Categories
2006 Korea

korea trip – 01 – toronto to vancouver to seoul

“You’re in the wrong line Sir! You have to go to the Air Canada booth to check-in.”

“But my ticket is from United Airlines. Its a roundtrip to Seoul”

“Yes, I am aware of that but your flight to San Francisco is actually operated by Air Canada. Just go down that hall and turn left at the corner and you’ll find the Air Canada booths.”

Alarm bells rang in my head. I had wasted 10 minutes standing in line for the United Airlines booth. It is now 8:25 AM and my flight is supposed to depart at 8:50 AM. I hate being late to airports. Oh no.. what if I miss my flight ? What will happen ? Do I loose the ticket ? Should I call lunato ? Do I get a refund ? What about our plan ? No no no…

All sorts of disaster scenarios went through my mind as I hurried towards the Air Canada booths only to find the line at least 20 people long. Great! Oh hold on, I only have a hand carry and my laptop bag. Maybe I can use the Automated Check-in machines.

8:30 and I’m standing in front of the AC and furiously punching in every reference number I could find on my Itinerary. None of them work. I tried searching by last name, first name, credit card used during purchase, date of purchase… nothing works. I asked a fellow traveller which reference number I am supposed to punch in. He replied that he would love to help but he is also running late so good luck! Thanks! I stop an Air Canada official but she tells me to get in line.

8:35 and I am in line with 14 people in front of me. 8:40 and amazingly enough I am now at the front of the line. The first booth opens up and the lady asks me to step forward. I sprint forward and tell her that my flight is supposed to leave in a few minutes and I misunderstood my itinerary and was sent here from the United Airlines booth.. what should I do? She asks for my boarding pass and I tell her that the Automated Check-in refused all my attempts. She sighs loudly and then asks for my passport and itinerary.

“Oh! This flight is closed Sir. You’ll have to go the Customer Service Centre to get re-ticketed.”

Oh, My, God! “What does that mean ?”

“Just step over to Customer Service and they will issue you a new ticket. Don’t worry, a few other people had the same problem,”

“Oh, so I’m not the only one ? Ok, that’s sort of comforting to hear. But about this ticket.. will it be for today ?”

“Sir, please just go there and they will take care of you and answer all your questions.”

8:50 and I’m now walking towards the Customer Service Centre, somewhat relieved that I am not the only one who couldn’t make it to United 8151.

The staff at Air Canada’s CS Centre were very nice and they issued me a new ticket without any hassle. They also gave me a complimentary $200 discount coupon for any Air Canada flight for all the “trouble” I had to go through because of the overbooking of their flight to San Francicso. Furthermore, this ticket will take me from Toronto to Vancouver and then from Vancouver to Seoul and arrive 40 minutes earlier than the SF to Seoul one. Not bad at all.

I had my boarding pass in my hand and all that remained now was to go through security and board the plane. I called skid before leaving Toronto and left a message saying that I will be transiting through Vancouver for the 2nd time but like before, I, unfortunately, wouldn’t have enough time to go out and meet him. Someday, hopefully soon, I will visit Vancouver and stay there for a few days.

The flight from Toronto to Vancouver was quite impressive. I was flying Executive Class, which is another name for First Class, and had a lot of leg room. I stretched my legs completely and still didn’t touch the seat in front of me. During the meal the plates were actual plates, not plastic plates. The glass was a glass, not a plastic replica. The fork and spoon were stainless steel. I didn’t notice any of these differences until I had almost finished the meal. Flying Executive Class is pretty nice. There was no movie though so I spent the time reading the 2nd Takeshi Kovacs novel by Richard Morgan: Broken Angels.

I only had 30 minutes in Vancouver so I spent that time buying Estée Lauder cosmetics from the Duty Free Shops for lunato, her sisters, and her sister-in-law. The plane took off again, I took a lot of pictures of Vancouver and I think I saw my brother’s apartment as well. This leg of the journey will be 13 hours long.

Categories
2006

humans vs subhumans

Ex-Ontario resident: “It could’ve been me”

A last-minute change of dinner plans may have saved Shweta Subramaniam from being a casualty of the Mumbai bomb blasts.

Subramaniam, who moved to India’s financial and entertainment capital from Ottawa in February to pursue a singing career, had planned to meet a friend on Monday night.

At the last minute, her friend cancelled. Subramaniam would have taken the Western Railway line to travel from her home in the midtown suburb of Andheri West to Santa Cruz, where the friend lived.

An hour later, the first in a series of powerful bomb blasts rocked that line.

“It’s a godsend he cancelled. It’s quite scary because it’s one of those moments when you think — it could have been me. The train route where the blasts happened is a regular one for me,” a shaken Subramaniam said in a phone interview from Mumbai yesterday.

…

Back in Mumbai, Subramaniam is rattled, though not enough to return to Canada, as her parents in Ottawa are urging.

Ironically, her parents had been nagging her to buy first-class tickets on the commuter trains, but she refused, preferring to travel second-class.

Categories
2006 Software

Trust the popfile octopus

Frustrated by the barrage of spam that my email addresses recieve daily, I decided look into the myriad of Spam filtering solutions freely available on the internet. Research on the topic led me to POPFile and I have been using it for the past six months. To date it has classified 22,842 emails with 98.98% accuracy. I’ve recieved a total of 17,966 spam emails during those six months, give or take a few that were either unclassified or classified incorrectly. Wow!

POPFilePOPFile describes itself as “an automatic mail classification tool.” The software uses a naïve Bayes algorithm to sort through the incoming emails and classify them as Spam or not Spam. Basically it creates a bridge between your mail client (Outlook / Outlook Express / Thunderbird / etc.) and your email server.

When you check your email, all incoming emails are sent to POPFile which runs statistical tests on the email content to decide whether the email is spam or a valid email. This is done by looking at the email content and matching the words against a dictionary of words that POPFile creates and manages automatically. Most spam emails usually have similar content “viagra, cialis, mortgage, payment, average, online, pharmacy, satisfaction, deals” etc etc and POPFile counts the numbers of spam-related words per email, creates a word matrix along with probabilities of each word being found in a spam message along with the other words as well, and then uses a decision chart along with the words’ interdependencies to classify the email.

If the email is classified as spam, then POPFile modifies the Subject line of the email and prefixes “[SPAM]” to the email’s subject. Your mail client’s builtin sorting operations can then place emails containing the word “[SPAM]” in the subject line into a temporary folder that you can either delete right away or sort through later at your convenience. You also have the option to automatically quarantine and delete all incoming email that has been marked as spam by POPFile.

Furthermore, you can create Magnets which will force incoming mail from specific email address and domains or with specific subject lines to not be checked by POPFile. This will ensure that all incoming emails from your work and/or friends will always reach your mail client.

As I mentioned earlier, this freely-available piece of software has classified the 22,842 emails I’ve recieved since January 2nd with 98.98% accuracy. I no longer look at the SPAM folder in my mail client and I just delete its content right away. I’ve created magnets for important email contacts and the rest are sorted for me automatically :)

POPFile - click for detailed info

Also, here are some official real-time POPFile stats popfile_stats.html collected from POPFile users who opted to take part in reporting feature. Quite impressive!