No statistician worth her σ² would call that a confirmation. Nonetheless, the summer that many considered the most cold, damp, and dreary in recent memory held off Furnace Day for 72 hours.

As none but the eidetic will recall, last year’s Furnace Day fell on September 19th. As always, I waited the arrival of visible breath in the living room before lighting the whistling propane on the evening of September 22nd.

Assuming the current trend is linear, the next Furnace Day will be celebrated on September 25th, 2009. Mark your calendars.

You can’t go fifteen minutes in this town without someone complaining about the summer weather: snow in June, frost in July outside of town (I had a garden hoze freeze solid on me on the 9th), and a lot more cloud than we’re used to in our semi-arid wonderland.

Thing is, I like rain. Aside from big trees, its one of the few things I miss most from down south. Now all I need is an oak or two and a few maples.

Also, I’m not crazy about the sun. For one thing, it’s hot. Damned hot. I barely made it through that excruciating summer a few years ago when the territory was struck ablaze from the heat. For another, it’s waged a 40-year campaign to pepper me with melanoma, regardless of hats, lotions, or ridiculous golf umbrellas. No, I’ll pass.

My not-so-secret hope is that global climate change will continue to bless our summers with cool moisture. (I’m less confident that the winters will remain chilly enough to keep out the riff-raff.)

Loathe me if you must, but my regular translucent-salmon “tan” is comparing pretty well to all you sunbathers this year.

The propane is once again sealed within it’s echoing metal caplet. All told, it’s been 247 days since the furnace was started on September 19th. That seems about average and works out to about $10 per day, although I have a sneaking suspicion my locked-in price will shoot up this fall.

Now that the bathroom is nearing completion — some three months after the wallpaper came down — I’ll be turning my growing renovation skills toward rebuilding and re-insulating the mudroom (or, “arctic entry” as it’s known in the local realty listings). That should ease the heating bill a little.

What really puts a bee in the bonnet of the elbow patch and pipe set atop the hill at Yukon College?

1. Suspicious selection of the president?
2. Assault in the residence?
3. Bears in the garbage bin?
4. Turnover in the computer support department?

Answer: None of the above. No, only one topic could launch an all-out week-long e-mail melee, dragging in everyone from the union president to the registrar to the facilities supervisor:

Sandwiches.

And not just sandwiches, but the precise location where said sandwiches — charitable sandwiches! — might be assembled.

There’s really no point in continuing to describe this ridiculous episode, other than to repeat, one last time, “sandwiches.”

My wedding band is a Murdoch’s Gem Shop special: a benuggetted piece called The Sluice Ring.

Anyway, sometime between June and last month, the ring had become denuggetted by one.

Murdoch’s renuggetted it at no charge, taking less than half the time they originally estimated.

Just one more reason to favour Main & Third over Chilkoot & Quartz.

(Disclosure: I do occasional contract work for Mac’s Fireweed Books and some other businesses that share ownership with Murdoch’s. None of the Murdoch’s staff were likely to have known that though.)

This is a notable addition to the never-ending Yukon Blackout Mashup & Feed Saga.

W00t! You may now subscribe to planned power outage bulletins from Yukon Energy‘s site via RSS. (What? No Atom feed? <wink>)

Thanks are due mostly to Janet Patterson who made all this happen after stumbling upon my self-interested griping.

I now resolve to pursue Yukon Electrical with renewed vigour to realize my ultimate goal of a Yukon blackout map mashup.

This week I celebrate my eighth full year in the territory. Eight is not a terribly round number, but if humans had evolved without thumbs it would’ve been: fractional arithmetic on computers would be a little less surprising, prices would all end in 7, and Rudy Giuliani would be the Mayor of 11/13.

To mark the occasion, I’ve posted the e-mail dispatches I sent along the road that took me here in a new section of the site called What He Wrote. I took the long way, coming north from Toronto via Halifax. Coincidentally, it took me eight weeks to make the trip, and upon arriving, my car had eight tires. Spooky.

You’d have to be a real What He Said fan (Hi Mom!) to slog through all of it, but at least it’s now preserved for posterity. Yes, this rickety old Celeron server should outlive me and my descendants.

I hope to continue adding to the What He Wrote section; perhaps including some of my works that contain the more traditional narrative elements like a beginning and an end.

To: Thor
CC: Zeus/Jupiter, Ukko, Haokah, and other electricity-related deities
Subject: Goddamn blackouts

Yet another of our multiple power outages today, right in the middle of burning a backup DVD on one computer, and upgrading the operating system on another. Also waiting for an important e-mail message that hopefully wasn’t bounced back to the sender in such a way as to suggest that I’m incapable of competently managing an e-mail server. All told, I lost 2.5 hours of semi-productivity, which converts to…including GST…at least seven beans and a plastic whistle.

Perhaps my blog entries of late have offended the patron gods of Yukon Energy/Electrical.

Silver Lining: due to much recent practice, I can now reset all of the house’s clocks and timers in under fifteen minutes.

I see Geoff was also caught in the dark.

I recently submitted two online orders: the first, a replacement laptop power adapter from Dell; the second, a memory upgrade for the same laptop from Crucial.

You would think a simple device like a power adapter (i.e., the brick that plugs into the wall) would long outlive its associated laptop — they’re just made of coiled wire, for crying out loud. But apparently the model for my Inspiron 5160 laptop is prone to failure: eventually the computer stops recognizing it when plugged in, and so refuses to charge the battery. A quick search showed that Dell stocks replacement adapters — at the ungodly price of $90 (for coils of wire!) — and so I ordered one. The site reported it would take a couple of weeks, but at least the shipping was gratis.

While my credit card was out, I doubled my laptop’s RAM to a full gigabyte. Crucial makes it easy to find the right type of memory sticks, and their prices aren’t atrocious (about half of what Dell charges, at any rate). Shipping would be about $15, but it would arrive via FedEx, so presumably quickly.

The adapter arrived first. It took about a week — only three days in transit from Texas — and was brought to the door by the Purolator guy with zero shipping or duty charges.

It took eight days for FedEx to “priority” ship the memory from Idaho. Aside from the shipping charge, I also had to fork over $20 duty while my parcel languished at the border for five of those days. From the tracking site, I also see that it spent its first day in Whitehorse aboard the delivery truck, before being unloaded at 5:05pm back at the depot (Miller time!). It was finally delivered at 11:06 the next morning. (In fairness to FedEx, I believe Air North handles ground delivery hereabouts, with apparently the same sense of urgency as Tom Hanks’s Russians in Cast Away.)

I was in no rush to receive the memory. And FedEx can’t be blamed for customs holdups either: Crucial seemingly lacks Dell’s border agents for handling the crossing in lickety-split fashion. However, the overall impression I’m left with is that FedEx truly does operate on Yukon Time (a local expression and tourism campaign slogan, defined as somewhere between late and never), so I’d go with one of the others when ordering vital supplies from Outside: Atlantic lobster, video game consoles, kidneys, etc.

This is yet another entry in the increasingly improbable Yukon Blackout Mashup & Feed Saga.

You didn’t ask for it, but you get it anyway: the [Sample] Yukon Blackout Map Mashup. It’s more sample than mashup, since I don’t actually have any Yukon Energy/Electrical data to play with. Instead, I invented a brief sequence of power fluctuations that afflict the Copper Ridge subdivision (at least the older bits of it that show up in Google Maps).

Not knowing what real data from the utilities might look like, I was forced to imagine that they might track blackouts, brownouts, and electrical surges. I also have no idea where the substation distribution boundaries are, so I just up and invented three of them that coincide with the neighbourhood/street-naming conventions on the Ridge.

In any case, the mashup is live and interactive, so click away on the “Step Forward” button to watch the scenario play itself out. You can also zoom and pan; same as the regular Google Maps.

I didn’t enable the option to view the map in satellite or hybrid mode though: for some reason the street view is wildly misaligned with those, although it does match up in the downtown. The regular non-mashed-up Google Maps doesn’t have this problem (it is consistently misaligned throughout, but only by a small amount).

Technical Details

Those that know me understand that the only reason this whole Yukon Blackout brouhaha exists is because I wanted an interesting reason to play with the Google Maps API. This has certainly fit the bill.

It took me a while to reacquaint myself with JavaScript, but the API examples helped me along. All of the mashup code is embedded in the page, so you can just View Source to see how it’s strung together.

To keep things simple, I decided against using a library like Prototype or JQuery, but I certainly would in future, for the iterator methods alone — raw JavaScript is a browser-dependent pain in the patoot.