This Sunday I visited the Great Wall of China at Badaling. It was raining very hard, making the path slippery and full of people with umbrellas that always seemed to nail me in the neck but when you are in China, the Wall is kinda a must. I got this picture with my little Canon G9 and I think its a gem.

I have been in China on business, and since my company's Beijing site get's its corporate network connection via Japan, many websites think I am coming from Japan. This morning when I checked in on Facebook I was prompted with the message below from facebook asking if I wanted to help translate facebook! Facebook makes _a lot_ of money. Couldn't they just spend the few grand to do the work themselves like every other self respecting service/software company? Facebook: that is tacky.

We just returned from yet another trip to Punta Cana, which turned out to be a really sensible place to head to, as we missed the recent massive snowfall in Ottawa. This time we boarded a dreaded charter flight from Montreal (Transat), and sat in our tight seats (but exit row!) for a few hours, made it to Punta Cana mostly on time (around 2pm on March 8th, 2008). We'd booked at the Gran Bahia Principe in the "Club Royal Golden" area, which is supposedly close to the beach and has "VIP amenities". When we reached our bus at the airport to go to the hotel we were surprised to find that we were already checked in, and that we'd been "upgraded" to the Ambar section/hotel, which is adults only. I guess they were fully booked with lots of families and were moving the childless to Ambar.

All in all, it was a great vacation -- the weather is great, beach was as always among the most beautiful I have seen. Since Ambar is a new hotel, I will provide some facts from my perspective to help you if you are thinking about staying there or at the Bahia in general.

The Good

• Ambar is very quiet. It caters to an older crowd. This may be a good thing for you.
• The rooms are nice and include a nice 4 poster bed, LCD TV, mini-bar stocked daily with beer, sodas, and a 50ml bottle of J&B, Absolute and Bacardi Limon.
• The grounds are extremely well kept.
• The food is mostly good, but very "heavy"...and the cooks have a hard time not burning eggs :-)

Yeah, it must be annoying being a model for the latest idea I had with my camera. What you see there is a snoot made of gaffer's tape and a cereal box...

This just in from Duane Nickull: "Air Canada strikes again. 120 people, 3 workers, one flight per hour for next 5 hours from Orlando."

This isn't uncommon, but it really is an indication that Air Canada Doesn't Give A $*&t about you or I.

For some reason I decided to visit Varadero Cuba instead of my beloved Punta Cana, D.R. All in all, I was not impressed. A lot of the issues I had can be broken down into distinct categories:

• Air Canada Vacations
• Weather
• Iberostar Varadero
• Myself being a whiney b&%ch

First off, a pretty photo:

Notice anything about that photo, beyond the beauty of the beach? Great segue to...

Weather

For three of the days we were in Varadero, it was rainy and/or cold. The photo above was taken on the day where things started improving. We were actually wearing pants and sweaters on one of the days!

Of course, when you have bad weather...why not go somewhere neat, like Havana? Well...here is another segue...

Air Canada Vacations

We booked a trip to Havana through Air Canada Vacations, but no one came to get us. We waited for 90 minutes. The rep had passed on erroneous information to our tour guide, and we did not connect. The rep tried to blame it on us. I got my money back, but for the inconvenience we should have been given something like a discount off rebooking. Instead we just got the rep trying to pass the buck... "these things happen... blah blah". The weather got better, so we didn't rebook, which means we hung out at the resort, which in turn leads to...

Iberostar Varadero

Just in case you don't recognize me ;-)

Here is the scenario: Air Canada sells various "pass" products. These passes allow you to pre-pay for a number of trips. You generally get a choice between a "tango plus" pass, which takes seats out of a low-cost economy fare bucket and a "latitude pass" which takes seats out of a full fare economy bucket.

The carrot that they always extend to get people to buy the more expensive Latitude passes is that you are entitled to upgrade from the J fare bucket within 24h or departure. This means that if there is an open full fare business class seat available...you get it.

Well, they decided that they had been too generous and decided that as of January 8, 2008 they will apply "capacity controls" to this upgrade...and not just for new pass holders but for existing passes. Can you believe that? Folks over at FlyerTalk have a big long thread going on about this. It seems that there is always something new for us to hate Air Canada for. I personally welcome international carriers into the domestic Canadian market...enough is enough.

Disclaimer: I think Dvorak is, generally, a professional troll...to quote some random on Slashdot.

John C. Dvorak more or less wrote what I feel regarding the One Laptop Per Child program.

Do African children need laptops, or do they need food? Well, perhaps they need both in the grand scheme of things but my sense is that right now they need food more than they need a laptop. How much food would $200 buy, I wonder?

While noble, I think we should deal with the problems in impoverished nations sequentially in priority order. Starvation and Political Instability/Genocide are perhaps higher on the list than internet access. Just my opinion.

[NOTE: see the first comment below, I added a script to get the auth_key for you.]

Today I decided that I would like to backup my flickr account to my Mac. After a few attempts at using a Java based UI tool "FlickrBackup", which had terrible network performance for some reason, I fell back to my trusty old Perl skills.

Here is what I did:

1. Install Net::Flickr::Backup

To install this module, open up a terminal and type:

cpan

When CPAN loads up, type:

install Net::Flickr::Backup

Its pretty much that easy.

2. Go to Flickr.com and create an API key. Create one for a web application, and enter pretty much any valid url as your callback. I know, its not a web application...just do it, k?

3. Get an auth_token. This is harder than it needs to be, but here is how I got it done:

- First get a frob. This page shows you how to do it manually. Mac OS X has a terminal command, "md5" that you can run to make your api_sig value. for example:

md5 -s 000005fab4534d05api_key9a0554259914a86fb9e7eb014e4e5d52permsread

Which would yield a MD5 hash of: f2c52fb8fd3124314227bbc0f48003d3

Which it turn would mean the auth url needs to be like:

http://www.flickr.com/services/auth/?api_key=9a0554259914a86fb9e7eb014e4...

Once the URL is constructed, paste it into a browser, and approve access to your account. Once you approve, flickr calls your callback url. I just made my callback a bogus url like http://mattmackenzie.com/authdummy/