Tonight’s Meal - Fruit and Berries with a Chaser

I’m like the poster child for good great eating habits. Just look at what I cooked up (well, sliced up actually) for myself tonite. EB may be on the road, but this house is nutrition heaven baby.

Here’s the latest installment of tonite’s meal in 424 pixels or less…

Disclosure:  the burger was from Joe’s on W. 4th.  It had bacon on it. It had cheese on it.  It had a pickle on it.  It came with fries.  I used ketchup.  It was delicious.

GardenWise web site launches

The GardenWise web site launched today - it’s another project we’ve been working on and built in Drupal. It joins BCBusiness and TVWeek as the latest online offerings from Canada Wide Media in Burnaby.

Tonight’s Meal - Indian with a Twist

EB’s out of town on a road trip and there seems to be a fair bit of debate about my eating habits while she’s gone.

It’s true I love to order from Veneto Pizza on Londsdale, Musashi in the West End for sushi, and I get a hankering for fish and chips from C-Lovers on Marine (their web site barely exists, sorry).

But heh, just because EB’s not in the kitchen doesn’t mean there can’t be some mean cookin’ goin’ on.

So, what better challenge than to be totally transparent and blog my evening meal for the next week or so. You know, let the sad truth hang out for all to see.

I nixed the idea of taking a picture of what I’m eating, I’ll leave that kind of thing to Roland.

Instead, I present . . . tonite’s meal . . . in 424 pixels or less . . .

Old Dogs, New Tricks

My mom and dad are both in their eighties and grew up on the prairies. Even though they live in an area where there are lots of lakes and rivers, my family heritage is not water based.

Definitely flat landers.

Aside from a short and wet ride once on a Laser, my dad’s never been on a sailboat. My mom is super uncomfortable in anything smaller than a BC Ferry.

So, I really wasn’t sure how they’d take to Madsu, our 22 foot Catalina sailboat.

Both of them totally loved it. I couldn’t get my dad off the tiller, and my mom actually claimed to be relaxed, even when the boat heeled in the puffs. The latter is a feat of immense proportion.

I have an old sailing text book in my nautical library (a corner of the shelf in the living room) and dad feverishly devoured every page in the evenings. Out on the boat, he quickly got the hang of things. Like any beginner we had lots of snake wake, but I was surprised at how fast he got the feel for the boat. It’s no rocket ship, but the little Catalina 22 is certainly forgiving and a perfect little boat for the old dogs (and me).

Watching my 80 plus year old dad head up to the fore deck to change the head sail made me both nervous and proud all at the same time. And the fact that my mom, deathly afraid of small boats, actually pestered me to go out “look, the sun is shining, we can go sailing now” is something else.

All I can hope is that when I’m in my 80’s I’ll still be game to try something new.

American Express Gives Small Business the Blues

I woke up to one of those calls you rather not get. It was from American Express and it was about my latest bill.

I should explain that I’ve had an Amex card since 1980 and have always had great service, primarily because it’s not a credit card, so it gets paid every month and I like the reporting they provide. There are still lots of places that don’t take the card, but since I use it exclusively for business purposes, its not a problem, and I’ve been super happy with the card.

However, I can’t say I feel the same today. About 8 weeks ago I took Amex up on an offer for a new business card, one that provides a slight rebate. It’s their Amex Business card. Great I figured. The card showed up and I started using it instead of my classic green Amex.

This morning, the voice on the phone from Amex was calling to ask why I hadn’t paid my last invoice. Huh ? I explained that I haven’t yet received an invoice from the new card.

“Ah”, says the voice, “we sent you an invoice 3 weeks ago”. But when the voice told me the address, it was clear why I hadn’t received it.

Amex sent the invoice to the wrong address.

Oddly, they got the card to me to the right address, but somewhere between issuing the card and sending the bill, they screwed up my address.

“So”, I say, “just send me the bill and I’ll be happy to pay it. Like I have my regular amex bill every month for the last 27 years ! ”

“Oh”, says the voice, “that’s fine, but until we receive payment, the card will be suspended, and there are some interest charges. Total due on the card with interest is $ 104.00″.

“What?”, says I, “Just send me the bill and I’ll clear the charges, but do remove the interest charge and do remove the suspension, since I haven’t done anything wrong here - you guys sent the bill to the wrong address”.

Long story short: after 30 minutes on the phone and 2 different Amex reps, they refused to reinstate the card until they’d received my $104.00. Even when they looked up my 27 years of payment history, they still were , um, un-moved.

So, because Amex screwed up, I was now being inconvenienced. What amazed me was that there was no-one at American Express who seemed at all concerned about losing a long time customer over their mistake, and over 104 dollar at that.

Needless to say, I’ll not be keeping the new American Express Business card, since this kind of business help I do not need. Nor does any small business person. If you’re thinking about getting one of these cards, think again unless you want to really be blue.

Windows On Mac With VM Fusion 1.0

I’m really liking VM Ware’s Fusion. I got the download from the Apple web site and despite having to re-authenticate Windows by talking to a MicroSoft computer for a few minutes, this really really rocks. I’d been running Windows on the iMac using BootCamp, but now we no longer have to reboot, and Fusion seems pretty solid so far. Click the thumbnail for a larger shot.

The installation was painless. What I really liked was that I could use my existing BootCamp partition - though you can install Windows clean if you want.

Nice job VMWare. This really makes my next desktop purchase a no brainer. I’ve been hanging on to a PC desktop because there are a couple of apps I depend upon that only run on windows, and a couple of B to B sites that only run on IE. Now, I can buy that new Mac I’ve been thinking about for my next desktop machine and still be able to access what I need on the Windows side, without having to reboot. I realize this is also possible with Parellels but I’d opted for the BootCamp route originally.

RSS Gone Wild

I was in for a big surprise when I checked the RSS feed for sailboats for sale in the Vancouver online Buy & Sell.

First of, there were an unusually high number of new items in the feeds, considering I usually see only 2 or 3 a day

so seeing 300 new ones was a bit of a shocker. Even more interesting were the feed items themselves:

Those are some interesting boats they’ve got listed in their 23 to 31 foot sailboats RSS feed.

That’s one way to boost your feed circulation - I guess.

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