Okay, let’s see if I can post from my mobile phone. If you can read this then I guess I can. I’m writing this in the Notes application on my Nokia N70, then cutting and pasting into Opera.

A brief wifi window here in Lisbon at the tail end of our vacation — we leave for Canada, via London, on Monday afternoon.

We’ve been spending the week exploring the city. It’s very different than Porto, where we spent two weeks last year — much more spread out, much more “modern” and with a different sensibility. And the cake shops — they are everywhere! Coffee is universally excellent.

We are museum junkies this trip. Yesterday [[Oliver]] and I visited the Public Transit Museum and the Electricity Museum and we were the only visitors to each (they actually had to turn the lights on in the Transit Museum, and fire up the trolley to take us on the ride through the transit yard). We finished the day at the Oceanarium:

Day before was the Communications Museum and the Coach Museum. All are interesting, have excellent cafeterias, and mannequins that are frighteningly lifelike.

[[Mom]], [[Dad]], [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] are off to Sintra today while I spend some time alone and get together with Pedro for lunch. [[Dan]] and [[Becky]] are in town on Monday so we’ll have lunch with them before heading up to London.

Having a great time here in Lisbon. Not blogging so as to spend time with family, have actual vacation, and be away from keyboard (except for right now, of course). Weather is sunny and fine. Apartment is excellent. Wonderful city.

My paternal grandmother — Nana to us boys — died 8 years ago today, a day shy of her 84th birthday. I remember clearly getting the news from my [[Mom]] while driving home late in the evening along the Kingston Road; tears streamed down my face and suddenly I couldn’t see where I was going. A few days later we were all in her home in Brantford at a bizarre yet delightful memorial event attended by a motley collection of her friends, neighbours and family.

Chief in my memory among the mourners were the father and son duo of Metro and Petro, who lived in the neighbourhood and had benefited from the kindness of my grandmother many times. Nana wasn’t one for ceremony or religion of any sort and she was cremated shortly after she died. Her “memorial” was held in her living room, and at some point in the proceedings Petro (or it may have been Metro) became quite distressed because he suddenly realized that there was no body present for the wake.

There was also the mysterious man with the goatee who had conversations with almost everyone present where his side consisted almost entirely of him stroking his beard and saying “ah yes, I see.” Nobody knew his name, or where he came from. I suspect he was another person who’d benefited from Nana’s help over the years — whether it was translating documents or dealing with the local MLA or talking to the Russian embassy.

A few years before she died, Nana was diagnosed with cancer, and her doctors wanted to perform something called the Whipple Procedure. Because there was a fair chance she would die on the operating table, she decided that she should come and visit us on PEI before the surgery. And so she got on the bus in Brantford and arrived in Charlottetown a few days later.

We spent a great week together, Nana, [[Catherine]] and I: we took her to a drive-thru donut shop for the first time, went to the movies (to see Hackers of all things), had a lobster supper and saw a lot of the Island.

As it turned out, she didn’t need the Whipple Procedure after all, and although her final years were fraught with various medical challenges, she lived long enough to come back to the Island for Christmas the year before she died.

My strongest last memory of her is when she was decided to check herself out of the hospital while my parents were away for a week. By the time they got back and realized what had happened she was ensconced at home, had home care set up, and was, I think, reinvigorated by being able to take back control of her life a little.

Nana was a strong-willed, independent woman. And although I probably didn’t know it at the time, I learned a lot from her, and a lot of who I am comes from her influences. It’s a great shame that she never got to meet [[Oliver]] — he didn’t come along for another year and a half — as I’m sure she would have loved him.

Even though you’re not in heaven with the angels or anything whimsical like that, Nana, I’m thinking of you today.

Air Canada doesn’t make it easy to link directly to flight status information on their website, hiding the information in a pop-up window behind a complex URL that looks like this:

http://book.aircanada.com/pl/AConline/en/OverrideServlet
?USERID=GUEST
&EXTERNAL_ID=GUEST
&EMBEDDED_TRANSACTION=FlifoInfoServlet
&SO_SITE_OFFICE_ID=YULAC18AB
&LANGUAGE=US
&COUNTRY=CA
&SITE=SAADSAAD
&TRIP_FLOW=YES
&BOOKING_FLOW=NONE
&PRIVATE_LABEL=ACO_AC_AIR
&MARKET=CA
&AIRLINE_CODE=AC
&FLIGHT_NUMBER=7489
&B_DATE=200703180900

To avoid either having to visit the Air Canada website or entering a long URL like this, I hacked together a little PHP redirecting magic to enable the following:

• http://ruk.ca/ac
• http://ruk.ca/ac/FLIGHTNUMBER
• http://ruk.ca/ac/FLIGHTNUMBER/DATE

The default date, if you don’t specify, is the current one; otherwise use YYYYMMDD. For example, to get the status of today’s flight 7489 from Charlottetown to Halifax:

• http://ruk.ca/ac/7489

Or to get the status of flight 861 on March 27th:

• http://ruk.ca/ac/861/20070327

Omit both the date and the flight number, and you’ll get a form where you can fill both in. You’re welcome to use this for your own personal convenience (with the proviso that it make break or disappear at some future date).

It is Sunday. The Post Office is closed. I have just used Ship-in-a-click on the Canada Post website to purchase a shipping label for a parcel I need to mail: I simply print out the label on my printer, tape it to my item, and slip in the mailbox across the street. It took 4 minutes. Amazing.

We’re meeting my [[Mom]] and [[Dad]] at Heathrow Airport in London on Monday morning. If all goes according to plan, our planes, from Halifax and Toronto, will converge there within 10 minutes of each other.

Because I have access to the Air Canada Arrivals Lounge at Heathrow I should, in theory, be able to get my four traveling companions admitted as guests. But as I wasn’t sure whether the guest policy can be extended to cover four guests, I sent used Air Canada’s website to send them a question on March 5th:

Your website suggests that it’s possible for me to bring guests to the lounge with me for payment of a “guest fee” of $10. Can you tell me if there’s a maximum number of guests I can bring with me? I’m traveling with my partner, my two parents, and my 6-year old son; is there any problem with purchasing guest access for these 4 guests?

I waited patiently for a reply. And waited. And waited. Today, 11 days later, came the following reply:

As mentioned in the e-mail that you already visited the website. However for more information not found on our website, we kindly request you to contact Maple Leaf Club at 1-866-556-9504. Or you may email at mapleleafclub@aircanada.ca.

Setting aside the lack of proper sentence structure, the email is, well, nonsensical. Presumably the only reason I would be asking in the first place is if the information was not found on their website.

Regardless, I dutifully emailed the mapleleafclub@aircanada.ca email address. Ten minutes later (they’re obviously much more on the ball!) came, alas, an equally unhelpful reply:

For CIBC Maple Leaf Club card holder/members, you must contact CIBC directly as they manage their own program. The number to call is CIBC 1-888-737-2665.

Setting aside the fact that Air Canada actually runs the Maple Leaf lounges, and it’s going to be an Air Canada employee at the door admitting us or not, I called the number as they suggested.

My call was answered on the first ring, and once I’d made my question clear the agent went away to check for an answer. After 2 minutes she came back to read me the information from the same Air Canada website page I’d started at — where there’s no information about the maximum number of guests.

So I guess we’ll just wait and see what happens…

Use of Cellular Telephones in the Hospital Environment is a report from the Mayo Clinic. The conclusion:

Interference of any type occurred in 0 of the 75 patient care rooms during the 300 tests performed. These 300 tests involved a total of 192 medical devices. The incidence of clinically important interference was 0% (95% confidence interval, 0%-4.8%).

Of course there are non-medical reasons — annoyance, for example — to not permit cell phones in hospitals. Personally I enjoy the “desert island” feel that comes from being forced to turn off my phone when entering the QEH.

The snazzy new reboot 9.0 website has some social networking jazz built in. Like Flickr when you add a new contact you can mark them as simply a plain vanilla “contact” or as a “friend.”

Sometimes the distinction is clear, but often it’s not. What exactly is the difference? I ended up marking some people as contacts, others as friends, and used the “have I ever eaten a meal with this person” as a dividing line. But that seemed unnecessarily arbitrary.

Thank goodness they don’t have “good friend” and “mild friend” and “close friend” as further choices.

If you’re headed south over the March school break, and are traveling through Halifax International Airport, I spotted a useful new service being offered there: coat storage. I’ve not used the service myself (although there have been several times, over the years, when I would have liked to) and I’m not sure of the details, but I found a stack of business cards with the details at the Air Canada ticket counter if you’re looking. Prices, if I recall correctly, were reasonable.