StreetComplete, heretofore an Android-only app, is now in beta for iOS, and I’ve been using it, and enjoying using it, for the past few days.

StreetComplete is a “questing” app, with a goal of filling in missing details on OpenStreetMap, things like house numbers, business hours, and accessibility. 

In the screenshot above I was prompted to add the level above ground of Kent Street Market, and responded with “0”, as it’s on ground level.

There are many ways to edit OpenStreetMap: the web-based editor, dedicated tools like JOSM, mobile-focused tools like OsmAnd. Street Complete is different because it’s not primarily focused on editing the map itself, but rather metadata attached to things already mapped. It’s like Mechanical Turk, but you don’t get paid and the world benefits.

An unexpected delight at last night’s True Mountain Laurel gig at Trailside Music Hall was opening act Lia Pappas-Kemps. This is her song A Thousand Times Over, recorded from too far away; go find the real deal online for full fidelity.

Her opening few songs were reserved, but as she got going she opened right up, and by the time she joined True Mountain Laurel on stage for her new single I Want It Easy, she was there.

The leaves on the sugar maple tree are starting to turn in earnest.

I saw True Mountain Laurel at Trailside last night, and loved it. You should seek them out.

The group is singer-songwriters Haley Blais and Sam Lynch, formidable talents in their own right, who turn out to have a synergy when they write music together and perform it: they’re witty, relaxed, talented players, and, despite a too-small-for-such-greatness crowd last night, they managed to weave a scene out of the evening.

If you can’t see them live, find their debut album Angel So Bad. My favourite track on the album is I Love You, Nicole, the inspiration for which was their shared middle name.

Three interesting creative people interviewed by curious interviewers, each worth a listen:

• Bjarke Ingels
• Sylvester Stallone
• Aaron Sorkin

The mobile app for GoodLife Fitness has charts for each day of the week showing how busy the gym is. I grabbed the charts for Charlottetown and animated them by way of understanding the flow from day to day, and the differences between weekends and weekdays.

In making the animated GIF I discovered a very helpful feature of Graphic Converter, my go-to Swiss Army knife for image editing: if you want to crop a bunch of images exactly the same way, open them all, crop one, and then select Edit > Crop all open Images with Last Values.

I grew up in the small village of Carlisle, Ontario. While it’s not like I grew up on a remote farm, or in the wilderness, during the years before I was able to drive it felt like the ends of the Earth.

Fortunately, by lucky happenstance, there was a Canada Coach Lines bus to Hamilton that stopped directly in front of our house on Progreston Road, twice a day, a lifeline to the pleasures of the city that my brothers and I took maximum advantage of. 

When that bus schedule didn’t line up, the alternate way into the city was to have Mom or Dad drop us off on Plains Road in Aldershot, in front of Murray’s Variety, where we could catch the GO Bus into downtown Hamilton.

I’m thinking of this right now because I’m on the bus to Morell, my first trip on PEI’s rural public transit system. I’ve got my folding bicycle with me, and when I arrive in Morell I’ll unfold it and ride the 30 minutes to our place by the shore. Later in the afternoon Lisa will drive out to meet me. The trip, like all rural transit on PEI, cost me $2.

I love public transit, and I’m encouraged by how it’s slowly but surely becoming a thing here on the Island.

It will take a generation, I think.

For young L., age 15, transit is second nature, and she thinks nothing of hopping on a bus to flit around the city.

It makes little economic nor environmental sense for this bus to be carrying only two of us to the north shore—me plus a fellow going out to Wyman’s in Canavoy. But it represents the patience that’s needed to give transit the chance to marinate, for the word to spread, for whatever social stigma is associated with transit to die off. Holding onto this takes political will at budget time, and I’m happy that, so far, that will has held.

There’s a certain anxiety that’s accompanied every single bus ride I’ve ever taken, from age 12 onward. Will the bus arrive? Will it be the right bus? Will I have the right change for the bus fare? What if I miss my stop? The only way through this requires a ceding of control, a suspension of disbelief (it’s why cars have such an advantage, with the extra agency they offer, despite their myriad other negatives).

I remember waiting on a desolate side street in Mestre—the mainland side of Venice—with Catherine and Olivia in 2010. We had tickets for the bus to Ljubljana, a bus that had started its trip in Florence and would finish it in Sofia. We weren’t entirely sure we were at the right stop. The bus was very very late. It was cold, getting dark. And yet eventually the bus arrived, and we had a wonderful journey with our mostly-Bulgarian fellow travellers.

I think of that trip often, and I use it as a way to remember that, in matters transit, things generally work out. And even when they don’t it’s an adventure.

My pre-trip anxieties today were several.

Would I be allowed to take my folding bicycle on the bus? (Yes. They don’t have provision for full-sized bikes, but they were happy to carry mine; I phoned ahead to confirm).

Was I too late to book a seat? (Yes, then no. Online you need to book an hour in advance; on the phone, though, I was able to book 30 minutes before departure).

Did I have the right bus stop? (No, then yes. The bus to St. Peters leaves from Queen Street by the Confederation Centre box office; I’d originally assumed it was around the corner).

Once underway the bus, brand new, developed a horrible-sounding squeal, requiring the driver to pull over on the edge of town for some diagnosing and consultation with base. It was decided we could continue, and after a few kilometres the noise went away (“stone in the brakes” was the diagnosis from my Wyman’s bus-mate).

Twenty-five minutes later I was dropped at the Morell Coop. I cycled over to the Dreadnaught for lunch, and then to the shore, just under 7 km in all.

And I feel like I have a new teleportational superpower. And a greater sense of nimble energy than a car has ever given me.

You had me at “retro Balkan pop music night.”

Sending an email to myself with Siri.

I happened by a page that listed cashback rewards for a particular credit card the other day, and at the bottom I found this fine print:

To earn the rate in each category, eligible purchases must be made with merchants assigned to that category. Categories are assigned based on merchant category codes (MCC) set by Mastercard. The payment networks assign each merchant to one MCC, even if they offer a variety of products and services. For example, gas stations, grocery stores and drug stores all sell several different products, but all purchases from these merchants — regardless of the type of product — are always categorized under the merchants MCC. 

I’d never heard of merchant category codes before, and so got curious. 

It turns out that, by virtue of accepting credit cards via Stripe for our Queen Square Press online shop, we have one of our own, 2741 for Miscellaneous Publishing and Printing. 

I had to set this when I first signed up for a Stripe account, and I wasn’t aware that it might affect things like the interchange fee. 

Or, as in the case of the credit card I was looking at, whether or not purchasers would receive cashback rewards for their purchases. In our case, they won’t: 2741 isn’t in the list of eligible MCCs.

Confusingly—a word that can be used for a lot of credit card-related things—per Stripe:

A frustrating aspect of MCCs is that there is not one universally accepted set of merchant category codes used by all entities and organisations.

Also confusingly, although whole industries—5812, Eating Places and Restaurants—are covered by a single MCC, in certain industries, like hotels and restaurants, one MCC is assigned to individual businesses, like 3009, Air Canada and 3600, Saddlebrook Resort–Tampa.

It all has the flavour of something made up on the fly, as it all likely was, with edge cases and exceptions evolving over time. A good reminder that while international standards bodies can appear arcane and overly complex, what they produce is, well, standard.