i@m.fm

Leaving the herd – my time has come. Life is full of change. Last
year was full of change with the birth of my son – so why stop there?
The era of change continues this year, with a big and important step
for me.

I will be leaving Tucows as of March 1st, 2007. Leaving the
herd was a difficult decision, especially after a full 5 years and 8
months of work with many wonderful people. I was the first Sales
Engineer to be hired by Tucows and it was an amazing opportunity to
help share and validate this position.

Thank you, Tucows, colleagues, ex-colleagues, suppliers,
partners and resellers for the amazing time I’ve had. I am hoping to
stay in touch with as many of you as possible.

But for me it is time to move on, time to move out of the barn.

Unfortunately at this point in time, I am not at liberty to
reveal a whole lot of what I will be doing. I can however say, that I
am looking forward to working a lot more with Peter, since he happens
to be the founder of the startup that I am co-founder of.

Stay tuned for more…

PS: Happy Valentine’s day!

Yes yes, I know. I never got beyond the first part of my DomainFest Global diary… Well, it appears that there was just too much going on there for me to keep track, but let’s just say that I had a great and successful time. More later…

Consider this the personal part of my diary of my trip to DomainFest in LA – I wrote this part on the plane yesterday. If you are looking for news from the event itself, you’ll be more likely to find them on my other blog, DomainEditorial.com.

January 31st, 2007:

Air Canada moved all of their flights to the new Terminal 1 in Toronto starting yesterday. So anticipating a little “new” chaos, I tried to make my way to the airport early. Well, tried. Things just don’t always work out as they should, so I arrived just the recommended 90 minutes ahead of my flight. At least I had checked in on the web the night before, so I should have been able to pass quickly through the Web-Luggage-Drop Off counter (where you don’t actually drop off your luggage, since you need to clear US customs first).

So I get to the web drop off counter and just in front of my 5 people join the row. Well, there was one whole counter open in this area, so I prepared for the long wait. An Air Canada employee appeared and managed to send some of the people in front of me away, since they had not actually checked in on the web. Still, some of those people that had not checked on the web remained in the line, so the wait took a while. Meanwhile, a friend who is traveling with me calls me and tells me he’s on his way, but late. So I give him directions on how to get to the counter, since he had checked in on the web as well. It’s almost my turn when they decide to add two more check-in agents, what a great move. One of them takes a while to adjust his monitor, since his station is right underneath one of the neat windows in the the roof of the new hall. Finally I am checked in without any problems, my luggage is tagged, so on to US customs and immigrations.

I am still ‘just’ a German citizen, so I get into the line for the people traveling with a Visa waiver form. Basically this means you need to fill out an extra form (I94W used to be the name, I think they have a new name for it now though) and they will fingerprint your two index fingers (on an electronic fingerprint machine) as well as take a picture of your face with something that looks like a basic webcam. So it’s always a gamble, but usually this line used to be of the shorter lines in Terminal 2, and in Terminal 3 you always had many people in front of you some of them taking ages to clear immigration (I missed my flight once due that that).

Well, there’s nobody else in my line – so far so good. However there is no open counter in front of the line. In fact, my line appears to share counters with the US citizen lineup, which is quite long. Especially since some of the officers appear to be leaving at this time (they were actually turning off their lit number signs at this point). Plus the person directing people to counters actually appears to only direct the US citizens to agents. At this point in time I am joined by a British fellow, who appears to be a little nervous about catching his flight (which is scheduled to leave 5 minutes before mine). After a while the person assigning people to desks actually notices us and moves me to one of the two open counters – next.

So after the immigration control (the officer barely asked me anything, complained about the glare on his screen when I asked him how he liked the new terminal). Also one of his pens was not working, so I promised to bring him a new one next time I see him. He was joking about wanting a Mont Blanc pen, but I said I could only offer him one of these hotel pens that I pick up on my trips.

On to customs, which was uneventful as usual, just showing my customs form. Then the luggage drop-off “Please put your suitcase on the X on the belt, wheels up”. Well, since I am not traveling with an upright suitcase I decided to lay it on it’s side instead of having it stand upside down on the belt. Next: Security. Normal stuff, just for some odd reason they wanted to X-Ray my laptop bag twice.

On to buy a drink, some food and water for the flight – off to the gate, where my friend joined me about a bit later. So we are in the air now – just past Denver on our way to Los Angeles. Turns out both rear toilets in the plane are clogged or broken, and the crew has not yet found a way to unclog them, so they are even possibly considering going to Las Vegas instead in order, since the lineup for the remaining front toilet is quite large. The pilot explained all of this and basically told us to try our best to keep it in and that they will try to arrive in LAX early.

Well, we did arrive about 15 minutes early – at the end of the flight the pilot again apologized for the “poor maintenance status” of the plane and sent us off. I had some problems with the pressure changes on the plane, this must be the last remains of my cold.

(to be continued)

So here it finally is – the first part of our story of our trip back from Berlin to
Oakville. A trip that should have taken a total of about 11 hours and
turned into a trip of over 20 hours, wife, 10 month old son and myself
included.

It all started out quite normal – we made our way to
the Tegel airport in Berlin, got in line at the KLM counter. After
standing in the long line for a while someone working there noticed
that we were traveling with an infant, so she helped us getting served
earlier. We said our good-byes to my parents and went through the
security checkpoint, took the bus to the plane and got onto the plane.

The
only small incident here on the way down the stairs is a airport
security employee who rudely rushes us to make room for him on the
stairs, only to go up the stairs again a minute later, since he forgot
his coffee upstairs.

At the scheduled take-off time there was an
announcement that we were still waiting for 10 passengers who apparently
should be at the plane within ten minutes. Another ten minutes passed
and we were told that we were still waiting for those passengers. About
one hour after the scheduled departure time, we were still waiting. So
we were getting nervous about catching our connecting flight in
Amsterdam and asked the flight attendants to find out what was going
on. After 1 1/2 hours the missing ten passengers boarded the flight -
and took their sweet time getting seated.

Now we found out
that there was one passenger too many on board  and it took
another half hour for the crew to find out that the ground crew had
forgotten to check in one child in a family of six.

So two
hours after the scheduled departure time, we finally took off and
arrived in Amsterdam just at the time our plane to Toronto was supposed
to take off. At the end of the flight, they announced all the connecting
flights that passengers would make, unfortunately ours was not one of
them. So we were asked to go to a specific transfer desk once we
arrived in the terminal building.

So because a pilot decided to wait 2 hours for 10 people about 40-50 other people missed their
connecting flights. I do realize that probably the ground crew had to
told the pilot it would only be “10 minutes”, but after a while it
might have made more sense to actually unload the luggage of those 10
passengers and just take off without them – after all there is a flight
between Berlin and Amsterdam every couple of hours.

So we arrive
to a long lineup at the transfer desk (they had not been able to
provide us with one of those little carts to transport us, since at Amsterdam
airport this service is reserved for disabled and elderly people,
people traveling with infants do not quality). Again we ask someone if
they could serve us quicker because we are traveling with an infant,
again the request gets granted.

We find out that they had
already booked us on a flight via Boston leaving in 30 minutes (which
we would have never made, had we properly waited in line and even
without that it was close, considering the size of this airport). I told
them I would prefer not to travel via the US (due to the additional
passport controls) and suggested re booking us for the KLM flight for
the next day and putting us up in a hotel for the night (my wife was
overtired since she had just gotten over a nasty stomach flu and had
not slept very well), since I figured a restful night would be best for
all of us. Well, it turns out that the flight for the next days were
booked solid, apparently in all classes. So they said they could put us
on standby on a flight via Montreal for the next day, and we would be
rather likely to get onto that flight.

Well when they handed us
our new tickets after a total of about 40 minutes they told us to better get moving, as
they had booked us on standby for a flight to Montreal leaving in 30
minutes. The gate agents had been told to expect us.

So
we arrive at the gate, pass the initial passport check and then stand
in front of the check-in agents (a man and a woman) who don’t even
acknowledge us. After a while the woman explain to us, that they are
getting our seats ready on the plane, since those seats are apparently
not normally deemed fit enough to seat passengers, since they are
“dirty” and they were placing blankets over them. I said “You must be
kidding me?” and my wife burst into tears, since she was completely
burned out after our run to the gate and this was just too much for her.

So the gate agent says to
her co-worker in Dutch “They are getting those seats on this plane, and
they are not even grateful that we are letting them get on this
flight”. So when my wife (who knows Dutch) calls them out on what they
just said, the male check-in agent starts saying that my
wife does not know Dutch at all and that’s not what his colleague said and
really, we should be rushing to the plane, otherwise they would take off
without us. There is no explanation or excuse for such a rude behaviour
- even if you consider that the check-in agents might not have know it
was KLM’s fault that we did not make it onto our original flight.

Anyways,
we move on to security, where my wife mentions the rude check in agents.
One of the ladies at the security checkpoint says to her: “You know m’am, it’s 50/50.
If you are rude to us, we can be rude to you”. While we were upset, we
were at no point rude to anyone.

So we get to the door of the
plane and the purser tries to locate our seats for us (no seats were
marked on the boarding passes). In the meantime, the “friendly” male
check-in gets to the door of the plane and says that they are not going
to be able to seat us together, which prompted my wife to tears again,
since she was panicking that we would not be able to jointly take care
of our infant son. The purser asked us to wait for a second and after a couple
of minutes they had freed two connecting seats in the middle aisle for
us. Still no bassinet for the little one, but at least we were seated
together.

The flight was pretty much un-eventful and we arrived
in Montreal without a problem. Once we got off of the plane, we were
asked to take a seat on one of the little carts and they drove us (and
another woman who was traveling with an infant) to the immigration
area, wonder why they would not do this in Amsterdam. We cleared immigration quickly and went on to wait for our
luggage. Well, we already figured that the luggage might not have made
it there, but the wait gave us a little well needed break.

So
when all the luggage (but ours) had come out, we went to the KLM counter, where we
were told that our luggage was scheduled to be sent on the direct
flight from Amsterdam to Toronto the following day. So upon our arrival
in Toronto, we should be contacting the Air Canada luggage service desk
(since our last flight from Montreal to Toronto was on Air Canada), and
leave our address with them so they could deliver our luggage the day
it arrived.

Next we cleared customs (which was easy, after all
our luggage was not with us), and went to the Air Canada counter. It
was just after 6pm at this time, and the KLM staff in Amsterdam had
booked us on a 9pm flight. So in order to get us home as quickly as
possible, the gate agent check it to a 7pm flight, so off through the
security check and to the gate we went. Once on the plane, I got two
cups of water from the flight attendants as we were completely
dehydrated by this time. On this flight also our little guy started
showing signs of being overtired, as he had only slept about two hours
on the trip so far – so he was getting cranky.

In Toronto we found out that we could file our luggage claims over the phone (as there was a long line-up at that baggage service desk), so we went to the taxi stand as quickly as possible, as we wanted to get home.

(to be continued in part 2)

The recent news about a lost harddrive for CIBC’s brokerage company and the theft of data from TJX’s computer systems (winners/homesense) just shows a glimpse of what is going to be common place crime in the future. Most likely it is already a lot more common place than we think, considering that there are probably many other companies that have experienced data theft but have decided not to talk about it.

So do we really trust companies to keep our data safe, when they say to us: “We are not telling you how we are storing the data and what we are doing with it, just trust us: We keep it safe.” Security by obscurity is not a real way to ensure privacy.

Be selective about what data you share with home – why does Blinds To Go for example need your phone number in order to provide you a quote? And maybe we should even go back to using more cash to pay for what we buy – it also makes our purchases less trackable.

Happy belated holidays and happy new year. We are now back home after a long vacation in Europe visiting family and friends – and the 20 hours trip back home (which normally is quite a bit shorter). More details to follow.

A short affair with Vonage leads me to cancel my account before my telephone number is even transferred to them. I guess I should have done some research in advance (but this info is hard to find on their site):

You cannot use a Softphone with a regular Vonage account. It turns out that you need to add a seperate softphone number to your account, at an additional $12.99 per month. There go all the savings. I have not found an option that allows you to make your main line a softphone.

One of my main points in transferring one of my numbers to Vonage would have been the ability to access it from my laptop from anywhere. Something that I consider standard for a Voip-Service, not an additional feature.

[update]: I’ve decided to keep this line with Vonage (for now), mainly because it seemed I might be running a risk of losing my number if I canceled so close to the end of the trial period. I do think that the quality of the line is very good. I have also been looking at Inter.Net’s voip service, which actually does allow you to use a softphone. However it took them too long to answer my email asking about the features and about transferability of my number. I’ll keep them in mind though, as it appears that their offer is a little cheaper too.

I just got back from the Targeted Traffic Conference in Hollywood Florida last night. Peter has got some coverage at ClickToHit and my other blog DomainEditorial.com features some posts as well. What a great conference and great networking. Wow!

Please also take a look at my blog about and for the Domain-Industry:
http://DomainEditorial.com/

We received a letter from the MP for Halton, Garth Turner, P.C. Thank you, but you could have saved the paper and the postage. In any case, this gave me the inspiration to post about something I’ve been meaning to comment on before, so here’s a quote from the letter:

(I am not even going to mention the amazing Universal Childcare Benefit and the huuuuuge GST cut he mentions in the beginning of the letter.)

Ok, first of all, the math seems a little off to me. It’s a tax rebate, so you have to wait until the next year to get it, plus it only came into existence in mid-2006. But OK, let’s keep that aside. Let’s do the math:

I pay $214 dollars a month for my GO train pass. That’s $2568 Dollars per year. WOW, that is expensive. The tax rebate appears to be 15.25% (please correct me if I got that wrong). So that would $391.62 as a rebate. Two months cost $428, so I am $36.38 short from “riding free for two months a year”.

Interestingly enough, the tax rebate only applies to monthly passes. And while I did not find any statistics, from my personal experience I always see many riders using 10-ride passes on the GO train. Some of them work part time, some of them drive in from time to time, in some months (vacation etc) the monthly pass is more expensive and some cannot afford the huge upfront expense of a monthly pass. Now the tax rebate should of course especially help the latter, but they are not eligible.

And yes, all of this just to save our “irreplaceable environment”. I know that the conservatives are very concerned about our environment. After all they quietly canceled some of the retro-fitting rebates for making houses more energy efficient before putting their “new and improved” programs in place.

While we are talking about the environment and Kyoto comes to mind: How the Liberals thought TV ads could convince everyone to save enough energy to fulfill the commitments in the international agreement we signed. Right, because we just need to watch an ad on TV in order to be convinced to cut our energy consumption. How about asking the big cooperations to curb their pollution a little as well?

Talking about pollution, politics and energy, I cannot afford to forget the mind-boggling ads of the Canadian Nuclear Association. Yes, Nuclear Energy is an “important part of Canada’s Energy Mix“. An important part that IMHO we should phase out ASAP. But hey, while we had plans all along to get rid of the dirty coal (which could have been a lot cleaner with the proper filters), the politicians just forgot(?) to make arrangements on how to replace the missing energy let alone considering any increased energy needs.

So Nuclear Energy is “clean – reliable – affordable“. Actually the TV ad was without the word “clean” for a while, so I assumed someone had ordered them to stop this message. But no, it’s back in the ad. So please explain to me how something that leaves waste that radiates it’s surroundings for centuries to come, could possibly considered “clean“? I don’t get it.