So I’ve got some Euros in my PayPal now, and I want to move them to a Canadian bank account. But I don’t want to lose anything in the conversion from Euros to Canadian dollars, so I want a Canadian bank account with the balance held in Euros. Here’s what I’ve learned after sending email to the major Canadian banks:

• Bank of Montreal: “Regrettably, our accounts are provided exclusively in Canadian and U.S. currency.”
• Citizens Bank of Canada: “Citizens Bank of Canada does not offer foreign currency accounts except for US dollar chequings/savings accounts.”
• Bank of Nova Scotia: “We advise that we currently do not currently offer accounts for Euros.”
• Royal Bank of Canada: “We offer accounts in Canadian or US dollars only at this time.”
• National Bank of Canada: “This message informs you that the e-mail you sent has not reached its destination because the domain “sibn.ca” is not valid. Please resend your message with the corrected domain.”
• CIBC: No response received.

The only positive response I received from from TD Canada Trust, which emailed back:

I am pleased to advise that TD Canada Trust does offer foreign currency accounts. However, you can only access our foreign currency accounts directly at your TD Canada Trust branch in Canada. They cannot be accessed via bank machines, EasyLine or EasyWeb.

Foreign currency accounts allow you to maintain your deposit without the need to exchange to Canadian Dollars, which may assist you if you are looking for an account to hold a large amount of another currency. In addition to being non-chequing, our foreign currency accounts:

• are non-interest-bearing accounts
• carry no service charges
• do not allow overdrafts
• are not eligible for coverage through the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation

All of which makes their option even less attractive than PayPal. So that’s where my Euros are staying for now.

I somehow missed the fact that Angels — which I sang the praises of here after taking to task here — has closed. I suppose the fact that it missed my notice is part of the explanation as to why they didn’t make a go of it. But it will be missed nonetheless, and I hope Ken Zakem doesn’t disappear from the Charlottetown restaurant scene, as he’s got imagination, a kind soul, and he can cook.

Elizabeth’s Gardens, the flower shop at the corner of Pownal and Sydney, is closed too. It was another business that I like the idea of, but where I never actually darkened the door.

The PEI Company Store in the Confederation Court Mall is gone too. It was, at times, an excellent place to find interesting gifts. But then it veered pewter-wise, and never seemed to recover. They lost me once they stopped carrying Rogers Chocolates.

Just around the hall, the Family Shoe Shoppe closed recently too. I did shop there, especially for wee shoes for Oliver. There are fewer and fewer places to buy shoes in Charlottetown, especially downtown, and I’ll miss this store a lot, especially as I walked through at least once a day on my way to and from work.

Meanwhile, Interlude, formerly across from the Fire Hall, hasn’t yet settled into its new home on University Avenue just north of Euston. The sign on the door has “September” crossed off and “Soon!” written in. I miss Gong Bao Thursday and hope they open soon.

Finally, on a brighter note, Sunbeams Café has opened in the space formerly occupied by Just Juicin’. I had lunch there last week — a cheese and tomato sandwich — and it was hearty, inexpensive, and the old “go go go” vibe was pleasantly missing from the space. That end of Queen Street doesn’t figure prominently on my food radar, so I can’t make claims that I’ll be a regular customer; all other things being equal, though, I would be.

Looking back over my wide and varied experience of technical meltdowns, I find myself realizing that when things go wrong, it’s often the DNS that’s at fault.

Of course it never seems like it’s the DNS that’s at fault, so I spend a lot of time debugging lots of other things. But then, once everything else is eliminated as a possible cause, it turns out that faulty DNS is the root of the problem.

Today, for example, I spent a lot of time helping a client figure out why staff on their internal LAN couldn’t access an administrative application on the offsite webserver.

There was nothing obvious on the server itself, nothing on the firewall on either end, and access from everywhere else on earth seemed just fine.

The problem was tricky to nail down because the problem would come and go. Sometimes access for one person would be instant while the person at the next desk would be plagued with constant timeouts.

Things got unplugged, re-plugged, examined and sorted through.

It wasn’t until I compared the output of the excellent Charles tool for one of my (perfectly normal) sessions with the output for one of my client’s (constantly timing out) sessions that the problem became obvious: they were hitting the wrong IP address.

It turns out that the DNS server they have set up on their LAN had a duplicate, incorrect entry for the webserver in place. So a DNS query on the LAN would return two IP addresses, one correct one and the other one that led nowhere.

So some staff were getting the right IP address the first time, and going to town, while other were getting the wrong IP address and then either getting no access at all, or timing out and then eventually getting access after 20 seconds.

We’ve just had the errant entry removed from the DNS, and so far things are swimming along like there was no tomorrow and everyone is happy.

Memories of the hurricane and DNS flood back.

It’s always the DNS…

By all rights Garnet Rogers shouldn’t have been booked into the Trailside Café in Mount Stewart last night. Mount Stewart is in the middle of nowhere. The Trailside seats, what, 30 people? It’s October and it’s cold and all the tourists have gone home. And Garnet Rogers is one of the world’s great folk musicians.

And yet, in some booking anomaly cum miraculous gift, there he was on stage last night (photos).

Careful readers may recall that, back in July, I instructed you all immediately go out and purchase tickets. Those of you who obediently heeded my call were treated to what can only be described as a transcendent musical experience.

Ten minutes before the curtain was to rise I was rewarded (or punished) for my exuberance by being pegged, by amiable Trailside impresario Doug Deacon, to stand up and act as master of ceremonies. Which explains how, for the subsequent 10 minutes I was lost in a delirium of trying to figure out how to appropriately introduce someone whose music I’ve been listening to for more than 20 years.

I fumbled through, and Garnet bounded up on stage, and for three hours, with a short break, he ran through a motley collection of guitars and songs new and old.

The last song of the night was a 20-minute rendition of Night Drive crossed with a new take on his late brother Stan’s Northwest Passage. When it was all over we in the audience were, I think, too overwhelmed to ask for an encore. Or perhaps we simply realized that Garnet had given us his all.

If you have tickets for tonight’s second date at the Trailside, you are lucky, as it’s sold out. If you are unlucky enough to live somewhere other than PEI, take a look at Garnet’s tour schedule and book tickets for his next performance near you. It won’t be as miraculous as a fluke date at the Trailside Café in October, but you’ll still thank yourself.

Oliver and I needed to kill some time before Tai Chi Gardens opened yesterday, so we took a side-trip to Victoria Park. Turns out that, if can overcome your fear of chance encounters with urban orgies, there’s a pleasant network of trails running through the park’s forests:

Pedro shows his grandfather how to Segway.

New articles released on the Yankee Magazine website now automatically trigger an update to the Yankee Magazine Twitter stream. So now you can follow Yankee through Twitter, and get an SMS or instant message every time there’s new content. Ah the joys of having content in a CMS and having access to an easy-to-implement API.

Every morning at 8:10 a.m. we leave our house at 100 Prince Street in Charlottetown and head north to Prince Street School. And every morning at about 8:12 a.m. we see the same bird perched on the same place on the same traffic light at the corner of Prince and Kent. It’s magic.

If you’ve bumped up against my digital identity in any of its multi-hued forms, you’ve no doubt come across my ubiquitous avatar:

From time to time I get flack from people thinking I need a better photo for this. “It’s really, really red, you know?” they write.

Yes, it’s really, really red. I know. It doesn’t bother me. Indeed it stands out, which is not bad for an avatar to do.

Until yesterday I thought that the original photos from the session that gave rise to the avatar were lost, but a consolidation of iPhoto libraries from four Macs produced the set:

This was a self-inflicted random act of photography conducted with our yellow living room wall as a backdrop on July 24, 2003. I shot the photos with my Canon S100; the top set with a flash, and the bottom set without.

The top set look like mug shots, and the lighting is far too harsh. Although the bottom set is very saturated with red, and not at all what I “really looked like,” the effect caught my eye. And the combination of whimsy, curiosity and suspicion in the last photo, in the bottom-right, is about as good a photographic representation of the inside of my head as you’ll find. So that became the avatar (I’ll use the bottom-left photo as the avatar when I release my first solo-acoustic album).

The funny thing about that photo is that when you look at it full-size, it’s actually quite out of focus; indeed it hurts my eyes to look at:

Somehow when it gets resized and cropped, it looks, well, okay. Of course it still is really, really red. I know.

What’s the story of your avatar?