Passport Application Lines = Hell

My passport expires in February of this year, and I have to travel to Seattle in March for the MVP Summit, so it was time to get a new passport. Unfortunately, now that the USA requires Canadians to have passports for entry (effective January 23rd), it’s causing massive backlog in the system and very long times. Having no other choice but to try and “beat the traffic”, we went for it today…

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That’s a picture of the line at the Calgary Passport office. Ashley and I woke up at 5am, drove downtown, and by 6:15am we were in line – and were probably 40th or so. People kept arriving after us, and by 7:15am there had to be at least 200 people in line. The employees started arriving around 7:30am, and we watched as they walked past us, came out to get a coffee, eat a danish, then go back inside. It was all I could do not to say something to them like “Why don’t you open the doors, can’t you see all of us here?”. I brought my laptop to do some writing, but that early in the morning my neurons weren’t all firing in sync, so I opted to read Cell instead (a pretty good book). They oh-so-graciously opened the doors about 8:15am, a whole 15 minutes earlier than normal. 🙄

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Once inside we got to sit in plastic chairs while we waited for them to call our number. We were C907, and they were already serving C903, so I was hopeful it wasn’t going to take too long. You definitely want to fill out the form online – people that had the hand-completed passport documents were processed by different booth dwellers, and there were fewer of them to help. Speaking of help, the Passport Office had 12 booths for processing people, yet only five were staffed. They have hundreds of people outside, and only five people processing. Great job government. 🙄 Thankfully, the process wasn’t too horrible once our number was called – it took perhaps 15 minutes. We were out the door by 8:45am, making the whole thing 2. 5 hours of waiting and 15 minutes of actual activity.

I find myself feeling very disappointed in how our government is handling this – they should be opening temporary passport processing offices in several places around the city. Ashley told me that Calgary has two passport offices, while all of Alberta only has three – and Price Edward Island has five in total. That makes zero sense. Processing evidently takes around a month, with the new delays, so I’m supposed to get mine near the end of February – just in time for my trip in March.

What I find interesting is that they cancel and partially destroy your current passport – meaning that I’m now unable to leave the country. What if I had a business trip that suddenly came up? What do business people do that travel a great deal? The system seems somehow broken.

Movies Worth Watching: V For Vendetta

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Last night Ashley and I watched this movie, and quite frankly, I wasn’t sure what to expect – I never saw it in theatres, and didn’t recall much about it. Originally a comic book series by Alan Moore (now collected as a graphic novel), the Wachowski brothers (of The Matrix fame) adapted the comic into a screenplay, and the movie was directed by James McTeigue (who was an assistant director on two Matrix films). Starring Natalie Portman as Evey Hammond, Hugo Weaving as V, Stephen Rea as Inspector Finch, and John Hurt Chancellor Sutler, V for Vendetta is a gripping movie with significant political ideas that are very relavent in our current times. I didn’t know who was in the cast other than Natalie Portman, so when watching the film I kept trying to place V’s voice – which had tremendous character and power – but couldn’t. It wasn’t until the last 20 minutes of the movie, when V gives a particular speech that falls into a more drawn-out delivery of vowels (Mr. Aaaaanderson), that I figured out it was Hugo Weaving behind the mask. He does a superb job of delivering emotion without relying on facial expressions, a feat not many actors can achieve. Natalie Portman does a credible job as well, though I never quite believed her British accent. The cinemetography was superb, the music was excellent, and the action scenes were gripping.

This is definitely one of the best movies I’ve seen in some time (Ashley concurs) – and, interestingly enough, the HD-DVD version is $3 less expensive than the standard DVD version on Amazon.ca right now. Unfortunately we watched this in standard definition, but I’ve added the HD-DVD version to my wishlist and my second viewing will definitely be in HD-DVD!

Importing .PRF Files Into Outlook 2007 in Vista

If you have a hosted Exchange account, you’ve probably dealt with the PRF file: it’s an automated setup file that you just double-click and it configures Outlook for you. Totally slick. But in Outlook 2007, Microsoft broke changed something and you can no longer easily import the PRF settings. There’s a way to do it under Windows Vista, but it’s slightly more involved. The instructions below are adapted from my hosted Exchange provider 4Smartphone.

  1. Download the PRF file from your hosted Exchange provider and put it on your desktop.
  2. Click Start, and then click Run. On Vista just type Run and his Enter. This will open Run command box.
  3. In Open field, type the following and don’t forget the quotes. You may want to copy/paste this into the RUN box and just change the variables: outlook.exe /importprf “C:\Users\USERNAME\Desktop\FILENAME.prf”
  4. Let Outlook 2007 do it’s thing – you’ll have to enter your username and password as part of the setup process.

And that’s it!

Does Sex Sell Domains?

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Leading up to CES, I was bombarded with a steady stream of communication, some from talented, relationship-building professionals, and some from cheap PR flaks who are an insult to the industry. One such cheap PR stunt came from a company called Dotster (no links, I don’t want to give them any more publicity than I have to). Dotster is a Go-Daddy wannabe, offering domains, Web hosting, etc. Somehow they thought that, rather than offering innovative services that customers would want and building their business on that, they’d instead use the oldest marketing trick in the book: sex. So they launched a nation-wide “talent” <chuckle> search looking for “ambassadors” <chuckle> near the end of 2006. Just before CES they picked the best “talent” and sent everyone a press release about it – complete with a link to download an image of the new “ambasadors”. Morbidly curious about the results, I downloaded the image and it was exactly what I thought: five “babes” in sexy poses. Check out the 57 megapixel version (yeah, that’s right 50-freaking-7-megapixels, 9526 x 6029 pixels). They say there’s no such thing as bad PR, but although I now know the name of the company, I know they’re more interested in cheap marketing tricks than focusing on their services. In the interest of fairness though, I should note that GoDaddy isn’t exactly above similar tactics – but at least they make no pretense of their advertising model being an “ambasador”. They hired Danica Patrick for that – she might be pretty to look at, but the lady also has skills!

Battlestar Webisodes: Not For You Canuck!

I was trying to watch the Battlestar Webisodes, but it seems that they’re doing some form of IP blocking based on geographical location. Regardless of which PC I tried, the videos would not stream for me. I asked friends in the USA to try, and it worked instantly for them. So it seems the licensing for the only applies to the USA. Gotta’ love it when corporations are stuck in ’80s-think when it comes to geography. Does anyone know if there’s a way for me to watch them?

I Couldn’t Resist Any Longer…First 2407WFP Set Up

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I’m still waiting for the Velocity Micro PC, and the XFX video card, so I haven’t set up my three 24″ LCD monitors yet…but today I just got sick of typing on my laptop (and having the twin hard drives heat up my hands) so I set up one monitor with the laptop. It’s…BIG. And very nice – even over VGA (which surprises me a little).

Microsoft Timeline of Operating System & Office Suite Launches

This is one of those things I’m posting for the sake of having it archived – I found it on this USA Today article about Vista.

MICROSOFT TIMELINE
Date Event
Aug. 12, 1981 IBM introduces its personal computer with Microsoft’s 16-bit operating system, MS-DOS 1.0
Aug. 1, 1989 Office suite launched
May 22, 1990 Windows 3.0 launched
Aug. 24, 1995 Windows 95 launched
June 25, 1998 Windows 98 launched
Feb. 17, 2000 Windows 2000 launched
May 31, 2001 Office XP launched
Oct. 25, 2001 Windows XP launched
Nov. 30, 2006 Windows Vista made available to businesses
Jan. 30, 2007 Windows Vista made available to consumers

Free Windows & Office Programs from Microsoft

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A fellow by the name of Blake Handler seems to have a lot of time on his hands – he created a directory linking to over 150 Windows and Office programs available from Microsoft. Some of the free goodies include:

  • Alt-Tab Replacement in addition to the icon of the application window you are switching to, you see a preview of the page.
  • Calculator Plus also performs many types of conversions.
  • ConferenceXP enables you to see & hear others in a virtual collaborative space, called a venue. You collaborate on an electronic whiteboard or PowerPoint presentation, send messages and more.
  • FolderShare keeps important files at your fingertips – anywhere. All file changes are automatically synchronized between linked computers, so you always access the latest files.
  • GroupBar desktop tool offers enhanced window management capabilities in a taskbar-like setting. Through simple drag-and-drop operations on window tiles within the bar, users can create lightweight, transient grouping relationships that allow them to perform certain higher-level window layout functions on multiple windows at once.

Check out the site for more.

My Dell Monitor Quest is Over

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Know what that’s a picture of? Three absolutely flawless Dell 2407WFP, 24″ LCD monitors. Each capable of glorious 1920 x 1200 resolution, and all three are perfect with no dead or stuck pixels. I received two of them yesterday, and quite frankly after my completely hellish experience with these monitors, when I un-boxed the two new ones yesterday I was expecting them to also be flawed. Somehow though, as I carefully set each one up, I had a small glimmer of hope that because they took so long to get here (about two weeks) maybe they came from the non-crappy factory. I powered up each one, ran some full-screen dead pixel tests, along with a colour banding test, and each was flawless. FLAWESS. I’m so happy this insane quest is finally done.

Sadly, I don’t have anything to connect them to yet – I’m still waiting for the Velocity Micro system to come back to me, and ditto for my XFX 7600GS for the Shuttle, so I can’t run dual monitors on that unit yet either. I’m hoping that by the end of the week all the pieces will have arrived and I can put my technology world back together again.

Now just you watch – in a month I bet all three Dell monitors will spontaneously die on me. 😆

Today is Hardware Day

Wow. In the span of 20 minutes, my 72″ Toshiba DLP TV was delivered, two new Dell 24″ LCD monitors arrived, and my repaired/replaced (not sure which yet) Shuttle SD11G5 was also returned. My geek head is spinning – I’m not sure which one to set up first. 🙂