5:00 a.m. — Got woken up by Rainbow Connection, instrumental version, on the CBC’s early morning service. Someday we’ll find it…

5:32 a.m. — Dan arrives in a truck to drive to the airport; early signs of blizzard on the roads.

5:41 a.m. — Arrive at airport. Perfect timing. Dan claims he is emulating my one-knapsack “extreme packing” lifestyle, but yet is weighed down by unwieldy multi-bag system that could never qualify as true “extreme packing.”

6:10 a.m. — Air Canada flight to Montreal leaves on time.

6:30 a.m. — Flight attendant announces that somehow the plane has been left without food. This later turns out not to be completely true: there are about a dozen Peek Frean cookies.

7:45 a.m. (EST) — Arrive Montreal. Make our way to the U.S. Customs pre-clearance. Dan, weighted down with his luggage, and not possessing a U.S. passport, ends up hours behind me. I browse for magazines, buy extra food, talk to home on the cell phone while Dan stews in line.

9:00 a.m. — Flight delayed 15 minutes to “wait for six late-arriving passengers.” These phantom passengers never arrive. Mysterious. Dan and I both seated right behind the first class section, and we both have weird padded seat belt that the flight attendant explains contain tiny little air bags. Presumably, in case of accident the air bags inflate and prevent us from being flung into first class, where we would have access to cookies and ice cream and special chi chi washroom.

10:00 a.m. — Movie on plane is School of Rock, which I’ve already seen. No matter, as it’s playing on a tiny video screen almost directly above my head. I remember when they had real 16mm projectors on airplanes.

12:20 p.m. (PST) — Arrive San Francisco. Meet up with Nick Burka, who has flown in from Ottawa. Dan and Nick head south to rendezvous with the other slices. Minutes later, Johnny and Jodi arrive.

12:50 p.m. — AirTrain to BART. Figure out how to buy BART tickets. Take BART to Powell Street and find our hotel (nice, clean, free Internet).

2:00 p.m. — Excellent Thai food for lunch; best since Bangkok. Nice walk down to Union Square. Nice and warm here — jacket/sweater weather; paradise.

3:30 p.m. — Get half-price tickets to see improv tonight at Fort Mason.

4:30 p.m. — Mandatory rest period.

5:30 p.m. — Exciting cable car ride to Hyde Street Circle. Somehow we are exempt from payment for ride (either that, our we are about to be arrested). Guilt pangs.

6:30 p.m. — Dinner. Forgettable. For future reference: avoid all faux 50s style diners unless they are inside Harrod’s.

7:30 p.m. — Bizarre trek overland to Fort Mason Center, through dark and scary park, down endless stairs. Improv at Bay Area Theatre Sports tonight turns out to be “Improv Shakespeare.” This is alternatively funny, monotonous, impressive and perplexing, but ultimately a good night out.

10:00 p.m. — (now 2:00 a.m. AST) Insanely fast driving taxi back to hotel. Meet heavy-packing Dan trolling for WiFi in the hotel lobby (he was the only slice to exempt himself from the loud rocking the others indulged in). Breakfast plans concluded.

10:30 p.m. — Johnny and Jodi go forth to procure Yugoslav wine for night cap.

Must sleep now.

I used to think that Island Tel Advanced [sic] Solutions was the only company of PEI that wouldn’t accept online payment of bills through my local Credit Union. But I was wrong. Regular readers will recall that we switched business telephone service from Island Tel to Eastlink back in December. While Eastlink’s service has been excellent, I found today, going to pay our bill online for the first time, that they don’t support this.

When I called their customer service centre, I was told that “we really wish we had it” but that “we’ve stopped telling customers it’s only going to be a couple of months because we’ve been telling them that for a year.”

Online bill payment is, I think, a very basic “price of entry” for any utility, and I’m frankly amazed at this oversight by Eastlink. Ironically, they accept online payment for cable television and for high speed Internet, just not for telephone service.

While this isn’t enough to push me back to Aliant, every month when I have to call them up to pay by credit card, or write them a cheque, I’m going to think a little “boy these Eastlink folks don’t have it together, do they” thought, and that can’t be good for business.

I’ve decided to use my trip at the end of the week to San Francisco as an “extreme packing” experiment. Rather than taking my usual business travel luggage — a full-size frame backpack with clothes, plus a large briefcase with laptop — I’m trying to pare down into one medium-sized carry-on knapsack.

As such, I welcome any tips from seasoned travellers on how to discard all but the essentials. What can I leave behind?

Update: here my report on how things went.

Back in 2001 I wrote about switching my domain name registrar from Network Solutions to a small Edmonton company called Trinic. After dealing with the non-responsive behemoth that was Network Solutions, Trinic’s lean, mean interface was a pleasure, and for a long time I was pleased with their services.

Starting in early 2002, I encountered some customer service problems with Trinic. Then, later that year, I heaped some more praise their way.

Since that point, however, it has been mostly downhill. When their services work, they work well. When they don’t work, it’s almost impossible to get a human being on the phone, and email response time has gotten longer and longer. Their web-based systems are “quirky” at best, and often contain incomplete information, and there have been several instances where domains have become “stuck” somehow, and have required them to clear something manually. With the exception of some outages in their DNS services, I’ve never encountered a serious service-affecting issue; that said, I’m gradually lost faith in the integrity of their systems.

All of which has led me, this week, to switch registrars again. This isn’t something I do lightly, mostly because of the amount of work it takes to transfer everything — seemingly endless streams of confirmation emails to go through, mostly, punctuated by waiting times for various third parties to do things.

I choose Webnames.ca as my new home. This company is an outgrowth of the original “dot ca” domain name registry at the University of British Columbia (back in the days when registering a .ca name was as simple as sending off an email message to John Demco). I first used their systems several years ago, and I wasn’t impressed: I ran into frequent problems, and found their customer service lacking.

I revisited them this week, and found things had improved dramatically. They have just unwrapped a new web-based management tool that is, in large part, intuitive, fast, and easy to use. In transferring a menagerie of 30 .ca and .com domain names this week, I ran into a couple of problems, mostly CIRA-related, and I never had to wait more than a couple of minutes to talk to a real, live, helpful person. The kind of person that could actually fix my problem, not simply take the details and promise to call me back.

I had a longer conversation yesterday with the company’s Business Development Manager, Rupert Lindsay, yesterday, and found him knowledgeable, helpful, and willing to answer almost any question I had.

I’m going to be sending more business their way in the days and weeks to come; if you want to register a domain name yourself, early indications are that Webnames.ca is a good destination.

My re-entry into the world of print has required finding good printers. This week I found two.

As much as I am firmly against casual mis-use of the letter K, Kwik Kopy, in its new location at the corner of Queen and Euston Streets in Charlottetown, is very handy, and thus was my default choice. They’ve been running some colour copying on coated card stock — business cards and posters — and the results have been excellent. Not only are the copies good, but I’ve been able to email PDF files to them, and their staff, including Shawn MacKenzie, the owner, have been good about getting back to me. I’ll use them again.

I also needed some larger versions of the poster produced, and for that I turned to Atlantic Digital Imaging at the corner of University and Kent. They work in large-format printing exclusively, and they do good work. They ran a proof copy of a 22 x 34 poster for me this morning, and the results were better than I expected. It’s not cheap (one copy of the poster is $49), but for small quantities it’s the only thing going. As with Kwik Kopy, they have no trouble accepting files by email, and have been very responsive.

Having good printers is like having a good ISP in the digital work. Fortunately, I have both now.

On Friday I will wing west by aeroplane, joining Steven, Daniel, Stephen and Dan (all being members of my landlord Borg collective), as well as Johnny and Jodi, in San Francisco for a 4 days of high-level corporate discussions and strategic planning exercises.

I’ll also get a chance to see Oliver and Sophie, and to tour the Scharffen Berger Chocolate plant in Berkeley.

Although others have asked the same question, it bears repeating: if there’s something in San Francsico you think I should see, let me know!

According to ISN, a logging truck on the other side of the Confederation Bridge drove into the Eastlink fibre that runs to Halifax. This left me without Internet (as ISN’s upstream is Eastlink) and telephone (as Eastlink is my telephone company at the office).

As things turned out, I missed the entire debacle because I was out at meetings. Things appear to be operating normally now.

After almost a decade of purely digital design, I’ve re-entered the print world, if only for a brief diversionary sabbatical, creating materials for my friends Coleman et Lemieux in Montreal.

Oh how I’d forgotten the fundamental, visceral thrill of seeing a digital conception born on the printed page. No amount of browser goodness can ever duplicate this physicality: being able to pick up, hold, fold, flip over, throw, lick, and overwise fondle a printed piece can never compare to moving patterns of light around the video screen.

The first product of this re-entry is the poster at right, for The Near Room, a piece that Bill choreographed that runs March 11, 12, and 13 at the Théâtre La Chapelle in Montreal. Bill promotes the piece as follows:

His first new work in 3 years, Bill is hoping it will go unnoticed beside his war memorial Convoy PQ 17 for orchestra, chorus and dancers to be presented at Pierre Mecure, June 6, 2004. Why shouldn’t it? Well for one reason, it has more firearms in it then Brian De Palma’s Scarface, and for another, the evening seems to consist of everything we dread: death, premature death, violent death and cancerous death. Juxtaposed against the impossible innocence of a 14 girl.

Print has limits — cost, colours, the size of the printed page — that the endless screen doesn’t. I’m finding these limits oddly comforting.

Stay tuned for the PQ 17 work, coming soon.

Since I switched to the Mac over a year ago, I’ve been using Canvas 8 as a replacement for the much-beloved Xara that I used under Windows for years.

I’ve struggled with Canvas: it’s not an intuitive product in many aspects, and there are many annoying bugs and inconsistencies. For example, often the result of an export will not look like the design: there will be small differences, and type can appear wonky. Part of this might be due to “operator error,” but I could never find solutions to these problems, and the Deneba help (which is web-based) and support system are anemic.

So this week, faced with a series of print jobs over the next month, and unable to stomach using Canvas, I downloaded the 30 day trial of Freehand MX. After using it for 5 days, I can say without reservation that it is a truly wonderful piece of software, and using it makes using Canvas seem like using a Model T Ford to drive to Toronto.

I’ll have more to report once my jobs have hit the press, but for now, if you’re struggling with Canvas, you might want to give Freehand a look.

If you hold CIBC Aerogold VISA, you can get emergency travel medical insurance for an addition fee of $122/year for a family of 3 (this example assumes that your family of 3 includes me, Catherine and Oliver: your mileage may vary, depending on your age). This covers you for multiple trips of up to 15 days, with additional top-up days available for $5.13/day.

However, CIBC also offers the CIBC Club Privileges Travel program, which costs $199/year, and includes family emergency travel medical insurance for multiple trips of up to 7 days, with the top-up amount the same $5.13/day. However this program also includes priority boarding, lounge access, and a yearly free companion ticket.

Depending on your travel patterns, this second program might end up being a better deal. It was for me.

I don’t know what the statistics are, but I imagine many people travel without insurance (many people probably have it included in their work health plan, I imagine). I’ve heard enough “if I didn’t have that insurance I would have had a $50,000 hospital bill” stories from travelers to the U.S. to invest in it every time I go out of the country. Thanks to brother Johnny, I remembered to do so for a trip coming up later this week.