I’ve been a little surprised by the lack of customer service I’ve had while on my business trip. Not once have I encountered a server who’s been friendly and chatted with me (or the other people I’m with) about anything. I’ve also encountered an outright lack of service: once when a server refused to give us separate cheques, even though we asked about it when we sat down instead of springing it sometime afterwards, and once when a different server refused to let us pay a bill with two different credit cards (even though I know perfectly well that this is a technically easy procedure). In short, while I may have been impressed by the food on this trip, my customer service encounters so far have been less than stellar.

(Ironically, one of the people who came with me on the trip is from the States – and he’s not surprised. He says that this lack of friendliness / eagerness to accomodate customer requests is not at all uncommon in various parts of the States, with California being one of them. In fact, he told me how pleasantly surprised he’s been by the friendly / helpful service he’s received in Toronto.)

I’ve taken the step of putting the “No Service” sign on my hotel room door.

The reason for this is the simple fact that I don’t like having things I’ve put in various places being moved around on me as part of the well intentioned attempts by housekeeping to clean up after me. I’m quite a tidy person, and clean when it comes to obvious messes. When I’ve moved the water glass from the bathroom to my living room table, where I put my laptop at night, and set it on a piece of paper that I’m using as a coaster – it’s ever slightly so irritating to come home after work and find that the water glass has been moved back into the bathroom again and the piece of paper thrown out. Had I wanted it to go back into the bathroom, I would have put it there myself. So, rather than come home every night and go through the whole ritual of putting the glass back where I actually want it – I’ve taken the step of making sure that housekeeping simply doesn’t visit.

Aside from some things being moved around on me, it’s also slightly strange to feel as if, every time I come home, I’m coming home to a brand new room. Most signs of it having been “lived in” have been removed. Personally, I like putting at least some kind of personal touch on the places where I spend my time – otherwise, it doesn’t really feel as if I belong there.

I’m typing this from my suite in Palo Alto, California. My business trip, during which I’ll have two weeks of training, started yesterday.

The flight was okay, although it took 1.5 hours to get through customs. Apparently, the long line-up was a little unusual – just my luck.

Everything’s nice here – but I already miss Michelle and the rest of the people back home. It’s all so quiet on my own…

A little while ago, Mapleview Mall (where Michelle works) started a new Christmas poster campaign. Just yesterday, I noticed that one of the key words on this poster was spelled incorrectly.

In short, the poster reads “Christmas momento”. The second word isn’t one that appears in the English language. In proper English, it should be “Christmas memento”. It’s spelled with an “e” not with an “o”.

I’ve since verified this by looking it up in a dictionary.

What’s intriguing, however, is that when I asked various people at our local drinking spot, Pepperwood, almost everybody thought that it was spelled with an “o”. We met up with some friends of ours from our condo, Walt and Janice. Walt supported my claim, while Janice was convinced that it should be spelled with an “o”. (This conversation all happened before I actually looked in our dictionary and got proof that the “e” spelling is correct.) How it could become so popular to think that the erroneous spelling is in fact correct I find to be a little unusual. Is it, perhaps, that people don’t often use this word and that the “o” version just resonates in the mind more? But, for anybody who has used the word (such as myself), it’s the other way around.

With respect to the poster itself, I can only wonder what happened. Surely it would have been run through a spell check first,and that should have caught the problem. (But apparently it may not have been.) Or, perhaps it was just a mistake on the part of the printer, and the people who approved the final version fell into the “wrong thinking” about the word, so didn’t notice anything wrong with it.

This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed a typo in something public – most often, it’s things like menus that get things wrong. But it is the first time I’ve spotted something like this that so obviously should not be wrong (while I suppose it’s an easy mistake, that doesn’t excuse the kind of proper verification that should have gone into it as a matter of routine) in such a high visibility public campaign.

Update: I’ve done more research and can clarify things some more. First, a Google search on: ‘memento momento “correct spelling”‘ quickly turns up more than enough references to support that the correct spelling is with an “e”.

But, from a UCLA course, “Linguistics 1”, here’s an explanation for why “momento” might have passed a spell check:

• “Please do not confuse ‘momento’ and ‘memento’. A momento is a unit of time (Spanish: ‘uno momento’). A memento is a souvenir, a memory.”

You can check the misspelling of “momento” online at SpellCheck.net, type it into Word and have it show you that it’s wrong, or simply look it up in a dictionary yourself.

Even if Kerry does win the Presidential election (and it’s not looking as if this is all that likely, although I suppose there’s always a chance), the fact that Bush has done so well is just a continued indictment against the intelligence of such a respectively large percentage of the American public. I find it unbelievable that so many people could honestly think that Bush is good for them or anybody else…

Update: Kerry just admitted defeat, and Bush is back in office for another 4 years. Somehow I’m not surprised. But I will say that my personal opinion of our neighbour just dropped down several more notches because of this.

I’m due to travel to California on a business trip next week. However, I no longer have a valid driver’s license, and my passport recently expired.

I went to get a new photo ID health card last week but could not do so because I couldn’t prove I lived in Ontario. Although their Web site mentioned having mortgage papers (which I did have) or a pay stub (which I also had) it didn’t state that they needed to be dated within the last few months. I finally got a cable bill and a current mortgage statement and went back there on Monday. That worked, and I got a new card, but only a temporary one. The actual one (with photo ID) will be arriving in the mail in the next 2-3 weeks.

I checked with AMEX travel, and using expired photo ID, along with a current, valid, temporary ID (without a photo) is not legally sufficient. They will only accept a single piece of up to date photo ID. (Although, you could get lucky and get across the border anyway, depending on the compassion of the border guard – but I was told not to count on it. Michelle went to Florida in the Summer using an expired passport, but she flew out of Buffalo, not out of a Canadian airport – and she may have simply been lucky herself in having the person who looked at hers not notice anything.)

I was told, however, that you could pay more and get a “rush” passport. Which I did. I got photos taken, and my dentist to notorize my form. My new passport will be ready to pick up on Friday. Which means that I should actually be able to go on this business trip after all – saving me the embarrassment of having to cancel (and probably paying the plane fare myself) because of something so stupid.

But, through all of this, it seems to me that if you don’t have a permanent residence and/or can’t prove that you have one it would be impossible to do anything. Which means that the homeless, among other things, can never get a health card. That seems just a little bit morally questionable to me. I’m hoping that there’s some process in place that I’m just missing that would allow them to get health care despite this issue…

I’m happy to say Michelle and I have worked things out since yesterday and things are peaceful here again.

As an aside, Michelle tried to reply to my previous entry and discovered that she wasn’t able to do so. I looked into it and discovered it was because of a spam comment fix I’d put in place some time ago. Apparently nobody had been able to comment since then. I backed it out (and in the process upgraded to the latest Movable Type) and now everything’s working again. I tried implementing a couple different spam comment fixes, both of which also ended up doing nothing other than generating error messages when trying to add a comment, so I took them out too.

When I married Michelle, I knew that she would have a cigarette every once in a while at parties. I didn’t like it all that much, but was still okay with it. Just because it’s not something I would personally do is no reason to judge somebody. But recently, things have been getting worse.

As of now, she’s smoking a cigarette a day – and, worse, it’s caused her to to lose her judgement over the situation to the point where she’s actually being dishonest with me about her behaviour. I’m not going to go into details, suffice it to say that, for all intents and purposes, her desire for her daily puff has assumed priority over everything else in her life.

At one point, after her behaviour caused a big rift between us when I caught her telling me several things about it that weren’t true, she told me that she’d ask me before she had a cigarette. I thought that we’d come to an agreement and that, despite her “problem”, I could trust her to be honest with me about it.

I finally got my physical job contract. I opened a bottle of champagne that her mother and aunts had bought for me a little while ago to celebrate my new job. She asked me if she could have a cigarette or not. I told her that I didn’t want her to. I didn’t want to associate the day of my “officially” getting my new job with her continued addiction to nicotine. Apparently she didn’t like my response because she went ahead and had one anyway.

I don’t know what to do about this. If there isn’t trust in a relationship, I don’t know what there is. Trust is the most important aspect of any relationship – it’s what I assume exists between myself any of my close friends and family. If I can’t trust my own wife and best friend – I can only question everything I know about her.

The first time I caught her being dishonest with me I was hurt. It took me several days to get over it, and I thought that we had the potential of being closer than ever when we made up. Now I have no idea at all where it leaves us. I’m hoping that we can get over this, but I don’t know if it’s in me to do so. At the very least, I want to be close friends with her, but I just don’t know if the foundation of an intimate relationship exists between us any more.

What’s worse is that she still continues to make light of this and doesn’t take my reaction seriously at all. She has no idea how badly she’s disappointed me – or even how much she’s jeapordized our relationship with this. I don’t get close to people easily, but the bonds I make are as close as I know anybody to make with anybody else. But if I’m ever betrayed in the openness I share with somebody, I’m very quick to disown them and move on with things. I’ve never been married before, never cared for anybody as much as I care about her. So this is the first time I’ve faced something as pivotal as this. I honestly don’t know where things are going to go from here.

I’ve just purchased a new monitor. A 20″ LCD ViewSonic VP201s. This thing is simply amazing. Of course, I’d, a couple days earlier, bought an ATI All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro Radeon video card in preparation for the monitor – for digital output.

I hadn’t actually intended on buying the monitor itself quite so soon, but the store I was going to get it at ended up having it on sale (for a week) for $200 off. I thought that was a deal I couldn’t pass up.

I’m still trying to adjust to the different display (yes, it’s a far better picture, but the way text, for instance, looks on the LCD is going to take a little getting used to) as well as the real estate. Since this thing runs in a native resolution that’s higher than my CRT – I’ve got a whole lot more desktop to work with.

I also had to spend 2.5 hours completely redoing everything under my desk because the digital video cable wasn’t long enough to reach my computer. (I’d been using an old analog cable for my older monitor.)

Additionally, I’d recently bought a KVM – a higher quality one that supported higher than 60Hz refresh rates, thinking I could (finally) just switch between my workstation and my server without leaving my chair. Unfortunately, I discovered that it produced ghosting on my screen – which I wasn’t about to put up with given the quality of my new video card and soon-to-be (now current) monitor. Perhaps really high end video cables would fix this, but I don’t know. However, I’m using the KVM to switch my keyboard and mouse, and my monitor (which has dual inputs) to switch my video. I have to do two different things, but that’s okay – I still don’t have to leave my chair.

I’ve finally finished with all of my layout changes, not only to my personal site here, but also to the main Inferno Enterprises site.

Essentially, this involved getting rid of the left and right navigation panes, and replacing them with a single bottom navigation pane. I also made some changes to the way that text presentation and buttons looked on this site, as well as some other minor tweaks so that Mozilla and IE stayed in line with each other as much as possible throughout the whole process.

I think things definitely look better now than they did before. I’m also making more extensive use of CSS and server side includes throughout so that if I want to change anything in the future it will be that much easier to make the change it in just one place.