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{ Monthly Archives } July 2007

A whole lotta shaking going on

I’m thoroughly enjoying my 3 free days in San Francisco between conferences (if you can consider a day where I spend 2 hours on conference calls and another 2 hours on a client report to still be a free day): the weather is perfect and I’m staying at a lovely hotel in a great location.

I did have a strange and unexpected wake-up call this morning: a 4.2 scale earthquake centred across the bay in Oakland, but big enough to wake me out of a dead sleep at 4:42am. Everything shook for about 20 seconds, and the Hilton actually creaked — I’m sure that it’s built to do that in an earthquake (sweat) !

2007 07 20 travel Comments (0)

The Air Canada exercise plan

Here’s how it goes:

  1. Book a Toronto-San Francisco flight on Air Canada’s website, allowing them to route you through Calgary.
  2. Check in the night before the flight and notice with some trepidation that you only have 50 minutes between flights. Reassure yourself that they probably don’t have US customs in Calgary (like they do in every other major airport in Canada) so you can check your bag directly through from Toronto to San Francisco without having to wait for it and recheck it in Calgary.
  3. The morning of the flight, awaken early with a slight state of panic about the Calgary 50-minute stopover issue. Call Air Canada, to be told that you do have to clear customs there, but that the time is sufficient since it’s a relatively small airport.
  4. Get to the airport with a suitcase that’s the maximum carry-on size (normally checked), plus a computer bag and a purse. Decide to carry it all on and lug it through security and out to the gate.
  5. Notice that another Air Canada flight (United codeshare) leaves for Calgary 45 minutes before your flight, hike over to that gate to check it out.
  6. Be told that in spite of the fact that Air Canada has put you on a too-tight connection, you have to pay $50 to change flights, and you have to go to the customer service desk 25 gates away to do that.
  7. With only 15 minutes before the flight leaves, quickly hoof it down to the customer service desk, toting suitcase + computer bag + purse, to be told that the flight has already closed its doors.
  8. Hike back to the gate and notice the gate agent with a slightly smarmy smile, and resist the urge to beat her up for sending you off on a fool’s errand.
  9. Get on your original flight and heave all the luggage into the overhead bin.
  10. In Calgary, arrive at the end of concourse A. Get the luggage down, jog all the way out the concourse and towards concourse C. Note the people waiting around for their luggage on the way, and offer a silent prayer of thanks that you didn’t check luggage.
  11. Get through US customs, then jog all the way down to the end of concourse C to the San Francisco departure gate.
  12. Repeat step 9.
  13. Burn many extra calories in frustration as the flight waits for another 45 minutes for transferring passengers.

Between this and the Air Canada diet plan (have you seen their food offerings lately??), you should have no problem getting into shape for that week on the beach. Of course, you might want to fly a different airline to get to your vacation destination on time.

2007 07 20 travel Comments (2)

Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon

For those of you who know what a non-athletic person I am, don’t get too excited: I’m not running a marathon, I’m not even running. However, I am walking 5km to raise money for the Fort York Food Bank on September 30th, a charity to which I’ve donated in the past due to the diligent efforts of my friend Ingrid.

You can click here to sponsor me; all donations will receive a tax receipt (although that may only be good for those of us who pay taxes in Canada).

2007 07 15 off topic Comments (0)

Me and W.R.

What’s more flattering than being adored by a chicken?

oh Sandy

2007 07 12 blogging Comments (0)

A perfect summer’s eve

A friend was in town yesterday from California, and we went to dinner at my favourite downtown Ethiopian restaurant, the Ethiopian House on Irwin (just north of Wellesley). It was 9pm by the time that we got there, and we sat outside in the warm, humid night, eating a platter of assorted dishes scooped up with injera, a traditional flatbread, and drinking Tusker, a Kenyan beer.

On the way home on the subway after 11, the air still overly warm from the hot days this week, I saw a guy carrying a duffel bag and a hockey stick.

Hot summer nights, Ethiopian food and hockey: how can you not love this city?

2007 07 11 food & wine Comments (0)

A social media convert

Damir, my other half, is a much more traditional engineer than I: he likes to ponder over new technology for a while, while I’m leaping about in it, shouting “c’mon in, the water’s great!” and trying not to get eaten by the sharks. When he does jump in, however, it’s with both feet.

In the past 3 weeks, he learned WordPress and MediaWiki, and last weekend relaunched his website using WordPress for the site content and MediaWiki for a knowledge base. He’s working on getting 100 articles into his wiki, both for general interest (that is, if you’re interested in getting data out of PLCs and into Excel or SQL Server for data analysis) and as a support reference for his customers. A lot of the material is pretty basic, but consider that his audience is the electrical and mechanical maintenance staff at automotive manufacturing plants.

I’ve been talking about moving my corporate website, small as it is, onto WordPress for about a year now, ever since I converted the site for my wine club, but somehow never seem to find the time. Obviously, the bar for websites in our household has been raised, and I have some catching up to do.

2007 07 05 blogging
technology Comments (0)