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{ Monthly Archives } January 2007

A fitting end to my time at Terminal 2

After my trip to hell getting to Austin on Saturday (my flight boarded on time but was over 3 hours late leaving Toronto, meaning that we sat strapped in for about 3.5 hours on the ground before ever taking off, then missed my connection in Washington so arrived in Austin about 6 hours late), I flew back to Toronto last night via Chicago. Of course, the flight was late getting out of Chicago — has anyone ever had an on-time flight from Chicago? — and we arrived in Toronto just before midnight.

The gate agent who met the flight informed us that we were the last flight ever to come into Terminal 2, since it was shuttered as of end of day. As I walked through to Customs, I looked around: no other planes at any gates; no people in any waiting areas. We were the only flight being processed through Customs, and the only baggage being unloaded, which made everything exceptionally fast — so fast that I had to wait 15 minutes for Damir to pick up me.

Given that I have flown in and out of this terminal literally hundreds of times, it felt like the end of an era. Next week, US-bound again, I fly out of Terminal 3.

2007 01 30 travel Comments (0)

Short-lived nirvana in Terminal 2

It figures that on my absolute last trip out of Toronto’s Terminal 2 (it closes for demolition on Tuesday), I find a spot — right in front of gate K in the US departures area — where I have both AC power and free wifi. The wifi seems to be courtesy of the Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge, which I didn’t think was that close but must extend behind one of these walls.

2007 01 27 travel Comments (0)

The Emperor’s Children (Claire Messud)

I know that I said in my review of jPod that there are few books that I don’t finish once starting them: The Emperor’s Children is one of those rarities. I struggled through about half of the book, wading through the overly-complex and pompous wording and characters that I really didn’t care that much about, until I read something that made me realize what a bad writer that Messud actually is, and what a crappy editor that she has: “is comprised of” when she meant “comprises“. Twice. I put the book down and backed away, slowly.

2007 01 20 arts challenge
books Comments (0)

jPod (Douglas Coupland)

My LibraryThing icon in the sidebar has been pretty busy lately; I arrived home on the 10th after being away for a month and found that three of the books that I had put on reserve at the library had already come and gone, and four more were ready to be picked up. I love the reserve system, and owe it all to Ingrid for telling me about it: just get your TPL library card and sign up online, then search away. When you find something that you like, you can put a reserve on it and it magically shows up at your local library branch when it’s available. The system sends you an automated phone message (which I wish was email) when there’s something for pickup, or you can login and check online. The unfortunate part is that after months of waiting for some of these, they all seem to be coming in at the same time: I have four things out on loan now, and another five waiting at the library for me (although two of these are DVDs).

The first one that I attacked was Douglas Coupland’s jPod, and I have to admit that I was disappointed; although this is called “Microserfs for the age of Google”, I found it inferior to Microserfs. I actually liked most of the story and the characters: a group of Vancouver-based game software developers who were building an entire evil subplot into what was supposed to be a children’s video game, and some of their strange companions. However, there were some really stupid page-wasters, such as when one of the characters created a challenge related to the first 10,000 digits of pi, it was accompanied by the entire 10,000 digits. Yawn, interrupted only by the fast flipping of pages past this nonsense. The largest of these went on for several pages, and became more than a little annoying. The most annoying thing, however, was the way that Coupland wrote himself into the book as some sort of evil genius. Not funny, not even interesting.

There’s very few books that I haven’t finished, once I pick them up, and I did finish this, although I don’t recommend it. Also, I wanted to include it the arts challenge (although I figure it’s cheating a bit, since that I can pop off 50 books pretty quickly and wouldn’t consider that to be fulfilling the arts challenge obligation).

2007 01 19 arts challenge
books Comments (3)

The Robber Bride on film

If you’re a fan of Margaret Atwood, as I am, you’ll want to catch the movie adaptation of her book The Robber Bride on CBC this Sunday. Mary Louise Parker’s in it.

Hey, it’s passive, but it’s CanCon so I’m counting this as part of the arts challenge.

2007 01 18 arts challenge
culture Comments (0)

2007 Canada Council Arts Challenge

Back in December, I received an email from Ingrid about the Canada Council for the Arts challenging Canadians to participate in 50 arts activities in 2007. Of course, I just noticed that I missed the registration deadline of January 15th, but what the hell — I’m doing it anyway, and not just because Ingrid’s suggesting a mid-year BBQ/sailing party to compare notes. (Why they would choose to be so exclusionary as to have a specific sign-up date, or not to provide a way to post your arts activities directly on their website, is a mystery, but this is the federal government that we’re talking about).

I’ll be blogging about my arts activities this year under the “arts challenge” category, so feel free to drop back and check how I’m doing.

2007 01 18 arts challenge Comments (2)

Netfirms has the last word

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll know that I had a run-in with a crappy hosting provider (Netfirms) that resulted in me blogging a lot of bad (yet completely true) stuff about them, and them letting me out of my year-long contract with a refund of the unused months. That finished in mid-November when I moved the site in question (my wine-tasting club’s site) to GoDaddy.

Just after I left for Europe in mid-December, more than a month after I moved the site off Netfirms, I receive a nice email from their technical support:

Thank you for your inquiry.

We have made some changes to your configuration and can currently see an improvement in the speed with which your site is currently loading. We will continue to monitor this and will make any tweaks or changes as necessary to ensure that the site continues to load quickly.

We would like to ask that you monitor your site as well and if you continue to experience any issues, please contact us.

Thank you for your patience.

I was going to email back to them and let them know that the speed improvement was because I’d moved off their skanky hosting a month before that, but they should have to figure that out for themselves.

2007 01 16 customer service
netfirms Comments (6)

Rogers and phone unlocking

People who live outside North America are shocked that we are shackled to our mobile service provider since phones bought through them are locked to that provider. Roaming charges with most providers are prohibitively expensive, and I’d really like to just get a local pay-as-you-go SIM card when I’m travelling so that I can use the phone cost effectively.

There’s all sorts of ways to get your phone unlocked (like those kiosks in the shopping malls), before my recent trip to Europe, I thought that I’d try the legal way: by asking Rogers to do it for me. Here’s what they said:

In your recent email, you have informed us that you would like to have your Blackberry unlocked for international use.

Unfortunately we are unable to unlock Rogers Wireless phones at any cost. If you try to unlock your phone through a third party your warranty will be voided and there is no guarantee the phone will work thereafter. Rogers offers roaming while outside of Canada to all of their wireless customers who have a compatible GSM phone with either or both the frequencies of 900/1800MHz (850/1900MHZ while within North America). You may review the charges associated with your account while roaming at www.rogers.com/roaming.

We do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and thank you for choosing Rogers.

“Your warranty will be voided?” “There is no guarantee the phone will work thereafter?” As far as I know, they phone unlocking procedure consists of entering an unlock code using a standard option in my Blackberry; how could this possibly render my warranty void or my phone unworkable? Is this just another telco scam to make as much money as possible off me?

2007 01 16 customer service Comments (5)

The chick flick effect

The good thing about an unconference like EnterpriseCamp is that it doesn’t attract too many of the testosterone-laden alpha geeks that many tech conferences do, so although there were only 3 women in about 40 attendees, I had a pretty good time on Saturday. Also, there was no chance of a line-up in the ladies room.

Nevertheless, I felt the need for something a little kinder and gentler, and finagled Damir into going to The Holiday yesterday afternoon. I have to admit, it was even more chick-flicky than I had anticipated: Kate Winslet and Jack Black as a couple? As the credits rolled up, Damir turned to me and said “I need to go to the pub right now and drink a beer. And maybe eat some chicken wings. Or shoot something.” [Okay, I made up the shooting something part, but that was in the spirit of things] I reminded him that the season premiere of 24 was coming up in a few hours, and would have plenty of gratuitous violence to counteract the chick flick effect; that seemed to calm him somewhat.

2007 01 15 culture Comments (0)

Catching up

Just returned from a month in Europe: pre-Christmas in Zagreb, where Damir lived for several years before he moved to Canada, Christmas in Osijek with his family, and New Years in Vienna plus the following 10 days. Still a bit jet-lagged, but westbound is always easier for me so recovering quickly. Pictures from Croatia and Vienna are on Flickr.

I was checking email but not blogging while I was gone, but there are a number of things that I want to blog about the trip, so I’ll do those after this without post-dating the entry but will mention the date in the entry itself (if that makes any sense).

Update: I’ve decided to post-date the entries so that they appear in as if they were blogged on the day of the event. You can find all my travel entries here.

2007 01 12 travel Comments (0)