Blessed by the Potato

Wow, so suddenly it’s August.

The summer, like many before it, feels different in August. I don’t know whether I just get used to the heat, or if the weather really does change along with all the subtle changes in the plant life, but it feels practically like a different season than June and July. The days are usually hot and baking, but not often as swealtering or deadly as those early summer heat waves. I’m usually driven indoors from the heat and solar radiation for most of the summer, and it’s right around this time of year that I start feeling like going outside and sweating again.

And of course with August comes the knowledge that Halloween is coming up. And this year is going to be a good year, I can just feel it. Yes, Halloween will fall on a Wednesday this year, which usually doesn’t go well. The weekend before often suffers because people can’t quite get in the spirit since it’s just a bit too soon, and people still have work the next day on the day of, and even though it’s only two days later, there’s never anything fun happening in the first weekend of November (of course, Thursday Halloweens suffer the most from this). But this year should be good. I mean, I’ve got a house, with a porch, and hardwood (hopefully) fog-juice-resistance flooring! I’ve got Wayfare and her 8 boxes of Halloween miscellany. It’s going to be on, so book that week off work, buy your plane/train tickets (if needed), and plan to be in London!

…There’s just one problem: I don’t have a bloody clue what my costume is going to be. I mean, half the time I leave the actual costume making/acquision until the very last minute, but usually I at least have a clue by the time late August rolls around (after all, if it’s necessary to knit 2100 linear feet of galvanized steel together, then one wants to get an early start on that sort of thing). Any suggestions?

Gifts for a couple at their wedding is a cute tradition: stock them up on all the things they’ll need for their new lives together… and to avoid ending up with 5 breadmakers and a baker’s dozen fondue kits, or to get a matching set of china or silverwear one piece at a time, gift registries evolved. These days, it gets harder as a lot of people getting married already have the stuff they need to start their lives together, because they’ve already been living on their own (and, since there are two of them, may in fact have two of everything they need to start their lives).

But that’s a rant for another time.

What I want to complain about today is the HBC (the Bay, Zellers, Home Outfitters) gift registry. A friend of ours is going to get married later this month and registered there, and I can’t believe the very basic features that are missing. First, the upside: my understanding is that they get to visit the stores (the Bay and Home Outfitters) and just go crazy-go-nuts in the store with a bar code reader as though they were on a shopping spree (which, essentially, they are), and it all gets added to the list. Guests can access the list online and buy things right off the website. However, there is no mechanism that I can find to cross gifts off the list except by actually buying them from the registry. If you get the same item at another store (for example, Caynes), you’d be hard pressed to get someone at the Bay to take it off their list. Heck, even if you got the item at the Bay and forget to tell the cashier that at the time, I don’t know if they would let you go back and cross it off the list unless you did a full return and rebuy (or at least that’s the vibe I’m getting, I haven’t tried it). That’s pretty stupid in my opinion. Yes, it helps force guests to buy at the store where the registry is kept, which gets more business for them, but I think the increased probability to shop there should be enough incentive for a company to host a registry, and as a courtesy should make it easy to scratch off items bought elsewhere (after all, if the couple gets two of a particular item, they may very well assume that the store didn’t properly maintain the list, and not recommend them…).

What’s even weirder is that even though Home Outfitters and the Bay are all part of HBC, they maintain separate lists for the couple. Even though (some) of the same items are available from both stores, if an item appears on the Home Outfitters list, we can’t buy it at the Bay. Furthermore, when Wayfare did buy an item in store, the saleslady seemed to have real trouble comprehending the concept of taking it with her and wrapping it. She was all keen on pushing the service where they can ship it to the store nearest them where they registered, and they can pick all the gifts up together (granted, it’s probably more convenient than trying to get one of the groomsmen to stay sober enough to be responsible for trucking the gifts after the reception, but it’s a lot less personal).

I’m sure somewhere out there (and I haven’t looked, not even a quick Google search) there’s a decent web service that will let you register for an arbitrary number of items at as many competing stores as you like, and guests can knock items off the list at their leisure (perhaps even before leaving to pick them up)… or at the very least a PHP/SQL script… Actually, something like that might come in handy come next Potatomas…

Back from Vacation! I wrote this entry on the second leg (after leaving Ottawa and arriving at my parents’ cottage), but didn’t post it at the time. I think “today” refers to last Thursday.

It hasn’t been a great vacation so far. Ottawa was ok, but we were both so busy with work that we just weren’t having a great time there, and left a night early. The cottage was better, fairly relaxing, though again we each had at least a full day of work to do after we got here. Today was going to be our first day of sleeping in and not checking email or anything… when the cleaning lady (who my parents hired to come on Monday and clean the place up *before* we got here) decided to show up at 8 in the morning and ruin our lay-in. Ugh. Especially disappointing as we were actually awake early on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (when she was 4 days late, we wrote her off as a no-show… ugh).

The dial-up has been fairly painful, especially when trying to send email attachments. I know having high speed for about a decade now has ruined me to dial-up, but it isn’t helped by all the “content-rich” websites out there that are useless if you turn the graphics off. Which is actually one thing that’s been bugging me about Firefox 2 – I can turn picture loading off to save on bandwidth (and then surfing is slow but not excruciating), but when I do so I just get the alt-text (if any is coded) and no option to load individual images that I can find – old Internet Exploder and Netscrape used to put an empty frame in as a placeholder for an image and then let me click on it (or right-click and select load) to get the image…

The drive to Ottawa was relatively smooth. There were, of course, a few construction slow downs, and a couple of insane drivers (one guy was zooming around lanes and passed me on the shoulder — I almost called 911 on him). The residence room here is pretty sweet. For less than the conference rate at the hotel, we’ve got two separate bedrooms, air conditioning, two desks, and a fridge and microwave. I knew it had a kitchenette, but I thought that would be fridge and stove, so I brought pots in pans so we could save more money and cook here… oops. Anyway, the full-sized fridge and freezer will let us stock up on drinks and soup and doggie bags from restaurants. We’ve got the dial-up working (as you can see by my access), but I forgot to bring a network cable to give the in-room high speed a try (it’s wired up, but they told me on the phone it wasn’t working).

There are really only two downsides to the place. The biggest is that the windows face east (right into the rising sun in the morning), and have crappy panel blinds, and both rooms have at least two panels missing, so it’s really bright when the sun comes up. If we’re gonna be here a week, I’m thinking some masking tape and tinfoil might be in order… :) The other minor thing is that the only light in the rooms are two lamps, and they took the light bulbs out of the desk lamps!

The conference doesn’t start until Monday, but I’ve got a full load of work to do here to prepare my presentations today. Hopefully we’ll get to do some touristy things afterwards.

The 12-volt outlet (cigarette lighter) in my car has been broken ever since my brother had the stereo system installed, possibly since before it came into our family. It’s never really bothered me. While I am a little anal about monitoring the air pressure in my tires, and always carry an air compressor in the trunk, I’ve managed to keep my tires inflated through the use of other people’s 12-volt power or the free air pumps at service stations.

I don’t know how long this has been going on, but I stopped at two different Esso stations in the past week, and both had started charging 50 cents to use their air compressors. Outrageous! For now, Petro-Canada, Shell, Sunoco, and Loblaws/Supercentre gas stations still have free air compressors (though the new Shell at Hwy 7 and Woodbine hides theirs around back halfway along the car wash lane). Considering how relatively cheap an air compressor is, how long they last, and how important properly inflated tires can be for safety, I’m really surprised at that move. Providing free air is just a cost of doing business for a gas station, and not a very big one, either. While I don’t run a gas station myself, an educated guess would suggest keeping the windshield cleaning stations topped up with cleanser, paper towels, and squeegees would cost more over time than the air compressor. I find this especially disturbing and surprising since they jumped straight to a 50 cent charge, instead of starting at just a quarter, and since they jumped into the mess all on their own.

Well, looks like I won’t be buying gas from Esso any more… which is a good point that Wayfare made: how much can they possibly be making, 50 cents at a time, from the few people who actually check their tire pressures regularly? Does that at all compare to the amount of goodwill they stand to lose from cheapskates like me?