Plumbing has always been a mystery to me. When I’ve tried my hand at it, inevitably something starts on fire. Or I end up driving a nail through a copper pipe and destroying the ceiling in the kitchen below me. I suppose I feel about the black art of plumbing pretty much the same as most civilians feel about the black are of website construction.

The episode which best illustrates this point is when we purchased a new pedestal sink for our old house in Kingston. Unable to figure out how to mount and plumb the sink ourselves, we left it sitting on the bathroom floor for 3 months and brushed our teeth in the kitchen sink.

It wasn’t that we couldn’t get a plumber to come and install it, it’s that 30 years of Dick Van Dyke Show reruns had us convinced that plumbers were very, very, very expensive. If you’d asked me at that point, I would have estimated, say, $600 to install a sink.

Finally we just had to up and call a plumber. “We’ll just pay the $600,” I said to myself. So we called up to Bobby Clow’s Store and asked them to recommend someone. As luck would have it, Don’s Plumbing was located just across the road from Bobby’s, and Don’s wife worked in the store. So Don came with a high recommendation.

And Don was great. He had spent a lot of time plumbing up our house over the years, and knew the system well. Over the 6 years we spent in Kingston, he performed innumerable miracles for us: installed a washer, moved a drain, fixed the pump, fixed the shower. And installed the sink. Don was friendly, highly skilled, and able to improvise when situations demanded it. Once Catherine went up to Bobby’s store looking for a shutoff cap for our outdoor tap; Bobby asked her to hold on for a second and ran across the road to Don’s, found what we needed, and brought it back. No charge.

Then we moved into town. Our plumbing needs are considerably greater here, as we not only have the usual sinks and toilets, but also hot water heating. When we rearranged our master bathroom last summer, we got to meet our second great plumber, Cecil Thomas.

We’ve met a lot of great tradespeople over the last couple of years (Herb and his guys from Meadowlaine, Herb’s drywall guy, Larry and his guys from ServiceMaster, Larry’s drywall guy), but Cecil stands out from the crowd. He is simply a great plumber and a terrific guy. He listens. He’s a master problem solver (especially useful in our ragtag old house). He’s a great technician. If we call he’s usally here within hours. And he’s just an all around nice guy.

So we’ve had good luck with plumbers, and while what they actually do still remains something of a black art, at least we’re not afraid to call them anymore.

And the sink? Don charged us $28 to install it.

Rob Schneider, American comedian and Saturday Night Live alumnus, starred in this spring’s regrettable film The Animal. The film also stars Colleen Haskell, Survivor alumnus and Blistex spokesmodel.

While I had originally no plans to see the film, I now have cause to reconsider, as I’ve discovered (thanks to my watchful friend Oliver) that the theme song was performed by German band Reinvented. You can watch the trailer (with Schneider and Haskell overdubbed in German no less).

By the way, it turns out that Blistex sells a line of Non-Lip Care Products, including Dairy Ease, a “full line of natural lactase enzyme supplements and treated milk.” Somehow the idea of milk that tastes like Blistex doesn’t seem very appealing.

Perhaps I’m missing the obvious here, but is there an easy way to automatically tell when a website was lasted updated? I now have 25 or 30 websites that I check regularly for updates, and it would be handy to have a quick visual way of know which have changed since my last surf ‘round.

I recall that in earlier version of Netscape or Internet Explorer there was a method for setting up your Bookmarks/Favourites to provide this visual indicator, but this seems no longer present.

I took a try at creating a system based on auto-grabbing the contents of my bookmarks list every 30 minutes, created a MD5 checksum, and then comparing this to the previous checksum, but ran into problems with sites that have rotating banner ads and/or a constantly updated date/time.

I invite your suggestions.

You’d be amazed at how difficult it is to find out what the weather in Germany is like in November using the Internet. I went looking for the German equivalent of this page in the online Visitors Guide for PEI.

While there are plenty of places to find out the current temperature in Germany, the German tourism sites don’t seem to be able to answer this simple question.

I finally found the answer from USA Today.

Last year at this time, I wrote a little bit about how Eddie’s Lunch, which is just down the street from us, is the heart of our community.

Well, earlier this year, just about the time we started our own home renovations, Eddie’s closed for expansion. At the time they planned to be open in a month or two, after expanding into the other half of their building. Well, spring came and went, our renovations were done, summer started, and now we’re almost in the fall… 5 months later and, finally, Eddie’s opened again in its new expanded format today.

They’ve done a good job. The “new” Eddie’s isn’t as, well, cosy as the old one. But they’ve managed to preserve some of the atmosphere of the old while creating a whole bunch more room. We dropped in tonight — the end of their first day open — and you could see the relief and excitement on the face of the woman we know only as “Mrs. Eddie” (although she isn’t married to Eddie, and never was; Eddie drives a cab now and is her brother? brother in law? We’ll have to get the full story now!).

There have been 100 times in the last 5 months where our thirst for Eddie’s has had to go unslaked. As of tonight, we need thirst no longer. Drop by Eddie’s yourself this weekend and welcome them back to our community!

It’s not an easy thing to create a successful neighbourhood hang-out. We used to visit Eddie’s Lunch, on Prince Street in Charlottetown, when we lived on Great George St. seven years ago. At that point it was more of a variety store, and ‘though it had a grill, it was hardly the kind of place you’d want to spend any time. Now we’re back in the neighbourhood, and Eddie’s has become the centre of our life. The variety store side has been stripped back to a bare miniumum — you can buy a quart of milk and a loaf of bread and a small soda pop, but that’s about it — and the grill has expanded threefold. The menu is standard grill fare — eggs for breakfast, burgers for dinner — but also includes a smattering of Lebanese food — shwarma, falafel, hummous, etc. — that rounds things out nicely. They’ve an interesting and ever-changing selection of cold drinks and a staff which is friendly enough to delight but aloof enough to not make you feel uncomfortable eating in what is, in the end, a very small room. They also serve the best hand-cut french fries in Charlottetown. Many’s the night (too many’s the night…) when Catherine and I say to ourselves “let’s go to Eddie’s” at supper time. Highly recommended. Eddie’s Lunch, 37 Prince Street, Charlottetown, PEI.

Although it’s a story that’s been examined a re-examined a million times, I find it interesting to note that in August of 1999 traffic to www.gov.pe.ca was 48% Netscape and 48% Internet Explorer. In August of 2000 it was 28% Netscape and 58% Internet Explorer and this past month it was 25% Netscape and 66% Internet Explorer.

In other words, in two short years, Netscape’s “market share” has gone down 23% and Internet Explorer’s has gone up 18%.

Earlier this week I mentioned my problems with Chapters censoring their in-store Internet terminals. Because Doc Searls’ weblog was one of the sites I couldn’t view, I sent him a carbon copy of the email I sent to Heather Reisman.

In reaction to that, Doc mentioned the incident on his website which, in turn, prompted a man named Buzz Bruggeman to send me an email. Buzz met Doc at last years Pop!Tech conference in Camden, ME. Why he emailed me, I’m not sure. But it was one of those emails that, for some reason, amdist the clutter of the penis enlargement and the interest free loan spam emails, I paid attention to.

Buzz is hawking a nifty little program for Windows called ActiveWords. Buzz’ Big Problem is that he is trying to sell the world a product that the world doesn’t know it needs. In fact he’s trying to sell the world a product that you don’t really know you need until you’re using it. And even then there’s a learning curve. Actually it’s not really a learning curve — it’s more like an “experiencing curve.”

I will not even begin to try and describe what ActiveWords does. Go to their website and download a free trial copy (don’t bother reading the PR on the website; most of it won’t make much sense). Install the program (again, this is a Windows-only program) and take it for a spin. Then you’ll understand.

I’m still learning how to integrate ActiveWords into my workflow. I cam imagine hundreds of ways I will put it to use. It’s one of those rare “shareware” programs that I will actually purchase. Enough said.