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.

Two new Island blogs, one from Cynthia Dunsford and the other from Rob MacDonald use the Blog*Spot system. These blogs are “paid for” with automatic Google text ads running in a banner across the top.

I was interested to note, this evening, the targetting of the ads to each blogs’ content.

Cynthia’s ads: “Fuss - High Heels Shop exkl. italienische High Heels Pumps Schuhe u. Stiefel - Größe 34 bis 46” and “Feet Love Gurkees Sandals Rope, washable, floatable, 8 colors $19.95 Safe Quick orders since 1997.”

Rob’s ads: “Beer Can World Make some money! I always pay top dollar for old beer cans. Toll Free.” and “Liburdi Dimetrics - Orbital / Tube / Pipe Welding Lathes, Seamers & Positioners.”

Surely this is the shape of advertising things to come?

When God was handing out girlfriends, I had the luck not only of getting a smart and beautiful one, but also one who would happily and willingly go to movies like S.W.A.T.. And even enjoy it. And analyze it afterwards on the way home. I’m lucky.

Because Catherine grew up on a farm in rural Eastern Ontario, and because her family didn’t pick up U.S. television stations, not only had she never seen the mid-1970s S.W.A.T. television series, but she had no idea of the meaning of the term. Like my grandmother, who when we took her to see the movie Hackers was relieved, when it was over, to find that it wasn’t a horror movie where people got chopped into bits, Catherine thought that “swat” was about a giant fly. Or a giant flyswatter.

We figured, in the end, even if the movie stunk, she would come away having learned something.

This movie season has seen a lot of mediocre action movies. The Italian Job was perhaps the most hyped and the most disappointing. I’m happy to report that, while not a great work of art, S.W.A.T. is a cut above the rest, and is an enjoyable night out at the movies if what you’re looking for is diversion, not uplift.

If you are familiar at all with the television series S.W.A.T., you can pretty well imagine most of the setups in the movie. That said, the plot has some interesting, if less-than-subtle twists, and the central premise is an interesting one.BR>

There are two very interesting things about the movie for me beyond all this.

First is that it was directed by Clark Johnson, an almost-Canadian (he is Molly Johnson’s sister) who I’d known previously only from his work on the early-1990s CTV drama E.N.G. and the late-1990s television version of Homicide: Life on the Street. I enjoyed him in both roles (they were similar — the “disaffected witty tough with a soft side”). Apparently he’s a director now, and S.W.A.T. is his first feature after a decade of television work. He’s good at it, and I suspect that we’ll see more of him.

The second interesting thing about S.W.A.T. (warning: plot spoiler coming up) is that one of the plot points involves the liberation by force of an international thug by a rag-tag crew of street gangs, well equipped with rocket launchers and 18 wheelers as weapons. Their motivation, $100 million offered by their prey for his release, is enough to get them working together as a well-oiled machine. This is interesting because you gotta figure that there are enough disaffected American tough guys with smarts and access to resources that the notion of getting better organized and making some serious inroads is inevitable, especially now that the universe of what one can use as a weapon has expanded beyond the traditional. Johnson’s movie shows what’s possible; you fill in the rest.

Catherine and I ended up at S.W.A.T., by the way, because we just couldn’t bring ourselves to see a movie in Mandarin with English subtitles even if Joe Sherman said it was good. And on a Labor Day weekend, in downtown Charlottetown, if you don’t want to go out for a drink well, what else is there to do?

I should add, for completeness, that we began the evening at The Churchill Arms (nee The Harp and Thistle). Catherine is a regular and enthusiastic customer; I am on record as been morally opposed to their cuisine. We had an excellent meal (I had the chicken korma, Catherine the chicken madras), served by top-flight wait staff, in a pleasant, smoke-free environment. It doesn’t get any better than that, and if this keeps up I’m going to have to take back my earlier unkind words.

Let me just say, for the record, and to preserve my curmudgeon street cred, that the so-called “Old Market Square Farmers’ Market” this morning at Confederation Landing Park, part of the Festival of the Fathers was the sorriest excuse for a farmer’s market I’ve ever seen.

By my rough estimation, there was one actual farmer in attendance selling actual farm produce. Otherwise the tent was filled with sad and tired looking craftspeople, a couple of authors, and an oddly-placed demonstration of metal wall unit systems.

If our Victorian ancestors shopped at markets like this they would be dead from starvation, but would be well equipped with knick-knacks and tole-painted bouys.

While I’m hardly an advocate for waterfront partying down, I must say that the whole Festival of the Fathers schedule is rather anemic.

Of the 70 events nominally a “part of the festival,” I count only 20 that aren’t simply regularly scheduled activities, like the tours of Great George Street, that we’re to be fooled into thinking are a Big Festival Deal. And that’s counting such “let’s really stretch this out” events as “Sun Protection - Get your FREE sunscreen sample!” and $20 brunches at the Delta.

I shudder to think what eager Labor Day holiday makers from away would think of Charlottetown if they decided to build a vacation around this sorry excuse for a festival.

Charlottetown’s summer tourism season is now bracketed by two tourismocractically programmed events, one a wild orgy of rockin’ out for the young drunk set, the other, perhaps because all the money got spent on building Big Fences for the former, a sort of “trick festival” where the goal seems to be to attract tourists to an agglomeration of events that were happening anyway.

Can’t we do any better than this?