I realize that Akismet can’t catch all the spam comments in a blog, and my wine club site gets hit pretty hard with spam comments (over 110,000 since I moved it to WordPress), but how could any filter think that a comment entitled “instructional blow job” is not spam?
The day after my incident on an Air Canada flight last week, I received a phone call from them ostensibly to check up on me (maybe to find out how litigious I was feeling), with a promise of a follow-on letter. I gave the caller an earful of my concerns about the carry-on baggage handling security screw-up, and he appeared to note the concerns although I imagine that they’ve disappeared into the vast maw of Air Canada bureaucracy, never to be heard of again.
Yesterday, I received a nice letter from the CEO saying that they regretted the “disruption to my travel plans”, since I suppose that they can’t come right out and say “sorry that we scared you when our plane pancaked on the runway, wasted four hours of your time getting your carry-on baggage off the plane, then failed to provide adequate security for it”, and found an even nicer surprise in the envelope: a $400 voucher for any Air Canada flight. Considering that that’s more than I paid for the round-trip flight to Moncton in the first place, that’s fair compensation: it works out to about $100 per hour for a Sunday afternoon.
In case there was any doubt that I receive an unusual number of Skype chat requests because I have the gender flag set to “female” on my profile, I present one of the more recent ones. This guy’s profile is absolutely hilarious, although I’m not sure how I feel about being categorized as a “mature woman” by someone who is less than a year younger than I am 
I’ve stopped posting all of the chat requests that I get in my Skype Stalkers Flickr set, there have been so many lately. I’m thinking about taking the gender flag off my profile to stop the barrage, although it is an interesting social experiment.
I’m blogging live from Enterprise 2.0 Camp today over on my BPM blog under the Enterprise2.0TTW category.
I’ve been a big fan of Fresh on Spadina since they opened a couple of years ago: it’s right around the corner from me, and the food is both great-tasting and healthy. We’re usually in there at least once a week, either brunch on Sunday or lunch during the week.
In the past couple of months, however we’ve noticed a decline in service. The wait staff have moved from efficient and friendly (in an “I’m cool so can’t be too friendly” sort of way) to ditzy and poorly-trained. The kitchen has slowed to the point where a brunch of one order of pancakes and one order of fruit/granola/yogurt takes over 30 minutes to deliver, and that’s well before the Sunday rush starts around 12:30.
Today was the last straw, however, when the food quality declined to meet the level of service. The server put in the wrong pancake order, forgot my cutlery, didn’t bother to ask at any time if everything was okay, and didn’t even stop back at our table until Damir literally waved his credit card in front of her face in order to prompt the bill. The kitchen took forever to deliver our order, and when it arrived, the banana-nut pancakes were thin, misshapen, overcooked and missing the nuts (which we found out later was due to the server putting in the wrong order) instead of the usual plump and delicious confection. We were both starving by this point and Damir, having run 6km this morning, wolfed the pancakes down anyway. I was luckier with the fruit/granola/yogurt — it’s sort of hard to screw up.
He mentioned that he had lunch there a few times while I’ve been travelling lately, and that the food and service was equally disappointing.
We’re now in search of another healthy brunch location in our neighbourhood. Fressen is a possibility, their dinner menu is great but the only time that we went there for brunch they were sold out of most of what was on their menu. Since they started the tapas menu for dinner, however, they no longer serve the pancakes and waffles for brunch. I’ve also heard about a new vegetarian place opening on Adelaide near Portland. We’re only part-time vegetarians, but favour vegetarian (or even vegan) places for brunch because they tend to be a lot healthier than the usual high-fat and high-sugar brunches.
Any suggestions are welcome.
In the last 7 weeks, I’ve attended 5 conferences in 4 cities (Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, Las Vegas), making presentations at 2 of them, plus squeezed in a 6-day vacation in Nova Scotia that was relatively stress-free right up to the point when the landing gear of my flight collapsed on touchdown on my return to Toronto. I have a serious case of conference bulge, caused by too much inappropriate food and drink, too much sitting, and a complete lack of willpower when it comes to exercising while travelling. I’ve visited my favourite and least favourite American cities. I’ve been at vendor conferences where they coddle me and turn me into a celebrity, and others where I’m pretty much ignored except for my hour on stage (the former is better for the ego; the latter is better for working on the tan and shopping).
This is the most intensive period of travel — barring a few month-long vacations in Europe — since my days as an evangelist for FileNet back in 2000-01. I’ve gone to a baseball game in San Francisco and a spa in Las Vegas, and eaten a lobster the size of a small dog in Nova Scotia. I’ve ridden the subway in Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta. I almost got stuck in Chicago in the last snowstorm of the season, then saw snow again in Nova Scotia 5 weeks later.
I’ve silently blessed the new DVR at home that has captured every episode of Desperate Housewives and 24 that I missed. I was away for Damir’s birthday, and for the first and second crashes of his birthday present.
I missed a few wine tastings: my own wine club’s, the New Zealand wine fair, and others. I had days at home when it felt like all that I did was unpack, do laundry and repack. I had a cup of tea poured on me on the flight to San Francisco, and a bloody Caesar in my lap on the way to Atlanta: neither of them my own drink, and both on the same pair of pants.
My next scheduled trip is Boston, almost a month off, but a new contract that I just signed will take me to Chicago and Montreal before then, so this round of travel isn’t done yet.
In spite of all that, we spend some time last night noodling over a potential trip to Austria, Slovenia and Croatia next summer: there’s some travel of which I never tire.
I booked my current trip to Las Vegas using Expedia, since that gave me the best hotel and airfare rates, and they threw in a couple of spa passes at Caesar’s Palace (where I’m staying) for free. During booking, Expedia also suggested adding an airport shuttle to the package — a great idea since the traffic is crazy on the Strip and that makes a regular taxi around $30 each way. I happily added shuttle service with Showtime Tours for $12 round trip, only to arrive here and find their usual rate is cheaper:
Only $1.50 less (and the conference organizers are picking up my travel expenses, so I don’t really care), but it’s the principle of it: Expedia probably buys vouchers from Showtime in bulk at a discounted price, and I don’t expect to pay almost 15% more than the regular price. If that had been a $300 Grand Canyon tour or Cirque du Soleil tickets that I’d added on at a 15% premium, I’d be truly pissed off.
It’s a very competitive market in online airfare and hotel bookings, so that keeps them honest on the base package, but you might want to do a bit of shopping around online before you let Expedia ask if you want fries with that.
