• Canadian Spice Market Inc.
  Online shopping for hard-to-find spices and speciality foods
  (tags: food)

I used Expedia for the first time when I travelled to Las Vegas recently: they got me the airfare and hotel at the same price as I could have independently, but threw in a room upgrade and two free spa passes, so overall a great deal. After the trip, they requested that I write a review, which I did, as follows:

Hotel Review: I’ve stayed at Caesar’s Palace several times over the years when in Las Vegas on business, and found some of the rooms a bit shabby. However, they’ve been undergoing some renovations, and my room in the Palace Tower was top notch. It appeared to be fairly recently renovated, and the decor was very nice. The bed was dressed with high quality linens and a duvet rather than the standard polyester hotel bedspread. The bathroom was large, including both a jacuzzi tub and a separate shower stall, although there were surprisingly few bath towels: enough for one, but it would have been marginal if I hadn’t been staying alone. I also had a chance to visit the new Qua Spa, which was great. I used the Roman baths, steam room, ice room and sauna, then lounged around and had tea and fruit — decadent! Since I had a day free at the end of my business trip, I spent some time at the pools, and they’re great, although it’s hard to find a shady spot and it gets very hot in the afternoon. I ate dinner at 808 and was a bit disappointed: the highly-recommended “deconstructed ahi roll” was oily and not as tasty as I had expected, although the mahi mahi main course was delicious. The service was what you would expect from a high-end restaurant, and the wine list was adequate although not overwhelming.

A couple of days ago, I received the following response:

Thank you for your feedback. However, your review, which is included below, needs a few revisions before we can accept it. Please make sure you:

• Write in English
• Don’t write in all caps
• Don’t mention specific prices or room rates
• Don’t reference other hotels

WTF? As far as I can tell, my review is all in English and properly capitalized, and I don’t mention rates or refer to other hotels. Unless some idiot at Expedia doesn’t know that the Palace Tower and the Qua Spa are both part of Caesar’s Palace…

NASA’s Earth Observatory issues a weekly newsletter with links to the most interesting satellite photos of the week. This week, one of them showed how a piece of Greenland that was previously thought to be a peninsula was revealed as an island due to the melting ice cap.

You can subscribe to their weekly newsletter here.

From the talented Jessica Hagy:

• Sramana Mitra on Strategy » Enterprise 3.0 = (SaaS + EE)
  An interesting collection of articles about what’s coming after Enterprise 2.0
  (tags: enterprise2.0)
• Toronto Girl Geek Dinners
  Women 2.0 and others have arranged our first Toronto Girl Geek dinner, and it looks like I’m the speaker!
  (tags: women)

I get a lot of spam, but this one is new to me:

From: Tech Support [mailto:Admin4@mllka.com]
Sent: June 8, 2007 8:34 PM
Subject: Here is the information you were asking for.

Recipe for great BBQ Sauce:

INGREDIENTS
1 quart apple cider vinegar
1 (20 ounce) bottle ketchup
1/4 cup paprika
1 pound dark brown sugar
1/4 cup salt
1 tablespoon black pepper
2 tablespoons red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup lemon juice

DIRECTIONS
In a large container, mix together the apple cider vinegar, ketchup, paprika, brown sugar, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, garlic powder, Worcestershire sauce and lemon juice. Pour into an empty vinegar bottle, ketchup bottle or other container and store in the refrigerator for up to
1 month.

The email was plain text so no virus or tracking payload that I could find. Not sure what possible benefit that sending this spam message could have to anyone, unless this is the BBQ sauce that you’re supposed to serve on your Spam.

In Austin earlier this year, I went for a walk by the river and saw some really interesting cypress knees, the part of the root of the cypress tree that extends above the ground/waterline. These don’t grow this far north, and I’ve always been fascinated by the structure.

Last week, I received a request via Flickr:

Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Cypress Knees, and we’d love to have your photo added to the group.

A Flickr photo group just of cypress knees? How weird is that?! The group is already up to 22 members (not including me, since I didn’t join the group, just added my photo) and 118 photos, and the group admin has done something quite funny that I didn’t realize was possible in Flickr: when you go to the group members page, the tabs have been renamed. “Admins” is now “Kneebones”, “Moderators” is now “Anklebones”, and “Members” is now “Kneedys”.

Today, I flew with WestJet to Montreal and back — my first time flying with them. It was weird to go into Terminal 3 in Toronto again, I haven’t been there for ages since I’m an Air Canada points whore, and it looked a bit tired next to the shiny newness of Terminal 1. The flight to Montreal left on time, although I could have done without the forced perkiness of the flight attendants that early in the morning.

We finished our meetings early and arrived back at the airport in Montreal around 3pm with oodles of time to spare before our 5:30 flight, so checked if there was an earlier one. First WestJet hiccup: not so many flights between Montreal and Toronto as Air Canada, so the next flight was at 4:45. It was $40 to upgrade, which we didn’t bother to do it since we were supposed to leave only 45 minutes after that. Then, 5 minutes later, I received WestJet’s automatic flight reminder:

From: flightreminder@westjet.com
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2007 15:16:24
Subject: WestJet Flight WS483 Reminder

Thank you for using WestJet’s Flight Reminder Service. Here is the information you have requested:
Flight #: WS483
Date: Mon, Jun 11, 2007
Departing From: Montreal
Scheduled Departure: 17:30 local time
Current Status: Late
Estimated Departure: 19:03 local time

Crap. We checked back with the WestJet desk to find out that the 4:45 was sold out, and the next flight was now 6:30, to be followed by our 5:30 leaving at 7pm. Again, not worth $40 to save 30 minutes — we’re boiling the frog now.

The delayed flight did leave at 7pm as promised, which is more than I can say for Air Canada when they have a flight delay, and we were able to find a spot outside in the sun where we could watch the planes landing to kill time for a while. However, I think that Air Canada’s wider choice of times would have got us home much earlier.

As a side note, I had wanted to fly Porter out of the island airport since I can practically walk there from home, but my customer booked the flight on WestJet from Pearson since it was $100 cheaper — almost exactly how much it cost me to take a taxi to and from Pearson. Beware of false economies.

I spent the weekend in Niagara with some friends from the Opimian Society, a wine club that I don’t belong to but probably should, tasted about 60 wines over the course of the weekend, met some winemakers, ate some great meals and bought a ton of great wine. Now I just need to find a place to put all the wine in our somewhat overcrowded condo.

I took copious notes on the tour and will blog about it over on my wine club’s blog when I get a chance. Also check out the 100+ photos that I took; I haven’t labelled them all yet but there’s some that need little explanation, like the one at the right where I happened to catch a little ladybug climbing up the grape stem when I was really just shooting the leaf itself in close-up.

Heard yesterday from an employee of my customer, a logistics company:

“Did you know that Wikipedia is editable??!!”

We need to work on that digital divide problem…