In Praise of Richard Collins

Every time there’s a crime, accident, or other matter worthy of police attention in Charlottetown, you can expect to see Deputy Chief of Police Richard Collins on Compass telling the police side of the story.

Richard Collins has very obviously not been to media school. He’s prone to sometimes using the wrong word in the right place, and sometimes he laughs at times when he shouldn’t. He tends to be more honest then he probably should, and then sometimes tries to take it back. In short, he’s not a polished media player. And that’s okay by me: Richard Collins appears on television like a regular everyday person who happens to work for the police department. He’s “one of us” and he approaches interviews, within the bounds of his job, just like that.

It can’t be an easy job, and he does it well. Thanks.

Catharsis

Somewhere in the world tonight, a good friend of ours is playing host to a dinner party for a world leader. I’m under strict orders not to reveal places, times or identities. Someday the world will know; tonight, I can only write in these hushes tones.

Random Acts of Kindness

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.

It’s always 87 degrees in Palau

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.

I’m like a bird

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.

Using MRTG to measure bandwidth usage

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:

MRTG Graph for peter.rukavina.net

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.

Viva Vivas

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.

Bangkok Canals

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.
Catherine and Oliver on the Klong in Bangkok

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.

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