On this day in 2007, the BBC ran a story about Reboot, which included word of Dopplr, the (now) late, great service that, for many, represented a high water mark of enlightened web services:

Another highlight was Dopplr, a new service “designed in a pub” according to its design director Matt Jones.

Announced as part of a talk on travel and serendipity, Dopplr gives frequent travellers a tool to “share where you are going to be with who you trust”.

It is currently in private beta and open to invitation only, although it appears to be used already by dozens of the Reboot attendees.

Apparently users of the service are fixing up meetings in pubs, bars and cafes that would not have happened otherwise.

Although the site works in a familiar way to any user of social software, using friends and invites, Jones wanted to stress that Dopplr “is a feature of a larger service, called the internet”.

He said: “We’re trying to be a beautiful part of the web.”

If you look carefully at the graphic accompanying the story you’ll find a (purposefully) terrified-looking picture of me.

From the weekly update from Charlottetown Farmers’ Market:

We bid our fantastic Market Manager, Bernie Plourde,  a fond farewell this past weekend. Bernie has been with the Market for 7 years and has made an indelible mark on our market and community, spearheading countless initiatives, including the launch of CFM2GO during the pandemic. We’ll miss you Bernie! 

Bernie is a great friend to the community in innumerable ways indeed; his tenure as manager at the market has been remarkable for the improvements to the building, for the multiple pivots required by COVID, and for his calm, cool, friendly demeanour in thick and thin. The members of the market coop have strong personalities, not easily wrangled into cooperation; that Bernie steered the ship for 7 years is a testament to his character. He will be missed.

I have long admired the Wall Street Journal hedcuts, used for author portraits. Originally these were painstakingly created by artists; recently, though, the paper has been experimenting with an AI-assisted system for converting photos into the same style.

For “members,” they have an online hedcut creator; membership is free, though, so anyone willing to sign up can try it out  

Since I decamped from Where’s Waldo?-style eyeglasses, I’ve been in need of an avatar refresh, so I did some experimenting and the machine came up with this:

I’m not sure it will stick, but it’s growing on me, so I’m going to try it out for awhile wherever fine avatars are served. 

May’s five weeks of Saturday Movie Night were programmed by brother Steve, arguably the family member with the deepest intellectual bench regarding film.

Last night, the final Saturday of the month, his selection was the the 1992 Norman René film Prelude to a Kiss, starring Meg Ryan, Sydney Walker and Alex Baldwin.

It was a good choice: it’s the sort of movie that doesn’t get made anymore, a quirky character-driven romantic studio film with a supernatural element. For a fan of Heaven Can Wait, it was right up my alley.

Musically the highlight of Prelude to a Kiss isn’t the eponymous song rendered by Deborah Harry but rather Annie Lennox’s rendition of Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye, from the 1990 compilation Red Hot + Blue, the best treatment the Cole Porter song has ever received (which is saying a lot for a song best known for versions from Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn).

I spent last night at The Inn at Bay Fortune where, in 2015, Catherine and I spent our last weekend away together by ourselves.

What I didn’t know when I booked—I thought I was just getting away for the night—was that there was an important healing aspect to this, a sort of reckoning that she’s gone and not coming back.

This didn’t really hit me until they brought the wine for supper, and I had nobody to wish cheers to. And nobody to share food with. And nobody to while away the evening chatting to. None of this made me sad, per se: it was more like my new baseline was rendered in sharp relief. “It’s just me now.”

On the way into supper I ran into my friends N. and D., a happy couple away for the night together, both of them very much alive. They invited me to join them for the meal, but I thanked them and declined, as I realized I needed to see what “alone” felt like. I did join them for dessert, though, which was very nice. And I didn’t hate them (that much) for being a happy couple.

It turns out that “alone” and “lonely” are different things, and that was helpful to learn.

Posted up at The Inn at Bay Fortune for the evening. The night is young yet; I leverage the late afternoon sunshine to sketch and drink a Negroni.

A montage of appearances by Meg Parsont on Late Night with David Letterman. Parsont worked on the 13th floor of the office building across from the Late Night offices in Rockefeller Center, and Letterman would call her up from time to time to chat, live on the air. She was the perfect foil.

Due reasons of proximity to our family doctor and loyalty to a locally-owned pharmacy, we have our prescriptions filled at Murphy’s Parkdale Pharmacy.

Murphy’s is nominally a member of the Guardian pharmacy group, and through that connection it supports using the Diem mobile app for requesting prescription refills.

It turns out that rather than a bona fide end to end digital system, requesting a refill sends a fax to the pharmacy.

On the other end of the equation, when renewals expire and the prescribing doctor needs to update the prescription, the pharmacy sends a request to the doctor. This request is sent by fax.

It’s remarkable that a mission-critical system is built on an ancient technology that amounts to a telephone-based network of remote printers. We once talked about building an online pizza ordering system using the same setup, but that was in 1995.

In my case, this creaky retro tech was exacerbated by the pharmacy having the wrong fax number for our doctor in their system, and so repeated faxes requesting approval for renewal went undelivered. But nobody knew that, because faxes.

I didn’t know that until today, though.

Last night I used the app to request a renewal, and everything went through without issue, but when I arrived at the pharmacy to pick it up this afternoon, it was nowhere to be found. While the pharmacy clerk was looking into the issue, one of their colleagues called me to tell me the prescription had expired and couldn’t be refilled.

The prescribing doctor is out until next week. Our family doctor’s office is closed. What to do? Fortunately the pharmacist had the discretion to issue a “continuing care” supply to keep me going.

On the occasion of its 70th anniversary, Thelma Phillips writes Stewart Memorial Hospital a love letter.

Last summer, once the lockdown was over and it was permitted to hold small face to face meetings, I went to my first meeting of a non-profit board I sit on.

I arrived second to last, and found that those who’d arrived ahead of me had removed their masks. This made me uncomfortable, but so as to not be an outlier, I removed my mask too.

A few minutes after I arrived, our final board member arrived, a long-serving and much-respected board member, and he kept his mask on for the entire meeting, thus normalizing something I previously regarded as aberrant.

Needless to say, I kept my mask on for the next meeting and those that followed.

Bill is an avid cyclist in our neighbourhood. He cycles year round, and has a well-worn through the rabbit warren of downtown streets. Often he’ll stop to chat when our paths cross. And he’s always wearing a high-vis vest when he rides.

It had never occurred to me to wear a high-vis vest while bicycling, but that it made Bill so much more visible won me over. And so when I go to get groceries in the evening on my bike, now I wear one.

Like my brave board colleague, Bill normalized something that previously seemed weird.

We get wrapped up thinking that change is hard and takes money and campaigns and social media outreach; often all it takes is one person to bravely lead the way.