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.

The CBC is running a series of ads these days in celebration of its 50th anniversary, or at least of the 50th anniversary of some part of itself.

One of the ads has a CBC luminary whose name escapes me talking about how one of the Big Missions of the CBC is Public Service. He cites as an example of this the recent Manitoba election when CBC Television was the only outlet in that province to offer live wall-to-wall coverage of the election.

That’s a Good Thing. And I think the CBC does a lot of Good Things, especially when it does things that you couldn’t really make money at if you tried. That’s what Public Service is all about, on one level, isn’t it?

But here’s what bothers me: the CBC’s approach to public service on the web is entirely derived from the kind of public service they’re used to offering on television and radio.

Here’s an example: every now and again, on a seemingly random schedule, various experts participate in the Maritime Noon phone in program (disclosure: I’ve been one of these experts myself, for my own little corner of e-expertise, on an even more random schedule).

The phone-in format is fine if you’re working within the limitations of radio: limited time, limited callers, audio-only. But considering that it’s unlikely that on the day my furnace breaks down their guest will be the furnace guy, and that even if this did happen, I would probably not get through as a caller, the radio phone in is of limited practical usefulness.

So here we have, in the Maritime Noon Phone-in, something that at one time in the distant past was exciting and revolutionary — hearing experts in Halifax speak about furnaces from the comfort of my living room in Charlottetown — but that is now mostly irrelevant given the changing informationscape around it.

Radio is ephemeral, there’s no way around that, and Maritime Noon is working on the radio within the boundaries of that medium as best it can.

Now, back to Public Service.

Presumably the CBC considers part of its Public Service role to be to provide consumers, citizens, listeners with practical everyday useful information delivered by people who know what they’re talking about. And to do so in an environment where education and enlightenment, not sales and profit, are the goals. That’s why they have a Maritime Noon phone-in.

The web is not ephemeral. Or at least it’s not as ephemeral as radio. The canvas of the web isn’t limited in the way that radio is, where you only have so much time to deliver information. And on the web you can not only include audio, but also video and text and pictures and moving rocketships.

So you would think that the web would provide the CBC with a way of expanding and enhancing and even perhaps replacing the Public Service consumer education mission it now handles with the Maritime Noon phone-in. My furnace breaks, so I go to the CBC website and find the furnace section, and there I can listen to and watch useful information about my furnace, read of others’ furnace experiences, email some furnace experts, and so on.

Because the CBC is a trusted source, this information is more valuable to me than, say, the website of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy which is funded by Private Companies and Their Associations.

But, alas, this is not the case. What I can do is get a list of upcoming Maritime Noon phone-in guests. An index of the ephemeral, in other words.

I’m the first to understand that the reason for this is probably in large part due to limited resources. I’m sure the Maritime Noon budget is stretched right now just trying to produce two hours of radio five days a week and there simply aren’t the staff and resources required to move in this direction or to even consider the possibilities.

It’s frustrating, in this light, to see that when the CBC does try and do new “web only” things, it does them in such an overblown, graphically intensive, non-standard, closed, proprietary fashion as to render the resources essentially useless. Need examples? ArtsCanada, Infomatrix, CBC Radio 3 are all examples of this insanity.

If the CBC is going to embrace the web as another conduit for informing Canadians, joining television and radio to form an info-triumvirate, then they’re going to have to engage the web on its own terms, and not simply see it as a brochure for what’s coming up on the radio, or some sort of wonky freakmedia where you do things you would never do on the air.

To do this is going to mean not only funding new media initiatives, but also educating journalists and producers, and taking the web seriously enough to devote serious creative energies towards it.

If the CBC sees as part of its mission to help me when my furnace dies, the web is just sitting there waiting for them to start using it.

As a special summertime experiment, we at Okeedokee are happy to announce the unveiling of OkeeNet: wireless access on Victoria Row. For access information, please contact Dave. Range appears to be roughly PEI Crafts Council to the western edge of Fishbones. As I type, I’m sitting the Confederation Centre Public Library on the same network, although the concrete sheel that houses it means I have to contort my body to get online. Thanks to The Buzz for joining us in play. More details later.

Happy Independence Day to our American cousins. Much is made of the differences between Americans and Canadians; one of the most significant is that Americans do patriotism right. Here in Canada we came late to the patriotism game, and it always feels more like subscribing to some government-controlled happiness program than something truly reflective of a deep abiding spirit. American patriotism suffers from no such problem: it’s real, it’s deep, and it cuts across social and economic lines.



July 4th is also the birthday of John Pierce, group publisher of The Old Farmer’s Almanac. John and his family will be visiting the Island next week for the first time; give them a wave when you pass them on the highway (they’ll be the ones in the Volve with the “Live Free or Die” license plates).