blog » January 22, 2007/Back in Waterloo. And I brought back some snow.

Jes complained that I haven't blogged recently, so here it goes. I'm back in Waterloo, after a nice break in Edmonton. I got back on the 8th. Southern Ontario has had a lack of snow this winter ... until I got back. It started snowing the night I got back, and since then, we had one or two days without snow on the ground. We even had a snowstorm that shut down the school last Monday.

On my flight back, I was randomly selected at security for a patdown, I guess to make sure that I wasn't hiding a plastic gun in my pants that would evade detection by the metal detectors. The guard who searched me was professional an courteous. Random searches are a good thing for security, as long as they are truly random, and not based on things like racial profiling. Because once you start trying to profile, the terrorists will recruit people who don't fit the profile.

Thumbs up to cashiers in Alberta (at least the ones that I met at Best Buy and MEC). The signature on my credit card is worn off. The cashiers in Alberta actually checked that it was me by asking for my driver's license. Nobody in Ontario ever checked my license.

Thumbs down to the Vancouver airport. They had to shut down the international terminal and re-screen everyone because of a security mess-up. I don't know the exact details, but it seems like somebody failed to do their job.