Unable to wait for the reports at the dinner table, I went up to Prince Street School with Catherine to pick up Oliver at the end of his first day at public school.

He survived. Thrived even. Ate his lunch. Loved story time and music. He has a very nice teacher, a very bright classroom, and a class size of 14, which about as good as it gets.

Learned a new word today: bussers. Used to describe the kids who take the bus to school rather than walking (there are a good number of kids bussed in from suburban Charlottetown to Prince Street). Used in a sentence: “The walkers have to wait for the bussers to leave before they’re allowed to go.”

Thirty-five years ago I entered grade one at Rolling Meadows Public School in Burlington (I wrote here earlier about how I emerged).

Twenty-two years ago I entered teacher training myself — an aborted effort, as it turns out — and did a round of practice teaching in a kindergarten classroom.

In both cases, the “transition to grade one” was, as I recall, a transition from the halcyon days of youth (kindergarten) into a more traditional all-desks-in-rows setup where “buckling down” was the operating metaphor.

I’m happy to report that this no longer seems to be the case: the desks are grouped in anarchic Hall-Dennis-style pods, the classroom is startlingly un-prison-like, and Oliver’s teacher seems more like Meg Ryan than Miss Havisham.

Of course this is just the first day; I’ve still an opportunity for all my conspiracy theories about formal education to come true ;-)

Back tomorrow for more.

I’ve noticed something about the iPhone-specific versions of Facebook and Digg: they are much more usable, on a regular old browser (at least using Safari) than the “mother” applications that spawned them. It’s almost like we’re going back to the days of Gopher where we could browse the information highway through a consistent UI unfettered by advertising, widgets and over-design.

At 8:10 a.m. this morning on the dot Oliver and I headed off up Prince Street toward Prince Street School for his first day of Grade One. On the way up the street we were the recipients of waves and shouts of congratulations; I also received a healthy share of knowing looks. We got to the school at 8:23 a.m.; two minutes to spare.

At 8:25 a.m. the first bell went off (except it wasn’t really a bell; it was more like the soft gong one hears at the Metropolitan Opera to signal the end of intermission) and Oliver headed into the throng. They told us at parent orientation night back in the spring that we shouldn’t cry — sets the kids off with the wrong attitude about school, apparently — and I just barely succeeded.

Oliver and I ate lunch on Saturday at Papa Joe & Evy’s in downtown Bathurst. At the end of our meal a slight misunderstanding about Oliver’s desires led to an impromptu piano performance.

Doubtless I’ll have more to say later, but in the meantime, here are the photos of our weekend in Bathurst.

This year’s exciting destination for “Oliver and Peter Go Away for the Long Weekend” (see last year’s edition) is Bathurst, New Brunswick.

This year we’re attempting to pull of an end-to-end “vacation by public transit.” We’re taking Charlottetown Transit to the bus station, Acadia Lines from Charlottetown to Moncton, and VIA Rail to Bathurst, and then we’re staying within walking distance of the train station and busying ourselves with the maximum fun afforded by Bathurst.

As you may have gathered, we have never been to Bathurst before, so it’s all limitless potential right now. See you on Monday.

I’m a longtime AppleWorks user. For a somewhat clunky all-in-one, it’s a pretty capable piece of software, capable of leaping tall bounds, and its spreadsheet has almost all the functionality you’d ever need. But my shiny new copy of iWork arrived a few weeks ago, so I’ve been trying to wrap my head around Numbers, its new spreadsheet piece.

Yesterday I went looking for how to do a “data fill” in Numbers — I needed a column filled with the numbers from 205 to 386 and I didn’t want to type them all in. In AppleWorks this was done by selecting Calculate \| Fill Special from the menu, followed by entry of a start value and an increment. In Numbers it’s almost unbelievably intuitive (so intuitive I couldn’t intuit it). Witness the following 10-second how-to video (created in the equally too-intuitive new iMovie):

This weekend we started to get alerts from our server monitoring system that our mail server here at Reinvented HQ was timing out. On Sunday I started to look into the issue, and it turned out to be a simple matter of thousands of spam messages suddenly showing up. Looking deeper, it turned out that almost every one of the messages — there were a couple of hundred thousand by the time it was all over — was for an address in the RoyJohnstone.com domain.

Roy is a client, and we host a single email address for him. The spam, however, wasn’t for Roy, bur rather for Alex, Benny, Clarisa, David, Edgar, Felix, and thousands upon thousands of other names — there was obviously a dictionary somewhere that was just churning the stuff out.

It would have been a simple matter of dropping all packets from the offending host. Except that the flood was coming from a seemingly infinite variety of hosts, from Taiwan to Poland.

None of the spam was actually getting anywhere — we have the server set up to automatically drop any email that comes in to an invalid address — but all those connections were taxing our poor old SMTP server to its limits.

In the end I solved the problem by pointing Roy’s email at a new Gmail account through a Google Apps setup for the domain; almost as soon as I changed the MX records in our DNS the spam stopped. Since the switch to GMail, one spam email has made its way to Roy and 75 have been dumped into the Gmail spam folder.

This is a perplexing kind of problem to deal with when you’re running a small mail server like we are: it’s one thing to filter out the spam (and Spamassassin and Apple’s Mail.app do a decent job of that), it’s another thing entirely to deal with the simple torrent of spam flooding into the server. I’ve tuned up Sendmail a little more since the flood stopped, adding some of its own spam-fighting tools like connection rate and bad recipient throttling. But these are all imperfect solutions.

I’m starting to wonder whether, in the spam-drenched world, running ones own mail server will be tenable any longer. If anyone has additional recommendations for fighting this sort of thing, I welcome them.

Searching American Airlines for flights from Halifax to New York I assumed they flew into Newark, so that’s what I searched for. Turns out that they can get me to Newark, but only by flying from Halifax to LaGuardia, then LaGuardia to O’Hare in Chicago, and then back to Newark:

In the non-insane world, LaGuardia and Newark are 43 minutes apart by car. In the bizarro world of American Airlines, things are a little more complex.

My friend Dave got nominated for a Gemini this week, for writing the Saultology of Robson Arms. Hey, Dave, congratulations.