For some reason I decided to visit Varadero Cuba instead of my beloved Punta Cana, D.R. All in all, I was not impressed. A lot of the issues I had can be broken down into distinct categories:

• Air Canada Vacations
• Weather
• Iberostar Varadero
• Myself being a whiney b&%ch

First off, a pretty photo:

Notice anything about that photo, beyond the beauty of the beach? Great segue to...

Weather

For three of the days we were in Varadero, it was rainy and/or cold. The photo above was taken on the day where things started improving. We were actually wearing pants and sweaters on one of the days!

Of course, when you have bad weather...why not go somewhere neat, like Havana? Well...here is another segue...

Air Canada Vacations

We booked a trip to Havana through Air Canada Vacations, but no one came to get us. We waited for 90 minutes. The rep had passed on erroneous information to our tour guide, and we did not connect. The rep tried to blame it on us. I got my money back, but for the inconvenience we should have been given something like a discount off rebooking. Instead we just got the rep trying to pass the buck... "these things happen... blah blah". The weather got better, so we didn't rebook, which means we hung out at the resort, which in turn leads to...

Iberostar Varadero

Just in case you don't recognize me ;-)

Here is the scenario: Air Canada sells various "pass" products. These passes allow you to pre-pay for a number of trips. You generally get a choice between a "tango plus" pass, which takes seats out of a low-cost economy fare bucket and a "latitude pass" which takes seats out of a full fare economy bucket.

The carrot that they always extend to get people to buy the more expensive Latitude passes is that you are entitled to upgrade from the J fare bucket within 24h or departure. This means that if there is an open full fare business class seat available...you get it.

Well, they decided that they had been too generous and decided that as of January 8, 2008 they will apply "capacity controls" to this upgrade...and not just for new pass holders but for existing passes. Can you believe that? Folks over at FlyerTalk have a big long thread going on about this. It seems that there is always something new for us to hate Air Canada for. I personally welcome international carriers into the domestic Canadian market...enough is enough.

Disclaimer: I think Dvorak is, generally, a professional troll...to quote some random on Slashdot.

John C. Dvorak more or less wrote what I feel regarding the One Laptop Per Child program.

Do African children need laptops, or do they need food? Well, perhaps they need both in the grand scheme of things but my sense is that right now they need food more than they need a laptop. How much food would $200 buy, I wonder?

While noble, I think we should deal with the problems in impoverished nations sequentially in priority order. Starvation and Political Instability/Genocide are perhaps higher on the list than internet access. Just my opinion.

[NOTE: see the first comment below, I added a script to get the auth_key for you.]

Today I decided that I would like to backup my flickr account to my Mac. After a few attempts at using a Java based UI tool "FlickrBackup", which had terrible network performance for some reason, I fell back to my trusty old Perl skills.

Here is what I did:

1. Install Net::Flickr::Backup

To install this module, open up a terminal and type:

cpan

When CPAN loads up, type:

install Net::Flickr::Backup

Its pretty much that easy.

2. Go to Flickr.com and create an API key. Create one for a web application, and enter pretty much any valid url as your callback. I know, its not a web application...just do it, k?

3. Get an auth_token. This is harder than it needs to be, but here is how I got it done:

- First get a frob. This page shows you how to do it manually. Mac OS X has a terminal command, "md5" that you can run to make your api_sig value. for example:

md5 -s 000005fab4534d05api_key9a0554259914a86fb9e7eb014e4e5d52permsread

Which would yield a MD5 hash of: f2c52fb8fd3124314227bbc0f48003d3

Which it turn would mean the auth url needs to be like:

http://www.flickr.com/services/auth/?api_key=9a0554259914a86fb9e7eb014e4...

Once the URL is constructed, paste it into a browser, and approve access to your account. Once you approve, flickr calls your callback url. I just made my callback a bogus url like http://mattmackenzie.com/authdummy/