(In The Happiest Geek on Earth):
O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference report number 1.
Read it here.
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Yesterday was an exercise in patience and perseverance.
It all started with an airline ticket that never made it to my house. I got the ticket using points I’d accumulated on my VISA card and the travel agency associated with the card insisted on sending me a paper ticket. I can’t even recall the last time I used a paper ticket. They were supposed to send it to me in the mail, but it never arrived. I tried calling the agency, but got stuck on hold each time.
Not knowing the difference between a paper ticket and an e-ticket, I went to the airport anyway. I’d paid for the ticket, so I assumed it would be on the airline’s computer.
Apparently not. The folks at the ticket counter explained to me that while an e-ticket represented an actual booking of an airline seat, a paper ticket was simply a cash equivalent that could be redeemed for a booked seat. No paper ticket, no seat.
I spent the next hour navigating the voice mail system of my credit card’s travel agency. About eight levels deep, I found an option that might help.
“To contact the emergency travel arrangements desk,” the voice said, “press five.”
I pressed five and twelve rings later, got connected with an agent. He suggested that I buy a ticket to San Jose and fill out a lost ticket indemnity form that would allow me to get the money back once my ticket had been confirmed as lost. The round trip ticket was a little more than I could afford — even with the guaranteed refund — so the people at the airline counter suggested that I buy a one-way ticket to San Jose and have the travel agency courier me a one-way ticket back home.
I followed their advice and proceeded to customs.
I handed customs my passport and boarding passes. They took one look at my ticket and decided I fit the profile:
- A one way ticket,
- bought at the last minute at the counter
- (which they mistakenly thought was bought with cash)
- by a solo-travelling non-caucasian male
- born in a country with active Al-Qaeda-funded groups (the Philippines has to contend with Osama-funded jerkoffs Abu Sayyaf).
I was escorted into a customs interview room, a small place with a desk equipped with a microphone, a chair on either side of the desk and a surveillance camera pointed at the interviewee’s chair. As I waited for my interviewer, I imagined someone in one of the adjoining offices snapping on a pair of latex gloves and slathering them with lube.
After about fifteen minutes, a man in a U.S. customs uniform approached the room, but was interrupted by a coworker. “Hey, Phil just brought in four boxes of Krispy Kremes!”
Both of them made a beeline in some other direction, and I waited another ten minutes for my interviewer to return. By then, I’d missed my flight.
The customs guy was pretty nice, asking me the same questions I’d been asked earlier — where was I headed, how long was I staying, whom I was visiting — as well as some out-of-the-ordinary questions:
- “Have you been to the middle east lately?”
- “Have you been to the Philippines recently?”
- “Are any of your clients from the currently ‘hot’ countries?”
He then asked if he could search my luggage; I said “yes,” partly because I had nothing to hide and partly because I didn’t want to face the consequences of saying “no”.
When he opened my accordion bag, he asked me to play it in order to prove it was a real musical instrument.
It was then that I decided that there is only one song you play when trying to establish your bona fides with a U.S. customs official: The Star Spangled Banner.
About four bars in, he declared me free to go.
He explained that my circumstances looked a little suspicious, hence the interrogation and search. I told him that I understood he was just doing his job and hustled out of there.
I was thankful that the searching was restricted to my luggage. I’m pretty sure that playing the U.S. national anthem played a part in convincing him that I was not a terrorist and that he should recognize my right to anal sovereignty.
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A couple of bits of interesting news, if you live in Accordion City…
Canada is experiencing the biggest surge in employment in the past five years. Both The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star have articles on it.
The city of Toronto is planning for growth, what with 1 million more people expected to move in and the city being second only to Los Angeles in terms of growth. The city is planning for it, and it looks — from this article anyway — that they might be on the right track:
Can the drab, car-dependent, strip-mall neighbourhoods along Kingston Rd. become pedestrian-friendly promenades like Bloor West Village and the Beach, lined with restaurants and flower shops?
The people planning the future of Toronto think so, and they believe they’ve come up with a way to do it.
Here’s a preview of their plan, which will be unveiled in two weeks.
It calls for stacked townhouses and low-rise apartments along commercial strips, and high-rise towers along subway routes. Public transit would be expanded until it becomes a viable option for people in every corner of the city.
The rest of the article is here.
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Flight plan
Sunday, May 11
- Continental flight 1994, Toronto to Newark (depart 2:10 p.m., arrive 3:45 p.m.)
- Continental flight 464, Newark to San Jose (depart 5:10 p.m., arrive 8:35 p.m.)
(Yes, I know it’s Mother’s Day. I’m having breakfast with her before the flight. Since my sister’s a mom now, I also got her a present.)
Friday, May 17
- Continental flight 279, San Jose to Houston George Bush (depart 6:30 a.m. — ack, arrive 12:28 p.m.)
- Continental flight 472, Houston to Toronto (depart 3:50 p.m., arrive 8:03 p.m.)
For those of you who want to reach me, I’m staying at the same hotel as the conference, the Westin Santa Clara. I’ve have my cell phone with me, and I expect to be able to be easily reachable by e-mail. I’ll have my laptop and wireless card; it’s always a good bet that an event where Cory Doctorow is one of the organizers will have wireless Internet access.
It’s also a good bet that an event that I am attending will have an accordion involved.
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Six Months Later…
I just realized that yesterday was the six-month anniversary of The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century. I’d like to thank all of you for your readership and kind words; I hope you’ve had as much fun reading it as I have writing it (and, where applicable, living it). I’d also like to thank all of you who recommended this blog, especially Will McLean for telling everyone he knows in Toronto — which makes up most of the city — and Cory Doctorow, whose influence and reach is rivalled only by that of Chancellor Palpatine.
This blog owes its existence to twerpish management at the company for which I used to work. The management had reduced the company to a skeleton crew — I was the only programmer remaining in the Toronto office — and installed new people in charge. The New VP R&D hand-picked a team of corporate cubicle drones to be his new programmers and as their numbers swelled, my role as UI Programmer diminished from oversseing the entire design to working on the “About” box and correcting the most minor of bugs. I was being paid to spend a good chunk of my day twiddling my thumbs. Out of boredom, I hit the Blogger site and created this blog.
2001 was full of big plans scuttled, career disasters and heartbreak; I found myself dumped, re-relocated from San Francsico back to Toronto after a mere four months, working for a company teetering on the verge of collapse, seeing most of my co-workers get laid off and watching the best job I’d ever had get whittled away by a self-serving, self-aggrandizing assholearchy. I wasted an hour and a half each day in a mind-numbing commute. I was put on the programming equivalent of chalkboard eraser-cleaning duty. I had more shouting matches with friends in six months that I had in the previous six years. The girl who’d dumped me moved back in with the postman I’d stolen her away from fair and square, and after September 11th, they got “terror engaged” (Fuck you, Osama, now it’s personal). If there was an upside to all these events, it’s that it gave me the fire to keep writing. While I rarely wrote about how far down to Hell things at gone (and in at least one case, I did it very elliptically), the act of writing, no matter how impersonal the topic, was cathartic.
As the days passed and the archives grew, I took the time to read what I’d written. I read some of the entries and think “well, that was an off day”, while I’d read others and swear that the writing was too good to have come from me. Good or bad, the act of reading my own writing gave me a chance to step back and look at myself from a more detached perspective. It became clear to me just how bad my current situation was; it should’ve been obvious, but I was too busy keeping my head down and trying to pay the rent. I would’ve figured it out eventually, but thanks to this blog, I did it that much sooner.
Maybe it’s one of those Heisenbergian “the presence of an observer at an event changes the event” kind of things, or maybe it’s just coincidence, but soon after I started writing the blog (and reading it, as it gained more entries), things changed for the better. Getting fired is normally a very unhappy event, but in my case, it felt as if I’d been paroled. It certainly looks that way, judging from the differences in my writing before and after I got sacked. The really fun stuff in The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century — the true adventures — started happening after that day. My examined life felt more and more worthy of living, starting with a Saturday night and expanding into new musical collaborations, travelling to San Francsico to experience CodeCon, the Lusty Lady and the Stagette, making a wealth of new friends, and various other adventures. While I was pulling down a much larger paycheque six months ago than I am now, I much prefer my present condition and the future hasn’t looked this bright in quite some time.
As I type this entry into my computer, I am also packing for another trip down to the Bay Area for another conference that I’m looking forward to. I’m in the process of starting my own consultancy, and the clients are coming in with little effort on my part. There’s one client in particular that’s working on a project that’s a lot of fun, and the story of how I landed that client — I’ve only told that story in a very cryptic way, but let’s just say there was a girl and an accordion involved — is quite funny. I’m back in a great city, well-established as a Queen Street fixture, reunited with old friends and making a lot of new ones.
I’m exactly where I want to be, and part of the credit has to go to this blog.
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(In The Happiest Geek on Earth):
Damn, it feels good to be a geeksta. Visual Studio Magazine’s latest salary survey.
Read it here.
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Is there one that makes you taste like chicken?
Sweet Release is a new product that…oh, you’re not going to believe me. See for yourself.