From The Old Farmer’s Almanac:

December 25 - Christmas Day. The ancient Celts divided the year into four sections marked by Quarter Days — the days of the two solstices and two equinoxes, on which the seasons begin. Gradually, to conform more closely to the liturgical year of the Christian church, the Quarter Days became identified with the church’s high seasonal festivals, which occurred close to the astronomical dates. Christmas, the fourth Quarter Day, was both the culmination of the old year and the first festival of the new year. The day originated as a solstice festival and signaled a time of resting and gathering fertility for a new round of sowing and reaping. This festival merged easily with the Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, which occurred at this time of year.

May Your Days be Merry and Bright.

I have never met a consultant — not one — who, at some point in their musing about whatever issue they are consulting on, has not used the “if you put a frog in boiling water, it will just sit there until it’s dead” story to try and make a point.

The most recent occurence was yesterday.

This was publicaly debunked nine years ago:

First we spoke with national scientific authorities. According to Dr. George R. Zug, curator of reptiles and amphibians, the National Museum of Natural History, “Well that’s, may I say, bullshit. If a frog had a means of getting out, it certainly would get out. And I cannot imagine that anything dropped in boiling water would not be scalded and die from the injuries.”

As such, I would like to formally propose that this story be officially retired from the consultant canon, and that any consultant who persists in using it be ineligible for ACOA funding.

Okay, maybe I exaggerate. A little.

The Canadian federal government, through its Department of Public Works and Government Services, maintains a web-based directory of public servants. They call it GEDS, and this is what you see when you arrive there:

I added the Big Red Arrow myself.

I’ve used this page dozens of times, and every time I do, I get confused about where I actually search.

You would think that this gateway to a valuable, up-to-date resource would have a big “search here” button. Or maybe even a search box right on the page.

But, no: you have to click on the little tiny “Search GEDS” link at the bottom of the page. Granted, that click takes you to a page with a nice search box. But I wonder how many people never find their way there.

We all carry around in our heads the perfect combination of our favourite musicians, imagining the perfect “jam session that never was.” Except, for me, it was.

Here is a portion of the description of the album that resulted, from the All Music Guide:

Originally a CBC/NPR radio broadcast from Christmas ‘93, this summit session featuring some of the most unique female performers and voices in the world … is an atmospheric treasure. While individual performances shine, the ensemble work is particularly stellar.

The album is Count Your Blessings, and the voices are Holly Cole, Rebecca Jenkins, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Jane Siberry, and Victoria Williams.

I dare you to listen to Rebecca Jenkins sing the opening lines of the title track, Count Your Blessings [420K MP3], without a tear coming to your eye. If it does not, I fear you are stone-hearted.

The piano at the opening of Silent Night [640K MP3] by Tim Ray, infuses enough invention into the song that all of your elementary school experiences of it may be purged. And it only gets better from there: these are five voices that are meant to be heard together, and this track is the ultimate expression of that. I’m not a big one for the religiously tinged songs, but 5:25 of this Silent Night and I’m in the creche with the myrrh ready to sign on.

Christmas season or not, if you are in need of a genuine music upliftment, you owe it to your soul to have this album in your collection.

Peter Mansbridge is doing The National live from Charlottetown tonight. The “anchor desk” is in a U-Haul truck a block from our house:

Peter is standing in the back of the truck, which is backed up towards Province House, presumably oriented to obtain the best view. I imagine what we’ll see on TV is something that makes Peter look like he’s floating outside; in reality, he’s under the lip of the truck:

Note the heating system at knee height.

Great George St. between Richmond and Sydney is blocked off to allow cables from a satellite truck that’s in front of 180 Richmond St. to wend their way over to the U-Haul:

We just came back from the “meet and greet” at the Confederation Centre with Peter Mansbridge, Rex Murphy and Bruce Rainnie.

Some media personalities shrink when you see them in “real life.” For these three, it was the opposite: they seemed more engaging, more interesting, more genuine in front of a crowd of 100 than they do on television. There was a good hours worth of question and answer, and some snappy door prizes. Bruce even [almost] called it Compass, for which I will have to send him a royalty cheque.

They’re shooting The National tonight from the back of a truck in the Province House parking lot. Although there’s no formal “audience seating,” it looks like it wouldn’t be a problem to drop down and watch things play out.

It just dawned on me: when the tourismocrats do crazy things like this, it’s because don’t actually like Prince Edward Island and feel that the only way to effectively promote tourism is to try to hide the real Island behind a freaky faux Island trucked in from away.

Here’s a freaky example:

The pinnacle of the Festival will be the Canjet Snow Kingdom, the home of Jack Frost.

Then, of course, there’s the “Family Concerts in the Park featuring Tributes to Shania Twain and Hilary Duff,” the “TechnoMedia Snow Maze” and the “Treehouse Live Outdoor Stage.”

In the freaky tourism dream-Island, everything has to have corporate sponsorship because nobody in their right mind would actually support this kind of thing without corporate cocaine to fuel it.

It might as well be Red Deer, Brandon, or Moncton at this point, they will have so effectively sucked the Island out of the Island.

Good-bye Charlie Town, we hardly knew ya…

Dan asked me if my IAXy can be used with WiFi. I said “no.” And it can’t, really: you need to plug it into a hard-wired Ethernet.

Which got me thinking about a product that would be a small device, not much bigger than a deck of cards, that would have an Ethernet port and enough guts inside to bridge that port to a nearby WiFi network.

It turns out that these things exist: this gizmo from Netgear is an example. It talks to your WiFi access point, and has an Ethernet jack. They pitch it as a device that can “[b]ring it all together - your PC, gaming console, Internet Radio, and wireless network.”

It also turns out that a plain old Apple iBook laptop can be used for the same thing using the OS X “Internet Sharing” feature (found under “System Preferences” and “Sharing”). If you select “Share your connection from: Airport” and then click “On Built-in Ethernet,” then you can plug other devices into the Ethernet port on the iBook and they’ll be “on the network.”

I just tried it — plugged my iMac into the Ethernet on the iBook — and it works. Neato. This means that, in theory, I could bring my iBook, my IAXy and a plain old telephone to the Formosa Tea House and run the entire operation from there. Perhaps I’ll try that tomorrow.

One of the neat things you get to do if you run your own server hardware is to give your servers a name.

There is a great tradition behind this, and each system administrator has their own approach. Upstairs at silverorange you will find servers called “tangerine” and “navel.” The old CA*Net server at UPEI was called “atlas” (my first email address on the Island was caprukav@atlas.cs.upei.ca). The main PEINet server was “bud.” The servers that run the Province of PEI website are called, somewhat mundanely, “web1,” web2,” and so on.

When it came time to name the servers here at the Reinvented Data Centre, I chose my grandfathers’ first names, and thus you’ll find “dan” and “ross” in our server farm.

Just over two years ago, I installed two new servers for a local client, and named them “edward” and “wallis” after Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom he left the throne.

Unbeknownst to me, my client had been calling the second server “wallace” for two year, until I disabused him of this notion today.

Now that I have run out of grandfathers, I’m not sure where I’ll turn next. I have “nettie” and “louise” as grandmother names. And of course I also have 13 new great aunts and uncles to draw on now.

I just came back from lunch at Interlude.

Beside me were a couple, apparently from New York but temporarily resident on the Island. They were having an argument. A persistent, complex-sounding argument that went on and on and on. And at voice levels such that it was impossible for me to not get dragged into it, yet quiet enough so that I had no real idea of the substance. There were lots of exasperated statements like “I try to communicate, but you never listen.”

All of this was made more disturbing by the antagonists dropping out of inward-argue mode and into outward “cold enough for you?” mode as their friends and aquaintances walked by. For some reason, seeing this public, private, public, private flip was quite stressful for me (let alone them, I assume): it was as if I suddenly came to realize that everyone has an inward an outward facing personality.

It’s amazing, too, how unimportant and insubstantial other people’s arguments sound when you have no personal involvement with them or their subject matter. I came halfway towards slamming down my chopsticks, turning to them, and shouting “why can’t we just all get along.” But I didn’t.

I’m left thinking that everyone should argue in the public arena. Or that we should take great pains to never do so.

In any case, Interlude temporarily ceased to be an urban oasis for at least this afternoon.