August 8th, 2008, 9 Comments »
Sticking with the telecommunications theme, I noticed a little blurb on the aforementioned 10-digit dialing flyer:
Wow, I thought to myself, I have no idea what six out of the eight n11 numbers are for. How curious. Here’s what I could come up with. These apply to landlines only, as far as I can figure. Cell phones may treat these access codes differently. I’m not near a landline at the moment, or I’d call them myself.
- 211 - Provides “free, confidential, multilingual access to information about the full range of community, social, health and government services.”
- 311 - It’s “a single phone number for non-emergency municipal services and information, and will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week in multiple languages.” Is it the same for every BC community, or just Vancouver?
- 511 - Apparently it’s supposed to be a national weather hotline, but, as of March, 2008, it’s been put on hold.
- 611 - This gets you customer service on a cell phone. I’m not sure what it does on a landline.
- 711 - A national telephone relay service (I couldn’t find a better link in my brief search) for the hearing-impaired.
- 811 - I couldn’t figure out what this was for in BC. In the Yukon, you can dial it to get health advice from BC nurses.
If anybody wants to call these numbers or tell me any fun n11 stories, fire away.
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April 27th, 2008, 10 Comments »
In yesterday’s Globe, I read an article about how Air Canada is now charging passengers $25 to check a second piece of luggage. This, of course, is the latest in a long series of indignities that travellers have had to suffer at the hands of the struggling airline.
I was amused by a sidebar accompanying the article (you can see it at the bottom of the online version) which discussed fees for various ‘premium’ services on Air Canada. Here’s what some of those numbers look like for a North American flight:
Check more than two bags: $100
Check two bags: $25
Check one bag: $0
Check zero bags: You save, get this, $3.
How baldfaced is that? Air Canada cites “record high and unrelenting fuel costs” for the new fee. If the price of fuel is driving this pricing, then shouldn’t one less bag be worth as much to the consumer as one more bag costs the airline?
And the third bag is even more ridiculous. I’d bet that processing subsequent bags doesn’t cost as much as the first. After all, the clerk is already processing one. The third bag shouldn’t cost three times the second, it should cost less than the second.
There’s also a $100 fee for overweight bags (from 23 to 32 kg). I should mention that 23 kg is a lot of bag. When we left to live abroad for a year, my huge backpack only weighed 17 kg.
I know the fees are aimed at discouraging travellers from bringing a lot of luggage, but that pricing seems hilariously audacious.
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March 28th, 2008, 9 Comments »
Last week I took my MacBook in to get my fan-sounds-like-a-Sea-King-helicopter problem fixed. They assigned me a six digit work order number. I looked at it, applied my one-and-only memory trick, and immediately memorized it. In fact, I still have it memorized. It’s 196805.
I do not mean to praise my memory. It is notoriously bad, and badly addled by modern technology. I can, however, commit numbers to my short-term memory quite easily.
What’s my trick? I convert the number to hockey players. As you know, each player gets assigned a more-or-less permanent number. Because I’m a hockey fan, I know the numbers of many of the players in the league. I also remember the numbers of a lot of older, retired players. I haven’t tried to memorize these numbers–it’s just happened osmotically over 15 or 20 years of watching sports.
So, the aforementioned work order number is Naslund-Jagr-Murzyn.
Oddly, I still remember a European phone number from last year: 24-21-88-42. That was Cooke-Lumme-Lindros-Lott. Ronnie Lott was a football player, but I couldn’t remember a hockey player with the number 42.
I’m sure this is a common strategy. And it could obviously apply to any memorized set of number-word pairs. Chemists probably remember 196805 as potassium-erbium-boron. Do you use this trick?
9 Comments »
January 20th, 2008, 9 Comments »
In a comment on a recent post, Mark asked about how we choose where to live:
How do you go about choosing locations, and what other locations you have on the list? I imagine you look for cheaper places that still have decent internet, along with easy access to lots of culture and sights. Are there any sites you use to find out about the net or apartments?
Any thoughts on Buenos Aires, Cinque Terre (Italy), or Cyprus?
I described my rationale for choosing Malta a year ago, but I figured I’d revisit my philosophy and try to extend it to a generalized, goofy theory of choosing foreign homes. I call it the Foreignness Index.
The Foreignness Index is a value of 1 to 100 which describes how foreign a new home is to you. Using the Index is personal–the value you ascribe a place is particular to you, today. For me, living in an apartment in Vancouver might be a 1, while living in a cave in Afghanistan might be a 100. Obviously those numbers would be very different for, say, an Afghan.
What factors contribute to rating a place? Here’s what I can think of, in vague order from more important to less important. When I use ‘new home’ in this list, I mean to refer to a variety of scales–the destination country, city, neighbourhood and your actual dwelling:
- Do locals speak the same language as you? If not, how much of your language are locals able to speak?
- How safe–in terms of crime, war, disease, and so forth–is your potential new home?
- What religion are most of the locals?
- How open and welcoming is the culture? This speaks to how important is it that you meet and befriend locals.
- How different will the weather be?
- How different will your actual dwelling be from what you’re used to. If you’ve always lived in modern apartments, how weird will it be to live in a mud hut?
- How different are the environs from what you’re used to? Are you an urbanite moving to the countryside, or vice versa? Will your new home’s population density differ from what you’re accustomed to?
- How difficult will it be to obtain the products and services that are really important to you. For me it’s reliable web access and Coca Cola. For you it might be Neiman Marcus and caramel lattes.
- Is the locals’ relationship to time different? Are shop hours more fluid? Is timeliness important?
- How different is the food? This one’s a bit tricky to objectively measure, but you can, both figuratively and literally, just trust your gut.
- Does the alphabet use the same character set as yours?
The list could be much longer, and each person will have different criteria, but that’s a good start.
The Foreignness Index in Action
Now, let’s apply that list and arrive at some values for places I’ve lived, and might go.
- Dublin, Ireland - 20 - Same language, similar social structures, similar weather, lived in somewhat different environs.
- Gharb, Malta - 35 - Plenty of English spoken, North African and Arabic influences, radically different location and environment, significantly different weather, limited access to usual products and services.
- Essaouira, Morocco - 55 - French is a second language here, radically different culture and religion, different weather (I walked on the beach wearing only a t-shirt yesterday) easier access to stuff than on Gozo, but not as good as the West.
Let’s put those and a few other values on a map (you’ll want to click for the big version):
A Dearth of Data on Living Abroad
To answer Mark’s specific questions: I like to find a couple of country-specific forums, particularly those frequented by ex-pats, to ask dumb questions. Here’s one I used in Malta.
There’s actually a real dearth of centralized information about living in foreign countries. I guess that it’s a hard data set to assemble, but the only book we found was Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America. It wasn’t bad, but it was US-centric, and focussed on permanent relocations instead of temporary time abroad.
Buenos Aires was actually on our short list, along with Malta and Panama. To select a country, I printed out the Wikipedia list of all the nations in the world. Julie and I then went for burgers and milkshakes and eliminated all the countries we definitely wouldn’t consider. That got us down to about 40, and we winnowed it down from there.
Argentina felt a little too foreign for our first time moving the business, and it’s a long way from Canada. Plus, we knew that if things went south business-wise while living in Malta, we could always scare up local business or make a quick trip to Europe. I didn’t fancy trying to make a solid living earning Argentinian pesos.
Italy is my dopplenation–it’s beautiful, but I’ve never cared for it. Cyprus might have been nice, but it seems like it wouldn’t have been that different from Malta.
Presumably the next time we live abroad we’ll choose somewhere more adventurous–a higher number on the Foreignness Index. Or maybe not. Who knows?
What about you, dear reader? What nation would you rate at, say, 50?
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May 16th, 2007, 8 Comments »
Among the sundry telephony options available to us for having conference calls with our clients back in North America, the best option has turned out to be SkypeOut. We wear headsets for the output, and use one of our Mac’s internal microphones for the input. Our 150-year-old limestone villa is kind of echoey, so we’ve started taking our meetings from the pool deck.
Mind you, it does get a little weird if the local basilica’s bells strike the hour. It just adds some charm to the conversation, I think.
We recently encountered a farcical situation when calling a client. They have a phone system that requires you to enter a three digit extension. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, you can’t do this using Skype.
I hastily surfed around the web, and discovered the DTMF Tone Generator applet. It’s very old school (compatible with “HotJava 1.1, Internet Explorer 4.0 or Netscape Navigator 4.0″), but it worked liked a charm. I just unplugged our headphones for a second and dialed the extension in the web page. The computer heard itself, and connected us to our client. We are l33t f0ne phr3aks.
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