Spark 68
Episode 68 of Spark is online now, and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One on Saturday. It incorporates slices of the why you should have your own domain name interview I did last week.
Episode 68 of Spark is online now, and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One on Saturday. It incorporates slices of the why you should have your own domain name interview I did last week.
Some tiny updates on our upcoming trip to Europe:
I love this video, shot from a sushi conveyor belt in Japan. Thanks to Til for the pointer.
I realize it’s probably been a long time since you walked down a sidewalk. And it’s probably been longer still since you walked down a sidewalk on a slushy and/or rainy day. But surely your basic physics knowledge should inform you that when you drive your automobile into a slushy and/or water-filled hollow at the side of the road it will cause the slush and/or water to be projected onto the sidewalk that abuts the road and, if there are pedestrians — me, for example — walking down that sidewalk, then those pedestrians will become covered in slush and/or water.
I think I speak for all of my fellow pedestrians when I beseech you to use more care on days like today as you make your way around town: we will be forever in your debt.
The East Coast Music Awards returned to CBC Television this year, with the four East Coast provinces picking up the tab through tourism advertising. How is this year’s tourism marketing line-up?
We watched the awards broadcast on CBC’s Bold digital channel, which limited its coverage to just an hour, and cut to a commercial halfway through Meaghan Blanchard’s performance and then just disappeared, replaced by an opera broadcast. Weird.
So it’s the deadline date for filing last year’s corporate payroll remittance information — the T4 Summary — to Revenue Canada. Fortunately they make this easy by providing a web-based gateway for filing, and they sent me out a letter with a special “web access code” in January (red arrow emphasis mine):
Now you might think that, given the fact that T4 appears on this letter six times, that the “web access code” on the letter would be the one that I would use to file my T4 summary. But it’s not:
I tried several times to get the code to work on their T4 sign-in page, but to no avail. Finally in frustration I called their support line (helpfully open on a Sunday afternoon) only to be told that this letter was giving me a “web access code” to file my T5, not my T4.
Was I supposed to be able to figure that out somehow on my own?
We hear so often about how our healthcare system is falling apart, it’s important to report on instances where it actually works pretty well. For the last week my right ear has felt a little funky, and today it started to feel even funkier and, although I’ve never had an ear infection before, it felt sort of what I thought an ear infection might feel like.
So I called up the Friendly Pharmacy to see if their walk-in clinic was open today. It was, and the person on the phone said it was “very light today.” So I called myself a cab and was there in 10 minutes.
There was nobody else in the waiting room, and the clerk took my details and showed me right into an exam room. Five minutes later the doctor was looking in my ears, and five minutes after that I was at the pharmacy counter filling a prescription for Nasonex which, the doctor says, should clear up my not-too-infected-yet ear.
I was back in a cab and at home within an hour of this all starting.
Speaking of Rob MacDonald, Island Eye for the From Away Guy is a classic Sketch-22 video made more interesting still by the opportunity to see Matt Rainnie before he made the transition from a Jack Black body to an Adrian Brody body (giving hope to all we schlumpy men).