On paper the idea of having a giant 70-mile long yard sale through the hills and valleys of Southern Kings County is laudable: you get a whole bunch of people out and about on a nice fall day, spending a little bit of money, eating in restaurants, buying gasoline and generally giving a boot to the local economy now that the tourists, by and large, have gone home.

The only problem is that the entire operation is based on the collected unwanted mechandise of the residents of Southern Kings County. And that, friends, is not a pretty picture.

Our informal survey of the sale route, starting just outside of Hazelbrook and driving although through Wood Islands, Murray Harbour, Murray River, and then looping up through Caledonia did, however reveal a lot about what’s not hot in consumer products this year.

Hot air popcorn makers. Fondue sets. Small microwave ovens. Kitchen sinks. Stuffed Disney toys. Typewriters. Clock radios. Bread makers. VHS videotapes. Music from the 1980s on CD. And copies of everything Danielle Steel has ever had published.

There was oodles and oodles of all that.

Along with endless, endless piles of clothes, chairs without seats, dead-looking plants. And even remnants of the Phentex revolution (wherein science found a wool that was cheaper, synthetic, and felt like cardboard and entranced knitting aunts from coast to coast).

The successful yard sale is based on the “your else’s junk is someone else’s treasure” principle. And when the 70-mile yard sale started seven years ago, there may indeed have been some treasure to be found on the tables. But what was on offer today wasn’t just “the stuff that people didn’t want any more” but also “the stuff that people didn’t want any more after they spent 6 years selling the good stuff they didn’t want any more.”

There were little bits of treasure here and there — our friend G. found some resaleable old books and a couple of good door handles in Vernon Bridge; Oliver and I found a box filled with Lego, toy trucks and a headless Barbie for $3 in Wood Islands. And the sausages and perogies at Phil’s Organic Garlic were second to none. Oliver, of course, is a mostly uncritical consumer at age four: anything that’s bright and colourful and/or branded by Disney or Henson meets his approval; he had lots of fun, punctuated by a brief tantrum as it came time to leave each waystation to prepare for the next.

And the day was beautiful. The people were nice. And Southern Kings is Prince Edward Island’s undiscovered jewel (the view from Phil’s place was worth the entire trip). And maybe that’s the secret of the event: it’s not really about the stuff at all, it’s simply a good excuse to go out for a Saturday drive in one of the most beautiful places on earth, see some people you know, and scarf down a pungent sausage or two.

A backslash looks like this: \. A slash, also known — albeit rarely — as a slant or oblique stroke or simply stroke looks like this: /.

There are no backslashes in web addresses (technical note: okay, maybe sometimes, but so effectively never as to be never).

All of the “strokes” or “slashes” in a web address are just regular old slashes, not backslashes.

So you read something like http://www.almanac.com like this: h t t p colon slash slash w w w dot almanac dot com.

In conventional everyday normal person world, the only time you’ll have cause to use the word backslash is when you’re using the MS-DOS command line, and need to refer to a directory. In MS-DOS, directory names use the backslash. So you read C:\fred as c colon backslash fred.

When you read web addresses, though, ditch the back and embrace the slash.

Side note: newspapers, especially small local ones, have an annoying habit of reproducing web addresses with backslashes. They should stop this.

My friend, let’s call him Mango, is one of those hip young Christian types. He’s got no problems saying — with sincerity — “I’ve accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as My Personal Saviour,” he volunteers in the local church youth group, and he believes.

At lunch on Monday, Mango, our mutual friend Sly (also a pseudonym) and I had a rollicking good conversation about Jesus, God, belief and the like. Mango and Sly shored up the “God is Good, God is Great” front, while I took the “you realize you guys are all deluded, don’t you?” tack.

In an clever but subversive effort to bring me into the flock, Mango sent me a link to RealLivePreacher.com, a blog the genesis of which is explained here; an excerpt:

This hospital gig was just the kick in the ass I needed.

You see, people facing death don’t give a fuck about your interpretation of II Timothy. Some take the “bloodied, but unbowed” road, but most dying people want to pray with the chaplain. And they don’t want weak-ass prayers either. They don’t want you to pray that God’s will be done.

Hell no. People want you to get down and dirty with them. They want to call down angels and the powers of the Almighty. THEY ARE DYING and the whole world should stop.

I threw myself into it. I prayed holding hands and cradling heads. I prayed with children and old men. I prayed with a man who lost his tongue to cancer. I lent him mine. I prayed my ass off. I had 50 variations of every prayer you could imagine, one hell of a repertoire.

That’s compelling stuff, and the blog that goes with it similarly interesting and well-written.

I’m not ready to start drinking the holy water (you do drink it, don’t you?), but it is does make me realize that closing my eyes entirely to the hardcore Christ types might mean that a lot of wheat is getting thrown out with the chaff.

So, Mango, you can consider yourself to have executed the Lord’s work today.

Next week at lunch I’ll return the favour when we discuss my Bolshevik heritage.

Despite my tortured relationship with our local phone company over the years, I gotta say it’s good to have Aliant employees back in the saddle again: calls to customer service are getting answered on the first ring, and the people who answer those calls actually know what they’re talking about. Guess we don’t know what we got ‘til it was gone. Welcome back.

I received a well-worded, thorough explanation of the $10/PDF charge that Kwik Kopy charges from owner Shawn MacKenzie. Although Shawn’s asked me not to publish his candid response to my earlier comments, and a follow-up email, I appreciate the effort he took to respond and I wish all service providers were as willing to discuss the terms of their service.

Here’s what I sent back to Shawn:

Thanks for taking the time to respond, and for explaining your mechanism for your RIP charge.

I think part of the disconnect here is that you’re looking at thinks from the point of view of “print shop management” where you have to (quite rightly) be concerned about the profit on each job, whereas I’m not really looking at you as a print shop, but rather a sort of “remote printer.”

Rather than bothering with the cost and expense of maintaining a local printer here, along with the needed to maintain it, collate and staple jobs, etc., I’m looking to outsource all my office printing, from large $1000 jobs down to small $2.00 jobs.

A $10/job RIP fee for a print shop seems quite reasonable, especially given the technical challenges you’ve outlined. A $10/RIP fee to “print remotely” simply isn’t feasible for me, both because it drives up the per-copy cost on small jobs to upwards of a dollar a page, and also because the charge interferes with my ability to send you jobs easily and without thinking “is it really worth spending that $10/PDF fee.”

A couple of days turnaround for a job sent to a print shop is reasonable. My standard for what I call “remote printing” would be “as close to right away as possible.”

It may be simply that I’m looking for you to be in a business you’re not in, and, what’s more, a business that wouldn’t be feasible. In any case, I do appreciate the fact that you’re willing to talk about it.

Steven Garrity, friend and landlord, has been busy promoting Firefox this week. He was interviewed by one Rainnie yesterday and will be on Compass, interviewed by another Rainnie, tonight tomorrow (the interview is taking place in the next room as I type this).

Steven gives good interview: I told him at lunch that while most people (read: me) have their voice move up an octave and double their rate of speaking when interviewed, Steven actually gets calmer and his voice mellows and becomes more golden.

My great hope today is that Steven’s dad, Police Commissioner Garrity, will be featured on Compass tonight as well — perhaps there will be some rowdyism that needs quelling. If there was some sort of flashlight disaster worthy of report as well, we could achieve a Compass Garrity hat trick.

Update: The Compass cameraman actually just said “I don’t see anything web browsery in here” during setup for the interview.

More update: Bruce Rainnie just said my name out loud. I may not have been there for the Beatles in 1965, but…

More inside scoop: Bruce likes Terminator 3, but says Terminator 1 is “fun to watch.” Take that National Enquirer.

Final update: I shook hands with Bruce Rainnie. Sigh.

On my Mac, PDF files generally open in an application called Preview which is quick, works well, and has just the right number of features. I’m upstairs here at silverorange borrowing a PC with a printer attached to print some PDF files, and I’m amazed at how slowly the Acrobat Reader opens under Windows, even on this zippy modern machine.

From the looks of things when Acrobat is loading, it loads extensions that handle everything from eBook reading to digital signatures every time it loads. Even if it’s just loading a 1-page PDF with no bells nor whistles.

Is there any way to configure Acrobat to start up lean and mean and to only load extensions when it needs to?

Speaking of quick printers, Action Press v. PEITFM [PDF] is an interesting case involving a local printer. The moral of the story appears to be “always have a contract.”

I want to be able to email simple black and white PDF files to a local quick printer (or even better, upload them directly to their digital copier) and have copies printed and delivered to me within a couple of hours.

Kwik Kopy comes close, but they’re sometimes slow reading their email, and they charge a flat $10 fee up front to simply open a PDF file.

Print Atlantic doesn’t seem to have a fee for opening PDF files, but they have turnaround times of a day or two, and seem more oriented towards press work that quick printing.

I think what I want is a Kinkos. Lacking that, is there anywhere else to turn in Charlottetown?

CBC is reporting that “The principal [of Queen Charlotte School] said he’s already met with some of the ringleaders, parents, and he’s told students not to travel in groups larger than six.”

So much for the whole “liberty” thing.