A good friend has invited my entire extended family to her house for a Christmas Eve open house. She sent along the following rules for the occasion:

• Show up.
• Under no circumstances dress up.
• Stay as long or as little as you like.
• Do not even think about a hostess gift.

This reminded me of an overnight visit to my friend Simon’s father’s house on the shore of Lake Huron about 20 years ago. Simon’s Mom had died a few years before, and I was driving Simon home to spend Christmas with his father, and spending the night before continuing on to my own family.

Being naturally socially ill at ease at the best of times, never having met Simon’s father before, and knowing him only as a public school teacher, a Mason, and through Simon’s stories about growing up, I was a little intimidated by the prospect. Even more so when he announced that “there are three hard and fast rules about staying in my house.” I shuddered: no gambling, no swearing, no rock and roll — something like that — was what I imagined was about to be presented.

“First,” he said, “you can sleep in as late as you like, and nobody will bother you.”

“Second, you can spend as much time in the bathroom as you like, and nobody will bother you with a knock on the door.”

“Third, you can eat as much or as little as you like for supper, and nobody will bother you about it.”

We had a great night: I was put completely at ease right from the bat, and we all got along like gangbusters. Smart man.

Aliant, my local phone provider at home, is making some changes to their “PrimePak” packages, and this prompted me to take another look at the Eastlink (my cable TV provider) phone offering. All I want is basic dial tone, one “calling feature” (call display), plus long distance. Here’s the current math for the local service:

For long distance, Aliant charges either 17 cents/minute for Canadian calls, or, with a $2.95 “network access charge,” 13 cents/minute daytime and 10 cents/minute evenings and weekends.

Aliant has a variety of other long distance plans, including one that offers 1200 minutes for $25.00 (with an additional $2.95 “network access charge”), which works out to about 2.3 cents/minute. One of the limitations of this plan is described in this FAQ on their website:

Q: How do I know if I have used up my 1200 minutes evening and weekend minutes or 200 daytime minutes? A: We are not able to provide you with the amount of minutes you have used until your bill is printed. One of the ways Aliant offers such low rates is by not driving a lot of cost into the product. Providing this type of information would be very costly. You may wish to track the number of minutes you use. If you do go over your free minutes, you still receive an exceptional per minute rate of $0.10 per minute evenings and weekends.

Eastlink uses a complicated-seeming system wherein they promise to “compare the top three advertised long distance plans and bill you the lowest of the three.” The added complication of Eastlink is that they won’t let you pay for long distance on your regular phone bill: you have to set this up separately as a pre-authorized cheque withdrawl or credit card payment, something that eliminates, for me, any of the “cable and telephone all on one bill” benefit.

This whole “network access charge” thing is new to me, but it appears to be a conceit that all of the long distance providers are using. Here’s how Sprint Canada describes their $4.25/month fee:

It is a monthly contribution from all customers to a fund that helps offset the cost of maintaining and enhancing the networks of telecommunication companies.

Funny, I thought that’s the per-minute fees were for!

I’m thinking that the best solution for staying out of this long distance hornet’s nest might be to simply move to Eastlink for local service (saving $72/year), and then routing all the home long distances calls through VoicePulse Connect over the Internet at 3.3 cents/minute with no monthly charge.

A reminder to Prince Edward Islanders paying property tax in installments: the fall payment is due on Tuesday, November 30.

I noticed a disturbing trend at this year’s Santa Claus parade here in Charlottetown: there were several religious groups with floats that were giving out candy canes to kids with little religious tracts attached with cellophane tape.

Now I’m liberal (or conservative?) enough not to be particularly bothered by the mere presence of religiously-themed floats in the parade. While I’m all for separation of church and state, I figure that their inclusion leaves the door open for me to run a “heathen bastards for nuclear war” float should the mood strike me.

And I’m even prepared to not get inflamed, most of the time anyway, by religious organizations trying to recruit new believers: if that’s what your God tells you to do, who am I to argue?

But targeting kids, and targeting kids with candy seems a little low to me. Candy is a drug, and even if we set aside the fact that you should leave kids’ religious life to their parents (or, better yet, to themselves), if your particular brand isn’t strong enough to sell itself without sugar inducement, perhaps its time to look inwards, not out.

One of the cool unanticpated side-effects of being able to see the library books I’ve got checked out as an RSS feed is that when inter-library loans come in, I see them in my newsreader well before I get an email from the library telling me they’ve arrived. Case in point:

This is true because ILL books get “pre-checked out” for you when they arrive, I assume because they have an immovable due date (when they have to get back to the “home” library).

While I’m here, let me again sing the praises of the inter-library loan. For the uninitiated, this is a service offered by most public libraries wherein if a book is not held in their own collection, they will scour the globe (or at least the continent) to find a copy for you and have it shipped to your home branch where you can borrow it just like a regular library book.

In the olden pre-computer days when ILL requests had to be delivered by canoe and sled-dog, this could take several months; with modern technology (along with the excellent ILL sleuths of the Provincial Library here on PEI), I’m finding many requests arrive within a week or two.

Inter-library loan makes your local public library much more powerful because it means, albeit with a time lag, their collection is essentially infinite.

From my mother comes a link to the top 1000 books, described as:

…the “Top 1000” titles owned by OCLC member libraries—the intellectual works that have been judged to be worth owning by the “purchase vote” of libraries around the globe.

OCLC is the “Online Computer Library Center,” a “a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs.”

If you have compact fluorescent lightbulbs in Charlottetown and need to dispose of them, you can do this by dropping them off at the Superior Sanitation drop-off on Mt. Edward Road every Tuesday and Saturday between 7:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. More details here, including locations elsewhere on PEI. Others in the U.S. and Canada can check here at Earth911.org.

I just ordered one of these Kill A WATT energy use monitors and eight of these compact fluorescent lighbulbs from Energy Alternatives in Victoria, BC on the strength of this article by Mag Ruffman in the Calgary Sun.

Anne-o-philes will recall that Ms. Ruffman played Alice Lawson in the Anne of Green Gables television series, and Olivia King Dale on the Road to Avonlea. She is now a home improvement guru. Proving that everything does indeed begin and end on Prince Edward Island.

From my friend Ann comes a link to this article in the New York Times about Amtrak’s new automated telephone system. I decided to take it out for a test drive. Here’s how it went [4.6MB WAV]. I was impressed, although things did go off the rails in the end when I tried to leave.

Because either we’ve been away, or our family doctor has been away, we managed to miss her flu shot clinic, and now she has exhausted her supply of the vaccine.

Looking for alternative sources, I phoned the Office of the Chief Health Officer. I had to leave a message because there was nobody in the office when I called. An hour later, Dr. Lamont Sweet himself phoned me and gave me the information I needed. Prince Edward Island is very small.

There is a flu vaccine clinic in the basement of the Polyclinic in Charlottetown on Wednesday, December 1, 2004 from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and again from 1:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.