The following sign is posted on the door of the East Point Lighthouse Craft Shop in East Point, PEI:
English: Owner’s Must Scoop (odd apostrophe there). French: Collect the garbage of your dogs.
A trading post is a “station of a trader or trading company established in a sparsely settled region where trade in products of local origin (as furs) is carried on.” It is not an old weathered post.
In California, if your cars fails a smog check and is thus what they call a gross polluter, the government will buy your car from you for $1,000. This make a lot of sense.
What is Navruz? Well, the President of Uzbekistan tells us that it’s “an especially dear holiday for its beauty and deep roots” where, among other things, celebrants “dance beside huge food pots.”
From the Embassy of the Republic of Uzbekistan in Germany, we learn that Navruz is a “festival of peace and new beginnings,” held at the spring equinox in Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries.
Which doesn’t really explain the Plof Contest.
Plof, it seems, is the Bukharan national dish (Bukhara,
in turn, is a city of southern Uzbekistan). Plof is described in this Jerusalem Post article as Bukharan Rice with Chicken and Carrots.
Which is where Procter & Gamble comes in. You might have thought that Procter & Gamble was a simply North American concern, but, no, they have extended their reach around the world. In Kazakhstan (the country just north of Uzbekistan), one of the brand names they operate is Fairy, under which banner they sell dish soap.
Which brings us to March 21, 2001 in Almaty, Kazakhstan and the Plof Contest.
In a community-minded spirit that a “festival of peace” would be bound to engender, Procter & Gamble sponsors a contest each Navruz in which contestants compete to, well, make the best plof.
This contest not only affords the good people of Almaty the opportunity to sample the “…first delicious Navruz plof,” but also, P&G tells us, results in “…ocean of positive emotions, smiles & happy faces…”
I hope one day to attend.
I went to Shoppers Drug Mart yesterday to buy shampoo. I had only one consideration in my choice of brand: a bottle that clearly indentified its contents.
I am amazed at how shampoo makers obscure the actual word Shampoo on shampoo bottles, especially when shampoo bottles look almost identical to conditioner bottles.
Given that most people use shampoo in a bleary-eyed early morning state while not wearing glasses possibly required for reading and other basic eyesight, it would seem that a logical design consideration for shampoo bottles would be the word Shampoo in very big letters on the side of the bottle. However what we usually end up with is something like shampoo, located under a Big Brand Name.
To assist in the alleviation of this problem, I offer the simple graphic here to any shampoo maker who would like to download it and plaster it on the side of their bottles. If you do this, I will buy your shampoo forever.
It is impossible to do justice in words to the many wonders of MacAusland’s Woolen Mills in Bloomfield, PEI. But I will try. At least a little.
MacAusland’s has been producing woollen blankets since 1932. And they do produce these blankets. From scratch. They take raw wool, card and spin it, then weave blankets from the thread. These are blankets that will last forever. They are soft and warm and so unlike what most people think of as a woollen blanket (scratchy, rough, etc.) as to be a breed apart.
A visit to the factory in Bloomfield is an experience in itself. There is no “factory tour” — you just walk right in the side door and are immediately in the midst of all of the amazing belt-driven machinery used to produce blankets. You are free to poke in and around anywhere, and there are no “warning, don’t go here” signs at all (note: as a result, of course, you should watch where you step, and where your young children stick their arms/noses/legs).
Walk up the steep wooden stairs to the “showroom” and you can select from a wide array of blankets in different colours and sizes, as well as a good select of yarn.
When you buy a blanket (and you should buy a blanket), it will be wrapped in paper and tied with string. They will ship anywhere.
This week or next, or the one after that, you cannot do wrong to take the afternoon off and drive up to Bloomfield. It’s about an hour and a half from Charlottetown, just past the O’Leary turn, right on Route 2. You can stop in Kensington at the Frosty Treat on the way up for an ice cream, and at the Richmond Dairy Bar on the way back for another.
There has been quite a bit of controversey about Windows XP, Microsoft’s next generation of Windows. Most of the discussion has centred around Microsoft’s nefarious new ways of detecting the guts of your computer and attaching your copy of XP to that computer and that computer only. A lot of people think they’ve Gone Too Far in the name of anti-piracy efforts, to the point where these “features” are going to interfere with legitimate users.
All that controversey aside temporarily, I’m happy to report that Windows XP is beautiful. Microsoft is running a preview program where, for $9.95 USD you can download a “work in progress” version of Windows XP over the Internet, burn a CD with it, and install it on your computer for 180 days.
So I bit, and took the new operating system for a ride. It is, indeed, still a work in progress, and is a little rough around the edges. However it is a much, much more sensible, well-designed and, yes, beautiful operating system than any that preceded it. It makes Windows NT and Windows 2000 look like amateur efforts.
I’ll be an upgrade customer when the time comes, nefariousness or not.
We switched our Internet connectivity for this server over to Island Tel’s OfficeConnect service a week ago today (hint to Island Tel: if you want people to link to your website, don’t use frames — you lose your brand identity!).
The transition went smoothly. The Island Tel installer was crackerjack: he was in and out in about 20 minutes (could have left sooner, but he was pleasantly thorough). We installed a switched hub, he made a call to the central office and, kazaam, we switched from dynamic IP to static, and everything flowed just like it did before.
The next day I moved the server up from the old Okeedokee data centre to its new home in our basement here on Prince Street; that transition, after the usual wait for new DNS information to propogate, went smoothly too.
So, all in all, I’m happy with the change, with the service I’m getting, and with the price point ($129.95/month for 1Mbps).
I am, however, dogged by constant technical problems, apparently unrelated directly to the Island Tel network: I maintain a webserver in Boston, which requires a lot of connection, over the Internet, to the server for upkeep, development and maintenance. In the run of an average day, I might be connected to the Boston server 5 or 6 hours. So I notice when things go wrong.
This traffic travels from my workstation over the Island Tel, Aliant, BellNexxia, and InterMedia networks before reaching Xensei in Quincy, just south of Boston.
For the past three days, I’ve been experiencing the oddest problem with this connection: every 6 minutes, like clockwork, the connection seems to “disappear” for about 10 seconds. Then it comes back, and everything is okay. For another 6 minutes. And so on. As you might imagine, this makes working on the Boston server somewhat frustrating: it’s like talking on a cell phone that cuts out every once in a while.
My problem is that the technical problem seems to lie either with BellNexxia or with InterMedia. I am a customer of neither, directly, and so I’ve no avenue for technical support.
The folks at Island Tel have opened up a trouble ticket on the matter, and have apparently escalated it to Aliant (note: Island Tel, Aliant and BellNexxia are all part of the same corporate family, although it seems a somewhat distant family most of the time, the kind where you lost your Uncle’s phone number a year ago and haven’t been able to find it since). As the “old” Island Tel wouldn’t have taken this step, I can only be grateful that they’ve at least gone this far. Alas to date it’s produced nothing in the way of results.
This week in the midst of the Code Red scare, there was a lot of hot air talk about the supreme importance of maintaining the unimpeded flow of Internet traffic because it’s now being using by doctors to do remote operations, banks to conduct online banking, etc. etc. More serious than Code Red is, I think, the fact that Internet Service Providers and backbone operators haven’t yet figured out the streamlined business practices and communications systems needed to take care of nagging little problems like this.
I certainly know that when the doctor in Milan is removing my appendix over the Internet, I don’t want him to lose contact with the e-scalpel every 6 minutes!
Imagine if you didn’t lose the keys to your car, but rather lost the ignition switch. This is what happened to me last night around 11:30 p.m.
Working on too little sleep with too much work to do, I was procrastinating by doing some housecleaning on the server that runs this website and some others in our oeuvre.
This server started off life as a Windows NT workstation, and gradually had a Linux server grow up around it. A byproduct of this slow creeping evolution was that the hard disks were littered with several Windows NTFS and DOS partitions (i.e. parts of the hard disk that “speak Windows” as opposed to “speak Linux”).
And so, last night, I thought to myself “why don’t I clean up those old partitions, copy off what I need, and free them up to use under Linux?” I should have stopped right there.
In an unfortunate series of wrong steps, I managed to render said server dead in the water. I did this mostly by forgetting that although it was mainly a Linux machine, its boot process was controlled by Windows NT. When I removed Windows NT, well, it’s like I removed the ignition switch.
Fortunately I was able to boot from an emergency floppy (yes, they are useful and worth that extra 5 minutes at install time!), copy from the existing partitions what I needed. And then I decided “hell, I might as well start from scratch and give the system a good purgative.” Unfortunately I decided this at about midnight.
I can conclusively report now that it take, once all is said and done, about four and a half hours to take a raw computer and turn it into a Linux-based webserver. About half that time was taken formatting hard drives (I mistakening selected the “thorough” option here), another 1/4 of the time waiting for MySQL to compile, and the last hour or so was spent on the relatively light work of installing Apache, PHP and getting all the web content files and databases back in the right place.
Because the server is located in the 175 year-old basement of Reinvented World HQ here on Prince Street, with me perched on an overturned dying pot huddled in front of a monitor perched on a log, the entire exercise brought back memories of the endless hours spent with Kevin O’Brien in the sub-sub-basement of the Confederation Centre during the early days of ISN. But that’s another story.
Tonight I’m thinking I might go down to Charlottetown Harbour and throw my socks in the Hillsborough River.