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.

I’ve always been blessed with good neighbours, almost from birth.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s we lived in Burlington, Ontario and our next-door neighbours were the Walters. Their son David taught me how to swear, and Mrs. Walters used to give us banana popsicles.

When we moved up to Carlisle, our neighbours on both sides were good, generous people. The Southams, on one side, used to let us swim in their pool, and we were babysat by several of their children over the years. The Dunhams, on the other side, passed on their paper route dynasty to our family, and kept all of us boys in pocket money through our early teens.

When I lived in Peterborough, post-university, I tended to live with groups of weird and wonderful people, and I was always pleasantly surprised with how forgiving our “straight” neighbours were of our youthful eccentricities. The ultimate Peterborough neighbour, of course, was Catherine, who was the archetypical “girl next door.”

My first day as an Island resident I managed to drive my 1978 Ford F-100 truck into the house next door to our apartment on Great George Street. It wasn’t 5 minutes before every neighbour within a 2 or 3 house radius was out to offer aid.

In Kingston, we were blessed with the Yeos down the hill and the Dobson/Doyles up the hill; both of them made living in the country a much better experience, and all were willing to lend a hand whenever we needed one.

Here in Charlottetown we’ve got the kind, resourceful and watchful Kelsey Todd up the street. Kelsey has watched our house while we’ve been galavanting around the world, blown out our driveway like clockwork every snow, and has gamely put up with the ruckus brought on by our near constant renovation projects. He’s the kind of neighbour you know you could knock on the door of at 3:00 a.m. and he would get dressed and take you to the hospital.

Today we learned that the house on the other side has just been purchased by local electric power guru Angus Orford and his family. Angus has always proved a ready and willing correspondent when I’ve flung electricity questions his way; I’m sure they’ll make good neighbours too.

For the past week or so I’ve had a website field in the discussion section of my weblog. Today I modified my FOAF file to automatically grab the people who’ve filled this field in, and incorporate them in dynamically. The result is that my foafnaut looks like this now:

The next step is to do some FOAF autodiscovery on each link to allow me to add a FOAF seeAlso section where appropriate.

Here is some basic information about who subscribes to The New Yorker, courtesy of their list brokerage.

My friend Robert says that self-help groups are the path to wellness happiness, so I’m turning to my readership, some of whom are experienced parents, for assistance with an entirely practical matter: getting Oliver to sleep.

When we were in Spain in May, Oliver finally twigged to the fact that he could climb out of his crib, and so when we returned home we had to retire his crib and move him to a single bed all of his own. Since the switch we’ve mostly failed at getting him to stay in bed the night through, and therein lies the problem.

The usual routine is this: we put Oliver to bed about 10:00 p.m. (he has, since birth, been a late-to-bed, late-to-rise child, and as this suits our schedule, we’ve no problems with it). Sometimes he’ll fall right to sleep, sometimes we’ll have to lie down beside him until he falls asleep.

He’ll then sleep soundly for 2 or 3 hours.

Then, around 1:00 a.m. or 2:00 a.m., he’ll wake up, get out of bed, and come looking for Catherine and I. If we lead him back to bed he won’t stay there, and if we lie down with him, no matter for how long, he wakes up and cries when we get up to leave. If, somehow, we manage to escape with Oliver asleep back to our own bed, he’ll often repeat the exercise again 2 hours later.

This all adds up to an exhausted Oliver, and exhausted parents. And the more it goes on, the more exhausted we all get, the fewer thought resources we have to apply to a solution, and the more established this broken routine becomes.

I’m sure our experiences are not unique. Can others offer war stories from the sleeping frontiers that might assist, or at least make us feel better that we’re not padding the halls alone.

Here’s the description of tonight’s episode of Access Hollywood:

Previewing “The Cooler” starring William H. Macy; going on tour with singer Michelle Branch; looking at what’s new on DVD.

A movie, called “The Cooler,” starring William H. Macy and Michelle Branch, wherein they tour together and watch DVDs. I’d go see that.

I must be doing my job: I’ve finally disturbed someone.

It’s true: when you phone the company formerly known as just “Xerox,” they answer the phone “Thank you for calling The Document Company: Xerox” (try it yourself: call 1-800-275-9376).

One of my clients has a big Xerox digital printer — it’s about the size of a Datsun 510 and prints 136 pages a minute. We’re in the middle of a project that’s pushing the capabilities of the machine to the edge, and this has meant that we’ve had to make good use of the company’s technical support resources.

So far, I’ve been very impressed: they’re taking our problem seriously, have assigned resources to it, and they communicate back to us regularly about the problem.