Distractions, reflections

In my day job, I recommend in-person interviews, because they produce a richness of understanding not possible over the telephone.  On this engagement, we decided to visit interviewees in Windsor as a day trip.  On a prior gig in Detroit, I had flown to Windsor and driven across the border.  For this day trip, the travel by Via Rail was practical. I arrived at the platform at Union Station with 5 minutes to spare.  Nancy was already there, and Stephen arrived one minute before the train departed.

With a schedule to pick up the train from Oshawa through Toronto to Windsor, Stephen got caught in a traffic at the shift change at the General Motors plant.  Having missed the Via Rail train, he was told that he could catch the later GO Train from Oshawa to Windsor, and arrive at Union Station before the train left.  The voyage outbound from Toronto was considerably less stressful.

I prefer travelling by train over flying.  The stress is lower.  It’s too bad rail travel isn’t a practical alternative to most destinations.

The rail route through southern Ontario sees a lot of farm land.

Highway 401 is normally considered the direct freeway from Toronto to Windsor. The original Highway 2 ran through small towns north of Highway 401.  Approaching Windsor, Highway 2 lost its official designation in 1998.  Read more... (472 words, 9 images, estimated 1:53 mins reading time)

Living in South Riverdale in Toronto, there’s not much of the city south of us. Between our home and Lake Ontario, there’s the Port Lands — an industrial area gradually being taken over by movie production. Since I hadn’t been around Toronto for much of the summer, I hopped on my bike just to see what’s new. The first big change was the opening, on Cherry Street, of a T&T Supermarket: a branch of the upscale, full-service chain originally in Vancouver area, with some branches up in the northern suburbs of Richmond Hill and Markham.

I used to shop in this location when the store was a Knob Hill Farms. That was a downscale warehouse experience, with lots of European imports and low prices. The T&T store was a complete renovation of the building, and it’s well lit, with extensive services of take-out food (dim sum and sushi), a bakery, and tanks of live fish.  Read more... (221 words, 3 images, estimated 53 secs reading time)

Since I’ve been doing a lot of work in Drupal — the open source content management system — I went to check out the Toronto Drupal Users Group. I biked over to the early evening meeting over at the Linux Caffe.

 Read more... (215 words, 1 image, estimated 52 secs reading time)

For a change, I went over to Simon’s apartment so that we could do some web site work. Simon lives east of Spadina Avenue, north of Lakeshore Boulevard and the Gardiner Expressway. Although it was rainy, the snapshots below should satisfy your curiosity as to what high-rise dwellers get to see every day.

Looking westward, there’s another complex going up across Spadina, nested in the railway properties. (Simon says if he’s going to sell his unit, he’d better do it before competition opens up across the street!)

 Read more... (203 words, 5 images, estimated 49 secs reading time)

David sees signals of overload in missing his flight to Helsinki via Frankfurt.

(by David): It looks like I’ve really maxed out on stress. My colleague in my day job said that I always look like I’m not under stress, but I guess I hide it better than most. I know when I’m tired, and try to watch out. On Thursday morning, when I drove into the office, I pulled into 3 parking spaces, before I decided to choose one. I got into the client office late — after making a stop at our downtown office to pick up printouts — and the remaining parking spaces were pretty tight. Since I was tired, I decided that I shouldn’t take any chances, and gave up on 3 parking spaces before I found a space that wasn’t so tight.

On Friday, in packing, I seemed to lose sense of time. I know that it usually takes 4 to 5 hours to pack for a trip of 2 weeks to Finland, if I don’t do any packing in advance. I got up late (having stayed up until 4 a.m. finishing up a report, and then puttered away at things that needed to be done: re-registering on the company’s medical plan (on the last day of registration), and checking in with DLH (since people in Finland will ask about him).  Read more... (803 words, estimated 3:13 mins reading time)