It seems that the Tim Hortons at Carlton and Jarvis is gaining ground as the city’s Worst Tim Hortons.

Poor Apprentice Blog.

I feel your pain:

I wandered into that same Timmys for a quick tea.

“An extra large, Earl Grey tea, double milk, please.”

“Green tea?” she says. Her voice is alarmingly similar to Scooby Doo.

“No. Earl Grey.”

She punches in my order. GREEN TEA comes up on the screen.

“Uh. Earl Grey? I asked for an Earl Grey,” I say pointing.

“Not Green …tea?”

“Earl. Grey. Extra. Large. Double. Milk.”

The second staff member comes over and voids the entry. She flummoxes around the punchpad until the other clerk comes back, finds it and pushes the buttons for her. I swear to you, she mumbled “green tea” as she turned to fill my order.

Seems Photojunkie has had a similar experience up on the Danforth, near to my fave fruit market.

Share your stories. Tell me of your Canadian shame…

This morning, I did something I haven’t done since the mid-80s:

I put shampoo in my hair.

I actually woke up with bed head and had to laugh. It wasn’t much but I did have a small wing of hair sticking out perpendicular to my scalp. No I did not repeat.

Cut me some slack. I was busy last week and my “new” clippers snag on my hair when it gets longer than 2mm.

For the last week I have been enjoying using Picasa and it’s instant blogging feature. I’ve been testing it over at deadrobot.blogspot.com (Blogspot is a banned URL here, more on that later) as an alternative to using Flickr and cutting down on disk space on my server. On install, Picasa 2 scanned my entire hard drive and showed me long lost images I had forgotten. It was like an angel came to me bearing long lost memories. Birthday parties, Xmas images, Sharkboy in a leather outfit… I even used Gmail to pass it on.

Then suddenly a friend suggested my angel wasnt what it seemed. He reminded me that nothing is for free on the web any more. “But there are ads when you email images or set up a blogger account or you get charged a slightly higher fee if you hit ‘Print this!’ in the lower panel,” I offered. Ever skeptical he sent me this:

Several components of Picasa attempted to connect to the intenet and were reported by ZoneAlarm. I let them have access (trusting Google – don’t they have a slogan about making money ethically?). Within hours I had 16 incoming hits on my webserver from 66.249.65.196 and 66.249.66.109 from a bot identified as “Mediapartners-Google/2.1”.

— from google.weblogsinc.com

My friend says that plenty of programs send data back to their company’s servers (Winzip, for example, or the still suspect RealPlayer) so that comes as no surprise. It’s what the program is sending back that is curious.

Dispite the fact that the Weblogsinc site was speaking of Picasa Version 1 back in April of last year, and none of the adware or spyware mentioned in the comments has reared it’s ugly head through the three programs I filter stuff through, I removed it all the same. Creeped me out. A search on my drive came up with a PF file (prefetch it says) downloaded twice in one day. Updates? Maybe. Twice in one day? Odd.

Still I’m going to monitor weblogsinc for a couple more days regarding Picasa 2 and see where that leads.

Meanwhile, Google is becoming persona non grata on other blogs due to it’s inaction towards stopping “splam” or “blog spam”. As you know, I’ve blocked Blogspot from my referrers list due to a huge attack a couple months back. Seems I wasnt alone. Google is skating dangerously close to becoming Geocities for this decade, very fast.

Hello from Ocho Rios, Jamaica!

Im sitting in a cafe with a Red Stripe, looking at the back end of our ship and we just got back from Dunn’s River Falls where Sharkboy and I successfully climbed the falls without falling and cracking our heads open!

We saw three different James Bond sets so far.

Yesterday, Labadee, was wet but good. Not the best day so far but relaxing on a private beach…more later.

Dinners are incredible exercises in excess. There are at least 4 restaurants on every level all offering food 24/7. Americans are walking pharm commercials as we have breakfast with different ones every day and they all want to talk about their sea sickness pills. Sharkboy has managed to offened every American at every meal sitting by mentioning movies that were touchy subjects:

To the Marines couple: Hey have you seen Jarhead yet?

Mr & Mrs Jarhead: (Icily) No.

To the Couple from Utah: Hey have you seen Napoleon Dynamite yet?

Mr & Mrs Mormons:( Icily) No. Never mention that stupid movie again.

To the Brit Couple Who Were Not Having ANY Fun: Hey what’s happening on Corrie?

Mr & Mrs CSI, Thank You Very Much: (Icily) We only watch American TV.

Bless him for trying.

The ship is amazing. Definetly going back next year on a different ship (I said typed “boat” and got a maragrita-soaked hand to the back of my head just now). The weather could be better, we’re running a day ahead of a tropical storm so the skies are iffy.

“I’m drunky!” says Sharkboy over my shoulder

More later. I need to wipe out the spam.

I love the new Stumbe Upon extension for Firefox. I just found this demo reel and thought it was cute.

Go to Apple.com/trailers and just *try* to find this picture of Mel snuck into his new trailer for Apocalypto