i@m.fm

I am on a business trip in Germany for Tucows… I left on Tuesday for an overnight flight, meet up with my boss (Dave) at the airport… here’s what I wrote at the airport, but the network left me before I was able to send it
Well, I am sitting here in the Air Canada lounge in Terminal one on my way to Europe. The flight was booked last Friday And I am trying out Bell‘s wireless network, which works surprisingly well. Next to me is my boss, trying out his new TungstenW from Palm. I should consider getting one of those too
So we are off to a bad start for our trip to Europe, since the flight is delayed by one hour so far. But maybe we’ll catch up a little during the flight, so we can actually catch our train in time and meet up work my collegue Marc…
I’ll be on my way back on the coming Sunday. So far I only noticed that I forgot my PDA, but I can go without that for 5 days, I think. Let’s hope it’s the only thing I left at home.
Yesterday I went out with my wife for a nice diner, we really enjoyed the food at the Trattoria Timone in Oakville (sorry, they haven’t got a website according to a quick research)
So in the Frankfurt airport we arrived in time due to a strong tailwind and we also finally managed to find a public shower (for 6 Euro a person) where we could shower and change. Then we meet up with the Sales Rep for Europe, Marc, who had already been in Europe for a few days. We meet at the trainstation and were on our way to Duisburg a few minutes later.
While Dave and Marc were on their way to Berlin in the evening, I spent the afternoon together with the reseller to get them up to par on our systems. When I was about to crash, I quickly booked a hotel at HRS, took a cab there (it was the Duisburger Hof by Steigenberger) and crashed. I sleped for about four hours and was actually considering going out again. Well in the end I just relaxes and fell asleep again at 1 in the morning.
The next day was spent working with the reseller’s CTO and their hostmaster in integrating the systems. We started off by building a basic cronjob that pulls new registrations from their database and processes them. Now they will just have to write the status back into the database. All in all we were rather successful and I also invited their hostmaster out to lunch.
In the evening I took the train to Berlin, but first I meet up with a groupmate from my computer group Padua. Dragging my luggage behind us, we strolled around the Duisburg Christmasmarket. I then took the train, and was picked up in Berlin-Spandau by my parents.
After a night here, I am on my way to another customer… More later, I got to get going (didn’t fall asleep until rather late last night… mr. jetlag says hello).

Spammers Now Clogging Blogs, Cell Phones
Of course blogs are a perfect target for the search engine spammers that normally stick to guestbooks and forums. We haven’t seen much of it here at BlogWare and I am hoping that we won’t see it for a while, but I have seen it on some of the other sites I am working on.

As my co-worker Ross reports: WarDriver Nabbed on Kiddie Porn Charges – Internet Suffers.
The funny thing is (if this is funny at all) that Jason were just talking about the possibility of such an event. Wonder when we are going to see other possible abuses for open WLANs, such as spamming or even the distribution of viruses…

So, we went to see the Mamma Mia musical here in Toronto yesterday.
Luckily I won the tickets – the people next to us paid over $90 per
person Thanks to Lady Luck.

We truly enjoyed the story of a single mother whose daughter is
getting married. The daughter has come across her mothers diary, and
has invited her three possible dads to the wedding… And so the story
starts and it is accompanied by the music of ABBA. The whole story is
set in Greece, and it’s some type of a comedy musical, there were quite
a few laughs. Every so often, a character would spontaneously start
singing a song, partially with adapted lyrics. The small orchestra is
heavily loaded with synthesizers, and so the music sometimes sounded a
tad too electronic to me, even more so than the originals.

And while we are talking about the sound, I couldn’t stop wondering
why they were torturing the speakers so much… If the higher pitched
sounds make your speakers sound tinny, there has to be something wrong
with the sound system. Also there is absolutely no reason to turn up
the volume if you reach the refrain of the song. Other well known rules
violated here were affecting the balance of the volumes of the voices
and the music.

The set and technical effects on stage were a great added touch to
the musical, and not overdone either – I was really impressed by it.
Also it took me a while to realize where their microphones where,
because it was not the usual weird thing sticking out underneath their
hair on their forehead.

The acting on stage was great, however I was surprised at the bad
signing, quite a few of the actors had troubke hitting the right pitch.
Guess the dancing was more important during casting.

We really enjoyed our afternoon, despite the traffic jams on the way in and out of Toronto.