Remember the levees? Parkdale Doris does.

By the way, if you’re near a computer in the early morning this week, you can listen to Steve hosting the morning show on CBC Radio One in Montreal (click on the ‘listen live’ link here) — 7:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. Atlantic Standard Time. Special bonus: they have they same horrible theme music as Island Morning.

As explained here, we’ve decided to delay the next episode of the Zap Your PRAM conference.

Yesterday — January 2, 2006 — was a weird day, with half the world acting as if it were business as usual, and the other half staying home to take a “day in lieu of” because the January 1 holiday fell on a Sunday. So my colleagues at Yankee were at work and the Charlottetown Mall was open, but I was at home recovering from the levees, watching Sesame Street and foraging through the almost-empty chocolates boxes for a hint of something with caramel.

But that was the morning after the day before. On January 1, 2006, as is almost a “tradition” now (2004, 2005), my compatriots G., J. and P. came by the house at 10:00 a.m. for an early cup of coffee and a review of the levee schedule. By 10:15 a.m. we were in the truck and off to start our day.

Highlights of our tour this year:

• For the second year in a row, Andrew Sprague was nowhere to be seen. Do they have levees in Saint John?
• Leo Cheverie was, however, in exactly the same spot in the Charlottetown Hotel where I shook has hand in 2005.
• As usual, Wes MacAleer was everywhere. That man has bonhomie in spades.
• Hon. Shawn Murphy and his Conservative opponent in the federal election, Tom DeBlois, always seemed to be within 20 feet of each other every time we saw them. I hope they shook hands at least once.
• Tim Banks trailed me the entire day.
• The apple cider at Fanningbank hit the spot. Gone this year was the book at the exit, the signing of which was always purported to earn one an invitation to the “garden party” mid-summer. P. said he thinks the “garden party” is open to everyone now, so earning an invite ceased to have any cachet.
• We ran into Hon. Pat Binns in the line at Charlottetown City Hall. He shook my hand, and said “Happy New Year, Peter.” Which makes me think he actually knows my name. Obviously this means I’m either being targeted for assassination, or that I will be running against Richard Brown in District 12 in 2007.
• Leaving City Hall we took on C., a new member of the pack. She was dressed like a space warrior, which added a certain futuristic quality to our group.

• The folks at the Queen Charlotte Armories outdid themselves this year: the chowder had an extra snap, the band was hot, the yellow and black curtain/bunting wrapping the hall was fantastic, and the place was packed. This is definitely the mid-levee-day highlight.

• The “moose milk” at the Havilland Club seemed to pack an extra wallop this year.

• New this year was a stop at the Town of Stratford levee (P., J., and C. are all Stratfordians and so they felt the special pull of their kin). This was held at the Monster Town Hall (which is actually quite a pleasant, airy space). Mayor Kevin Jenkins was there with his council, there was wine and punch in abundance, and a nice collection of snacks laid out.
• The strip over the river meant that we missed HMCS Charlottetown’s levee. Next year.
• Our strategy of arriving early for the Premier’s levee at the Confederation Centre paid off again: we were in line at 2:25 (the official start time was 3:00), and so our time in line was quick, and the mountains of tasty foods were fresh and waiting for us.

I almost decided not to go out this year — post-Christmas fatigue and all. But P. called the night before, G. was intransigent, and so I was wooed. I’m glad. See in 2007.

Here, as best as I can determine, is the schedule for the levees in and around Charlottetown for January 1, 2006. Last year the UPEI levee started at 11:00 a.m. — can’t get anyone on the phone at UPEI today, and the clerk at the Rodd Charlottetown told me it starts this year at 10:30 a.m., so that’s the time I’ve listed.

It is remarkable, by the way, how little organizations use their websites to promote this sort of thing. Many of those listed below have whiz-bang websites with nifty calendars of events that haven’t been updated since the summer.

If you know any of the missing times, please post a comment, or contact me so I can update the table.

Updates:

• Added Seniors Active Living Centre
• Added start time for HMCS Queen Charlotte
• Added times Town of Cornwall

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 NATed to one webserver, some traffic NATed 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.