At $11/day this is much cheaper than taking a cab to and from the airport, or parking in the main airport garage at $24/day. And it’s fast, because the parking lot is on the Link train route, which means 5 minutes and you’re inside the terminal. Useful option for short trips out of Toronto.

Here’s the web page, and a map. You do need to print out and bring the coupon with you, otherwise its $14/day.

Last May I bought a new laptop, an Asus W3V. About a month later it started behaving badly: occasionally refusing to enter or return from standby, randomly changing the display resolution when changing power management state, and, once in a while, blue-screening with a complaint about the video driver ati2dvag.dll toodling off into an infinite loop. Not want you want from a brand new laptop.

In the bad old days — 1993, to be specific — I would have walked down the hall, found “Andre the device driver guy from Quebec”, and handed him my laptop to debug. An hour later, he would have handed it back, fixed. Such were the benefits of working on the Windows NT team. (That and once-a-week “Weekly Integration Meetings”, i.e. “free party with heaps of great food and beer”. Intern heaven.) This being the Internet era I am sadly no longer in touch with Andre or anyone else who regularly debugs at the kernel level. So I searched around online for a fix, including an abortive attempt at communicating with Asus (their support is, shall we say, lacking in chi), and eventually gave up. My fix was to keep the laptop plugged in and avoid standby. How embarrassing.

Thankfully, the story has a happy ending: I just searched again and finally found this fix, which recommended removing the Power4Gear power management software. So far, so good: my laptop is working again, and standby works just fine now.

Internet: 1, Power4Gear: 0. Thank you, Mavtop. You are wise.

P.S. Other Asus W3V flaws and foibles:
- the speaker is tinny and too quiet. strange for a multimedia-oriented machine.
- flashing blue light when in standby will eventually drive you insane. low-tech fix: color it black with a marker
- “fast launch” keys on either side of keyboard inevitably launch something, turn off the mousepad, or turn off wireless when you hand the laptop to someone else.
- nifty mousepad scrolling gestures don’t work with Firefox

Ze Frank did a nice piece on waves.

It reminds me of this New York Times article about Friendster, and why it failed to capitalize on its early lead in social networking.

For best effect, read the NYT article first.