Back when I was a wee lad myself, during my one and only year of higher education, I used to look forward to Thursday nights. At 9:00 p.m. (or was it 10?), I would head off to the snack machines and buy myself a bag of chips and an icy cold Fresca, and then adjourn to the Junior Common Room ato watch Hill Street Blues.

I liked Fresca then. But then it went away.

Now it is back: eagle-eyed Catherine spotted a lone bottle of Fresca in the cash-side cooler at Zellers tonight and we agreed to split it. Alas this was not the Fresca of old: first, it was Diet Fresca, and so it had a horrible “sugar free” aftertaste. Also, it appears that in the 16 years since I was in university they have reformulated Fresca so that its taste approximates that of Lemony-fresh Pledge.

Advice: avoid Diet Fresca.

From Susan Arbing: the Iowa Corn Cam. And if you find that interesting, be sure to check out The Amazing Maize Maze, which is the Official Maze of The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

My spritely friend Oliver from California passes along links to live Pig, Cow, Sheep and Goat cameras.

I’ve always condemned the charter airlines (like WestJet and Canada 3000) for advertising cheap fares by using the “one way fare based on return travel” gambit. They advertise a $99 fare to Toronto, but then, in smaller print, tell you that this is the one way fare, but that you have to buy a return ticket. So the real fare is $198.

Until now I hadn’t seen Air Canada adopt this deceptive technique. This changed last night when they announced their latest seat sale.

They’re advertising a one way trip to Boston for $189, a fare which, deep into the fine print, you read is “each way based on return trip travel and may only be purchased on a return basis.” So the real return fare to Boston is $378. This isn’t a bad fare, but it’s not fantastic — I’ve flown with little advance notice in the past year for $490. It’s certainly not a “jaw-dropping” fare, as they suggest on their website.

I wish Air Canada would stop the sneaky tactic; they shouldn’t have to lower themselves into the charter gutter to compete.

It is interesting to note that you can fly to Zurich from Charlottetown for $10 more than it costs to fly to Seattle from Charlottetown.

Not satisfied with the ultimately useless chat I had with Network Solutions about their annoying pop-up ads, I decided to have an ultimately useless telephone call with them.

You can listen to the entire call or the call without the 1:30 of on-hold music) [MP3 stream: you’ll need a player like WinAmp to listen], the highlight of which is the customer service rep telling me “the people you would have to contact about that would be Microsoft.”

I’ve been evaluating Urchin, a web traffic reporting tool, for several clients. Everybody I’ve showed the output to has been impressed: it’s flexible, uses its own database, lets you look at reports and graphs over different periods of time, and has a nice little e-commerce revenue reporting system built in. You can download a trial copy.

Recent search terms that have led people to this website:

• stores for belly dancing outfits in california
• technology: the way we might be
• martha stewart living archives
• pepperidge farm goldfish jingle
• tamara hickey fan
• big and advanced and email and system
• guys in bike shorts
• flowjet water dispenser

At the corner of Grafton and University Streets in downtown Charlottetown, in front of Province House there is a tree with its own phone line.

I first noticed this last summer: about halfway up the tree there is an Island Tel box similar to the one on the side of my house. There’s a Big Black Cable running out the top of the box that disappears into the sky, and a regular old beige 4-conductor wire running out the bottom and down the tree.

As regular readers will know, I have been, from time to time, mildly critical of Island Tel. On this occasion, however, it would appear as though they are living up to their rhetoric:

Your business has special needs. At Island Tel we understand that you need to grow while keeping costs down, and be accessible to customers without having a large office.

Craig Wilson writes (in response to my quest for a car):

Allow me to go out on a limb and suggest you get to know Bob and Nettie Likely at Sherwood Volkswagen. Small dealership, honest people who expect to make a fair margin, a service manager who has been involved with VW for over 20 years and friendly qualified mechanics who welcome you poking your nose into their world and asking questions. I have purchased 4 cars there and am now looking at another. I have colleagues who have purchased 3 cars there. Each of us is satisfied.

I will pay them a visit. My brother Mike has a VW Golf and likes it a lot.

I am a frequent user of Dictionary.com. It’s a good website, that provides useful information.

Of late, however, I’ve noticed that every so often when I visit the site, a “pop-under” ad for Network Solutions (a pop-under ad pops up under the current browser window, and I usually don’t notice it until later).

I find these pop-up ads quite annoying, especially given that I am a longtime Network Solutions customer (last time I checked I have paid them $4015US over the years for domain name registrations).

So I decided, naive guy that I am, to ask Network Solutions to stop sending me annoying advertising. I went to the Network Solutions Chat with Customer Service page, and had an online chat with one of the customer service reps. I would copy and paste the chat transcript, but the Java applet that ran the chat wouldn’t allow me to do this.

After asking me various questions about the ads (are they from our website? are they from your website?), the customer service rep suggested that I contact the offending website (Dictionary.com) and ask them for help. When I pressed further, they suggested that I turn off Java and/or turn off cookies in my browser, and when I suggested this would compromise my experience of other websites, they suggested I look for a program that disables pop-up ads.

In other words, a company of which I’ve been a good customer for 6 years is paying to have another company plaster my house with ads and the only way they can suggest I can make it stop is to find yet another company to try and help me make it stop.

Does this not seem insane? I will be looking for somewhere else to take my domain name registration business.