After watching Andrea Ledwell receive her vegan powerball at Receiver Coffee in a coffee cup on Sunday, and hearing me joke that it was intended to have something poured over, Oliver went for it today, and poured blood orange Sanpellegrino over his own powerball. We dubbed it “The Andrea” in her honour. And he ate/drank it with a demitasse spoon. Ask for it by name next time you’re in for a snack.

While we were waiting for the bus home today, Olle explained to me and Oliver how QSL cards work: two ham radio operators establish a radio connection, the more distant and unlikely the better; during the connection they exchange call signs, which are globally-unique and can be used to look up a postal address; to mark the magical radio connection, a printed QSL card can thus be sent, acting as a kind of award of merit for defeating geography via radio.

Olle delivered this explanation in light of Ton’s proposal:

Letterpress printed QSL cards for successfully sent and received Webmentions must be the most finely targeted joke. The audience very likely not larger than 3 people.

Being interested in Webmentions, and also being a letterpress printer, I feel an obligation to make this happen.

Here, then, are the Indieweb building blocks:

• Olle writes a blog post.
• On my blog, I reference Olle’s blog post, and so my blog sends him a Webmention.
• Olle’s blog receives the Webmention, and looks to see if he’s ever received one from me before.
• He hasn’t!
• Olle’s blog looks for a postal address h-card on my blog and, finding one, sends a mailing label to Olle by email, ready for attaching to a letterpress-printed QSL card that he can pop in the mail to me.

For this to work as outlined:

1. Blog authors need to includ their postal mailing address on their blogs, marked up as an h-card. I’ve got this but not everyone does.
2. The Webmention-receiving logic on blogs needs to be able to track first contact, and trigger a QSL-card-sending callback when it’s established.
3. Letterpress QSL cards need to be printed. I can do this.

I agree with Ton that the audience is small. But we’ve already got 3 people, so the idea has already reached 100% of its estimated audience.

Tim Carmody, on Kottke.org, writes about pain medication; in part:

This is all to say: no, I’m not on pain medication. Yes, I’m terribly uncomfortable. No, I’m not uncomfortable enough to jump through hoops and beg for more drugs. (Maybe if I were, things would be different.) And at the times I was most uncomfortable, those were the times when medicine was the least available to me, by design.

We’ve got to get over our weird Puritanical crap about pain and pain medication, and accept the fact that in certain contexts, we need the drugs. And by “we,” I mean myself, the medical system; everybody. We can’t be responsible for the entire opioid epidemic every second of every day. Sometimes we just need to be able to go to sleep.

I’ve learned a lot about this domain in the last 5 years. The backlash against opioids, while understandable given the toll that they’ve taken, has also served to cast an unhelpful shadow over pain meds of any type. For those in chronic pain, carrying the extra weight of that shadow is the last thing they need.

Blog posts about Crafting {:} a Life from people who were there:

• Crafting {:} a Life Unconference Day 1
• Crafting {:} a Life Unconference Day 2
• Crafting {:} a Saga
• Leaving PEI
• Fantasy Cartography
• Crafting {:} a Life
• Crafting {:} a Life initial impressions
• Press Pound to Publish
• Communication does count
• Crafting {:} a Blog
• Three Conversations about Blogging
• Unconference Aftermath / Unconference Forwarding
• Connection Problem
• Canada - Crafting {:} a Life (Flickr photos)
• Crafting {:} a Reflection

If you’ve written something I didn’t catch, please let me know.

Lost in all the hullabaloo this past week was Oliver’s last day of public school.

Ton Zijlstra wrote about the first day of our unconference.

There’s too much for me to process right now to write more myself, other than this snippet, written to a friend last night:

I realized that, by being the organizer of the unconference, I wasn’t really able to “go to the unconference” myself. Which is not to say that I was disappointed at all, just that my experience was necessarily different. More the palpable thrill of catalyzing connections. And the frightening/joyful realization that it’s possible to tenaciously conjure good things.

We gather for day two, starting with a walk to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market, in 90 minutes.

For years I’ve been suggesting people or chairs in a circle, but they always end up in neat rows, like a school classroom. It seems like overkill to organize an event just to realize this dream, but you do what you gotta do. Crafting {:} a Life starts in an hour.

Amsterdam’s Removing 10,000 Parking Spaces is a short film about the Dutch city’s plan to do just that (link from Peter Bihr’s Connection Problem newsletter).

One of the things that we miss when we talk about the migration from internal combustion vehicles to electric vehicles is that, especially as long as we retain the private-ownership model, the need for parking remains.

It would be political suicide for a city councillor in Charlottetown to even hint at the notion of reducing parking; I’m not sure what the bridge to such thinking is.

But what a wonderful world it would be.

Insulate our House?

Our home energy audit last fall told us that if we insulate our basement and our walls at 100 Prince Street (neither of which have any insulation at all), we can reduce our household energy use by 35 GJ/year.

The audit estimates that we use 188 GJ per year in oil to heat our house, producing 13.4 tonnes of CO₂; lowering that to 153 GJ per year would lower our emissions to 10.9 tonnes, a savings of 2.5 tonnes per year.

We got an estimate from Greenfoot of $10,286 to insulate the walls (“drill and fill”) and basement (“2lb closed cell polyurethane foam insulation”); Efficiency PEI rebates would lower this to $8,036.

Put all this together, over a decade, and we’d save 25 tonnes of CO₂, spending $321/tonne to do so.

Buy an Electric Car

Five months into 2019 we’ve spent $176 on gasoline for our 2000 VW Jetta, a total of about 160 litres; extrapolating over a year, assuming roughly the same consumption, 32 litres a month, we’ll use 384 litres of gasoline in 2019.

According to this conversion calculator, 384 litres of gasoline produces 0.93 tonnes of CO₂.

We could replace our Jetta with a 2014 Nissan Leaf electric car for about $18,000 all-in, and we could charge it only from renewal energy

If we did that, we’d spend about $18,000 and, over a decade, we’d save 9.3 tonnes of CO₂, spending $1935/tonne to do so.

So, which one?

There are several assumptions and missing parts built into my calculations (including the assumption that our 2000 Jetta will live forever), but as a gross calculation it’s helpful for making decisions about where money is best spent.

Buying an electric car is sexy and exciting and Jetsonian but, at least for people who drive as little as we do, it makes more sense, dollar-for-tonne, to put our money into our walls.