Peter's Useful Crap

Before you fly, write down the phone number (non toll-free version) of the airline through which you booked in the originating country. If the originating country is different than the base country of that airline, write down the phone number for the airline in its base country as well. If you booked through a travel agent, write down their phone number as well. These phone numbers could be useful resources if you ever experience flight connection and/or booking problems while in a foreign country.

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Recently I was flying back to Canada from Europe through Frankfurt. I had booked through Air Canada but was flying on Lufthansa due to the two airlines’ partnership through the Star Alliance. My flight to Frankfurt had been delayed, causing me to miss my connecting flight from Frankfurt back to Canada.

At that point, I was told to head to the Lufthansa booking counter to get on another flight. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the next (and last) flight to Canada was leaving in 3 hours. This is a summary of who I politely tried to get to book my flight:

• Lufthansa in-airport booking counter: The line-up was over 2 hours long. By the time I had gotten re-booked by another means, the person who had been directly in front of me in line was still waiting. Therefore, had I waited in that line the whole time, I might have missed the last flight, or they might have given me the same “can’t help you because you booked on Air Canada” answer as the Lufthansa German reservations phone centre.
• Air Canada in-airport booking counter: She said she could not help me because I was on a Lufthansa flight and it was Lufthansa’s responsibility to get me on another flight since they had caused the delay. After I pleaded, she supposedly tried to do what she could but said she simply didn’t have access to book me.
• Lufthansa German reservations phone centre: She said she could not help me because my flight was booked through Air Canada.
• Air Canada German reservations phone centre: It’s closed on weekends.

(While the Star Alliance is useful in terms of giving you more booking options for a particular airline, it also makes it easier for airline representatives to play a game of “pass the buck”.)

I then called Air Canada’s Canadian reservations centre. Within about 5 minutes, they had booked me on the last flight home.

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I was lucky in a couple of respects:

• I met a fellow passenger who was in a similar situation as me. He was able to lend me his phone to call the German phone numbers.
• I had a laptop and headset in my carry-on bag, and my home phone provider is a VoIP provider. This meant that I was able to look up Air Canada’s Canadian reservations centre toll-free number and call it as if I was in Canada (although on an expensive airport Internet connection). As I noted at the beginning of this post, be sure to have the non toll-free number of your home airline, because if you are stranded in a foreign country, you will likely not be able to call the toll-free number.

TransLink, the Vancouver publish transit authority, has a nice “mobile site” at m.translink.ca. I use it frequently even though I don’t own a web-enabled phone.

TransLink says the following about the mobile site:

TransLink’s mobile information service – m.translink.ca – gives you quick and easy access to transit schedules, alerts, advisories and even the Buzzer blog – all via your mobile device!

The mobile site is also accessible from any device that is Internet-enabled and that uses a web browser, so there’s no reason why you can’t use it from a desktop computer or laptop!

If you’re looking for the next bus times, first and last SkyTrain, SeaBus, and West Coast Express times, this is a much more efficient site than the main TransLink site. It addresses a few of the deficiencies of the main TransLink site, as the mobile site is:

• Faster
• Simpler
• Provides bookmarkable URLs (so that you can return to find key routes or stops much quicker)

Now, the mobile site is not as fully featured as the main site, as it doesn’t provide things like maps, full bus schedules (or schedules for specific times), and lots of other general information. (In particular, I think that bookmarkable HTML pages of full bus schedules would be really handy.) But consider it as the better alternative for day-to-day lookups and usage.

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If you’re a developer, consider experimenting with the unofficially documented TransLink API or the static full dump of route data. Update: TransLink no longer provides a public API

Supposing you have a spreadsheet with keys (Domains) and values (Count):

If you want to display the count for “orange.com” in a different cell, you would use the function VLOOKUP, whose basic use is nicely described here.

But as in the screenshot above, certain domains such as “green.com” appear several times. What if you wanted to sum the values of all of the “green.com” counts?

The solution doesn’t actually involve VLOOKUP, although it is somewhat in the spirit of VLOOKUP. Rather, you would use the function SUMPRODUCT, which multiples two columns and sums, well, the products. However, we only want to include certain rows if they match our criteria. This involves testing the key (Domain); the result of our test would be TRUE, which has a value of 1, or FALSE, which has a value of 0.

In E2 (replace comma with semi-colon for OpenOffice.org Calc):
=SUMPRODUCT($A$2:$A$10=D2,$B$2:$B$10)

In E3:
=SUMPRODUCT($A$2:$A$10=D3;$B$2:$B$10)

… and so on. E2 is essentially summing 1 * 2 and 1 * 4 for the blue.com rows and 0 * the count for all the other rows.

The actual spreadsheet I was working on involved full URLs containing the domain:

Therefore, I couldn’t do a simple comparison. I had to do something more like “does the URL contain a certain domain”. This is where the function SEARCH (case insensitive, as opposed to the case-sensitive function FIND) came in.

In E2 (replace the commas with semi-colons for OpenOffice.org Calc):
=SUMPRODUCT(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(D2,$A$2:$A$10)),$B$2:$B$10)

In E3:
=SUMPRODUCT(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(D3,$A$2:$A$10)),$B$2:$B$10)

… and so on.

Since the SEARCH function returns a number (specifically, the placement of the needle in the haystack) and the error “#VALUE!” if the search term does not exist, the ISNUMBER function will return 1 or TRUE when there’s a search match.

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Limitations: If you’re doing something similar to this with URLs, note that we are searching for “blue.com”, “green.com” and so on to appear anywhere in the URL. You’ll need a more robust solution to support matching those strings only in the domain (since technically you could have a URL “blue.com/green.com”.

With storage, bandwidth, and the quality of network connections and solutions getting better, CDs and DVDs are being shared — hopefully legally — and backed up more frequently. These often take the form of *.iso, *.bin, *img, *.udf and other files, freeing you from having to carry discs around.

There are programs such as Alcohol 52% or 120% (which also enables you to create backups) and the unsupported, Microsoft-released “Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP”, which enable you to “mount” the backup files as virtual drives. This is useful if you don’t have a CD / DVD drive on your computer or you simply don’t want to wastefully burn a disc. My favourite such program for Windows is Virtual CloneDrive.

With the sole purpose of emulating a CD / DVD drive, Virtual CloneDrive is efficient and simple to use.

Its options are straightforward, it’s a lightweight program, and it’s free.

Once you’ve mounted the disc image, it will appear like any other actual drive on your computer, as if a disc was inserted into that drive.

The Bridgeport Canada Line SkyTrain Park & Ride in Richmond is actually the River Rock Casino’s multi-level parking garage.

This may be obvious to many people, but for me, who’s used to the outdoor lots at the Scott Road and King George stations, it was a bit confusing the first time. The lack of clear signage and the politically-sensitive naming of the station (“Bridgeport” instead of “River Rock Casino”) added to the confusion for me.

Technically, the casino’s address is 8811 River Road and the Park & Ride’s address is 8888 River Road. The casino’s parking garage is directly connected to the SkyTrain station. If you’re a visitor to Vancouver or simply heading to the station for the first time, just think Bridgeport Canada Line SkyTrain Station = River Rock Casino.