Before it was taken over by the soccer moms, the “practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty” meme had a smaller more elegant life flowing forth from its instigation in the pages of the Whole Earth Review magazine by San Francisco writer Anne Herbert.

One of my favourite things to do, as Sean Connery says in Finding Forrester, is to give an “unexpected gift at an unexpected time.” If I could do this full-time, I would happily take it on.

Sometime reader of this site (and the author of only other site on the Internet to link back to this site from its “blogdex”) Lou Quillo has a nice story that falls under this umbrella.

I think I should move to Palau: first, it’s got a “Compact of Free Association with the United States of America,” so I presume my U.S. citizenship would get me in good there. Secondly, and most important, it seems as though it’s always 87 degrees there.

Palau, the CIA tells us, is “a group of islands in the North Pacific Ocean, southeast of the Philippines… slightly more than 2.5 times the size of Washington, DC.”

Not surprisingly, there are no direct flights from Charlottetown to Palua; you can, however, fly from New York City. Leaving New York on January 1 at 6:00 a.m. would get you into Koror (the capital) at 9:00 p.m. on January 2, local time, for a total flight time of 25 hours. You fly from New York to Houston to Guam to Palau on Continental Airlines. Return fare is $2174US. Not too bad given that you get to be in Palau, in the balmy 87 degree weather, when the journey is over.

It’s 4:53 p.m. on a Wednesday, and I should be hard at work helping my colleagues at YANKEE make their website better.

But I can’t, because Island Tel’s Internet network is cut off from the rest of the world for the second time in as many days.

To their credit, it’s been a long time since there’s been any problems with my Internet service. I would have hoped that they would have been using this happy fallow period to work hard at improving their customer service in the event of an outage like this.

I was wrong.

Here’s how things have progressed over the last 15 minutes:

Upon noticing the problem, I phoned the Island Tel Advanced Solutions Help Desk. The call was answered on the first ring but, alas, I was informed that the number was no longer the number for the Help Desk and given a 1-888 number to call instead.

So I called this new number — 888-796-1825 — and a robot answered the phone and told me to “press 1 for network status.” So I did. And was told that “1 is not a valid option.” I tried again, just to be sure. No luck. So I pressed “3” for technical support and was told that all representatives were busy, but that my call was important to them and I should hold.

I held for a while, but no actual person being in evidence, I hung up and phoned another number — 800-773-2121 — which, oddly enough, appears to lead to a parallel help desk with a completely different set of options (but, alas, no “network status” option).

I selected the option for high-speed technical support, and this is where I’ve been parked for the last 8 minutes, listening to bizarre abbreviated versions of songs by the Nelly Furtado, Jann Arden, Jimmy Rankin, and kd lang. (Really: for some reason the “hold music” consists entirely of 60 second clips of pop music songs — just as things are getting good, they stop one song and cut over to another. Do they think we have short attention span, or is this simply a way of avoiding SOCAN fees?)

Now Lord knows I would never suggest that an ISP like Island Tel would be expected to offer 100% uptime — I probably couldn’t afford their services if they did. The question is not “can you be perfect?” but rather “how do you react when the inevitable problems that will occur, do?”

Wouldn’t it be an excellent business idea to use your own technical support line as a showcase for your telephony prowess rather than offering embarassingly long hold times and 60 second music clips?

I’m into 18 minutes on hold now, and the music’s wrapped around entirely, so I’ve heard the Nelly Furtado wrap around again.

Hey, the network just came back! I can’t stay on hold any longer — too much Jann Arden. I know I’ll never find out the cause of the outage. I’m out 1/2 an hour’s work, and 2 or 3 hours worth of concentration is shot. Sigh.

If you have ever wondered how much of your Internet bandwidth you’re actually using, MRTG — Multi Router Traffic Grapher — is an excellent, free, tool.

I’ve known about MRTG for a while, but I was always stymied by the fact that it relies on SNMP to gather traffic statistics, and as I don’t have access to my upstream router via SNMP, it appeared like the tool would be of no use to me.

The solution was so simple I should have figured it out a long time ago: I just enabled SNMP on my own server, and pointed MRTG at it. Here’s the result:

Obviously I don’t exactly need a T1 to meet the demands of my server. Note that this graph only includes the traffic to and from my webserver, and not the traffic from other machines on our network.

If you’re running RedHat Linux, RPMs for both SNMP (variously called Net-SNMP and ucd-snmp) and MRTG are available from the RedHat Network.

The transformation of Eddie’s Lunch into Vivas continues.

Week by week, Vivas is slowly becoming the coolest place in Charlottetown to eat lunch. Just today, for example, both Perry Williams and Eric MacEwen — the Duke and Earl of Island Hip, as it were — had a Vivatastic lunch. Throw in regulars Roy Johnstone, Sara Saunders, Catherine Matthews, Jack LeClair, and Don Stewart to say nothing of an up and coming crowd of furry toque bearing younger hepcats, and it’s a regular Studio 54 of the East. Heck, even Kevin O’Brien is a sometimes regular, and he not only drives a VW Beetle, but he’s been known to wear a leather jacket from time to time.

All cool aside, the most profound Vivic change of late has been the introduction of Good Tea.

Regular readers will recall a recent lament in this space about the difficulty of procuring a good cup of tea in this town (or, indeed, in any town). Well, this is no longer a problem at Vivas. No word of a lie, I had the best cup of tea of my life today: served boiling hot in a very pleasant red clay teapot that didn’t spill when poured, with a heated mug, teaspoon, milk and sugar all provided (you be surprised how often one or the other of these is missing at other restaurants). The tea was, well, amazing. Really amazing. Amazing enough that you should probably drop everything right now and walk over to Vivas and have a cup of tea yourself.

Tell them I sent you.

Harold Stephens’ column this week is called Bangkok is a water town and he writes about the importance of the Chao Phraya River and the canals, or “”klongs” to the life of the city.

Perhaps our most thrilling experience in Bangkok this past February was on the klong that runs from behind Jim Thompson’s house out towards City Hall.

This klong is about 20 feet wide, and runs right through the middle of the city. The public boats that run along the klong are long and narrow, covered with a roof, and powered by a noisy and exposed engine at the back. There is an ingenious system rigged up for protecting patrons from getting splashed with water; it involves a tarpaulin that runs the length of each side that’s attached to pulleys. When the boat picks up speed everyone is expected to grab the pulley handle nearest them and haul down, which raises the tarp.

The protocol for getting on the boat goes like this: boat pulls up, you get on as fast as you possibly can to avoid getting thrown into the water when it hurries off 15 seconds later. As you might imagine, this feat, difficult enough, was doubly challenging with wee Oliver in my arms, but we pulled it off.

The utility of the aforementioned tarp system becomes immediately apparent once the boat takes off: they move fast. So fast, in fact, that we couldn’t avoid getting a wallop or two of klong water in our face before we figured out our roll on the pulley. Thankfully, we didn’t die instantly.

Once the boat takes off, a toll collector manouevers her way along the boat, collecting the 5 baht fare (about 17 cents) and you’re given a ticket.

We took the boat all the way to the end of the line, hurried off in much the same fashion as we alighted, and lived to tell the tale.

When I was young, I delivered the Hamilton Spectator in my neighbourhood. By far and away the most memorable customer of mine was a family that lived three or four doors up the road at the end of a long, long lane.

If you turned left at the end of the lane, you ended up at the Cedarvale Horseradish Factory, but if you turned right you ended up at Burf’s house.

Burf was the archetypical wiry evil dog. All those stories that have been written about kids breaking into the local junkyard and being chased by a mangy, barky, ferocious dog were based on Burf.

Never has there been a more onomatopoeiac dog than Burf.

Delivering the paper to his house involved dismounting from my bicycle at the end of the lane, positioning the bike for optimum rentry should Burf appear. Next I had to creep, silently, along Burf’s driveway, ending up at a breezeway separating the garage from the house proper; in the breezeway was a section of furnace pipe that was the final destination for the newspaper.

The breezeway was also Burf’s favourite hiding place, so the actual paper drop-off process involved a complicated dash, shove, and run. And if Burf was around, awake, and ornery — about 10% of the time — the “run” was a mad dash back to the bicycle, and a frantic ride back to the road, with Burf running along beside threatening to jump up and devour me whole all the while.

I imagine that Burf is dead now, either due to old age (he would be in his thirties now, I presume) or because he was put down after eating subsequent paper carriers. He will not be missed.

I have listened to dribs and drabs of the new CBC Radio One programme Sounds Like Canada and I like what I’m hearing.

The show’s greatest accomplishment? Leaving the legacy of Peter Gzowski aside and cutting a new path.

The show’s post-Gzowski predecessor, This Morning tried to be Morningside with a new theme song and different hosts. It thrashed around, but never found focus or comfort.

What is ironic is that Sounds Like Canada is hosted by Shelagh Rogers, the presenter perhaps most associated with the Gzowski era; perhaps it took a member of the family to throw away the past and come up with something new.

The show is not without its problems: the whole “let’s put our ear up to the wall of Canada” metaphor is apt to run its course eventually (I hope). After all, one can only “listen in on the grade 3 class in Owen Sound making pumpkin pie” for so long before it ceases to be interesting. If it ever was.

And there’s a disappointing holdover of features from the old era: the “franco-Canada for anglos” segment C’est La Vie ceased to be interesting long ago; holdovers like the children’s book panel, while perhaps inevitable given their popularity, seem out of place and tired.

The highlights: Rogers out in the country interviewing people on the ground; the financial affairs mini-show That’s Capital and the cooking/food segment Consicencious Kitchen; and the new segment The Listening Room, promoted this week and starting next, which promises to be the first regular incursion of radio art to reach a national audience, ever.

It’s hard to be a regular listener: my day doesn’t start until the show is well underway, and it’s hard to be a deliberate listener when working, but I’ll tune in as often as possible.

I had lunch last week with a friend, and took away a valuable lesson. This friend, let’s call him “Ernie,” had been thinking about leaving Prince Edward Island for work off the Island. He’s got a good job here, and lots of friends, but the job away offered career development promise, and he seriously entertained the idea.

In the end, he and his family stayed here on the Island.

Why?

Because they realized they had it pretty good here: good job, good friends, nice, small, close-knit community. Just enough diversions to keep their minds occupied — movies, theatre, restaurants, and so on — without all the downsides of a larger city (crime, noise, crazy busy atmosphere).

When you haven’t grown up on the Island (and even if you have), it can seem sometimes like a remote northeastern outpost, devoid of the fun and exciting trappings of the Big City. And sometimes, career-wise, it seems like the only option for playing in The Bigs is to sacrifice quality of life for opportunity.

Ernie and his family didn’t do this, and their example, in a small way, opened my eyes to how good we’ve got it here too.

Thanks, Ernie. Enjoy the ride.

Saturday morning bright and early brothers Mike and Steve and I headed east from Carlisle by U-Haul truck and VW Golf for Montreal to deliver Steve’s life to his new home.

The day started poorly when a bizarre transmission problem with the U-Haul caused a disconcerting clunk at random speeds between 90 and 100 km/h. With the pedal to the floor, Steve could hardly keep the truck over 100 km/h; this slowed our trip somewhat, and caused brother Mike no end of frustration, as he was driving the chase car behind (and more often in front).

We arrived in Montreal around 4:00 p.m., and found that Steve’s new apartment is on the fourth rather than third floor, a grand total of 53 elevator-less steps from ground floor to his front door. With Steve working at about 140% of capacity, Mike at about 100%, and me at about 60%, we managed to lug, push and carry Steve’s life up those 53 stairs. At the end of this, 2 hours later, we were all dead to the world.

After a brief time for recovery, we returned to U-Haul, and found a good Thai restaurant on St. Laurent for dinner. We were back home and fast asleep before midnight.

Sunday morning we were off to Home Depot to buy Steve some blinds, and to the grocery store to get him stocked up on Diet Coke and Kraft Dinner. After a hearty Quebecois lunch at the deli around the corner from Steve’s, Mike and I loaded up the Golf and headed back down the 401 to Carlisle, where we arrived around 8:00 p.m.

Of the 36 hours between 8:00 a.m. Saturday morning and 8:00 p.m. Sunday night, we spent about 16 hours driving, 3 hours moving, 5 hours eating, 3 hours shopping, and 9 hours sleeping. I got a good chance to spend time with Steve on the way up and Mike on the way back, and although it was a little crazy and swift, it was a good weekend.

Wee Oliver, meanwhile, enjoyed the rapt attention of his grandparents for the weekend: went swimming, twice to Tim Horton’s, walks in the woods, etc. As far as I know, he was not called upon to move any boxes.

Tomorrow, weather-willing, we’re back on JetsGo to Halifax, then a drive to Charlottetown. Wish us luck.