I have an America Online account so that I can check to ensure that the email client operates properly with various mailing lists I maintain.

Yesterday I got a report from a user that they were having difficulty using AOL’s latest version, the much-touted “version 7.0,” with one of our sites, so I upgraded my own computer to this version so I could try to duplicate their woes.

This was a mistake.

Upgrading (if you can call it that) to this version of AOL installed all manner of crap on my computer, rendered Windows file sharing inoperable, and caused my Internet Explorer to think that it should dial out to AOL every time I clicked on a link (even though I’d configured AOL to know about my broadband connection).

I uninstalled everything to do with AOL to try and solve the problem, and this solved everything but the file sharing problem, which was only solved once I disabled the faux network adapter that AOL installs to let you use their service over an existing Internet connection.

Beware.

Some of the minimum qualifications for work as a flight attendant for JetBlue:

• Willing to think outside the box to find a way to say “YES” to our internal and external customers.
• Willing to be away from home 3-5 nights in a row.
• No visible tattoos.
• Maintain a neat and professional appearance.
• Needs to pass a 10 year security background check and a drug test.

I imagine that if I survive the apocalypse, the nature of my existence will mirror the room where I type this note: I am locked inside a small, windowsless room filled with computers and air cleaners in the bowels of the agriculture research station in Charlottetown. Everything is covered with a fine white dust. I can access my website, but only through a 7 year-old text-only web browser called Lynx. The phones still work, but for how long? I’m trying to access the central computer, but I need a newer version of SSH to do that, and I can only get through to Finland sporadically. The hum, the hum, the hum of the air cleaners is driving me insane. Will I see my family again?

We travelled out to the underwater republic of Mount Stewart on Sunday to attend our first auction of the season. Gerald Giampa and his family were auctioning off what appeared to be pretty well everything they owned.

Gerald is the owner of the Lanston Type Library and you can read his story here. I’m not sure what fate awaits the family (or the type archive), as they were auctioning off the fridge, the stove and the oregano, so it looks they’re moving away, or at the very least rejecting materialism and seasoning.

So there I was, standing in a couple of inches of red mud in the middle of a crowd of some 200 people at the auction, waiting for the fun stuff to come around for bidding, when who should I see across the field but Ernest Hemingway.

Given the literary nature of the auction (half the audience was there for the belt sanders; the other half for the limited edition chap books), Hemingway’s appearance wasn’t unexpected. There is, however, the matter of his death to contend with.

We left shortly thereafter, and returned home, without french fries (to Catherine’s chagrin) and life has been normal since.

I didn’t know that Earl Proulx had died. I never met him, but his spirit is certainly infused in the buildings (and the people) of Yankee.

Here is a website about decay.

If every other parent is like me, then there are a lot of people secretly terrified of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS. It is, in essense, a condition without obvious cause or opportunity to effectively prevent in which infants just die. This happened to Robert X. Cringely’s son Chase this week, and even though I only know him through what he’s written, and from his PBS television work, my heart goes out.

Take a read of this <a href=http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/story/0,3604,628613,00.html”>article in The Guardian about VW’s new Glaeserne Manufaktur in Dresden. Then visit the website of the factory. Truly amazing.

(Be sure to check out the “360 degree experience” portion of the website: this is the richest QuickTime VR I’ve come across).

We passed through Germany (Frankfurt en Main) on our way to Prague in 1998, and spent 2 days there on the way back. Not much time to experience a country, save realizing that Coca-Cola costs $7CDN a glass. But I was overwhelmed with how much Germany has to offer the world, and how much we Canadians, still reeling in some deep seated way from WWII, ignore this.

When I was young, the evil bastards we all hated were the Russians, and the evil bastards our parents had hated when they were our age were the Germans. There’s no doubting that each country wrecked havoc on the world in its own way. But behind the historical evil lies amazing, complex and facsinating worlds waiting to be explored in the present.

I propose that Maid Marian’s, a restaurant in the former borough of Sherwood, now part of Charlottetown, has the best restaurant service in Charlottetown. Their food is straight ahead “family restaurant” fare, and eating too much of it will probably cause you to implode, but they have table service down to an art, to the extend that most any other restaurant, by comparision, appears to offer no service at all.

If you have never been to Maid Marian’s and want to initiate yourself, go on Monday or Tuesday nights when they have “2 for 1” hamburger nights. Two people can dine for less than $5.00 and come away full.

We mourn the passing of Jay Chiat.