A reminder that the Secret Design Bunker pop-up at Nine Yards on 63 Fitzroy Street runs today only from 12 noon until 8:00 p.m. I’ve just returned from a visit: it is the most wonderful thing. You simply must go. Be sure you get a tour of the actual bunker from Alisha and Nick.

After many months of back and forth with the U.S. Department of State, my new U.S. passport arrived in the mail yesterday, c/o Canada:

I hold a U.S. passport, as well as a Canadian one, by virtue of having been born in the U.S. to Canadian parents. For years I resisted taking out a U.S. passport because to apply for a passport required a Social Security Number, and to apply for a Social Security Number required registering for Selective Service. Eventually I aged out of the Selective Service requirement, and so the path was clear.

For my first passport, I made the application at the federal building in Bangor, Maine, in person, in 1999. It was a bracing experience that involved metal detectors. Subsequently I’ve been able to renew my passport by mail.

This time, 20 years on, was much less smooth than the previous.

Things first went off the rails when my application was rejected because I sent a U.S. dollar Canada Post money order in payment, and this was not acceptable. The letter I received on May 22 explained:

The payment you submitted is not acceptable because it is not payable through a United States bank. Please submit a new check (personal, certified, cashiers or travelers) or money order (U.S. Postal, commercial, currency exchange) payable to “U.S. Department of State” that is payable through a United States bank.

Super-convenient for Canadians, those options, what with United States banks being on every corner here. Not. Ultimately I was able to get a U.S. dollar draft drawn on a U.S. bank, from CIBC in Charlottetown.

Problem solved?

Not yet.

A month later I received another letter:

Thank you for your recent passport application. However, the identification you provided is not sufficient for passport purposes.

This was strange, as there was no requirement to submit identification, other than my old passport. The only items on the application form were:

• Your most recent U.S. passport book and/or card;
• A certified copy of your marriage certificate or court order if your name has changed;
• Fees; and
• A recent, color photograph.

Nonetheless, I was required to better identify myself. And with some intriguing options; the letter continued:

Please complete the enclosed DS-5520, Supplemental Questionnaire to Determine Identity for a U.S. Passport, and submit the form with photocopies of five (5) or more personal documents, which are five (5) years or older. For your information we have included a list of acceptable forms of personal documents that may assist our office in establishing your identity.

The list was long, and included things like “military identification” and “traffic ticket” and “school yearbook photograph with your name and photo, also with school’s name and year that it was issued.”

The challenging hurdle was the requirement that these pieces of ID needed to be five years or older.

I’ve got lots of forms of current ID, but I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to assemble a suite of half-decade-old ID, and so I included things like my ID for the PEI Archives and Records Office (signed, more than 5 years old) and, because “Newspaper/Magazine articles (with your photo & name, news paper’s name & date)” was one of the acceptable forms of ID, this article from The Guardian from 2014:

I received no further communication from the State Department after sending in my packet of aged ID.

My passport arrived in the post yesterday. I’m good until 2029.

I’m going to save all my expiring ID cards in a bucket for use then.

There’s some pretty funky homebrew typography painted at the entrance to our driveway.

Pro tip: if you have a list of files that you need to retrieve from a webserver, you’re better off putting the list of URIs in a file, and then:

wget -i list-of-files.txt

than you are crafting a shell script like:

wget http://www.example.com/file-number-1.jpg
wget http://www.example.com/file-number-2.jpg
wget http://www.example.com/file-number-3.jpg

The former works much, much faster.

VIA Rail has a page that compares various aspects, including emissions, of the train vs. the car vs. the plane for some common central Canadian routes.

The fine print is interesting:

Train emissions calculator

The formula used to calculate train related data emissions is: (Litres of diesel fuel consumed X Emission Factor) / average of seats available on the selected route = Kg of CO2 equivalent per seat. The emission factor of 3.00715 Kg of CO2 equivalent per Liter of diesel No. 2 was used. The fuel consumption for each selected route was calculated using an average of real-time fuel consumption as measured by the Witronix technology over a 12-month period. The emission factor for diesel No. 2 is calculated by Environment Canada as part of its National Inventory Report (2011 submission) and takes into consideration the global warming potential of CO2, CH4 and N2O.

Flight emissions calculator

Number from Zerofootprint Flight emission calcultor for Air Canada used.

Car emissions calculator

For the calculations, a mid-size sedan with a combined fuel consumption rate of 10.0 Liters per 100 km was used, considering an average capacity of 4 passengers per vehicle. The distances are calculated in Kilometers using Google Maps. The formula used to calculate car related data emissions is: (Litres of gasoline consumed X Emission Factor) / average # of seats = Kg of CO2 equivalent per seat. The emission factor of 2.500 Kg of CO2 equivalent per Liter of gasoline (Tier 0) was used. The fuel consumption rate for a mid-size vehicle is an average calculated for mid-size type vehicles from the 2013 Fuel Consumption Guide developed by Natural Resources Canada. The emission factor for gasoline is calculated by Environment Canada as part of its National Inventory Report (2011 submission) and takes into consideration the global warming potential of CO2, CH4 and N2O.

I don’t know if these are the right calculations to be using, but kudos to VIA for including them.

It would be nice if VIA create a more general-purpose emissions calculator that worked for all of their routes.

My friend Mark lives out in Pownal, about 15 km east of Charlottetown.

On Thursday he was at home and needed to get to town to rendezvous with his wife Trina, and with us, for a trip out to Oyster Bed for a social.

In the normal course of affairs he would have asked Trina to drive the 30 km round trip to fetch him, but he decided to ride his bicycle to town instead.

I rode some of the route he took on an ebike earlier in the month, and so I know it’s not a flat and gentle ride.

All hail Mark.

A lovely new video from The East Pointers, featuring Emma Watkins, aka Emma Wiggle.

And, in the other direction, The Wiggles ft. Tim Chaisson of The East Pointers.

Let us never forget that Steven Garrity broke Tim Chaisson 15 years ago. It’s been a meteoric rise ever since.

The first Pride Parade happened in Charlottetown in 1994, the summer after we arrived on Prince Edward Island. It was a shameful event, not for the parade itself, but for the insults and objects hurled from the sidewalks at the brave who ventured out.

Twenty-five years and one 18 year old son later, Pride was a very different thing today: a joyful celebration that stretched for miles and included as diverse a group as I’ve ever seen.

Among those participating was Oliver, who joined with the Green Party on its solar bicycle float; you can see him pedaling his heart out as he passed me on Euston Street this afternoon (he’s in a green T-shirt on the end of the bike, wearing a grey cap):

I am both a proud father, and proud of this Island for having evolved over the last 25 years.

My friends at Nine Yards Studio have been skunkworking away for months now, inside a sonically-isolated design shop floating inside the courtyard of their headquarters on Fitzroy Street, on a project that seeks to take their considerable skills dealing with Big Things into the world of Small Things.

When they gave me an early tour this winter, I casually referred to the effort, in my affected way, as taking place in their “secret design bunker.”

This week I was overjoyed to receive an invitation to the public launch of the… Secret Design Bunker.

Finally, after years of vain frustration, toiling in the mines of coming up with names for things (here, here), I hit the big time!

There’s a blog post (emphasis mine, obviously):

Stacked, is the Secret Design Bunker’s first series of design explorations. The series celebrates plywood as a material and experiments with the potential forms it can be used to create. Children curiously stack wood blocks on top of one another; the Secret Design Bunker explored the potential forms of plywood could create with the same sense of curiosity.

And an invite:

And a front page story in The Guardian this morning:

The hatch to the Secret Design Bunker gets opened to public air on Tuesday, July 30, 2019 at 12 noon at 63 Fitzroy Street in Charlottetown.