The Frisbee Golf Tournament is on, starting at 10:30 a.m. at Strathgartney.

And the weird server implosion that happened here in the middle of last night is over and things are running as normal, as least for now: a sudden influx of spamy email is causing stress on SpamAssassin.

I was talking to a colleague yesterday, let’s call him “Sam.” We were talking about travel destinations. He was shopping for a place to go for a week with his wife this winter, and we were talking about Europe. He had some hesitation about going to Europe for short little trip because they have longer-term plans to “do Europe” later, and didn’t want to sneak in little preliminary bits of Europe before the big event, lest they ruin the surprise (I am paraphrasing here).

Here’s the thing: get in your car right now and drive to Halifax and get on a plane that leaves there tonight. If you fly west to Vancouver, it will take you about 9 hours to get there, including a 2 hour layover in Toronto. If you fly east to London, England, it will take you about 7 hours to get there, including a brief stop in St. John’s.

Once you’re at Heathrow, you’re basically less than 3 or 4 hours from of almost anywhere else in Europe. For example, you can fly from Stansted (a quick bus ride from Heathrow) to Prague the same day, and you’ll be in Prague by 4:00 in the afternoon (and on EasyJet, you’ll only pay $120 for the flight).

And so on.

San Francisco is 9 to 11 hours away. Whitehorse is about 12 hours. Dallas is 8 or 9 hours from Halifax.

Granted, there are passports, and borders and other things to consider when going to Europe (although arguably there are more complications going to the U.S. these days).

But for some reason we still think of Vancouver as “close” and Europe as “very, very far away.” To the extent that many think of traveling to Europe as being in the “once or twice in a lifetime” category.

And this isn’t something unique to travel: the thought of picking up the phone and actually calling someone in, say, Rome or Madrid would be something that I, even with all my voice-over-IP and “man of the world” posturing, would treat as a special event. Even though calling Rome right now would cost me about 7 cents a minute, which is about half as much as it costs to call Summerside at Aliant’s regular rates.

Even the thought of mailing something “overseas” seems exotic, and something that would deserve a special trip to the post office.

This concerns me on several levels.

Personally, I’d like to be able to get over my “far far away” hang-ups about Europe because I think I would go there more often, have more fun, be a better person.

Provincially (so to speak), I’d like more of the people I work and live alongside to be able to do the same: I think the way we plan our cities, live our lives, eat our food, etc. would be dramatically changed with more European travel under our collective belts.

And I think if we all treated European (and for that matter worldwide) travel less like a 50th wedding anniversary and more like a trip to the corner store, we would get a heck of a lot more out of the travel experience.

The thing is, I’m not sure how to make this happen, personally or otherwise. Maybe it just takes more traveling, calling and mailing.

They say we should all be drinking more water. And personally I’ve been feeling sort of dehydrated of late.

So, with Johnny’s support, I said “hey, let’s get a water cooler at the office.”

As my friends upstairs are patrons of Prince Edward Springs, the water arm of the company formerly known as Seaman’s Beverages, I called there first. And I immediately got trapped in the spider’s web of interactive telephone menus that kept leading me to the “general mailbox for the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Group.” I didn’t want to leave a message, I wanted to order some water. So I hung up. I tried three of four more times over the afternoon, and always ended up at the same place. If they can’t answer their phone, I reason, perhaps they will forget to bring the water too.

Next.

Things looked more promising at Sparkling Springs: they have a website, and that website has an order form. I dutifully filled this out, and was assured by the response that they check their email every day, and that I would hear back shortly. That was 48 hours ago. I have yet to hear back. If they can’t answer their email, I reason, perhaps they will forget to bring the water too.

My third option is Culligan. However I have latent fears about Culligan, for I associate their brand with “water treatment.” Which implies that the water in question was originally in need of treatment. And the last thing I want is fetid water that’s been made better by technology.

Perhaps I should simply turn to the tap.

It turns out that our family is not alone in our love of the Amazing Race. Tuesday night’s episode was very good: I’m already adding “that zip line thing” to my list of things I must try sometime (apropos of which, I can’t wait until Phil’s Book comes out in the fall; I’ve a feeling it will change my life).

Here’s something I’ve never understood: a lot of sitcoms start off life with well-crafted, witty, clever opening credit sequences. Think of Spin City with its spinning manhole cover, or Ellen with it’s “we’re too good for credits,” or The Drew Carey Show with its Cleveland Rocks musical number.

Inevitably though, after a season or two, they almost all revert to the standard “theme song played over a montage of old episode highlights” style credits.

Why is this?

Is there evidence to suggest that viewers are more likely to stick around for a new episode if reminded of the wacky hijinks of episodes gone by?

The saddest example of this phenomenon is the change in the WKRP in Cincinnati opening, which started off with the classic “tuning the AM radio dial” sequence, and then took a sad slide into the standard montage.

I welcome the theories or explanations of others wiser than I…

GeekTool is a neat piece of Mac software that lets you stick any image (local or remote), any file, or the output of any command line into your desktop image. Here’s what my desktop looks like as a result (click for super-huge image):

From top-left down, you see the current The Old Farmer’s Almanac Webcam image, a graph of the load average on the Yankee webserver for the past 60 minutes, an MRTG graph of the bandwidth used at Peer1, where Yankee’s servers are hosted, and the current weather radar for Halifax.

Think “active desktop for the Mac” but less Microsofty, more geeky, and arguably much more lightweight and efficient.

Thanks to macosxhints.com for the pointer.

Here’s an interesting audio archive of interviews by Vin Scelsa on his WFUV radio programme Idiot’s Delight.

I’m in the midst of reading Mark Jacobson’s book 12,000 Miles In The Nick Of Time: A Semi-Dysfunctional Family Navigates The Globe, and was intrigued to listen to the interview with Jacobson and his daughter Rae. I’ll be reviewing the book shortly over on the Reinvented World site.

Other interviews you can listen to include Eddie Izzard, Norah Jones, Tim Robbins, Tom Wiats and Kurt Vonnegut.

From Edward Hasbrouck comes a reminder that The Amazing Race 5 starts tonight on CBS. Note that if you’re in Atlantic Canada, the show is being broadcast on ASN, not on ATV, although ATV is broadcasting it on Saturday nights in repeat. It looks like in the rest of Canada you can watch the show on your regular CTV station.

Catherine and I were driving up to Margate late in the afternoon yesterday to have dinner at the [fantastic] Shipwright’s Café before going to the big Bruce Cockburn concert in Summerside.

We decided to take the iPod with us, and listen to some audiobooks on the car stereo, using the little Griffin iTrip transmitter that broadcasts onto the FM band.

As we were driving along, I noticed that there was an uncommon amount of interference on the frequency we were using, so I asked Catherine to scan the dial looking for an clearer one.

So she tried.

And there wasn’t one.

All along the dial, there were radio stations coming in at every frequency. We stopped tuning at 88.5, and heard, clear as if it were broadcasting across the street, the unmistakable sound of National Public Radio. A few more minutes of listening and we’d figured out that, as if by magic, we were listening to WFDD, broadcasting from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which is 1362 miles away from PEI.

Intrigued by this amazing occurence (okay, I was amazed, and forced Catherine to feign amazement), we scanned down the dial and picked out WVTF in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a couple of rock stations from Fayetteville, North Carolina.

This weirdness continued all along the drive from Charlottetown to Margate, with the stations fading in and out as we went up and down hills and around corners.

I immediately got on the horn to my “they know about radio” gurus, Kenny Adams and Gordon Johnstone, and they both confirmed that this is something that just happens once in a while because of something Gordon call a “lift.” Apparently the technical term is tropospheric ducting.

We shut off the radio when we got to Margate, tuned in again on the way to Summerside, and then, on the way back to Charlottetown around 10:30 p.m., found that our friends in North Carolina were gone from the dial.

I tried to convince Catherine that this was the weirdest thing that had ever happened, but she wouldn’t buy it. It was pretty weird.

Our colleagues at silverorange are organizing a frisbee golf tournament in support of Habitat for Humanity this Saturday. I’m proud to be able to reveal the members of Team Reinvented:

• Catherine Miller
• Cynthia Dunsford
• Matthew Rainnie
• Stephanie Rainnie
• Janice Stillman
• Ann Thurlow
• Me

Astute readers will recognize that we have almost all domains of human endeavour covered, from broadcasting to theatre to publishing to government to medicine to the visual arts. I’m confident that this broadly based team will combine to whoop some serious ass.

Daniel at silverorange assures me that there is still room for additional teams to enter at this late hour; full details on the tournament website.