I was a very early user of TD Bank’s web banking system. It was horrible. It treated you like you were a bank teller: you had to submit “jobs” of “transactions” and so forth. It was easier to drive in to the branch. A lot has changed. I was inspired to take another looked at their web offering by our account manager, and I must say that I’m impressed; their user interface is almost as good as Metro Credit Union’s (which I really, really like). Most impressive, though, is the fact that I can register my mother’s TD Bank account as a “personal payee” and then I can transfer money into her account over the web. As you might imagine, my mother likes this feature too.

Interesting TD Bank story: when I was 11 years old, I went into my local TD Bank in Carlisle, Ontario and asked for a bank card. This was back in the mid-1970s when bank cards were very new and nobody had heard of them. The tellers had to root around in the back of the branch for an application, but they found one and, a couple of weeks later, my bank card arrived in the mail. It was only later that I found out that, at least at that time, 11 year olds weren’t allowed to have bank cards. But I got to keep mine, and so I was, for a while, the only kid in Canada with a bank card (or so I like to imagine).

The birth of our Oliver was not without its stresses and complications. We are now in a good and healthy state, and have many to thank for their help along the way: Dr. Frank MacDonald, Dr. Pamela Sproule, Dr. Peter Noonan, Dr. Pauline Champion; the nurses in labour & delivery, the NICU, and the maternity ward, who are among the most skilled and compasionate people I have ever met (I would name them individually, but my foggy mind cannot retain all of their names…); the hospital staff — janitors, food service, all — who shared in our ups and downs; our neighbour and friend Catherine Hennessey who kept me filled up with macaroni and cheese during the stressful times, and generally bouyed my spirit; colleagues at www.gov.pe.ca and Yankee who put up with my absence and cheered us on; and most of all our families: Grant, Marina, Norm, Frances, William, Debbie, Ioma, Hazel, Joe, Jim, Cathy, Pierna, Larry, Mike, Steve, Johnny, Jodi, and all their children for their support and love.

Catherine and I are proud to announce the birth of our first child, Oliver Duncan Lowell Rukavina, born October 1, 2000. You can email Oliver at oliver@rukavina.net. But he doesn’t know how to type.

I received a telephone call from a research firm on Saturday afternoon. The firm was polling on behalf of Island Tel.

From the questions asked, it appears as though the survey was designed to test how loyal Island Tel’s customers are in the face of pending local telephone competition (i.e. rate your response to “I would be unhappy if I could not deal with Island Tel”). There were also questions about where I bank, where I grocery shop, and what my department store of choice is.

Since there are no department stores on PEI (you think Island Tel would know this…), I said that I didn’t shop at a department store and the call centre operator dutifully entered “Do Not Shop” in the appropriate field in her database. When it came time to ask me more detailed questions about my department store preference, the computer thought that “Do Not Shop” was the name of the store. What ensued was a comical look into how computers rule our lives, with the operator asking me to react to statements like “Do Not Shop can always be trusted to act in the best interest of customers” and “Do Not Shop is a socially responsible company.”

You can listen to the exchange in RealAudio to get the full effect.

Noted Canadian author, columnist and broadcaster Jim Carroll is taking our weblogging software out for a ride. Today he launched The Jim Carroll Web Log, which uses the same “publish-it-yourself” software behind sites like CatherineHennessey.com and Steve.Rukavina.net. Welcome, Jim!

A CBC “Off the Beaten Track” episode in which I talk about what happens when you bring in cats to eradicate mice. Originally aired on September 22, 2000 on CBC Radio’s Mainstreet program in Prince Edward Island.

The Marion Island Cat Eradication Program

Introduction: In 1949, five domestic house cats were introduced to Marion Island to help control a problem with house mice.  By 1977, these five cats had multiplied to 3,400 cats and had eaten several bird species to extinction.  This situation begat the “Feral Cat Eradication Program,” which, over the course of 19 years eliminated all of the cats from the Island.  This is their story.  WARNING TO AUDIENCE: This feature contains discussion of the killing of house cats.  Sensitive viewers and cat lovers may wish to go away for 5 minutes.

The House Mouse Problem

• The word mouse has no scientific meaning – it’s used generically to describe small rat-like rodents.
• The house mouse is one of a greater family of rodents that includes mice, rats, voles, gerbils and hamsters.
• Your average house mouse is brown or gray, can be up to 8 inches long, including their tail.  
• House mice mature quickly, and can mate 2 to 3 months after birth; gestation takes about 3 weeks, and litters can include up to 12 young.
• The house mouse is native to Eurasia, but has been spread around the world.
• If you do the math, you can see that two mice can produce many millions of ancestors in rather short order – two mice mating can result in 2000 mice six months later.
• Sometime around 1818, sealers using Marion Island as a base inadvertently introduced house mice to the Island.
• House mice feed on invertebrates, which are otherwise an important part of the Island’s food chain.
• And house mice seek the food and shelter of human dwellings, so the mice became a problem for the people manning the South African weather station on Marion Island.

The House Cat “Solution”

• The house cat is a member of a family of animals that includes leopards, cougars, and pumas.
• Your average house cat weighs 6 to 10 pounds, and is 21 to 28 inches long.
• Cats reach puberty at 9 or 10 months, can have up to 3 litters a year, and an average litter contains 4 kittens.
• We humans, it is said, first domesticated cats about 3,500 years ago when Egyptians used them to protect their granaries from mice.
• And in 1949, the South African residents of Marion Island decided to introduce house cats to the Island for the same reason – to rid the island of the house mice that had been there for almost 150 years.
• And so five cats (a neutered orange male tabby cat, a black and white female, and 3 kittens) were brought to Marion Island in 1949.
• How naïve they were…
• Two unexpected things happened:
• The cats liked eating birds more than they liked eating mice – and were eating some species of birds to extinction
• The cats multiplied (maybe not so unexpected!)
• A feral cat is simply a sort of cat that, once domesticated, has returned to the wild.
• The result was that by 1977, there were 3,405 feral cats on Marion Island, and the cats were causing far more ecological damage than the mice they were brought to control.

A Note about Feral Cat Eradication

• The problem of feral cats is one we see all over the world – a world where people don’t spay or neuter cats, and where they thoughtlessly abandon their domestic cats on the edge of town.
• In many cities, their any colonies of feral cats, and these colonies are blamed – rightly or wrongly – for everything from spreading rabies, spreading disease, and eating birds.
• There are two strong factions in the “feral cat problem” world:
• The eradicators think that we should gather up feral cats and kill them.
• The trap-neuter-vaccinate-release people advocate trapping cats, spaying or neutering them, vaccinating them against disease and then releasing them back to the wild.
• In 1977, it was decided to take the eradication route, and thus began the “Marion Island Cat Eradication Program.”

Marion Island Cat Eradication Program

• Step one was to introduce feline panleucopenia into the cat population.
• Feline panleucopenia, commonly known as distemper, is an extremely contagious virus that is, roughly, “the flu for cats.”
• The symptoms are similar to those of the flu in humans: coughing and sneezing, vomiting, and diarrhea.
• It rarely lasts for more than a week, but it has a very high mortality rate.
• Feline panleucopenia was introduced into the cat population on Marion Island, and it killed a lot of cats: by 1982, the population was estimated to have shrunk from 3,400 to 615.
• Then the cats developed immunity to the virus, and with less competition for food, cats with immunity survived and multiplied.
• In 1986, with the population on the rise again, it was decided to hunt the cats as a secondary measure: eight 2-man teams using spotlights and 12-bore shotguns killed approximately 803 cats this way.
• Hunting proved not effective enough to eradicate all of the cats.
• In 1989 and 1991, traps were used to try and capture the remaining cats.
• In April 1991, only 8 cats were trapped.
• It’s now believed that cats have been completely eradicated from Marion Island…
• 19 years later!

The Situation Today

• Now that the cat problem has been solved, researchers are turning again to the problem of house mice.
• Biologist Charl Louw is on Marion Island this year doing research on the house mouse problem, looking at population size and growth, trapping, marking, and releasing mice.
• And the Marion Island Cat Eradication Program is held up by the anti-eradication advocates as an example of why cat eradication won’t work in urban areas (if it took 19 years in a closed system like Marion… etc.)

Coming up this Friday on CBC Prince Edward Island’s Main Street: The Marion Island Cat Eradication Program. This is story of how 5 house cats were introduced to remote Marion Island in 1949, multiplying to 3,400 cats by 1977, and how it took 19 years to rid the island of them. Listen live on Friday, Sept. 22 at 4:30 p.m. AST, or watch here for a RealAudio link.

I’ve spent the balance of the day trying to re-register Internet names in the CA domain (i.e. reinvented.ca). Up until recently registration in the CA domain was free, and was maintained by an arm of UBC. Administration of the domain is in the process of being switched to a new organization called CIRA (which seems to just be CANARIE in disguise). The process is not going well. I opted to use webnames to do the re-registration — they’re one of the new “CIRA-accredited” private outfits that process registrations for a fee. Everything went pretty smoothly on the webnames website — I selected and paid for the domain names in question and got a receipt along with a password to take me to a special page on the CIRA website where I’m supposed to read and agree to abide by an [insane] multi-page [316K!] document. This is where the “fun” starts. CIRA was obviously woefully unprepared for this exercise, and their software was under-tested, for I received a variety of errors throughout the day ranging from SQL server “too many connections” errors to scripting errors to simply having my connection to their webserver refused. To quote a technical support person from webnames, when asked about CIRA: “their website’s basically fucked.” At this point, I’ve managed to process three of four domains. It’s taken about 8 hours. Sigh.

A sad and interesting visit to the planet They Just Don’t Get It this morning to buy a box of envelopes. I used to buy all of our office supplies at Carters in Charlottetown. This was when they were located in a spledid historic building on Queen St., and had a store with all the good characteristics of an old time stationer. And then they moved. In what seemed like an odd move, Carters gave up their Queen St. location and moved to the old Zellers store on Kent St., into what amounts to a modern piece of innocuous architecture; accompanying this was a rapid descent into mediocrity. Since they moved, I’ve [rather sheepishly] been shopping at Staples, the new bigbox-stationer cum computer store in the suburbs. With our recent move downtown, I thought I should give Carters another try, and so when the need arose to purchase a box of envelopes, off I went.
I shouldn’t have bothered.
I quickly found my box of envelopes and walked up to the cash, where I spent 5 minutes in line waiting for the clerk to complete a complex series of tasks with another customer (to her credit, she may have been assisting NASA with Space Shuttle operations). Once it was my turn to pay, I spent another 3 or 4 minutes waiting for her to enter a complex series of commands into her computer that would, I presume, release title to the envelopes to me (I lost track after about 50 keystrokes). When this was completed, I received a giant 8 by 10 receipt and my envelopes.
Now I have never been a stationer myself, and perhaps I am unaware of the subtle data processing demands of the profession, but it seems like a more logical customer service path to strive might be something like: “I walk in, pick up a box of envelopes, pay, leave.” I that in a sane world this would take about 42 seconds. And if it did, Carters would have my stationery business forever.

Okay. I just wrote four cheques to the various heads of the beast that is Island Tel. One cheque for my residential telephone line. One cheque for my business telephone line. One cheque for my cellular telephone. One cheque for my high-speed Internet service.
Does this make any sense? Shouldn’t the smart people at Island Tel be able to figure out how to consolidate all of this into one bill? And why would I hire Island Tel to solve my business problems if they can’t appear to solve this simple problem?
Oddly enough, the friendly customer service agent told me that I can get my high-speed Internet and residential telephone service on the same bill, but only if I sign up for a PrimePak. Weird.