For the second time in the five and a half years I’ve been writing in this space, I’ve been contacted by the subject of one of my blog posts asking that I remove a what I wrote about them.

In both cases their reason for asking was because a Google search for their name was listing a post about them prominently, and they felt that this might interfere with their ongoing job search efforts (apparently Googling for an applicant’s name is becoming a common part of the employee screening process).

In neither case was the post untrue, ill-tempered or negative. Certainly neither contained any hint of libel or slander.

In both cases I complied with the subject’s wish, and removed the post about them.

While I’m as much a libertarian as the next guy, I’m also loathe to screw up anyone’s life, especially when it might interfere with the livelihood of a private citizen. Neither subject was, nor is, a “public figure” and their presence in these pages owed more to friendship than anything else. And, besides, they both asked very nicely.

If you find me ruining your life with my awesome control over Google [sic], drop me a line and we can discuss how to best proceed.

Back when I worked in community radio, our mantra when faced with “controversial” broadcasts — someone strongly advocating a point of view on air, someone else complaining about our giving a voice to such crazy views — was to simply offer those in opposition an equal opportunity to air their take. In other words, “if you don’t like a radio show, come and make your own!”

In general, I feel the same way about the Internet.

If you’re concerned about “brand you” on the web — what pops up when you’re Googled — you can either try to manage what others write about you (sometimes this will work, often it won’t, and it’s a doomed strategy long-term), or you can work to establish your own credentials by telling the Internet about yourself (in both cases referenced here, the “problem” I created really extended from the fact that there was little else online about my subjects, so I was the “authority” on them).

Start a weblog. Or a podcast. Or even just write an “About Firstname Lastname” page that Google will slurp in, index, and deliver to those who search for you. Ultimately this is the only viable solution for populating the web with high-quality, accurate (and, I suppose, flattering) information about you, and the barriers to doing this quickly and effectively are so low (essentially no cost, very little time, and you don’t have to do any research because you’re already familiar with yourself) that I can’t imagine how anyone in the job market wouldn’t do this before their first resume comes out of the printer.

This is all freshly trodden ground this new “media in the hands of everyone” thing. And we’re all figuring out the boundaries of what’s possible, what’s right, what’s helpful and what’s harmful: we’re discovering that the systems and standards that have been in place for hundreds of years of “you need to raise the capital to buy a printing press to control the media” might no longer apply. I think the only way to proceed rationally is to treat each case with common sense and compassion, to look for patterns, and to talk about what we’re doing while we’re doing it. Which is what I’m doing here.

Acadian is the bus line serving the Maritimes, and they have a very inventive logo:

As with the old Canadian Airlines logo, the designers of Acadian’s logo needed to come up with a solution to the “Acadian” in English vs. “Acadien” in French conundrum. The result: they simply turned the “a” upside down. Very clever.

Yesterday was my regular every-56-days appointment to donate plasma across the street at Canadian Blood Services.

I’ve come to appreciate donation day, for several reasons.

The first has nothing to do with blood at all: I find the regular marking of each 56 day period a useful milestone — more useful than the passing of the months. It’s like a regular planetary event.

Second, I admire and appreciate the system the whole plasma collecting system, from paperwork through to the equipment used to actually extract the plasma, that Canadian Blood Services has in place: it works well, is designed to have several redundant checks to make sure the right plasma gets labeled as coming from the right person, and gets me in and out in about an hour and a half.

Third, it offers me some comfort to have my weight, blood pressure, and blood chemistry screened every couple of months. No, it’s not a thorough checkup; but if they’re willing to take my plasma, it means I must be at least somewhat healthy.

Finally, I just plain like the staff over there: they are friendly and helpful and dedicated to a fault, always remember my name, and somehow manage to make even the litany of “have you traded money or drugs for sex”-type questions flow with a minimum of embarrassment.

On the wall of the room where I go to have my blood pressure and temperature taken, and to answer the aforementioned set of “high risk behaviours” questions, there’s a photocopied piece of paper that’s a simplified version of this chart of blood types and compatibilities.

I know from my donor sheet that I’ve got O+ — “O positive” — type blood, a type I share with 39% of Canadians, and the most common blood type in the country. As such, I can donate blood to people with type A+, B+, AB+ and O+ blood, and I can receive type O+ and O- blood.

Most interesting — and something that explains a lot of the yelling on the television show er — is that people with type O- blood are “universal donors” in that their blood can be given to people with any blood type. That’s why you hear things like “four litres of O-neg, stat!” on medical shows — in an emergency room, where time is of the essence, and you don’t want to have to wait around to type a patient’s blood, giving them O- blood is a safe bet.

This Wikipedia page tells the whole story, with all the details you could ever want.

A list of every ministerial resignation in the Canadian Parliament since 1867. My personal highlights:

• 1978 - FOX, Francis, Solicitor General of Canada - Liberal - Signed the husband’s name on a hospital document to procure an abortion for a woman with whom he had had an affair.
• 1976 - SHARP, Mitchell William - Privy Council - Liberal - Wants to make room for younger ministers.
• 1968 - LAMARSH, Julia Verlyn (Judy) - Secretary of State of Canada - Liberal - She would never serve in a Trudeau cabinet.
• 1963 - HARKNESS, Douglas Scott - National Defence - Progressive Conservative - Difference of opinion on a matter of principle concerning the Government’s defence policy, specifically the nuclear arms question.
• 1920 - MEWBURN, Sydney Chilton - Militia and Defence - Unionist - With the termination of the war and the task to carry out the problem of demobilization almost completed; “feels that his contract has terminated and that the administration of the department should be handed over to someone else.”
• 1907 - EMMERSON, Henry Robert - Railways and Canals - Liberal - Accused of being in a hotel in the city of Montreal with a person of ill-repute. Resigns not to embarrass the Prime Minister.

By the way, I do think that Hon. Ralph Goodale should resign. I have every reason to think he’s a stand-up guy, and I think it’s conceivable that there was, in fact, no leak from his department. But while his Ministry is under the cloud of criminal investigation, I think it’s only proper that he step aside, if only to remove any suggestion of impropriety as the investigation proceeds. I don’t think there’s any shame in resignation, I simply think it’s The Right Thing To Do.

Although I don’t know much about their business model, and I can’t vouch for them outside my specific experience, it’s worth mentioning a service of Points.com that I’ve found useful: transferring “points” from one “loyalty program” to another.

In my case, I had a bunch of otherwise useless “Esso Extra” points, accumulated from my gas purchases. Points.com let me transfer these points to my Air Canada Aeroplan account. The benefit wasn’t huge — 1020 Esso points (about $1000 worth of gas, redeemable at Esso for a free litre of oil) earned me 204 Aeroplan miles (about 1% of the miles required for a flight from Charlottetown to Boston), I imagine that in the hands of more dedicated loyalty program gamers, the site could provide some real benefit.

I’ve spent the last couple of days here in the office reconfiguring our internal network. Although things on our side of the [[silverorange]] / [[Reinvented]] data centre are pretty simple, I’d been itching to tidy things up, and the aforementioned purchase of a new Linksys [[WRT54GS]] wireless access point was the catalyst I needed.

Here’s what I ended up with:

The key change is that all of our network traffic now runs through the new [[WRT54GS]] (half of the network used to sit right on the ISN gateway), something made possible by the handy fact that it is possible to replace its firmware (aka “the software guts that makes everything work”) with a stripped down version of the open source Linux operating system.

There are several flavours of Linux available for the Linksys WRT54 line of wireless routers — DD-WRT, HyperWRT, for example — I settled on OpenWRT for my install, mostly because it has the best documentation of the bunch.

Actually installing the firmware wasn’t exactly painless (I’ve put a few tips specific to my setup on my [[WRT54GS]] page), but it went pretty easily. After the install I had to do a fair bit of poking around to figure out the configuration required for my setup (two WAN IP addresses exposed to the Internet, with the router using NAT to shovel the right traffic to the right internal server).

Ultimately the configuration turned out to be pretty straightforward: this post helped me figure out how to add a second IP address to the WAN-facing side of things, the iptables man page helped me set up [[NAT]], and this helpful NAT HOWTO helped me solve a vexing problem wherein external users could see our webservers, but I couldn’t see them from inside the LAN.

So if you look at the network diagram above, you’ll see that our outward facing IP addresses are both handled by the WRT54GS, with some traffic [[NAT]]ed to one webserver, some traffic [[NAT]]ed to another webserver, and a little bit of SIP traffic sent along to my Sipura SIP device (which lets me register with external SIP-based VOIP services). Similarly, my iMac has a hardwired connection to the router, which is my connection to the web, and both of our iBooks connect wirelessly (using WPA for wireless security).

One of the cool side-effects of running Linux on the router is that a wide variety of open source software can also run on the device, including the handy iftop application that lets me view bandwidth usage in real time:

In this instance, both [[Johnny]] and I are listening to [[Steve]] host Radio Noon in Montreal, Johnny is sending some traffic to the [[Yankee]] webserver, several people are browsing sites on our two webservers, and I’m running iftop on the router itself (hostname of nettie). The three columns on the right show the bandwidth usage at 2, 10 and 40 second intervals, and there are totals at the bottom that show that at the moment this snapshot was taken we were sending out 10.3Kb/s of data and receiving 272Kb/s, for total usage of 282Kb/s (this Wikipedia page can give you some idea of what this means practically).

So far things are flowing well, and the entire operation required only about 10 minutes of downtime to swap in the new router. I’ll report back later on how things progress from here.

I met Henriette Weber Andersen at [[Reboot]] in June. When I say “met,” I mean “we ate dinner in the same restaurant the closing night of the conference and were briefly introduced.” But I’ve been reading her blog ever since.

Henriette recently launched a genius project called Can I Crash?, subtitled “a service that lets you lend your sofa to travelling bloggers.”

The idea is that if you’re a blogger on the road, you look up your destination and find a helpful blog-friendly host with a free couch or room or cabin or small place on the floor willing to put you up.

It’s like a blog-specific version of a similar service offered by The Globetrotters Club, which publishes a member directory wherein each member can indicate whether they’re willing to offer advice, guiding and/or accommodations for their local area.

The interesting thing about Henriette’s project is that it’s based around the idea that “if you have a blog, you probably won’t kill me in my sleep.”

In other words “writing = trust”.

One’s blog, then, becomes a sort of extended narrative resumé, and the “authenticity” of the writing (to say nothing of its Technorati ranking) establishes ones credentials.

And so as we collect mojo points on eBay, we now collect “humanity juice” by blogging.

It’s just this sort of juice that politicians — like our own Shawn Murphy — are looking for when they set up campaign blogs.

“Vote for me and I’ll build a big building” and “vote for me and I’ll make sure you have a job” don’t cut it any longer with early adopter voters: we want a window into the soul.

And while “Earlier in the morning I had a workout at the Spa” [ref] isn’t exactly that, it’s certainly a wider window than “I am proud of the unparalleled investment our government has committed to Charlottetown and across the province.” [ref].

Because I live in a place where trust is established largely on the basis of social and family networks — if I know your father or your aunt, and I trust them, I’m pretty sure I can trust you — it’s going to be fascinating to see how this new sort of credentials plays out locally.

In the meantime, I’m going to follow Can I Crash? closely. My favourite offer of a crashpad to date comes from my friend [[Olle]] in Copenhagen: “Couch in kitchen, in central Nørrebro. (When we get up, you get up.) Vegan food. No pets. Slow WLAN.”

High-level sources inside the [[Compass]] organization tell me that the supper hour television news on CBC is up for a re-branding — again — starting January 9. What once was Compass, then Canada Now will become CBC News at 6:00.

Except in St. John’s, Newfoundland where owing in part, one assumes, that it airs at 5:30 p.m. in sections of the province, it will continue to be known as CBC News: Here & Now.

My sources say that the irony is that, given the upcoming Olympics and other events, the new “CBC News at 6:00” will often not actually appear at 6:00 p.m., leaving commentators in the awkward position of having to announce the “CBC News at 6:00 at 7:00” and the like.

If there was ever an obvious time to repatriate the Prince Edward Island edition of the supper hour newscast as Compass, now is it.

The Globe and Mail reports: Christmas trees combat bird flu. Cool.

My in-laws, [[Grant]] and [[Marina]], arrived from Ontario last night to spend the holidays with us, so this morning’s regular Saturday morning outing around [[Charlottetown]] had a special guest-star: Papa.

The market was as bustling as a midsummer’s day, and we saw lots of people we know: along with our “regular stops” with [[Kim Dormaar]] and [[Karin LaRonde]], we saw [[Nils Ling]], [[Darren Peters]], [[Hope Paterson]] (down from Toronto) later her father [[Rob Paterson]], [[Catherine Hennessey]] and her sister [[Betty Maurice]] (over from Vancouver). [[Jim Lea]] and [[Jeannie Lea]] were there too (I kind of wish someone had turned me on to the fact that they were married; I suppose everyone assumed I knew). If we’d stayed a little longer, I figure we would have seen everyone pass through; at the very least we would have run into Mac Campbell and Tim Banks (who, if you think about it, are quite unalike). Oliver enjoyed showing off his grandfather to all present, and especially enjoyed the gift of Christmas cookies from Karin.

Next stop was [[Indigo]]. I gotta admit that our local branch has improved a lot from back in 2001 when it first opened. My last several visits I’ve been overwhelmed by the friendliness and professionalism of the staff; last night in particular I received some of the best bookstore service I’ve ever received (making a purchase that, for now, must dare not speak its name). I finally relented, after all these years, and upped for the special $25 discount card; the same salesperson that tried to sell me on the benefits last year went at it again this year, and I found myself unable to say no. I just know that I’ll forget to use it as the year wears on, but my purchase seemed to make her so happy that it was a worthwhile investment.

From Indigo we drove up to Staples to return a pair of Linksys WRT54G wireless routers. I’ve been intrigued by the possibility of running Linux on Linksys units for a while, and an opportunity to install a wireless bridge at a friend’s house finally presented a good reason to purchase one, while a need to move from WEP to WPA (two different methods for securing wireless networks; WEP, the old way, having been shown to be, well, not all that secure after all) here at the office presented an opportunity to purchase another. So last night I bought two WRT54G’s, and this morning I returned them because I discovered, to my chagrin, that they sported “v5” firmware, which no longer uses Linux at all, and thus doesn’t support things like OpenWRT and DD-WRT (two open source projects that let you replace the “brains” of your wireless access point with a more capable set of code). Fortunately, Staples also sells the WRT54GS, which is still Linux-based, so I ended up swapping the 54G’s for two 54GS’s.

At the checkout at Staples I ran into my old friend [[Cam Beck]]. I first met Cam when he was working for [[Scott Linkletter]] at [[COWS]] back in the mid-1990s. He’s since joined the forces of the dark lord and Cam and I had a good chat about all that.

From Staples we drove down through the rabbit warren of streets that lead from University Ave., past Charlottetown Rural High School and out to North River Road so we could make a stop at [[Sporting Intentions]] to pick up a newly outfitted set of skis for [[Oliver]]. Oliver, if you suddenly gain the ability to read before Christmas morning, please ignore this paragraph. [[Darren Peters]] was at Sporting Intentions too (proving that he really is ubiquitous).

Our final stop of the morning was at the Ellen’s Creek Plaza [[Formosa Tea House]], which has become a regular stop on our Saturday morning journey. Oliver got to introduce Papa to his friends there, we had a refreshing iced tea and sushi, Oliver received a kind gift of orange slices and some cookies, and we had a good chance to have a pre-Christmas chat.

Our morning at an end, we piled back into the car and headed back down North River Rd. to home. Later in the afternoon we’ll head over to [[Ann]] and [[David]]’s for our annual Christmas Eve lunch (we’re all very excited — especially [[Jodi]] — about a secret present I found last night for Ann). Then quickly home to bed so that visions of sugarplums might dance in our heads. Or at least in [[Oliver]]’s.

Best wishes to all for a good holiday.