This is two years old, and perhaps everyone has seen it already, but I found it quite moving.

Customers of Charlottetown-based Internet provider ISN began to get word this week that the company is about to be acquired by Nova Scotia-based Eastlink. The sale represents the end of a 14 year project for ISN’s founder Kevin O’Brien.

Kevin and I first met in the spring of 1993. We were essentially doing the same job — taking resources to the Internet — for two different sectors; Kevin was working for the PEI Federation of Agriculture and I was working for the PEI Crafts Council. What began with innocuous conversations about technology that spring led eventually, 18 months later, to the creation of ISN: I, in essence, goaded Kevin into creating his own ISP and was his unofficial technical co-conspirator in the early days.

Over ISN’s colourful history there haven’t been many projects I’ve engaged in, from my work with the Crafts Council to the founding of Digital Island and my work with the PEI Government, to my Okeedokee partnership to Dave Moses to my current setup sharing ISN bandwidth with silverorange, where ISN hasn’t played a pivotal role. The consumption of the company by Eastlink thus represents not only the end of a project for Kevin, but also the disappearance of a human-scale bandwidth provider for the Island. Things will never be the same.

As many of the early conversations where the seeds of ISN were planted took place at The Noodle House here in Charlottetown, Kevin and I returned to the scene of the crime to record a series of conversations about ISN past, present and future. We began with a discussion of what has happened, what’s ahead for existing ISN customers, and you can listen to this in the first of what will eventually be three podcast episodes/

In future episodes we’ll talk about how ISN got started, and about some of the misadventures along the way.

Beside my hotel on Luisenstrasse in Berlin there was a pick-up location for drive easy - pay low. I don’t completely understand the concept, but as near as I can determine this idea marries cheap car rental with brand advertising.

You may recall that my trip to Berlin was filled with twists and turns. I naively thought that this intriguing part of the trip had passed: the Berlin to London to Boston trip went smooth as silk, and the weather in Boston and New Hampshire miraculously cleared for the brief periods I needed to travel up to [[Yankee]].

This morning, after a stirring Yankee “Publishing Star” awards lunch (this quarter honouring Heidi Stonehill, an excellent senior associate editor at The Old Farmer’s Almanac) I made a beeline for Logan and made it down in record time, despite the weather earlier in the morning being a combination of rain, sleet and snow.

I returned my car, got my boarding pass (not checking my bag, per my vow as a result of the earlier debacle) and went through security. After 10 minutes packed into the crowded Air Canada waiting room, I heard my name of the public address system.

I reported for duty, and was told by the friendly but harried agent that there was “a problem with my ticket.” He took my boarding pass, and I overheard him trying to get British Airways on the phone: the evils of inter-airline wrangling had returned (you may recall that I am traveling my entire journey on a British Airways ticket, despite flying parts of the trip on Air Canada).

It seems the source of the problem was this: when Air Canada was late into Montreal two weeks ago, causing me to miss my British Airways connection to London and necessitating travel 24 hours later on the same flight. Apparently when I was rebooked British Airways actually “reissued my ticket,” which meant that the “ticket number” changed (this is a long multi-digit number, not the “booking reference,” which didn’t change). It seems that when they did this, somehow my Air Canada ticket, at least in the Air Canada computer, didn’t follow along, so my trip from Boston to Charlottetown was attached to a ticket that no longer existed.

To repair this required that the agent get the new ticket number from British Airways. Which he had troubles doing because he couldn’t get anyone on the phone (apparently there is no special airline-to-airline hotline for this sort of thing). Fortunately I’d asked Maritime Travel in Charlottetown to double-check my reservations before I left Montreal for London and they had the presence of mind to email me my new ticket number. So I solved my own problem and obviated the need for the agent to call British Airways by digging out that email.

He told me that I was lucky, as if I hadn’t found the number, I would have had to pay for a new ticket.

Moral of the story: the benefits that I assumed would extend from having a travel agent book a complicated multi-airline trip on the same ticket seemed only to add complication to my travels. Granted, I did benefit when the “one ticket” meant that British Airways had to rebook me because Air Canada was late. But they didn’t exactly make it easy.

Oh well: I’m none the less for wear (although [[Catherine]] told me earlier that the Charlottetown Airport has closed, so my flight home tonight might leave me in Montreal again). And without travel intrigue what would I blog about.

“Hey,” I said to myself, “maybe I’ll rent an iTunes movie to watch on the plane,” as I sat down to wait for an hour after arriving early for my flight to Montreal from Boston. Fortunately I had the help of a friendly American with a US iTunes account (we can’t rent movies in Canada yet), so I went through the rental process. It was hard to find a movie that I wanted to watch, but I settled on Live Free or Die Hard. And clicked “Rent.” And then:

My plane leaves in an hour, so I don’t think I’m going to make it (the movie, not my plane).

Since we migrated [[Yankee]]’s web infrastructure to Peer1/Dedicated in November, our MySQL server has been experiencing table “crashing” problems and binary log corruption problems. These problems manifested themselves in a variety of ways:

• Doing a mysqlbinlog dump on the binary logs resulted in an ‘Event too small’ error at some point in the dump.
• Because of the binary log corruption, attempting to use MySQL replication to mirror data on a slave MySQL server failed at the same time.
• Selected tables — almost exclusively those with very frequent SELECTs and INSERTs both — were frequently being marked as “crashed” by the MySQL server, and needed to have REPAIR TABLE run on them to correct the problem.
• MySQL “error 127” messages in the server logs.
• MySQL “error 134” messages in the server logs.

Although we didn’t suffer any actual data loss as a result, and although repairing the tables always corrected the problem, there was obviously something afoot that needed solving.

And so over the last month I’ve been methodically working through possible solutions to this: tweaking the my.cnf configuration file, upgrading the verion of MySQL (we started with 5.0.22 Community and ended up at 5.0.54 Enterprise), changing queries that used the affected tables. Nothing worked.

Finally we opted to seek help from MySQL itself, and purchased the entry-level “Enterprise Basic” package and opened a support ticket. Over the course of a few days of going back and forth with their (very helpful) technicians, they ended up suggesting that it may be a problem with our disk controlled, and suggested we talk to our server managers about this.

So we got back in touch with Peer1 support (also very helpful) and they immediately discovered an incompatibility between the 3ware 8000 disk controller and the 4GB of RAM in the server running MySQL. On Wednesday night we had them downgrade the RAM to 3GB, and since that time it’s been clear sailing: no binary log corruption, no table crashing.

I write all this mostly to add the information to Google so that others with similar problems will see this as a possible (and not all that obvious) solution.

Back in 2006 during our stay in Porto, Portugal, [[Oliver]] and I visited Livraria Lello, an historic bookstore in the centre of the city. I snapped a photo of the beautiful staircase in the centre of the store:

Two years later, The Guardian linked to the photo in Flickr in a story on book shops. Obviously having a photo linked to from The Guardian is a good way to get a lot of people to see it; here is the Flickr graph of views for the last 28 days:

It really is a beautiful bookstore, and if you’re in Porto you must stop there.

My friend Paul just called me on my mobile, a Rogers Wireless pre-paid, to invite me to dinner. We spoke for just over a minute. Because I’m “roaming” in the USA, the rate is $2.99/minute, and because it’s Rogers, the billing is rounded up to the minute, so the call cost me $4.98:

I don’t mind paying more to roam, and I don’t mind paying more for pre-paid, but $2.99 a minute is insane — it’s $180 an hour. Sigh.

Eastern Promises — Sunday afternoon at Hackesche Hoefe Filmtheater in Berlin, right around the corner from Plazes HQ. Ticket purchase went like this:

Me: Sprechen Sie Englisch?

Clerk: Nein. Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

Fortunately our language impasse was solved by the fact that there are only so many things one does in front of a ticket wicket, and I handed over my Euros and got my ticket. I thoroughly enjoyed it (as much as one can enjoy garroting) and I came to realize that Vigo Mortensen is actually as good as everyone says he is. Hackesche Hoefe has a very nice setup (it’s a little hard to find, as the entrance is inside a courtyard and the cinemas are behind an unmarked door on the top floor of the building; it’s also good to understand that “So.” on the schedule is the abbreviation for Sunday).

The Darjeeling Limited — Sunday night at the CineStar at Potsdamer Platz. The first theatre I’ve been to since we saw The Avengers in České Budějovice in 1998 that I’ve been to a movie theatre with assigned seats. Very comfortable theatre with excellent sound and picture (the Big Screen is well suited to the movie, which has a lot of panoramic shots of trains in India). A great movie too, especially speaking as someone with brothers.

Atonement — On British Airways flight 239 from London to Boston on Monday night on my “personal video screen” on the back of the seat in front of me. This was old school personal video, so all the movies started and ended at the same time (more modern systems have video “on demand” and you can start and pause at will). The movie is not a stunning tour de force but neither is it without its virtues. Keira Knightley was far less annoying here than in anything I’d seen her in previously.

I Am Legend — On Tuesday night at the Peterborough Community Theatre here in New Hampshire. This is a tiny theatre that runs 6 nights a week showing first run movies in a town of 6,000 people, which is a rare thing these days. Got to sample a Twix Java chocolate bar, which was oddly alluring. By far and away the highlight of the movie was the magic of making New York City appear deserted, effects done so well as to be indistinguishable from real. Otherwise it was a pretty straightforward zombie movie.