Funny, just last night we were debating whether it was Hitler or Mussolini who made the trains run on time (I backed Mussolini, on the premise that Germans likely didn’t need any little Austrian to teach them how to make trains run on time):
Do yourself a big favour and add xkcd.com to your feed reader.
Last night, we had the first Toronto Girl Geek dinner, which drew about 40 people with only one brave male soul amongst us. The rules of attending a Girl Geek dinner are simple: if you are male, you must bring a female with you or be brought by a female. You don’t have to be invited. You don’t have to be a girl. You don’t even have to be a geek.
One of the questions that came up was how to get more women integrated into the Toronto tech community, and I suggested that the *Camp events were a great place to start: they’re more casual, it’s easy to gain some experience and confidence with public speaking by heading up a session, and the male attendees are not the usual chest-beating alpha males that you find at some technology events. How disappointing, as I looked around the room, to realize that not a single TorCamp man was in attendance to show his support for women in the Toronto tech community.
The next dinner is planned for September 19th, hope to see more of you then.
Zipcar, which I have started using in the past couple of months and greatly prefer over the time-wasting experience of a regular rental car, has just dropped their rates in Toronto: it’s now $10.50/hour or $69/day for their baseline cars, or $12.50/$87.50 if you want to drive a Mini.
This price drop puts them well within striking distance of the price of a regular rental car: normally, I could rent a car for a day in Toronto from Budget for about $50 plus gas, but that’s because I have a gold Visa card that covers the extra insurance; without that, it would be about $70/day plus gas.
If I were doing a multi-day rental, I’d probably go back to Budget, but for the occasional “I need a car now, for a few hours”, I’ll stick with Zipcar and appreciate the new lower rates.
A year and a half ago, I was invited to move my blog over to a site that was more of an old media site, but covered the technology space that I do: business process management, service-oriented architecture, business intelligence and other integration technologies. However, I’m blogging about all sorts of other things now, so have decided to move my business blog back to my own domain (actually, I had that domain redirected to where it was hosted, but you get the picture).
I’ll likely put a lot of my technology-related blogging over on my business blog now, and I need to see how things settle out in the next month or so in terms of what content goes where. I still believe that I need a “professional” blog and this “off topic” blog; not because I’m trying hide this blog, but because there’s people reading the other blog who aren’t interested in this one, and vice versa.
Some things I’ll post on both sites, like the daily auto-post of links from del.icio.us. [I've decided to post the links only on my business blog, to reduce confusion]
I don’t usually break the confidence of the swarm, but I just checked the history logs for the conversation that went on in our TorCamp group chat on Skype last night to find a few of them discussing the latest target of their website design scrutiny:
Swarmie #1:
ack! i just had a look at streets.to :O
i like the way it looks like the cab runs over the pedestrians on the sidewalk on this page http://www.streets.to/assets/recent/elephantcastle.php
what a horrific website
Swarmie #2:
re: streets.to websitedesign.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
[quoting the actual site:]
<table border=”0″ width=”782″ bgcolor=”#FFFFFF” id=”table36″ height=”285″>
<tr>
<td bgcolor=”#FFFFFF” width=”776″ align=”left”>We offer website design services utilizing Macromedia Flash and superior programming.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Swarmie #3:
oooh man, stop it, you’re hurting my W3C sensibilities!!
These guys completely crack me up. 
When I arrived in Toronto from Boston today, the customs process was a bit odd. Only gone for three days, I had no checked luggage and nothing to declare, and I filled out the customs form as usual: checked “business” as the purpose of my trip, the “no” to all the questions about if I were bringing back this or that. The customs agent looked at it, went wild with a red marker, circling several of my responses, then asked if I was bringing anything back. Uh, no, that’s what I put on the form. Any business materials (which usually means things like marketing materials)? Nope. Did I have a laptop? Yes… Off she went with the red marker again, and when I walked off with my form, I noticed that she had changed one of my “no” responses to “yes”, that being the one asking if I was bringing any business goods into the country, whether or not for resale, and wrote “laptop” below.
WTF?
I’m not a customs expert, but I thought that “goods” meant things that I was importing into the country, not the laptop that I left with three days ago. And if that constitutes “goods”, what about my Blackberry? My camera? The pack of mints in my purse? As far as I’m concerned, these are all my personal belongings that I carry with me everywhere, no different than my wallet and a paper notebook.
I didn’t, of course, question her; even if she was wrong, there’s never anything good that’s going to come out of arguing with a border guard.
Thanks to Jevon MacDonald and Priceline, I’m in the Hilton at Boston Logan airport for $65/night: regular price about 4 times that. First time that I’ve used Priceline, I was always a bit wary of the “name your price” option, but when I specified the area and the minimum number of stars, I realized that I’d be staying at either this hotel or the airport Hyatt, either of which were completely acceptable. Jevon clued me in that $65 was the price to bid (I have no idea how he knew that, but have since discovered some websites that collect recently winning Priceline bid amounts), and suddenly I’m paying less for 3 nights than I would have for 1 night at the Westin across the harbour where the Enterprise 2.0 conference is going on. I can certainly afford cab fare, or the inconvenience of the subway, for the price difference.
I’ll definitely be using Priceline again, although it is completely prepaid so no last-minute cancellations as you might have with a regular reservation.
I don’t know how they do it, but it’s completely silent in this room — my laptop fan is the loudest noise that I can hear. I’m facing the city rather than the runways, but I still thought that there’d be some level of flight noise. I’ve heard only one plane taxiing, and that one was practically under my window. New hotel, ergonomic desk chair, wifi (although not free), nice linens on the bed, bathrobes in the closet; I can definitely get used to this.
