6 months remaining on the passport

Woe is the traveller-to-be with only five and a half months validity left on their nearly-empty passport.
The standard requirement of countries around the world is for you to have at least 6 months vaility remaining in in your passport after you leave their country.
This means if you are going to be in Egypt or China or Russia (oe anywhere else)until the end of January, then your passport can expire no earlier than the beginning of the following August.
And yes, visa offices do catch this a lot. Visa applications will be rejected for the simple matter of a passport with not enough months of validity remaining. Do you really want to lose hundreds of dolalrs in visa fees just because your passport was too near expiry?
Also, with machines reading passports at airports and borders, expiry dates are checked and flashed to the border agent without that person having to do the math to figure out the expiry. And you do not want to be turned back at the airport once you are already in the country!
The good news is Passport Canada is likely to change the Canadian passport system to one more like the UK and USA. This means as of 2011 at the earliest, Canadians will probably be able to get 10 year passports.
Right now the best we can do is buy an extra 24 pages of space in the five year passport.

CHINA NEWS FLASH - NO FAST SERVICE

There is bad news in Visaville.
Yesterday the Chinese embassy in Canada announced to its closest suppliers the bad news about fast visa service: it was over.
In a flash there is no longer one day or three day service on Chinese visas. All visas are being processed in five days.
The fee remains the same at $50 for a single entry visa, and $75 for a double entry visa. Multi-entry visas remain unavailable for the foreseeable future.
So click here to get your Chinese visa from VSC: Canada's best and most trusted visa provider.
The lesson to all of us is to plan ahead and be prepared.