I enjoyed hearing my home province of Prince Edward Island make the list of other places one might like to live (even if only for two months of the year year) in episode 417 of the Accidental Tech Podcast (at around the 13m 30s point). Any other year, John Siracusa, we’d be glad to have you.

We’ve been fortunate on Prince Edward Island to have had limited exposure to COVID-19 and to have effective leadership from our health authorities.

Today, someone in the family needed a COVID-19 test (unlikely to be a real case, but had cold symptoms). We had a drive-in test just after 8am (maybe a 10 minute wait/process). When I checked today at 4pm, we already had our NEGATIVE result.

The results may have been ready sooner—I just didn’t think to check so soon.

Competent government!

Using consumer products to mark milestones in your life has the feel of creepy consumerism, but our lives are often framed by the things we buy. Like it or not, our cars, homes, phones, and computers all mediate many of our more meaningful life experiences.

As a selfish retrospective, I am documenting my life in cars. I’m not really a “car person”, as will be made clear by my choices. Even so, listing all the cars I’ve owned does bring back memories of where I was in life at the time. I hold no illusion that this will be interesting or relevant to anyone else. Such is the privilege of publishing my own website.

The executive summary is:

• I’ve owned eight vehicles.
• Half were manual-transmission, half automatic.
• They’ve all been neutral grey, brown, silver, or black, with one wild yellow exception.
• There was a wagon, two compact hatchbacks (still a type I like), four were sedans (or “car-shaped cars” as the ATP hosts would describe them), and one a minivan.
• One burned to the ground in front of me.

1978 Volvo 200 Series (1998-99?)

This car was born the same year as me. The car and I were both around 22 years old by the time it ended up in my hands. Technically, I didn’t own it. It was lent to me for about a year by friends. It felt like it was milled from a single block of steel (or maybe granite). The loan of this car came with one generous but short lesson in how to drive a manual transmission, at the end of which I was handed the keys. It was yellow, and had a cassette player that usually held a copy of Bargainville by Moxy Fruvous.

Driving this car felt a bit like I imagine it feels to captain a super-tanker—you don’t really steer it. Instead, you give directions that are eventually conveyed to wheels, and the body of the car would follow shortly after. It was very yellow.

1991(ish) Volkswagen Fox

This was the first car I really owned myself. I bought it for a few thousand dollars (about a year of income for me at the time). It was built like a (tiny) tank, and was a blast to drive because it was so small.

The day after I bought the car, a friend asked if they could borrow it for a quick errand. I was too nervous and protective of my new possession to let anyone else drive it and declined.

A week or two later, after owning it for only a couple of weeks, the battery came loose and sparked against the underside of the hood. I pulled over, the engine caught fire, and the car burned beyond repair. I wouldn’t have though so much in a car was actually flammable.

From then on, if someone asked to borrow my car, I’ve always said yes.

1989 Toyota Camry

This dark-brown boxy Toyota sedan was probably one of the worst cars I’ve owned. Not because it was poorly made or designed, but because by the time it came to me, it was rusted to near death.

One morning I backed out of my apartment parking space and gently applied the brake. The brake pedal went directly to the floor with absolutely no resistance. There was no braking power at all.

It was a manual transmission with an easily accessible hand-brake, so it was easy to slow to a stop. I then made the poor choice to drive a car with no brakes to the service station, which was only a few blocks away. I kept it below 10Km/h, rode the hand-brake, and kept it in a low gear.

I can still remember the mechanic showing me the metal pipe that held brake fluid. He rubbed it between his fingers and thumb and it literally crumbled to dust.

1991 Dodge Spirit (2002?)

I bought this car with something like CAD $2,500 in cash. I remember it’s oddly powerful V6 engine most of all. Drove it with 3 of 4 hub-caps for most of its life. This was the last vehicle I owned before cars started rounding their corners.

2004 Toyota Echo hatchback

This was the first car that cost more than a few thousand dollars and to this day the only brand new car I’ve ever “owned” (it was leased). The lease was a financially questionable choice for me, but I was fortunate to find someone to buy it out eventually.

This care was a great design. Tiny on the outside, and huge on the inside. Of all the cars I’ve owned, including a full-size sedan and a minivan, this one felt the most spacious when sitting in the drivers’ seat.

It was fuel efficient, had comfortable space for 4 adults, and some storage space behind the rear seat. This car was also born during the transition from CDs to digital audio. It had a stereo with a CD player that could play audio CDs and burned CDs containing MP3s, so I could easily fit 100+songs on a CD.

This car drove me Boston and all around Prince Edward Island.

2000 Toyota Corolla VE Sedan (2005-2010)

I married into this car. It was dependable and solid. I remember when my wife-to-be asked the used-car salesmen what the “VE” indicated, his answer was delightfully honest: “It means it’s the base model.”

I once had a bottle of Drano leak in the back seat that transfigured some of the seat fabric into a hard plastic mass. This car was fine with one child car seat, but two car seats was pushing it.

After this car, we decided it would be the last without air conditioning.

2007 Honda Accord SE Sedan (2010-2015)

The Honda Accord was bought because it had a wide enough back seat to comfortably fit two car seats (and the occasional squished-in niece). It served us well until it was time for a third car seat. This car was solid, comfortable, and reliable with four doors and big trunk.

Buying a ~3-year-old Honda worked so well, we did it again…

2013 Honda Odyssey (2015-)

Finally, with the coming third child, I had the justification I had always needed to own the ultimate driving machine: the minivan. I’ve always been pro-minivan. They are so versatile and practical. This van has plenty of room for our kids and their cousins and friends.

This was a fancier van than we needed or wanted, but when shopping for a used vehicle in a small province, options can be limited. It has air-conditioning, fancy powered sliding doors (that I initially hated, and have grown to appreciate), heated seats, and a weird stereo that can rip up to six CDs and store the music in some mysterious digital form in the van. It even has an internal copy of the Gracenote database of CDs, artists, and tracks.

This van has shuttled a full load too and from the extended-family cottage, and dragged a few Christmas trees home from the lot each winter.

I had hoped that this might be the last internal-combustion-engine vehicle I own, but I’m still waiting on a fully electric minivan – particularly one that doesn’t cost as much as a small house.

Fiveshadowing – like foreshadowing, but even more obvious.

My dream car is:

• A minivan. I want room for my three kids, a few of their friends, and their sleds.
• All-electric. A plug-in hybrid is a help, but I’d rather jump in with both feet.
• Affordable. While affordability is obviously relative, I don’t want a $60k (or $120k) luxury vehicle.
• Two or three years old. I’m happy to have the first owner pay $10,000 to break in the first few coffee spills and shopping-cart scratches.

My dream car is not:

• Self-driving. I’m fine steering all the way to the grocery store. Call me in ($CURRENT_YEAR + 10) when I don’t need a steering wheel.
• Fast. Life has enough metaphorical whiplash. I don’t need to experience g-forces while getting the kids to soccer.
• A driving entertainment centre. I don’t need six screens to drive to the grocery store.
• A showcase of experimental door mechanisms. As Alex Blumberg notes in this podcast episode, those Back-to-the-Future doors on the Model X are embarrassingly ostentatious.

As of today, the closest thing to an electric minivan is a $100,000+ Tesla Model X super-car SUV with embarrassing super-doors. Chrysler does sell a plug-in hybrid Pacifica minivan that could work for us. I’m curious to learn how practical it is to drive in all-electric mode by default and fall back to internal-combustion only when you’re out of battery.

Given that my requirements are not likely to be met any time soon, I’ll likely need to consider alternatives. We may have to settle for a smaller vehicle and pay more for something newer than we want/need. We may also need to consider giving up on our dream of owning only one vehicle. We could go for an older, cheaper gas-powered minivan for occasional use, plus a smaller electric vehicle for regular/daily use.

It’s unfortunate that going electric is still a luxury. I look forward to the time when the cheapest Kia, Hyundai, Honda, & Toyota are all-electric.

All of this said, I could just step up an buy a used first-gen electric Kia Soul for $15,000 or so. It’s been done.

If you had shown me some of the basic features of today’s design tools like Figma and Sketch back when I was using Photoshop ten (and twenty) years ago, my head would have exploded:

This Netflix stand-up comedy special by Tom Papa, You’re Doing Great, is worth a watch. I suspect your enjoyment of it may wane the further you get from the tired-dad demographic, but that’s me.

This highlight on the “Good Old Days” is a good teaser (mildly not safe for playing out loud at work):

Though I don’t know the details, the Canadian government seems to require internet service providers to allow other vendors to resell access on their networks. For example, here on Prince Edward Island, Bell and Eastlink have the infrastructure to get internet access to homes in the form of actual cable and fiber-optic lines. There are other ISPs that sell home internet access, but under the surface, they’re just relabelling service on Bell or Eastlink networks.

I had been using Eastlink for home internet, mostly for historical reasons. As of January 2021, Eastlink’s least expensive home internet plan is $100.95/month before tax (100Mbps down, ~10mbps up).

City Wide Communications resells this same level of service (on the same infrastructure) for $54.95/month. A savings of $46/month

It is worth noting that Eastlink offers this $100.95/month service at a rate of $79.95/month for the first 12 months. I try to ignore any kind of “introductory offers”, as I end up with services like this for many years. Also, the City Wide service is still $25/month less than this introductory rate.

I was a bit skeptical of switching, as the inconvenience of any administrative overhead or the headache of switching just isn’t worth it for me. That said, saving over $500/year was enough for me to try it out.

It has been four months since I switched from Eastlink to City Wide. I’m happy to report that the switch was easy, and the level of service has remained the same.

On another note, I also switched our ‘landline’ home phone from Eastlink to City Wide. This was also much cheaper, but with the caveat that with Eastlink, it’s an actual wired home phone setup, while City Wide offers a voice-over-IP service over the internet. In theory, they should work identically, but the ye-olde phone network feels more stable to me.

I did run into issues with my VOIP service on City Wide were a few times when the VOIP home phone box would disconnect and fail silently. We wouldn’t notice until we tried to make a call, and then we’d realize no one could call us for who-knows-how-long. This happened on-and-off for a few weeks, but just before I got annoyed enough to contact their customer service, the issue went away and has been stable for several months now.

I hope more people learn about these resellers, if only to drive down the rates of the established providers. I’d be happy to be a customer of Eastlink or Bell, but I’m not going to pay double for it.

I’ve been working at the Web design and development agency, silverorange, since we founded it in 1999. It really is a great place to work.

Though we are distributed across Canada, we work together on PEI for a week each summer, and get away from our regular work to retreat together for a week each winter (except during pandemics, when we go all remote).

Back in 2016, I wrote about how silverorange is one of the things I’m most proud to have helped create.

There are 21 of us working at silverorange these days, and we’re looking to hire for three additional positions:

• Full Stack React Developer
• Quality Assurance Developer
• Native App Developer

If any of these roles are of interest to you, I encourage you to apply. If there’s someone you know you who think would be a good fit, poke them about it too. Thanks.