Recent Activity

Just a piece of advice that I’m going to float out onto the Internet in case anyone else finds themselves in a similar situation as I was. Actually this was my second time and perhaps writing about it will make it easier in the future.

If you have an invoice from FedEx as a recipient (for duty or taxes or whatever) but you are now in a different country from which the package was received, there are two things to know:

1. You can’t pay for it online. I think this is true even if you aren’t in a different country. But you can do it by phone.
2. The contact number for FedEx may not direct you to a place where they can help you. At all.

Case in point: you have an invoice from Canada (because you shipped yourself or your family something at Christmas from the US), but you are now back in Bermuda where you live. You click on the Canadian FedEx site thinking this is a good place to start. You find a contact number. It is toll free which might work from Bermuda, but may or may not actually be toll free. Calling this number connects you to a Caribbean/Bermuda contact centre. If you try to explain you have an invoice, the best case is you are transferred around for a while until you find someone who can help you. Worst case, you dead end on someone who can’t help you (or transfer you apparently).

The trick is as soon as someone answers (after 1 for English, and 0 for a human) is to ask for “Canadian billing” (or whatever country your invoice is from). Now you should be talking to someone who can actually help you. They may have to involve someone else but they actually know how to properly transfer a call. Have the invoice number and a credit card handy and you are good to go.

I don’t know how many of these invoices they serve, but this is my second inside of a year, so you would think that they would allow for online payment, since you can do most other things online. I guess I’ll have to enjoy my international scavenger hunt each time.

I just wanted to take this time to wish everyone who reads this a happy holidays and a hope for all the best in 2010.

It has been another interesting year for me, moving to Bermuda once again, hopefully this time for a bit longer, but only time will tell that story. At the moment I am home in Nova Scotia with my family, which makes me happy. I only get to see them once or twice a year, so I definitely enjoy these times.

I suspect that 2010 will be a busy one for myself, but enjoyable none-the-less.

Some of you may have noticed an increase in the frequency of new photos going into my Flickr account. I haven’t really mentioned anything yet, but this is due to the daily shoot. That is a page I created which contains more information regarding what it is, but the summary is that once a day, the @dailyshoot account on Twitter posts a photo assignment to help motivate you to get out and make some photos. My page is a mash-up matching the instructions from Twitter to the photos I post on Flickr for it.

So if you are a bit of photo buff and feel like you have been languishing of late, perhaps this is the motivation you need. It was for me.

For anyone not in the know I am currently part of the Pacific Standard Tribe, visiting family and friends in Vancouver for a couple of days before drifting slightly eastward to Banff on Thursday. And since Banff isn’t a place that I am recently familiar with, I made sure that I was preparing for being there. It seems that everything I brought and packed was considering the current state of Banff, but an old state of Vancouver from when I was here last in June. Neglecting to remember that in the winter months it rains in Vancouver. A lot.

And not the type of rain that can be avoided with good timing and a careful watch on the doppler radar, this is a soul-crushing long-term drizzle that I suspect won’t let up the entire time that I’m here. At least is what the forecast seems to indicate. So while I brought gloves, scarf and toque to prepare for the -2°C temperatures in Banff, I didn’t bring an umbrella or rain jacket. How soon we forget. In Bermuda, rain is something that happens at a point in time. And you can literally watch it pass by overhead.

Bottom line, looks like I’m going to get damp. I’ll try to borrow an umbrella, but I’m not going to let some water from the sky stop me from seeing my friends and doing what I need to do. I’ll let you know how Banff goes at some point too (I’m there for the CanUX conference)

Well it was a slow Hallowe’en at our place in Bermuda, no one arrived at the door looking for candy. That just means more candy for me. I did even dress up for it.

I’m in the midst of creating a new web project which is small enough that it has a good chance of getting done. I using it as an excuse/reason to dabble with something new, technology-wise. To balance all the Microsoft that I get at work, I’m playing with Ruby again. Only this time not with Rails. Rails is so much more than I need for this. This time I am playing with HAML, Sinatra and at some point Passenger. If these things don’t interest you, then you have my permission to stop reading now, because it isn’t going to get better.

read more →

Every year we celebrate the day of our birth.¹ Well many people do. Others elect to deny the passage of time by not acknowledging this annual event. We also like to celebrate/recognize anniversaries of other notable events such as marriages (relationships in general) and tragedies. In fact we recognize the concept so widely that most languages have a specific word for it. Coming to English via Medieval Latin, anniversary signifies a yearly return. Interestingly enough modern usage is borrowing upon this concept in an increasingly liberal manner. For example, I think that “10 year anniversary” is a tad redundant and that “10th anniversary” makes more sense. However, I know that the former is perhaps even more pervasive.

It is the other usages which pose the problem. “Our two month anniversary”. “Our three week anniversary”. Almost everyone understands what is being said here. But there is a contradiction here. I can’t speak for such development in other languages (feel free to comment if you have an idea), but in English I can picture two possible lines of evolution in this situation. The first is that new words will form derived from anniversary. The second and ultimately more likely scenario is that anniversary will lose its annual connotation and will be properly modified with other words like in my examples above.

All of this is an elaborate and well-researched introduction to my main point: I am 10,000 days old today. So you can call it my 10,000 day anniversary (which is a bit odd sounding), or we can coin a new word and call it my 10,000th dayversary. I don’t really like the form of that word though. I don’t like the yv together, it isn’t a combination which happens in English, so perhaps we can borrow on the more melodic spanish translation of day and use diaversary. With the pronounciation as /dia/, not /daɪə/. The word we use shouldn’t distract from the significance of the day. I think society would be more interesting if we denoted age in days as a matter of course. If the drinking age was 7000 days instead of 19 years (in NS and other Canadian provinces). I can definitely appreciate the extra cognitive overhead this would impose, and realize that is the reason we use years. Even with years, it takes me a fair bit of time after a birthday before I can consistently recall my new “age” if asked.

If you would like to play with dates and see when your next significant diaversary is I recommend visiting timeanddate.com. In general it is a great site for the temporally inclined (or those who would like to be).