Well, that seemed to work. The first poll reported a 7:01 p.m. and the last result went online at 9:28 p.m., so it was all over in about two and a half hours. By comparison, back in 2003 the first poll came in at 7:09 p.m. and the last one came in at 9:23 p.m.

The webserver performed well: at the peak load it was responding to just over 13 requests a second. The load average on the server never tipped over 1.3 all night long, and we had more than enough bandwidth to go around. Just goes to show that stripped down Apache, serving out HTML files, can do an awful lot without breaking a sweat.

Google Analytics is churning through traffic data as I write, so I should have some actual traffic numbers sometime tomorrow; the raw Apache logfile is 114MB.

As in previous elections, after the initial trickle of advance polls, data entry became a sea of numbers and I lost my ability to attach any meaning to what I was typing. Fortunately this time I had brother [[Johnny]] sharing the workload, so it was never as frantic as it was in the heat of 2000 and 2003.

It was a pleasure to work again with Elections PEI: Lowell and Norma and all their staff know elections cold, and they managed the entire event with aplomb.

Off to bed so I can get up at 4:30 a.m. and fly to Switzerland ;-)

In anticipation of my trip tomorrow I’ve made my usual round of calls to my credit card companies to let them know I’ll be away in Europe for 10 days. I’m not sure what the “note on my file” they promise to put in place actually does — I’d like to hope that it somehow integrates with the anti-fraud triggers in a positive way — but they all seem so happy that I’m calling that I almost look forward to calling.

A new “feature” I was exposed to from both my VISA and MasterCard issuer today was an attempt to up-sell me services at the end of the travel business. On the VISA side they tried to sell me travel medical insurance, on the MasterCard side it was “a low balance transfer rate of 1%”.

I know that credit cards are a business, and this upsell is no different than the seemingly endless inserts I get in my bill each month. But somehow calling about a “note on my file” seems like it should be removed from the commercial fray — more “editorial” than “advertising.”

Of course it’s always smart business, which is why we can only expect more of it. “Thank you for calling about your medical emergency Mr. Rukavina; while I’ve got you on the line I’d like to take a moment to let you know about our new line of convalescent homes …”

Somehow I’ve come up short on the “late spring holidays” front: I was at [[Yankee]] last week and thus working on our Canadian Victoria Day and today, Memorial Day in the USA, I’m back here in Canada. I’ll have to be more careful in July when the next bifurcated holiday set is due.

Today is Ordinary Polling Day (regular people call it “Election Day”) here in Prince Edward Island. For the past couple of days I’ve been busy fine-tuning the election results website for Elections PEI, and tonight just after 7:00 p.m. it will spring to life with live results.

Given that the last time we did this we’d all just slept through a hurricane, we’re starting the day with a concrete logistical advantage: it’s so much easier to run a website when you have electricity, and when you don’t have to step over fallen trees to get to the office.

Because much of the Island was without both electricity and Internet in 2003, the use of the election results website for that election was, well, “much lower than anticipated.” So tonight is really the first opportunity since 2000 to discover how many Islanders will get their results online. Which, in turn, should teach us something about the change in Internet penetration into Island homes in the past 7 years.

How do we know how much capacity to build? The honest answer is “as much as we can build with the gear we have.” How will we know whether it’s enough? When it grinds to a halt. Which, of course, we hope it doesn’t.

Which is not to say that we haven’t Taken Steps. All of the pages you see on the election results website are straight-ahead HTML; they’re not build “on the fly,” but rather generated automatically every two minutes by a PHP-driven process behind the scenes. This means that there’s no database bottleneck, and that the limiting factors, in the end, are Apache and available bandwidth.

To handle the increased bandwidth we’ve had a temporary additional Internet connection installed to supplement the bandwidth already in place through the Government WAN: there’s a fiber running to the Confederation Centre of the Arts and we’re tapping into the same big pipe there that’s used to stream live video of the Legislative Assembly. In theory we can burst to 10 Mbps if we need to. On the Apache side, we’re running Apache 2.2.4, with everything that’s not required stripped out.

As a failsafe we’ve got an off-Island mirror site set up, using Amazon’s S3 for hosting, and we can switchover to that site by changing our DNS if required.

From the ballot box to the Internet, your vote takes the following path: the ballots are counted separately for each of the 319 polls, the ballot count is reported by telephone to Elections PEI’s offices at 180 Richmond Street (there’s a phone bank with 10 stations set up there) where the ballot count for each candidate is recorded onto a pre-printed sheet of paper (technical tangent: the sheets themselves were printed from spreadsheets created directly from the MySQL database of polls and candidates by the excellent OpenOffice::OODoc).

The sheets of paper get carried over to [[Johnny]] and I where they’ll get entered into a web-based results tabulation system that’s running on a sister server to the webserver (trivia: the name of the webserver is Wallis, the name of the back-end server is Edward). Entering the results updates a MySQL database, and the MySQL database is used to update the results pages every 2 minutes. After they leave our hands, the results sheets get handed to the next desk over where they get entered into a spreadsheet on a standalone PC; having this redundancy in place lets us compare numbers through the evening, and also provides a backup in case the network goes down and we need to generate printed results.

At least that’s how it’s all supposed to work. Stay tuned tonight to see whether it actually does.

While there’s obviously some pressure involved in working to ensure that all the contingencies have been planned for, one of the beauteous things about Prince Edward Island’s electoral process is that it’s still firmly based on pencil and paper. If the Internet goes down, or the servers catch on fire, or I lose my ability to type, the election will happen, the results will get tabulated, and democracy will march on.

In any case, at 5:50 a.m. tomorrow morning I’m on a plane to Copenhagen by way of Montreal and Zurich. If tonight is problem-free then it will be a “well-deserved vacation.” If it isn’t, well, then I’ll be “fleeing the country.”

If you’ve ever scored a Priceline deal on a hotel room, you know that your stay in “Room 212” can be costing you a much different price than the person in the identical “Room 213” is paying. Like airlines, hotels manage their inventory to maximize the revenue per room, selling as many rooms as they can at the highest rates possible while simultaneously appearing to charge everyone a reasonable rate and, at the end of the night, end up as full as possible.

Exactly how hotels do this is something of a mystery to we consumers. Purposefully so, of course: if we knew the drill, we could play the game back at them. And indeed frequent travelers know at least parts of the drill, and plan accordingly.

Today when I checked out of my Boston hotel the night auditor mistakenly printed my receipt over top of some pre-printed “yield management worksheet” forms that he’d left in the printer. He noticed the error of his ways, and offered to print me another receipt, but I said it was okay and left with it in hand. At the bottom was a “Notes/Strategy” section that offers a small peek into how hotels manage their inventory:

The truth of the “different prices for the same room” system was proved by a report that was left on the front counter of the hotel: it showed that prices charged for the room I paid $169 for last night varied by as much as $40 up and down.

Ten years ago my brother [[Steve]] was in South Korea teaching English. Reasoning that I should seize the opportunity to visit, I managed to figure out a way of getting from Boston to Seoul for next to no money. I got myself to Boston for free by cleverly combining a trip to [[Yankee]] into the mix, and because I flew out from Boston early in the morning, I ended spending the night before in the Harborside Inn on State Street.

Back in 1997 the “Big Dig” — the multi-billion dollar, multi-year plan to rid Boston of it’s elevated downtown Expressway by burying the highway — was in full swing. And the Harborside, which opened just two weeks before my visit, was right in the middle of it. Literally: directly in front of the hotel there was a deep bit being hollowed out with giant battering rams (the pit was the beginnings of what is now the new Aquarium subway stop).

I was warned when I checked in that I might notice “some construction noise.” That was an understatement: around 6:00 a.m. it felt like the world was going to end, with every smash into the bedrock of the giant machines out my window shaking the foundations of the hotel. This effect seemed only amplified by the atrium that forms the core of the hotel; it acted as a giant amplifier:

What a difference a decade makes: the Expressway is gone now, and the work to convert the ground it covered into greenspace is well underway. You can actually see North Boston from Quincy Market, and almost all of the chaos brought on by the Big Dig is gone. Indeed my journey down from [[Yankee]] to Logan Airport was only 2 hours, and I glided in on I-93 south and down into the Callaghan Tunnel without stepping on the brakes after I turned at the lights up in Manchester.

So now the Harborside, which once looked like a crazy enterprise in an inane location, is in the middle of a revitalized waterfront. Where once there were battering rams is now a nightclub patio. The T stop is right at their door, and the walk to gnocchi is only 5 minutes.

The hotel itself is showing its age a little — the cold water tap in my room came off in my hand, the carpets are a little frayed, and the free breakfast served in the atrium is no more. And there are several new “boutique” hotels in the city that have taken some of the shine off the high thread-count sheets and hardwood floors that seemed so revolutionary back then.

By you can’t beat the location — among other things you can be at the airport in 10 minutes, which is why I’m here tonight — and at $169/night in the high season, it is, for Boston, one of the best deals going for a spacious downtown room.

Last year after [[reboot]] I had coffee with Thomas and one of the ideas I floated was a parallel conference for kids that could be called rebootkins. I think the idea of “conferencing with your kids” has a lot of appeal, at least for we in the “I’d rather travel with my kids” set.

Well, there’s no rebootkins yet, but in today’s reboot email from Thomas comes the note, under “a couple of the changes you can expect…”:

kids friendly with hilmar, the icelandic babysitter, that can watch your sleeping baby or play with your kids if you bring them along

Sadly, wee [[O]] (who’s not so wee anymore) is staying at home this year, so they’ll be no hilmar for him. But with reboot’s new DIY spirit, I’m up for a full-on rebootkins for reboot 10.0 next year.

Another cause for excitement in Thomas’ email: it looks like the DIY T-Shirts idea I floated took off and is going to happen. This is very cool.

No, I wasn’t consumed by The Ghost of Robb Sagendorph; I’m still alive and thriving. It’s been a good, and very productive, week here at [[Yankee]] and I’m about to pack up and drive down to Boston. I’m in Boston for the night, and then back to PEI tomorrow morning.

The rest of this week, and over the weekend, I’ll be focusing on Elections PEI-related work and then, after polling day on Monday and the results posting on Monday night, I’m off to Montreal for the day on Tuesday, and then to Copenhagen, via Zurich, on Tuesday for [[reboot]], which starts Thursday.

I’ll be back on the Island on June 7, after a brief stopover in Berlin to see my friends at [[Plazes]]. [[Oliver]] “graduates” from kindergarten the week after that, and then he and [[Catherine]] are off to Ontario for a couple of weeks. The last week of June I’ll be back here at Yankee.

Be careful what you wish for, they say. I wished for constant motion, and it’s happening. It will be nice to stop for a moment come July and spend languid afternoons on Victoria Row sipping sangria and discussing Descartes.

It’s 10:00 p.m. and I’m borrowing a desk here at [[Yankee]] to work a second work day. My first work day was concerned with travel databases and the moon’s place in the astrological zodiac; tonight’s work day involves a little fine-tuning of the system we’ll use to present results of the provincial general election next Monday.

I’m on the second floor of the Sagendorph Building, named after Robb Sagendorph founder of Yankee magazine. The building, began in 1805 and evolving ever since, is an architectural rabbit warren.

Around one corner you might find an old 128K Mac that used to run the company library. Around another the many mysteries of “Jud’s Museum,” the office of Editor-in-Chief Jud Hale, where you’re as likely to find Lee Harvey Oswald’s chicken’s head as anything else. Somewhere hidden in here is the Black Box that holds the secret formulas the underpin The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

In the library just down the hall from where I write you can find a copy of The Save-U-Money Book and The Pilgrim Way. Looking for the washroom just a minute ago I mistakenly walked into a room containing a nut meat grinder, a pair of tin candles sticks, a pair of eyeglasses and a manila folder labeled “Churchill, Sir Winston.”

In other words, if any walls can talk it’s these ones.

Once I finish up here in 30 minutes or so — and I’ve been putting this off — I will have to exit the building, turning the lights off behind me. The last leg of my trip to the car, after the last light gets switched off, involves a fumble in the dark through the mail room, past the cache of canned pop, through the lunch room, and out the front door.

The path will also take me past the door to the basement. I have never been to the basement. But last fall, on a night just like this night, as I walked by I saw an unearthly glow emanating from the deeps. Thoughts of Robb Sagendorph immediately flooded my mind, and I high-tailed it out down the hall and out the door.

As long as I keep writing this post, I can avoid a similar encounter.

One of my favourite things to do when visiting [[Yankee]] was to eat lunch a couple of times at the Harrisville General Store. Harrisville is a small village just 5 minutes up the road from here in Dublin; it’s an old mill town, with the red-brick mill buildings forming the spine of the village along the river that drains from Harrisville Pond.

Harrisville is a strange mixture of an effete enclave and “back to the lander” service center, and at is heart has always been the general store:

The store, in recent times, was always a place to go and get an excellent sandwich and a drink and sit out front on the porch enjoying the spring sunshine. When [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] and I borrowed a house on Harrisville Pond several years ago the store was the place we bought all those American indulgences like Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and exotic iced teas and micro-brews.

A few years back, however, the longtime operator of the store moved away, and the new operators, veterans of a Dunkin Donuts it was rumoured, took over and, well, ruined the place. They turned it into something worse than a Kwiki Mart. And all Harrisville was sad. After a while I couldn’t even talk about the store to my Harrisville friend because it was like talking about a child that had wandered away.

I’m happy to report, however, that it looks like the Harrisville General Store is back: I took a leap of faith and drove up for dinner tonight and, to my surprise, some of the old spark was back. There was veggie chili in the crock pot, artisanal iced tea in the cooler, and excellent chocolate chip cookies in the cookie jar. Dinner cost me $6. It was excellent. The spring sun on the porch was warm. Harrisville gleaned.