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…

I got a friendly call back from Aliant Mobility in Moncton this morning regarding sending Internet email from a cell phone. He told me that, despite the fact that I was, and am still, able to send Internet email from my Aliant cell phone, officially this is something that doesn’t work. Indeed both the operator I talked to last night, and the person I talked to this morning claimed that it was impossible.

For regular readers the irony of this will not be lost: when Aliant, at long last, does something right, they both claim that they’re not doing it and, further, claim that it’s impossible.

Sigh.

Last March I wrote about Danger Bay. Late last week, I got an email from the creator of Danger Bay.

Last December I wrote about our old friend Mikey. A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Mikey, who I hadn’t spoken to in 10 years.

Last month I wrote a review of Angels Restaurant. This morning I got a call from the owner of Angels, Ken Zakem.

The Internet is like a message in a bottle. Except it’s like a million messages in a million bottles that are bound to bump into their intended recipient eventually.

Although I never thought I would use the words “Aliant” and “Cool” in the same paragraph, I must give them credit for finally turning on a neato feature on their digital cellular network: the ability to send real Internet email.

Previously you could send SMS messages to other cell phones right from the phone, but sending bona fide email meant entering the clunkoverse of their WAP browser, which is tantamount to inscribing messages on stone tablets.

Now that they’ve turned this feature on, I can send email to anyone with an Internet email address right from the phone. I’ve tested this feature several times, and messages have arrived almost instantaneously.

The only glitch: email messages from cell to Internet come “from” your phone number @txt.bell.ca (presumably because they’re using the Bell Canada SMS-to-Email gateway). If this email is replied to, it doesn’t ever reach the cell phone, and never bounces back unsent. Email addresses for Aliant phones, for some bazonko reason, are @wirefree.informe.ca.

I called Aliant Mobility about this, and they told me that I’m not actually supposed to be able to send email from cell to Internet, although they promised to get back to me to explain why it was that I can.

Still, it is cool.