The Guardian reports in today’s edition that there will be an open house on the set of Rose and the Snake in Rock Barra this Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. There’s a nominal admission fee, with proceeds to charity. We’ll be there.

Nothing gets Islanders going like a good they left the Island off their map story. This is at least the second one of the season. Maybe we should start publishing maps without the rest of Canada on them.

Bob at the Brackley Drive-in is having a great triple bill for his closing weekend of the season, Sept. 12 and 13: Freaky Friday, Pirates Of The Caribbean and, best of all, Open Range, which Johnny and I saw in Boston last month and really enjoyed.

Of course staying up for Open Range will be something of a task, but it’s worth it.

Domain name service, or DNS, is the bane of my digital existence.

For those of you lucky enough to exist outside the technical sphere, DNS is the mechanism by which, when you type www.reinvented.net into your web browser, this name gets translated into a numeric address (aka “IP address”) — in this case 24.222.26.154 — thus allowing your number-obsessed computer to obtain the necessary information over the Internet from this address and return it to you.

When DNS service works, which is most of the time, it does a splendid job. A DNS server just quietly sits there all day accepting requests and spitting back responses.

When DNS service doesn’t work the effects are rather dramatic, as without the ability to translate name into number, webservers and mailservers and their kin appear to be effectively “off the air” to the rest of the Internet.

When I switched the connection here at Reinvented from Aliant to ISN yesterday, the IP addresses of all the machines on our network had to change as well (there’s no “number portability” on the Internet — when you switch providers you generally switch IP address blocks).

Switching IP addresses requires, as you might expect, changing the DNS configuration to follow. And that’s what, in the middle of a hectic day, I did yesterday.

Now at its heart the DNS system is simple and elegant. But it’s also something that is relatively unforgiving of errors. And completely unforgiving of stupidity.

Unfortunately, I made several errors, some of them stupid, most of them small things, like switching a 24 for a 22 (you wouldn’t believe how confusing typing the number 24.222.26.154 a dozen times is, and how often it goes through the fingers 22.222.26.154!).

That, combined with a TTL — a “hey, don’t both refreshing this information for X amount of time” — of 24 hours that I should have lowered in anticipation of the switch, meant that this website, and my email, were invisible for much of the last 24 hours.

Nobody to blame but myself for this one.

I know that things are getting back to normal now that the spam is starting to flow again.

While it was frustrating to be offline, it was oddly peaceful to not have the usual email torrent flowing in.

Continue on amongst yourselves…

Here’s an email we sent to Reinvented’s web hosting customers this afternoon:

Just a note to let you know, as a web-hosting customer of Reinvented Inc., of a change we made today to our Internet service.

For the last 3 years your website has been hosted on our servers connected to Island Tel “Advanced” Solutions’ network. Unfortunately some of the time their “solutions” have been slightly less than “advanced,” and although we’ve managed to keep things humming about 98% of the time, that 2% of the time when problems have cropped up we’ve been very frustrated with the poor service we’ve received from Island Tel, and as Island Tel has morphed into Aliant, and moved their technical support offshore to Moncton, things have only gotten worse.

I’m happy to report that as of this afternoon, our servers are now connected to Island Services Network’s network. ISN is a local company, based in Charlottetown, and is the Island’s oldest Internet provider. We’ve always found their customer service to be a cut above the rest, and have long-standing business relationships with their key people.

We don’t expect the new setup to be perfect, but we do expect the response to problems from ISN to be faster and more intelligent. Which is only a good thing for you and for us.

I was ISN’s first customer; it’s good to be back.

Today’s the actual day we’re making the big de-Aliant-ification here at Reinvented World HQ. The switch, because it involves some DNS magic, might take this site, and @reinvented.net and @rukavina.net email, offline for some until new DNS information propogates. Have patience. See you on the other side.

Update at 4:35 ADT - We’ve switched everything over, and all seems to be operating properly. DNS will take a while to worm its way around.

I was waiting in line for my Strawberry Sunrise yesterday down at COWS at Peakes Key here in Charlottetown when I looked up and saw “since 1983” painted on the railings. Which means that our local ice creamery has just finished its 20th season of serving ice cream.

COWS, like any Island institution, has its supporters and its naysayers. But there’s no doubting that the quality of the ice cream we Islanders have access to as a result of COWS far outstrips anything else available otherwise. To say nothing of the hundreds if not thousands of students that COWS has given summer employment to, and the year-round employment from their mail order business.

Scott Linkletter, who dreamed all this up and has kept it going all these years, is too modest to crow about achievements like this, but he and his staff deserve a hearty congratulations from all of us.

Every time there’s a big increase in price of gasoline scheduled, we inevitably hear stories of “long lines at the pump.”

Now there’s no debating that an increase in the price from 70 to 77 cents a litre is a big jump. But for a car with a 40 litre tank, that’s an increase of $2.80 on the cost of a tank. Surely making a special point of driving out to a gas station and standing in line costs more than $2.80, doesn’t it? Even if you pay yourself the minimum wage, that’s about 20 minutes of time. To say nothing of the (admitedly small) amount of gas used to get to the gas station.

Perhaps the feeling of “sticking it to the man” by getting in under the wire is too attractive to pass up?

The Globe and Mail reports that Princess Anne is visiting Kingston, Ontario in her position as:

Colonel-in-Chief of the Canadian Forces Communications and Electronics Branch, the group of 2,000 troops responsible for setting up phone lines, Internet and wireless communication.

Lest we readers mistakenly think that this position actually involves actual setting up of actual phone, Internet and wireless communications, the story continues:

The princess’s position is ceremonial.

Later in the story we get to hear the Princess’ thoughts on the importance of military communications:

“One of the things people forget — in peace as well as in war — is that communications stay the same,” she said. “It’s something that has to be continually practiced.”

Huh?

The great success of Okeedokee, the company that Dave Moses and I started in the heady dotcom bubble days is the Prince Edward Island Vacancy Service, a project that we continue to maintain, and take pride in because it works, and serves a useful purpose (finding a place to stay) for people in a pinch (when they can’t find a place to stay).

In the second year of the service, Bruce Garrity came on board as Tourism PEI’s in-kind contribution to the project, and through Bruce’s tenacity the number of tourism operators using the service grew considerably.

Anyone who’s worked with Bruce knows that he’s one of the nicest guys you’ll ever come across — as ready to sit and chat about particle physics or tree pollen runoff as he is to get down to the business at hand.

Which is not to say that working hand in hand with Bruce didn’t have its challenges, mostly computer-related. Bruce, you see, was not raised in the digital age, and so the “okay, just record your voice, save it as a uLaw-format file, and upload to the server”-like tasks we presented him with were not second-nature. Or third or fourth-nature. As the main technical point-man for the project, I bore the brunt of dragging Bruce into the twenty-first century, and this involved a lot of early morning telephone calls.

And I’m not a morning person, as many can attest.

Suffice to say that there were many times that I used Bruce’s name in vain.

So it gives me particular pleasure to see Bruce falling off the end of a boat in a manner not unlike I might have imagined during the “is that a double click or a single click?” days.

Of course he’s not really falling off the end of a boat, he’s parasailing in New London as part of the pre-wedding shindig that his son Steven documented extensively.

My colleague from Yankee, Lisa Traffie, spoke very highly of the parasailing at The Pier — she went twice when she was here in July. We tried to organize an outing during my own family shindig a couple of weeks ago, but alas the wind was too high, and all parasailing was cancelled for the day we had set aside.

The Garritys make it look so much fun that I might have to take a day off work this fall before they shut down and see what I can see.