“Trust grows when you take time to understand the thoughts and feelings of others before you act.”

So starts the third chapter of The Right Honourable David Johnston’s book Trust: Twenty Ways to Build a Better Country. He continues:

My grandmother told me that people were given two ears and just one mouth for a good reason: we should listen before we speak. She was a wise woman and an early proponent of what we refer to now as emotional intelligence. While that term gets bandied about quite a bit these days, emotional intelligence at its core is the simple act of listening to and empathizing with another person—and using that listening and empathizing to inform your decisions and actions.

His Excellency’s motto as Governor General was Contemplare Meliora – To envisage a better world – and this book is an surprisingly useful guide to doing just that.

In December 2018, at great expense and complexity, we insulated our attic, removing decades old asbestos insulation and replacing it with R40 of blown fiberglass.

Did it help our energy consumption?

Here’s a comparison of our 2018 and 2019 winter season oil bills:

Oil usage information alone doesn’t account for differences in heating due to differences in the weather; with the help of Efficiency PEI, I determined that there were 2,391 heating degrees days in the first four months of 2018, and 2,567 heating degree days in the first four months of 2019, suggesting that, all other things being equal, we would have used 7% more oil in 2019 (about 2,580 litres).

But we actually used 2% less oil, so our net oil savings due to insulation was closer to 9%.

Our home heating oil cost, because of the increase in the price of oil, doesn’t reflect savings, but rather a 2% increase:

Had our consumption not dropped due to insulation, we would have spent about $2,348 on oil in 2019, meaning our net cost savings was about $129.

From Fairphone: The most sustainable phone is the one you already own. In part:

A phone’s biggest environmental impact comes from the manufacturing process. That’s why – whether it’s a Fairphone or something else – the most sustainable phone available is the one you already own. So the longer you keep it, the more sustainable it becomes. Extending the lifespan of existing phones is the best strategy for reducing their impact on the planet. And it’s not only good for the earth – it’s easy on your wallet, too!

While keeping our 2000 Volkswagen Jetta has been mostly due to frugality and limited resources, I do take some pride in having not needed to cause another car to be created to replace ours.

Seth Godin on digital hygeine:

The solution is fun and simple: find a smart person and have them watch you use the computer for an hour.

She’ll share ten shortcuts and principles that will amaze you.

And then you can return the favor.

I did, albeit less intentionally, with Olle several years ago, the big payoff of which was turning off email notifications; this has improved my productivity and reduced work stress.

Last month I watched Josh MacFadyen use QGIS in a coffee shop for 15 minutes and I’ve been using what I’ve learned to great effect ever since.

Manitoba fiddler Patti Kusturok accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Rusu at the National Fiddling Day celebration at St. Paul’s Anglican Church on May 18, 2019. Sound engineering in the hall was by Brent Chaisson; I plucked this sound from the back of the church with my phone.

I’m putting this here because I ran into a confounding issue that it took me a long time to find a solution for, and I’m hoping to solve the issue for others in the same situation.

You’re using Firefox and OpenStreetMap on a Mac and you’re clicking on the “Show My Location” icon in the toolbar and you’re seeing the error “Geolocation error: User denied geolocation prompt”:

You’re seeing this despite having granted Firefox permission to use your location for openstreetmap.org:

You are confounded. You search for answers, and all you find are references to geolocation and https, but you’re already accessing openstreetmap.org via https, so that’s not the issue.

The issue might lie with your macOS Location Settings:

Open System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Location Services and make sure the Firefox.app settings is checked (you might need to click on the padlock in the bottom-left and enter your system password to be able to make this change).

Once you do this, you should find that the “Show My Location” process works in OpenStreetMap as expected:

Today was National Fiddling Day, an occasion for which we have Libbe Hubley to thank, as it was her Private Members Bill in the Senate that conjured it into being.

The day was marked here in Charlottetown with a rousing concert St Paul’s Anglican Church.

Just in case you were concerned that you might have missed a statutory holiday, An Act Respecting National Fiddling Day offers clarity on this point:

For greater certainty, National Fiddling Day is not a legal holiday or a non-juridical day.

We refilled this hand soap dispenser with Downeast Hand & Body Soap at Riverview Country Market for 98 cents. (the original bottle of Nature Clean soap cost more than $5.00).

At the end of our trip to South Melville yesterday, Trudy, whose Chevy Bolt I’d driven there and back, called up the “Range Impacts Since Last Full Charge” screen, which shows factors that influenced the range of the car:

The outside temperature last night was about 4ºC, which explains the 15 km loss there; it also explains why we lost 10 km from “climate settings,” as we needed to turn on the defroster a couple of times.

The 7 km loss from “elevation” can be explained by the hilly terrain between Charlottetown and South Melville:

The elevation between Charlottetown and South Melville, from PlugShare.com

The most interesting number–and the only one that I had any influence on–is “technique,” and it reflects my behaviour braking and accelerating. And my (essentially random) technique scored us an additional 4 km of range.

Earlier this morning Terry Howatt thoughtfully left a comment here about a meeting tonight of the PEI Electric Vehicle Association in South Melville.

As I’m curious about such things, and eager to learn more from people who aren’t try to sell me something, I dropped a line to my new friend Trudy (who also came to me by way of this blog) to see if she wanted to go to the meeting with me. Trudy is almost two months into her own experience as an electric vehicle owner: she purchased a Chevy Bolt at the end of May.

Trudy quickly wrote back, said she was game, and offered me a drive. When she showed up at my place at 5:45, she hopped out of the driver’s seat and offered me the opportunity to drive the Bolt, which I eagerly accepted.

When we arrived at Harry Smith’s house in South Melville we were greeted by three Nissan Leafs, a Tesla Model S, a Tesla Model 3, a homebrew SUV conversion, and another Bolt. And an enthusiastic group of EV owners and owners-to-be.

The proceedings were informal, the refreshments were well-turned-out, and the group proved generous and willing to answer my endless stream of questions.

Driving Trudy’s Bolt was a joy: it’s fun to drive, comfortable and roomy; after 20 minutes I forgot that I was driving an electric car.

If you’re interested in attending the next monthly meeting, or if you simply have questions about electric vehicles, you can contact the group by email at peieva2019@gmail.com.