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.

Remember a few weeks ago when I lamented the dramatic uptick in the amount of spam I was getting. Well I got rid of it. All of it. Here’s how.

First, I modified the procmail settings on our mail server to redirect all of my incoming email to my Gmail account, except email coming back from Gmail itself:

:0
* !^X-Gmail-Received: .*
! XXXXXX@gmail.com

Next, I modified my Gmail account so that under the “Forwarding and POP” section it’s set to “Forward a copy of incoming mail to…” my actual address, and “archive Gmail’s copy.”

The effect of these two changes is that all incoming email gets redirected to Gmail where spam is stripped out (very, very effectively) and non-spam is forwarded back to me where, because of the procmail rule, it’s not forwarded to Gmail and I pick it up from my IMAP server, using my regular old mail client.

In addition to the spam that Gmail’s filtering out, I’m also running Spamassassin locally, and using Apple’s Mail.app anti-junk mail features.

In addition to the spam-fighting properties of this solution, I also get a searchable backup of all my incoming email at Gmail.

This has all been in place for 3 days now, and I haven’t seen a single spam message in my inbox yet.

Longtime readers will recall that our little family spent two very pleasant weeks in Portugal this spring, a trip you can read all about if you weren’t here earlier.

Somehow, however, I’ve managed to have several hundred conversations about our trip after the fact during which I referred to the great country as “Portugo.”

Oh course I know that it’s spelled Portugal, and I’ve always written it that way. But for some reason for as long as I can remember I have pronounced this with a “go” at the end instead of a “gal.”

Fortunately my brave English-major brother Johnny finally held an intervention one night this week over dinner, and put me on the course towards overcoming my disability.

As a first step, let me formally apologize to the people of Portugal for unintentionally maligning their country through mispronounciation. You have license to refer to Canada as “Cnda” or “Canadoo” or “Candanga” when in conversation with me, and I promise not to take offence.

Well, actually not so many tales to tell.

Johnny and I arrived here Sunday night, very late. The past three days we’ve spent in meetings with our colleagues at Yankee, dreaming up all sorts of interesting new projects.

On Monday night we managed to steal away into Nashua to visit the L.L. Bean outlet store; last night we were both dead tired, and we repaired to our room at the Jack Daniels Motor Inn early after an overly hearty meal at Harlow’s Pub (wherein I ate more meatloaf in one sitting than in the previous 5 years combined).

Tomorrow morning we’re up at the crack of dawn to visit Yankee’s Boston office. If we play our cards right we’ll have some time free in Boston tomorrow afternoon, and then it’s home to PEI, via Montreal, arriving on the Island just before midnight. Promises to be a very, very long day.

The last time I tried to use my Rogers Wireless “Pay As You Go” pre-paid mobile SIM on my phone here in the USA, it didn’t work: any attempt to use it resulted in a “No Service” message, even if the phone found a local GSM network to connect to.

This wasn’t a surprise, as the Rogers website made it clear that the pre-paid plan didn’t support US roaming.

Imagine my surprise today, then, when I noticed I had a Cingular signal here at Yankee in New Hampshire, made a call back home to Charlottetown and the call went through.

I talked to Catherine for 31 seconds and then checked my account balance on the Rogers website to see what the charge was: it cost me $4.98. I assumed this was the per-minute charge, as the pre-paid charges in Canada are traditionally billed to the nearest minute.

Turns out that this is a new pre-paid feature of Rogers Pay As You Go offering, something they’re promoting on the front page of their wireless site with a big banner ad. Here’s the rates page for US roaming; they quote $2.49/minute, which suggests they mis-billed me for a two-minute call. That’s the rate for making or receiving calls, both local and long distance.

I called Rogers customer service number (using my own hint to talk to a real person) and found out that the billing actually starts when the phone starts ringing. Turns out that my call was actually a 62 second — aka “two minute” in mobile phone math — call and hence that’s what I was billed for.

Johnny and I are headed south today to visit our colleagues at Yankee for a few days. You can follow our progress on Plazes and, true to form, I’ll be sure to regale you with exciting foliage tales from the New England frontier.