I had a health test recently, the results of which I would receive in the mail. Not having heard anything by this morning, I wondered for the thousandth time in my life why the results couldn’t be available to me online. I decided to search “PEI patient medical records” to see if there has been any update on this long-promised service.
I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon a pilot project for MyPEI and MyHealthPEI, where PEI residents can signup for early access to both online government and health services. I gathered the ID I needed to register, quickly moved through the easy online verification process, which included me saying my name in a video that is uploaded to their system to be reviewed by someone somewhere (verification in person is also available at Access PEI locations), and within a couple of hours, my account was active.
I haven’t had much time to look around on the MyPEI site (don’t think there’s actually much there yet), but the MyHealthPEI site (which seems to be provided by Telus Health) contained a list of my immunizations back to 2013. The Lab Results section was empty, but I found a notice that said they will be making results available for tests starting with those taken in March 2025.
The My Health Links section seems to be rich with links to resources on a wide range of topics. I’ve always found the Health PEI website a bit awkward to navigate – you sometimes need to know what you are looking for to look for it! – but this is well laid out.
In the end, I didn’t find what I wanted this time, but am hopeful that soon the days of waiting for medical tests to show up in the mail will be a thing of the past. The adoption of electronic medical records has been a long and bumpy process for the PEI health system, so this is a positive and important step.
Last week I popped the first disc of the third season of Succession into my DVD player (the library is my Netflix) and pushed the play button on the remote. Nothing happened.
I took the battery cover off the back of the remote and did what I’ve done often over the past few years: twirled the batteries and tried again. I don’t understand why this worked because it seems totally bonkers, but twirling the batteries would somehow revive them. This time, though, nothing happened. I put some fresh batteries in and the remote worked, so my luck extending the useful life of the original batteries that came with the remote well past what I would have thought possible for cheap AA batteries had run out.
For, you see, I purchased the DVD recorder/player on January 14, 2006 at Future Shop in Charlottetown. We used it a lot for the first five years we had it because we had dialup internet until 2010 so streaming wasn’t possible. I would say the player is still used a few times a month, but mostly the remote just sits there and waits.
I will reluctantly drop the Greencells in a recycling container, but these cheapo batteries deserve to take a bow.
While tidying up the basement yesterday, I pulled down an unlabelled file box that turned out to have some writing on the back.
When I left Daily Bread in 2001, I packed my personal items in this box and it ended up moving back to PEI with me.
This is a relic of Year 2000 prepping in Canada’s largest city.
I worked at the Daily Bread Food Bank in Toronto from 1994 until 2001. In January 2000, DBFB was located at 530 Lakeshore Boulevard West at the foot of Bathurst Street in the original Loblaws warehouse. Built in the 1920s, it was a massive, dusty, slightly-scary building, but as we paid no rent to our landlords, Wittington Properties, the real estate arm of the Loblaws grocery chain, to us it was home sweet home.
Part of my job was looking after the DBFB archives. We didn’t have much money, so I was always on the lookout for clean, gently-used file boxes that occasionally came in filled with donations of non-perishable food that I could reuse for storage. I plucked this beauty from a pile at the side of the loading dock after its contents had been emptied into a larger box ready for the sorting procedure we used for public donations during the first week of 2000.
The turning of the clock from December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000 had people a little freaked out, and many started to prepare by purchasing extra food in case computer glitches caused transportation issues and the food supply ran short.
Short term businesses popped up that would deliver a pallet of food and household necessities to your home designed to get you through the complete break down of society. I even knew people who were preparing for (and looking forward to) the “end times” and the return of Jesus Christ, but who also bought a lot of extra food and water….just in case.
Governments planned well in advance for any possible issues and Daily Bread was included in that planning. Toronto was estimated to have a three day supply of food on hand at any time in grocery stores, warehouses, the Ontario Food Terminal, and the large manufacturing factories of companies like Campbell and Kraft. After those supplies were used up, well, there would be panic.
I’m probably not giving away any important secrets now to reveal that if the Y2K bug had caused widespread disruption, Daily Bread (and probably other similar organizations) would have been taken over by the government, the building protected by the military, and the food we had on hand (which could be millions of pounds) would have been distributed to the general public.
Knowing about this planning meant I not only bought some extra food and bottled water myself, but I filled my car with gas, got a few hundred dollars out of the bank, and was prepared to hightail it out of Toronto and drive to PEI as fast as I could if things went sideways. My parents always had masses of food preserved and, well, we are resilient in rural PEI in a way a major city just isn’t; I had seen how messed up Toronto could get after a big snow storm and didn’t want to white knuckle the end of the world there.
In the end, nothing much happened when the year 2000 started, except people realised they didn’t need all the Chef Boyardee and Kraft Dinner they had in their cupboards and wanted to donate it to the food bank, which was a happy bonus for us. I believe the file box I have came from one of the large office buildings in the downtown business district, where employees decided to set up their own collection bins so they could toss in their extra non-perishables on their way to work.
All the details of the impromptu Y2K food drive we launched escaped me, but I found this Globe and Mail interview with our executive director, Sue Cox, from that time that fills in the blanks. Sue was a great boss and a lot of fun, as the last sentence shows!
Y2K bust proves a boon for food banks
John Gray
Toronto
Published January 10, 2000
The Y2K bug that didn't bite has proven to be a windfall for some of the needy in the Toronto region.
The Daily Bread Food Bank estimates that about 13,500 kilograms of food have been contributed from stockpiles that nervous residents had built up in the event of a turn-of-the-century disaster.
When the possible disaster did not happen, Daily Bread issued a public appeal that the unneeded goods be dropped off at firehalls and Loblaws supermarkets in the greater Toronto region.
Sue Cox, executive director of Daily Bread, said there had been "a nice response" throughout the region.
Although not even a partial tally of donations will be completed until tomorrow, and contributions may continue for some time, Ms. Cox said preliminary estimates suggested there have been at least 30,000 pounds (13,500 kilograms) of food contributed.
She thought most of the contributions really had come from people who feared the world's computer systems would stagger, if not collapse, from complications of entering a new century and who stocked up on food as a precaution.
She cited an encounter with one woman who arrived at a firehall with about 22 kilograms of food that she had stored in her basement as a hedge against a crippled computer infrastructure.
Pronouncing herself pleased with the results, Ms. Cox said she had never conducted a millennial food drive before and did not really expect ever to conduct another.
I actually went to work on January 1, 2000 even though the food bank was closed not because I was a workaholic (though I was, a bit), but I was in charge of the computer network and telephone system and was curious to see if everything was still chugging along.
Our computer network was 30 donated 386 and 486 computers and a few printers. Our server was a 586 Compaq desktop running a Novell product. We had two fax machines. There was only one computer connected to the internet, located in our mail/fax room, and I would log onto it to send or receive the odd email, but it wasn’t connected to our internal network at all, the best firewall ever.
DBFB had a very simple website that was hosted and updated free of charge by a company with headquarters downtown. We referred to our website in our marketing, but it got very little traffic.
dailybread.ca May 10, 2000 from Internet Archive.
I spent most Saturdays in November and December 1999 testing the computers for Y2K compatibility using a disc that had been sent to us by the federal government. I can’t remember what happened if a computer failed the test, but I probably patched the Windows operating system somehow and moved on to the next computer.
We had an amazing HP printer, a LaserJet 4. It was an astonishing workhorse. It printed hundreds of pages a week in our dusty office, rarely jamming. I cleaned a mouse nest out of it once and it just kept going. I had it repaired by a technician who came to the food bank a couple of times when it stopped working, and he would replace a part and get it going again.
Somehow I found out that there was a chance the LaserJet 4 wouldn’t work properly or connect to our intranet, so the first thing I did on that January 1 was boot my computer and send a page to print on the LaserJet 4, and of course it worked. That little beauty was still chugging away when I moved back to PEI in 2001.
Using barbed wire fences to create a telephone network makes so much sense, but it was new to me until I stumbled upon this fascinating article. Always enjoy reading about rural ingenuity. Favourite fact: the barbed wire networks sometimes used corn cobs, cow horns, or glass bottles as insulators!
Lori Emerson’s website seems full of interesting projects, and I especially love the table of contents from her upcoming book Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook.
We started getting early morning spam phone calls on our landlines a few years ago (our house has an apartment for my mother). Early as in 6:30 a.m. early. My mother was not usually out of bed or, if she was, she was getting dressed or in the bathroom, and she would rush to answer the phone. As her mobility decreased, I was afraid this would all end in a fall.
To prevent a possible tumble, I started taking her kitchen phone off the hook every morning when I got up. I’d hear a dial tone followed by a ring noise and then a voice telling me to hang up and try my call again (apparently known as an intercept message). After the message was repeated twice, a rapid busy signal would start and eventually would go dead after a long period.
My mother would replace the handset when she was in the kitchen and ready for her day, and if someone called to tell her that her Windows machine was acting up or she had won a cruise, she was awake and ready to hang up on them. This was an easy solution to an annoying problem.
We have two phone lines in our house. Our copper line was replaced in 2021 by a fibre optic cable that gives us internet, television and telephone. As my mother doesn’t use the internet, and we are able to wirelessly bounce a television signal from the Bell Home Hub modem to give her television, we decided at that time to leave her copper telephone line as it was.
Until Bell Aliant sent out letters earlier this year. The first informed us that if my mother’s copper line broke, they wouldn’t fix it and my mother would have to get a fibre line, which was fair enough, I suppose. That was followed a month later by another letter saying they would be cancelling her phone service by August if she didn’t switch to their fibre service. A classic Bell passive-aggressive move.
As we already had the fibre line and Home Hub in our house, it was an easy matter of some magic person left over from Island Tel days doing some programming at the Bell Aliant office in Charlottetown and rerouting my mother’s phone number to our modem (each of the Home Hubs has room for two phone lines). We lucked out again and had a tech come to our house (another Island Tel vet nearing retirement) who was able to make things work in our basement to easily route from our modem to my mother’s phone.
The morning following the switch, I picked up my mother’s handset expecting to hear the regular pattern. As I moved around her kitchen, I heard the dial tone followed by the signal to warn that the phone was off the hook, but no gentle, helpful voice.
I thought that was the end of the voice, but a couple of weeks later I was looking after a friend’s house while she was away and remembered she still had her copper line service, so I had one last visit with the Bell Aliant voice:
Anyone know who recorded this message? It certainly sounds like an Atlantic Canadian voice, maybe PEI but could be Newfoundland or Cape Breton, too. Recorded on tape? A copy of a copy of a copy? Let me know what you know, and please try your call again.
This beautiful vignette from Peter’s Italian travels sees him momentarily propelled back in time to the backlot at Cinecitta in 1962 and onto the set of a Sophia Loren/Marcello Mastroianni classic, and I’m swooning at the thought of it.
What if we had all agreed to use the internet only to share the beauty we had seen through our days, like digital Damiels and Cassiels?
My 2020 Chevrolet Bolt EV was part of an August 2021 recall by General Motors to address battery fires. I waited patiently for my new battery only for GM to announce in June 2023 they were ending the battery replacements and would instead be installing enhanced monitoring software in vehicles that hadn’t yet had the replacement completed.
I’d heard George Iny from the Automobile Protection Association on the local CBC Radio noontime show many times, so I wrote to the APA after hearing about the change in recall and was surprised to have a response from Iny himself, who asked if he could use my email as part of an article on the subject, which I said would be fine. I sort of forgot about that part of our exchange until I did a search tonight for the latest information on the recall and found the email (attributed to T.B., cough cough) as the basis of a MoneySense article.
One thing I thought of after I emailed the APA was the potential hit in resale value I could incur. There seems to have been no rhyme or reason as to which cars did or didn’t get the battery replacement, so other 2020 Bolt EV owners did get the new battery and the 8-year warranty that came with it, while I get nothing but software. When it comes time to sell or trade my car, I would expect it to be worth less than a 2020 that had the new battery and warranty, and there will be no compensation from GM for that loss.
I’ve gone from being impressed by GM promising to look after all their Bolt EV customers to being pretty sour. I had only owned one other GM product in my life: an ancient quarter ton pickup I bought from my car-dealer cousin, Warren, to use while our house was being built, handy to pick up supplies for the carpenters and keep construction moving forward, but in constant need of repair so a short-lived possession. Unless GM have a change of heart (which would mean they would have to first acquire a heart), I can’t imagine I will ever buy a General Motors product again. I’m sure Mary Barra won’t be losing sleep over that, though, because I’m old and like to keep cars for a long time, so probably another couple of cars will see me out.
I still like the Bolt EV, think it is well built and have enjoyed driving it, but GM’s absolute disregard for customers stinks like the tailpipe of their stupid Hummers.
Me driving my first zero-emission car, a gift from one of the toy salesman who used to visit to my parents’ general store, 1969. I assume someone stopped me from driving off the step, or was this the inspiration for the final scene in Thelma and Louise?
Justine Haupt has started taking preorders for rotary cellphone kits and has released a video explaining the whole thing (it includes a great Contact Easter egg!). I don’t need a rotary cellphone, but love that this wildly intelligent and creative person has created it just because she wanted one. The combination of an ePaper display, rotary dial and real ringer bell is so steam-punk exciting!
Canton Becker has released a 1,000,000 hour long song today for Earth Day, on cassette tape, of course! You can randomly skip to a section that no one else has heard before and name a 15 minute section. Here’s Squeaky Ducks on a Summer Evening at around hour 695,203 for your listening pleasure.
I spent part of Earth Day cleaning out a pond in the decommissioned gravel pit on the land we inhabit, gently replacing frogs I stirred up and waving at the one butterfly I saw, seagulls, crows and blue jays wheeling and calling above it all. It was warmish in the late afternoon sun, and I was content in a way I never am in any other place. Water, trees, sky…that’s really all I need.
