It’s amazing how much travel compresses reality. A normal day for me is something like “Wake up, eat lunch, work, eat dinner, work, watch Seinfeld, sleep.” This routine is interspersed with Oliver wrangling and the odd meeting here and there.

Today I awoke in my bed in Charlottetown, and spent the afternoon on the New Bedford, Massachusetts waterfront. In between I flew from Charlottetown to Halifax to Boston, rented a car, and drove the hour south. Whew!

New Bedford Summerfest is what the various icky pretend festivals that Charlottetown holds every Canada Day and Labour Day weekend could be if there was less tourist pandering, more creativity and a larger spirit involved in their creation.

Every July the historical downtown of New Bedford is taken over by this three day festival of the arts. There are three main components: a huge collection of artisan booths strung along the closed streets north of the water, a collection of musical venues ranging from the small and intimate to the slightly larger music tent on the water, and a huge dining tent on the State Pier where fresh seafood (really fresh seafood) is served.

The music is folk roots celtic. It’s like Grassy Hill Radio, but live. This afternoon, for example, I went to a workshop in the small Customs House Tent featuring Garnet Rogers, David Jones, Ellis Paul and Scott Alarik. The theme of the workshop was “Left Her Heart & Lost My Own: how men sing about love.” This was followed by a workshop called “I Love the Ground Whereon He Goes: how women sing about love” that featured Lucy Kaplansky, Susan Werner, Sally Rogers and a weird Scottish duck full of energy named Ray Fisher. It was all wonderful music in a delightful setting.

Tomorrow I’m going to return for more of the same, finishing off with a concert by Livingston Taylor.

There are several great things about the way the Summerfest event is organized. Admission to the entire weekend is only $7, and you pay for this by simply buying a button when you arrive. There are no giant wooden fences around anything — it’s all done on the honour system. There’s no big huge concentration of people overwhelming one area of the downtown; the event is nicely distributed across a wide area, and the musical venues are all low-key and low-amp, so for the residents of the downtown it’s not like having The Who over for the weekend.

All in all a very pleasant if jam-packed day.

The waste of the residents and businesses is gathered and disposed of at the Crapo Hill Landfill. Really.

Here’s a free suggestion for Island Tel: the computer I’m using to type this in the Charlottetown Airport in the Business Centre that you sponsor is an ancient, slow, IBM Aptiva. It makes your high speed Internet service — which is presumably what you’re trying to show off here —- seem very sluggish and unappealing. An investment of less that $2,000 could get you a brand new sexy computer that would make the Internet fly, and make people used to dial-up connections go “ooh, ahh” and much more likely to upgrade at home. Just a thought.

My friend and erstwhile colleague Dave are off this week on a pilgrimage to New York City.

For Dave, despite his living large, take no prisoners, bravado, this is is very first trip to the Big City (or at least to this Big City). And it’s only my fourth trip (and my first was when I was 8 years old, so I don’t remember much) to the City. So I’m certain a wacky and exciting time will be had by all. Stay tuned for developments as they happen.

I’m heading off this morning for a circuitous via-Boston and New Hampshire route to New York; Dave is joining me at Logan on Tuesday. We’re flying Delta for the first time, which should offer an interesting comparison to the recent dreckly service I’ve been getting from Air Canada.

With time to kill because of my cheaper Saturday-stay fare, I’m heading to the New Bedford Summerfest Folk Festival tonight and Sunday — who could resist a stellar lineup of folk greats with an admission fee of $7?

Watch this space for more.

Tonight I’m introducing a new concept of time/distance measurement, MT2DBU. This is short for “Mean Time To Drunken Break-up” and it describes precisely the time it takes to walk (stagger) from bars south of Grafton St. and west of Prince St. to exactly in front of our house.

South and west of us, you see, is a collection of bars and pubs: The Merchantman, Rum Runners, Peakes Quay, The Olde Dublin, Gahans, where couples go to drink and make merry, especially on these wonderful summer evenings.

While alcohol sometimes brings couples closer together and introduces uncommon amounts of amouressness into a situation, in other situations, and perhaps with greater amounts of alcohol applied, it has the reverse effect, symptoms of which are much screaming, yelling, crying, use of extremely foul language and so on, all culminating in the at least temporary break-up of the relationship.

In front of our house.

You see the nature of the MT2DBU is such that the time between leaving the bar and said alcohol-induced frazzle reaching maximum intensity places said couple right along our stretch of Prince St., while they’re making their way through the downtown to their home to the north and east.

We have witnessed (and more often just heard) all manner and style of these sort of break-ups, and two summers of research has taught us a lot about the human condition. If nothing else, our ribald vocabulary has almost doubled as a result.

So if you and yours happen to find yourselves overindulged and ornery in the downtown heart of Charlottetown, you may wish to take my advice, nip any troubles in the bud, and take separate cabs home. You’ll thank me in the morning, and I’ll thank you.

Although I stand by my earlier comments about Island Tel Mobility, shortly after I posted them came a fly in the ointment.

I pay $4.50 a month for Mobility’s InforMe text messaging service. This lets me receive short text messages on my digital cell phone, and I use it with server and network monitoring tools as an alerting mechanism (“Pete, Pete, the network’s down, we need you…” cries the server).

Earlier in the week I was upgrading this monitoring system, and this involved some testing of the email to cell phone system. It was working well and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Nothing had changed on my end, but the messages I was sending myself as a test weren’t getting through to my phone.

This went on for several hours before I gave up and went to bed, but not before I wrote an email to Island Tel’s customer service folks to inquire about the outage and, further, to seek their advice on whether I could excpect this sort of outage to occur in future.

Today I received the following response:

Thank you very much for your recent inquiry.

We were having isolated problems with our Text Messaging service starting last Friday. The problem occurred in the Bell network which our SMS system is linked to.

The system should now be restored.

This service, along with all of our wireless services, are not guaranteed, and can on occasion develop problems whether they be system problems, or simply coverage problems.

So sorry for this inconvenience.

Their website says: “Text Messaging gives digital cellular and alphanumeric paging customers the capability to receive and view text messages on the display screens of their phone and pagers.”

I think they should add “sometimes” to the sentence. Sigh.

One of the consistent bright spots on the Island Tel (err, Aliant) front is the company at least formerly known as Island Tel Mobility.

I have consistently found the staff at Island Tel Mobility to be friendly, knowledgeable and helpful, whether in person at the Phone Centre or on the telephone. They know their products and services, they know their internal systems, and I’ve never asked a question that they haven’t answered fully and quickly.

Interestingly, and perhaps contrary to what you might assume, Island Tel Mobility’s services are priced competitively with the rest of North America, and most times their service plans are cheaper and require less commitement than comparable plans on carriers like Verizon and Sprint in the U.S. (especially when you factor in the U.S. exchange).

The latest development is their unveiling on an online billing system that lets you view, download, report on, and pay for your cell phone service. In traditional Island Tel style the interface is clunky, and entirely unrelated to any of their other systems. But it works, and the ability to download call detail records as an ASCII comma-delimited file is wonderful.

A note from Angus Orford at Maritime Electric:

The current number of customers that have signed up for ‘Green Power’ is 445. The total number of 50 kWh blocks being purchased per month is 1141. The average number of blocks a customer is purchasing is 1141/445 = 2.56 or 128 kWh.