Fred Hyndman died a few days ago, news I was sad to receive, as I had great admiration for him as a businessman, philanthropist, and raconteur.

Back in the summer of 2019 I was invited to join John Robinson, Fred Hyndman, Alan Holman and Keith Piggott one week for coffee at Casa Mia, a special guest star, of sorts, at the weekly meeting of group of esteemed men that I had no business among. I wrote to a friend at the time:

It certainly did result in a kind of cross-cultural dialog (inasmuch as me, a neo-capitalist white man, having coffee with a bunch of solidly-capitalist white men, could be considered to be cross-cultural).

Regardless of it being a club meeting for the connected and powerful, or perhaps because of that, it was thrilling: the collective wisdom, kindness, and connections of those four was a rare thing to be invited to sit among. I’m happy for the memory.

Through Hyndman & Company, the company founded in 1872 that he inherited and expanded, Fred was my insurance broker for almost 30 years, but I saw him most often at parties at Catherine Hennessey’s, where he and his wife Shirley were frequent guests. (We also shared a habit of grocery shopping at Sobeys on Saturday nights.)

My enduring memory of Fred, though, came during my time as Executive Director of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust. The Trust was fundraising in support of the preservation of a significant piece of land on New London Bay; Fred contributed $50,000 to the cause. I was so bowled over by his donation that I sent him a personal letter of thanks, revealing that I’d been shopping the market for a better deal on car insurance, but that I had decided, due his generosity, to stick with Hyndman’s. 

“For the rest of my life,” is how I believe I worded my commitment.

Fred replied with good humour, suggesting my duty would only extend to the end of his life.

I’m happy to have fulfilled the terms; saddened by the circumstances that brought us there.

Green Meadows Bake House, just south of Morell, is open on Saturday mornings and sells a selection of breads, desserts, jams, and eggs. Watch their Facebook page for highlights of the week and for the signal that they’re open for business (here’s an RSS feed if you’d like to avoid Facebook). Payment is cash in an honour box or Interac e-transfer. Delicious.

I mentioned here that, over the years, I’ve linked to 133 places on OpenStreetMap from the space.

I set out to find a way to see those all on a map together.

I started by pulled out the OpenStreetMap IDs from my blog posts, with a MySQL query:

SELECT DISTINCT
 REGEXP_SUBSTR(field_body_value, '(?<=openstreetmap\.org/node/)[0-9]+') AS node_id
FROM node__field_body
WHERE field_body_value LIKE '%openstreetmap.org/node/%';

I then took that list of IDs and fed it to to Overpass Turbo as a query:

[out:json][timeout:25];
// Query all specified OpenStreetMap node IDs
node(id:
 3635784842, 3685963653, 3993674129, 4035609636, 4219153895, 3964961857,
 4354449846, 4368123936, 4486042006, 4212707889, 4602261458, 3693372328,
 3968667591, 3958645088, 773014435, 3980190956, 4013819799, 5011996054,
 3969063933, 4038653569, 3158817668, 3964875104, 3969441406, 5169624992,
 3801233358, 4593194200, 3969441407, 3982594975, 4010401866, 5832876155,
 1708994432, 1309334554, 1036621453, 3969441408, 5838493293, 4426845996,
 1748034323, 6240463094, 3964847306, 6459062029, 4604411453, 6424079068,
 4944710421, 4782985721, 6573258632, 6568896351, 3933036111, 2147027795,
 2615087430, 6605643321, 6652045815, 2182448223, 2186517765, 6688182495,
 6605321137, 6764407623, 6605651269, 3980513109, 6835691382, 6685552004,
 10858023, 6927460722, 7033960414, 3980513108, 7049488908, 2186488338,
 7727257681, 6573258634, 7751869034, 7840152104, 7951258371, 8014027214,
 8032817159, 8040803229, 4038653574, 6918920793, 8873060974, 8934216741,
 8951491829, 8980628803, 9315988227, 3980228660, 3964958255, 284006122,
 5268968932, 10973805204, 11218571610, 3969063907, 2361760932, 5863968654,
 11954599648, 12007408941, 12073479082, 12302232891, 12606957600, 6388479600,
 8542055290, 12765929228, 10025847334, 292984586, 4059855982, 13131503728,
 13356191552, 6672707890, 13877687747, 13951901855, 2622719611, 2467594779,
 4267855005, 3283009692
);
// Output full feature metadata (coordinates & tags)
out body;
>;
out skel qt;

(You can copy and paste that query into Overpass Turbo yourself, or just click here to load it.)

I exported the result as a GPX file, which gives me the geolocation — the latitude and longitude — of every place I’ve linked to.

I then imported that into gpx.studio to let me see all the places on a map. Here are some screen shots at various zoom levels:

The next logical step would be to create a map interface for browsing my blog posts — a way to look through the other end of the telescope, so to speak.

I am a very linky blogger: if I can hyperlink a noun in something I’m writing, I generally will. As evidence: there are 32,250 links in the 11,096 posts here. I consider this not only a service to the reading public, but also a part of what being a blogger is about, helping to weave connections, pathways through the infinite ether.

The question on my mind, often, is what to link to. There are categories of nouns that I wish there was a more generally-accepted canonical destination for on the web.

Books

Books, for example. Whistler, by Ann Patchett, was just released (I’m 4/5 of the way through; it’s very good). If I want to link to it, do I link to:

• The book’s page on her website?
• The book’s page on her US publisher’s website?
• The book’s Wikipedia page?
• The book’s WorldCat page?
• The book’s Open Library page?
• The book’s page at ISBN.nu?
• The book’s page on Bookshop.org?
• The book’s page at Bookmark, my local bookstore?
• The book’s page in my local library catalogue?

Open Library has always been my preference, and it’s the clear emotional choice: it’s run by the Internet Archive, its mission is “one web page for every book ever published,” and it was founded by Aaron Swartz. But its software seems trapped in 1995 and it never seems to have gained traction on a Wikipedia-like way (it seldom shows up in web search results when looking for a book). I remain unsure.

I’ve linked to Open Library book pages 34 times.

Places

Places are perhaps the category of nouns that I link to most often, and I’ve settled on OpenStreetMap as my canonical destination for these links. The upside is that OpenStreetMap is open, so it can be enhanced and kept up to date by the commons, it’s free from advertising, and it’s the map service that’s increasingly my go-to for accurate routing. 

The downside is that linking to an OpenStreetMap page, like this one for the Weird Harbour coffee shop, for example, seems like linking to the source code for something, rather than a human-focused actually useful destination. I remain unsure.

I’ve linked to OpenStreetMap places 133 times.

People

It used to be that the way you linked to someone was to link to their blog. Easy. But of course not everyone has a blog, and not everyone’s blog will be around forever. 

People have Instagram pages and Facebook pages, but it always seems wrong to link to those, and I feel icky all over when I do.

Some people have Wikipedia pages, and some people have a Wikidata record (here’s mine), and I’ll generally link to those absent any other compelling destination, but that’s a small slice of people too. There’s ORCID for researchers (here’s mine), and VIAF for authors (here’s mine), but those are also a small slice.

At one point I solved this problem by maintaining the Rukapedia, which had a list of people in it that I tried, fruitlessly, to keep up to date and current. And then I gave up.

I remain unsure.

I have no idea how many people I’ve linked to, because I’ve never had a standard method.

The Semantic Web

Part of the reason I think about this to the (unusual?) extent that I do is that in addition to the 11,000+ posts I’ve written here over 26 years being a corpus, those posts also contain a treasure house of information books, people, places and other things. Because this treasure house remains just text, it lacks the structure that would allow me to treat it as a resource that I could explore by navigating its hidden network (“what books have I written about?”, “what are the places I’ve visited in Berlin?”, and so on).

There is a longstanding vision for this vision of a “semantic web,” a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web itself:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A “Semantic Web”, which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The “intelligent agents” people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

That was written in 1999, when “intelligent agents” was still at the “people have touted for ages” point; now we are there, and I wonder how the utility of what Berners-Lee imagined back then might have evolved as a result.

What are your linkable nouns on the web?

Véronique wrote:

I love the aesthetic of Dandelion’s coffee shop website/blog.

Dandelion is a “speciality coffee bar in buxton, derbyshire,” Buxton being a town of about 20,000 people, southeast of Manchester, in England.

And the Dandelion website is just peachy; enough so that I emailed its designer, Elliott Cost, a fan letter:

I just wanted to echo her compliments for the site: it’s dreamy in a way that’s thoroughly modern and useful, yet artful and evocative of the minimalism of the early web. I wish more coffee shop websites would offer up things with such clarity. 

I love how the things anyone really wants to know — address, wifi password, opening hours — are right up front. I love the explorable menu. I love the blog. I want to immediately go to Buxton and have a Cherry Iced Coffee.

Eliott Cost, it turns out, has designed websites for other projects I’ve bumped up against, including Rebecca Toh, Internet Phone Book, The Creative Independent, and Uncommon Fruits. It’s a reminder that to find interesting things, find one interesting thing, and then follow its network.

From Protopia by Kevin Kelly:

Dystopia leans into problems; utopia leans into progress; protopia leans into problems and progress in unison. It acknowledges there is no progress without problems, and problems propel progress. Dystopia runs on fear, and utopia runs on faith. Protopia runs on facts: the fact of real problems, and the facts of real progress. Most people have no issue with facing up to the problems we are creating today, but they take issue with the idea of real progress. They can believe half of the world is rotten but have trouble seeing the 1% better difference. This is where a long view can help.

I was walking to the public library this morning, past Province House. Newly-elected Green Party member Tayte Willows walked by me, and for a moment, everything felt right in the world. 

According to Canada’s Historic Places, the Zoé Vallé Library, in Chester, Nova Scotia, has a live-in librarian:

Since 1978 the continuing support of the community has ensured the Zoé Vallé Library continues to operate as Chester’s sole library and it remains under the stewardship of a live-in librarian, making it a unique setting for a public library, while preserving its historical form. The historical associations related to the library’s origins as a gift from a summer resident, Zoé Vallé, continue to be preserved as her personal collection of books remain in the library, whose motto is inscribed on a commemorative plaque and reads “Here She Still Welcomes You.”

Recent updates from the library suggest this is no longer the case—“The Village Clerk/Treasurer’s office has been situated upstairs in the former caretakers’ residence.”—but it’s delightful to think this was once the case.

(via Katie).

From Seventy Flavours, Vanilla by Clark MacLeod:

The actual highlight of the day was a visit to Pictou, a town I’ve driven past many times and always wondered about. There isn’t much to see — an expensive leather goods shop, the usual tourist draws around old architecture, not unlike Charlottetown. What made the day was a stop at Thompson’s Dairy Bar, which boasts around seventy soft serve flavours. Despite the selection, I had vanilla.

Perhaps worth taking the ferry back home for!

From Locking Type by Carl Middleton:

Anyone who is lucky enough to own type and a printing press by default is a custodian of the heritage of letterpress printing, and in turn holds artefacts which have helped inform the evolution of communication. The newest elements housed in any letterpress workshop would have been manufactured around forty years ago and the oldest can be one, two or even three hundred years old! As time passes it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find replacement parts and even to cast new letters – therefore it is very important that what each of us own, is taken care of.

Wise words. I feel it.