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.

Back in the day, when I was working at Canadian Tire selling Commodore VIC 20s and 64s, Commodore had an advertising campaign in Canada with the tag line “I Adore My 64” with an associated catchy jingle (another proof that eventually everything will be on the web). In French they had the same jingle, but the tag line was “Rien ne peut battre mon soixante quatre” — which translates as “nothing can beat my sixty-four.” All these years later, I’ve still got both versions running through my head.

The details for reboot 9.0 have been released: May 31 and June 1 in Copenhagen. Depending on the whether there’s a provincial election this spring here on Prince Edward Island or not, I may or may not attend. But I’ve registered anyway ;-)

My brother Steve emailed this morning and mentioned, about someone he’s working with, that “he jokes even with people that don’t like him.” He meant it as a compliment.

It got me thinking about living on Prince Edward Island — it’s my 14th anniversary of living here today — and how in many ways it’s like the 135,000 of us who live here are crammed into a small room with each other, and as such have to find ways of getting along.

This week I’ve been out and about in public more often than usual, and in my travels I’ve run into two friends who’ve run federally for the Conservatives, a friend who’s running for the Liberals in the next provincial election, several friends who are die-hard capitalists and a couple who are die-hard socialists. In my immediate circle of friends I have people on all points of the religious compass, from full-on drunk-the-Kool Aid believers to complete skeptics. I have friends who are adamantly pro-choice, and friends who are, well, not. I have friends who live on $12,000 a year, and friends who live on $120,000 a year.

And I’m pretty sure that I’m a pretty typical resident of Prince Edward Island in this way.

Of course many people elsewhere have a diverse and multi-opined community.

It’s just that here in PEI, where family ties are so strong, where overlapping family connections are so prevalent, where it seems sometime that everybody went to school with everybody else (or at least their brother did), and where, relatively speaking, there are so few of us, the fabric of everyday life is woven more tightly.

In other words, it’s best not to piss someone off because it’s likely that eventually they’ll be your boss. Or your brother in law. Or their sister the police officer will be arresting you.

And yet, for the most part, things work out: Islanders have a way of relating to each other that allows people of wildly divergent political, religious or philosophical views to, well, joke with each other.

This isn’t to say that Islanders get along all the time. And it’s certainly not to suggest that people don’t “talk.”

But when you see two people who, in any other place, would likely never meet, and who if forced to put all of their ideological cards on the table would likely be mortal enemies, gathered around the kitchen at a house party getting on like gangbusters, it’s hard not to marvel at the delicate balance that lets PEI society work as the well-oiled machine that it is.

Oliver, Catherine and I, along with my Mom and Dad, are taking a short vacation to Lisbon, Portugal next week over Oliver’s spring school break.

It’s a last-minute trip with destination inspired partly by all-time low overseas Air Canada fares, partly by a desire to renew our acquaintance the country we grew to love so much last year.

As last year, we used Holiday-Rentals.co.uk to find ourselves a base for the week in Lisbon (we’re now die hard adherents of so-called slow travel — it’s such a pleasant alternative to old-school “different city every night” style travel).

We’ve got lots of exciting plans for our week (Oliver is very excited to know there’s a toy museum); I also hope to be able to have a coffee with Pedro (my Plazes unofficial evangelical counterpart in Portugal). And Dan and Becky will overlap with us for a day, so we’ll have to have an overseas “Gong Bao Thursday on Monday in Lisbon” with them and impart our accumulated Lisbon knowledge so as to prepare them for their all-too-short two day stay.

Despite my interest in social networks and location-based services, I’ve come to realize that their actual utility to my regular everyday life has, at least so far, been somewhat limited. This may be due to the nascent nature of these tools. It may be due to my location (where the social utility of Plazes for me is limited to knowing where Cynthia Dunsford is all the time). Social networks might also be of more use to, well, social people.

That all said, I’ve come up with a killer social networking application that takes my Genealogy of Influence idea to the next level.

BarfWatch.

In my imagination, this is a web-based social networking tool that aggregates three sets of information:

1. Information about the people in my real, physical life — friends, family, colleagues.
2. Information about the location of these people.
3. Information about the health of these people, especially as regards infectious conditions like cold and flu.

The idea is that, by aggregating this information, I can, when struck with a cold or cough, both record this information in the tool, and also use the tool to find likely vectors for what ails me.

In other words, if 25% of the people in my office are out with a a cold, it’s likely, perhaps, that I caught the cold at work.

Because members of this network would also record the severity of their condition, information about remedies they’d tried, and a signal when they were feeling better — “mild headache, severe cough; rested for 3 days and drank only clear liquids and felt better on the fourth day” — there would be practical utility in the tool.

Indeed, over time the tool could become a sort of “personal health forecast” that would look at past trends and infection vectors — “whenever Peter gets strep, Oliver gets it 3 days later” — and predict future health, and suggest evasive maneuvers (“Your personal threat level for flu is up 15% today; suggest increased duration for hand washing”).

Of course there are significant barriers to something like this actually working, not the least of which would be the reticence of friends, family and colleagues to share information about their illnesses (and even if they were willing, perhaps the last thing a barfing person wants to do is to update their BarfWatch profile).

But, nonetheless, I think it’s an interesting idea to think about because in there somewhere I think there are some actual practical notions for how we can share health information with ourselves outside of the formal health care system.

If you’re trying to send email to @gov.pe.ca email addresses (inside the provincial government here in Prince Edward Island) and your email is bouncing back, it’s likely because of a server outage they’re experiencing today. I just got off the phone with the Help Desk there, and they indicated that there was a power outage in the Aubin Arsenault Building and that, as a result, GroupWise email and other network applications inside government aren’t operating properly. They hope to have the problem corrected this morning.