From the announcements page on eBay: Honesty Counters on Item Pages are currently unavailable. Honesty is working to correct this as quickly as possible..

When you’ve been using your cell phone to browse the web, one of the things that is constantly frustrating is the need to use the phone keypad to “type” URLs and other information into the phone. This is done using a special technique which involves pressing number keys an appropriate number of times to call up the required letter. For example, you press 2 once for A, twice for B and three times for C. One of the more frustrating things is that when you want to type in the same letter more than one (i.e. www), or letters which share the same key (i.e. fred), you have to pause slightly to wait for the phone to know you want to keep typing. I found tonight that one of the fringe benefits of having the last name Rukavina is that it’s possible to type this on a phone keypad without ever repeating the same key twice in a row.

Wow, I just found out that eToys is out of business. So much for the power of Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

When Catherine and I lamented the lack of good food delivery options in Charlottetown, my wily friend Ann suggested we experience George’s Grill, run by the family of the mercurial local actor Ed Rashed. So today for lunch we ordered up a couple of cheeseburgers, a large order of fries, and a couple of pops. Total cost $10.50, including delivery (which took only about 10 minutes!). Verdict: best hamburgers in town, served as hot as if they were just off the grill; french fries were generic and somewhat soggy. We’ll be back.

This week on Off the Beaten Track, a review of Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen [requires RealAudio to listen].

The award for best integration of a popular song into the fabric of a television drama goes to The West Wing for this week’s episode, Somebody’s Going To Emergency, which used the song New York Minute by Don Henley to excellent effect.

CatherineHennessey.com went live to air a year ago today. Or rather, as seems appropriate, it went to air on February 29, 2000, a date which doesn’t happen to fall this year. In any case, it has been an interesting ride acting as Catherine’s computer doula. Catherine has honoured the occassion, unwittingly, with flurry of new posts today. Tune in.

My friend Oliver casts aspersions on me whenever this website turns overly geeky (or ginky, as my friend Catherine would say). So I will be quick. I’ve upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows 2000; early results are promising. Windows 98 needed about 5 reboots a day; so far I haven’t had to reboot Windows 2000 once in a week. There was some early weirdness caused by an old Contour Design mouse driver hanging about, but I’ve switch to a PS/2 mouse, and everything’s purring along fine now. Speaking of Contour Design, they make the best CSI-deying computer mouse I’ve found yet; they come in several sizes, and in right- and left-handed models. They’re about $90US, but worth it. If you ever have need to convert from, say, Microsoft SQL server to Sybase ASE (or Oracle, or DB2), you can’t go wrong with DBArtisan from Embarcadero. It’s expensive, but boy does it save a lot of time when you’re doing database migration. We’ve had a Siemens Gigaset 2420 wireless telephone system for almost 9 months now; we had to have a couple of handsets replaced initially because of freaky digital interference, but since then the system’s been a dream. Two lines, 4 cordless handsets, digital answering system, intercom, etc. Only downside is that it’s range is pretty well in-the-house. Recent technical support experiences: Microsoft (excellent and free, which is very unusual), Dell (horrible and free, which is also unusual; tried to get hard disk specs on an existing system; they could figure out whether it was a sales or technical support issue); Purity Dairy (excellent as usual; called from the milk aisle at Sobey’s wondering if 3.25% = homo milk). Okay, that’s it. Cast your aspersions.

My brother Johnny has the distinction of having been on the periphery of the season’s biggest earthquakes, one in Guatemala on January 13 and the other yesterday in Vancouver. Could Johnny be some sort of earthquake-attracting superhero?

We bought groceries at the big, newly renovated Sobey’s in Charlottetown today. One interesting feature of the redesigned store is that there is a woman who’s only job is to wander the aisles making sure that you can find everything you’re looking for. This is a welcome change from having to bother the stockboy who’s trying to navigate 320 cases of apple juice through narrow aisles.