St. Paul’s Anglican Church commemorated the beginning of its 250th year by ringing its bells 250 times at midnight tonight.

My friend Elmine made a new video every day in December and posted each to her YouTube channel.

Spurred on by her disciplined example, and with the helpful guidance of Making Books, I’ve been trying to make at least one book a day. This has been proving very helpful in teaching me the pitfalls of folding and cutting and sewing. Here are some early examples, each imperfect in its own special way:

I’ve made four stab-bound notebooks since starting this run, and here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• Punching the holes with the awl is a really important step to get right: if the holes don’t go all the way through, or if they’re crooked, everything that happens next is harder.
• It really does help if I run the needle and thread through beeswax before sewing: friction is reduced greatly. I need to be sure not to apply too much beeswax, though, as it can get ground into the cover if I’m not careful.
• Tangled thread is the enemy, and can run things quickly off the rails. The best response is to take a breath, reverse engineer the tangle, and proceed.
• Nothing makes a stab binding look worse than ending up with threads wrapped around each other: see the third hole from the right in the green example above; conversely, neat and ordered stitches, pulled taut, produce a pleasant result (the middle example is my best yet).
• Actually, nothing makes a stab binding look worse than stabbing myself with the very sharp bookbinding needle and bleeding all over the book and my tools (example omitted from photo).

I’ve seen some examples online of a hybrid coptic-stab binding technique that has the visual pleasures of the later with the functional pleasures of the former; that’s what I’m off to next.

An interesting post from Jarek Piórkowski about the open data available for Presto card users about their transit usage (Presto is the contactless transit fare scheme used in the greater Toronto area and in Ottawa).

(I tried accessing my own Presto usage from trips to Burlington I made in 2017 and 2018, but the Presto verification process went sideways for me at some point after my initial registration and I’ve never been able to resolve this).

We came out to our friends Ila, Sosi, Paul and Lori’s Belfast compound for the afternoon. The main event was an failed attempt to light the burn pile; a disappointing conflagration, but a nice photo of the setting sun.

If you can overlook that it’s on a site called “The Art of Manliness,” this guide to threading a needle got me threading needles 100% of the time (up from approximately 0% of the time previously).

I like to have a notebook in my bag to jot notes on, and often I want to tear those notes out and hand them to someone, so today I made a prototype of a “removable notes” notebook:

When I write “prototype” I really mean “rough and ready,” as I encountered some challenges with the stab binding that rendered it less than I would like it to be (and those challenges most extended from my complete inability to thread needles). But the concept worked.

The “removable” nature of the notes by running the signatures through “perf rule” on my letterpress, a hardened-steel perforated cutting blade that does a remarkably good job at perforating:

Here’s a short video of the “removability” of the notes in action:

It’s a very pleasing tear.

Khoaw Pon Authentic Thai on Great George Street has become one of my regular lunch stops: the food is well-made and well-spiced, the staff are friendly, they serve cold water in a tall ice-free glass, and the prices are reasonable.

Today I stopped in for lunch to find the placed slammed: there was a table of about 25 people taking up almost all the available seating, with several take-out orders waiting for food.

They handled the situation with aplomb, however: they offered me a seat in the (almost empty) burger place next door and, when my food, understandably, took about 30 minutes to arrive, they presented me with a $20 gift certificate for my troubles.

As a result they turned a bad situation, where I might drop them from my lunch rotation and recommend against others eating there, into a good situation where I’m lauding them.

Bravo.

Every year, like clockwork, between Christmas and New Year’s Day, as work is quieter than normal and the financial year-end approaches, I think “I should get a jump of end of year payroll, and file T4 slips right now.”

And every year I hit the brick wall that is Canada Revenue Agency’s “systems maintenance” that prevents e-filing of T4s between December 21 and January 7.

What inevitably happens is that, with my momentum quashed, I set the task aside and then realize, after the February 28 deadline, that I’ve waited too long.

Inspired by Patrick Rhone (who, in turn, was inspired by Derek Sivers), I have created a /now page. As outlined here, this is a that fills a gap that exists amidst blogging, social media et al:

No. If I wonder how someone is doing these days, it doesn’t help me to see that they went on vacation last week, are upset about something in the news, or even got a new job. That’s not the big picture.

Think of what you’d tell a friend you hadn’t seen in a year.

Like, “Still living in Dallas, though considering moving to Austin. Working at ABC. Really getting into cycling. The kids are age 3 and 6. I’m reading a lot of Pema Chödrön, and listening to a lot of jazz piano especially Brad Mehldau. I’ve stopped taking on web design clients, since I’d rather keep improving my back-end database work.”

That’s what a now page is for. You can’t get that big picture from any other outlets I’m aware of.

I was also inspired, covering the same terrain, by Austin Kleon’s post Don’t discard. Keep all your pieces in play., especially:

Margaret Atwood once said, “You’re supposed to do one thing. If you do more than that, people get confused.”

It’s not just that other people get confused – you yourself get confused. You love all these things, but you feel like you’re supposed to pick one.

My answer to “what do you want to do when you grow up?” is “everything.” Which is born out by my coding, writing, printing, bookbinding pursuits.

I’ve long admired the weeknotes of my friend Ton, and the monthnotes of my friend Peter, but I’ve never got it together enough to be that regularly retrospective; I’m hoping I’ll be more successful at this project; I’ve already got a reminder to update the /now on January 28, 2019.

(See also Less, More and None, a similar but different effort; I don’t have it in me to be that declarative right now; via University of Winds).

Catherine generously gave me a copy of Making Books, from the London Centre for Book Arts, for Christmas. Many handmade books are sure to follow.

I love that they have a project called A6 that accepts submissions of self-published “artist books, zines and publications,” with the only constraint being they must be A6-sized.

A6 is my favourite of the ISO paper sizes: I love my A6 notebooks and the pouches I carry them about in; I went as far as equipping myself with an A6-sized water bottle this fall.

Making Books has a very clear diagram of how the ISO paper size system works:

Each size from A0 to A7, when folded in half, becomes the next size down: fold an A6 in half and you get an A7 signature. It’s brilliant, and it’s a shame that, when we converted to the metric system in Canada in the 1970s, we didn’t go all the way and adopt this sizing system as well (the province of Ontario tried, but ultimately gave in; when I was in grade 13 in high school the photocopiers were filled with A4 paper).