The Inter-Library Loan — wherein your local library obtains for you, usually at no cost, a book not in their local collection from another library, often one very far away — is the great secret of the book world. I have many friends — mostly librarians, I must admit — who are diehard borrowers of books using this system. And many more friends who have never ordered a book by Inter-Library Loan, never even considered it.

I’ve always found the online form for Inter-Library Loan on Prince Edward Island to be needlessly complex, and I’ve never got my library card handy to enter its number when required.

So I created a my own Inter-Library Loan Request Form. The form is simpler, and smarter — it will remember your personal details (using cookies) so that once you’ve entered them once, you don’t need to do it every time. Otherwise, it simply submits the information to the Provincial Library Service using the same mechanisms, and then the helpful library folks take over.

I’ve got two ILL books on the go right now. The first, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, came from Halifax. I picked up the second, Reporting Back: Notes on Journalism today; it came from British Columbia.

If you’ve never used the ILL system before, and you’re a reader, I encourage you to try the system out. I welcome comments on the design and function of the form, and on the books you read as a result.

If you’re interested in taking things one step further, read about the follow-up project, ISBN to Inter-Library Loan on the Reinvented Labs website.

Following from my simple Inter-Library Loan Request Form for Prince Edward Island, I created a JavaScript “bookmarklet,” modelled on LibraryLookup by Jon Udell, that lets you link directly from an Amazon.com (or Amazon.ca or, indeed, any of the book-related websites supported by LibraryLookup) book details page to a PEI Inter-Library Loan Request form, pre-filled in for that item.

You can use this in conjuction with the LibraryLookup tool for the Provincial Library Service Catalogue to order books by Inter-Library Loan that aren’t available locally.

Here’s the bookmarklet: ISBNtoILL.

Drag that link onto your browser’s toolbar. Then whenever you’re using Amazon.com, or another book-related website where the ISBN is in the current URL, click the link to load an Inter-Library Loan request form.

This system works by taking the ISBN from the URL (using the mechanism from LibraryLookup), passing the ISBN to Amazon.com using their SOAP API to get the author, title, publisher and date details, and then simply creating a regular HTML web form pre-filled with this information. When the form is submitted, the actual processing of the ILL request is done by the Provincial Library Service’s server.

We ate lunch at the new restaurant Out of Africa this afternoon. It’s located on the University Ave. strip in Charlottetown, right across from Swiss Chalet. The food was very good: I had a couple of vegetarian samosas — similar in form to those at The Noodle House, but much spicier — and a plate of fried rice with nicely spiced vegetables. Catherine had the same, and also had the goat currie, which she was was equally tasty, although very spicy. We were given a couple of pieces of banana cake for free, which was a nice way to finish the meal off.

Staff were very friendly and accommodating. Decor was uninspiring — basically of the “1970s plywood lunch bar in Smooth Rock Falls” school of architecture, but it was clean and well set up.

We’ll be back for sure.

When I lived in Peterborough, there was a live improvised soap opera presented every Friday evening called “East City” (named after the neighbourhood of the same name). The soap opera revolved around a fictional family named “the Dunsfords” and drew upon the acting talent of a revolving stable of local and national actors. At its worst it was boring and fluffy; at its best it was some of the most wild, synergistic theatre I’ve ever had the privilege to witness.

That the fictional family was called the Dunsfords makes the fact that Cynthia Dunsford, who is Cynthia Dunsford in real life, is also, in a fictional sense, Parkdale Doris. The fiction/non-fiction line is swooshing all around and I can’t keep anything straight.

In any case, Cynthia has a weblog, which I found only because it linked back here. Although we’ve never met, I think we share an overlapping ironic sensibility.

Which reminds me: I caught the tail end of a piece on CBC Main Street about a similar improvised soap opera starting up Monday at the Arts Guild — can anyone fill in the details, as I missed most of them…

After three days of rain in Quebec City, we returned to the following forecast for Charlottetown:

<shameless plug>Forecast is from The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which has a handy customizable 5-day forecast on its front page.</shameless plug>

Blogger, author, and filmmaker, Ian Williams is getting married on Saturday to filmmaker Tessa Blake. Best wishes.

It’s raining. It’s the first week of August. It’s PEI. Result: streets clogged with grumpy, soggy people who don’t really know where they’re going. Scene is set for mass grumpysteria.

Driving through New Brunswick, I found that my digital cell phone (a Nokia 3285 from Island Tel/Aliant) wouldn’t switch back to digital mode after automatically switching to analog mode in an analog-only area. I phoned Aliant in New Brunswick, and they told me my phone was probably broken and that I should drop in to the phone centre upon my return.

So I did, this afternoon. At 3:00 p.m. there was one clerk available, and two people in line. I sat down. Waited 15 minutes. The line didn’t move. The next person in line asked us all how long we’d been there, and I learned that the person in front of me had been there for 40 minutes already. Nobody at Island Tel/Aliant seemed particularly concerned, or even mindful of the problem.

I excused myself and ducked into the phone booth across the hall and called 611 (formerly the repair number for Island Tel, now repurposed as the Mobility phone number). The clerk there told me that I should go next door to the “mobility shop.” This is an office located in a temporary-looking building next door that used to act as a sort of parallel cell phone universe in the old days; I didn’t know they were still around. I hiked over there, and the man behind the desk told me that the behaviour of my cell phone was “normal” — in other words, for some crazy reason my phone, once in analog mode, has to be manually switched back into digital mode by either turning it off, or by chanting a special series of menu commands. The craziness of this seemed lost on the technician, and I went on my merry way.

Next stop, TD Canada Trust, to deposit a pay cheque for my brother Johnny. I decided that, since I was headed out towards the Charlottetown Mall anyway, I would stop by the Wal-Mart branch of the bank. So I fought my way out North River Road, found a parking space, waded in through the rain to the teller’s desk. Only to be told that “this is an in-store branch, we don’t offer any teller services here.” Which begs the question, what does the branch do? In any case, I headed back into the crowded rainy streets, thinking the world was plotting against me.

Up the hill to Future Shop, thinking I might exorcise my frustrations with Island Tel/Aliant by jumping shop to Rogers or Telus. Behind the cell phone counter was a pleasant but knowledge-free saleskid who, despite thrashing around from computer to computer, was unable to do anything more than pull a print-out from the Telus website, and tell me that although they have a complete display of Rogers GSM phones, they won’t actually sell them because Rogers service on PEI is so bad. Sensing that I should get out while the getting was good, I took my printout and headed home.

More crazy traffic. Stopped at Tim Horton’s to get a [rare, this summer] Iced Cappucinno, and received the usual stellar Murphy Group customer service — probably less than 20 seconds from order to driving out of the parking lot. Proof, at least, that there’s still some hope for service, even if only for caffeine.

Rimouski, contrary to popular belief (such as it is), is actually quite a nice town. Stunning waterfront. Wonderful downtown museum in an old church lovingly renovated. Great collection of restaurants (Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, Sushi Bar, etc.). There is, of course, for most Islanders (or anyone else), not reason to “pass through” Rimouski, so I expect it gets far less tourist visitation than it rightly deserves.

That I was able, with 5 minutes of driving around, to find an open WiFi access point in Rimouski suggests to me that WiFi is now very close to “available everywhere.” I didn’t have it in me to drive around in the foggy rain of Levis tonight (which is where we are now), so I’m dialed in to my emergency Earthlink account. Boy is the Internet ever a horrible place to be at 24,000 bps.

Our weekend gone mad will see us in Quebec City until Thursday, followed by a mad dash back to the Island to pick up where our life left off.

I am in Rimouski. A crazy weekend gone wild. New Brunswick is very big. Went to the Brussel Sprout festival in Rogersville yesterday and saw the strongman competition. Today tried to swim in Lake Matapedia, but the rocks got the better of our feet. Oliver is getting a good survey course in “playgrounds of eastern Canada.” As I type this I’m huddled up in my Jetta stealing WiFi from a unwitting civilian. Or it might be the VIA station across the street; Tomorrow, on to Quebec City, Catherine’s longtime dream. Back on the Island when the fun runs out.

I’ve been a fulltime Mac user for seven months now. How quickly we forget. I’ve spent most of today wrangling with a Windows machine, a replacement for a 7 year old server that runs one half of the Vacancy Information Service.

Now I’m not trying to do anything unusual here, not trying to make the computer speak Thai, or interface with a nuclear reactor. I just want to install Windows NT, update NT with various security patches to bring it up to date, and install a couple of applications.

Wow.

First, Windows NT Workstation comes with Internet Explorer version 2, perhaps least least compatible web browser ever made. You would think that Microsoft itself would endeavour to tender at least some offer of backwards compatibility to allow people still saddled with this browser to upgrade. But no. Try visiting the Windows or Internet Explorer pages with Explorer Version 2, and you get a morass of HTML and JavaScript verbiage thrown at you, with no clear method to download an upgrade.

Logical next step was to use Internet Explorer to download Mozilla. This went fine, but post-installation Mozilla refused to run, throwing a clasically cryptic Windows error message that meant absolutely nothing.

Same thing happened with Mozilla Firebird.

I suspect that the problem were simply a result of out of date operating system components. Which I could download using Windows Update. Which I could use if I had a more modern version of Internet Explorer.

I won’t bore you all with the rest of the day’s activities. Suffice to say that it pretty much continued like this. Punctuated by the usual “the software you have installed requires that you reboot your computer.” I think I’ve rebooted about 26 times now.

Still at it…

Tomorrow, luck holding, this machine goes into operation and I go back to my Mac.