General
Why Can't We All Just Be Honest?
On Saturday evening I went a fundraiser event. It was a fun event, not so much because of the event itself but because of the company. Ali and I started the night off at our friends M & B’s house, whom we hadn’t seen forever. And we were joined but our other friends L & J. Although we hadn’t seen M & B for close to a year, it was if it had only been last week. We caught up on the latest news and chatted about whatever came to mind.
At one point in the evening, I had a conversation with M & B about how I valued their friendship due to its low maintenance. Despite the fact that we had been unable to get together for such a long time, there were no hard feelings, no harsh words and no one felt guilty. We all realized that sometimes life gets busy and we just weren’t able to get together. But it wasn’t without trying; attempts were made but coordinating four schedules just didn’t let it happen until this weekend. And that’s okay.
The irony of the night is that I also ran into a colleague whom I’d previously run into in a grocery store. We did a quick catch up in the store and he suggested we get together for lunch sometime. He didn’t have a card so I gave him mine and he said he’d fire off an email. I’m not typically someone who like to get together to do lunch with anyone other than friends because I honestly am not very interested in other people’s lives. I’m busy enough with my own life and the lives of my family and friends that the last thing I need to hear about is some other guy’s life and what he’s doing. It sounds harsh, but after being in business for myself I’ve found that when you are on a high, everyone wants to try and partner up so as to improve their own lot in life. Or that of their business. Or both.
In this case, my acceptance of lunch was a genuine offer but perhaps the offer from the colleague was not. I even took the time to track down this guy’s email and send him one; no reply. Personally, I don’t understand people who make offers they don’t intend to keep. If I run into someone that I know I have no interest in catching up with, I’ll end the conversation with something like “it was great catching up with you; probably see you around” or words to that effect. Why set up the expectation of a lunch or meeting if there is little desire to?
Where was I? Oh yes, the event. And the irony. About an hour after the conversation regarding low maintenance friendships, who should I run into at the event but the same guy from the grocery store. After the friendly “How’s it going?” I asked what happened to lunch. He mumbled though some reply about he tried and how he looked Zymeta up in the phone book, even going so far as to spell out Z-Y-M-E-T-A for me. I was on my way to the dance floor so I left it at that and didn’t see him for the rest of the night. What’s with the excuses? Why can’t we all just be honest? Tell me you forgot. Or you got busy. Or whatever the truth is.
And just to make sure, I looked up Zymeta in the white and yellow pages. Yup, we’re there, under the ’Z’.
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Peters' Drive-In
The best friendships are the low maintenance ones. Those are the friendships that persist no matter how much time goes by and where the participants always give the benefit of the doubt. That’s pretty much the way is with my friend Steve. Over the past year we’ve both been so busy that we haven’t been able to connect. Initially we tried to hook up via phone and email, and then it was email, and then we both simply feel off each others primary surveillance radar (that’s my flying reference for today). Of course, meeting for lunch was always in the back of my mind, but the situation just didn’t allow for it. Finally today, after just over a year, Steve and I were able to meet up at the Boston Pizza on 17th Avenue.
Here’s where the Peters’ Drive In reference comes in. It turns out that Steve and his wife bought Peters’ Drive In back in October 2005. For anyone who’s never been to Calgary, Peters’ is legendary with Calgarians and is likely the most well known business within the city. It’s a classic 50s style drive in selling hamburgers, fries and shakes. And everything on the menu is amazingly delicious. And addictive. I’m surprised that there haven’t been rumours about addictive substances being added to their shakes (in much the same way as the similar type rumours around Tim Hortons coffee).
In any case, congrats to Steve and given the type of man Steve is, I know that he’ll be true to his word when he says that he ”won’t change a thing about Peters’ Drive In”.
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Customer Service at the Yardhouse
Yesterday Ali and I spent the day basically doing not much of anything. We slept in, had a lazy breakfast and then did some furniture shopping. We landed up in Kensington, a nice area of Calgary which is just on the north side of the Bow River. While driving around, we had been listening to the Team Canada women’s gold medal hockey game on CBC Radio and since we were both hungry, decided to grab a bite to eat. The original destination was far too packed so we decided to hit the Yardhouse, and as an added bonus we’d be able to catch the last period of the hockey game on the pub’s TVs.
The Yardhouse in Kensington is the second Yardhouse to open up. The first Yardhouse opened shortly before the Calgary Flames’ run for the Stanley Cup in 2004 on 17th Avenue, which most people know as ‘the Red Mile’. The Yardhouse pub can attribute most of it’s success to the Flames, given that 17th Avenue is a little bit like radio; there are a few stronghold locations and everywhere else tends to have a high turnover as pubs try to reinvent themselves and mimic the popular locations (such as Melrose and The Ship & Anchor).
The Yardhouse in Kensington opened up late last year in what I believe used to be a Bass Brothers location. In any case, the space is nice, in a good location and full of TVs. The service on the other hand, leaves much to be desired. When we came in, the pub wasn’t all that busy, with perhaps 15 people there, all of whom were watching the Team Canada women’s gold medal hockey game. Immediately after the win (yay, Canada!), the sole bartender there switched the sound off the game and onto what he referred to as ‘classic rock’ (personally, I don’t consider Ossy Osbourse classic rock but whatever).
Since the medal ceremony was coming up immediately, Ali asked the bartender nicely if he wouldn’t mind switching the sound back to the game. It was at this point that the rudeness began. Long story short, the bartender was rude, condescending and everything that customer service shouldn’t be. Did he have a bad day? Possibly. But does that matter, especially to us? Nope. And while most people might be offended, leave a small tip and forget about it, if I owned a bar I wouldn’t want to take that chance. Especially when there are lots of options out there. And especially since you never know who it might be that you’re offending. In this case, the bartender angered a women who happens to work in public relations and over the course of her ten years of work pretty much knows everyone in the media (print, radio and TV). And now Ali has made it her personal mission to let everyone know about the poor customer service at the Yardhouse; you can read her blog entry about the Yardhouse.
On a related note, we ended up buying a couch from a cool store named Willow Studio in Kensington and in talking to the owner, Sandra, discovered that she too had had a bad experience at the Yardhouse and will never return. Not a good start for the Kensignton Yardhouse if you ask me.
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Back On The Air
I discovered yesterday afternoon that access to this blog (and all the Zymeta blogs for that matter) was limited due to a particular firewall rule. This rule was preventing access to “calendar.css” and as a result for causing grief for anyone accessing the site externally. Of course, it took me several weeks to notice since lately I have rarely blogged outside of the office.
In any case, I don’t foresee shutting down the blog site so in the future, if there’s any prolonged issues please contact me and find out what’s up. Because if somethings wrong and I haven’t blogged about it, then there’s a good chance I don’t know about it. Enjoy any entries here that you may have missed due to the configuration error.
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Email Address Validation In Web Apps
If you’ve ever signed up for some sort of web-based application, you’ve likely been asked to supply your email address. Often, the email address isn’t used for anything more than sending you information on specials or sales or whatever. But in more and more cases, the email address you supply is used as a way to reset the password for your account on the web application. And in both these cases, if the web application doesn’t verify your email address (by sending you an email first) you should make darn sure that you enter in the correct email address. If you don’t believe me, read on.
Regardless of how the email address is to be used, a validation of some kind should be required before the user can continue and/or the email address is used. It’s a win/win situation for both sides; the user wants to ensure that his account on the web app is safe and that they can reset their password if required and the web app owner wants to ensure that they aren’t sending email to someone who doesn’t want it. That said, I’m sure most users get annoyed when they are forced to wait for some sort of validation email to arrive. Yes, I agree it’s a pain, but you’ll be much happy than the guy who signed up for an Expedia.com account and used my google email address as his contact email (in his defence, his first and last name are the same as mine).
It started on November 4, 2005 when I received confirmation of a trip to the Turks and Caicos booked via Expedia.com. The itinerary detailed the trip times, flight numbers and passengers. But it wasn’t my expedia.com account (I don’t have one) and I certainly didn’t book the trip to the Turks. In the interest of being a good citizen, I tracked down a support email address for expedia.com and sent them a nice note explaining that this user had obviously entered in the wrong email address. The reply from Expedia.com came six weeks (yes, SIX weeks) later, and they had this to say:
Please accept our apologies regarding the misunderstanding with your account. It seems that the account holder may have entered an incorrect e-mail address that is why you have been receiving confirmation e-mails from Expedia. You may keep getting more emails from Expedia.com in the future and it may take a while until they change it. Meanwhile, we ask for your patience in this matter.
I figured that meant that they would contact the customer and let the customer know that the wrong email address had been entered. It would then be up to the customer to change the email address. Okay, seemed fine. Except that emails from expedia.com continued to arrive telling me about various specials they were having… for another two months. And when another travel itinerary arrived yesterday, I decided enough was enough.
So I went to the expedia.com website and went to the sign in page. Lucky for me, Expedia.com has a link that allows me to reset my password and even sends the login account number to the email address they have on file. And mere moments later an email had arrived from expedia.com with my account number and a link that allowed me to reset his password. So I logged in and changed his email options so no more special offers or other similar information emails would be sent to me. But then curiousity got the best of me and I continued to peruse his account. I now know his phone numbers (he lives in New Jersey), the address of his emergency contact (also lives in NJ and has the same last name), and the name and phone number of his travel companion. This is where it gets interesting; the two trips he’s taken so far have been short trips to resort-type destinations on odd dates and it’s been with a woman who lives in Connecticut. Seems a bit suspicious to me and you’d think he’d be a bit more careful with that kind of information.
In any case, the story ends here. As of this afternoon, his account password is still the same as what I changed it to yesterday and I suspect that it will remain until such time as this other Douglas plans another trip. But the important thing here is to remember that when a web application imposes some constraints on you, whether it’s the length of your password or the need to have a number in your password or email validation, it’s very likely that the web application designers are doing it for your own good and not to annoy you.
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How To Lose Five Hours
Wanna lose five hours of your life? If so, it’s easy. Simply fire up Enemy Territory and get into the zone. I’ve now done that several times over the past couple months. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that, either. On one hand, I love playing the game and totally get right into things. While I do end up XP hogging a bit and try to move up the promotion chain, I also try to ensure I play an appropriate soldier ‘type’ that is needed based on the map being played. But on the other hand, as I write this close to bedtime, I feel like I’ve wasted some good programming hours. Perhaps I should simply be happy that I’m in a position to think about things like this.
As a side note, although I’d love to say that playing Enemy Territory is wasted flying time, flying as a hobby costs far too much money to do whenever there’s free time to be had.
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Disneyland Trip - prep
Tomorrow, Ali and I are heading to LAX to spend three days at Disneyland. The best part, aside from actually visiting Disneyland again (I went a long time ago as a kid), is that Ali has _NO_ idea that we’re going. At this point all she knows is that tomorrow morning she needs a suitcase full of clothes. Here’s hoping it’ll all work out. It’s a surprise for her birthday so it should be fine.
I booked everything months and months ago and it’s taken all my energy to keep it all a secret. And not just from Alison but from everyone, since who knows who Ali might talk to who might give it away, either on purpose or by accident.
I’m going to set up a personal blog site on Ali’s website so once I do, I’ll be getting her to blog her perspective of the trip.
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Good things come to those who hack
I read this article about a hacker who ran a zombie network that he claimed contained as many as 100,000 computers. Now caught, the potential exists for this 20-year-old to spend four to six years in jail. While I realize that a need exists for the prison system, I wish that it wasn’t the case. More often than not I think people end up worse coming out of jail than they were going in. However, in this case, considering last weeks struggle with zombie network base referrer spam, I find myself giggling with glee and hope for nothing but the ’worst’ in jail for this guy. Perhaps that makes me a bad person, but then again, I always believe that 99.9% of the time, you ’get’ what you deserve. [You read into the italicized words as you see fit].
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Customer Service At Air Canada Jazz
For anyone who hasn’t read about the NYC trip Ali and I took back in October 2005, one of my pieces of luggage was stolen off the carousel at New York’s La Guardia airport. But luckily it was recovered as an abandoned bag within the LGA airport somewhere and Air Canada was good enough to deliver the back to me later that evening.
But really, this wasn’t Air Canada’s fault. This is a security issue at LGA. If they’d had better security at the airport this could have been potentially been prevented. And yet, Air Canada bears the cost as they are responsible for my luggage from the time it is checked in until the time I pick it up at the destination. I got my luggage back that night so I was very appreciative of Air Canada’s efforts. But since I was a baggage handler back in high school, I also know how expensive (big picture) it is to return luggage to passengers after the fact. So I took the time to write Air Canada a letter to express my appreciation and to explain that this wasn’t their fault and that this is something that should be address with the LGA airport authority.
And that was the last I heard of that. Until, that is, last Friday when I received an envelope in the mail from Air Canada Jazz. Inside was a personalized letter expressing regret at the troubles I experienced along with a cheque for $50 to ”put towards the cost of replacing my lost shoes and belt.” And I’m not making this up. An employee at Air Canada Jazz took the time to write me a personalized letter, hand write a cheque and mail it to me. I was already a big fan of Air Canada because I’ve never had anything but great service from AC. If this is a sign of the way Air Canada (and Jazz) are treating customers that experience problems then I can’t see myself ever favouring any airline other than Air Canada.
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Office Dullard
In followup to yesterday’s post on drowning out background noise, I was reminded of Strong Bad (of homestarrunner.com fame) and his suggestions for dealing with the office dullard. Thought everyone might enjoy it. Of course, with headphones on, you can just pretend that nothing else exists.
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