Back when we were all crazy over noise, Ritchie Simpson asked the most important question of all:

I must ask the question of you Peter “Were it Fred Eaglesmith, amps at 11 in front of the masses, would you be so churlish?”

I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of weeks, and I’m afraid to admit that Ritchie’s got a point: if it were music I actually liked, I probably wouldn’t have minded the crazy noisefest.

As such, I think the rest of my arguments are either invalid, or at least severely compromised.

I am hypocritcal old fart who doesn’t understand those young kids and their rock and roll. Ignore me.

I followed up with Aliant technical support this afternoon regarding my DSL woes this weekend. I wanted to know why their remote reset of my DSL device didn’t fix the problem, and I had to enlist someone to actually physically unplug the device to get it working again.

The technician told me that although a remote reset and a physical power-reset are similar, there are some problems that can only be solved by a power-reset. He suggested that this is all a result of the DSL device “getting out of sync” due to “an electrical charge on the phone lines changing.”

I’m not really sure what that means.

In any case, if you’re in a situation where you need to rely on connectivity to your home base from a remote location, it looks like Aliant’s DSL service isn’t a good choice, because you will, as I have two or three times, find yourself 1,000 miles away from home with a technician instructing you to “just unplug it.”

I asked the technician what Aliant could offer me as an alternative, more robust solution, and he could only offer “a T1, but that would obviously be more expensive.”

It amazes me that we have had consumer Internet in one form or another on Prince Edward Island for almost 10 years, and we still don’t have a rock solid technical solution for static, permanent, low-bandwidth situations.

For the past 5 years I’ve been a devoted fan of the HylaFax system. HylaFax uses a computer’s fax/modem to send and receive faxes; it’s the UNIX equivalent of something like WinFax on a Windows machine, but far more powerful.

Here’s how I’ve put HylaFax to use:

The Enhanced Farm Weather Forecast Program faxes detailed local weather forecasts to farm clients across Prince Edward Island early every morning during the crop season. The program is now in its 6th year. The first year of operation, a Windows-based solution for faxing was developed in-house, and was extremely problematic. For the past five years, a Linux-based system we installed has used HylaFax, and has proved rock-solid. We send out about 15,000 faxes a year, and we’ve never had a problem.

From a technical perspective, here’s what happens: every morning Environment Canada emails 5 weather forecasts to the server, each in a separate email, with the forecast as a MIME attachment. The forecasts are parsed out of the email, and then each forecast is faxed out to a list of subscribers for that local area. We created a web-based system to allow the subscriber list to be managed, and the fax queue to be monitored.

At Yankee Publishing, we use HylaFax to fax out proofs and invoices from an internal web-based Classified Advertising system. When a new proof or invoice needs to be sent, the web system calls a HylaFax client running locally to talk to a HylaFax server on another system about 200 miles away which, in turns, sends out the fax. Again, this system has proved useful and reliable.

Finally, we use HylaFax internally to send and receive faxes for Reinvented Inc. When you fax something to (902) 892-1513, you’re actually talking to an old Motorola Voice/Fax modem in our basement which, in turn, hands off the fax to HylaFax. We then use a fax-to-email gateway to send a PDF of the fax to our corporate email address for viewing and, if required, printing. To send faxes (which we do only rarely), we print from whatever application to a PostScript file, transfer this file to the server, and use the HylaFax client to send manually (there are Windows-based clients that do this automatically through a Windows printer driver, but, so far, nothing analgous for Mac OS X).

Over three HylaFax installs, we’ve found that the single most important choice to make is the fax/modem to use. There’s a lot of information on the HylaFax website, including a voluminous mailing list that’s searcable, that can help with this selection; in all three cases we’ve set up, we’ve used very cheap, generic external fax/modems that have costs less than $75, and each has proved up to the task.

HylaFax is one of those nice pieces of software that, once you install it, just works, year after year, fax after fax.

Highly recommended.

When I was in high school, I was in Senior Band. I played bass clarinet, and then later the oboe and the bassoon (note to current high school students: playing the oboe does not make you cool).

Last night’s episode of Entertainment Tonight “Where are they now?” on Knots Landing made me remember some of the songs on our set list, which was heavy on television theme songs, including the themes to:

• Mork and Mindy (good bass clarinet part)
• Knots Landing
• Dallas
• Fantasy Island
• The Love Boat
• The Rockford Files

We also played Africa by Toto, which had a great oboe part (which is very rare).

Boy do I ever feel old.

I have had the lyrics to that Curtis Driedger song, from the cassette-album Problem A, running through my head for years. I lost my cassette years ago. I need another copy. It’s one of the best songs, ever.

Catherine Hennessey has posted her story of border woes. I was observing from a distance as all this played out, and thought I might assemble the tale myself, but thought it prudent, given my reliance on Catherine for a good cup of tea, to hold my tongue. Now she’s gone and outed herself.

On both Southwest and EasyJet, there are no assigned seats: planes are boarded on a “first checked-in, first served” basis.

EasyJet explains this on their check-in and boarding page as follows:

This makes boarding quicker so aircraft waste less time on the ground at airports - and it is by keeping costs down in this way that allows us to keep fares low.

I’d always assumed that this “boarding quicker” was related to the time saved from passengers not having to bother with finding their assigned seat, but that never really rang true as a reason.

Today, boarding JetsGo (which does have assigned seating) in Toronto, I think I figured it out: when there are no assigned seats, there’s an incentive for passengers to arrive early and board quickly: the reward is a better seat.

Perhaps this has been obvious to everyone but me.

I am, you see, an “front of the liner” when it comes to boarding planes — I am a careful student of the various nuances of announcements, motions, door openings, and so on, and I’m usually able to time my presence at the gate so that I’m at the head of the line, and first on the plane.

And so I rarely see what happens after the initial boarding call.

Today I decided to play it differently: I remained in the lounge until the very last minute, reading my New Yorker until just before last call. Then I simply got up and walked on at a leisurely pace.

Because I had an assigned seat waiting for me, I felt no rush. I could have probably even spent an extra couple of minutes in the lounge if I’d wanted to cut it close.

And therein lies the problem.

Take that leisurely attitude and extrapolate it up to millions of passengers on thousands of flights, and there are hours and hours of time saved, time when jets can be in the air making money rather than on the ground waiting for layabouts to finish reading their magazines.

So here I am speeding down the 401 when my cell phone rings.

“Hello, is this Mr. Rukavina?” asks the voice on the other end of the line.

“Yes,” I cautiously reply.

“This is Thrifty Car Rental calling. I’m calling about the vehicle that you have rented, due to be returned on July 16th. It needs to go into the shop on July 14th. Are you still in the Toronto area? We need arrange to switch cars with you.”

“Well,” I reply, “you are lucky, as I’m going to return the car early, tomorrow morning, as my plans have changed.”

“Oh, that’s good. It’s fine even if you want to return the car on Monday.”

What if I had been in Sault Ste. Marie? And if it’s so urgent that the car go into the shop, should I really be driving it?

I’ll be back on the Island Sunday afternoon. That is, unless the wheels fall off the Chrysler Sebring.

Last night, after our family wedding in Keswick, Oliver and I headed back to our hotel. I noticed that there was one unanswered call on my cell, from my brother Johnny. “The Reinvented server is off the air,” he told me when I called him back. “I can’t ping it.”

Back at the hotel a couple of minutes later, I was able to verify what he told me: our server was no longer on the Internet. This is a situation that affects not only my own email, but a wide variety of clients, and, of course, the readers of this website.

Based on prior experience with this sort of thing, I phoned Aliant’s technical support number and was able to talk to a Moncton technician (regular readers will recall that Aliant moved its business Internet technical support from Charlottetown to Moncton to “improve service”).

I requested that our DSL modem be remotely reset, something which had solved similar problems in past. Apparently DSL modems aren’t entirely bug-free, and need to be either locally reset, or reset remotely by a technician. I was promised that this would be done, via a trouble ticket to Charlottetown, sometime last night, and that if this was the problem, I should have access back by morning.

This morning I woke up and, alas, the server was still off the air. I phoned Aliant back and talked with another technician. I asked her to check and see if the reset had been performed, and she said that it had been. I told her I would investigate further to see whether it was a local issue, and call back if it wasn’t.

Shortly thereafter, thanks to the ever-helpful Steven Garrity, who drove over to my house and accessed my network via WiFi and verified both that there was no Internet access and also that my server was up and running, I knew that the problem was, in fact, Aliant-related.

I phoned back and talked to the same technican again, and explained the situation. I suggested that if they had reset the modem as she claimed they had, then perhaps it was a routing issue. Her only offer was to dispatch a technician to my house to plug a device into the modem directly to verify that it wasn’t working. She made an unhelpful point of making sure that that I knew that if it proved to be a problem with my network and not their equipment, I would be charged for the visit. I asked that, given that I was 1800 miles away from my basement at the moment, there was another solution. She said their wasn’t. Point full stop. Perhaps the least helpful technical conversation I’ve ever had with a branch of Aliant. And that’s saying a lot.

Realizing that Aliant wasn’t going to provide any help at all with fixing a problem with their service, I did the next best thing and called my friend Gary into action.

I was able to send up the Bat Signal for Gary, who has recently moved to town, and thus has no phone, by phoning Catherine Hennessey, who put the word out on the street. Two hours later Gary was in my basement. He unplugged the DSL modem. Waited 5 seconds. Plugged it back in. And I was back on the Internet. Problem solved.

So yet another pox on the house of Aliant. First for selling an Internet solution that craps out completely, without warning, two or three times a year. Secondly for hiring unhelpful technicians. Third for locating them in Moncton, without the direct tools needed to do their jobs. And fourth for never admitting this, never apologizing, and treating customers more like viruses to be expelled rather than their lifeblood.

Apologies to readers, clients and correspondents for disappearing from the Internet for 24h. I’ve already made a call to ISN, a locally-based, actually-helpful Internet provider, to start the process of ridding myself entirely from this inept Borg of a corporation.

When we boys were little, we would spend the summer “out in the field” with our father the geologist, who was doing ressarch fieldwork along the Great Lakes. We watched the moon landing in the back of a VW Microbus on a battery-powered television, which is about as close to living the Arlo Guthrie lifestyle as I am ever likely to get.

When Catherine was a girl, she would spend the summer “out in the field” with her father the cattle farmer, doing chores. We used to think our chores were hard — mowing the lawn, weeding the strawberries, etc. — but Catherine had actual chores, like “mucking out stalls” and “fixing the grain truck.”

Here we both are, 25 years out, “in the field” for a week, attending the wedding of Catherine’s cousin Pam in Ontario.

We flew the excellent JetsGo from Charlottetown to Toronto on Wednesday. But for the time inconvenience of a 45 minute scheduled touchdown in Montreal, I can’t see how, in any way, this is inferior to the Air Canada jet to Toronto.

Arriving in Toronto I did my now familiar dance with the car rental agency (in this case it was Dollar, which apparently has merged with Thrifty) over “the coverages.” It goes like this: agent says something very quickly like “accident… responsibility… pay upfront… disaster… accident… totality… destruction” and I say “okay.” And then I get the invoice to sign and it’s got a $200 charge for “the coverages.” And I say “that’s covered by my credit card.” And they say “accident… pay upfront… are you sure… destruction… mayhem.” And I say “no, that’s fine, thanks.” And we proceed. In this case we then entered another phase where they told me I was being upgraded, for free, to a Jeep Liberty. When I told them I just wanted a regular car — both because my credit card doesn’t cover SUV rental accidents, and because, well, I hate SUVs — they acted like I was crazy to look such a wonderful and special gift in the mouth. Eventually they relented — it took a lot of phoning around to get an actual car beamed in — and we went on our way in a capable if uninspiring Chrysler Sebring.

We have spent the last couple of days here at my parents in Carlisle. Oliver has been luxuriating in the extra attention offered by Grandma, Grandpa and Uncle Mike. Catherine has been able to sleep a little. And I have been squeezing ever hour out of the day working on some deadline-heavy projects.

Today we’re heading northeast to the southern shore of Lake Simcoe for the big wedding. Tomorrow we’re back to Peterborough for the first time in almost a decade for a quick overnight stay with our old friend Stephen Southall. Sunday it’s on to Napanee; Catherine and Oliver are staying with her parents for a week and a half, and I’m spending a quick few days there before jetting back home for a lonely, but no doubt productive week and a half myself.

Ontario is much as it ever was: more urban sprawl, more acronyms (everything’s “GTA” here), more smog, more varieties of juice in corner stores. Amazing to find the Tim’s drive-thrus are so slow here — makes the Murphy bunch on PEI appear positively sprintly. Sad to see “the models” get kicked off the island last night on The Amazing Race — they were growing on me.

Off to Keswick…