Before Catherine went to New York City in May, I called Aliant, her cell phone provider, to convert her over to the Digital North America plan. Although the plan is $79/month, the prohibitive cost of Canadian cell phone calls when roaming in the U.S. makes it a real deal.

Because Aliant’s customer service agents are on strike, I had to deal with a manager. They took my request, but because they didn’t have access to the actual computer system where the actual change would actually be made, they had to take the details and submit a work order. I was assured that the request would be processed, and even if they were late getting to it, the effective date would be the date of my call.

Just to be sure, I called back the next day to confirm the change had been made. There was, alas, no record of the original work order. So another request was sent in, and again I was assured that the change would be made, and that Catherine would be covered.

On June 9, I received Catherine’s cell phone bill for May. With $299.56 in usage charges for the calls she made and received while in the U.S. Calls that should have been covered under the Digital North America plan at no additional charge.

As a side note, if you’ve ever casually thought about using your Aliant cell phone in the U.S. with a standard plan, here’s some incentive not to: the majority of Catherine’s calls were billed at $2.71 a minute. That means that a 20 minute call home was billed at $54.24.

I called Aliant today, and got the same “we don’t actually do anything here, we just pass along requests” response. The manager took my details and promised that someone would get back to me.

We’ll see what happens.

By the way, I have a deep new respect for the Aliant customer service folks: watching their managers conduct simple operations like “talking and typing at the same time” and “listening to people spell their name” and “knowing what services Aliant offers” with an utter lack of aplomb, you realize that our brothers and sisters on the picket lines truly are skilled professionals.

I’ve had several conversations over the last couple of weeks with people who are planning to “vote strategically” in the federal election. Generally this means they’re going to vote Liberal because they think this will keep a Conservative from being elected, and thus keep Stephen Harper from being Prime Minister. I’m sure there are other variations on this, depending on the riding, but it basically boils down to “voting for someone you don’t like so that someone you don’t like more won’t get elected.”

I wish people wouldn’t do this.

I think of election day as a sort of national opportunity to say “this is who we are.” And I take the show of my hand very, very seriously. Seriously enough that voting for someone who I don’t respect, whose ideas I don’t believe in, or who doesn’t reflect my true feelings, would feel like telling a big, public lie.

I think we should vote with our hearts, not while holding our noses, because I think it’s the right thing to do. I think it’s the bedrock on which the entire representative democracy is based.

I also think not voting for someone just because “they don’t have a chance of winning” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it doesn’t make a lot of sense: election day isn’t a lottery or a horse race; there’s no upside for backing a winner.

The amazing thing about our electoral system — and I really do think it’s an awesome system that demands our respect — is that it’s a fluid, unpredictable system made up of millions of parts, the outcome of which, polls and pundits aside, is completely up in the air. Up to us.

When you start trying to “game” the system, telling lies about how you really feel with the hopes that enough people will lie with you, you’re perverting that system without truly understanding the potential results.

And in the end, whether you vote Liberal to keep out the Conservatives, or Conservative to keep out the Liberals, or Green to punish the NDP, your vote is going to be used by someone for purposes you didn’t intend — someone, sometime, is going to say “look, 65% of the electorate in my riding supported my plan to outlaw free thought.”

I think the honest, respectful thing to do on polling day is to go behind the screen and pick the person you think should represent your riding in Parliament. I’d like to think that would be obvious.

Let me just state, for the record, that when you are three and two thirds years old, the Boston Children’s Museum is pretty well about the greatest place on earth.

Oliver and I spent two hours there yesterday. When we got up today, I couldn’t think of anything else that would be as much fun as going back. So Oliver, my mother, and I went back for another three hours today.

Three floors of 100% kid-focused fund. Highlights: dressing up as a bee in the “PlaySpace.” The Arthur exhibit. Playing with boats in the model of the Fort Point Channel. Wearing dresses and poodle skirts in Grandmother’s Attic. Learning to use a wheelchair, and how to pick up balls with a head-mounted scoop in the accessAbility exhibit. And the turtles.

Otherwise in Boston, we found two great playgrounds: there’s one in the North End in the park opposite the Marriott Long Wharf, and another in Boston Common at the end of the Frog Pond. Both are modern, well-maintained, and lots of fun. And both use a spongy mixture of ground-up rubber tires and some magical bouncy material under all the equipment — a material we also saw used in Bilbao — that is so much better than the sand, gravel or cedar chips we use in PEI that we might just as well be using shards of broken glass.

We’re heading north tomorrow. Johnny and Jodi are speeding ahead as an advance party. By Thursday there will be at least nine next of our kin on the Island.

I have always taken considerable pride in our association with The Old Farmer’s Almanac. Not only is the Almanac drenched in considerable history — it’s North America’s oldest continuously published periodical — but the work we do for them is right up our alley: creating simple, useful web-based tools that let you do things like look up weather history and find out when the sun is going to come up.

The sister publication of the Almanac, YANKEE magazine, presents us with similar opportunities: answering challenges like help me plan my vacation, and I need a recipe for Boston Cream Pie.

This spring sees two significant events in our relationship with Yankee Publishing, publisher of both the Almanac and YANKEE.

First, it’s the start of our ninth year working with Yankee: our first job — a small programming job that lives, in much-modified form today, as the travel search (see the 1996 archive) — was launched in the spring of 1999.

Second, we’ve just renewed and strengthened our working relationship, with the signing of a new contract today.

It sometimes seems odd to have our primary client located almost 700 miles away. But it works. Both because the folks at Yankee are smart, creative, and flexible, and also because the nature of publishing has always included working with authors, illustrators and photographers who are far-flung. Why not far-flung web developers too?

So please bear with me while I send thanks to our colleagues on the Yankee web team: Group Publisher, John Pierce; Corporate Director of Production and New Media, Paul Belliveau; Almanac Senior Editor, Mare-Anne Jarvela; YANKEE Internet Editor, Ian Aldrich; Internet Design Coordinator, Lisa Traffie. Special thanks to Steve Muskie, who joined us on the “outside” as a Yankee contractor a couple of years ago, but who was a Yankee employee back in 1996, and brought us “into the fold,” and to Yankee President Jamie Trowbridge for believing in the Internet and its possibilities for Yankee well before most publishers had begun to do so, and with a continuing consistency and commitment that few publishers have been able to match.

And thanks as well to the myriad others at Yankee, from Linda who answers the phones (with what is arguably the best phone voice in North America), to Mike who installed our weather station (and keeps Yankee running otherwise), to all of the writers, art directors, production artists, editors, fact checkers, copy editors, ad salespeople, photographers, circulation staff, mail order sales staff, accountants, clerks and other support staff who always make us feel welcome when we visit, and who have been so uncommonly willing to welcome the web into their day-to-day life.

And, perhaps most importantly, to my brother, and Reinvented’s second employee, Johnny, who, from a standing start, has become an accomplished programmer and designer, and whose work you will see on all of Yankee’s sites.

This is fun.

For some reason that, over ten years working here, I have never completely understood, Peterborough, New Hampshire is something of a hotbed of magazine publishing. Even more so if you look back into the past.

When I was a tadpole geek back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was an avid reader of Byte and Creative Computing magazines (there’s an interesting story about their founding); both were published in Peterborough.

Although both magazines are now gone (Byte lives on as a fee-based web publication), and the granddaddy of Peterborough magazines, 73, ceased publication last year, there’s still plenty of publishing happening here.

Of course there’s YANKEE and The Old Farmer’s Almanac, published here in Dublin, just up the road from Peterborough.

There’s also a bunch of kids magazines and the audiophile magazine Audio Xpress. Wayne Green, founder of Byte, publishes NH To Do from nearby Londonderry. Helmers Publishing makes Desktop Engineering and Supply Chain Systems Magazine in the north end of town near the high school. And nearby there’s also Frontline Solutions, another supply chain magazine.

One of the largest mailing list brokers, Millard is based in Peterborough too.

And I’m probably missing many others.

I remember reading the Byte masthead many years ago, and seeing Peterborough, NH, and wondering where it was. Now I know.

We’ve been here in the U.S.A. since last Saturday, hence the echo you’ve been hearing when you ramble around here this week. Johnny and I have been hard at work here at Yankee while Catherine, Oliver, Jodi and my mother have been exploring the Monadnock region of New Hampshire.

Last night Catherine and I had a brief time to ourselves — Oliver stayed with uncle, aunt and grandmother — and we stole away to the Wilton Town Hall Theatre to see Super Size Me (recommended by brother Steve, and a very good documentary, worth seeing, but may prevent you from ever eating fast food again). When we returned to our cottage at 10:00 p.m., everyone was fast asleep: Oliver exhausted them.

We’re off to Boston tomorrow morning for the weekend, and then we’ll slowly wend our way north back to the Island, with the requisite stops at Delorme and L.L. Bean.

When we get back to the Island, we’ll be joined by brothers Steve and Mike and by my dad, making for a complete Rukavina family matched set. We may be forced to challenge the Garritys or the Ledwells to some sort of challenge of strength or intellect.

Tired. Wired.

Our American cousins, I thought this morning in the shower, have it good: they’ve got three national songs that everyone knows the words to. The Star Spangled Banner, America The Beautiful and God Bless America. At the Reagan funeral last night, each was used at an appropriate moment.

Here in Canada we’ve got Oh Canada, which has not only changed its words in my lifetime, but is also now more often sung bilingually than not, with the English/French break coming at some random time and taking everyone by surprise.

There’s God Save The Queen, of course. I imagine that most Canadians could at least belt out the first line, and most over 50 could remember the entire thing. It’s not quite about Canada, mind you, but there’s history on its side.

I suppose our third is The Maple Leaf Forever. Except that I know neither the tune nor the words, and I expect I’m not alone in that.

Were I ever to die, I think I’d like to have Speaking With the Angel (by the trio Cry, Cry, Cry), You Don’t Need (Jane Siberry) and, despite the corniness, Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin) played at my funeral.

The thought of the mourners slow dancing on my grave is too good to pass up.

I had lunch with my old friend Peter Lux today, and he encouraged me to take a look at, and participate in, a new project he’s sheppherding: MensNet.ca, a sort of “Slashdot for Canadian men’s health.”

Peter is arguably one of the country’s leading advocates of “health promotion” — making information about our health available to us — and this project deserves a look.

Back in the olden days, when I was a day camp counsellor at the Hamilton YMCA, one of my favourite things to do with kids was to take them on “behind the scenes” tours. They loved it. I loved it. It was great fun.

In this tradition, Hope Paterson is taking kids on a behind the scenes tour of Atlantic Superstore.

Now if she would only do this for adults too!