I’ve just landed here at Pearson Airport in Toronto after an Air Canada flight up from Boston. The flight was on time, in a brand new, comfortable jet with leather seats and plenty of leg room.

Because Air Canada hasn’t moved its cross-border operations to Terminal One yet, we landed at Ye Olde Terminal Two, but the trip through customs was quick, and I was met at the exit from customs by a friendly agent who offered to squire me in a golf cart the length of the terminal to the shuttle bus to Terminal One. The shuttle trip was really neat, as the bus wends its way along the tarmac around planes and construction, giving an interesting behind the scenes look at the airport.

Terminal One is truly a wonderful space, and the swanky Maple Leaf Lounge I’m sitting in as I type makes the lounges in Montreal and Halifax looks like they are run by Aeroflot: there’s a tremendous amount of space, a wonderful view of the airfield, a nice buffet of salad and wraps, a self-serve gelato station, and copious, fast, free wifi. Even the machine-made hot chocolate isn’t bad.

I fully expect to regress back to the old 1972-era Air Canada once I step on the flight to Charlottetown in an hour: I suspect the sesame snacks will be out in full force, and the plane no doubt will be the oldest in the turboprop fleet. But at least I’ve been offered a small glimpse of how Air Canada treats the Important People up here in Upper Canada.

Off to have a gelato…

Here’s a thought: people who think like me probably bookmark like me, and so if I follow the trail back to people who have bookmarked the same links I have in del.icio.us, maybe I’ll find good workmates.

Pointer from programming language savant Olle Jonsson comes a pointer to Programming Language Examples Alike Cookbook, a sort of Rosetta Stone for programmers. Neato.

The CBC reports that Pat Binns thinks “[r]esidents of P.E.I. support changing daylight time to stay in synch with the United States.” Mr. Binns knows this, the article says, because:

The P.E.I. government conducted an online poll to gauge how Islanders feel about changing daylight time, and Binns revealed that the results were overwhelmingly in favour of adopting the same system as the U.S.

Since when did we agree that it was okay for the government to make policy decisions based on the results of an “online poll?”

At dinner with my Yankee friends last night I was called on to provide iPod technical support. Young Jamie’s iPod mini wasn’t being found by iTunes on his iBook when he plugged it in; it would show up as a mounted drive on the desktop, but he couldn’t get music onto it.

Turns out that his iPod spent a brief time, before Jamie got an iBook, as a “Windows iPod” and it seems that once an iPod has suffered that fate it is rendered unusable in the Mac world until it undergoes gender realignment.

The solution: get the latest iPod Updater from Apple, run it, and select the “restore factory settings” option. This will erase everything from the iPod, but leave you with a fresh, clean, Mac-compatible iPod. It worked, and Jamie is rocking out to Billy Joel as we speak.

I’ve spent an exhausting, but ultimately very satisfying couple of days here at Yankee evangelizing the kind of things that generally get poured into the “Web 2.0” bucket.

This afternoon we had a long “state of the web” session with a group of people from across the company, and I led everyone on a journey through open source, APIs, XML, weblogs, RSS, podcasting, tags, AJAX and wikis. The interesting part was when my Yankee brethren took the ideas I fed them, and started to imagine out loud how they could be used to enliven the useful storehouse of data, ideas and authority that Yankee brings to the table.

I suppose it was unreasonable for us to expect that the CBC’s web properties would remain advertising free forever. But they’d been free and clear of adverto-clutter for so long that it came to seem to be in their nature. But now we have:

Good bye ad-free CBC… nice knowing you. (Pointer from Dan).

Kudos to the Town of Peterborough here in New Hampshire for saturating their downtown with free wifi. Here’s the Plaze and here’s what they say on their website:

This free service is made available through a combined effort of the Town and several downtown businesses, to enable people visiting or having appointments in the covered area, to “stay in touch” electronically.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the general excellentness of Strongspace. Strongspace does one thing: it sells secure (SFTP, rsync) disk space on well-maintained remote servers. What it really sells, though, is customer service.

The Strongspace website makes it easy to sign up for an account, easy to pay for an account, and easy to use an account. And when things go wrong, they’ve got a real person — his name is Justin — to answer questions. Quickly and completely.

David Cairns taught me an important lesson more than a decade ago: it’s not if your hard drive is going to fail, it’s when. Hard drives are tiny machines that are moving all the time; they have to fail eventually. Now think of all the email, photos, music, and whatever else you have on your computer that you’ve neglected to back up. Now imagine it gone. Forever. Now go and sign up for a Strongspace account and back your stuff up: for $8/month, it’s worth it, and you’ll be supporting a good group of people doing a good thing well.

Strongspace is one of an interesting new breed of web offerings that do simple, important things well. Let’s call them “microservice companies.” Unlike Yahoo!, which wants to sell you love, sell you greeting cards and heal your dog, these new microservice companies leverage open source software, commodity hardware, commodity bandwidth, and smart people to create useful tools.

And because these tools are built on open standards by open people, they can often be combined in interesting ways. Flickr (yes, I know, owned by Yahoo! — a microservice mouse inside a all-in-one elephant) photos can live inside Plazes. Bookmarks from del.icio.us can be read inside NetNewsWire. My blog posts can be digested by Technorati, and then fed back to me as an RSS feed.

In a sense what we’re seeing is the implementation of the UNIX command-line philosophy — a bunch of small, simple tools that can be combined together to become more powerful — on the web. It’s fascinating to watch, and compelling to consider the possibilities of getting involved.

Did I mention that your hard drive is going to fail?

Lack of disclaimer: I’ve no connection, other than as a satisfied customer, with Strongspace and I receive nothing other than good karma if you sign up.

As I write this in the Air Canada lounge at Trudeau Airport in Montreal I’m on my way to Yankee — I’ll be there until Friday evening.

Had the World’s Best Flight Attendant this morning on the Air Canada Jazz flight from Charlottetown. The “free” bandwidth here in the lounge is abysmal — crawls along at a snail’s pace — but at least it’s here. And hey, it’s a new Plaze!

You can follow my journey by watching the Where is Peter Rukavina page on Plazes. Or you can just watch the top-right corner of the weblog.