[[Dan]] was honest to FedEx, so they sent him chocolates. This is the kind of story that makes me want to sent FedEx chocolates back.

The first international edition of The Amazing Race started airing this month: The Amazing Race Asia.

I’m slowly regaining my footing. Realizing that I would need groceries or I would slowly starve, despite the copious broadband, I headed down into Albenga to find the COOP Supermercato.

The drive down in the daylight was somewhat more harrowing than the drive up last night in total darkness. Indeed if I’d known the nature of the terrain last night, I may very well have frozen up and parked the car by the side of the road: it’s mountainous here. I had no idea. I suppose I might have read this page, wherein it is revealed that I am living “about three hundred metres above sea level, in the middle of the Pennavaire valley.” But I don’t think that would have helped. Suffice to say that driving the road down to Albenga is better than any virtual car racing game you’ve ever played: all sorts of twists and turns and one-lane parts, accompanied by the occasional BMW on your tail in a big hurry.

But the harrow is worth it for the stunning beauty of it all. Here’s the view out my front door:

And here’s a view of Colletta from the visitor parking lot, which is just up the hill from the village:

In any case, I found the COOP, figured out how the “put your vegetables on the scale and push the button with the appropriate picture to generate a price sticker” system works, picked my way through 50 different varieties of pasta, figured out how to pay (fortunately this turned out not to be one of the “you must be a member to shop here” coops that we’ve encountered elsewhere) and emerged 30 minutes later with 28 EUR work of food, enough to tide me over for a few days.

The Ethernet jack in my tiny loft is located beside the bed upstairs, about as far away from a useful location as possible. So I stopped at the UniEuro (think “Italian Future Shop, but with more doilies”) and bought a 5m cable, which turned out to be just long enough to stretch downstairs and plug into my laptop. My work setup isn’t optimized yet — the MacBook is balanced on an upturned salad bowl on top of a garden table that I’ve rigged lower using bungee cords, but that’s the next project.

As I write I’ve just polished off a Swiss cheese and zucchini sandwich on crusty bread and a tangy glass of blood orange juice. Eating = good.

It’s 10:34 a.m. Central European Time. Which makes it 5:35 a.m. in Charlottetown. And somewhere in between in my head.

If you ever want to give yourself a challenge, fly across the Atlantic ocean and limit yourself to a few hours sleep. Then, for good measure, take another two hour flight down to Nice, and then get in a tiny tiny car and drive at 130 km/h (the speed limit) through a seemingly endless series of tunnels, in the dark, into Italy. Turn off the main road and drive up into the hills (still dark) on a tiny tiny road. Up up up.

Miracle of miracles, I did it. And I arrived here in Colletta around 8:00 p.m. last night. Found the bar, got paid up, found my apartment, and was asleep by 10:00 p.m.

Given the aforementioned darkness, I’ve no idea what Colletta actually looks like — that’s today’s mission. And I’ve got to find someone to sell me a 20 foot Ethernet cable so I can move the laptop downstairs and get some work done.

I am, my former travel companions will tell you, somewhat obsessive about the small details of travel. As such, here’s what’s gone wrong (and right) so far:

• After taking the trouble to clean and straighten the cord on my Shure e2c earphones, which I use with my iPod, I left them on the dining room table at home.
• The zipper on my inside pocket on my 3-day old Marks Work Wearhouse fleece jacket broke. Perhaps I should have gone to MEC like [[Dan]] and [[Isaac]] suggested.
• The nameplate was ripped from the front of my rolling suitcase. As this was some sort of made up Zellers-related nameplate, this isn’t such a bad thing.
• There is now free wifi (Datavalet) in the Air Canada Arrivals Lounge at Heathrow Terminal 3. And a PC with broadband. Last time I was here, in February, it was dial-up only.
• There is, for some reason, free wifi here in the Terminal 1 departure lounge at Heathrow - SSID is “Wifi Zone - The Cloud”.
• [[Plazes]] has the wrong country code for Lichtenstein in the Plazes SMS registration page — I’m sure they’ll correct it soon — so no Plazes SMS updates for now.
• [[Jaiku]] doesn’t seem to be accepting web-based presence updates right now. In other words, as soon as I need them, both of my “location based” tools are in the shop.
• If you ever print your British Airways boarding pass at home (you can do this up to 24 hours before flying), make sure you bring all of the pages — I was rejected at security because I left the second page, which contained only a duplicate bar code and the page footer at home and I needed to get a new boarding card printed. Thankfully I was taken pity on by a kindly agent, and didn’t have to line up for this.

I’ll relax soon, I promise…

Arrived Heathrow in fine form — even got a little sleep on the plane, and the Air Canada vegetarian option was mildly delightful. Off to see if I can find British Airways. My flight on BA to Nice will be my first since I flew BOAC from Toronto over the Atlantic with my parents and [[Mike]] in the early 1970s (wherein I became a member of the Junior Jet Club — perhaps I should inquire as to my current status).

I arrived at Halifax International Airport at 9:00 p.m. for an 11:00 p.m. flight. All the drive long from Charlottetown I was sure I would be terribly late.

I was the only person in the “line” at the checkout counter, the only person going through security (a wicket staffed by 6!) and the only person at the Maple Leaf Lounge counter. I was in and through and sitting here drinking tomato juice in 10 minutes. Obviously late-night Halifax departures are the way to go — much preferable to the barely controlled chaos of Trudeau Airport in Montreal, the other jumping off point for Islanders heading over the Atlantic.

Kudos to Air Canada, by the way, for the whole “web checkin” thing — it “just worked.”

For the past couple of months I’ve been working with the folks over at Plazes in Berlin on a series of screencasts designed to help explain the service to new users.

It’s been an interesting journey: I’ve learned a lot about “screencasting” as an art, and have built up an good Screencasting Toolchain along the way. I’ve also stuck my fingers deeper into Plazes than ever before, and have worked with a really excellent team at Plazes bringing the screencasts from dream to implementation.

The screencasts went live just now, so our humble Reinvented Plaze is beaming out to untold millions. As is my goofy looking photo (a photo I took three years ago in our dining room that makes me look as though I’ve got a severe sunburn; but it has become “Brand Pete,” so what can I do?).

One of the interesting things about this job is that it came as a direct result of this declaration of war against shyness. Scroll down to the end of that post and you’ll read how I ended up at dinner in Copenhagen after reboot with Stefan and Felix — “the Plazes guys.” And so it began. Take that, shyness!

Another new Plazes feature went live at the same time: the ability to update your location by SMS text message. This feature takes Plazes mobile in a whole new way; you don’t need to have a particular mobile phone like you do with the Mobile Plazer — you can update your Plaze from anywhere with any mobile carrier with any phone.

Of course now I’ve got to update the screencasts to include a chapter on this new feature…

I’m off to Italy tomorrow night for a two-week “working vacation.” I was corresponding with a new [[Plazes]] contact in Japan a month ago and mentioned this term and it made no sense to him; for me it means “relocating my regular everyday life to a new location for a couple of weeks, but continuing to do the same work I do, just eating different food, hanging out with different people and sleeping in a different bed.”

I’ve added my itinerary to the Rukapedia should you wish to play along from home (or if you’d like to have a Ligurian lunch, or you need to track me down to tell me that I left the tap running in the bathroom).

Oddly enough for one like me with a career that’s all about patterns and systems, I’m notoriously bad at noticing patterns in my everyday life. [[Catherine]] still makes fun of the time, ten years ago, when I realized that sometimes the night sky was bright and sometimes it wasn’t (this despite having built a tool that demonstrates exactly why).

I am also notoriously bad at judging time — [[Johnny]] knows that if I say “I’ll be done in 10 minutes” I could emerge anywhere from 5 minutes to 2 hours later.

So if you asked me “what time do you usually arrive at the office,” any answer I’d come up with would be a crazy wild guess at best.

So I decided to find out.

I used the Plazes API to pull a list of my arrival times at the Reinvented Office on weekdays for the past four months. I then charted my “first arrival of the day” on a chart (using AppleWorks of all things) and here’s what I came up with:

I am obviously completely unsuited for a traditional “9 to 5” job.

My work departure time is somewhat more consistent, mostly because there is usually a fixed point — 6:00 time for supper and [[Compass]] — to shoot for:

The same graph a year or two ago, when I was much less successfully making it home for dinner on time, often working night four or five times a week, would have trended much later in the day.

Of course someone more versed in statistics, and with better tools at hand, could apply trend-lines to the data, and deduce something approximating an answer to the “usual arrival time” question. I’m content, for now, to leave it as a jumbly series of red dots.