If you go to this page here, which is the support page for the HP PSC 2355 printer/scanner, you will see a helpful link identified as “Chat with an online technician.” As I can’t get my PSC 2355 scanning features to work after an upgrade to OS X “Tiger,” and can’t find any information about why this isn’t working on the HP website, I clicked on the link.

There’s a note on the subsequent page that reads “The HP Chat application does not support Mac Operating System. Mac customers can still access a support technician via e-mail or phone.” I didn’t see that, so I entered the requested information and clicked “Connect” and, for some magical reason, the system worked on my Mac. Here’s how it went.

Ricky: Hello Peter.

Ricky: Welcome to HP Total Care for All-in-One products. My name is Ricky.

Peter Rukavina: Hello

Peter Rukavina: I’m having problems with my HP2355 All in One.

Peter Rukavina: It’s connected to my iMac via USB.

Peter Rukavina: I’ve just upgraded to OS X “Tiger”

Peter Rukavina: I can print, but I cannot scan.

Ricky: Peter, I understand that you have PSC 2355 and installed on MAC OS. Am I right?

Peter Rukavina: Yes.

Ricky: Peter, let me explain you.

Ricky: At the present time HP does not offer Chat Support for this product in the Macintosh operating environment. HP does offer full support for your product in the Macintosh environment through our telephone support teams. They can be reached by calling us at 1-800-474-6836 or 1-800-HPINVENT. We apologize for the inconvenience and look forward to serving you.

Peter Rukavina: But your website says “click here to chat online” right on the Mac support page…

Ricky: I would like to help you to resolve the issue. As the support is restricted for Windows versions, we need to have sufficient documents to support you on MAC OS. So, I recommend you to contact the phone support team and they will help you in resolving the issue.

At this point, leaving the chat window open, I called the 1-800 number that Ricky gave me. After following through a series of voice prompts that led me to identify my product and operating system, I was told that the support centre was closed on Sundays. I returned to Ricky:

Peter Rukavina: I called your 1-800 number, but the recording there says you aren’t open on Sundays.

Ricky: Peter, let me confirm, is this the number you have called now:1800-474-6836.

Peter Rukavina: Yes. I called, followed the prompts to identify the PSC 2355 for Mac, and received a recorded message saying you are only open on Mon-Fri and on Saturdays.

Ricky: Peter, I think the MAC support team is opened from Monday to saturday.

Ricky: The support center for Windows is opened for 24 / 7.

Peter Rukavina: Is there any way I can get Mac PSC 2355 support on a Sunday at all?

Ricky: Let me check.

Ricky: Peter, thank you for your time.

Ricky: You can email the issue to the email support team and they will reply you with in 1 hour with the solution.

Peter Rukavina: Thank you for your help. Have a good day!

Ricky: Open the above link. Click on link which is under Email and post the issue to them and they will help you to resolve the issue.

I’ll let you know what happens next.

The sum total of my cycling in France was an hour long jaunt around Aniane, so I can’t claim to have real personal experience with French cycling. However I did make a couple of observations:

• Cyclists are treated with much more respect by motorists than they are here in Canada. That means always giving cyclists a wide berth when passing (a few metres wasn’t unusual), always signalling the intention to pass, and not trying to pass if conditions weren’t safe.
• If you wear cycling shorts, shoes, etc. and are “pro” or “semi-pro” then you also wear a helmet. We never saw an amateur “around town” cyclist wearing a helmet.
• Cycling seems much more popular as casual recreation; it was not unusual to be sitting at a remote café and have a gaggle of 10 or 15 cyclists show up, dismount, and grab a coffee before continuing on their way.
• Everyone, pro and amateur, uses hand signals.

I just brought my bike up from the basement this afternoon and I rode it in to the office for the first time after filling up the tires at the Ultramar gas station on the corner.

Read more about cycling on PEI from new cyclist Rob Paterson.

My friend Harold Stephens is getting together with author Robert Davis to launch a Bangkok Restaurant Reviews website. Reviews should start to flow shortly; if you hungry and near Bangkok and looking for sage advice, this will be the place.

La Famourette, the excellent restaurant between Aniane and Gignac has a website. There are lots of pictures that show off its riverside location.

A couple of things I’ve noticed on my Mac of late:

• BBEdit was starting up very, very slowly. I threw the BBEdit Preferences file in the Trash; now BBEdit starts up very, very quickly.
• You can now import Firefox bookmarks into Safari. Perhaps you could always do this? I’m not sure. But it’s as simple as File \| Import Bookmarks and then locating the Firefox bookmarks file.
• So far I’ve had absolutely no troubles post-Tiger upgrade other than a general sluggishness of the system (which seems to be getting better). All of my applications and devices are working as they did pre-upgrade.

I got a ride up to the north shore last night for the Annual General Meeting of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust from one of my fellow directors. We couldn’t remember which fork in the road to take at Kensington to get us to Sea View the fastest, so he pulled a PEI road map from the side pocket of his car and handed it to me.

The map, while familiar, seemed very different from the one in my car. Further examination revealed that it was a 1984 road map of PEI. The ferry — “CN Marine” — was still in service. The waterfront of Charlottetown was a rail yard. CHTN was out on North River Road. And there was a detailed introduction to the metric system on the back.

It boggles my mind to consider the process by which this map was transferred, over 21 years, from car to car, remaining intact and in the right place. We must go through a dozen PEI road maps every year in our family.

Being away for a month meant coming close to missing the “15th of the month” deadline for submitting the payroll remittances for Reinvented to Revenue Canada. I couldn’t mail them in, because Revenue Canada says “the date of receipt is the date the payment is delivered to the Receiver General and not the date you mailed the payment.” Much to my surprise, I found that I could take the payment to the Metro Credit Union and Revenue Canada considers this to be “delivery” (they say “date stamped by your financial institution”).

So I made it under the wire.

Curiously, the Toronto Dominion Bank wouldn’t accept the payment, even though Revenue Canada clearly states “make your payment free of charge at your Canadian Financial Institution, in Canada, by presenting this form to the teller.” I don’t have a business account at the TD, and they wouldn’t accept my Credit Union check.

The Brackley Drive-in Theatre has opened for the season. With the new season comes a new RSS feed. Subscribe with your favourite newsreader, and you’ll always know what awaits you at the drive-in.

Here’s how the RSS feed looks in the new version of Safari:

The feed is just a test right now, and probably needs some tweaking; I welcome any feedback.