What’s going on at Island Tel? I’ve made three calls, on different matters, to various toll-free numbers for various departments of the Company this week, and all calls have been answered on the first ring, and the person who’s answered has had been able to provide me with all the information I need. This is a good sign.

Regular readers will recall that in this space over the past year I’ve related a series of frustrations with various aspects of Island Tel, culminating in an Open Letter to Island Tel.

Based on those experiences, I had pretty well made up my mind to switch my Internet connectivity from Island Tel to Eastlink, and, indeed, had begun discussions with their sales people about pricing and timing.

All of which might make it seem a little surprising that, at least for the time being, I’ve decided to stick with Island Tel and, indeed, to upgrade my service with them and consolidate all of Reinvented’s equipment here in the World HQ on Prince St.

How did Island Tel win me back? Here’s what they did:

1. Ron Waite, Regional Vice-President, (PEI), and Vice-President Carrier Services, Aliant Telecom, responded to my open letter. His response didn’t knock me over with its eloquence or attitude, but he did respond, knowing full well that his response would appear online, at that’s something.
2. An emissary from Island Tel’s sales force took me out for a COWS mocha iced cowpuccinno and, in a no-bullshit, frank and honest exchange, listened to what I had to say, and tried to explain the Island Tel side of the story.
3. A side-by-side comparison of Island Tel and Eastlink’s low-end dedicated IP products reveals that they offer about the same bandwidth for the same price. All things being equal, I’d rather be close (in IP terms) to my major PEI client, and Island Tel’s network gets me that.
4. Further experience with Eastlink’s customer service suggested that it wasn’t as different from Island Tel’s as it would appear: there proved to be just as many long telephone trees, unreturned phone calls, etc. at Eastlink as at Island Tel. My last call to Island Tel was answered, by a real person, on the first ring; this is a quick way to my heart.
5. I’d been promised a meeting with the Eastlink “Internet expert” for several weeks, but this was never arranged; and Island Tel sales rep was at my door within 20 minutes of an initial call to his cell phone, and he knew his stuff.

I am under few illusions that Island Tel has changed substantially as a company in the last two months, and a good number of the major items raised in my Open Letter are still not resolved. However they’ve done enough (and Eastlink has failed to sufficiently impress enough) to tip the scales in their favour.

I will continue to be their most challenging and demanding client, will continue to report on my challenges here; for now, however, they continue to have my business. Let’s see how it goes…

Regular readers will recall that I mentioned my surprise that a Tim Hortons Garden Vegetable Sandwich contains 23 g of fat.  I had been in the habit of ordering this sandwich as a “healthy alternative” without thinking about it (doesn’t garden vegetable sound healthly?).  I sent an email to Tim Hortons, and this is what they wrote me back:

Dear Mr. Rukavina,

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for taking the time to contact us regarding your concerns with the Tim Hortons Garden Vegetable Sandwich.

Tim Hortons has created a Nutrition Guide featuring a cross section of our products.  As you have recently viewed this guide electronically on our website, we hope that you have found the nutritional information useful in helping incorporate Tim Hortons products into your lifestyle.

The Garden Vegetable Sandwich is not advertised as a “healthy alternative” sandwich.  It is prepared with Plain Cream Cheese, Tim Hortons Special Dressing, Cucumber, Tomato and Lettuce.  The total fat content of this sandwich is 23 grams.  The areas of the sandwich in which the fat are located is as follows:

    Plain Cream Cheese, 13.0 grams
    Tims Special Dressing, 9.0 grams
    White Country Bun, 0.5 grams

To lower the total fat of this sandwich, request a sandwich with a Light Cream Cheese and no Tims Special Dressing.

Yours truly,
Consumer Nutrition Co-ordinator
Research & Development

That (a) Tim Hortons would respond at all, (b) they would take my request seriously, and (c) that they have a Consumer Nutrition Co-ordinator are all very heartening things.  Kudos to Tim’s for excellent service.

My ebullient brother Steve writes I have fond memories of several trips to the Clappison Drive-in (now closed) as a child, four little kids packed in the back of the car….

I have equally fond memories, and that’s what led me to hook up with Bob Boyle and the team at Brackley Drive-in four years ago to put together a website (we get paid with a seasons pass; paper ROI is about $50/year; actual ROI is immeasurable).

Steve explores the world of the drive in in Saskatchewan in a great CBC piece that aired today.

I ran the Island’s first webserver at the end of a 14.4 Kbps modem. It worked just fine. Although it took about 24 hours to download a CD-ROM’s worth of data over that line, it was more than enough for the traffic of that day (circa 1994). If memory serves, the PEI Crafts Council paid PEINet about $350/month for that connection.

Fast forward to the present: Island Tel or Eastlink will now sell me 1 Mbps (that’s one million bits per second, 71 times faster than a 14.4 modem) for half that price.

Sometimes, if you’re not watching the ball, orders of magnitiude can change and you don’t notice. Amazing.

I made two calls today, one to Eastlink and one to Island Tel, to ask about their low-end, static-IP “high speed” Internet products. Here’s what I found:

When I called Eastlink’s toll-free line, I had to wade down two levels through the telephone tree, then wait 4 minutes on hold before I could talk to someone. The person I ended up with seemed quite capable, and could answer all my questions.

Eastlink’s bottom-end service, branded Enhance, is $150/month, with an $89 installation fee. It includes 1 to 5 static IP addresses, DNS service, and 10MB of web space. Bandwidth is 1 Mbps up, 5 Mbps down.

Island Tel’s toll-free number was answered on the first ring by a live operator. The operator was quite helpful, and answered my basic questions. When I had additional questions that were beyond her knowledge, she promised to get back to me, and approx. 1 hour later I received a call back from a very knowledgeable sales rep.

Island Tel’s bottom-end service, branded OfficeLink, is $199.95/month (however various discounts can take this as low as $139.95/month) with a $150 installation fee (no discount for existing DSL service switched over). It includes 5 static IP addresses, DNS service, 5 MB of web space, 15 hours of dial-up service an a Merx account. Bandwidth is 1 Mbps.

In a previous life I earned a small income training blind people to use computers with screen readers and voice boards. This was in the DOS era, and the word processor of choice — indeed about the only major word processor available other than WordStar — was WordPerfect.

At that time WordPerfect was still produced and marketed by its original maker, WordPerfect Corp., based in Utah (the product was later acquired by Novell, then sold to Corel; back in those days WordPerfect Corp. was well known for offering free lifetime technical support).

Anyway, whenever you started WordPerfect for DOS, the first screen you would see would flash by in a second or two, giving the program’s title and copyright; most people would’t ever see this, as it flashed by so quickly.

However screen readers “see” everything, so every time you started WordPerfect, the screen reader would dutifully read the entire mesage, including “Orem, Utah, USA”, which was the location of WordPerfect Corp. Except that the screen readers of the day weren’t smart enough to read “USA” as U-S-A, so they would read “usa”, sounding like “youse-ah”. So we would hear “Orem you-tah youse-ah”.

This little bit of audio is burned into my ears. And, no doubt, the ears of many others from those times.

Under the category “things you learn when you read the fine print” is the fact that the cost from Maritime Electric to power an air raid or fire siren is “$3.30 per month per HP of nameplate rating.” This according to their Rate Schedules and Policies document.

Roman Holiday and Heaven Can Wait are very similar films, made 25 years apart. Beyond that they are both Paramount Pictures releases, both movies involve a romance where mistaken (or hidden, or misunderstood) identity plays a central role (in Roman Holiday, Gregory Peck as reporter Joe Bradley falls for the Audrey Hepburn as Princess Ann, but Hepburn’s character doesn’t know that Peck’s character knows she’s a Princess; in Heaven Can Wait, Warren Beatty as Joe Pendleton living in Leo Farnsworth’s body falls for Julie Christie as activist Betty Logan, but Christie’s character doesn’t know that Beatty’s character is a football player living in an industrialist’s body). And both movies end in a press conference (of sorts), after which the plot resolves itself.

The two films end in very different ways, however: in 1953 in Roman Holiday, it was acceptable to have a movie end with the romantic leads forever apart (Gregory Peck takes that long, lonely walk into the credits, after a press conference during which he shares some of the most delightful “we know that we will forever be apart” body language ever captured on film), whereas by 1979 in Heaven Can Wait, a twist of fate leads the characters back together (“You’re the quarterback…?” says Julie Christie, realizing that the football player she’s met in the corridor is her reincarnated love).

Each is a perfectly wonderful and endearing ending, but the difference points out a trend that has only grown stronger in the intervening years, which is that modern audiences now demand satisfaction at the end of their movies: Meg Ryan must find Tom Hanks, ad infinitum. This is sad: it means that movies just snap out of a mold, have little romantic suspense; these movies teach us little about the delights of ephemeral experiences. Sometimes it’s okay that things don’t get resolved. Sometimes it’s better.

Don’t the members of Boy Bands like ‘N Sync and the Backstreet Boys actually play instruments? I never see them with any in their videos on MuchMusic. Where does the music come from? Who’s playing?