Okay, I didn’t get paid for it, so maybe it’s not really professional, but the author of a driver’s education course in California saw my photos of geese crossing the road (taken early one Saturday morning in eastern Toronto) and asked to include them as illustrations for the course. She just sent me a draft of the section that includes them:
Went to Kooza last night, the Cirque du Soleil’s new show playing in Toronto until October 7th.
Its fabulous and breathtaking. It’s a return to their circus performer roots of acrobats and clowns, with all the polish and glamour that they’ve gained over the years but no pyrotechnics or anything else to distract from the amazing performers.
Go on, get tickets now.
Men and women communicate differently, there is no doubt. For example, Damir goes running with our friend Susan most mornings at the ungodly hour of 6:15am: she runs over from her place about 6 blocks away, then they go off for 5-8km together. Yesterday, I asked him how his run went, and he said that Susan was late (which is unusual). His story:
She was late because she stopped to talk to some firemen. She was edgy when we ran, it was some female thing.
In the evening, we met Susan and a visiting friend for drinks, and she noted that she’d had a pretty crazy day, saying that Damir probably already told me about what happened that morning. I said that he had said she was late for the run because she stopped to chat up some fireman. Her story:
She smelled smoke as she ran over to our place, went up the driveway of a house to investigate, and found their back porch on fire. She raised the occupants of the house out of bed, had the parking attendant at the lot across the road call 911, tried to keep the fire from spreading by kicking the bits of burning porch away from the house, and hung around to give her story to the police and firemen. By the time that she met Damir at the park across the road from us, she was 10 minutes late and still hyped on adrenaline, so much so that he had to tell her to slow down during the run.
Hmmm, a slightly different take on the story. 
I haven’t been posting my Skype Scumbags recently, but one popped up today that really pissed me off. I was working away and a Skype request to share details (that is, add to my friends list) came in from a “nick desanctis”.
My Skype profile clearly states “Please be specific in your contact requests. I do not accept blind contacts, especially from idiots who think that because my profile says ‘female’, it means ’skype me’”, but I meet a lot of people in business and don’t remember all the names, so I always check the person’s profile to see if they might be someone that I’ve met rather than a garden-variety stalker. This guy was from Montreal, where I visited a few weeks ago on business, and it was a vanilla “please share your details with me” request, so I sent him a message:
[7:02:50 PM] Sandy says: do i know you? i use skype primarily for business and do not welcome unsolicited personal invitations
As soon as he responded, I realized that he was just another Skype stalker, the likes of which I see at least once a week, sometimes several times in one day:
[7:07:10 PM] nick desanctis says: hi
[7:07:43 PM] nick desanctis says: you don’t want to talk to me
[7:08:14 PM] nick desanctis says: do you have hotmail
[7:10:05 PM] nick desanctis says: so why did you talk to me
The thing that really pissed me off was his last line (”so why did you talk to me”) because it implies that because I responded to a blind invitation that could have been a valid business connection, I’m somehow “asking for it”. This is right up there with guys who think that women are asking to be sexually assaulted because they wear a short skirt or walk on the street alone at night.
I’m not the only one who gets these; a female friend of mine who says that she tends to see invitations from the “spiritual weirdos” recently received the following invitation on Skype:
Feel free to connect with me via email or [phone number] and/or via “heart subspace” (too late to unconnect there - I am already locked-on to your heart I am afraid).
“Heart subspace”??!! I don’t know whether to laugh or barf.
I have a comment troll over on my business blog, and it’s painfully hard to do the right thing, which is to ignore them. Feeding the trolls only ever results in more insulting comments; luckily, as the blog owner, I can “unapprove” the comments instead so that they are hidden to all but me.
They must not realize that I can see their IP address when they post a comment, since it exposes them as being on the network of a vendor in the technology space that I write about. That leaves me with the deliciously wicked alternative of outing them if they become too annoying: although they’re not using their real name or email address, it’s a relatively small company location (although owned by a larger company that will be concerned about having its employees seen as acting unprofessionally), and they should be able to track down the offender internally.
The funny part is that after I blocked the offender the first time from further comments, he began posting under another name and email address; a bit of googling showed the addresses to be recognized pseudonyms for the same troll on some internet forums related to our industry.
I continue to be amazed at the things people will say when they think that they’re anonymous.
I’m in Florida this week on business (in fact, I’m enjoying the free wifi in Fort Lauderdale airport right now), and because I booked late, the only decent flights for price and schedule were on US Airways. I stopped flying US Air several years ago when their service was crappy and their on-time record — at least when I was on the plane — was even worse. And every flight into the US seemed to stop in Pittsburgh. As an Air Canada regular, I didn’t even consider flying them again until they joined the Star Alliance (which allows me to accumulate Air Canada points for a US Air flight), and even then it’s taken me a few years to return to them because of my previous poor experiences.
The flight down here on Wednesday was a really pleasant surprise. Except for leaving from Toronto terminal 3, which seems so outdated compared to the newer terminal 1, everything went smoothly. We flew to Charlotte on a 737-400 — an adorable little airport with rocking chairs instead of benches in the main concourse — then I changed concourses to board an identical 737-400 on to Fort Lauderdale, only to find the same flight crew on board, a weird coincidence. Both flights landed early, which means that they’ve likely set their schedules overly long to account for any delays, but at least that way there’s many less missed expectations. [I think that this is common practice now; I was on a flight back to Toronto recently that arrived 30 minutes early, which meant that I had to wait around for my ride since he was counting on the flight being on time.]
Even the in-flight magazine was great, with several articles of interest: ferry trips on BC’s inside passage, luxury “camping”, designer purses made out of auto upholstery fabric. I took it with me to the hotel to finish, and grabbed a few references out of it for future travel plans.
One last really nice thing: when I booked the flight at the last minute (less than 24 hours before I flew), only centre seats were available on the online seat selection. However, the online purchase process ingested my Air Canada Aeroplan number, and sometime between then and a couple of hours later when I did the web check-in, it had detected that I’m an Aeroplan Prestige (silver level) member and put me into better aisle and window seats. Bonus.
Although I prefer Air Canada because they tend to have more direct flights to places I’m going, I’d definitely fly US Air again.
A couple of weeks ago, we attended b5media’s party to celebrate their new office space, and I found that the foozball tables of pre-boom tech offices have been replaced by a higher-tech equivalent: the Wii. I scored the high bowling score that night, in spite of having only bowled once in real life in the past 20 years, and everyone found the Wii to be a huge amount of fun. In case you’ve been living under a rock lately, the Wii is so popular because you play the games as if you were playing the real-life version: you bowl imaginary balls and swing imaginary an tennis or golf club with the “Wii-mote” in your hand.
We decided that a Wii would make a great gift for my parents as both a good party game and a bit of light exercise, and after much searching around we found one at Wal-Mart and installed it at our place so that we could make sure that everything worked properly and check via our wireless connection for upgrades. Oh yeah, and so we could become pros at all the games.
This past weekend, we took the Wii to my parent’s place and installed it, and had some fun with the games; as predicted, bowling was the big hit, although there were a few others that were popular as well. Dad has a bad shoulder with quite limited movement, and he had to beg off a few games, but I think that there’s been an overall beneficial effect, based on an email from my mom last night:
I think you have found the solution to your dad’s shoulder. He went to the [physio]therapist today and she was pleased and said there was more movement in the shoulder. He told what he had been doing, bowling, and she thought the game was so much fun and thought that maybe that was the answer…Will see what a daily round of these games will do for him by month’s end.
Now I just need to figure out how to have the Wii covered by OHIP.
Just finished a long weekend here (yesterday was a holiday and we took Friday off) at my parents’ cottage in Prince Edward County. We always have a list of jobs to do when we go down there for the weekend; this weekend it included:
The end result, however, was pretty satisfactory, with the Union Jack (British flag), the Maple Leaf (Canadian flag) and the White Ensign (Canadian Navy flag) flying at the end of it all:
Talking about *camps and unconferences on my business blog is starting to have some effect: yesterday, I received the following email thread that had gone between two conference organizers in my industry:
You mentioned a technique for facilitating a discussion and I think you called it CAMP? I did a brief search on the web but didn’t find it. Did I remember the acronym correctly? Would you point me to a website for more information? I want to investigate techniques for getting the audience more engaged.
The recipient had passed it on to me, and I responded with some information on Open Space to get them started.
It may come to nothing (especially when they realize that they can’t charge as much for this sort of format), but any interest in unconference formats by conference organizers has to be a good thing for the participants.
