Early on in my relationship with Lisa, James, an old friend of hers, on meeting me for the first time, winked at me and said “I hope you like projects.”
He said this, I think, with more than a small touch of “do you know the enormity of what you’re getting yourself into.” Little did he know that, as much as Lisa finds completeness and comfort in projects, I too like biting into a quirky creation quite often. And thus, in this, we are both well-matched, and provided with a canvas upon which to paint our relationship.
The latest manifestation of this was our originally-quite-modest (but never, in truth, quite modest) plan for a holiday gift for friends and family.
It was something we’d been thinking about for awhile, after our collaboration last winter on a letterpress-printed box filled with Christmas candy (a project that, strangely, I wrote about almost not at all here). Without formally agreeing, I think we both went into this holiday season knowing that we were going to up the ante.
It all started innocently enough, on November 25, when I texted Lisa a link to this recipe for Sichuan chilli oil, along with:
Can we make the chilli oil?
Could the chilli oil become a Christmas gift?
Could we label the chilli oil with a Sichuan pepper print?
to which Lisa replied, 30 minutes later:
Sure:)
Sounds lovely.
And we were off.
We were well-served, in preparing for the project that was emerging out of the mists, by our 4-day relief printing workshop this fall: we knew we wanted to incorporate lino-block printing into the project somehow, and printing labels on spiced oil jars seemed to be as good a way as any.
Very quickly “can we make the chilli oil,” in Lisa’s mind-prone-to-scope-broadening, became “let’s make jars of three things—hot oil, sweet candy, and salty nuts—and let’s print separate-but-related labels for each.”
And then we leaped into a ping-pong of I-can’t-remember-whose-idea-was-whose collaboration, an exercise that ended with a decision to, yes, produce three food products from scratch, with labelled jars, but also to package the jars in a custom-printed box.
While we were waiting for boxes to arrive once ordered, Lisa set to managing the food production, and we riffed on different approaches for producing the labels. Now that we were going to relief-print the box, we decided to letterpress-print the labels, and I made some prototypes:
After a lot of back and forth with HOT, SWEET, SALT in various typefaces, we decided to revert to digital means for label printing, purchasing sticky labels from Staples, designing in Pages on my MacBook Air, and printing on an HP inkjet printer, the result of which was:
At this point we were ready to turn our attention to designing and printing boxes.
We ordered 250 box-board boxes (reverse tuck kraft boxes, 3”x3”x5”), uncoated so as to take well to the Akua water-based intaglio inks we planned to print with.
Lisa set out to carve a lino block with a floral pattern, something plausibly holiday, without being specifically Christmas. We’d recently brought some very nice poinsettia plants into the house, and these seemed to fit the bill. Lisa snapped some photos:
She took one of the photos, and, using the Prisma app on her iPhone, she enhanced the contrast and detail, to result in:
Lisa used that as the starting point for a freehand sketch onto the lino block, which she then carved with a set of wood carving tools we’d purchased earlier from Lee Valley Tools.
The boxes arrived just after Lisa started carving, and we were too eager to wait for her to finish, so I pulled a print from the block-in-progress onto one of the boxes, using simply the back of my hand for pressure:
We immediately realized a couple of important things.
From a design perspective, Lisa realized that she wanted to carve a lot more of the lino block, leaving more whitespace than “redspace.”
From a printing perspective, we realized that our hands weren’t going to be up to the job of hand-printing ~100 boxes, and so we set out to figure out how to use my letterpress to do the pressuring.
We also realized that we wanted to rotate the lino block 90 degrees, to fill the entire side of the box.
And, in another example of scope-broadening, Lisa set out to carve another lino block, an interlocking yin to the first block’s yang, to print the other side of the box in a way that the floral pattern on one side flowed seamlessly into the floral pattern on the other.
While Lisa kept carving, I knocked out a quick test carving to test the letterpress’ ability to print lino. I carved on a small pre-mounted lino block that, with a bit of supplementary packing, became pretty-well 0.918 inches deep, “type high” in letterpress parlance. The “quick” nature of this resulted in my forgetting (how could I!) the necessity of carving “backwards,” and so this block:
Became this box once printed:
Ignoring my ignorance of a fundamental aspect of the geography of printing, a satisfying proof of concept that it was possible to lino block-print on the letterpress.
We tried the same approach using Lisa’s still-in-beta lino block:
While the box wasn’t entirely satisfying, it was promising: with better precision, and more carving, we had hope for a better result.
Meanwhile, a larger purpose for the box was starting to emerge between us: we decided that we would give the boxes out, filled with their hot, salt, sweet treats, but with a call to action to the recipients to refill the boxes with something new and pass the “good” along. “This box is for good” became our rallying cry, and we experimented with different approaches to rendering this on the box in type:
While Lisa carved and carved, I set out to realize our experiments in type; everything changes when the limits of fonts-available comes to play, and so the design evolved. My first idea was to leave ink out entirely, and simply deboss the lid of the box:
While this was rather satisfying from a tactile perspective, it turned out not to be all that readable in anything other than ideal lighting. And so I added some gold ink, and tried again, with a much more pleasing result:
We both really liked the gold-on-cardboard effect, and so I continued that for the inner flaps of the boxes, which explained more about the “for good” part of the concept:
Doing the actual production printing required some fiddling, as various parts of the box were variously one or two layers of cardboard thick, so I had to buttress certain parts with a “shim” taped to the packing.
The final letterpress part of the job was to print instructions, with a registration website (yes, another example of scope-broadening) and a unique number for each box. These got printed in black, using an auto-incrementing numbering machine for the numbers:
Meanwhile, the lino blocks! The blocks Lisa carved are in themselves things of beauty:
Lisa decided to hand-ink each box, using a “rainbow roll” technique we learned at the relief printing workshop, where two colours of ink are rolled out on glass in parallel, with some overlap:
We rolled the ink onto the lino block with the brayer for every print, initially on the table and, one we got rolling, on the press itself:
To get the lino block to “type high,” we secured some ¾ inch MDF from Home Depot, cut down (at no charge!) to the right size. This took the block to almost exactly type high, with the difference made up in the packing.
Because we opted to hand-ink each box, and because the lino block was slightly larger than our largest brayer, we needed to roll the block in several passes for each box; eventually Lisa settled on a three-brayer scheme that saw the rainbow roll rolled down the middle, with supplementary blue and red on separate brayers. It was a lot of work, but we got it down to a well-oiled printing dance together.
And, of course, every box needed to be printed with two lino blocks, one for each side. It was a process that spread out over almost two weeks.
All told, each box was printed seven times: one side each with lino-block, then four separate letterpress-printed messages on different parts of the box, and a final numbering run for the unique box numbers.
The finished box is something we’re both very pleased with:
With all the boxes printed and the ink dried, all that was left was to assemble each box, fill with two of the three bottles of treats, and then deliver them near and far, explaining the “for good” concept many many times.
Our hope is that boxes get received, refilled, passed on, many times; we built a little website (a Google Form, for now) to allow people to register their box number, so that we can follow their journeys around the world.
I can say with some assurance that I have never been involved in a collaboration—artistic, logistic, design, spirit—as connected as this one was. Lisa and I can both rightfully attest that what emerged from our collaboration was something that neither of us could have arrived at individually. It was a joyful, intimate exercise in creativity. One we hope to repeat over and over.
Yes, James, I like projects.
Cling wrap is, by its very nature, irascible. You can make it slightly less so by using this neglected feature of the cling wrap box. Hat tip to Lisa for turning me on to this.
The other part of our grand celebration of two years together this weekend (see also The East Pointers, by surprise) was a night out at Slaymaker & Nichols, the restaurant a few blocks from us.
This too was a surprise, a surprise made better by Lisa not knowing in advance that, in addition to its restaurant downstairs, Slaymaker has three guest rooms upstairs.
When I’d heard tales previously of others staying overnight in the same city they live, it seemed so absurd. “You have a house!”, I would quietly whisper to myself.
But I can tell you now that slipping away for the night helps create a magic circle that made the weekend all that more special for both of us.
We started the night, surprise once-revealed, with supper in the Slaymaker & Nichols dining room.
We started with cocktails (Mojito Fresca for Lisa; Watermelon Mule for me), and then a meal. I had the Ringleader Burger (bacon jam, roasted shallot aioli, kale, sharp cheddar, tomato, dill pickle, brioche bun, roasted baby potatoes), which was wonderful in all the right ways; I don’t eat beef very often, so, when I do, I want it to be awesome. It was awesome.
Lisa had Mr. Carlson’s Turkey Dinner (herb pancetta stuffing, mesquite gravy, cranberry, gremolata, mashed potatoes & veg), skilfully and willingly modified by the chef for her dietary particularities; she also was impressed, inasmuch as said particularities might have, in less deft hands, resulted in a bland and depressing turkey supper, but the hands were skilled and her meal tasty.
After the show we returned to our overnight room, the General Scott (named after a circus horse). We found it a playful (mildly) circus-themed room with all that we needed. Especially worthy of mention were the very nicely-appointed washroom, with lovely big bathtub, and the turntable with collection of records in the hall (James Taylor, Chet Baker, Jackson Browne, Jackie Gleason).
We went downstairs for a nightcap around 10:00 p.m.; the dinner crowd had thinned out, and the vibe had migrated from supper club to speakeasy.
In the morning we had the option of a breakfast board served in our room from 7:00 a.m., or brunch in the dining room from 9:00 a.m. We opted for brunch (aided by an early morning delivery of French press coffee ready for adding boiling water from the in-room kettle).
The kitchen again rose to the challenge of making Lisa a suitable breakfast, adapting the Turkish Eggs on Toast, which she loved. I had the Let’s Go Mushrooming (cremini, sherry creamed leeks, garlic toast), which was just simply fantastic. The coffee was strong and free-flowing. It was a great finish to the stay.
Service wise, Slaymaker was firing on all cylinders; in an email to the owners this morning I wrote “the entire operation appeared ready to be of service whenever we needed it, without question,” and that was true: so much of what otherwise might have been friction, in a less attentive operation, was offered freely and eagerly. We left with the impression that Slaymaker is a good place to work that attracts good, friendly, helpful people.
If you’re looking to craft your own magic circle in downtown Charlottetown, I can’t think of a better place.
Lisa and I met face to face two years ago today. Last night I surprised her with tickets to The East Pointers live at Confederation Centre of the Arts; my surprise was well-enough executed that, until the MC came on stage to make introductions, Lisa had no idea what show we were going to see.
It was a wonderful night. And an emotional one for me: although I’ve been a fan of Tim Chaisson forever, this was my first time—and Lisa’s—seeing the band live. Their music is so woven into me, and yet I’d only ever heard it recorded, often alone, often in moments when one of their tracks spoke to me in an important way. To see them live, with a thousand other people—many of them devoted friends, family, and fans—was another experience again. Tim and Jake (and the late Koady, who was in the air last night) are such talented songwriters and musicians; it turns out they’re an awfully good live band too.
Carolyn Dever, writing in Public Books, about the ongoing cyberattack affecting the British Library:
Perhaps that’s the bitterest extreme of the irony: the sense in which the ransomware attack violates the very premise of libraries themselves. Libraries exist to connect learners with knowledge. Full stop. That’s what has been destroyed: not the stuff, but the connections, the fascia.
The library’s website and catalogue have been offline since Halloween, rendering its (decidedly analog) collections inaccessible.
This is all eerily reminiscent of the recently-released Julia Roberts-Mahershala Ali-Ethan Hawke movie, Leave the World Behind. How to disable a society? Take down its information infrastructure.
This is the 2024 levee schedule for New Year’s Day, January 1, 2024 for Charlottetown and Prince Edward Island.
Show levees that are ages 19+ Show only Charlottetown-area levees
Organization | Location | Starts | Ends | ♿ Accessible | All Ages |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Timothy’s Coffee and Campbell Webster | Timothy’s Coffee 154 Great George Street, Charlottetown, PE |
8:00 AM | 10:00 AM | Yes | Yes |
Upstreet Craft Brewing | Upstreet Craft Brewing 41 Allen St, Charlottetown, PE |
10:00 AM | 11:00 AM | Yes | No |
Lieutenant Governor | Government House 1 Terry Fox Drive, Charlottetown, PE |
10:00 AM | 11:30 AM | Yes | Yes |
Mayor of Charlottetown | Charlottetown City Hall 199 Queen St, Charlottetown, PE |
10:30 AM | 12:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Rotary Club of Charlottetown | Beaconsfield Carriage House 2 Kent Street, Charlottetown, PE |
10:30 AM | 12:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
North Granville Community Centre | North Granville Community Centre 575 Taylor Road, North Granville, PE |
11:00 AM | 12:30 PM | Yes | Yes |
Morell Lions Club (Reception) | Morell Fire Hall 15 Park Street, Morell, PE |
11:00 AM | 1:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Town of Borden-Carleton | Borden Legion 240 Main Street, Borden-Carleton, PE |
11:00 AM | 1:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Silver Fox Curling and Yacht Club | Silver Fox Curling and Yacht Club 110 Water Street, Summerside, PE |
11:00 AM | 6:00 PM | Yes | No |
University of PEI | Faculty of Sustainable Design Engineering 550 University Ave., Charlottetown, PE |
11:30 AM | 1:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
HMCS Queen Charlotte | HMCS Queen Charlotte 210 Water Street, Charlottetown, PE |
11:30 AM | 1:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Mayor of Kensington | Family and Friends Restaurant 45 Broadway St N, Kensington, PE |
11:30 AM | 1:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Prince Edward Island Regiment | Col J David Stewart Armoury 1 Haviland Street, Charlottetown, PE |
12:00 PM | 1:30 PM | Yes | Yes |
Town of Stratford | Stratford Town Centre 234 Shakespeare Dr., Stratford, PE |
12:00 PM | 1:30 PM | Yes | Yes |
PEI Brewing Company | PEI Brewing Company 96 Kensington Road, Charlottetown, PE |
12:00 PM | 2:00 PM | Yes | No |
Copper Bottom Brewing | Copper Bottom Brewing 567 Main Street, Montague, PE |
12:00 PM | 6:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Royal Canadian Legion - O’Leary | O’Leary Legion 69 Ellis Ave., O’Leary, PE |
12:00 PM | 7:00 PM | No | No |
Seniors Active Living Centre | Bell Aliant Centre 560 University Avenue, Charlottetown, PE |
12:30 PM | 2:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Town of O’Leary | O’Leary Town Hall 18 Community Street, O’Leary, PE |
1:00 PM | 4:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Morell Lions Club (Free Skating) | Morell Credit Union Rink 59 Queen Elizabeth, Morell, PE |
1:00 PM | 2:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlottetown | SDU Place 45 Great George Street, Charlottetown, PE |
1:00 PM | 2:30 PM | No | Yes |
Morell & Area Development Corporation | Morell Credit Union Rink Community Room 59 Queen Elizabeth, Morell, PE |
1:00 PM | 3:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Royal Canadian Legion - Wellington | Wellington Legion 97 Sunset Dr, Wellington, PE |
1:00 PM | 3:00 PM | Yes | No |
St. John’s Lodge No. 1 and Victoria Lodge No. 2 | Masonic Temple 204 Hillsborough St., Charlottetown, PE |
1:00 PM | 3:00 PM | No | Yes |
Town of Three Rivers | Three Rivers Town Hall 172 Fraser Street, Montague, PE |
1:00 PM | 3:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Royal Canadian Legion - Tignish & Town of Tignish | Tignish Legion 221 Phillip Street, Tignish, PE |
1:00 PM | 5:00 PM | Yes | No |
The Haviland Club | The Haviland Club 2 Haviland St, Charlottetown, PE |
1:00 PM | 5:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Village Green Brewery | Village Green Brewery 30 Church Street, Cornwall, PE |
1:00 PM | 5:00 PM | No | No |
City of Summerside | City Hall 275 Fitzroy Street, Summerside, PE |
1:30 PM | 3:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Town of Cornwall | Cornwall Town Hall 39 Lowther Drive, Cornwall, PE |
1:30 PM | 3:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Royal Canadian Legion - Summerside | Summerside Legion 340 Notre Dame St., Summerside, PE |
1:30 PM | 4:30 PM | Yes | No |
Garden Nursing Home | Garden Home 310 North River Road, Charlottetown, PE |
2:00 PM | 3:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Royal Canadian Legion - Charlottetown | Charlottetown Legion 99 Pownal Street, Charlottetown, PE |
2:00 PM | 3:30 PM | Yes | No |
Benevolent Irish Society | Hon. Edward Whelan Irish Cultural Centre 582 North River Road, Charlottetown, PE |
2:00 PM | 4:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Razzy’s Roadhouse | Razzy’s Roadhouse 161 St. Peters Road, Charlottetown, PE |
2:00 PM | 4:00 PM | Yes | No |
Royal Canadian Legion - Miscouche | Miscouche Legion 94 Main Drive, Miscouche, PE |
2:00 PM | 6:00 PM | Yes | No |
Town of Souris | Eastern Kings Sportsplex 203 Main Street, Souris, PE |
2:30 PM | 4:30 PM | Yes | Yes |
Premier Dennis King | Confederation Centre of the Arts 145 Richmond St, Charlottetown, PE |
3:00 PM | 4:30 PM | Yes | Yes |
Holy Cow | Holy Cow Burgers & Wings 7788 St Peter’s Road, Morell, PE |
3:00 PM | 5:00 PM | Yes | Yes |
Murphy’s Community Centre & The Alley | Murphy’s Community Centre 200 Richmond Street, Charlottetown, PE |
3:00 PM | 6:00 PM | Yes | No |
Royal Canadian Legion - Ellerslie | Ellerslie Legion 1136 Ellerslie Road, Ellerslie, PE |
3:00 PM | 7:00 PM | Yes | No |
200 Wing Royal Canadian Air Force Association | The Wing 329 North Market Street, Summerside, PE |
4:00 PM | 6:00 PM | Yes | No |
Sport Page Club | Sport Page Club 236 Kent St, Charlottetown, PE |
4:00 PM | 6:00 PM | No | No |
North Rustico Lions Club | North Rustico Lions Club 17 Timber Lane, Rustico, PE |
4:00 PM | 8:00 PM | Yes | No |
Olde Dublin Pub | Olde Dublin Pub 131 Sydney St., Charlottetown, PE |
4:00 PM | 10:00 PM | No | No |
PonyBoat Social Club | PonyBoat Social Club 157 Kent St, Charlottetown, PE |
4:00 PM | 10:00 PM | Yes | No |
Charlottetown Firefighters Club | Charlottetown Fire Department 89 Kent Street, Charlottetown, PE |
6:00 PM | 12:00 AM | Yes | No |
The levee schedule is covered under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike License.
Some kind of lovely: Suddenly (Woken By Alarms), featuring Lucy Farrell and Kris Drever, from Farrell’s album We are only Sound.
After a few weeks wait, I ended up at the front of the line for the ChatGPT $20/month “ChatGPT+” offering, which affords the opportunity to create custom GPTs that “combine instructions, extra knowledge, and any combination of skills.”
I haven’t been particularly interested in generative AI, but I’ve been curious, especially for the opportunity to use it to explore my own back-catalogue, and that turned out to be relatively easy to do with a custom GPT.
This blog is maintained, for reasons of procrastination, in Drupal 7. To get posts out of Drupal and into a CSV file I could use to train the GPT, I ran this MySQL query:
select title,from_unixtime(created) as 'Date',field_body_value as 'Text' from node,field_data_field_body where node.nid = field_data_field_body.entity_id order by created
That gave me a CSV file with the title, date, and body of each post. I uploaded that to the GPT, and then told it:
I’ve uploaded a 24 year archive of the blog posts. Each post has a title, creation date, and the body of the blog post. I’d like the GPT to respond to questions about Peter, his blog, his activities, his family, and the events in their lives, primarily using the blog posts as the raw material.
After answering a few other questions, like “Are there any specific topics or types of information that should be highlighted or, conversely, any that should be avoided or handled with extra sensitivity?”, the GPT was ready to take for a ride.
I started off easy:
Peter: How many blog posts has Peter written?
GPT: Peter Rukavina has written a total of 10,755 blog posts.
For questions like this, the GPT shows its work, in this case a Python script:
import pandas as pd # Load the CSV file containing Peter Rukavina's blog post data file_path = '/mnt/data/Untitled.csv' blog_data = pd.read_csv(file_path) # Count the number of blog posts total_posts = blog_data.shape[0] total_posts
Next, I asked for a year by year count of posts, and the GPT returned:
1990: 1 post
1995: 5 posts
1996: 7 posts
1999: 13 posts
2000: 94 posts
2001: 355 posts
2002: 464 posts
2003: 802 posts
2004: 730 posts
2005: 854 posts
2006: 610 posts
2007: 540 posts
2008: 622 posts
2009: 415 posts
2010: 250 posts
2011: 290 posts
2012: 339 posts
2013: 292 posts
2014: 194 posts
2015: 161 posts
2016: 423 posts
2017: 597 posts
2018: 543 posts
2019: 519 posts
2020: 641 posts
2021: 586 posts
2022: 255 posts
2023 (up to the date of the last post in the data): 150 posts
I asked “Please display that as a bar chart” and the GPT returned:
I was curious to know more about when I write, during the week, so I asked:
Show posts by the day of the week they were written on, Sunday through Saturday.
and the GPT replied:
Sunday: 1,332 posts
Monday: 1,679 posts
Tuesday: 1,634 posts
Wednesday: 1,682 posts
Thursday: 1,618 posts
Friday: 1,568 posts
Saturday: 1,239 posts
That’s a remarkably even distribution over the days of the week, with expected lulls, for other activities, on the weekends.
I figured I might as well ask the same thing about the months of the year:
Show posts by the month of the year.
And the answer:
January: 866 posts
February: 797 posts
March: 953 posts
April: 903 posts
May: 992 posts
June: 953 posts
July: 1,057 posts
August: 890 posts
September: 855 posts
October: 857 posts
November: 819 posts
December: 810 posts
Again, a relatively even distribution, with an uptick over the summer, best illustrated with a “show that on a bar chart”:
With the basic data analysis completed, I jumped into to questions about the content:
Peter: When was Peter’s child born?
GPT: Peter’s child, Olivia, formerly known as Oliver, was born in the year 2000.
That’s right.
Peter: Where was Peter’s grandfather Dan born?
GPT: Peter’s grandfather, Dan, was born in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.
That’s wrong (he was born in Croatia). I told the GPT that:
Peter: That’s wrong. He was born in Kjonsko Brdo, Croatia.
GPT: Thank you for the correction. Peter’s grandfather Dan was born in Kjonsko Brdo, Croatia. If there are more details or questions you have, feel free to ask!
I then asked:
Peter: Where was Peter’s father born?
GPT: Peter’s father was born in Kjonsko Brdo, Croatia.
Also wrong. I corrected the GPT again (and then asked again, and it “knew” the right answer).
Peter: When did Peter meet Lisa?
GPT: Peter met Lisa in the spring of 2020.
Wrong.
Peter: What was the name of the summer CBC Radio series Peter created?
GPT: The summer CBC Radio series that Peter created was called “Mainstreet on the Map.”
That seems like a flat-out hallucination. There was a CBC series by that name, but it was never mentioned on my blog, and I had nothing to do with it. I pressed the GPT:
Peter: Try that again. Try harder.
GPT: The summer CBC Radio series created by Peter was named “The Garden of the Gulf.”
That’s another hallucination. I decided to offer hints:
Peter: That’s wrong. Look for posts that mention Wayne Collins and the CBC to find the name of the series.
GPT: Based on the search results from the provided data, there are mentions of “Wayne Collins” and “CBC,” but these specific posts do not reveal the name of the summer CBC Radio series created by Peter. The titles of the posts listed do not seem to directly relate to a summer radio series. Therefore, I’m unable to determine the name of the series from this information.
The GPT did not take the hint, despite this post containing the sentence:
Eight years ago I had the pleasure of producing a 10-part series for Island Morning called “A User’s Guide to the Future.”
I tried to press on, but I ran into my ChatGPT+ limit:
GPT: You’ve reached the current usage cap for GPT-4, please try again after 6:12 PM.
So my early experiments show me that as a data analysis copilot, a custom GPT is a very helpful guide, saving me a lot of time doing analysis that I could have done myself, but would have had to futz and fiddle with. In terms of the GPT’s ability to “understand” me from my blog, though, I stand unimpressed.
I’ll continue to chat and see what I can find out about myself. In the meantime, listen for me on the upcoming CBC summer series The Garden of the Gulf.
I have been typing professionally for 43 years, ever since, at age 14, I started working for a local hobby shop.
Over those four decades I’ve typed hundreds of thousands of lines of code, typed millions of words of blog posts, typed hundreds of letters to Santa Claus, and entered untold Minute Maid frozen orange juice invoices into a mini computer. I’ve typed so much that my longterm disability insurance policy has specific exclusions for anything related to my typing-related body parts.
And over those four decades I’ve worked hard to make it possible to sit at a keyboard to do all of the above, without completely losing the ability to do so, seeking advice from smart ergonomics people (followed by repair from smart physiotherapists), and purchasing the best office furniture I could afford.
A big investment came in 2010, when I purchased a custom-designed desk chair from Chairs Limited in Dartmouth. It cost me $748; for me, a lot to spend on a self-indulgence, no matter how adjustable it was (and it was very adjustable). I typed in that chair for 13 years. I wrote a book in that chair. I sat in that chair for phone calls, Skype calls, Zoom calls (including a regular once a week, every Friday morning at 11:00 a.m., with my colleagues in New Hampshire). I sat in the chair for, what, 15,000 hours? Maybe 20,000?
I have all but stopped typing professionally, so I’ve no need for a desk chair.
Last week, with Lisa’s estimable Facebook Marketplace skills deployed, I sold the chair. For $75. To parents who bought it for their son.
The chair served me well; it was a good investment.
The truth of the matter is, however, that there’s no chair, and no amount of ergonomics, that will made sitting in one place for 8 hours, day after day after day, good for the body; perhaps if I’d had a less comfortable chair, I would have been prompted to the far better option of standing up to move around.