Jim Kenzie's The Driver's Seat

Toronto Auto Show

8:20 a.m. at the Toronto Auto Show and you can still hear the occasional drill as car makers put the final touches on their exhibits for today's Media Day.

As we did at Detroit, we're following the 'crocodile' all day. Follow our blog on wheels.ca.

Ain't Technology Wonderful?

Yesterday, it was WiFi on the airplane.

Today, it’s WiFi on the bus to the race track at Fontana for the Ford EcoBoost demo runs.

Of course, the soon-to-be-universal availability of WiFi simply means more work for everybody.

“You have WiFi - why haven’t you filed that story???” sort of thing.

Hmm-mm - maybe I can start a rumour that WiFi causes brain cancer…

Flyin’ into Los An-gel-EEZE…

…but not bringing in any keys at all (apologies to Arlo Guthrie for the paraphrasing. If you don’t know who Arlo Guthrie is/was, ask your Grandpa.)

We’ve been told pretty much since there were cell phones that we couldn’t use them on airplanes.

They would “interfere with aircraft frequencies”.

Really?

The tiny battery in my I4 is powerful enough that it could generate a signal strong enough that it could take a twelve billion dollar, twelve billion kilogram aircraft RIGHT OUTTA THE SKY?

Then why does Al-Qaeda bother with shoe bombs, underwear bombs or Semtex?

I think airlines don’t want us to use our cell phones for the same reason they won’t let us wear our BOSE noise-cancelling headsets when they can do the most good - on take-off.

They want us paying attention in case something goes pear-shaped.

Well, maybe. But I think the potential damage to what’s left of my hearing overrides the minuscule benefit of wearing those dumb ear-bud headphones they force us to wear so we can listen to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Hits’ album until the seat belt sign is switched off.

They let me stuff my ear plugs in. Why, if hearing what the attendants are saying is so important?

And what about hearing-impaired passengers? They couldn’t hear flight attendants’ instructions either.

It’s discrimination against the hearing-UN-impaired!

And on this flight from The Big Smoke to the Bigger Smoke, they actually have WiFi on the plane!

Surely, that creates a bigger electronic noise profile than a cell phone.

The free WiFi is part of a promotion Air Canada is running with Toshiba and this in-flight wireless service ‘gogoinflight’. They lend you a new Toshiba notebook computer, and comp the in-flight wireless.

Hey; I’ll give almost anything a try if it’s free.

(At ten bucks for four hours? Um, no...).

Well, the Toshiba they have given me will only boot up with a French language ‘user profile’. The English one just craps out.

I parlez-vous well enough that I can still mess around a little.

I can load web pages fine, but when I try sending an e-mail from gmail’s web mail system, I keep getting “server error".

Well, that's useful.

Just for fun, I've tried booting my own HP 2133 laptop, and using the supplied promotion code to access the gogo thing - and it works.

And I CAN send e-mails from gmail - and post this blog too!

Don’t know why the Toshiba wouldn’t work, but that's no longer my problem - I have given it back.

My seat-mate couldn’t make the Toshiba work for him either. Nor could he get his own laptop to even ‘see’ the gogo wireless service.

I told him to try the time-honoured Microsoft solution - when in doubt, re-boot.

Sure enough, there it was, and away he went.

So I guess I’ve joined the Mile High Club - blogging division only.

Boo.

***

Flyin' in to Los An-gel-EEZE this time for a Ford EcoBoost driving program tomorrow at Fontana race track - will be thinking of Greg Moore who lost his life there in 1999...

Then, Wednesday and Thursday are the press days for the LA Auto Show, which is rapidly becoming one of the most important auto shows on the planet.

The car companies aren’t headquartered out here - that’s what still gives Detroit its edge.

But their design studios are mostly out here - this is where trends get started.

And the market is here - especially for the latest and greenest.

Wheels will be all over this show like a bad rash.

Sir Editor has decreed that LeBlanc and I will be blogging throughout; John will focus on electrics/hybrids; I’ll do real cars from the imports; Jil McIntosh will do real cars from the domestics; Peter Gorrie, one of The Star’s environmental writers, will look at the show from that perspective; and Peter Bleakney will be driving round in circles in the nearby desert in some hot-rod Porsche, so he won’t come to the show itself (hey; would YOU if that were the alternative?) and the fuel he’ll burn will probably give Gorrie hives.

Tune in Wednesday!

I succumbed - to Facebook

Well, I did it - I set myself up on Facebook.

Or "FaceTube" as Top Gear calls it.

I really have no clue how it all works yet - and may never.

And it's not like I need more distractions to keep me from meeting my deadlines.

But it seems Facebook, despite the recent and various concerns about security of personal data, is now a bigger 'search engine' - at least for certain types of data - than Google.

I am, as you might well guess, 'Jim Kenzie'.

But like my Twitter account ('jim_kenzie') you're not going to see a mention on Facebook every time I drive to the store for a carton of milk, or what I had for lunch (to save you the wondering, probably toasted tomato sandwiches).

That said, I'm not certain yet exactly what you ARE going to see on there.

A Work in Progress, as they say, and you're welcome to join me in it.

www.facebook.com, as if you didn't know.

He's BACK!

After losing my iPhone, I never quite got the hang of blogging on the replacement phone I borrowed. (No point in buying a new iPhone until the new 4G hi-def unit arrives!)

But I've got a temporary iPhone replacement now, and as soon as I remember how to use it, we should be back at ya regularly. Thanks for your patience.

I also apologize for not updating the comments like I should.

Work in progress!

One less excuse for not blogging

Finding time to blog with all the travel I do is tough.

But I am posting this FROM AN AIRPLANE!

Air Canada is having a trial of In-Fight Internet access. And so far anyway, IT'S FREE!

How cool is that?

It's only on selected flights so it may not improve my efficiency all that much.

But it is a start.

What's next - tweeting?

Does anybody know what "openDNS" is?

From the "a little learning is a dangerous thing" file, I know just enough about computers to almost get it.

(Note: this has nothing directly to do with cars; only with this blog).

For the last couple of days, every time I tried to access almost any web site, something called "openDNS" would pop up, saying that access to that web site was blocked.

It's not like I was looking for some porn channel or something. Google; yahoo; thestar.ca - just about everything except my anti-virus software was being blocked.

I had no idea what openDNS was, or how it got installed on my computer.

I tried e-mailing the openDNS support people, asking what the heck was going on. To their credit, they did respond, saying that I could change my IP address to avoid the problem.

Um, sure... Not quite enough learning, as it happens.

The support people said it is not downloadable, so I didn't do anything to invoke it. They said it might be part of my "ISP" - Internet Service Provider (I DO know that much). I use the Rogers' Rocket Stick USB key internet access thing, the only semi-high-speed system I can get out here in the boonies.

So I still don't know how or why it openDNS was there.

All of which to say that this is why I haven't been on my blog for the past couple of days - it seems to be working today, so we're back at ya.

I also know I'm WAY behind on Comments; I have a bit of a busy first half of the week - drive to New York City for a Bentley event Monday, then back Tuesday night for a presentation at Georgian College Wednesday morning.

But the rest of the week looks fairly OK, so I'll try to start catching up then.

Thanks for your patience.

Ain't the Internet wonderful?

I met Anatoly Fomin yesterday.

The automotive journalist from Moscow and I were sharing a shuttle at a BMW event in Marseille France.

He said, "Ah, The Toronto Star! I read Wheels on the Internet! I remember your story on the Chinese battery-powered cars at Detroit this year. I was at that show too."

As much as I love newspapers, the chances of Anatoly ever picking up a print edition of Wheels in Moscow are pretty slim...

Having trouble e-mailing me?

I know just enough about this computer/Internet stuff to be dangerous.

I mean, in a previous lifetime I actually WAS a computer geek, but those days are long past me now.

But I did figure out in the relatively early days of the Internet and e-mail that having an e-mail address that was tied to my ISP - e.g., aol in those bad old days, or sympatico now - meant that if I decided to change ISPs, I would have to tell the entire world that my e-mail address had changed.

So I got my own domain (jimkenzie.com, the best eight bucks I spend every year - thank you, GoDaady.com) and use jim@jimkenzie.com as my main e-mail address.

This effectively acts as an "alias" - I simply point it to my "real" email address. Then if I change ISPs or whatever, all I have to do is change the pointer, not the address.

Everyone keeps sending mail to jim@jimkenzie.com, I keep getting the messages.

Works a treat.

Except this past January, something went wrong with my domain registraiton, and jim@jimkenzie.com got temporarily suspended. I thought I had fixed it, but just this past week I discovered that it had gone south again.

The worst thing is, of course - I didn't know! You can't react to e-mails that you never receive.

I THINK it's fixed again, so if any of you have tried to contact me via that e-mail address in recent weeks, please try again.

I suspect any messages that were sent there during the time-out are lost in cyberspace for ever - my apologies...

Comments on this blog have been coming through OK though - keep 'em coming!

Big, apparently satellite-free, Sky Country

I'm on a press event in Montana, within spitting distance of Yellowstone National Park.

They call this Big Sky Country, and at night, the stars are brilliant.

The problem - if there are satellites which enable Internet connectivity, they must get lost up there, and access is a major issue. So posting to this blog has been a problem.

I hope at least this apology gets through.

I'm back Wednesday night and will get right back on it.

OK, I'll hit "post", and let's hope...