When I lived in Peterborough, there was a live improvised soap opera presented every Friday evening called “East City” (named after the neighbourhood of the same name). The soap opera revolved around a fictional family named “the Dunsfords” and drew upon the acting talent of a revolving stable of local and national actors. At its worst it was boring and fluffy; at its best it was some of the most wild, synergistic theatre I’ve ever had the privilege to witness.

That the fictional family was called the Dunsfords makes the fact that Cynthia Dunsford, who is Cynthia Dunsford in real life, is also, in a fictional sense, Parkdale Doris. The fiction/non-fiction line is swooshing all around and I can’t keep anything straight.

In any case, Cynthia has a weblog, which I found only because it linked back here. Although we’ve never met, I think we share an overlapping ironic sensibility.

Which reminds me: I caught the tail end of a piece on CBC Main Street about a similar improvised soap opera starting up Monday at the Arts Guild — can anyone fill in the details, as I missed most of them…

After three days of rain in Quebec City, we returned to the following forecast for Charlottetown:

<shameless plug>Forecast is from The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which has a handy customizable 5-day forecast on its front page.</shameless plug>

Blogger, author, and filmmaker, Ian Williams is getting married on Saturday to filmmaker Tessa Blake. Best wishes.

It’s raining. It’s the first week of August. It’s PEI. Result: streets clogged with grumpy, soggy people who don’t really know where they’re going. Scene is set for mass grumpysteria.

Driving through New Brunswick, I found that my digital cell phone (a Nokia 3285 from Island Tel/Aliant) wouldn’t switch back to digital mode after automatically switching to analog mode in an analog-only area. I phoned Aliant in New Brunswick, and they told me my phone was probably broken and that I should drop in to the phone centre upon my return.

So I did, this afternoon. At 3:00 p.m. there was one clerk available, and two people in line. I sat down. Waited 15 minutes. The line didn’t move. The next person in line asked us all how long we’d been there, and I learned that the person in front of me had been there for 40 minutes already. Nobody at Island Tel/Aliant seemed particularly concerned, or even mindful of the problem.

I excused myself and ducked into the phone booth across the hall and called 611 (formerly the repair number for Island Tel, now repurposed as the Mobility phone number). The clerk there told me that I should go next door to the “mobility shop.” This is an office located in a temporary-looking building next door that used to act as a sort of parallel cell phone universe in the old days; I didn’t know they were still around. I hiked over there, and the man behind the desk told me that the behaviour of my cell phone was “normal” — in other words, for some crazy reason my phone, once in analog mode, has to be manually switched back into digital mode by either turning it off, or by chanting a special series of menu commands. The craziness of this seemed lost on the technician, and I went on my merry way.

Next stop, TD Canada Trust, to deposit a pay cheque for my brother Johnny. I decided that, since I was headed out towards the Charlottetown Mall anyway, I would stop by the Wal-Mart branch of the bank. So I fought my way out North River Road, found a parking space, waded in through the rain to the teller’s desk. Only to be told that “this is an in-store branch, we don’t offer any teller services here.” Which begs the question, what does the branch do? In any case, I headed back into the crowded rainy streets, thinking the world was plotting against me.

Up the hill to Future Shop, thinking I might exorcise my frustrations with Island Tel/Aliant by jumping shop to Rogers or Telus. Behind the cell phone counter was a pleasant but knowledge-free saleskid who, despite thrashing around from computer to computer, was unable to do anything more than pull a print-out from the Telus website, and tell me that although they have a complete display of Rogers GSM phones, they won’t actually sell them because Rogers service on PEI is so bad. Sensing that I should get out while the getting was good, I took my printout and headed home.

More crazy traffic. Stopped at Tim Horton’s to get a [rare, this summer] Iced Cappucinno, and received the usual stellar Murphy Group customer service — probably less than 20 seconds from order to driving out of the parking lot. Proof, at least, that there’s still some hope for service, even if only for caffeine.

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.