General

Trip To Niagara Falls

Today was the day we had decided to take off completely, rent a car and head to Niagara Falls. I’d never been there and Ali had only been there once briefly. We rented a car from Budget up on College and Spadina, which is more than reasonable walking distance from the Novotel Downtown. However, this gave us the opportunity to try out Toronto’s subway, which neither of us had ever used. Unlike the stories I’d heard, I found the transit staff to be friendly and the stations and trains clean. I forgot to take pictures, though that gives me an excuse to ride the subway again next time I head to YYZ. Thanks to Google Maps, navigating from Budget to Niagara Falls was easy, though all I really needed was the directions from Budget to Queen Elizabeth Way; after that, it was smooth sailing. Of course, even the most complex trips are made easy with Google Maps.

Niagara Falls is an absolute gongshow, with bus load after bus load of traffic and tourist attractions that you would expect at somewhere like Disneyland. But the actual falls were amazing, and the mist produced was a welcome relief to the extreme heat Southern Ontario was facing. After admiring the Falls for a while we headed to a nearby patio where we could continue to admire Niagara Falls while munching on some finger food and drinking some wine.

When then headed to Niagara-on-the-Lake, which is only a short drive from the Falls, in order to check out the vineyards and grab a nice meal. On the way we drove by the Niagara District Airport, which is so close to the Wineries that I think I can convince Ali that a cross Canada trip would be worth it, just to visit again. Just past the airport is a hige sign on the left for Peller Estates, which for some reason caught our eye. We arrived at Niagara with no real plans and having done no research whatsoever, so Peller, as far as we were concerned at that point, was no different that any other winery. We were just looking for a winery to tour.

Peller Estates was an amazing winery tour. If you are only planning to do a couple of tours while you’re in the region, make sure your trip includes a visit to Peller Estates. The staff there are very knowledgeable, the wines are amazing and the grounds are beautiful. Peller also has a nice looking restaurant on site, though Ali decided that she wanted to go to town instead (which as it turns out was a mistake). I’m not sure if all winery tours offer a similar experience since we only visited Peller, but it would be very hard to top Peller. If you do visit Peller, be sure to ask for Kevin, who helped us through our tasting and made the afternoon much more than simply sipping a few wines.
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Toronto Is A Sauna

Here in Toronto today it is scorching hot and humid like nobody’s business. I heard a couple people mention that they were going to a gym sauna for relief; not sure that was a true story or not. But the last three days that I’ve been here have been a sprinting competition from one air conditioned building to another. Luckily there is some relief from the heat around 9pm, at which time you can migrate to a patio (that hasn’t had it’s furniture melted).

I was pleased on Friday to discover there is a Old Spaghetti Factory across from the Novotel Toronto Centre, where we were staying. Our original room in the Novotel was on the fourth floor, but had a crap view and no Internet access (not even any unprotected wireless connections). So I opted for what Novotel calls a ‘Superior Room’, which is basically the same room with a different crappy view but with ‘free’ Internet access. The irony was that when we moved in the room’s Internet connection didn’t work but now on the 9th floor I had several wireless connections to use.

Ali and I did some exploration early on to find the locations of the nearest Tim Horton’s (visited daily) and Second Cup (got an iced/blended coffee there once). We also checked out the St Lawrence Market a few blocks away, which actually was a bit of a disappointment. But, overall, downtown Toronto is a fascinating place and full of activity. Now if only we could get rid of that heat.
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Fun Times At Airport Security

I don’t remember where I read it (I think it was one of the aviation blogs in my RSS aggregator) but someone recently wondered if Canadians are too nice. I tend to think we are. I like that we aren’t skeptical of everyone or everything (ask me about the time I tried filling up my car in Palm Springs at 4am) but I think that we are learning far too much towards ’nice’. And yesterday at the security checkpoint at Calgary’s International Airport is a classic example.

Apparently Thursday afternoons are the worst day to travel in Calgary. There were a couple of charter flights leaving along wih the regular scheduled flights so the security line at Gate C was huge. The line was so long that despite having all the x-ray machines going, the line went out the door, into the terminal and as far back as the Virgin store. On a side note, the long lineup worked out well as Ali got a chance to purchase some chocolates for the trip (which would have cost $400 dollars or something outrageously stupid like that on CanJet) and I got to see that the Virgin store’s videos were provided by PromoOnly.

Finally, after what seemed an eternity, we got into the one of the security x-ray lines. Unfortunately for us, we were stuck behind a potential terrorist. Seriously. If we had been in the United States this guy would have been dropped to the ground and put in jail, at least overnight. How came I be so certain? Because he had a bullet in his carry on luggage. No, not a slug or a casing, but a real, live round, ready to be fired from a hand gun. What did security do? Did they detain him? Take him aside and take him out? Was the airport detail of CPS or RCMP called? No, no, and no. Instead, they nicely told him he couldn’t take a bullet with him. And to add insult to injury, he argued with them. Seriously.

Okay, so probably this guy likes handguns and is a club member and forgot that he had some ammo left over from his last trip to the cabin. Or maybe not. regardless of the circumstance, don’t you think it warrants further investigation? Especially if the guy starts arguing with security. Only a moron or a fanatic (I hate fanatics) would argue with authorities after being caught trying to smuggle a bullet on a plane. In any case, I think that we are far too nice. And I made sure as we dashed to catch our plane at Gate C42 that that crazy guy with the bullet wasn’t on our flight.
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Flying To Toronto

On Thursday I’ll be flying to Toronto. Unfortunately I’m not flying in a small aircraft, though that would be a rather long trip, especially since I only need to be there for a few days. Instead, I’m flying on CanJet which will be a first as they only recently started flying to and from Calgary.

Canjet flies 737s, so I don’t suspect that there will be much difference between them and WestJet, though I’m hoping that CanJet won’t have the ”we’re the best because we lowered flight costs” attitude and instead will have more of that genuinely east coast friendliness that you find in the Maritimes.
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All Good Things Come To Those Who Ask (Nicely)

I was going to post a huge blog entry about all the new stuff going on with the Zymeta Jukebox but then I remembered that I already told anyone who was interested to contact me. Which, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, is what Aaron (a KDE developer) did and as a result he got a tour of the office and was able to check out all the cool things we are up to. I also had an old university buddy who called me up out of the blue, so I took him for beers at Melrose to show off the jukebox in it’s element and to discuss all the cool things we are doing. And on Tuesday it happens all over again with someone else. And the best part is that all these people are genuinely interested in what’s going on, mostly because there are no preconceived notions of how things used to work, might work, should work, or otherwise.
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How To Be A Cry Baby

Today’s world is full of many people, all of whom fall into some kind of group. Groups like good, bad, evil, do-gooders, cheaters, etc. You can get more specific and group people into pilots, programmers, spawn campers (a la Quake), whatever. You name it, there’s some kind of grouping for it. And there’s nothing that says you can’t belong to more than one group; in fact there’s really no rules to this grouping game at all.

There are many groups you should strive to belong to; groups like peacekeepers or tree huggers or any group that basically tries to make the world a better place. Like getting rid of world hunger or helping people in remote villages get access to clean drinking water. All good, noble groups. But of all the groups, there are many you should do you best to avoid. Today, we’ll look at the cry-baby/complainer group. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with complaining, unless you find yourself doing it all the time, over and over (especially about the same thing) and not actually doing anything whatsoever to fix it. So, you want to belong to that group? Here’s a look at some sample things you can do to join.

1. Complain. Over and over. Tell the world (a blog is a great and conveniently lazy way to do this) how wronged you have been. Over and over. But never actually do anything to try and make things better. Chit chat about traffic jams is a personal favourite of mine for this.

2. Complain about silly things like how high the steps are at houses where you deliver mail.

3. Complain in court instead of trying to resolve a problem between yourselves. Everyone’s a winner when there are lawyers involved.

4. Take your complaints out on the messenger. Messengers are an easy target and directing your complaints to them will make yourself feel better, while at the same time avoiding actually solving anything. Another win-win situation.

5. Make sure you jump on a bandwagon if one exists. You always have more leverage for your whining when there is more than one person (except in the Army where this is considered mutiny).

Dare I go on? Choose your groups wisely for people will always judge you by your actions and thus by what groups you fall into. Oh and before you give me grief about complaining about the complainers… I’m trying to help them by pointing out their faults. :) And no, I am NOT talking about anyone in particular… this is just a funny blog that came out of that silly article above regarding Canada Post.
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Smart people defending bad ideas

This article immediately brought a few people to mind that I’ve encountered throughout my career (no, I’m not talking about you ML, but I think you came close one time *g*). It’s a bit of a long read but worth it in the end, especially the last half of the article from ”Killed in the long term by short term thinking” on. To be totally fair, even I’ve defended a few dumb ideas in the past but in the end was never too stubborn to admit that I was indeed, wrong. Though, once again in my defense, I was rather young and naive.
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Gun Stays In Canada

I was very pleased today to see that the McGee handgun will stay in Canada. I will however note, again, that I was disappointed that the owner chose to sell it via auction where the possibility existed that it might leave Canada. It’s all about the greed.
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Star Wars

I took the Zymeta Development Team to see Star Wars: Episode III this afternoon. Worst movie ever. Okay, maybe not the worst movie ever but it certainly didn’t come close to living up to the hype. And it was nowhere close to as good as the original three. And I think it was the worst of the “new” three movies.

At first I thought that perhaps my reaction was due to the fact that I am now old, and no longer the 5 year old kid entranced with Star Wars. But I still like the originals. And the more I think about it the more I think that the movie was simply over engineered and took what should have been a five or six hour movie and tried to squish it into two hours. I read somewhere that George Lucas spent almost as much money on advertising as he did on making the movie. I’m thinking he should have spent more time and money trying to get a good screenplay written.

Would I recommend going to see Episode III? If you love Star Wars, you will find that no matter what, you have to go. If you don’t see it in the theaters you will likely regret not going. But afterwards, you may regret having spent $15 on what feels like a big, commercial rip off. Personally, I won’t go see the movie in the theatre again, and it’s not likely that I will buy the DVD. I still haven’t bought any of the other movies on DVD either. Am I bitter? Nope. But I am really disappointed and so is the 5 year old boy inside me that never grew up.
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