After running the Yankee webservers on variants of Apache version 1 for many, many years, we finally made the leap to Apache version 2 today. The transition was seamless, and the load on the system is significantly less post-upgrade.

My anarchist landlords upstairs have launched a project to consolidate their individual DVD libraries into a central DVD archive, from which they each may borrow freely. And they’ve invited me to participate.

This meant that I had to actually look at what DVDs I own.

To begin with, as the son of a librarian, I am genetically not predisposed towards media asset ownership: the idea of buying a DVD is foreign to me, and so it’s only in the rarest of cases that I do so.

What I’ve found, alas, might be too embarassing to contribute to the hipster archive upstairs:

• Heaven Can Wait
• Roman Holiday
• Sabrina
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s
• Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me
• Utopia

Not exactly chocked full of hard-edged hipsterism, although you must say there is interesting variety, albeit with an emphasis on Audrey Hepburn films.

Now that my colleagues upstairs have gone reviewing crazy, I’m feeling the pressure to keep up. As such, reading this stroller review prompts me to sing the praises of the Maclaren Volo, a very portable travel stroller.

A travel stroller is one of the most valuable pieces of equipment you can take with you when travelling with young children. When we were in Thailand two years ago, we took a Kelty backpack to carry Oliver on our backs, a selection based on our assumption that a stroller wouldn’t work well in the rough and tumble world of Bangkok and environs. It was a bad choice: we completely underestimated the effect that the heat of Bangkok (30 degrees C when it was cool) would have on us (carrying) and Oliver (confined inside a hot backpack). Within a couple of days we had set the Kelty carrier aside, and traded it in for a travel stroller borrowed from a friend.

When we returned home, we realized that we needed a travel stroller of our own. The problem with most travel or “umbrella” strollers — i.e. the kind that it’s easy to find locally at Zellers or Walmart — is that although they fold up to be quite small, they’re very uncomfortable for the kid that has to sit in them because the unfolded seat is too small, and too low-slung. This type of stroller doesn’t tend to hold up well either, especially when travelling hard (i.e. being flung into airplane holds, etc.).

After doing a lot of web research, it seemed that the Maclaren Volo was what we were looking for, and when we were in Seattle on the way to Johnny and Jodi’s wedding, we found a dealer with a good selection, and bought one.

We have not been disappointed. The Volo has served us well, both on local car trips to Halifax and Moncton, where it folds up nicely into the car’s trunk, and on a three week trip to Europe last spring.

Good points:

• It’s very tough: we’ve flung it around all over the place, and it has never suffered for it. The wheels haven’t worn out or broken off, which is something that’s happened to every other stroller we’ve owned.
• It’s very light: as light or lighter as a cheaper umbrella strollers, and easy to sling over your back with the included carrying strap, when you need to lug it folded up.
• It’s comfortable: perhaps most important! The unfolding mechanism creates a seat that’s much less “sunken,” so the child’s bum doesn’t contort downwards. Oliver has happily spent many hours in the Volo, and has never complained. The mesh fabric breathes well, so there’s less opportunity for kids to get hot and sweaty.
• Over the lap and over the shoulder straps means kid is less likely to fall out, even when going up and down escalators, or being carried up stairs.
• It folds up quickly, and you only need one hand to do so: see this video on Maclaren’s website for a demonstration.
• Lots of underseat storage: when we were in Spain, lugging two large backpacks, a car seat, and Oliver, we could stick Oliver in the stroller, one of the backpacks under Oliver, the car seat on one of our backs and the big backpack on the other’s back. We weren’t nimble, but we could navigate. You can stash an incredible amount of stuff there.

The only downside we’ve found is that it’s not a cheap purchase. With accessories (a rain cover, a shade cover, and a padded seat, all removeable), we paid about $175 Canadian for stroller; you can buy a cheap umbrella stroller for $30 at Walmart. That said, you’ll probably have to buy 3 or 4 cheap umbrella strollers to equal the lifetime of the Volo, and you’ll have a much less comfortable kid if you go that route.

You probably wouldn’t want to use the Volo as your around-town everyday stroller (unless you’re an always-traveling nomad family): it’s missing cup holders, you can’t recline the seat to let your kid sleep, and it doesn’t have any sort of shock-absorbers, so kids feel every bump in the sidewalk. It’s also not well-suited to winter use because of the mesh seat (although you can mitigate this somewhat with the padded seat accessory).

But if you’re looking for a rugged, compact, comfortable stroller to tour the world with, this is the best we’ve found.

Alert: I am in the midst of consuming an iced café mocha. Anything I write here for the next 8 hours should be read with that in mind.

As I write this by cover of darkness, sequestered here in my office, the entire Island is without power. CBC Radio had a brief announcement about this on the 10:00 a.m. news, and then went on with regular programming, presumably based on the assumption that we Islanders would rather be lulled to sleep by Shelagh Rogers than informed about a power calamity. Fortunately, due the good offices of my powerful landlords, the Reinvented server still has power, and is humming along one floor up. Not that it has anywhere to go: our upstream Internet is dark, so I’m writing to an audience of no more than one.

There seems to be a lot of siren traffic around the city: perhaps people are trapped inside elevators, or have tried to use propane furnaces to brew coffee? On the way here in my car, intersections were well-behaved, and everyone was observing the 4-way stop rules one is supposed to observe when traffic lights are out (I know this because CHTN told me so).

I made a horrible discovery this morning, courtesy of the same CHTN: I am now a candidate for “golden oldies” radio. I always thought of CHTN as a bastion of music by groups with names like The Platters, and The Rondelles, with little bits of Elvis for effect. But CHTN now plays Bruce Cockburn and the Doobie Brothers: the same music I listened to with the crystal set under my pillow on CKOC Hamilton thirty years ago. Thank goodness nobody else, especially the hipsters upstairs, can read this; who knows what mocking might result.

I’m off to a meeting uptown. I imagine it will be at least supper time before the full-fledged looting begins, and perhaps Friday before we have to arm ourselves. Stay tuned.

Update: the power came on 30 seconds after the above was posted.

I love this fakeisthenewreal.com website. It may qualify as the first truly interesting website I’ve seen in years.

It says here (but oddly not here) that Sam Roberts is playing the Festival of Lights on July 2, 2004 here in Charlottetown.

Thanks to our undercover operatives on the west coast for digging this up.

As far as I know, I only learned who Jessica Steen was about 5 minutes ago. I was looking for information on the ill-fated CBC sitcom Hangin’ In. Jessica appeared in one episode of the series, and she showed up in my search.

Reading her filmography I have become convinced that she might be the classic Canadian actor; among other things, she has appeared in:

• The Uncle Bobby Show
• SCTV
• A Swiss Chalet commercial
• The Littlest Hobo
• Night Heat
• An Eatons commercial
• John and the Missus
• Street Legal
• Due South

In other words, save The Beachcombers, she has appeared in every significant piece of Canadian cultural output in the last 25 years. And she’s only an year older than I am!

Recently she has gone on to fame and fortune in the U.S., appearing in episodes of The Practice, Navy NCIS, and ER. The role you might recognize her most from is the Michael Richards love interest from the 1997 movie Trial and Error.

I’m following Rob’s lead:

On our way to the hotel, I looked out the taxi window as wonderingly as though we had just landed on another planet.

It’s from Give Me the World by Leila Hadley, a delightful book about a trip across Asia and Europe by Hadley and her six-year-old son Kippy in 1951.

To play along yourself:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Oliver and I went to the Pinch Penny Fair on Saturday (an event my mouth insists on calling the Pench Pinny Fair).

In amongst the tattered cast-offs of the cultural intelligentsia — toasters, Thomas the Tank Engine books, plants, grappling hooks, PDP-11 microcomputers — were a couple of boxes of 33-1/2 RPM long play records.

And in one of those boxes I found a collection of albums that could have well been my own collection, circa 1987. It included Solitude Standing from Suzanne Vega, Love Over and Over from Kate & Anna McGarrigle, and even a couple of Loggins and Messina albums. Freaky.

If this happens to have been your record collection, kudos on your fine taste.