Delusional Calgaria
Found via a friend’s FaceBook posting, delusionalcalgaria.ca has me in stitches this afternoon. It’s a tongue-in-cheek ad campaign put out by the Government of Nova Scotia to encourage Nova Scotians to seek out opportunities in their home province rather than moving west in search of fortune.
(De-luge-unul Cal-gu-ree-uh) Acronym: DC
An affliction that affects 4 out of 5 Nova Scotians living away from home in Calgary. Symptoms include loss of balance, blurry vision and separation anxiety. Sufferers may show signs of acceptance of high costs in Calgary, lack of awareness of new opportunities to have a better life back home in Nova Scotia, and occasional upset stomach.
Make sure you watch the intervention video. It’s the best part!
An Unharmonius End
Another Canadian Airline has bitten the dust. Harmony Airways announced today that they will be ending all scheduled flights over the next couple weeks.
The good news is that people who had tickets booked on Harmony will be issued full refunds. Well played, Harmony. Customers of previous Canadian airline casualties Jetsgo were not nearly as lucky.
The bad news is now I’ll never get to use my $500 Harmony voucher I received in December. (Harmony handed it out to placate passengers after an extremely delayed Christmas flight). Boo! So much for my hopes of going to Hawaii in May.
But that’s not the only reason I’m sad to see Harmony go. I only flew with them a couple times but was always pleased with their customer service (delayed flight notwithstanding). On all of my Harmony flights the seats were comfortable, there was free food and wine, and the staff were friendly and courteous. That’s a trifecta Air Canada has never managed to achieve in all the times I’ve flown with them. And Westjet, as much as I love them, charges for food and drink.
Harmony were also the only Canadian airline that still offered a discount to full time students with ISIC cards. That’s why I flew with them at Christmas. Now there’ll be no more air travel price breaks for Canadian students. I guess I’d better look into booking my Christmas holiday flight on Aeroplan points in the next month or two…
links for 2007-03-27
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How to use ryncs for automated backups – useful for both Linux and OS X users.
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Google calendar tricks and tips
Information Overload
Interruption, a hot topic in Human-Computer Interaction, is getting a lot of play in the mainstream media these days. Yesterday’s New York Times had a nice article summarizing some recent studies on interruption and multitasking.
And earlier this week my father directed me towards an article from this month’s Walrus (registration required): Driven to Distraction.
Wireless devices encourage ill-advised multi-tasking: driving and checking BlackBerrys; talking on the phone and reading email; working on two or more complex projects at once. In corporate meetings, participants discreetly text one another or check email while the boss is talking. University classrooms are now filled with students tapping away at their wireless laptops. They may be focused on a document or a website related to the lecture or they may not. Digital technologies invite disruption and pose a daunting challenge to the possibility of a group of individuals applying their collective attention to a particular chore.
Sound familiar? I know I can identify! The irony of it all is that, in the hopes of streamlining my life I actually add to my interruption by subscribing to RSS feeds for sites such as Lifehacker and 43 Folders.
In fact, there’s a whole industry emerging around the idea of increasing productivity in this age of endless distractions. Somewhere near the bottom of my haphazard to-do list (which is also online, by the way) is my plan to read Getting Things Done – which I’ve bought but not yet looked at. Because though I’ll never be able to eliminate distractions entirely, maybe I can at least learn to better manage them.
links for 2007-03-26
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I love it when I think of a tool I need and then find out it already exists (as of only two days ago!)
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Two of my favourite TV worlds collide! So awesome.
The perfect antidote for a grey, rainy day…
…is finding out you won a scholarship worth two years of PhD funding! The same scholarship you had been turned down for last year and the year before! Hooray for persistence.
Setting a bad example
Because the grad students in our lab are all about planning ahead, we purposely overbooked hotel rooms for an upcoming conference with the intention of cancelling later on if we didn’t have enough bodies to fill the rooms. This was indeed the case, so last week I set about cancelling one of our rooms using the online hotel booking tool.
The conference in question was CHI 2007. CHI is a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) conference, so it’s all about good design and user interfaces and whatnot… or so one would think.
Given this, it was quite amusing when I was presented with the following two choices when I tried to terminate my reservation:
Did I want to “Cancel”, or “Cancel this Reservation”?
Foggy Tea
The constant rain this winter has prompted me to search for a drink more comforting than my standard morning “tall nonfat latte,” and I’m happy to report that while I’ll probably be back to my lattes when the sun reappears in a month or two, I’ve found an excellent temporary replacement. One of the coffee shops on campus advertises a drink called London Fog – early grey tea, steamed milk, and vanilla syrup. Yum! It’s perfect on a foggy Vancouver winter morning.
Now, I’ve been a Loondon Fog connoisseur since November, but in the past month or two the drink seems to have become really popular and all the coffee shops in town have the “recipe” down. This is good because I can now order a sugar-free London Fog at Starbucks, instead of having to ask for a “nonfat earl grey tea misto with sugar free vanilla.” Phew!
Apparently the London Fog is not just a Vancouver thing either; My barista sister in Halifax is also a London Fog fan, and last month Freestyle – a national afternoon radio show on the CBC – did a series of Fog-related interviews!