Meeting a distant friend

Over the weekend I did something that I have been meaning to do for a while which is to meet a friend from the other side of the globe. Gemma and I have known each other for a couple of years but only formally met in Montreal when our paths crossed recently. A couple of years ago I exchanged emails with the New Zealand chapter of my honor society. Gemma was their communications person and put me in touch with some folks that would be attending the Arizona conference that I attended. We connected again through myspace and finally on Facebook. A while back she commented how she had been able to buy a ticket from New York City to Toronto for $12.00. She would then be heading to Quebec City for a World Youth Summit. I could either meet before or after the summit. Getting together before the summit proved hard to schedule so we opted to meet afterwards. On Friday, met in front of McGill University and had supper at a nearby Italian restaurant. [The caesar salad and pizza were great.] We went across the street to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream as even though she has been in the U.S. for six months she hadn’t experienced the marvelous Vermont ice cream. We concluded the evening talking at a local coffee shop. As the clock was striking midnight, I headed back to Ottawa and she departed for Toronto-New York City-Washington, DC.

Wordabble

I thought I would blog about a new game available for the iPhone and iPod Touch which has me excited. The folks at Fusion Bay recently developed a game called Wordabble. Using the touch interface of the iPhone/iPod, you locate words hidden in a 5x5 block of letters. What I like about the application is it is easy to use, intuitive, fun and addictive. You can play the game in three modes, a timed game, a marathon session or you can download the game of the day and challenge your friends and family. At any time you can submit your scores to see how fair with other players. I like the way the application cleanly and smoothly presents the challenge of finding the words. I say check-it out!

Civic Holiday, Colonel By day or John Graves Simcoe day

The first weekend in August we have a holiday that has many names, Civic Holiday, Colonel By day or John Graves Simcoe day. I decided to head to Montreal to see if I could achieve my geocaching goal of 900 finds. On Friday night, I joined a long line of people at the bus station heading to Montreal. In all there were 180 folks in line for the 5 p.m. bus. Security was heightened as they had undercover cops and sniffer dogs checking out everyone’s luggage. Once at the McGill residence, I found that the place was overbooked for the weekend. They have another nearby residence which I checked into and was upgraded to a better room at no additional cost. On Saturday, I joined a line of five people eager to buy the iPhone. I bought a white 16 gigabyte phone. WooT!

Over the next couple of days I did a geocaches marathon finding 26 geocaches putting my finds tally at 902. On Monday, I headed up to the Apple store which is located in the second largest mall in Canada, the le Carrefour de Laval. I was talking one of the specialist (blue shirt) about my challenge in getting the native Yahoo mail on the iPod touch to work and he suggested seeing one of the Genius (black shirt). After an hour the genius couldn’t get the Yahoo Mail app to work. I opted to use some custom IMAP and POP settings to get it to sort of work and not work. All in all it was a great holiday weekend.