I’ve just booked tickets on Air Canada for a trip to Italy this fall. My fare from Halifax to London was an unprecendented $398 return ($646 total with taxes and fees) — the lowest I’ve seen this fare since I became obsessed with it.

By comparison, the fare from Charlottetown was $646, which is over $900 with taxes and fees; for $300 I’ll happily drive to Halifax.

My ultimate destination is Colletta di Castelbianco, which describes itself as “a medieval hill-top village restored as an internet e-village.” I’ll spend two weeks there getting lots of work done and enjoying the olive harvest, which will be happening all around me (I must admit that some of my motivation for the trip was to be able to say “I’ll be in Italy for the olive harvest”).

Meanwhile, [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] are going in the opposite direction, visiting her parents, and mine, in Ontario. Their tickets to Ontario cost more than mine to London.

Doing currency conversions on the fly is something that strains my brain. When I was in Copenhagen in 2005 for [[reboot]] I never got the Kroner-Dollar conversion right, and I was always buying things I thought were $5 but that were actually $50.

Things aren’t so bad in Japan right now, however: according to the Bank of Canada, the current value of the Canadian dollar is almost exactly 100 Japanese Yen, which means that to get Dollars from Yen you simply divide by 100.

The first BarCampCopenhagen is being organized for November 17, 2006 and Henriette has unleashed her first “video blog” to talk about it. The background music seemed to have a “Woody Allen movie” feel to me, and Henriette confirms that’s indeed where it comes from.

I noticed something odd about the setup of [[Oliver]]’s partition on [[Catherine]]’s iMac tonight and further investigation showed that Oliver had turned on the Afghan (Pashto), Turkish and Welsh international keyboard layouts. As this isn’t easy to do “by accident,” I can only assume it was intentional. I imagine Oliver is maintaining some sort of pan-national Myspace page without our knowledge.

The TED Talks series of audio and video podcasts is a rich pool of interesting thought. I particularly enjoyed Sasa Vucinic from the Media Development Loan Fund, an organization that describes its mission as follows:

In many transitional countries, independent news organizations are starved of affordable finance; credit usually comes at the price of compromising editorial independence. MDLF financing is often the only way a media company can access capital while preserving its autonomy. MDLF provides resources that empower its clients to make the most of their dedication to objectivity and accuracy, building solid businesses around the core values of independent journalism.

MDLF maintains a segregated, revolving pool of funds for its loans and investments. Loan repayments are recycled through the pool to provide financing for other news businesses. Most MDLF financing is given in the form of loans or finance leases. Maturities, amounts and interest rates vary depending on the particular company, business plan and country. In general, however, loans and finance leases have terms of four to seven years, including grace periods of six months to one year for beginning principal repayment.

Sasa was introduced as a “non-profit venture capitalist.” When I heard that phrase, lightbulbs went on in my head.

Rocket Propelled Grenades are the subject of The 3LA Podcast for today.

Five years ago in this space I suggested that an extra 15 seconds under the tap after hand washing would result in a better experience.

How naive I was. The key, it turns out, is rubbing.

The problem with being an inveterate iconoclast is that you often throw away perfectly acceptable ideas just because they happen to be de rigeur. It is for this reason that I’d always been disappointed with the performance of those hot air hand dryers in public washrooms: I’d always ignored the “rub your hands together rapidly” graphic that graces these dryers, feeling that it was some sort of propoganda designed to deflect us from realizing that these dryers don’t actually work.

Turns out that I was wrong: two weeks ago, in a fit of pique because my hands wouldn’t dry, I decided to try this method out. To my surprise, it worked. And my hands dried.

Reasoning that this method might also have some application in the hand washing arena, or, more specifically, in the soap removal arena, I tried rubbing my hands together under the tap after the “vigorous soaping up” period (my traditional behaviour to that point had been simply to place my still hands under the tap and let water rinse the soap off).

Wow!

Rubbing after soaping actually removes the soap. And so you leave feeling refreshed and content, leaving the sadness brought about by having half-soapy hands behind.

I reason that, assuming proper hygiene, I’ve washed my hands about 75,000 times in my 40 years: it’s a testament to my pig-headedness that it wasn’t until wash 75,001 that I discovered the joys of a good rub.

[[Johnny]] and I left Boston last night just after 5:00 p.m. and we got to Montreal 40 minutes later (which somehow seems like magic).

Our trip through customs was slowed because I had a cheque from [[Yankee]] in my backpack that required checking the “are you carrying more than $10,000 in cash or monetary instruments” box on my customs declaration. In case you’re wondering what happens when you do this: I was diverted from the line where you hand your form in on your way out into a cavernous empty room with lots of counters where two agents were waiting to serve me. I answered a lot of questions about the cheque, and my reason for carrying it, and what business I’m in, and why “making a website” would cost so much — presumably all towards proving that I wasn’t a money launderer — and then signed a form that was along the lines of “I hereby solemnly swear that this is legit” and was let on my way.

As a bonus, I’d also checked the “are you carrying any plants or plant products” box because I’d purchased two pounds of coffee beans for [[Catherine]] at Polcari’s Coffee in North Boston. Fortunately this wasn’t a cause for their concern.

Once I was released, we had to do the annoying “back out into the general population and through security again” routine. And once we were back on the inside we started running into people we knew.

First it was CTV’s man on PEI Dan Viau in the hallway. Then MP for Charlottetown Shawn Murphy in the Air Canada Lounge. Down in the departure area we ran into Senator Libbe Hubley and her capable EA (and our client) Allan Rankin. Once we were on the plane we ended up sitting behind Dwight Thompson, an old colleague from the Dept. of Agriculture. And then, of course, the ubiquitous Ritchie Simpson came rollicking down the aisle.

If our plane had gone down the world, or at least our corner of it, would have been left without political leadership, musical accompaniment, agricultural policy, or private local television news. Oh, and discount mortgages.