I’ll be voting for Amir Zuccolo for Mayor of Charlottetown in the November 2, 2026 municipal election.

Of the seven candidates on the ballot, Amir has the best combination of intelligence, experience, creativity, consensus building, and compassion. She will be an excellent mayor, and her election will mark an important inflection point for the city.

In the 171 years since its incorporation in 1855, Charlottetown has seen a woman in the mayor’s office for only four years. While that alone is not enough reason to elect Amir, the only woman on the ballot, to the position, it’s high time we concern ourselves with electing officials who reflect the diversity of the community they represent. Electing Amir will help do that.

She brings the skills and approach (and humility) of a scientist, the concision of an educator, the patience and compassion of a parent, broad experience in community engagement, including experience in municipal government: we will have a capable, experienced woman in the role, ready to lead.

I sat down with Amir this morning in her campaign office to talk about what motivated her to run, what her approach to the mayoralty will be, how she will use the work to right an often-fractious council, and her positions on issues like public transit, planning and development, and how we can come to regard all residents as being worthy of support, services, and empathy.

Amir impressed me. She’s quick on her feet, thoughtful, generous, and has clearly spent the four years since she decided to run for the position deeply immersing herself in the issues council confronts.

I really feel like this election for Charlottetown is a change election. We have three open wards, as well as the opportunity to elect our second female mayor. And it’s really not just about the next four years. I see that what’s going to happen in Charlottetown in the next four years, and eight years, is going to set us on a trajectory going well into the future, possibly for the next fifty years. So we really need to have good, smart, compassionate leadership at the table to make the decisions, knowing the context of where we are with AI, with climate change, with a trade war, with economic instability going forward, so the city can be prosperous.

I encourage you to learn more about Amir, and to join me in supporting her. 

Ton writes, in The PHP Interruption:

This site, and my other ones, and my business ones (including our NextCloud), were offline as precaution since yesterday afternoon. I was at LegoWorld in Utrecht with E and Y, when I realised what was going on, and left for home to take my stuff down.

The “precaution” was a notice from the maintainers of PHP, the programming language that powers this Drupal website, and much of the web, that there was going to be a critical security release of the language at 10:00 a.m. Wednesday.

I was in the same boat as Ton, and this site has only sprung back to life, after more than 24 hours offline, just now.

In my case I noted a mention on Hacker News of the issue just before I went to bed on Tuesday night. At the time the post had just three comments and the item was down at the bottom of the site’s first page; right now it has 656 comments.

I woke up on Wednesday to news that exploits of the vulnerability were circulating, and the advice from several reputable sources was that the best course of action was to take PHP-based websites offline until a patch could be applied.

So that’s what I did.

And then a funny thing happened, a thing that perhaps will be the positive outcome of all this: I kept the server offline.

For almost 30 years my professional life had a prime directive: keep the servers running at all costs. 

And I lived and breathed that, sometimes at a cost to my sleep, often at a cost to my relationships, and, in the hyper-vigilance that was always there, at great cost to my ability to ever relax.

Yesterday Lisa and I had a plan to go out to shut down our place by the shore for the winter. Prime-directive-me would have immediately cancelled that plan: keep the servers running at all costs. 

But I’m no longer working for anybody else. My maintenance of the webserver that’s bringing you this site makes me responsible to none but myself. No revenue will be lost if it’s offline. I have no technical reputation to preserve.

So I set down tools and we enjoyed a sunny afternoon together, vacuuming and cleaning and shutting off the water.

When we returned, I kept the good times going and went to a previously scheduled meeting of my Men’s Group. When I got home from that, though I did take a few minutes to get updated on patch progress, I went to bed roughly on schedule (old me, keep the servers running at all costs me, would have 100% stayed up all night, if that had been required).

This morning I went to a gym workout, came home to shower, went to interview a candidate for mayor, took a break, went to a therapy appointment, went out for lunch.

And only then I sat down to wade through the process of getting things back up and running.

Here’s a brief technical rundown, as much for me to remember as for you to know, of what I did, starting yesterday and running into today:

• I needed to update to PHP 8.4.27, the newly-patch version.
• I had a server at Hetzner running Fedora 42.
• Fedora 42 is no longer receiving updates, so the patched version of PHP wouldn’t be released.
• Fedora 43 would receive the update. But Fedora 43 will reach its end of life in December. I decided to go ahead anyway.
• I spun up a new Fedora 43 server, got it mostly set up, synced my Drupal and other code, synced my MySQL databases, synced files, and then waited for the patched version of PHP.
• The patched version of PHP didn’t arrive for Fedora 43 yesterday: I could see it going through the process of being built and pushed for testing, but it got stuck there (I did learn a lot about the PHP build process while waiting!).
• Late last night, just before bed, Remi’s Repository did have a patched version, and I installed that. Then I went to bed.
• This afternoon I finished up the migration: copied over SSL certificates, did some other readiness housekeeping.
• Switched over the DNS for all of my websites to point to the new server.
• Tidied up some missing dependencies.
• And here we are.

The collateral damage from all this was limited: Olivia’s blog was one of the sites that went down, and this happened to coincide with a need for her to write in public. She got frustrated, understandably.

There was that, and that various of my side projects—WhatsMyLot.com, CaminoFrances.info, TheIslandWalk.info, ThisBox.info—were offline.

The collateral benefit, though, of being able to release the commitment to the prime directive weight so much more than any of that.

Release from hyper-vigilance comes from unusual forms. This was one of them.

Aidan Walker, among other things Creator-in-Residence at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes about his appearance on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

I don’t understand what exactly he was there to talk about, other than that it had something to do with memes. What saved the piece for me, though, was this paragraph, referring to Maher:

You must feel empathy for the Boomer marooned in a world he is not adapted to exist within. It is as if they have been sailing on a boat all their life, a boat which they understood had some problems and was not always pleasant, but it remained afloat. And now that entire boat is sinking, at the same moment they are growing weak and feeble, approaching death. They reach for any kind of floating material they can wrap their hands around. With media types — the people who look into cameras for a living — this clutching is especially desperate because so much of their power came not just from youthful good looks but from an ability to intuit things about the audience, to hop on a trend — to have a read not just on what was going on, but how people would want to feel about it and what you could say to bring them there. Now they have no such orientation.

What an evisceration, one that I can’t help but feel the target of, if even just a little. (See “something to do with memes,” above).

With Province House reopening this week after a long restoration, I thought it high time to improve the rendering of the building—and Queens Square around it—in OpenStreetMap, in three dimensions.

OpenStreetMap is not, at its heart, a 3D map, but it supports tagging buildings and other objects with information about the third dimension—height, roof shape, etc.—and there are experimental websites that will use these tags to render in 3D.

There’s a degree of unsatisfying hopeful magic to figuring this out, especially as different renderers render buildings differently.

Lately I’ve been using the Urban Eye 3D plugin for the JOSM OpenStreetMap editor to aid in the effort: it helpfully shows a real time 3D representation as I’m editing, which is lightyears ahead of the old-school “make edits, wait a long time for rendering engines to update, repeat” process. 

Here are some screenshots of Queens Square in the Urban Eye 3D viewer:

The editing is excellent exercise in really looking hard at buildings and their parts, not unlike using Tinkercad to make a model for a 3D printer.

Given that few people will actually ever see the 3D rendering, that’s its primary utility for me. I find it meditative.

Some places you might eventually see my updates show up in various degrees of 3D:

• F4map Demo
• OSM Buildings
• Streets.gl
• Osm2world (just Province House)

These sites are updated on an irregular basis, so it could take weeks for the latest changes to appear there.

I found my way to Jacinta Palud’s blog through a link in Stephen’s guestbook.

It’s a blog in a very old-school sense, and I enjoy the mix of links, photos, and Winnipeg insights. Subscribed.

My old friend Stephen has started a blog, Sout.ca, using the very simple (and inexpensive) Pika platform.

From his first post:

Anything except the fact, for me, that social media is heartbreaking. And sickening. So to some degree, this is a replacement for social media for me. And that means that I hope to hear from people. I will tell my funny little stories and in response many people will finger paint. I might finger paint myself.

Stephen is decamping from Facebook, where he’s been writing for many many years. It’s good to have him here (in the blogosphere).

Here’s a photo of me and Stephen from 2002, proving our longstanding friendship (which longstands back to 1985).

(Credit to Annie Mueller for first turning me on to Pika).

Peter Bihr, in Do we all want to be middle-managers for AI assistants?, writes:

These AI assistants are like putting an intern in charge of your life. Do you really want to middle-manage all of this, focus on quality control and all, rather than just do the thing yourself? The doing, that friction that it brings, that is the life, that is the work!

I mean, who wants to be a middle-manager for their own life?

An echo of a similar sentiment from China that I linked to yesterday.

Peter’s reference to his father’s generation reminded me that there was a point in my father’s career as a research scientist where he was promoted to middle-management. 

At the Canada Centre for Inland Waters there were sections and divisions, and at some point, in his late 40s if memory serves, he was promoted to become a section head. He hated it, eventually gave up the position, and returned to being a full-time researcher for the rest of his career.

The imprint on me of this, which I recall being a frequent topic of dinner conversation at home, was that there are doers and there are people who manage the doers, and that there is a nobility in being a doer, and a strong crass, demoralizing quality to being a manager.

Peter asks “I mean, who wants to be a middle-manager for their own life?”, and I think he’s speaking directly to that schism: there is joy, accomplishment, self-knowledge, in the friction of doing. On the other hand, once we get beyond the thrill of bossing agents around and having them do our bidding (and becoming their managers), the demoralizing realization that, in Cory Doctorow terms, the horses are riding us.

For the first time in 9 years, there’s no fence surrounding Province House in Charlottetown. The building re-opens later this month, following extensive restoration.

From chinese period of my life (a visit to China pt.1) by Spencer Chang:

I can’t imagine giving up my frictionful everyday human encounters. The inconvenience is the cost we pay to encounter each other, to stumble onto a new discovery, to expand our ways of seeing. These kinds of things can’t be engineered.

The post is about the lack of friction in everyday China, but it could equally as well be about the lack of friction when we us AI to answer all our everyday questions.

A few weeks ago Lisa and I made some heftier handmade paper, and experimented with pressing previously carved lino blocks into the still-wet pulp.

Today I took one of those sheets and used it for the cover of a notebook.