About two weeks ago we were listening to Donovan Woods on the car radio, and I declared boldly “if Donovan Woods came to town, I’d 100% get us tickets.”

A week passed.

We were driving to Nova Scotia, listening to Donovan Woods on the car radio again. Lisa casually mentioned that she heard something about him coming to play Charlottetown. I looked it up: she was right, but, alas, he was playing Charlottetown Saturday night, and we’d be in Halifax.

Sigh.

I continued to scroll: he was playing Wolfville on Sunday.

We’d be in Wolfville on Sunday!

Lisa led the charge to carry us through the wormhole of rejigging our plans so we could stay an extra night. (When I was younger, in my “sure, let’s hitchhike to Vancouver” stage, this would have been seamless; my ship  needs more ocean to change course as I age.)

We’re booked a hotel.

We got tickets.

The concert, as it turned out, was being held 35 seconds walk from our hotel, and we ate supper across the street, so little was asked of us, at least as far as moving about.

The crowd was pleasantly multi-generational, the venue just a notch bigger than “intimate setting,” but we were in row H, the last one, so it wasn’t a stadium either.

Woods played two sets, one of tracks from his new EP, with stories of his close collaboration with his late songwriting partner Abe Stoklasa, the other filled with his back catalogue.

He is a gifted songwriter and an accomplished guitarist; my only complaint was that the vocals were mushy-sounding, a combination, I think, of his (self-declared) “whispery” style, the PA, the room, and my old ears.

What the sound lacked in clarity, though, Woods more than made up for with emotional punch: his words get to the heart of the matter better than almost anyone.

It was a good night. I’m happy my ship can still turn, even if it needs more room. 

Phil Gyford has a fascinating chart in his post Laboriously keeping track; it charts his yearly cash withdrawls from his bank account:

I suspect my chart would look very similar. I very rarely need cash: the only regular need is for my haircuts at Ray’s, and for visit to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market (and even there, the merchants increasingly accept credit cards).

On our trip to Europe last month I withdrew cash only twice (which was good, because there’s a $4 surcharge from international ATMs every time I do), and in both cases it was more “we should probably have some cash” than any specific need.

Go back 30 years to my first trips to Europe and I would have relied on ATMs (or, before then, travellers cheques) to fuel the trip, and finding an ATM would have been the first task in any new place.

(In Belgium, we discovered, the banks are getting out of the ATM business, and have formed an Interac-like consortium to create centralized ATM kiosks under the CASH brand.)

Today it’s more common to find “cards only” than it is to find “cash only,” you can pay for trams, trains, and buses with a tap of the iPhone, and it’s only edge cases, like leaving cash for cleaners, where cash is actually needed.

It seems possible that mine will be the last generation to have used cash for the bulk of our lives; it would not surprise me if it disappeared entirely in the not too distant future.

From Do Things You’ll Love Yourself For by David Cain:

And Present Self definitely sees Future Self as someone else. Think of how often you feel at odds with this hypothetical future version of you, such as when you put off something you ought to do today. You’re just dropping more work onto the desk of Future Self, who … will have enough to do already. You can rationalize it only because he feels like some other guy. He’s not you, not really. You obviously don’t want the task in question on your own desk. Say Present Self wants to sneak in another episodeof The Wire before going to bed, because it’s getting really good. This will cost Future Self something — she now has to carry the day’s already considerable burdens on 6 hours of sleep. But Present Self is the one who gets to choose for both of them.

I have never ever regretted performing acts of service for Future Self. Make the bed. Set out the cereal bowl for the morning. Fold the clothes with a little extra care.

Cain’s suggestion that we regard Future Self as “someone else” makes so much sense, and explains a lot of my own behaviour.

Last month I set and printed a “certificate of authenticity” that Lisa can attach to her relief prints. I’m happy with the result; it was a fiddly job.

One of the fiddlier fiddly parts was figuring out how to set the “fill in the blank” lines. What I ended up doing is using 2 point line rule, buttressed by 10 point slugs, which conveniently combined to match the 12 point Gill Sans.

The 10 point spacers, by the way, came from the old Prince County Hospital print shop; I store them now, as they did then, in medical specimen bottles. 

Those of you who read my friend Dave Atkinson’s Sunday email newsletter know that Dave frequently writes about picking up spikes on the side of the road.

When I stepped off the bus on Upton Road this morning, carrying my folding bicycle, I was greeted by this sight:

My first thought was “fuck Dave Atkinson and his self-righteous showoffery.”

My friendlier side then stepped forward, my “that Dave Atkinson is a model of civic responsibility for all of us” side. So I picked up the washer.

I kept riding.

Then, as I was pulling my bicycle up to the gym, I noticed something in the corner of my eye. It turned out to be a tiny cardboard box, perfectly sized to my newly-acquired washer.

All hail Dave Atkinson. 

On Friday, I replaced the Ring doorbell camera on our house, one that’s been there for more than a decade, with a Reolink doorbell camera.

The Reolink doesn’t require a subscription, its video streams are end-to-end encrypted, and it can archive video on local storage (rather than Amazon’s cloud).

It does, however, require a MicroSD card that you supply yourself, and when I went shopping yesterday I was shocked to see how steeply prices have risen.

I ended up buying a Kingston 128GB card for $54.99. 

From How to remember and forget by Mike Monteiro:

I worry that we—the big collective we—are forgetting too much already. Recent history is an ongoing seemingly inescapable trauma, and forgetting is a coping mechanism. And while I understand that we are all doing what we can to cope, I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to forget that we survived a pandemic. I don’t want to forget that millions of people did not survive a pandemic. I don’t want to forget that we elected a fascist, moved heaven and Earth to be rid of him, and then elected him again. I don’t want to forget that we threw the people who did the heaviest lifting under the bus. I don’t want to forget that they came for our neighbors, and for our families, and for our friends. I don’t want to forget what they’re doing to the people of Palestine.

Mike Monteiro’s weekly newsletter so often hits deep into the folds of my brain.

You should really buy his book, How to Die (And Other Stories).

From How global logistics got me over my fear of personal agents by Matt Webb:

I gave in, I had to: Claude Code, here you go, have my Gmail. Claude Code, here you go, drive a web browser without me even looking. Then I built an agent to process my email, navigating the FedEx website and uploading worksheets for me when that was the request (all the requests are subtly different), replying to emails from humans and attaching the worksheet when that was what had to happen. I started conservatively, human-in-the-loop as you’re supposed to do, centaur-style, checking the drafts, but there isn’t the time. I admit it, I surrendered.

Matt Webb is not a shrinking violent when it comes to innovation or AI—he developed and sells an AI rhyming clock, after all—but he’s also a person of deep thought an integrity, so when he “surrenders” and allows an AI agent to take over real business processes, with real consequences, it’s worth noting.

From an interview by Stephen Colbert with Steven Spielberg, about his new movie Disclosure Day:

Colbert: There are many moments in this when Emily Blunt’s character, without giving anything away, expresses this empathy toward people and it doesn’t just get them out of a tight bond at times, it actually changes the people to whom she is expressing this inner power of hers and those are some of the most beautiful moments of the film.

Spielberg: I think if you became, if you become the person you’re talking to, even if it’s for five seconds and in five seconds to understand deeply everything this person’s been through throughout their entire life before you come back to yourself, there would be a lot more cooperation between our own species on this planet.

An excerpt from a short story I wrote for young L., back in COVID days, when she was quarantined:

Over the days that followed “it,” both Ellery and Morepeth found themselves, without really thinking about it, without any intention, becoming — kinder? Maybe that wasn’t the word? More understanding? Empathetic? Considerate of other people’s feelings? All of those, really.

Take Sully Gufstason, for example, a kid in their class. A kid who’d been in their class since grade 1. Sully was the kid — there, alas, always seems to be one — who nobody understood. Sully was different, no doubt. Eccentric. (“Interesting” if you were more open-hearted). And he was made fun of, teased. “Sully Guffy” was the nicest of the many names he was called, repeatedly. “Nice hat, Sully Guffy,” the more bullying kids would yell. Ellery and Morepeth weren’t bullying kids. Not at all. But they also sat passively by, watching Sully get bullied.

Until. It. And the — kindness?

Something changed. They started talking to Sully. Treating him like a real person. Which, of course, is what he was. They invited him to their garden to help tend the — many — beets. And others followed in their example. Not everyone. Not all the time. But enough that Sully started to enjoy going to school. Which he never had before.