Back in 2011 I wrote a script to automate the scraping of the public GIS layers that the Province of Prince Edward Island makes available.

I’ve updated this script now–download it here–to handle the now blessedly simpler way the downloads work now (you don’t need to register to download any longer), and I’ve added the generation of a PyQGIS script that will automatically load all the downloaded layers into a QGIS project, ready for entertainment and delight.

We are watching a livestream of the ECMA folk stage at St. Paul’s Anglican Church across the street.

Our bandwidth at home is beamed across Prince Street from the Reinventorium (in the basement of the Parish Hall of the selfsame church) into an Apple Airport Extreme upstairs, which has an Apple Airport Express extender downstairs that Oliver’s MacBook Air in using for his wifi.

Oliver’s got the livestream playing on his laptop, and is streaming it to our Apple TV.

The Apple TV is connected to our 20 year old analog Sony Trinitron using an HDMI to RCA converter.

Where we’re watching music being performed in the church. Across the street. As it’s happening.

My family doctor has this chart on the wall of one of his examining rooms, one of an interesting collection of old medical artifacts.

I’m deeply suspicious that the cure for cannibis poisoning includes strychnine, itself a poison that is “a highly toxic, colorless, bitter, crystalline alkaloid used as a pesticide, particularly for killing small vertebrates such as birds and rodents.”

That seems like a trick.

Blackbird, by The Beatles, sung in Miꞌkmaq by Emma Stevens at Allison Bernard Memorial High School in Eskasoni, Cape Breton.

See also Kalolin Johnson – We Shall Remain (It Wasn’t Taken Away), Emma Stevens – My Unama’ki (My Cape Breton), and Kalolin Johnson – Gentle Warrior (featuring Devon Paul and Thunder Herney), all from the same school.

Two Weeks, from The East Pointers, is one of those songs that instantly and naturally finds its place in the canon, filling a void we didn’t know existed.

It also happens to include what I believe to be the first reference to Charlottetown Airport’s IATA code, YYG, in a song lyric:

Monday morning, minus eighteen
Another WestJet, YYG to Calgary
I’d always knew she’d get used to me leaving someday

This solves the perplexing problem of Charlottetown not rhyming with anything.

The song was awarded Song of the Year at the East Coast Music Awards last night, well-deserved recognition.

On page 73 of the 2019 East Coast Music Awards program there’s a half page advertisement for the PEI Liquor Control Commission:

You will note that a QR Code figures prominently in the design of the ad; while leafing through the program this morning I noticed this, and I pulled out my phone to see what was encoded therein.

For reasons perhaps having to do with the QR Code’s non-standard white-on-salmon presentation, I couldn’t get it to scan; to do anything with it I needed to take a photo of the ad and then doctor the photo on my Mac, inverting the colours to be dark-on-light. Once I did that I could scan the code from my phone, where it unfurled into a link for Shopify’s website:

I alerted the marketing department at the PEI Liquor Control Commission, and their response was that it was “a stock image that was used to create the ad for the ECMA program, and was not intended to be used as a functional QR code.”

While we all share a laugh about the folly of our government’s liquor regulator accidentally advertising for Shopify, there’s a more profound revelation to be gleaned here, and that is that QR Codes, always questionable to begin with, and of so limited a practical utility as to approach none, have now become digital tchotchkes so meaningless that there is apparently very little risk in dropping random ones here and there, safe in the knowledge that nobody’s ever going to scan them.

It is May Day, and thus the start of the tourist season in Charlottetown, part of which involves turning Victoria Row back into a pedestrian-only thoroughfare.

After many years of using bollards, the City of Charlottetown has changed to using lockable gates this year, complete with a garish sign:

And so, for yet another year, my protests that we should sign positively not negatively are ignored.

Set aside the ugly and ill-fitting sign itself, as I suggested in 2017 the message here should be Pedestrians Welcome – Street Closed to all Vehicles.

The problem with the messaging this year is that it’s a lie: the street isn’t closed, it’s just different.

For many months now I’ve been passing a sandwich board on Queen Street, just up from The Guild, advertising “The Most Stunning Passport Photo You’ll Ever Have,” for $13.91. I was intrigued both by the audacious claim and by the unusual price. But, not in need of a passport photo, I was in no position to test the proposition.

This week, though, I was.

My U.S. passport expires in June, and so this week I needed a passport photo: the memory of the sandwich board had stuck with me, and I decided to try them out.

I showed up at 1:12 p.m. yesterday at the door of the studio–it’s in the Queen Square Centre at 119 Queen Street–to find it closed, but with a message on the door about how they were close by, and offering a mobile number I could call. So I sent a text, and got a reply 2 minutes later telling me they could be there at 1:35 p.m.:

I grabbed a cup of tea at Casa Mia and, at 1:33 p.m. got an update “I am back. See you.” I walked right over, and was greeted at the door by the efficient and friendly HK.

HK had me remove my eyeglasses, take off my sweater, and tuck my hair behind my ears. He spent some time lining me up–”raise your chin just a little,” “show a very slight smile,” and so on–and then snapped a photo with his digital SLR. This was no formulaic Shoppers Drug Mart robotic photo, this was “the red carpet meets the passport office.”

After a few minutes wait, HK emerged with my photos, trimmed and ready. I paid him $16.00–it turns out the “intriguing” price of $13.91 is simply what $16.00, taxes-in, amounts to–and came back to the office to assemble my passport application.

I quickly realized that the photos I had were the wrong size: instead of the required 2 inches square, they were 1-7/8 inches square. With the Internet awash of “top 5 reasons your passport application will get returned to you” stories where “wrong-size photo” ranks high, I was hesitant to go ahead. I texted HK back, and he immediately replied with an invitation to return to get reprinted photos of the right size:

I did, indeed, drop round the office around 4:00 p.m. and HK confirmed that he’d trimmed photos to the wrong size, apologized, and then quickly generated two replacements for me.

Was it “The Most Stunning Passport Photo You’ll Ever Have”? I don’t have enough distance from the subject to say so, but I do know it’s certainly the best passport photo I’ve ever had taken, and one that makes all that came previous look like they were taken in the basement of a prison while I was being booked for murder. So I suppose that meets the standard.

I was telling a friend about my experiences with HK and the photo this morning, and we agreed that so often in customer service it’s not so much that we’re bothered when things go wrong–things always go wrong–but rather what the follow-up from the going wrong is.

HK wasn’t on site when I showed up at his door; but there was a sign on the door with a mobile number, and he replied to my text quickly.

The first photos were the wrong size, but he quickly made good on this.

Part of the reason I’m telling you this story is because I got a good passport photo; but it’s mostly because of what amounted, in the end, to excellent service, problems or no.

So, if you’re looking for a passport photo in Charlottetown–some might say “The Most Stunning Passport Photo You’ll Ever Have”–I can recommend A.P.E.I. Photography Gallery & Studio.

A lovely story about planning for edge cases by Anne Gibson; in part:

Internet in homes is pretty ubiquitous, especially among those who can afforda Nintendo Switch or a Playstation 4 in the first place, so the chances that the person buying the game doesn’t have access is pretty darned low…

…unless you’re in the hospital for a cystic fibrosis tune-up, and only one of the two household Nintendo Switches has copies of Super Mario Party or Mario Kart 8 that are up to date. And the hospital’s guest internet, which is perfectly useful for downloading email and surfing the web, has decided it won’t let you connect to the Nintendo game servers. And driving 45 minutes home just to update the games really isn’t an option.

The original version of Almanac.com had a “hole” in the top-left corner, just like the print version does; if you clicked the home you got to read The Hole Story.

I like it when technology is created to do unexpected things.

(Oh, and if you want to learn more about the hole, watch this video).

My favourite new fountain pen this year is the TWSBI GO that I purchased at Oblation Papers & Press in Portland, Oregon in March:

The GO is an inexpensive pen–it cost me less than $20–with a striking design and a novel ink-filling mechanism: a spring-loaded pump, the instructions for the use of which are delightful:

And it really is that easy: unscrew, stick the nib in your inkwell with the plunger depressed, let go, and it’s filled with ink. It makes filling the Pilot Metropolitan, with its squeeze-the-rubber-bladder filling system, seem positively antediluvian.

TWSBI is a Taiwanese pen manufacturer with a name that has an interesting backstory:

TWSBI’s name stands for the phrase “Hall of Three Cultures” or “San Wen Tong” in Chinese. The character “Wen” translates into language and culture. The phrase “San Wen Tong” also brings to mind the Hall of the Three Rare Treasures created by Emperor Qianlong as a memorial to three great masterpieces of Chinese calligraphy. The initials of the phrase “San Wen Tong” was reversed and thus turned into “TWS”. The last letters “Bi” was added with its literal meaning of “writing instruments”. Thus combining the two segments, creating TWSBI.

You cannot, alas, buy TWSBI pens locally right now, but you can get them from Wonder Pens in Toronto.