ca, then peter@isn.net, then peter@digitalisland.com. Finally, when the company became Reinvented, I became “peter at rukavina.net” and vowed never to change my email address again. So far so good.

So a word to the wise (and not only the @Home refugees): it’s quite a simple matter to set yourself up with your own domain name. I deal with a registrar in Edmonton called Trinic, but there are innumerable others that can offer you the same services. Trinic will let you register your own .com domain name for $20/year, and will forward email from someaddress@yournewdomain.com to an email address of your choice for $34/year.

That’s a good deal, and something everybody should consider seriously. Not only does it mean that you can keep the same email address for life, but it also means that you’re no longer shackled to a particular Internet provider just to keep your email address. It also means that you can dispense with insane email addresses like @pei.sympatico.ca which never should have seen the light of day in the first place.

By the way, if your last name happens to be Rukavina, I can offer you an @rukavina.net, @rukavina.ca or @rukavina.info email address at no charge. Just let me know.

If you haven’t already, you should check out the Weekly Top Five on brother Johnny’s website (there’s an older issue online too). A good introduction to what’s happening in the music world. Or at least in Johnny’s music world. And perhaps a partial antidote to Steven Garrity’s problems.

Grassy Hill Radio has redesigned their simple, clean interface to become even more simple and clean. It’s a wonder of efficient design (NetMechanic says it loads in 3.15 seconds). And their streaming audio is about the best match with my musical taste that I’ve found.

And Jane Siberry has a wonderful new CD called City. You can listen to samples, and learn more about the disc one her website. My copy just arrived in the mail, and I am listening now.

Before Jake there were Buffy and Max, and maybe even some other dogs that I’ve forgotten. And I know there was at least a trial period with a siamese cat in there somewhere.

But Jake was our childhood dog. He is an actor in all of my childhood memories: taking him out to pee late at night (with the attendant terror of being in the back yard late at night), the whistle that Dad used to call him, the times he would break all the rules and come upstairs under my bed during thunder storms, running away from home with Jake in tow (only lasted 2 hours until I gave up and went home).

I don’t remember Jake as being a particularly gallant dog. He was enthusiastic, smart, personable, gentle, eccentric. But not gallant. However in the pictures below, he looks like the most noble dog — a King of Dogs.

I took these pictures, and developed them myself (the scan is from a contact print) during a small period of my youth when I fancied myself a photographer. I have no idea how I got Jake to pose like this; he appears to be “looking on” on the way the fashion models do.

Eventually Jake developed cancers and other diseases that meant he had to be put down. I remember the day we took him to the vet for the last time. I’ve never been given to great emotion, but that was a sad, sad day.

Back in 1983 and 1984, the centre of my universe was a little Commodore 64 computer. If you were a member of the C-64 religion and you lived within 100 miles of Toronto, then the church you prayed at was TPUG — the Toronto PET Users Group. PET because Commodore’s first computer was the PET, or “Personal Electronic Transactor” (product positioning was never Commodore’s strong suit).

Although my first computer, purchased new for $550, was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I, my Commodore 64 was my first computer with a colour screen, a printer, and a keyboard that let you type in both upper and lower case. For its time, it was a pretty cool little machine.

Every month a bunch of the more geekly fellows from Waterdown District High School would get in a car and drive to Oakville to attend the monthly TPUG meeting. There we’d assemble with a bunch of uber-geeks from all around Toronto and listen to talks about assembly language and the like. Refreshments were served.

One of the guys from TPUG who I found really interesting was a guy named Dave Williams. He was a great speaker, and was really kind and helpful to young guys like me.

Dave was the editor of TPUG Magazine, the party organ, and he gave me my first freelance writing job: a review of a new version of the FORTH computer language that was just then available for the Commodore 64. Somewhere around here I have the actual article, but pictured at right is my letter of offer [PDF, 64KB]. If I remember correctly, the article was a page long, and I signed over copyright to them, so I received a grand total of $40.

I can’t say that those felt like crazy, heady days: I don’t remember anyone talking about computer revolutions or anything. This was mostly pre-BBS, pre-modem, and way, way, pre-Internet. The best reason, beyond pure hobbiest joy, that anyone could come up with for having a computer in your house was that you could file your recipes on it. However I never actually heard of anyone doing this.

More than anything else, though, going to those TPUG meetings, and hanging out with adults and getting published in a magazine was an incredible boost my teenage self-confidence. I learned that if you share a curiosity with someone, you can engage them in conversation, even if they were otherwise a lofty, important, seemingly unapproachable person. Good life lessons, and those often lost in the “War Games” stereotyping of those days.

TPUG is still around, but their website makes it pretty clear that they’re on the waning margins of the computer world now, not at its centre. Maybe I should take out a membership for old time’s sake.

The folks at NorthStar Business Solutions are sending spam email around to Charlottetown businesses, titled “FW: Charlottetown Chamber of Commerce E-Business programs.” I received a copy in my email this morning, and it included a 36KB Word attachment, and an anonymous 247KB attachment labelled simply Picture.

I don’t know who NorthStar Business Solutions is, but by sending me unsolicited email, they have guaranteed that I won’t do business with them.

An appropriate invoice [5KB, PDF] was sent in reply. I would encourage other annoyed recipients to do likewise.

Note to other businesses: don’t send me junk advertising email unless I give you permission!

The trend today appears to be making notes to the future.

Here is a note to those in the future after I have gone: you don’t have permission to “pore over my hard drive.” When I die, take my computer and throw it away.

My thinking in this regard is prompted by the announcement that a posthumous Douglas Adams novel, extruded from his hard drive, will be published next year.

I think this is a stupid, insulting and inane idea.

All you will find on my hard drive is a bunch of software to help you find out what the weather was like on July 12, 1994. And some pictures of Oliver. And a recipe for peach pie. I suppose you could cobble this together into a very mundane sort of novel. But I’d rather you didn’t. And, truth be told, give the fact the I am not like Douglas Adams in any important regard, nor would you try.

But just in case someone ever has the inclination, let this serve as official notice that I forbid you. So there.

I am a big fan of the Eastlink interactive television guide. It’s not really an Eastlink product: they just rebrand Tribune Media Services generic TV guide. But that’s neither here nor there: it’s still a pretty handy web application.

I do wonder, though, who writes the episode descriptions that appear with the listings.

For example, tonight’s episode of The Practice is described as follows:

The guys work with an insurance company to settle the claim of a young accident victim.

The listings at Canoe are somewhat more descriptive:

Jimmy and Eugene clash during a case involving an insurance company’s settlement with a 10-year-old accident victim.

TV Guide’s website has a different take:

Complications in a personal-injury suit unsettle Jimmy, whose emotional reaction prompts a disbarment hearing presided over by the uncompromising Judge Hiller.

The official description from the The Practice website says:

Bobby, Eugene and Jimmy work with an insurance company to settle the claim of a 10-year-old accident victim. But when the case presents a dilemma of moral and ethical proportions, the tension that’s been brewing between Jimmy and Eugene finally boils over.

I think it would be a cool job to be the guy (err, person) who watches television all day and writes the summaries for the listings. In my heart of hearts I know that I could come up with a better description for Seinfeld, which is described in my listings as:

Friends living in Manhattan obsess over little things.

Many of the monumental events in my family appear to happen while peeing.

All this talk about working at home got me thinking back to when I was doing my apprenticeship in the Composing Room of the Peterborough Examiner. This was pretty well the only work experience I’ve ever had which took place in a Real Workplace, complete with all the usual workplace rituals (Christmas parties, coffee breaks, co-workers, etc.).

Most of the people in the Composing Room had been working there just short of forever. They weren’t progressive people. They were incredibly generous, patient, kind, funny, compassionate. But coming from working with anarcho hippie freaks to working with these guys was a big shock to my politically correct system. When all was said and done, I loved working there. But it did have its challenges.

The Composing Room was housed on the second floor of the paper’s offices on Water St. While at one point Composing had taken up 3/4 of the floor, the reduction in the size of page production technology meant that much less floor space was needed, and also meant a reduction in workforce from 90 to 9 over twenty-five years. So by the time I arrived, we were all gathered in the corner of what used to be a large open space.

One vestige of the larger workforce was the employee washroom: a vast room with a big foot-operated trough-sink like the kind you might remember from elementary school. There were a lot of rituals associated with the Composing Room washroom: when you could go, how long you could reasonably spend there, etc. And there was a very specific way you were supposed to leave that day’s paper tucked into the stall doors (for the next guy) if you took it in with you.

The best story I ever heard about the washroom was this: Robertson Davies, noted Canadian author, was Editor of the Examiner from 1942 to 1955, and then Publisher from 1955 to 1965. His tenure at the paper overlapped with that of almost everyone I worked with in the Composing Room, and there were many stories about him.

Davies has been described as a “gentleman in the old-fashioned sense of the word.” The story goes that when he was Publisher he arranged to have his office extensively renovated; one aspect of this was rather extensive renovation of his private washroom (including the installation of a bidet, something which, 20 years later, the guys in the Composing Room still thought was weird).

Because his private washroom was being renovated, he obviously needed the use of other facilities, and the Composing Room’s being the closest, this is the one he choose. The kicker was, however, that it was deemed inappropriate for the Publisher to use the same stall as the Composing Room guys, so a particular stall was choosen to be temporarily taken out of general service, a lock was installed, and this stall became the private domain of Davies.

When the renovations were completed, Davies returned to the comfort of his bidet-strewn palace, and the stall was returned to its rightful users.

Twenty years later I came along and used the stall in question every day to do my own peeing and worse. I will leave the osmostic possibilities to the reader’s imagination.

One of the great regrets of my time at the paper is that I didn’t steal Davies’ thesaurus.

The Examiner, you see, had a small library off the editorial offices. This library, with the exception of the morgue, was little-used and most of the books hadn’t been read in years (you could tell from the cobwebs). One night I was creeping around the paper at 2:30 a.m., waiting for the Saturday paper to come off the presses so I could go home. I wandered into the library and picked a random book off the shelf: it was a Roget’s Thesaurus. I opened it up and on the flyleaf was a bookplate printed “Property of Robertson Davies.”

I thought, for a moment, that I should liberate the book for my own library — it wasn’t being appreciated in its hiding place in the library, my thinking went — by my upbringing got the best of me and I returned the book to its place on the shelf. I fear that when the Examiner picked up and left for the suburbs several years later, the book ended up in the trash.

Those were wonderful times.