Oliver and I got a serious chance to take the new Prince St. School playground out for a ride tonight, just before dark. While it’s not as magical as the Elliot River Dream Park, it’s so, so much better than the rusty nail-type playground equipment it replaces as to seem pretty dreamy. The newly-laid sod on the field helps a lot too, although my jury is out on the choice of loose gravel for the “cushion to catch falling children” material — I much prefer the bark mulch in Cornwall, or the space-age bouncey rubber material we encountered in Spain (although it would probably crack and explode in the cold).

Nice to (finally) see a wheelchair accessible piece of play equipment too.

Oddly enough, it seems as once of the pieces is already in the shop for repair — we noticed that one of the wild wavy whales was missing tonight.

We call the playground the “Gary playground” after our friend Gary, who’s just bought a house across the street. Gary is already, I hope, preparing lunchtime menus for Oliver once he calls Prince St. School home.

Kudos to the people who put this project together, in memory of our neighbour on Hensley St. who tragically died last year. It’s a worthy memorial, I think.

First off, it has been over a decade since “floppy” disks have actually been “floppy,” and several more years since they were really floppy (the 8-inch version). Yet we continue to call them “floppy disks.” I think there was an effort to call them “diskettes” there somewhere. Maybe everyone calls them that now. I still called them “floppies.”

And today I was handed my first floppy disk in about 3 years. I was amazed to find that people still used them.

And, as a Mac user, I was unable to use it. Macs, you see, haven’t had floppies for quite some time, presumably an effect of Steve Jobs waking up one morning and decided they were irrelevant.

What to do? The election is in high gear, and I’ve got to get the mail-in ballot application on the Elections PEI website.

So, down to the basement to the Linux server called “dan” (after my grandfather). It has a floppy drive.

Drop into deep Zen-like state to recall the Linux method for manually mounting a floppy disk from the command line:

mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy -t msdos

That works. Copy the file to dan’s hard disk, then email it to myself. Floppy paradox solved.

The Council of Canadian reports that Leo Broderick, well known to readers of this website, is off to Cancun to be vigilant during World Trade Organisation meetings.

I remember when I got a small amount of ACOA funding from the late great Sandy Griswold back in 1994 to go to a conference in California. Sandy lamented that it would be much easier to get me funded to go to a conference in, say, Moncton, or even Michigan. California, though, had a pesky optics problem. My other problem was asking for too little — I think I needed $200 or something. He pushed things through though — I think I was funded under the Cooperation Agreement on Rural Economic Development or some such contraption.

Leo’s work in Cancun, noble and just though it may be, suffers from the same unavoidable optical problems. I’m sure that Leo and his colleagues, forthright as they are, are committed to having absolutely no fun at all in Mexico, despite the holiday makers surrounding them ;-)

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.