Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Thursday November 08, 2007

The Canadian Double Double

I've spent a few days in Toronto with a customer working with Faban. Effectively, we took a generic benchmark I'd adapted from some work Akara in our pae group had done and helped them to use the Open Source Faban to test/validate what they're doing with databases on our systems with Solaris.

I'll post the sample later-- it should be pretty usable for anyone who wants to run through a set of operations against a database and see how they do. In the sample, I had implemented backends for PostgreSQL and MySQL so one could see how the operations fared on each of the different databases.

One of the little cultural differences I came upon here was that they have their own "Double Double". Here, that means double sugar and double cream in your coffee at Tim Hortons. It seems to be a variation on a Starbucks... kind of. In downtown Toronto, the Starbucks and Tim Horton's were all in close proximity, so I have no doubt they see each other as competitors. To me, culturally, it's closer to Dunkin' Donuts in Boston.

For those who don't know, Southern California's "Double Double" is a double meat, double cheese cheeseburger at In-n-Out Burger.

My friend here at Sun, Kim LiChong, tells me that part of the draw, or at least the branding, is that Tim Horton was a Hockey player for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

There were a couple of other cultural differences that I encountered-- the one other big one being that they actually changed the voiceover on the Mazda commercial to have a different pronunciation! Up here, like in Australia, it's "Maaaasda" as in the 'a' sound in apple, not "Mahsda". I saw the commercial several times-- I wasn't sure after the first time, but I was certain of it by the third time.