Column 2 by Sandy Kemsley

I travel a lot these days, and couldn’t do it without all of the great tools available:

• As I’ve written previously, if you’re applying for a Canadian passport, do yourself a huge favour and fill out the form online; that reduces the actual visit to the passport office from about 1.5 hours to about 15 minutes.
• If you cross the Canadian-US border frequently (or enter either country from elsewhere), get a NEXUS card so that you can use the automated kiosks instead of standing in immigration/customs lines; this reduces your time from 15-45 minutes standing in line to about a minute. The first time that I used the NEXUS kiosk, bypassing a line of about 1000 people at Toronto airport on a Monday morning, I almost wept with joy. Works at airports and land crossings.
• Use TripIt to organize and share your travel plans. TripIt is definitely the most useful online service that I’ve found in last year: you forward your air and hotel itineraries to it, and it auto-parses them into an online itinerary. I can share my trips with my other half, so that he knows where I’m staying and when to pick me up at the airport. There’s also a mobile retrieval to get any particular part of your itinerary emailed to you in short plain text in case you forget to print out the itinerary. They’ve also just started accepting itineraries from corporate booking services such as Orbitz.
• Dopplr is more of a travel social network, where you indicate when you’ll be where, and can see if your friends overlap in the same locations. TripIt is trying to do something similar, but since that’s not their main focus, they aren’t quite doing it so well, and don’t have the mindshare. Personally, I’d rather have all of this information in one place (TripIt) than use two services, but I’d need to have more of my social network using TripIt.
• SeatGuru and their related mobile site lets you get a good seat on any airplane, or at least avoid the ones that don’t recline and are beside the lavatory. Pick by carrier and craft, and it shows you seating plans of the plane with the good, bad and cautioned seats marked.
• FlightStats and their related mobile site lets you track any actual flight, sometimes more accurately than airline sites. However, it doesn’t always get updated in the case of cancellations.
• FlightAware is quite similar to FlightStats, and provides a map for a specific flight to tell you exactly where it is and when it will land. Great for checking on the inbound flight when you’re waiting to take the same plane outbound.
• Google maps on your mobile device can now use cell tower triangulation to give you an approximate real ground location even if your mobile doesn’t have onboard GPS: it sucks down your battery fast, but works as a low-res GPS in a pinch.
• Mobile airline sites — I’ve used Air Canada, United, US Air, Delta, WestJet, Northwest and American — allow you to check flight status and set up alerts for changes in status; some even allow you to check in for your flight via your mobile.

The best thing that you can do for yourself if you fly frequently is to use one airline (and its partners) in order to accumulate status, and get yourself to gold level status if you can. This may (depending on the airline) give you lounge access to get you out of the madding crowds in airports — a sanity-saver when there’s a massive weather delay — and get at least a desk and a plug, and sometimes free wifi, food and drink. Status sometimes gets you free upgrades to business class, as could a full-fare economy ticket if your company springs for the fully-flexible alternative. Gold status also allows you to board the aircraft during pre-boarding, which means that you can carry on the maximum allowable bag size, avoiding checking any bags. Don’t feel guilty when you cram that suitcase into the overhead bin: if you don’t use the space, someone else will.

I read a newspaper column last week (not surprisingly, on an airplane) in which the author was complaining about things that have been a fact of life for a while: taking shoes off at security, no liquids through security, no free food onboard. My advice: you know about these things in advance, so suck it up and learn to compensate. Wear slip-ons. Budget ahead to buy an overpriced bottle of water after security. Pack a lunch. If you must whine, at least whine about unpredictable events, not the ones that you know are going to happen.

Update: one thing that I forgot, is that if something goes seriously and unexpectedly wrong, don’t be afraid to complain, although try to do it nicely. A few weeks ago in Vegas, I spent one night in a $2500/night suite after starting out in a “non-smoking” room that smelled like an ashtray. They moved me out of the suite after one night, to a much nicer room than I started out in, but I’m quite sure that I’ll never actually pay that much for a night in a hotel room so was happy to have the experience.

Sometime after 7pm Eastern tonight, Google decided to do some maintenance on my kemsleydesign.com email account, which is hosted on Google. Some notice would have been nice, instead of getting errors through Outlook, then attempting to access the webmail to see this:

24 hours?? I guess this is how they get us to move from the free Google mail accounts for our domains to the paid ones.

I’ve reconfigured to reroute my email elsewhere, but if you sent me something between 7-8:30pm Eastern, it may be sitting in a bit bucket at Google.

Hope that everyone here in Canada had a great Canada Day weekend, and that everyone south of the border has a great 4th of July tomorrow.

Blogging will be light this week, since I expect that half of my readers are on vacation.

This meme has been floating around for a few months on the web, and it’s time for it to die. I was tagged by Neil Ward-Dutton, and I promised to respond although I’m not passing it on from here. Time for a new meme!

So here goes, five things that you (probably) don’t know about me:

1. I hold a private pilot’s licence, although I’ve only flown once in the last five years. I remember my first solo flight like it was yesterday, and regret not keeping it up.
2. My favourite TV shows are Desperate Housewives and Battlestar Galactica. Don’t even try to psychoanalyze that one.
3. I love to cook, and most times would rather cook for friends than go out to a restaurant. In particular, I will cook just about anything on a barbeque regardless of weather, which seems less weird if you consider that my family traditionally cooks a 30-lb Christmas turkey on the barbeque. In the snow. My favourite vacation ever was cooking school in Tuscany.
4. My first programming language was FORTRAN, and I never learned COBOL. I started my career writing Fourier analysis pattern recognition applications for satellite images, although I’d be hard-pressed to remember what an eigenvalue is these days.
5. I learned to read at age 4, and it’s been my most common leisure activity since that time. In spite of that (or maybe because of the number of books that I read), I rarely keep books for very long: I either borrow them from the public library, or buy them and pass them on to friends/family when I’ve read them. My only “permanent” collections are cookbooks and travel guides.

A cool map that you can create of the countries that you’ve visited. Here’s mine:

create your own visited countries map

When I look at it, I’m more amazed by the places that I haven’t been (nothing in South America? or Asia?) than the 29 countries that I have.

The past few days, I’ve been listening to Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as read by Mark “the Brooklyn Bluesman” Forman on his Getting a Leg Up blog. Forman’s not a great reader — or maybe I’m totally spoiled, having just listened to Stephen Fry read the last Harry Potter book — but at least this way I can load it up on my iPod and listen while I’m walking around town or on the subway. If you prefer the printed word, you can also download it in PDF from Doctorow’s site, where he makes some of his writings available for free under a Creative Commons licence.

I was walking and listening today, and heard a bit of prose that describes our current age as seen from the vantage point of people in the future who live with embedded hardware in their brain that provides constant access to their digital environment:

…living like the cavemen of the information age had, surrounded by dead trees and ticking clocks.

I was struck by the imagery that that phrase conjured up for me, of the old days when paper was still a significant budget item, and as a cavewoman of the information age I immediately rushed home and browsed the PDF version to get the full quote. The following line was even better:

Being offline helped me focus.

Oh yeah, I know that feeling. Someone please take away my RSS reader for a day or two?

I received one of the new video iPods as an early Christmas present, and I’m loving it. Although I loaded up a bunch of music that I’d ripped for my previous MP3 player, I mostly use it to listen to podcasts and audio books. There are a few video podcasts that I’m watching on it; although the screen resolution is great, I’m unlikely to watch anything as lengthy as a TV program. I’m starting to like the iTunes interface; I was using the much simpler iPodder (now Juice) for podcast subscriptions previously, but this has the advantage of easily synching them up with the iPod and doing a whole lot more than iPodder does. Earilier this week, on the subway coming home from a client, I watched the daily 5-minute video podcast from Rocketboom, then listened to a chapter of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Cool.

The down side: the control to scroll through the menu lists is a bit jumpy sometimes, making it hard to land on the right item. More importantly, however, there is a weird interaction with my new Blackberry: when I have them tucked side-by-side in my handbag, the iPod volume changes (usually increases) when the Blackberry transmits or receives data. I originally thought that there was a fault in the iPod, but noticed that it was actually a device interaction one day when on the subway: as soon as we hit an above-ground spot on the line where the Blackberry could send/receive, the iPod volume changed. I’m guessing that the Apple engineers never tested for that. And one last complaint: why can’t they use a standard USB cable instead of one with a proprietary connector at the device end? Even the Blackberry uses a standard USB cable with the mini-port at the device end, but Apple has created one more piece of cable on my desk.

That’s it for gadget week — see you in the new year!

I admit it, I’m a Crackberry addict. I have been for years, since I bought my old 957 and started having access to my email wherever I went in North America (well, almost everywhere: since it ran over the digital pager networks, there were some large holes in rural areas). After more than four years, I decided that there wasn’t room in my handbag for my old Nokia phone and my 957 — and they were both starting to be an embarrassment in front of my geeky friends — so I combined functionality and went for the Blackberry 7290. It’s a GSM/GPRS phone/email/PDA all-in-one device that is supposed to work almost anywhere, although I haven’t travelled outside of North America since I bought it, but it’s certainly worked everywhere that I’ve been, including many places where the older technology didn’t work. I really like how everything is integrated: I get an email from someone, and as long as they’re in my address book (which I synch with my Outlook address book), I can call them directly from the email. Or email them back. Or SMS them. All without looking them up in the address book as a separate operation.

The down side: the screen is smaller than the old 957, although the good resolution and colour makes up for that somewhat. However, I did have to bump the font size in order to hold off the bifocals for another year. There are a few functions that I’d like to be more convenient, for example, call forwarding (which I do whenever I’m in my office) requires way too much navigation.

I adore this machine. I come from the good old days of presentations done on overhead projectors with transparencies, and there was never a time when my transparencies weren’t covered with ink by the time that I finished a presentation. Then, along came PowerPoint and I was forced to gesture wildly at the screen instead, which is amazingly unsatisfactory. The tc4200 works like a regular laptop, but the screen swivels around and folds down flat, covering the keyboard, allowing me to write directly on the screen with the provided stylus. Now, I do my presentations on the tablet and am able to write and highlight all over the slides again. I’ve used this for several days of training plus some casual presentations that I’ve done in the past few months, and it works like a charm. I’ve had several favourable comments and envious glances about it from the attendees, as well. It’s also great for curling up in an easy chair and poking through my feeds in the web version of Bloglines, which is mostly a point-and-click activity that can easily be done with the stylus. The handwriting recognition is quite good, although my typing speed is fast enough that I don’t use that a lot — I’d rather convert back to keyboard mode and do 60 wpm.

The down side: it runs XP, which is a pig compared to Windows 2000, my previous operating system. On my old machine, which was less than half the speed, the same amount of memory (0.5GB) was plenty for Windows 2000, but I had to drop another 1GB into this for a total of 1.5GB before XP started behaving tolerably when I’m running multiple applications simultaneously. As far as I know, Windows 2000 doesn’t support tablets so I’m stuck with XP, and now I’m mostly used to the user interface, so I guess that I’ll just have to live with the crappy multitasking.

Also on the down side is the lack of a firewire port, and I haven’t been able to get my PCMCIA firewire card working properly with it: my Canon Elura 50 digital camcorder is not recognized, although the same card and camcorder work fine together on other machines. HP support claims that no one has tested a firewire card on this machine, so can’t even recommend a different card to buy. I’m suspecting that it has something to do with power to the PCMCIA slot, and that an externally-powered card might do the trick, which will require making a trip to a computer store with my laptop and camera to try said card before I buy. Troubleshooting three devices from different manufacturers is always a hassle, since none of the vendors will provide anything that resembles technical support.