Rogers/Fido has dropped their prices and increased their data allowances with the recent uproar over the release of the iPhone 3G in Canada. A quick call to Fido and my charges have gone from $100 for 200 MB to $30 for 300 MB. It’s not unlimited but I can’t fault them for reducing the price (finally) and increasing the allowance. Now I do feel as if I’ve subsidized the adoption of data plans into Canada but hey, I’m Canadian, eh. We seem to be ok with living within our tax structure.

Whatever the case, I won’t be complaining about Fido for a while.

Michael Arrington has affirmed my voicemail habits – I am not alone. I’ve gotten very good at:

a) looking at my missed calls and just calling the person back or
b) hitting 7, 7 within 2 or 3 seconds of listening to a voice mail, deleting it.

This has consequences. My wife now leaves messages like, “Hi Baby, call me please!” instead of 10 second ramblings. Half the time we’ve already spoken and dealt with whatever she wanted to discuss.

I haven’t taken the plunge at removing my office line but my office assistant is now checking messages when she is in. Anyone that really needs to speak with me either emails or has my cell number, and knows to call it.

So – is it time to remove all voice mail from my life?

I’m using my phone quite a bit these days for mobile internet/bluetooth modem. Most sites I hit show full web pages by default; I can’t think of one that gives me a mobile version by default. Bandwidth plans in Canada are pretty pricey so it can be quite annoying to watch MB burn as you load some homepages.

So to do my part I installed Wordpress Mobile Edition and now the site has a nice little low bandwidth version for mobile access. Without changing the url.

Gismondi has recently been trouncing on BC’s draconian liquor laws – huge markups. Even worse, which he hasn’t been touching on, is that our liquor distribution board (LDB) doesn’t actually bring any value beyond distribution. It’s up to agents to import liquor into BC which the LDB markups up; they get their cut. And our liquor laws prohibit anyone but an agent from importing liquor in. So if I’m looking for orange bitters I basically have to make it myself. Or improvise.

The Manhattan is one of the classic martini’s. Rye, vermouth, a dash of bitters. Generally more rye than vermouth, 2:1. Except for the New 1920’s cocktail (a Manhattan) which calls for a 1:1 ratio of rye to vermouth. Unless you’re in BC and can’t get orange bitters.

So you improvise:

1 oz rye (Crown Royal, b/c we’re in Canada)
0.5 oz dry vermouth
0.5 oz orancio
perhaps a dash of benedictine for spice

And the consequences aren’t bad…

[Update sometime in 2008....] Turns out you can get angostura bitters from Meinhardts

Got a newsletter from AWS this morning, two great improvements that were holding me back from using it for production servers:

• “elastic IP’s” = static IP’s linked to your account, so you can move them amongst instances
• Availability zones = geographic high availability

Nice – we can use this for more than just development/staging now. On the fly production environments without resorting to hackery.

Gmail keeps bouncing mail that I’m trying to send via the web interface, immediately:


Received: by 10.141.74.5 with SMTP id b5cs448688rvl;
Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:32:14 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.140.226.14 with SMTP id y14mr4038995rvg.24.1206498734646;
Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:32:14 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <>
Received: by 10.140.226.14 with SMTP id y14mr6157234rvg.24;
Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:32:14 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <000e0cd151de04494de080248e28f2e@googlemail.com>
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem
To: xxxx@gmail.com
Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:32:14 -0700 (PDT)

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

xxxx@xxxxx.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 12): 550 5.7.1 Email rejected due to sending server misconfiguration - see http://www.ordb.org/faq/#why_rejected


Googling, Ordb.org seems to have gone offline in 2006. Wtf.

[Update 20:15] Seems google is a lazy user of ordb.org Long-Dead ORDB Begins Returning False Positives

At the beginning of February we needed some extra laptops at the office so I called up a local Mac store to pick up the last macbook air they had in stock, sacrificing my higher powered macbook pro to developers. Yup, taking one for the team. The transition wasn’t 100% smooth and I wouldn’t recommend it for non-technical people:

-the macbook air kept dropping our office wireless connection, a Netscreen 5GT Wireless. This is a pretty sweet little router so it was quite surprising. Add in that I didn’t have an ethernet adapter yet and it was pretty frustrating.
-it however did work fine with a flashed linksys at home, and an airport express + Time Capsule.
-Initiating a wireless transfer of my user account from my old laptop to the new kept cutting out after 5 minutes

I ended up transferring all my docs via a usb external hard drive. I started from scratch on the Air in terms of my applications/settings.

The weight is awesome, it’s sexy, good enough for a business user who lives in the shell as well. I have it backing up to the Time Capsule at work via ethernet (this took a long time as it’s only 100 Mb with the adapter). It has however made many hard drive “clicking noises” while Time Machine is working. Very scary.

All in all – not recommended for non-technical users and not what I would have expected as an “Apple experience”.

It sure is pretty though….

Got the shots from my canon up at last. Can’t find my cell shots…argh.

Besides all the wonderful pictures of my wife and kids (I’ve made a few public including one series that reminds me of a movie) there was this one in particular:

that I loved. This was cured ham for the sandwiches they were making. It was taken at Le Grande Epicerie just moments before the lady in the picture sternly told me, “Non!”. My wife later told me they frown on pictures being taken there.

I, and my compatriots, lived off the sandwiches (for lunch) for the two weeks we was there.

And today – I saw a fellow doing the same thing at the Oyama Sausage Company in Granville Island. So happy to find this done back at home as well. Now if I can convince them to start making sandwiches

Rest of the pictures on flickr.

My first time in Paris and here’s the coles notes:

-it’s much like Vancouver, but a little warmer
-there hasn’t been as much dog doo-doo as people warned me
-the french version of subway is everywhere. It isn’t even subway, it’s just seems like every store. And the baguettes have an *appropriate* amount of cured hams, roasted tomatoes, butter, pesto or cream cheese. Nice greens. And about the same price. I have a picture of someone cutting the ham off a leg and putting it in a sandwich for someone, on the spot.
-riding the metro was cool at first. By day 3 the packed RER or Metro, and cattle-like sound of shoes clopping between stations started to take the novelty off
-that said, Paris is another example of a country that has their mass transit right, or close enough. I cannot believe we don’t have this in North America. Maybe another 2-3 hundred years and I start to picture transit going under major streets in Vancouver.
-Cheese! Wine! Bread! Maybe some of you have heard speak of this…..

I’ve adjusted to buying food and am not treating each excusion as a costco run to ensure I have all possible food for the next two weeks. I buy what I need for the day and put it in my tiny fridge.

I’ve also learned that a relatively large man can shower in a 1.5×1.5 ft area. You just need to rotate every so often to adjust the angles of soaping.

I haven’t had chances to really explore as it’s a working trip but even arriving into La Defense was completely surreal. Can’t wait to see the other sites.

Spent the first weekend this year at Marty’s Place in Langley, Whidbey Island (WA, USA). Not too far from Vancouver, ~3 hours without border line ups – not much more than a ferry ride to Vancouver Island. We stayed at a restored heritage farm house. They’d done a great job bringing it back and it felt like we had come home as soon as we arrived. A huge kitchen, large dining room, living room overlooking Saratoga passage, sitting room, media room and upstairs 4 bedrooms and an office sprouting off a long hallway that ended in a windowed sitting area. Clear-stained dark wood over everything. A house big enough to entertain in and for the family to spread out. Oh – 5 acres with a firepit overlooking the ocean!

Langley itself was a nice community. Nice shops, the main food store was well stocked and had a small organic section. Bakery across the street. My wife picked up a handful of wonderful puppets for our upcoming plane ride to Paris.

I decompressed.