Little time to write, as my typing hours are taken up with dealing with practical career-related issues back home. To make a long story short, olives got picked and turned into olive oil, tremendous meals were consumed ([[Oliver]] has eaten more species over the past two days than he did in his first 7 years), we’ve done the laundry, and today we drove high up into the hills through the next valley to the east to visit Castelvecchio di Rocca Barbena:

At day’s end we drove into Albenga for some urban action, and happened upon the Christmas market: one long street of all the Italian wine, cheese, meat, bread, preserves, cookies and chocolates you can possibly imagine in one place. With samples. While Oliver chafed at the bit — exotic cheese only holds so much allure for the young set — we did our best to cover it all.

We returned home to Colletta, Catherine made a meal of all the leftover food in the fridge (supplemented by highlights of the Christmas market, including perhaps the best chocolate cookie, ever), and I’m hurrying around trying to squeeze out the last bit of reliable wifi I might see for days.

There’s more photographic evidence in the Flickr. Tomorrow we get in the car and head off into points unknown: we fly from Milan on the 12th of December, until then our road is open.

The wind has died down, the sun is out, and there’s no need for jackets. More photos in my Flickr.

Well, that was a long trip. When we last joined each other we were in Montreal. Since then we’ve been all over the place.

To make a long story short, we flew to Boston, took the water taxi to the Moakley Courthouse wharf, walked to the Boston Children’s Museum where we had three hours of maximum fun. Water taxi back to Logan Airport for an Alitalia flight to Milan overnight.

Our flight was near-empty, so we were able to stretch out and get some sleep (albeit with seatbelt buckles jabbed into our backs), and so when we landed in Milan at 6:50 a.m. the next morning (1:00 a.m. Charlottetown) we were marginally less catatonic. Although still pretty groggy. Alitalia, by the way, was great: efficient, friendly without pretense, and on-time (the 150 km/h tail wind helped).

In Milan we waited with about 500 people — seemingly all of them ahead of us with complicated visa issues — for passport control. And then we were in Italy. The local agent for our super-cheap easycar rental was Locauto and they opened their doors just as we arrived. Our “smallest possible car available” rental magically upgrade itself into a Lancia Musa, a very pleasant hatchback cum mini-mini-van. Formalities were quick, the agent friendly, and the booster seat I’d ordered for [[Oliver]] was waiting for us.

[[Catherine]], four days into a wicked head cold, devoid of sleep, and prone to carsickness, was nonetheless able to navigate us out of Milan Malpensa airport, onto the Autostrada, and south to the Mediterranean. This took us first through the interior plains around Milan, and then through a series of tunnels through the hills around Genoa until we emerged into the sunshine near Crevari.

We headed west along the A10 to Savona where we stopped for lunch (a disappointing and expensive pasta lunch at an empty Egyptian restaurant) and then followed the SP1 — the coast road — along the shore to Finale Ligure (an amazing piece of roadwork that) where we re-joined the main highway.

Forty-five minutes later we were shopping for groceries in the Coop in Albenga, my old haunt from last year’s trip. Truth be told we had no idea what we were buying, true catatonia having set in — it appears that we bought a lot of chocolate, a lot of juice, and little else. And an hour later we were in the bar being greeting by Massimo and 5 minutes later we were installed in our apartment.

Soon we were asleep, and when Oliver came into our room to wake us up we thought it was 7 a.m. and it turned out to be almost noon. I guess we were tired.

Up at 4:45 a.m. this morning (though I didn’t sleep a wink). Friendly Coop Taxi man right on schedule at 5:15 a.m. Breezed through Air Canada checkin in Charlottetown and catatonically slumped into our seats for an on-time 6:00 a.m. departure. Greased through customs and security at Dorval in about 10 minutes, and currently lounging in the Air Canada Lounge and feasting on gherkins and All Bran waiting for our plane to Boston.

Meanwhile, back at [[Reinvented]], the New Hampshire Cookie Primary we crafted for [[Yankee]] shows an early lead for Apricot-Coconut Balls (from Ron Paul’s wife Carol). If the other candidates get wind of this the server may well catch fire. And it will likely do this as I’m flying somewhere over New England. Or the Azores.

One piece of travel advice: 1-800-GOOG-411 is a traveler’s best friend. I just used it to book a water taxi for later this morning from Logan Airport to Rowes Wharf.

The stuff of my work life for the past month has largely been the migration of [[Yankee]]’s web infrastructure from Peer1’s colocation facility in New York to Peer1’s managed servers in Miami.

We’ve been happy customers of Peer1 in New York since 2003 when we first moved in (a process that started, in part, from this hearty recommendation). Mike, the facility manager, has been great to work with, and the two or three times over 4 years that I’ve had to haul someone in on the weekend to do a hard reboot they’ve always been smart and helpful. The bandwidth has been rock solid, and with the exception of one “unplanned power event,” the facility has been all we could have hoped for. If you’re looking for colo, I have no hesitation in sending you their way.

When it came time to refresh Yankee’s hardware this fall, we looked at simply purchasing another fleet of Dell PowerEdge servers — they’ve served us well for almost 10 years — but also decided to look at “managed hosting” as an option.

When we started the process, the whole “managed” vs. “self-managed” vs. “colocation” was a mystery to me; I assumed that “managed” meant a return to the old PEINet days, with a server controlled by overlord go-betweens.

As it turns out, that sort of regime is called “shared hosting.”

Managed hosting involves, in essence, leased hardware (which they take care of, repair when needed, etc.) over which you have complete control, supplemented by a various a la carte services like managed OS package updates, backup, and service monitoring. It’s more like “renting part of a sysadmin” than it is like “installing a troll to guard the bridge.”

In other words it’s a good fit for a situation like ours where on one hand we want to be able to have complete control over the iron but, on the other, could benefit from an extra pair of hands.

And so we dove in.

So far the process has gone very well: tech support responds quickly to tickets and answer the phone on the first ring. The servers they provisioned for us — 2 Intel 64-bit machines and 3 32-bit ones, all running RHEL5 — were ready 3 days after we placed the order.

In 2003 the migration to colocation in New York meant buying servers, getting them delivered to Dublin, NH, flying to Boston and driving up to Dublin, spending 4 days installing RHEL on the servers and then migrating over our data and content, then loading the servers into a car and driving to lower Manhattan to install them.

In other words, a lot of physical work, supplemented by considerable pizza.

This time there was no physical work at all, just a lot of scp from server to server over the last month.

Not content to simply do a straight migration, I decided that it would be a good opportunity to move our development process into the 20th century, so most of my work of late has been as much about installing Subversion and Trac and moving our 44,000-odd pieces of code and related objects into the repository. Among other things this has been akin to an archaeological dig through coding-past for me, as this is a project that, in one way or another, I’ve been involved with for 11 years now.

Today was the final “flip the switch” day. This meant coming into the office early this morning, taking the old servers offline, copying about 18GB worth of MySQL data over the wire, changing the DNS to point to the new servers, and then bringing each of 7 websites back only in step, dealing with any niggling migration issues as I went along (somewhere in there I learned how to make a built-in PHP module into a loadable PHP module so as to add dBASE support — dBASE support! — to our PHP).

The switch is now fully flipped. We’ve got a few more days worth of power and bandwidth in NYC to let me pull over anything I missed in the process, but now all the action is in Miami.

Time to go home and get some sleep…

The episode of Spark that includes my interview with Nora Young about my rabbit is now online in its official “edited down for broadcast” form.

Interestingly, the episode was supposed to air on CBC Radio One this morning, but was pre-empted, and so will only air in its Saturday, Nov. 24th time slot. Which is only appropriate, as the episode is all about “on demand lifestyle.”

We leave for Italy in a week for a two-week family vacation. And so I got in my car and drove out to the remotest tundralands of Charlottetown to visit the CAA in their new “you can’t help but drive here now — cars, aren’t they great!” location to get an “International Driving Permit.”

I seem to go back and forth on this seemingly useless piece of documentation: in odd years I bite the bullet, pay the $27 ransom, and get one; in even years I don’t, and thus risk immediate imprisonment in an Italian roadside offender prison.

Tourist literature seems to be split on whether an IDP is actually needed or not, with the majority view recommending it. But I’ve always been suspicious of this, and I’ve never actually heard of anyone being asked to show their IDP to rent a car, or otherwise.

As near as I can tell the sole practical function the IDP is to translate into other languages the words “private passenger” on the back of my PEI driver’s license — in other words to let the Italian highway police know that I am not licensed to drive 18 wheelers on the autostrada.

Why it takes two passport-sized photographs and a $15 fee (and why it expires after a year), I do not know.

Have you or anyone you know ever found that having an IDP was required or useful when traveling?

I went to book my tickets for PlazeCamp this morning, and the Air Canada computer system was down, so my travel agent couldn’t make the booking. Now I hear that their computers are down all over the world, and that they are checking everyone in by hand.

Here’s the understated Air Canada bulletin. Their operational status page has no information on this, but looking at the flight departure information for Pearson Airport it’s obvious that all hell has broken loose, with about half of Air Canada flights delayed, and with delays of 30 to 90 minutes common.

CBC is on the story, and has a somewhat less obtuse assessment than Air Canada’s:

“It’s totally chaos out here. There are hundreds and hundreds of people in lineups that are absolutely going nowhere,” said Catherine Clark, a CBC producer with Marketplace who was waiting for a flight.

I’m happy to announce that we’ve just set the date of PlazeCamp, aka “Plazes Developer Day,” for Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at Plazes HQ in Berlin.

As anyone who has been involved with Plazes for a while knows, the Plazes API has gone unloved and unappreciated since the relaunch of the server earlier this year (which is not to say that there hasn’t been a lot of work internally at Plazes focused on this!). Among other things, PlazeCamp is a “coming out” party for the soon-to-be released brand-new Plazes API. It’s also an opportunity for the Plazes development team to welcome the developer community back into their home (both digital and physical).

The date has been set, you can book your tickets now. Details on format will follow, but you can expect a mixture of the formal and the informal, with plenty of time for actual developing and hacking, and plenty of time to eat, drink and be merry.

To register for PlazeCamp, just “Me Too” this Plazes Activity.

Okay, here’s something cool about the CBC Radio One program Spark: this morning at 11:00 a.m. I taped an interview with host Nora Young. While the episode that my interview will form part of won’t air until next Wednesday, the raw audio of the entire thing is online.

This is wonderful on many levels, perhaps most so because it allows listeners to understand better the voodoo that happens between the raw unvarnished interview and the polished, edited version that goes to air.

You cannot truly appreciate the wonders of Nora Young until you’ve sat on the other side of the microphone from her: she is one of those rare broadcasters who is curious, a good listener, and capable of both understanding and emitting sarcasm. It was a pleasure to be her guest.