Thursday, July 31, 2008

Rendezvous: a leisurely tour of Paris by Ferrari



It's a 9-minute tour of Paris by film director Claude Lelouch. The soundtrack is a Ferrari 275 GTB engine (Lelouch's own car), but apparently the car used to film it was actually a Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9. I guess I can accept it's better that he drilled holes in a M-B bumper to mount the camera rather than violating the Ferrari's skin.

If you listen carefully, you'll notice a little overzealous mixing of extra tire squeal in places :-( Lots of arguments about the speeds attained in the film...some experts saying no more than 85mph, while Lelouch claimed something over 200kph (about 120mph).

Apparently there was only 1 "lookout" person put in place for safety--near the Louvre.

More about this film here.

Friday, July 25, 2008

Wedding Registry Etiquette

See my article on Google's Knol regarding wedding registry etiquette.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

It pays to play hockey on Air Canada


Seth Godin's blog brought this to my attention (I'm quoting him here):

"Air Canada, which my readers generally concur is the single worst major airline in North America, has a fascinating policy. No oversized duffel bags, regardless of weight, unless they contain hockey gear. No shin guards, you pay $80 a bag."

Actually, for reservations made after May 15th of this year, it's now $100 a bag.

Turns out their policy is a bit more balanced than that...it's not just hockey gear that gets the fee waived, it's also snowboards and skis :-). Full details are here.

Reminds me of a contest ran a long time ago to come up with the Canadian equivalent of the phrase "as American as apple pie". The winner was "as Canadian as possible, under the circumstances."

Friday, July 11, 2008

Facebook doesn't like my attitude. HAL?


Occasionally I try to wade through the sea of irrelevant crap that Facebook puts on my page to figure out what my friends are doing etc....and today I got really frustrated with the glacial speed at which Facebook was loading my pages (and jerking elements out from under my mouse).

So I went up to the box where it says "what are you doing right now", and typed in "wondering why Facebook is so annoyingly slow!"

Well, Facebook didn't like that very much at all.

I got an error message something like "Oops, sorry, we can't do that for you, we're working on xyz..."

Then, I clicked on the "Friends online" button in the lower right (where it said several of my friends WERE online), and that magically went to 0 and said something like "can't find any of your friends".

Does this sound like HAL or what???