Tag: travel

Edmonton International Airport launches new brand

eia - we'll move you The Edmonton International Airport’s (EIA) new “we’ll move you” brand actually launched earlier this month on May 8th, but I didn’t see a commercial for it until this week. I haven’t had to fly anywhere either, so I’m not sure if the new brand is prominently displayed at the airport itself or not.

The new brand is meant to bring awareness to the fact that EIA is growing:

The new brand and airport expansion program reflect EIA’s shift from a small, regional airport to a medium-sized international airport serving Northwestern Canada. EIA is Canada’s fastest-growing major airport for two years in a row and now serves over six million passengers annually, a nearly 50 per cent increase in just three years.

The “we’ll move you” philosophy also underpins the $1.1-billion expansion program and current initiatives to incorporate industry-leading technologies, including common-use, self-serve check-in kiosks, Pay & Go parking stations, the expedited customs clearance program NEXUS and a host of others.

The expansion is expected to be completely by 2012 and should enable EIA to service nine million passengers annually. A key aspect to the expansion is a brand new control tower. Our airport is finally getting some food outlets too, including another Tim Horton’s and two Starbucks.

In addition to the branding, they’ve got a new URL: http://www.flyeia.com. It simply redirects to http://www.edmontonairports.com. Reminds me of Edmonton Transit’s http://www.takeets.com address, which I find far easier to remember than anything else.

I like the new logo and colors. Fresh and bright, the new design definitely makes EIA feel more modern than the old navy blue and red.

You can learn more about the changes happening at EIA here.

Questionmark Users Conference Day 3

The conference is now over! Today’s half-day included three encore sessions from the previous two days, and the closing session, “The Road Ahead”. Some news on the next version of Perception was shared, and lots of feedback was gathered using these nifty little electronic voting devices.

It was a lot of fun for me to meet my colleagues face-to-face, many of whom I have only spoken to via email. More importantly though, I got to meet and talk with customers – the people who actually use the software I help to create. Getting their feedback was really great!

If I met you at the conference and you’ve stumbled across this post, please feel free to get in touch! I’d love to catch up.

I’ve got one meeting left today and then I have some time to explore San Antonio before I head to the airport tonight. I probably won’t venture too far, but the weather looks great for wandering. Actually, I’m sitting outside writing this!

Questionmark Users Conference Day 2

questionmark I think today went more smoothly for me than yesterday, probably because I felt a little more comfortable having met a bunch of people. I still learned quite a bit too, so I am feeling pretty good about the trip as a whole. I think it was a worthwhile experience for me.

Sessions I attended today included an overview of our reporting options, a session exploring the ways to integrate Perception with other projects, and a couple of Q & A sessions. Again I was struck by the high level of knowledge that some customers have.

Tomorrow is the last day of the conference, but it’s really only a half day. The big news will be an announcement about the next version of our software, so that’s exciting!

Drinks with epodcaster! Wes, Greg, and Mack

After the conference ended today I had the pleasure of meeting up with Jennifer Navarrete and her family. Jennifer is a fellow podcaster, and we’ve been Twitter buddies for quite a while (she’s epodcaster). When she saw my status updates about being in San Antonio, she asked to meet up, and I’m glad she did! It’s always great to meet people in real life 🙂

Tonight’s conference event was pretty cool – they got us all into buses and took us to a place called Sunset Station. They handed out drinks as we walked in! There were nacho and fajita bars inside, and they eventually expanded into a dance room for line dancing and the like. Music wasn’t too loud either, so it was great to walk around and chat with people.

I don’t leave San Antonio until tomorrow evening, so I plan to do a bit of exploring/shopping in the afternoon. Should be fun!

Questionmark Users Conference Day 1

questionmarkToday was the first official day of the conference, and it was really interesting. The hotel we’re at (Westin Riverwalk) is a great venue because all of the meeting rooms are on the same level. We started out with a “birds of a feather” breakfast, followed by the conference kickoff and general session. Our CEO, Eric Shepherd, shared a number of company highlights. Notably, Questionmark turns 20 this year!

The rest of the day were breakout sessions. I attended a “Training with the Techs” session to learn more about assessment authoring with our Windows tool, a Product Central session to hear from customers about how we can improve our product interfaces, and another training session on reporting. I learned quite a bit at each one, not only from the Questionmark staff who were presenting, but from customers too. Some customers have an incredible amount of product knowledge, they truly are experts.

This evening was the “Dine Around” event. We broke into groups and ventured out on a photo scavenger hunt! Each group also had a reservation at a particular restaurant along the river walk. It was lots of fun! I can’t wait to see the slideshow tomorrow morning.

I’ve started uploading some photos to this photoset, but it’s slow-going. The upload speeds for the Internet here aren’t very good.

En Route to San Antonio

I’m traveling to San Antonio today for the 2008 Questionmark Users Conference, taking place through Wednesday at the Westin Riverwalk. I didn’t find out I would be attending until late this week, so the flight options were pretty limited. I was scheduled to leave Edmonton this morning at 6 AM.

I left my house a little later than I wanted to, meaning I didn’t get to the airport until just before 5 AM. That would normally have been okay (though cutting it close), except that the self-service check-in machines were all down. So I got in the incredibly long line and started to wait. I gave up on that after about ten minutes, jumped into the first class/business line, and pleaded my case.

The service agent was really helpful, and she helped rebook me on a later flight. Frankly I was fairly surprised at how busy the airport was so early on a Sunday morning. Anyway, I’m in Denver now, on a long layover. I should arrive into San Antonio tonight at around 6:30 CDT.

The great thing about the Denver International Airport is that they have free, ad-supported wireless Internet – something I wish we had in Edmonton. I’ve been using it for a while now, and it seems pretty quick. Uploads are really fast actually, faster than my connection at home, at least to Flickr! I uploaded a bunch of pictures from Megan’s birthday celebration last night. Happy Birthday Megan 🙂

More later!

I Love TripIt (And You Will Too!)

Late last year I came across TripIt, a free Web 2.0 travel organization service. TripIt helps you automatically build an itinerary, access it from multiple locations and devices, share it with others, and more. It also automatically includes maps and weather forecasts, among other information.

I’ve used TripIt four times now. The first was my trip to New York over Christmas. I managed to convince Sharon to join, and we built our entire itinerary using TripIt. I also used it for my trip to Yellowknife, for Northern Voice 2008, and for my recent weekend trip to Calgary. TripIt is dead simple to use, and once you get used to using it you sort of get addicted!

The way it works is you book your flights, hotels, car rentals, and restaurant reservations as you would normally. Then, forward your confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com. TripIt will automatically recognize the information, and insert it into your new itinerary. The only time this hasn’t worked for me was when we made our reservation at Bar Americain in New York (which supports OpenTable). I have to think that was a temporary glitch, because it has been flawless ever since (including our OpenTable reservation at Blink in Calgary). Megan booked the flights to Vancouver for Northern Voice, so I didn’t have a confirmation email to forward. I entered the information manually, and TripIt even made that easier – it knew the departure and arrival times and other information based only on the airline and flight number. Pretty cool.

tripit

That’s why I love TripIt – it’s just so deliciously simple! Forward the confirmation email and you’re done.

Sure you can add extra information and custom items to the itinerary, but TripIt does the heavy lifting and that’s what is most important. You can print your itinerary of course, and the formatting that TripIt provides is really clean and simple. If you forget to do that however, no worries – TripIt can send you your itinerary via email! You can send the command “get trip” to plans@tripit.com, and it’ll respond with your information. Or you can send something more specific, such as “get flight”. It’s really quite neat! You can learn more about the TripIt To Me feature here.

Some other handy features that TripIt includes:

  • The ability to share your trips with others. They can be either viewers or collaborators, meaning they can add items to the itinerary.
  • A travel guide for your destination. TripIt will load information from Wikipedia, Flickr, Eventful, and more.
  • See Who’s Close is a new feature that shows you when your connections (friends) are going to be near you at any given time.
  • iCal support, meaning you can load your itinerary up in Outlook, Google Calendar, and more.

As much as I love TripIt, it’s not perfect. Here are the top three features I’d like to see them add:

  1. Twitter and SMS support! Most other apps that I use on a regular basis (such as Remember The Milk) have this. Email is great, but Twitter and text messaging are better.
  2. Facebook widget. What I’d really like is for TripIt to do what dopplr does – show upcoming trips, and post an item to my news feed when traveling. If TripIt had this feature, I probably wouldn’t use dopplr anymore.
  3. Library of locations. When we went to NY, we added items like “Greenwich Village” and “Statue of Liberty” ourselves. It would have been really awesome if TripIt could have recognized those locations and automatically included relevant information (such as directions from/to our previous/next locations, pricing information, etc). This feature would make TripIt absolutely incredible!

If you’re just planning a quick road trip to see family or friends, TripIt may not be that useful for you. For all other kinds of trips however, I think you’ll find TripIt to be absolutely indispensable. I can honestly say I won’t travel without it anymore!

Food Glorious Food! In Calgary!

I stole the first part of the title from my sister – she uses it for pictures of food she makes and I like the way it sounds. I love food! So much so that Sharon and I went down to Calgary this past weekend for Dine Out week. It was also a good excuse for a short break away from everything.

Montreal Smoked Meat Omelette

Sharon is a great writer, and she summarized our trip very well on her blog – Part 1 and Part 2. Instead of repeating what she’s already written, I’ll just share a few highlights:

  • We ate at the following restaurants: blink and Galaxie Diner. Both were awesome! The photo above is the Montreal Smoked Meat Omelette from Galaxie. It’s a great little diner, with Coke memorabilia everywhere!
  • We stayed at the Westin Calgary, which is a really nice hotel. It even has a Starbucks in the lobby. We were upgraded to the business tower, which included free Internet!
  • We checked out the new glass floor at the Calgary Tower – it was mostly underwhelming (apparently that’s not a real word?).
  • We also checked out the Calgary Farmer’s Market, which was pretty cool! Lots of stuff to see, including Phil & Sebastian, where we tried coffee made using the Clover.
  • I got to use my iPod touch with open wireless to find directions using the Maps application!
  • It snowed like crazy on Saturday night in Calgary. I was hoping we’d escape the snow, but I guess we weren’t so lucky. I did get a few good pictures though.
  • We walked through Chinook Centre, but I only bought two shirts from Old Navy (not a big shopper, what can I say).
  • We stopped in Red Deer on the way back to see Tom & Bry. We had dinner at BP’s, and our waitress was pretty terrible. Either really new, or really dumb.
  • We didn’t go to Starbucks once, though we did drink lots of coffee. Crazy isn’t it?!
  • My photos of the trip are here.

It was fun! Dine Out Calgary will happen again next year, from March 9th to March 16th. Edmonton has one too.

In Vancouver

Megan and I arrived safely this afternoon here in Vancouver. The flight was really short, I think we were almost 20 minutes early! Our accommodations are the same as last year (Triumf House) and once again the room is great. The place is so empty though, I don’t know why more Northern Voicers haven’t caught on. It’s about a five minute walk from the Forestry building where the conference is held.

We went to Vera’s Burger Shack for dinner tonight, a place I went last year too. It was yummy! We also made a stop at Starbucks, which was pretty nice of Megan considering she gave up coffee for lent. I guess she knows just how addicted I am 🙂

I thought I was quite prepared for the trip, but it turns out I forgot my toothbrush and also a wireless router (I usually travel with one). No big deal though, I’ll get a toothbrush tomorrow.

Looking forward to MooseCamp tomorrow!

Off to Vancouver for Northern Voice

nv2008 It’s that time of year again! Later this afternoon Megan and I are flying to Vancouver for the fourth edition of Northern Voice, Canada’s blogging and social media conference. And as usual, I’ve left far too many things until the last minute. Ah well.

Lots of people have asked me this, so I figured I should blog about it: I am not doing any recording this year (I did some recording in 2005 and again last year). I’m just going to enjoy the conference as an attendee. That said, I am bringing some recording devices. And a webcam…maybe we’ll have some live streaming!

There are lots of ways to follow along this weekend. Keep an eye on the nv08 and northernvoice tags at Flickr, and also on the NorthernVoiceBloggers channel on Jaiku. And of course, I’ll be twittering and blogging here.

Have a great weekend and I’ll see all you Northern Voicers shortly.

Going to Northern Voice 2008

Post ImageMegan and I just registered for Northern Voice 2008, once again taking place at the Forestry Sciences Centre on UBC’s main campus in Vancouver. This is the fourth year the conference has taken place, and its the fourth year in a row we’ve attended. Dickson has joined us twice, but I don’t think he’ll be coming this year. Sharon came with us last year, and I think it scared her off. I asked if she wanted to come this year, and she just laughed at me! Ah well, it’s not for everyone I guess.

Here are my "I’m registered" posts from 2007, 2006, and 2005. Each year I’ve done a little more than just attend (was a panel member once, did recording twice) but this year that changes. I’m looking forward to a less stressful experience, and I know Megan is too 🙂

If you’d like to register, you can do so here.

Read: Northern Voice