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Up here in Soviet Canuckistan where, thanks to genetic manipulation, the beavers are so large that they can peek over the tops of porta-potties, there’s been a lot of discussion over whether or not Rogers, the first company to carry the iPhone, was going to allow users to share their 6GB/month data plan with their iPad. Rogers has yet to commit one way or the other and says they’re looking into it – but it’s my opinion that if they haven’t said yes or no by now they’re just too chicken to come right out and admit publicly that it’s not going to happen – which has caused a lot of people to cancel plans to buy an iPad 3G.

Well, Canadian iPhone users, I’m happy to announce that after some careful thought and experimentation, I HAVE DISCOVERED A WAY TO SHARE AN IPHONE DATA PLAN WITH AN IPAD, AND IT DOESN’T EVEN HAVE TO BE THE 3G MODEL!

I know, this is startling news and I wouldn’t say it unless I had performed the experiments and seen the results with my own eyes. While I could keep the process to myself, or even sell it for obscene amounts of money, the truth deserves to be made public - so for the first time ever, I’m going to tell you how to tether your iPhone to your iPad and share your data bucket between them!*

Here’s what you’ll need:

To set up tethering:

1) Connect the iPhone to the Macintosh with the USB cable.
2) On the iPhone,go into Settings/General/Network/Internet Tethering and turn it on; if presented with the option of Bluetooth r USB, select USB.
3) On the Mac, go into System Preferences and select Sharing.
4) Select Internet Sharing, set it t hare the connection from “iPhone USB” in the pulldown menu, and check the box for AirPort in the “To computers using:” section.
5) Turn on Internet Sharing, and SUCCESS:

Isn’t it amazing? Now even iPad Wi-Fi owners, who couldn’t dream of having unfettered access, can roam at will as they consume data wherever they choose! They can be the envy of all those around them as they thumb their noses at cell providers like Rogers who won’t let them share a data bucket between two devices! And to think, it’s as easy as using AirPort to connect your iPad to your laptop…

…which you have tethered to your iPhone…

…which means you are already online and…

…don’t need the iPad…

Well, drat.

I guess it’s a good thing the printer hasn’t yet started working on that order of glossy, 4-colour brochures I placed this morning. Well, since you’re here, I suppose you may as well watch a video of one of our giant beavers.

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I drove down to Seattle on Friday, June 11, for a live showing of Cinematic Titanic and while the end result was successful, it wasn’t without some difficulty along the way.

The first bit of trouble was when I first placed my ticket order. The purchase link on the venue’s website wasn’t the right one (there were two shows that night and I wanted the 9:30 PM show but I accidentally clicked the link for the 6:00 PM show). This was completely my fault, compounded by the fact that I didn’t notice until I’d completed the ticket purchase.

Cue a moment of panic.

Fortunately, Ticketmaster was willing to credit my purchase, something they won’t usually do, because I’d called them immediately after noticing my mistake. There are a lot of reasons that TM is towards the top of my hate list but when the chips were down and I screwed up, they came through and for that I do thank them.

I went ahead and bought new tickets, making sure that this time I was ordering the right ones, and I thought all was in order – however, it would turn out that I was wrong again.

When I placed the order I’d requested the tickets be mailed to me because it was one of the few free delivery options available to me (one of the reasons I don’t like TM that much is because of all the nickel-and-dime charges they add to the transaction price), and I thought I had plenty of time for the tickets to be delivered…but that was my second mistake. Time passed, but the tickets never arrived.

The day before the show I still hadn’t received the tickets so I called TM customer service and filed a “lost ticket” claim; I was told that the claim would be on file at the venue so as long as I had my ID and the credit card I bought the tickets with, I’d be good. Just to be on the safe side I made sure to take a copy of the custserv phone number with me as I knew they would be open until 9 PM and with a show starting at 9:30, I’d have time to call and get things sorted out if the box office didn’t have a record of my tickets.

It turns out that my plan would be thwarted by a small detail – namely, that the 9:30 ticket price as listed on the venue’s website wasn’t the showtime, but instead was when the box office opened. It could have gotten ugly but, fortunately for us, once we made it to Will Call the ticket claim was on record and we were able to get in - no phone call was required.

Enough about tickets; now I’d like to tell you about how the venue handles their box office because in my opinion, it’s very well done.

Showbox at the Market has a lounge called the Green Room where, if you’re attending a show, you can enjoy drinks and food while waiting for the box office to open. In order to keep crowds from getting unruly each person is given a numbered card representing a group ranging in size from 10 to 20 people. When the box office opens the first group is called in, once they’re lined up and being handled the second group is called, and so on. I think this system is great as it allows you to enjoy yourself before the show without having to worry about standing in line, people cutting in, and so on. We arrived in Seattle around 8:00 PM which gave us time to relax, have a couple of beers and get something to eat (mmm, nachos).

The venue is general seating and for an event like a movie viewing, coming in late can mean you’re stuck on the floor in folding chairs on the dance floor with no slope to allow you to see over the heads of the people in front of you – we were lucky enough to find seats in the back, where there’s balcony-style seating, with minimal sightline interruptions.

The show itself? As with all Cinematic Titanic shows, the movie was terrible but the riffing made up for it…I do wish, however, that Frank would get a new warmup bit as I’ve now heard “Convoluted Man” twice and that’s really one time too many…as Manuel Garcia O’Kelly Davis would say, it’s a “funny once.”

Since the show didn’t start until 10:30 it made for a very late night and we didn’t get home until around 3 am on Saturday, but it was worth it to see live movie riffing. I heartily recommend you attend a CT Live! performance if you can…and if it’s at the Showbox at the Market in Seattle, try the fully-loaded nachos in the Green Room.

CODA: Guess what arrived in Monday’s mail? My “lost” tickets.

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My Dear Friends:

It is with a heavy heart that I write the words you are reading now, and yet I must write them because you have a right to know the Truth.

A Truth so heinous, so insidious that it strikes at the very fabric of our society.

And to think that I am able to give you this Truth because of a television commercial.

Last night I saw an ad for Verizon, in which a mother was going to let her daughter go off with her friends at the mall; she was comfortable doing this because her smartphone had a program which allowed her to track her daughter’s location through the daughter’s cellphone.

Think about this…the ability to track someone by using one of the modern devices that we have come to rely so heavily upon.

I considered the seriousness of this and felt reassured that, should I desire to avoid being followed as I went about my business, I could simply turn off my phone and remove the battery.

But hold on a minute…there are phones that have the battery installed in such a way that they cannot be removed. That’s right, my friends, I’m talking about Apple’s iPhone.

Now please bear with me here, as this might get a bit confusing, but I promise that when I’m finished, you’ll know the Truth.

What phone carrier offers the iPhone? AT&T.

Who has co-operated in the past with the National Security Agency, allowing the government to have information about their customers? AT&T.

Who’s on Apple’s Board of Directors? Al Gore.

Who do some people claim “invented” the Internet? Al Gore.

What administration is rolling out a National Broadband Plan? The Obama administration.

What political party do Gore and Obama both belong to? The Democratic Party.

Health care reform, also known as “Obamacare,” has recently been signed into law.

Excessive cellphone use has been targeted as a possible cause of brain tumors.

The connection, my friends, is this:

The Democrats can track everyone who uses a cellphone. Sure, we know AT&T is in bed with the Administration, but why should we believe the other telcos are innocent?

If you use an iPhone you can’t remove the battery, which means you can still be tracked, which means that not only will the government know where you are at all times, but when you eventually enter the hospital for treatment of a brain tumor they’ll already have even more information on you because of the mandatory insurance requirements that are part of the health care “reform.”

If you try to avoid being tracked by turning off your cellphone and removing the battery your chances of developing a brain tumor will be reduced, which means you’ll be less of a burden on the healthcare system. This reduction in medical claims could eventually drive the insurance companies out of business, and if that happens then nobody gets any medical care.

Is this the kind of world you want your children to live in – a world where the choices are to use iPhones in order to be able to have access to a doctor, or else have the freedom to move about as you please but run the risk of not being able to get treatment should you fall ill?

Why haven’t Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity and Coulter picked up on this? Am I the only sane voice out there?

I think Dr. Miles Bennell said it best:

“Listen to me! Please listen! If you don’t, if you won’t, if you fail to understand, then the same incredible terror that’s menacing me WILL STRIKE AT YOU! They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next, You’re next…!”

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Vancouver recently hosted two different productions of EVIL DEAD: THE MUSICAL – one local, one “touring” - and since I’m a big fan of the movies I felt it was my solemn duty to see both versions and try to determine which one was better. Here are my thoughts on the matter…

ACTING: Both shows were good; the local production had slightly more of a “community theatre” feel to it but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some characters were better in one show than in the other – for example, I liked the local Ash’s characterization more than the touring Ash. The touring Ash also suffered from looking somewhat like a comedian by the name of Ryan Stiles, and while I know it’s not the actor’s fault I couldn’t help but be put off a bit by the mental image of Drew Carey’s sidekick fighting off demons with a shotgun and chainsaw. The touring Shelley, on the other hand, was definitely the better ditz.

A special round of applause goes to the touring show’s stage ninjas – I know they’re not technically actors but some of the things they did, especially with the bunny, merit recognition.

SINGING: I thought the local production had a slight edge here, and while there was a problem with the sound cutting out during the last song of the first act the actors projected as much as they could to make up for the lack of amplification.

DANCING: I thought the Vancouver actors were better but is that due to their talent, that of the choreographer, or both?

SET DESIGN: The touring production definitely won here, but I do want to compliment the local show on assembling a set that had to take into account the fact that the Norman Rothstein Theatre doesn’t have a trapdoor in their stage floor; this meant the set had to be built with a raised floor which affected the sightlines, but it was functional and effective.

EFFECTS: Again, the touring company takes this category. The local crew did the best they could but you have to admit that when you don’t have the ability to install a plumbing system that allows you to dump liters of blood on your “splatter zone” audience members, you’re at a definite disadvantage. Here are a couple of blurry cellphone pictures showing the pipes that were suspended over the audience:

Speaking of blood, here are some pictures to give you an idea of how much blood I was hit with. First, the Vancouver show – I was in the front row, slightly off from dead centre:

Next, here’s a picture of how I looked after the touring production – 3rd row back, 3rd seat from the end, stage right:

The only way it would have been better is if the touring show was able to warm up the blood before dumping it on us…that stuff was COLD.

The touring show did go overboard with the smoke machines at times, especially during the “Do the Necronomicon” number towards the end when the smoke was so thick the actors were almost completely hidden.

If I was going to award points in a head-to-head contest I would say that the touring production won by a decent margin, but I have to give the Vancouver show extra points for putting on their show even after finding out that the touring show would be here at the same time – when they started mounting their production they were told there wouldn’t be any competition.

I think the ultimate winners were people like me who went to the trouble of seeing (and enjoying) both shows because the overall experience was…

(I have to say it)

Groovy.

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I’ve been a Rogers Wireless customer since 1997. How do I know this? Rogers told me. Remember this, because it will become important later in this story…

I bought the Apple iPhone 3G when it came out last year; it was an upgrade from my old Motorola V360 flip phone because, while I liked the V360, it didn’t have a lot of the calendar and contact integration that the iPhone offered.

Okay, I’ll admit the iPhone’s audio and video capabilities played a big part in my decision too.

When the iPhone 3G S was announced, I decided to see what my upgrade options were. I wasn’t too sanguine about my chances because:

It took Rogers a while to update their website with the upgrade information. Once they’d done so I checked and saw that I was eligible for the discounted price…but since I’m a big fan of instant gratification I went to the dealer I’d bought my original iPhone from to see if I could pick one up right away.

According to their computer, I wasn’t eligible for the upgrade discount.

They offered to call Rogers to confirm but since this was the day after the Canadian launch of the 3G S, the wait time for customer service calls was about an hour. Since it was obvious I wasn’t going to be getting my hands on a new phone that day I decided to go home and place the order on the Rogers website so I could be “certain” to get the discount.

Time passes, about 10 days elapse. I haven’t heard anything – Yes, No, or Fuck Off – from Rogers, so I decided to call and ask the status of my order.

The response boiled down to 2 words… “What order?”

I thought the order might have been pulled because Rogers had screwed up the info on their site and I wasn’t eligible for the upgrade price, so I was pleased when the customer service rep confirmed that I was indeed eligible for the lower price and she would be happy to place a new order for me. I hung up the phone a happy bunny.

At this point, the iPhone’s popularity became a problem as demand had outstripped supply. Since I was busy with Canada Day and Celebration of Light I didn’t have the time or inclination to stress over shipping delays, so life went on and all was right with the world.

The last week of Celebration of Light, I received a voicemail from Rogers telling me that my new iPhone should be shipped within the week and that if I went into Rogers’ site and updated my account info with an email address, they’d let me know the UPS tracking info when it was available. I updated my info and then waited for the email…but instead of receiving an email, I came home one day to find a UPS doorknocker for a delivery attempt.

By this time I was off the fireworks barges and back at my desk job, so I went onto the UPS site and requested a shipping redirect so my work location. I did this in the evening and I expected it might take a day or two to be processed, so I wasn’t surprised when I came home the next day to find a second doorknocker.

I called UPS to confirm that the redirect was in place, only to be told that Rogers doesn’t allow redirects because someone has to sign for their shipments…I chose not to engage in a philosophical discussion about how a redirect doesn’t automatically mean that the package can’t be signed for, and instead asked if they could just hold it for me to pick up.

That, they could do.

In Delta.

Pickup hours 2-8 PM, Monday through Friday.

Sigh.

I started planning how to get from downtown Vancouver to Delta after work the following day but I was interrupted by someone ringing my doorbell. I went downstairs to see who it was and lo and behold, it was the UPS driver; he’d had to make another delivery in the area and was nice enough to come back and try my house again. I signed for the package and happily started setting up my new iPhone, then did a wipe and restore on the old one (I’d already found a friend who was willing to buy it from me). I’ve got my reasons to dislike UPS, mainly for their obscene cross-border clearing charges, but I have to admit they did good this time.

Time marches on, and a week passes.

I get a phone call from Rogers. Remember 1997? Here’s where it becomes relevant.

The rep calling me was new and/or not very good at reading from a script, because he’d obviously been instructed to call customers who’d recently bought new phones and review their plans and coverage. While he knew I’d been a Rogers customer since ’97, he obviously wasn’t aware that I’d been using an iPhone for the past year and that the voice/data plan I had was perfectly fine with the new iPhone. I hope this wasn’t intended as an attempt to try and upsell me, because if this guy has to make a living from commission he’s going to starve.

He also asked if I needed any help using my new phone, so I reminded him that this was just a new version of the same phone I’d had for a year and that I was fairly proficient at making calls and listening to my voicemail. I decided to refrain from asking him for tips on playing Wolfenstein 3D because I was worried it’d break his brain if I forced him to go off-script.

While discussing my data plan he mentioned something called Mobile Backup, where your contact lists would automatically be backed up online. I sync my phone with my computer so this wasn’t a big deal, but since it was included in my plan I thought I’d take a look at it. The rep told me that if I went to the Rogers Mobile website I could register there…pity that not only did he give me the wrong URL (after putting me on hold to get the info from someone else) but the feature doesn’t support iPhones. Oh well, no serious loss there, other than to Rogers’ credibility.

Another point against Rogers is that according to the rep I didn’t have an email address on file, which would explain why I never got a shipping notification even though I’d added my email address to my account profile. If you’re keeping track, the score is now:

UPS +1

Rogers -3

Rogers can tell how long I’ve been with them but can’t tell when a hardware upgrade is for a model with the same basic phone features, or when an offered feature doesn’t work with a particular phone (something that I was able to figure out by finding the right web page myself and reading the information contained there)? The mind boggles.

It’s a good thing I’m happy with my cellphone service because, if this round of customer “service” is any indication, actually trying to report and resolve a problem would likely result in serious stress and much screaming.

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I was driving East on Broadway, coming home after a day on the fireworks barges, when I saw a bicyclist traveling along Broadway in the curb lane. This in itself isn’t unusual, but let’s add a few things to the mix:

The part that’s the most relevant to this scenario is the way the hockey stick was being carried. I don’t have an overhead image of a bicycle so I shall use this giant letter T to represent the bike, with the top crosspiece as the handlebars:

Instead of trying to carry the hockey stick along the length of the bike, the cyclist was holding onto it across the handlebars like so:

The cyclist was in the right (curb) lane, staying as far out of traffic as possible, but as we approached the intersection I could see there was going to be trouble because there was a lamp post on the corner. Consider, if you will, a stickless cyclist approaching an intersection where there’s a lamp post:

Now think of what is likely to happen when you’re carrying a hockey stick across your handlebars, you’re approaching an intersection with a lamp post on the corner and you’re not paying attention to your surroundings:

Sure enough, the stick connected with the lamp post and the cyclist performed an involuntary dismount at a 45 degree angle onto the road. Fortunately for him, he escaped without apparent injury because:

He got up and recovered his bike and hockey stick, and judging from his facial expression any physical pain he might have been feeling was no match for being publicly embarrassed in front of a group of pedestrians and other cyclists that saw him perform his little stunt.

Thank goodness he wasn’t a bicycle courier because the sidewalks of downtown Vancouver would have been littered with the unconscious bodies of countless pedestrians.

I hope he made it home okay, but I suppose it depended on whether or not he learned from what could have been a serious mistake that turned out to be nothing more than a relatively minor inconvenience.

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As you’ll recall from our previous episode, I was getting irate calls from Crazy Missouri Woman who was convinced that I’d been calling her and hanging up. I flagged her number with a specific ringtone and added her to my “special” contact list so I’d know when she was calling. Last week she called a couple of times but I didn’t answer, and she didn’t leave any new rants on my voicemail.

Well, she just called again.

I’d decided that the next time she called I’d answer, if for no other reason that to make her pay long distance charges. I picked up the call and readied myself for some ranting and raving, only to be subjected to the most awful, hideous, totally polite phone call I’d ever received.

0_o

I said hello and she asked me if my number was for a residence. I told her that she was calling a cellphone and she said she’d been trying to track down who was prank-calling her; when I told her I was in Canada she sounded genuinely shocked. I then told her that I had no idea why her call display was showing my number when she was sure the calls were coming from Florida (I have no idea why she was sure of that, unless it was because the person she suspected of making the calls lived there) but that I was not calling her. She said that she was calling the numbers back to confirm them and was then going to forward everything to the Missouri Attorney General. I told her that if they wanted my cellphone records they could subpoena them and that I wished her luck in her efforts, at which point she thanked me and when I told her to have a nice day she said, “You too, sweetheart” and hung up.

Ooooooookay…let’s recap:

Originally she called to scream at me, accuse me of prank-calling her and call me a liar when I denied it, and she left 2 voicemails calling me a bitch and saying she’d reported “me” to the state AG. This time she was polite, willing to listen and (apparently) believe me when I told her that I wasn’t the person calling her, and that was that. Oh, and apparently she hadn’t contacted the AG’s office yet, despite what she’d said 2 weekends ago.

I can think of a few reasons why this occurred, but as I am not any sort of therapist or substance abuse professional (either for use or treatment) I won’t list the possibilities; I’m sure y’all can come up with them on your own.

If she calls again, and if she’s nice again, I will have to try very hard not to say, “You know, I think I liked you better when you were screaming at me…it made for better press.”

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This past weekend I went to Victoria to check out the British Museum traveling exhibit and on Saturday, while I was enjoying some ice cream (peanut butter chocolate), my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, an 816 area code, but I decided to answer it anyway because it was a sunny day, I was in a good mood and I figured I might be able to have some fun with a telemarketer.

Alas, this was not to be.

The woman on the other end asked me why I kept calling her and hanging up; I replied that I had not been calling her (I hadn’t) and that, despite what her call display was telling her, she was mistaken. After trying to point out that technology isn’t infallible, she called me a liar and hung up on me, so I shrugged and wrote it off as one of those strange things that happen.

Then my phone rang again…same person. I let it go to voicemail.

A few minutes later, another call from her…again, I let it go to voicemail.

I listened to the messages later; the first one was a threat to go to the Missouri Attorney General on Monday to report my harassment and ended with her calling me “Bitch.” The second message was to tell me that she’d contacted the Missouri AG (Hey, Missouri residents, congratulations on having state officials that work weekends) and reported me, and that I’d better have deep pockets because I was gonna be paying a lot of money in damages. She signed off again with “Bitch.”

After those two calls I didn’t hear back from Crazy Missouri Woman (hereafter referred to as CMW) until testerday afternoon, when she called me again. I let the call go to voicemail again but this time, instead of ranting at me, she hung up without saying a word.

Ooooh, psychological warfare! You know, I was really hurt that I didn’t get called “Bitch” again. Where did I go wrong?

She then called a second time, this time without leaving any message at all.

Great, I have a groupie. Not only that, I have a stupid groupie. Okay, from now on I’m going to refer to this particular sort of person as a “stoupie.”

This isn’t my first brush with stoupies; some months ago I was getting calls from a woman (different state - sorry, Missouri, you don’t have the market on stoupies) who was insisting that I either had someone else’s phone or I was the person she wanted to talk to and just wouldn’t admit it…she was somewhat incoherent so I couldn’t be 100% sure which it was. I ended up creating a special contact in my address book for that particular number and assigning it a special ringtone so I’d know when she was calling but of course, after I did that, she stopped. After the Monday calls, I added CMW’s number to that contact so I’d know when she decides, if ever, to bother me again.

To commemorate this moment in my life, and in the spirit of Canadian Content, I have decided to adapt a classic rock ditty to suit my particular situation:

MISSOURI WOMAN (with apologies to The Guess Who)

Missouri Woman
Stop calling me
Missouri Woman
This is just crazy

Hey woman
What’s with the attack
Missouri Woman
Do ya need Prozac?

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I know this is going to be hard to hear; please believe me when I tell you that I thought long and hard about whether or not I should tell you exactly how I feel. Still, sometimes we have to do the hard things even when we don’t want to.

Consider this an intervention.

I know things have been hard for you since you were injured while serving in the military. A lot of people forgot about you and you might have simply faded away, no one being the wiser, until Ben found you and invited you to help him at his place of employment. The work invigorated you and soon you were popping up all over town, being your usual noisy self, making people sit up and take notice whenever you appeared.

After a while it became almost a requirement to invite you; no matter where we went, you were there waiting for us – sometimes hiding in the background while trying not to draw attention to yourself, other times almost demanding that we notice you. “Here I am,” your presence seemed to cry out. “Aren’t I wonderful?”

Like any houseguest, though, eventually your “staying power” went from quirk, to minor annoyance, to aggravation…and a lot of us who used to eagerly wait for you to show up now began to dread running into you.

I’d been meaning to tell you how I felt for some time now, but the final straw was when I noticed you were hogging the limelight in a British TV show I was watching – and not being content with the occasional scene, you were often showing up multiple times in the same episode.

That’s when I knew I had to say something.

You need to learn from the experiences of our mutual friend Alan – He overstayed his welcome, became the butt of countless jokes and finally, when his antics were too obnoxious to be ignored anymore, he was fired. I’m not sure if anyone in his professional circle knows where he is now and, honestly, I don’t know if anyone really cares.

I’d like to see you leave gracefully before that happens to you; by leaving on your own terms perhaps you can make people forget how overexposed you’ve become and then, at some point in the future, you will be welcomed back with open arms. We will miss you, of course, but if you stick around much longer some of us – including me - may actually come to loathe you. Do you really want that? I don’t think you do.

Goodbye and good luck, Wilhelm. Take care, and perhaps we’ll meet again in the future.

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A little over a year ago I was asked to do a presentation for an Event Planner course at the Art Institute of Vancouver; when I was finished, they gave me a travel mug as a gesture of appreciation.

It was one of the better mugs I’ve had over the years; the lid was a simple twist open/closed with no springs or hinges to break, and the metal liner meant that while it didn’t keep my coffee as hot as a vacuum mug would, it kept it warm enough.

Not too long ago I noticed a sloshing noise that would occur after I’d dumped out my old coffee and rinsed out the mug; I didn’t pay it any mind until recently when I realized what had happened – somehow, the seam between the metal liner and plastic shell had opened, however slightly, and it was allowing liquid to get inside the mug.

If I were someone who drank his coffee black this might have been acceptable but I use cream and sugar, so some of that mixture was getting in there. Have you ever left a mug of coffee with cream and sugar sitting for a day or two and gotten a whiff? It’s not all that pleasant and now I noticed that my red travel mug, a gift from the AI students, smelled the same way.

I decided that I was going to have to say goodbye to the mug.

Thus began the search for a new mug to use at my desk. I knew that as nice as the AI mug was I wouldn’t be getting that particular style again because I didn’t want to have to be constantly wondering when the new one was going to develop a leak between the walls.

I was in Costco recently and saw they had a 2-pack of Contigo Autoseal vacuum mugs; I’d heard good things about them and decided to give them a try and I have found what is possibly, for me, the perfect travel mug – it’s metal with no gaps for gunk to collect, it’s double-walled and the vacuum insulation keeps my coffee hot, and the lid is leakproof (so far) so I don’t have to worry if I accidentally knock it over.

Now if I could just get people at work to make a fresh pot of coffee when they take the last cup, life would be almost complete.

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