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?

I have several clients who have intranet applications running on servers that live behind a firewall. General there are firewall rules in place that allow me to access these servers via SSH (over port 22). But I need a way of using a web browser to test applications I’m developing on these servers.

Here’s a brief explanation of two ways I can do this, using Mac OS X on my end, and Linux on the remote end.

First, and easiest, is to use Apple’s new X11 server beta to use a browser running on the remote machine. To do this, I simply start up an X11 terminal client, use SSH to connect to the remote server, and then run Mozilla. To do this requires that X11 Forwarding be enabled on both the client and the server. On the OS X end, you need to uncomment the line ForwardX11 yes in the file /etc/ssh_config. On the remote end, make sure that the line X11Forwarding yes is uncommented in the file that’s probably located at sshd_config. Running Mozilla over a remote connection isn’t as fast or responsive as running a local browser, but it’s much snappier than I expected.

The second method is to use SSH port-forwarding and a local browser. Let’s say your remote host, behind the firewall, is called remotehost.com, it’s running a server on port 80, and your account on the remote machine is called myaccount. To port-foward on your OS X machine, simply call up a Terminal session and enter ssh -l myaccount -L 8080:remotehost.com:80 remotehost.com. Now you can call up a local browser, and browser to address localhost:8080. and you’ll be surfing the remote website.

From TahitiGuide. com comes the best explanation for my disposition this week:

“Je suis Fiu” est une expression souvent entendue en Polynésie Française, difficile à traduire simplement, il exprime une sorte de lassitude, qui pourrait se traduire approximativement par “ Farniente ”. Surtout il justifie l’arrêt immédiat de toute activité, voire le manquement à une promesse de rendez-vous. C’est une sorte de sentiment d’abandon général, parfois dû à une bringue (une fête) de la veille, ou parfois également sans aucune raison particulière.

News from Australia about the other Prince Edward Island. Pirates. Intrigue. And a devastated fishery.

In a serious case of re-spurning, Catherine and Oliver and I went out to Charlottetown Toyota to test drive the new Echo Hatchback this afternoon.

Regular readers may recall that we rented the European version of this car in Spain back in May, and waxed about it.

Fast-forward two months, and what does crazy Steven Garrity do (as briefly revealed here) but take up the gauntlet, and actually go out and lease one.

After a high-level secret meeting of the web intelligensia this afternoon at Cora’s, Steven drove me home in his new Echo and, feeling our street cred sliding away, we had no choice but to test drive ourselves.

Here’s the weird thing: the test drive cars have (a) no radio and (b) no air conditioning.

Now I’m not an expert, but I can tell you that 99% of people, when test driving a car on a hot summer day, will immediately do two things after adjusting the mirrors: crank up the stereo and crank up the A/C. I would imagine, given the Echo’s target market of young rockers, the percentage for the Echo demographic is more like 99.9%.

But because both radio and A/C are “dealer-installed options,” the cars on the lot are barren of these features until post-purchase, and so the car you get to test drive feels like some sort of Government-issue proto-car, stripped of all its toys.

Weird.

Anyway, not in any way to detract from the tiny wonder of a car that is the Echo Hatch (esp. compared to its Sedan brother, which is almost archetypically ugly), we realized that much of our attraction to a tiny perfect car had to do with the tiny perfect life we lived in Spain. We three are a big lot, physically and stuff-wise, and as much as the idea of zipping around town in a fuel efficient dynamo appeals to me, I think we’ll stay committed Jetta owners, at least for a while.

In the meantime, if you see a sleek silver Echo Hatch prowling around Charlottetown, piloted by a gallant young web-buck, give a wave and a nod to Steven. Who knows, he might even offer you a ride home!