2:00 a.m. - Finish up work for the night, mostly making small last-minute changes to the system that will tally the votes in today’s election. When I finish, I figure, being up, I might as well go out and see what’s happening outside, so I take a brief drive around the city: not much to see other than driving rain and curious onlookers.

2:30 a.m. - Return home and turn on CBC Radio to see if there’s any news from Halifax; find out that they’ve been hit pretty hard over there — ferry terminal roof gone, bridges closed, apartments evacuated. Catherine gets up with an awful barometric headache, and decides to sleep in Oliver’s bed just in case a tree falls on him. I try and get to sleep.

3:00 a.m. - Wind really picks up. I tune into the CBC again and hear that the “eye” is due to pass over Charlottetown in about 20 minutes. Andrew Sprague is on the phone to CBC Halifax talking about the situation on the ground here; right in the middle of his piece the power goes out and he disappears for a couple of seconds until the CBC’s backup power kicks in.

3:15 a.m. - Wind whistling through the front door so loud that it’s impossible to sleep.

3:45 a.m. - I finally manage to get to sleep, and sleep pretty solidly through the night (or at least what remains of it).

8:45 a.m. - Catherine and Oliver wake me up and I’m not sure where I am and what’s happened. Look out the back window and see a large tree in Angus and Karen’s back yard is down, and then that the tree in our back corner is split in half. Leaves all over the place. We look out the front window and see that the last remaining elm on Richmond Street is looking well-pruned. Power is out.

8:49 a.m. - Small discussion with Catherine about whether it’s possible to have a shower when the power is out. Given the day to come, I decide to risk it. Shower goes well.

9:00 a.m. - Although natural inclination is to jump right into things, I decide to eat breakfast: a bowl of cereal with blueberries and a glass of juice. Catherine digs out Eunice Reid’s old black rotary dial phone — the modern cordless phones don’t, of course, work without power. Brother Steve phones on his cell while on his walk to work at the CBC in Montreal.

9:10 a.m. - Meet up with Karen Rose, our new neighbour, surveying the damage next door. Find out from her that Maritime Electric expects power to be out for the day (Karen has the inside line on this, being married to Angus Orford, Maritime Electric’s spokesman. Karen says Angus has been up all night). See Norma Palmer, from Elections PEI, walking up the street on a mission.

9:15 a.m. - Decide to walk over to Elections PEI to see if they can use any help. Run into Gary on the way, and he tells me about Connaught Square (aka Jail Square) losing most of its trees, and the marina being creamed.

9:20 a.m. - Arrive at Elections PEI and find Merrill sitting in the dark, talking on the phone. Review the situation, ask him if there’s anything I can do, as I’ve got no power and thus no relevance otherwise. Norma arrives back, soaked. It starts to rain.

9:25 a.m. - Merrill sends me to deliver a message on foot to Bobby Macmillan and Richard Brown’s headquarters because they’re not answering their phones: the Civic Centre has been declared dangerous, and three polls in District 12 have been moved to Holland College.

9:30 a.m. - Torrential rain continues. I stop by the house to get a rain coat. Walk down Richmond Street to Richard’s office and find a tree across the street and power lines down. Jonah Deacon, Richard’s campaign manager, talks me through and I give him the message.

9:35 a.m. - Walk up Hillsborough St. to Bobby Macmillan’s headquarters and deliver the message to one of his people — she already knew, of course. Trees down all over the place, and many streets blocked off (which doesn’t appear to stop people from driving down them, around the barricades).

9:45 a.m. - Back home to change my pants — soaked in the rain. Realize that I would never make it in a life at sea. Catherine and Oliver okay; Emily has arrived for a previously scheduled babysitting appointment; no stopping that woman!

9:50 a.m. - Back to Elections PEI to find only Barb in the office and a sign on the door saying they’ve moved to the Confederation Centre. Barb tells me that the Centre has emergency power, and the phones have been forwarded.

9:55 a.m. - Over to the Confederation Centre. Find it oddly pleasant to be somewhere with power. Find Merrill and George in the Lecture Theatre on the phone. Review the situation: decide there’s no point trying to get the website working, as nobody will have power anyway.

10:05 a.m. - Elections Central is starting to get calls from electors looking to find where to vote. Normally the website would make this an easy civic address lookup away, but the website is down with no power. Realize that I have the raw materials to rig something up, especially as Confederation Centre has working Internet access.

10:10 a.m. - Return home to retrieve my laptop, keyboard, and CD containing PEI civic address data.

10:25 a.m. - Set up at the Confederation Centre. Get connected to the Internet. Download and install MySQL for my laptop. Dump the civic address data into a MySQL database, and rig up a small command line application to allow a civic address to be entered and a district and poll to be returned. Start answering questions that come in on the phones.

10:30 a.m. - Talk to Kevin O’Brien on the phone and find out that ISN, which is scheduled to provide one half of the Internet feed for election night, actually has power, and that Kevin’s prepared to move mountains to get things working. Gordon Johnston, who’s handling the networking for event, arrives, and says he thinks he can patch together things to the point where we can get online, and run the back-end systems, if we can get a generator to 180 Richmond St., where the servers are housed.

10:45 a.m. - Merrill okays the generator, and George Macdonald, who has been seconded from Transportation and Public Works for the election period, makes a call to get a generator. It’s easy to forget that Government has things like generators available at times like this.

10:55 a.m. - Talk to Kevin O’Brien on the phone again. He offers to power up my own servers, here in the basement of 100 Prince St., using the generator built in to his Road Trek.

11:05 a.m. - Realize that DNS, as usual, is going to be the Achilles heel of any effort to get elections results online to the public: the primary servers are in my basement, without power, and the secondary servers are in the Government complex, without power. Start to look for DNS alternatives, and find that it’s impossible to move DNS servers without 24 to 48 hours notice. Contact my domain registrar in Edmonton to see if there’s any way around this.

11:15 a.m. - As a precautionary move, I sign up for DNS service from several third-party DNS providers.

11:25 a.m. - Call Kevin back: if he can get power to my basement, I can get my DNS servers up and running, and we should be back in business. Arrange to meet Kevin at my house.

11:27 a.m. - Hear from Gordon that the generator’s in place at 180 Richmond, and that power has been restored to the Elections PEI servers. Gordon’s also arranged to borrow power from CBC’s generator in the basement of Province House to let our dedicated fiber circuit to the Confederation Centre be lit, giving us the ability to update results from the Centre.

11:45 a.m. - Meet Kevin at my house. He goes off to gas up his van, and Catherine and I dig out the extension cords we’ve accumulated over the years (you can never have too much phone cord, to many extension cords, or too many lengths of garden hose, in my experience). Kevin returns, powers up his generator, and my basement has power. And, oddly enough, Internet service on the cable modem.

11:50 a.m. - The main Reinvented server is complaining about disk problems on reboot. Spend about 30 minutes in the basement, in the dark, with Kevin, holding down the ‘Y’ key as RedHat Linux fixes the disk problems. Reminds both Kevin and I of the times we used to spent in the basement of the Confederation Centre, back in the day, when ISN’s servers were based there.

12:10 p.m. - Disk still being fixed. Kevin takes off in my car to put out more fires.

12:45 p.m. - Merrill calls: they need my address looking up services. Leave Catherine in front of the server, and head back to Elections PEI. Start answering “where do I vote?” questions. Continue to work on the DNS problem.

1:25 p.m. - Get a call from Trinic, my domain registrar in Edmonton: they confirm that changing DNS servers requires action by CIRA in Ottawa, which can take up to 24 hours.

1:45 p.m. - The generator at 180 Richmond dies. I walk over to find Gordon looking exhausted after trying to restart it. George arrives and tries to get it started. No go. George calls for another generator.

2:00 p.m. - Gordon goes off to vote, and I meet with Merrill and Lowell and we decide to move the servers from 180 Richmond into the Confederation Centre where they can run the back-end results tabluation system; we’ll leave the Internet out of the picture until we’ve got that end of the system working.

2:05 p.m. - On a lark, I try to start the generator myself: it starts on the first pull. We have power! Take Merrill’s desk lamp and hook it up in the vault so we have enough light to navigate the servers out.

2:15 p.m. - Lowell and I wrestle the servers out of the second floor of the vault at 180 Richmond (lots of buildings in Charlottetown have vaults: how many have two floors!) and wheel them over to the Lecture Theatre.

2:35 p.m. - Servers up and running in the Lecture Theatre. Set up a small private network, and get my laptop, the IBM laptop that will be printing results, and the servers all talking to each other. Find that the laptop is missing drivers for the printer, but that Charlie Mackay, ever resourceful manager of Election Central, has brought the driver CD. Install the drivers. Print. Find that the printer (a leased HP LaserJet) will only print if you press and hold a big button on the front, which makes using it on Election Night inconvenient. Merrill volunteers to go for a walk and retrieve the CD for his LaserJet, which is in place as the backup printer.

3:00 p.m. - Gordon arrives and announces that he can get us on the Internet by patching the ISN connection at 180 Richmond St. through to the Lecture Theatre with a big piece of fiber and some borrowed generator power in Province House (where the CBC has a huge rented generator to power their televsion and radio setup there). Realize the DNS issue might make this a vain effort, but we forge on.

3:05 p.m. - New printer drivers installed on the laptop: Merrill’s printer prints like a dream.

3:10 p.m. - Food, liberated by Charlie from the CBC, arrives. Fears that the CBC pasta salad may be tainted arise. We’ve already started eating it. Sigh.

4:00 p.m. - Connection to ISN is in place. Wow! Talk to Catherine on the phone: my servers are alive and kicking. Try to hit my servers from the Confed Centre, but no deal. Walk over to 100 Prince to find myself without Internet access. Sigh again. Ride my bike back to the Confederation Centre.

4:05 p.m. - Talk to Kevin on the phone. He promises to do whatever he ca to get Eastlink to restore cable modem service. We talk about the possibility of moving my servers up to ISN, but realize that we can’t route my IP addresses, which are really Eastlink IP addresses, up to Kevin’s server room on Kent St. without help from Eastlink, which appears to be in short supply.

4:25 p.m. - People who will be answering the phones at Elections Central arrive for training, and place starts to hum. Carol Murphy and Teressa Richards, who will be running the results printing operation for the night, arrive, and we briefly run over things. Realize that one of the best decisions I ever participated in when I was working with Government was to hire Teressa and Carol.

4:35 p.m. - Run through some tests with the results tabulation system, and things look like they’re all working. The results system is a web-based application that runs on a pair of Linux servers. Results come in over the phone from Returning Officers, and are written down on sheets of paper, one sheet per poll. The sheets are then walked over to my station, where they’re entered into the web application, and stored in a MySQL database on the servers. Carol and Teressa’s workstation then uses another part of the application to print sheets, with changes highlighted since the last print, and these are then photocopied, given to the media, and finally, as a backup, entered into a Lotus spreadsheet. Leaving aside Lotus, it’s a completely open-source election!

5:15 p.m. - More testing.

6:00 p.m. - Calm before the storm: phone people have gone for dinner, along with Carol and Teressa. Grab another little bite to eat (more tainted salad). Merrill rides my bike around the room.

6:25 p.m. - Phone people have come back. Arrange to have Charles, Kevin’s technical man, set up electionspei.isn.net as a backup domain name. Gordon gets the domain name spread to the media, and talks to Nick Grant, who runs the Government webservers, about getting a link online once the Government computer room, which is still without power, comes back online.

6:45 p.m. - Gordon connects his laptop to the Confederation Centre’s Internet connection, and finds he can hit the public results page. So we’re live to the Internet, albeit in a slightly hidden out of the way corner.

7:00 p.m. - Polls close.

7:09 p.m. - First call comes in. Data entry. Everything works! First poll printed and to the media.

7:11 p.m. - Lowell volunteers to sit with me and read numbers and names to make the data entry go faster; this proves an invaluable help.

7:25 p.m. - The results are coming fast and furious now. Only one glitch encountered: somehow the names of a couple of the split polls — where one too-large poll is split alphabetically in half — got missed in the proofing process, so I manually update the database to change a couple of instances of “(A-L)” to “(A-M)”.

7:45 p.m. - In a trance-like data entry state. Numbers, numbers, numbers. Realize that if I try to interpret any of the numbers, I’ll lose focus, so even though every result is flowing through my fingers, I have no idea what’s actually happening with the election.

8:41 p.m. - A small lull. Lowell and I flip the browser over to the public page and see we’re at 323 of 336 polls, and the Liberals are leading in 5 seats, the NDP in 0, and the PCs in 22.

8:45 p.m. - Lull over.

9:05 p.m. - About 10 polls still to come in. Lowell and Merrill get on the phone to chase down the last results. Sea changes slightly: 4 Liberals, 23 PCs.

9:23 p.m. - Last poll arrives. 336 of 336 reporting.

9:25 p.m. - Take a brief break as the Lotus data entry is finished up. Take a call from the production man at The Guardian: we’re providing them with a data file of the results, and he’s anxious to know when it will hit their FTP site. Tell him it should be 20 minutes.

9:45 p.m. - Compare all the results for all polls in the web system with the numbers entered into the Lotus spreadsheets to make sure everything matches. Everything’s okay. Prepare the file for the Guardian. Realize the connection to ISN has gone down, most likely because they’ve shut off the generator at Province House. End up generating the Guardian file on one network, disconnecting, hooking up to the Confederation Centre Internet feed, and FTPing the file. Try to call the Guardian, but nobody’s home. Try another number. And another. Finally someone answers, and we confirm the upload.

10:10 p.m. - Realize we’ll need to update the www.gov.pe.ca site, which came back online sometime during the evening, with results, because the local Elections PEI servers will be offline tonight.

10:15 p.m. - Copy the relevant files to my laptop, and shut down Edward and Wallis, the Elections PEI servers. They’ve performed admirably and need a rest. Brush them down, feed them some oats.

10:20 p.m. - Realize I can’t actually update www.gov.pe.ca from the Lecture Theatre, because I’m outside the newly installed firewall there. Backup plan: go back to 180 Richmond and use the feed there. Lowell and Merrill and Gordon and I are the only ones left at Election Central. We pack up the gear and wheel it over to 180 Richmond. The guard at the back door tears a strip out of me for taking my bicycle into the Centre. I take a picture of Merrill and Lowell for posterity.

10:30 p.m. - Back at 180 Richmond, we find ourselves without a network. I hear Gordon’s car door slam, and manage to catch him before he leaves. Find out that the problem is as simple as plugging back in some things in the vault that were unplugged earlier in the day.

10:40 p.m. - Some fancy footwork in BBEdit to transform the web pages into shape for www.gov.pe.ca. Upload the files. Couple more changes. We’re done.

10:45 p.m. - Head home, laptop, rain coat, keyboard, and bicycle in hand. Catherine’s in one piece — still has a headache, alas — and Oliver is fast asleep. Find out the Brackley Drive-in was destroyed in the hurricane, along with the roof of the Charlottetown Driving Park, and most of the Charlottetown marina. No Internet at home still, so no excuse not to go to sleep.

10:55 p.m. - Getting ready for bed, I realize that I’ve missed most of the media coverage of both the hurricane and the election.

11:15 p.m. - Sleep, wonderful sleep.

A reminder to Islanders that it’s Election Day. You can find out where to vote; you have from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. to place your vote. Live election results will be available on the Elections PEI website this evening.

I have been a mostly-loyal viewer of ER since the very beginning. After watching tonight’s season opener, I have become convinced that they’ve now exhausted all possible “what could happen in an emergency room” plotlines.

While there are still mildly interesting, or at least diverting, “field trip” plots, like the African trip (that appears to have killed off the most significant Croat main character on primetime), the whole “electricity goes out / water main breaks / kids shoot kids / evil virus from away / really bad winter storm” story idea bin has been used up. And almost everyone has slept with, had an affair with, or had a crush on everyone else, suffered from a major drug, personal, physical or medical crisis, and had an attack of “what am I doing in medicine” conscience.

What’s left?

One day earlier, on ED, this is an important year because they’ve blown the “anticipating the main characters getting together” tension, and need to replace it with something compelling beyond “will their relationship work out?” Witty banter — and they have some of the wittiest witty banter, finely tuned almost exactly at my demographic — will only carry them so far.

I’ll tune in to both next week.

Hollywood mogul Dave Stewart joins the blogosphere. Welcome. (Thanks to Cynthia, who I had the good fortune to meet face-to-face this afternoon, for the pointer).

For those of you prone to such behaviours, I’ve modified the Blogroll OPML file (you can always find a link in the sidebar of this website under “Other Formats”) so that it will import directly into NetNewsWire. Note that there are several sites on my Blogroll that don’t support RSS, or that don’t support RSS auto-discovery, so they’ll end up as dud subscriptions; you can just delete them.

I suffered this week, for the first time in 23 years “in the business,” a hard drive crash on my desktop computer, rendering it useless, and in need of repair. That’s a pretty good record.

So, for now, I’m working on my laptop, which normally gets pulled into use only when I travel.

What’s amazed me is how much less dire a circumstance this is than I expected.

My email’s all stored on an IMAP server in the basement.

My address book, calendar, and bookmarks are stored in my .Mac account.

The Mac software I’ve purchased is mostly delivered electronically, and is easy to re-download and re-install if required.

The stuff of my work — scripts, programs, web pages, and the like — is all stored elsewhere, on servers that are backed up by others.

My desktop is obviously, in the end, really just a slightly souped terminal, and the data — which is what we used to think of as the reason for having a computer in the first place, is scattered around everywhere from my basement to Boston to New Hampshire to California.

If my desktop had crashed 10 years ago, I would have been out of commission for at least a week, if not longer. This week, after spending a frustrating 5 or 6 hours trying to diagnose and solve my desktop problem, I dropped it off at little mac shoppe, plugged in my laptop, and picked up where I left off.

Decentralization good. The network really is the computer.

Buttons aren’t what they used to be. Back in the day, any political campaign, radio station or pop culture phenomenon worth its salt would have a collection of buttons associated with it. No more. I don’t think, short of Family Literacy Day, a late holdout, I’ve seen a new button in years. If the Internet has killed a medium, I think it’s this one.

Pictured here are the remnants of my button collection, started in the mid-1970s and last added to in a serious way in 1984 when I covered the Liberal leadership convention for my local newspaper (this was the one where Chretien lost and Turner won — see the left side of the montage for Don Johnston, Mark MacGuigan, Eugene Whelan, John Munro and Chretien buttons, along with a runaway Rosemary Brown button from the NDP.)

Click on the image to order a Biggie Size version.

Other things you’ll notice: in the lower left corner there are some radio station buttons — CJJD (Hamilton), CHUM and CJRT (Toronto) and FM108 (Burlington); some technology buttons in the upper centre — I Adore My 64 was an ad slogan for the Commodore 64 computer; a good collection of pro-library and pro-water buttons, reflecting my parents’ vocations; several YMCA buttons in the lower-right; the Cardinal Tours buttons from the trip my grandmother and my brother Mike and I took to New York City in 1978; in the top-right a Ben Fernandez for President button (who was he?).

My favourite, and the reason for digging out the old button box, us is the button lower-centre, which is printed with only “This is my ZAP button” for reasons only know to history. I’m going to see if I can get copies of this made for the big Zap conference next month.

It is my secret love of button and badge culture that has to date prevented me from writing a snide, vitriolic piece about our DVA workers and their identification tags, worn morning, noon and night (seemingly) both in and out of DVA. But I’m not being snide nor vitriolic. So, goofy-looking tag-bearers, in the name of the Fonz, I salute you.

We’ve all done it: written an email that references “the attached file” and then forgotten to attach the attachment. Sometimes we realize this and send a second message, usually titled something like “I am an idiot!” with the attachment. Sometimes we don’t realize this, and get back a flurry of messages from our correspendents with subject lines like “You are an idiot!”.

When I was young and footloose and working at the Royal Ontario Museum translating FORTRAN programs into BASIC, and working, on the side, in Turbo Pascal, Gene Wilburn, the director of IT at the Museum, gave me a very useful programming trick: when you’re writing a program and have occasion (as one often does in Pascal) to use a curly bracket ({) which will later need to be closed, simply type, in advance, the closing bracket at the same time, and fill in the “middle” afterwards.

I’ve used this technique ever since, and it’s saved me a lot of hunting around trying to figure out where my mis-matched brackets are.

So in the spirit of Gene’s sage advice, I offer the following similar suggestion: when you are composing an email with an attachment, and you type the word “attached,” as you inevitably will, at that very second you should actually attach the file.

So the progression would go something like this:

Dear Bob,

I have attached

…and here you break and actually attach the file to the message, after which you continue…

the spreadsheet you requested.

Cheers,
Peter

Get into the habit of doing this, and you will never be called (or be forced to call yourself) an idiot again!

Apple’s Backup utility, which receives a lot of flack for requiring a .mac account to allow you to use it, even if you’re backing up to a local CD or DVD, is actually quite a useful and powerful tool.

I’m in the midst of recovering from a hard disk failure on my iMac, and I was able to back up everything important to a couple of DVDs before I lost total control of the beast.

Rather than backup up to some complicated, proprietary, compressed backup format that requires the original software to restore from, opening the DVD on my iBook reveals the files I backed up, in the original directory structure, ready for use.

Wonderful.

I have two machines, one connected to one ISP, the other connected to another ISP. Both machines have two Ethernet cards (aka NIC cards). I want to connect the two machines directly together so that traffic back and forth between them can go direct, rather than from one ISP to the other. How? Easy!

First, connect the second Ethernet card in each machine with a crossover cable. This is a regular Ethernet cable but for the fact that its “send” and “receive” wires are crossed over (this is an over-simplication, but it helps). When you go to the store to buy this cable, make sure you buy a crossover cable rather than a regular patch cable. As an alternative, you can plug both machines, using regular patch cables, into the same hub; the effect is the same.

Next, set up the network connection on the first machine’s second Ethernet card:

ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
route add -net 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 eth1

This assigns an IP address of 192.168.1.1 to the second Ethernet connection. This IP is of a special collection set aside for this “private” purpose; just don’t pick one at random!.

Next, do the same on the second machine:

ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
route add -net 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 eth1

Same deal here, but this machine gets an IP address of 192.168.1.2.

That’s it! At this point you should be able to ping 192.168.1.1 from 192.168.1.2 and vice versa.

I’ve just set up a couple of machines like this for polling day here on Prince Edward Island; both of them have gigabit Ethernet cards. You wouldn’t believe how fast files fly from one to the other!

I’m posting this here because most of what you’ll Google when searching for how to do this is instructions for connecting one machine to the Internet using a second machine’s existing Internet connection, and that’s not what this is about.

I’m assuming, by the way, that you’ve already handled getting the second Ethernet cards in each machine recognized and configured as eth1.