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We eventually did arrive in sunny South Carolina, the Palmetto State, starting point of the American Civil War. We stayed in Mauldin, one of the many suburbs of Greenville.

Since there was no real itinerary, I gave myself two goals; a) observe southern Americans in their natural habitat and b) find a Palmetto. Greenville has lots of Americans but no Palmettos; I’m thinking that some will be found closer to the coast. But while hanging out in the Greenville area, I made all kinds of interesting observations about the state and it’s people:

Temperature
The first thing I noticed about South Carolina in the summer is that it is hot. On the day I started writing these posts it was 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and it was humid too. Apparently it’s not always this hot, but such heat is not unusual either. Interestingly, the people of South Carolina refuse to acclimatise themselves to the summer heat. Every building we went into, every building, from gas station to bistro had mucho air conditioning. It’s like every building in the state is kept as close as possible to 70. The power consumption in the summer must be just enormous.

Roads
Like most places we’ve been to in U.S., South Carolina has very good roads. There are paved roads everywhere and perhaps as a result, the urban areas are very spread out. The only way to get anywhere is to drive. A lot of the roads don’t even have sidewalks, even on residential streets (why would you have them if everyone drives?). This isn’t unique to South Carolina, just something that was fairly obvious.

Fast Food
The farther you go south in the U.S., the greater the density of fast food joints. Every strip mall has a few, and the region has no shortage of strip malls. Even a small town like Mauldin, with only 17,000 people or so, must have at least two dozen fast food restaurants, in addition to another dozen or so restaurant chain eateries. As to be expected, there are chains in the U.S. south that are unheard of in Ontario. Waffle House, Ruby Tuesday (yeah, named after that Stones song), Bob Evans, iHop and Hardee’s all come to mind. Didn’t get a chance to try them all, not sure if I want to.

The Flag
In the northern states the stars and bars were quite common with like every second building and car adorned with the American flag. In South Carolina flags and signs are common, not of the U.S. flag, but of the South Carolina State flag. It even has a Palmetto on it.

The Delta Faucet
Every sink and shower I’ve looked at uses a single knob Delta faucet. While I’m sure they exist, I haven’t yet seen a traditional two tap fixture. I’m not sure if this is a Carolina thing or a U.S. thing, but I found it interesting.

The Old and the New
Many of the Southern states are proud of their heritage, and it goes back a long way in some cases. Even though most Carolinians live in modern American cities, private groups and the state governments put a fair bit of effort in maintaining museums and preserving old buildings, particularly in Charleston, the old state capital.

South Carolinians Are Polite
Certainly more so than other States I’ve been in, and I dare say, more than many Ontarians. I remember when I was in California the people there always seemed like they were in a hurry. People would bump into you, cut in front of you, generally be around you without uttering a word. In South Carolina people say “excuse me”, “thank you”, “sorry about the wait”, and all the other sayings that civilised people should say to each other.

South Carolinians Like Church
Every second block has a church of some denomination or another — this is the Bible Belt after all. But the churches don’t get in your way. The only religious-like state law that caught my notice was a prohibition on buying booze on a Sunday. This is fair enough, as throughout the week you can buy all the hooch you want at any gas station, corner shop or grocery store.

South Carolinians Have Not Forgotten The War
Not the Second World War, Korea or Vietnam, but rather the American Civil War, which the South lost. A lot of the historical record of South Carolina is devoted to it’s leadership in the War and in the Confederacy. South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union and one of the last to surrender.

Even though they were out-manned and out-gunned, there was always a chance the South could have forced the North into a stalemate. The possibility is intriguing. For a long while in the war the Confederacy gave as good as it got from the Union, but in the end they lost and lost big. In South Carolina, one quarter of all the men in the state fit for military service died. Many of its cities were sacked. Most of the Confederacy states were broke following the war. This and other humiliations the South endured, all under the Abraham Lincoln’s watch. I didn’t get a chance to talk to anyone in detail about it but there does seem to be a streak of wishful nationalism in the state.

Palmettos
I did eventually find some Palmetto trees in Charleston. I was very happy.

I’m sure there’s more, but I just can’t think of it all.

America is similar to Canada, but not the same. There are all kinds of little things that remind you that you’re not in Canada. Individually you wouldn’t notice these things, but add them all together and you have yourself a foreign nation. It’s not intolerable by any means, it’s just different.

As always, all the Americans I encountered along the way were affable, decent folk. It amazes me that these nice people elect the horrible federal governments that they do.

When you’re there, it’s hard to forget you are in America. For all its many faults, Americans are proud of their country and they show their pride every chance they get. Even South Carolinians find the time to fly the red, white and blue alongside their blue and white palmetto flags. Americans are not afraid to say they are the best, even if they’re not. I think Canadians would do well to show a bit of this pride too, since Canada really is the best nation in the world.

Would I go back? Perhaps, if I had the time. I would have liked to see more of the state parks, and aside from the waterfront in Charleston, I never did get see a Carolina beach. But we covered a lot of ground. Going south involved no less than ten states: New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan. Maybe one day I’ll get to drive their roads again.

Nothing in particular happens to you when you enter the U.S. South. Banjos don’t start playing, gospel choirs don’t start singing, and you don’t develop a drawl in your speech. From the point of view of Interstate 77, nothing much has changed.

In our case, we passed a welcome sign for West Virginia and continued along our way over the hills, through the artificial canyons and under some mighty tall bridges.

West Virginia is even more hilly and more hick than the western halves of Pennsylvania and New York. It’s called the “The Mountain State” for reasons now obvious to me. Aside from the beautiful scenery, it’s serious hillbilly land and we stopped in it only long enough to sleep. The continuous climbing up and down mountains gets to you after a while.

That little western bit of Virginia that sticks underneath West Virginia turned out to be pretty similar, as was the fairly short section of North Carolina we went through (though perhaps not quite as hilly). There really isn’t much to tell… just interesting things to look at as you blow past them at 80.

One thing we did notice was that the temperature outside the car was increasing. Even by late morning you could tell it was going to be a hot one. According to the weather report I reviewed before we started it is going to be 101 by the time we get to Greenville. Evidently it gets hot down South and here we are driving right into it.

Next: Observations on South Carolina

[part 1] [part 2] [part 3]

Not every house in PA is a shack and not every town looks like a trailer park. Some of the settlements and buildings are quite impressive and may well date back from before Independence. Some of them are even famous.

The well known town I’ve identified on the map is Punxsutawney. For a brief moment I wonder if this is the town I think it is. That’s not as silly an idea as it sounds. Name reuse is very high amongst American towns. Greenville, Columbia and Charleston, for example, are all major cities in South Carolina, but are found in other states too. In fact, I think all three of them are found in Pennsylvania too.

How many towns in America can possibly be called Punxsutawney? Since it’s sort of along the way, we decide the easiest way to find out is to go there are find out for sure. We leave the 219 and head down the 119.

Yep, it’s the home of Punxsutawney Phil, the original weather forecasting groundhog. Though arguably famous before, the town became megafamous thanks to Bill Murray’s hit film Groundhog Day, even though most of the movie wasn’t actually filmed here.

This is a town that really, really loves its mascot. They’ve got banners on the street, statues on their walks, even a wooden groundhog statue in front of their war memorial situated in the middle of Groundhog Park. Fear the cuteness.

We don’t have enough time to look for Gobbler’s Knob where the official ceremony takes place as we are aiming to make it to our hotel in West Virginia before nightfall. I’m not even certain if you can visit the Knob during the off season, and I would hate to disturb Phil.

Other than the whole groundhog thing, Punxsutawney is not much different than any other small town. Cute little downtown, couple of industrial employers, lots of nice old houses. More small town-ish than a lot of what we’ve been seeing so far in Pennsylvania. An interesting find in the middle of quiet Pennsylvania hills.

119 leads you to 22 and 22 turns into I376 on the way through Pitsburg towards the I79 leading to West Virginia. We blow through the Pitsburg area in around fifteen minutes and grab Interstate 79 heading south.

Next: Crossing the Mason-Dixon line

[part 1] [part 2]

The only map of any part of the U.S. we have is the little bits of map that fill out the edges of our Ontario map. This is enough to get us going in more or less the right direction. Without any really deep thought about it we decide that Route 219 looks like a better bet than the I90 and we take it. 219 effectively gets us out of the urban horror of Buffalo and into the hilly Western New York countryside. Slowly it takes us from one cute little town to another southbound towards Pennsylvania.

Nearing Pennsylvania, the hills start to become larger and bushier and the settlements begin to spread out. Not only distance between them, but also the density of the settlements lowers to the point where it becomes very hard to tell when you’re in a town and when you’re just passing a bunch of houses.

Somewhere around Bradford, PA, we notice a sign for something called the Zippo Vistor Center. This turns out to be the main plant of the Zippo lighter company, complete with a Zippo themed park. They don’t have detailed maps of the state, but the tourist maps they do have seem to indicate that 219 continues south for some time. So what the hell? We get back on it and continue south.

Prefab housing is common in the area, both trailer homes and modular houses. There are even businesses along the road where you can buy a house “off the shelf”. Houses that are more permanent are made of wood with cinderblock basements. Brick is used sparsely. Vinyl siding is most common. You won’t ever forget you are in the U.S.A. either. Every second house is flying an American flag. Every now and again you’ll see a place with a “Welcome back Cpl such-and-such” sign on its lawn. I’m assuming this is a proud family welcoming home a soldier, back from one of America’s many military engagements around the world.

I’m getting a notion that the economy has not been kind of this area of the States. There are lots of abandoned homes and businesses along the road. What’s really interesting, perhaps disturbingly so, is the number of dwellings that should be abandoned, yet someone is still living there. It’s the oddest thing — a house in a state of tremendous disrepair with a new-looking truck sitting in the driveway and laundry on the clothesline out back. I don’t recall seeing this kind of thing nearly as much in Canada, not even in Newfoundland (where there are plenty of run-down houses, but the locals there have the good sense not to live in them). There are even some structures that look as if they were peiced together out of scrap.

219 continues in and around the hills, winding its way from one cute little settlement to the next until it finally brings us to the town of Johnsonburg, where we buy a map from a gas station overshadowed by the strange machinery of the Weyerhaeuser mill. Soon I notice on that map that we’re fairly close to well known Pennsylvania town.

Next: Phil’s place

[part 1]

One of these highways is a Canadian one and one is American. Can you tell which one?

We’re hopefully going to drive from Fort Erie, Ontario, though New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina and finally into the northern part of South Carolina. Planning of this step has been vague, perhaps follow the I90 south from Buffalo then maybe get on to the I79 and figure it out from there. We have a reservation at a hotel somewhere in West Virginia, but since we have no maps of any of these states, we have no way of knowing where it is exactly. The plan is to obtain maps sometime after we get into the U.S.

I’ve been told many a story about U.S. highways, often unfavourable. While I haven’t been to every one of the states, so far I have no complaints about any of the Interstate or state highways I’ve driven on.

Most states have a “state speed limit” of 55 miles per hour, but on most of the state and interstate highways the limit is higher. On many parts of the interstate system, the speed limit is 70 mph (around 115 kph). While this is the speed you should drive, I found many people passing me at 80. Later, I was told the police will nail people going 80. Meh. Our car handles surprisingly well at 100…

The road conditions are very good. The area we are travelling in is very hilly, but great effort has been put into making the road surface smooth, the curves are mild and the grades as gradual as possible. One annoyance: some states use concrete road in sections and the surface of it produces a high pitched whining in the car.

These roads are very well marked, better than Ontario highways. In Ontario you often get only one warning before you hit an exit. Along the Interstate you almost always get two. Major exits will even count down from the 3 mile mark, to 3/4 mile, 1/2 mile, 1/4 mile, then the exit in big, fat letters with an arrow. There are signs everywhere along the road telling you about all kinds of stuff. There’s helpful ones, curious ones, and ones that seem pretty odd at first glance.

And then there are the billboards and sign posts. There are copious quantities of billboards along the highway, sometimes in the oddest of places (roof of a house is my favourite). Sign height would seem to be important, and you find all manner of signs for stores and fast food joints mounted on top of gigantic, un-guyed posts, some of which looked like they were close 100m tall.

You also see the oddest stuff along the highways, like moving houses. I don’t mean mobile homes — I mean a house being moved from one area to another in pieces. We have seen a half-dozen of these so far. They have escort vehicles with flashy lights to warn you of the dangers of a prefab house lurching around the road at 70 miles an hour. You pass them quickly. Prefab homes seem quite common in this neck of the woods and I might elaborate more on that in the next post.

Like Ontario, American highways have two seasons: winter and construction. We passed dozens of road crews working away at various aspects of the highway, repaving, widening, fixing barriers, making new exits. Unlike Ontario road crews, these U.S. workers often have state police guarding them, I’m guessing because morons keep hitting them, or maybe impatient people harass them, I don’t know. You see the usual signs along the road that say “Work Ahead 1 Mile” but also strange ones like “Give ‘Em a Brake” and “Let ‘Em Work. Let ‘Em Live”.

The differences are mostly cosmetic, like many a road in Ontario the State and Interstate systems seem pretty decent. And up in the peaks of the Appalachians make for a pretty and interesting ride.

Next: In the hills of Pennsylvania

I don’t get vacations all that often, but when I do they don’t tend to be normal. I’m going to Greenville, South Carolina with Marcy to visit some of her friends. But as an added wrinkle, we’re not going to fly down, we’re going to drive!

I’m a little bit trepidatious. I hate travelling, road travel most of all, but the idea of such a drive is interesting. I’ve never done such a long drive in a car before. We’ll be doing the run in our aging Ford Taurus, but I’m confident (enough…) in the car and I suppose it will do all right with the some 2700 kilometre journey we’re going to ask of it (it has to get us back home, too).

And did I mention that we’re going to U.S.A.? And not just any part in the U.S., the Bible Belt, no less. A liberal like me needs to keep his yap shut about certain things. I must remember not to comment on stuff like the War in Iraq (I disapprove), God (don’t like Him), trade (the whole softwood lumber thing is bullshit), sex (I like it), gay marriage (got no problem with it), decriminalisation of marajuana (ditto), etc, etc… Still, I have yet to meet an American I really disliked, and that’s saying something, because there are plenty of Canadians who I hate.

So it’s off to the Niagara Peninsula and Fort Erie to begin our curious journey to the Southern U.S.

I only ever drink Tim Hortons coffee when I travel. I don’t know why.

Next: All about the U.S. Interstate

“Sixty bucks for that!?”

“Sir, I just removed 12 different viruses from your computer. The ones that were preventing it from starting.”

“But that’s sixty bucks. Jesus, my mechanic doesn’t charge this much.”

I get this kind of indignation now and again and I am always mystified by it. Most people are very happy that we have fixed their computer for them. I’m happy to have fixed it. Everyone should be happy…

I resist the urge to ask for the name of this mechanic, as I suspect he works out of a backyard somewhere. There was a time when I too worked out of my basement. Those were happy, simple days, when the Frankie was all about the beer money. The days before I became a professional.

The time comes when people who think they are good at what they do need to move out of the house and get it on for real. Take a chance and get a proper office to work in and meet clients at. Over six years ago my former business partner and I made this very scary, deliberate decision. We moved our shop out of his grandparents’ house and into an office downtown. We were very worried that we wouldn’t be able to make our rent. Back then we only charged twenty dollars an hour, a serious undercharge in our industry. I’m surprised we ever got any business clientele at that rate. Over the years our shop rate slowly increased to the market norm of sixty dollars an hour.

So what is that 60 bucks buying you?

For starters, it pays for the shop. Building a computer shop, buying the tools, amassing the parts and developing a solid business is not cheap. Since I’m not working out of my house that shop not only needs to pay for its rent, it also needs to pay for my mortgage.

It pays for the best. I’m not afraid to be, or admit to being, one of the best desktop technicians around. My crew is the best. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t work for me. And for this I only charge you sixty dollars an hour. You should take this as a kindness. If this were a big city I would be charging ninety and I’d be busy all the time.

It pays for the two decades of training it took to make me the best, and the lifetime of learning it will take to keep me there. It’s not an easy road, but this is what it takes to keep the computers running. Everybody in IT knows and accepts this.

It pays for all the cuts I’ve received working on cheap, shitty, dangerous cases. Maybe you might work in a job that only makes your wrists sore. I work in a job that makes me bleed from time to time.

It pays for the attention to detail. The little things like putting fans in the right places, mounting drives with the right number of screws and putting in all of the expansion slot covers.

It pays for the accessories: zip-ties to bundle wires, loom to make it look nice, chemicals for cleaning — all of these things cost money.

It pays for the research. Computers are so complicated that many of the problems they are admitted for are problems the I’ve never seen before. You are paying me to find your answer.

It pays for the stuff no one ever thinks about, like the millions of dollars of liability insurance we have. Just in case someone is really, really unhappy.

It pays for all the kit we burn out every year fixing stuff. A busy shop like ours go through hundreds of dollars of equipment a year just to keep up.

And most of all, it buys you the peace of mind knowing that you have taken your system to professionals, not some fly-by-night outfit working out of a basement. It’s a little thing, but an important thing, knowing that you are being taken care of by someone who does the job for a living. It’s worth sixty dollars an hour.

Because I am so nice, I thought I’d post a link to PodTech to help them along with their Scoble-powered server stress test. Mind you, it doesn’t look good for a webcaster if their servers can’t take a beating like that, but hey, what do I know? Someone referred to the whole affair as the ‘Scoble-effect’, but I think ‘Scoblized‘ sounds so much hipper. Better check the load distribution on that router before yer totally Scobleized. I like that. It’s interesting that the PodTech site couldn’t take it and yet Scoble’s own blog, hosted over on Wordpress.com, continues to truck merrily along.

Well… now I’m just rambling. Anyway, this reminds me of another experience I had with a busy site the other day.

Like many in the trenches of the IT industry, I figured that I too should get me a copy of Windows Vista Beta 2 so I can poke at it (I want to see if it will run on a Pentium 3 800). I personally don’t plan to run Vista, but I imagine I’ll be installing it on plenty of customer machines (smiling the whole time — I’m going to make a stupid amount of money selling RAM and video cards, hehe).

Downloading Vista from Microsoft is not as easy as you might think at first. Microsoft has this dreadfully complicated procedure for getting the download. You have to sign up at a website, give it some personal information, feed it your email address, respond to an email, get a product key (for a beta?!) and then you get to download it. Well, except that last part didn’t work for me. The website told me plainly that the servers are too busy. I’m a little bit surprised that a single beta download has broken Microsoft. Are there that many people downloading it? It doesn’t look good for a technology company if they can’t keep up with a beta download, but hey, what do I know?

One might wonder why they don’t just use Bittorrent to distribute the thing like the open source folks do with Linux. Apparently blogger Chris Pirillo had this very same thought:

When I asked why they couldn’t just seed it as a torrent (BitTorrent), Aaron responded:

There are legal and privacy issues which unfortunately make that not an option for Microsoft to officially sponsor a BitTorrent. I really wish we could do it, but we can’t. If someone [seeds or downloads a torrent] we can’t guarantee that they’ve got an unaltered copy, etc.

Apparently they’ve never heard of MD5sum, SHA-1, or any of the various checksum systems which you can get for free. I can’t speak for other people, but I for one would pick a torrent called “Windows Vista Beta 2 – Microsoft Official” over something called “VISTA.BETA2.corp.WGAcrackd.[DVD].L33tH/\X0rs.POOKi.rar”. I guess they figured that the legions of nerds downloading it were too stupid to figure all this out. So instead, they force everyone into direct downloading, overloading their servers and bandwidth, and ultimately leaving me with no copy of Vista to play with.

So how does one fix this? Simple. You download the torrent. Someone was bound to put it up anyway. Someone with a MSDN account, I’ll bet. They got their DVDs mailed to them a while back. We sparked up Bittorrent at the shop and had all 2.7GB of it in a few hours. We probably had it before most of the suckers downloading directly did.

Ever wondered what the Canadian Recording Industry Association has been doing while you weren’t looking?

They’ve been lobbying your government to adopt American-style copyright laws, presumably so they can get you thrown in jail for downloading music and video and stuff. It’s not within the scope of this post to point out what’s wrong with criminalizing copyright affairs, other than to say that it is wrong.

Michael Geist alone can’t fix this. Canadians need to make sure our government knows that these lobbyists from the big media industry don’t represent us. Canadians deserve better than to have the fate of our culture decided over a couple of rounds of drinks with hired charlatans.

A buddy needs me to ship some computer stuff to his home all the way out there in Western Canada. Easy enough. The address he gives me is on Cimarron Grove Drive in Okotoks, Alberta, just south of Calgary.

Whenever I ship a parcel I usually check the location with Google Maps and double-check the postal code with Canada Post, just to make sure the given address makes sense. When I do this with the Cimarron address I am surprised to discover that half the streets in Okotoks are named Cimarron. A subtle reference to history? Or perhaps the developers were fans of the movie (it did win the 1931 Oscar for Best Picture after all).

I discover that in addition to Cimarron Grove Drive, there’s also Cimarron Bay, Cimarron Boulevard, Cimarron Close, Cimarron Circle, Cimarron Crescent, Cimarron Drive, Cimarron Green, Cimarron Hill, Cimarron Point, Cimarron Rise, Cimarron Trail, Cimarron Way, Cimarron Grove Bay, Cimarron Grove Circle, Cimarron Grove Close, Cimarron Grove Crescent, Cimarron Grove Gate, Cimarron Grove Road, Cimarron Grove Rise, Cimarron Grove Way and Cimarron Common.

Luckily the postal code seems to match, so I think I’m going to send the sucker and hope the delivery folks don’t get confused like I am now.