With temperatures in the mid-teens and wearing Spring jackets and sneakers for our after-supper walk, it’s hard to believe that 3 years ago this week there was still a lot of snow and ice on the ground, the result of 2015’s endless winter.

Here’s 2015 in our backyard vs. tonight.

In an exchange that reflects blogging the way it’s supposed to happen, Ton left a comment about energy usage data in the Netherlands on my post about my postal code. And then, when I asked him a question about this, he responded with a detailed and very helpful blog post of his own.

One of the things he revealed there is that his house in the Netherlands consumes 3700 kWh per year of electricity.

Because we’ve been doing detailed logging of our own electricity consumption, this gives me an opportunity to compare.

Our Maritime Electric electricity meter read 1702925 on April 24, 2017 and reads 2246469 as of one minute ago, a difference of 543544, or 5435.44 kWh.

This means that we consume 1735 kWh–46% more–per year for our detached single family home of three than Ton’s detached single family home of three.

Our friends Bill and Michelle, who are also participating in my electricity and water monitoring project, and also have a detached single family home of three, started out at 3125321 and are now at 3615162, a difference of 489841, or 4898.41 kWh, which is about 10% less than us, and 32% higher than Ton.

I’d be interested in drilling down into the primary reasons why our electricity consumption is so much higher.

Over March Break in Halifax, Oliver and I stopped in to see our friend Nardag*, daughter of our old friends Bob and Yvonne. I’ve known Nardag all her life, and it still seems odd that she’s now a independent young woman. It was wonderful to see her.

While we were visiting, Nardag’s neighbour was over for a visit, as it was Friday, and Friday was the day set aside for smoothie bowl breakfasts (in this, she explained, she takes after her father, who is similarly regimented in his habits).

What is a smoothie bowl, you ask? I put this question to our hosts: “it’s a smoothie, but in a bowl,” they replied in unison, “with things sprinkled on top.”

They offered to whip up a couple of extra smoothie bowls for us, and we eagerly agreed. Shortly they were placed in front of us and an array of the “things” laid out surrounding. This array included everyday things like nuts and shredded coconut, along with various other mysterious powders, some of which we were warned were rather bracing to consume.

We opted for a safe sprinkle of known things, and enjoyed the experience immensely.

To the point where we have now introduced the radical smoothie bowl concept into our own breakfast routine.

I remain unclear as to whether Nardag and her neighbour invented the smoothie bowl—for all I know Californians have been consuming them for decades—but I’ve opted to believe so.

They’re simple to make: prepare a smoothie as you normally would, albeit perhaps a bit thicker. Pour it in a bowl. Sprinkle to taste with coconut, yak horn powder, etc. Enjoy.

* Nardag is not Nardag’s actual name. On the day she was born, Catherine got a call from her mother and misheard her name, which is actually Nadja, as Nardag. While this struck me as an odd name, her parents have a Bohemian bent, and so it was not outside the realm of possibility. As is my wont, I embraced the mistake entirely.

Oliver goes out to Crapaud every Sunday afternoon for 90 minutes with the brilliant art educator Jennifer Brown. Every week they tackle a new medium, or a new artist, or a new subject. Today it was making block prints of inuksuit.

For the longest time, if you wanted to resize a EBS volume (aka “your disk drive”) attached to an Amazon Web Services instance (aka “your server”), you had to go through a dance that involved shutting down the instance. This was relatively simple in spirit, but terrifying enough in practice that I procrastinated doing it as I watched the size of my primary volume on the server powering this blog gradually fill up.

Today I reached 100% and I had no choice: fortunately, things, it turns out, have become much easier. All I needed to do was resize the volume in the AWS console (select the volume, click Modify, change the size) and then extend the Linux filesystem to use the new capacity with:

sudo growpart /dev/xvda 1
sudo resize2fs /dev/xvda1

From start to finish it took about 2 minutes.

Now I’ve got gigabytes of free space to slowly fill up in the weeks and months to come, and the confidence that when I need to increase capacity again I won’t need to go into hiding to avoid it.

My postal code for the last 18 years has been C1A 4R4. As postal codes go, it’s a pretty good one: it has been easy to remember, and it looks sharp on an envelope.

It wasn’t until I went to mail something to a friend just up the street that I realized that there are other people with the same postal code, and I got curious as to how many of us there are.

Google’s map of the postal code’s boundaries shows C1A 4R4 as including all the buildings on the east side of Prince Street from Richmond Street to Grafton Street:

Indeed, Canada Post’s reverse-postal-code-lookup tool shows 24 addresses fall under the postal code:

• 96 Prince Street, with 96-A and 96-B
• 98 Prince Street
• 100 Prince Street
• 104 Prince Street
• 106 Prince Street
• 108 Prince Street, with 108-1, 108-2, 108-3 and 108-4
• 114-1 Prince Street, with 114-2, 114-3, 114-4, and 114-5
• 120 Prince Street
• 124-1 Prince Street, with 124-2, 124-3, 124-4, 124-5, and 124-6

On a roughly-pasted-together composite of Google Street View images, these addresses look like this:

There are 6 buildings in all: 2 single-family homes (ours, at 100 Prince Street, is one of them), 2 multi-unit homes, and 2 multi-unit apartment buildings. Spread across these 6 buildings there are 19 distinct residential units and one office/retail space. A rough estimate, assuming an average of 2 people per unit, then, would see about 40 people sharing the postal code.

The walk from 96 Prince Street to 124 Prince Street is about 79 metres; Google says the distance can be walked, cycled or driven in about a minute.

Often, when I’m in a hurry, I’ll often write my return address as “Rukavina / C1A 4R4,” reasoning that our letter carriers are experienced enough to sort things out if the letter ever needs to be returned.

I’ve become fascinated recently with very-small-scale geographies, inspired, in part, by Flaneur magazine, which focuses on one street per issue: perhaps the best thing to do when everyone else is trying to communicate with everyone, everywhere, is to reach the people in my postal code?

The CBC reports that a Nova Scotia teenager has been charged with programmatically accessing public information from a public Government of Nova Scotia website. This is an issue near and dear to my heart, as the accused was charged for engaging in exactly the sort of thing that I do regularly.

For example, earlier this year I was contacted by a Prince Edward Island journalist who was researching the latest plan by the Government of Prince Edward Island to equip the Island with a high-speed Internet backbone. They’d been looking for the tender documents associated with earlier attempts to solve the same problem, but had been stymied by the fact that these older tender documents were seemingly no longer available online, and their access to information requests had remained unfilled; they wanted to know if I could help.

The dropping-out-of-view of the older tenders appears to have been a side-effect of the Province’s migration to a new website: the legacy tender website contained records of tenders extending back to 2002; when it was replaced with a new section on the new website, older tenders were not included in the migration of the search feature, and so the tender they were looking for was no longer online. The confusing thing for the journalist was that, until very recently, they’d been able to use Google to locate older tender documents, and they were showing in Google search results; this was no longer the case, though, and they were wondering whether the documents were still online in some form.

I agreed to assist them in their search, as I’ve a personal interest both in why we haven’t collectively been able to solve the Internet access issue on PEI despite trying for 25 years, and in open data and transparency and access to information.

What I discovered is that the older tender documents are, in fact, still online, on the legacy government website; they’re just not exposed to the new site’s search.

If you take the URL:

http://www.gov.pe.ca/tenders/gettender.php3?number=$tender

and replace $tender with a number from 1 to 5884 (a limit I found simply by experimenting), you can retrieve information for tenders back to this June 6, 2002 tender for a heavy-duty tire changer.

One of the things computers are very good at is iterating. Which is to say, doing the same thing over and over and over again in a loop.

So, with what I learned about how the legacy tenders are stored, publicly available, I wrote a short computer program to grab all of them:

for ($tender = 1 ; $tender <= 5884 ; $tender++) {
  system("wget \"http://www.gov.pe.ca/tenders/gettender.php3?number=$tender\" -O html/$tender.html");
}

This left me with a collection of HTML documents, one for each tender. And this included the 2002 RFP FOR CONSULTING SERVICES TELECOMMUNICATIONS NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE, the 2006 REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS FOR PROVINCIAL FIBRE OPTIC BASED NETWORK, and the 2007 REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS FOR OPTO-ELECTRONICS AND RELATED SERVICES. None of these tender documents are accessible through the updated search tool, but they are all still publicly available online, and they references to them continue to appear in Google search results:

In the end, then, I was able to supply the journalist with the materials they were looking for, using publicly available copies on the Province’s publicly available webserver. That I happened to access these materials by iterating (“show me tender #1, show me tender #2, show me tender #3, etc.”), with a computer doing the heavy lifting, is immaterial.

I’ve used similar techniques to retrieve information dozens of times over the years. It’s how I was able to provide an RSS feed of Charlottetown Building Permits (which only recently went dark when the City updated its website and made this impossible). It’s how I can continue to provide a visualization of PEI’s electricity load and generation. And it’s how I was able to create an alternative, more flexible corporations search a decade ago when I was otherwise unable to find information about Richard Homburg.

The freedom to retrieve materials that are online at a public URL, whether in a browser, via a script, or through other automated process, is one of the fundamental freedoms of the Internet, and it’s one of the things that distinguish the Internet from all networks that came before it.

The story of the accused teenager in Nova Scotia bears striking similarity to my search for tenders and my search for corporations information; from the CBC story (emphasis mine):

Around the same time, his Grade 3 class adopted an animal at a shelter, receiving an electronic adoption certificate.

That led to a discovery on the classroom computer.

“The website had a number at the end, and I was able to change the last digit of the number to a different number and was able to see a certificate for someone else’s animal that they adopted,” he said. “I thought that was interesting.”

The teenager’s current troubles arose because he used the same trick on Nova Scotia’s freedom-of-information portal, downloading about 7,000 freedom-of-information requests.

He says his interest stemmed from the government’s recent labour troubles with teachers.

“I wanted more transparency on the teachers’ dispute,” he said.

After a few searches for teacher-related releases on the provincial freedom-of-information portal, he didn’t find what he was looking for.

“A lot of them were just simple questions that people were asking. Like some were information about Syrian refugees. Others were about student grades and stuff like that,” he said.

The teen said a single line of code was all it took to get the information. (CBC)

So instead, he decided to download all the files to search later.

“I decided these are all transparency documents that the government is displaying. I decided to download all of them just to save,” he said.

He says it took a single line of code and a few hours of computer time to copy 7,000 freedom-of-information requests.

“I didn’t do anything to try to hide myself. I didn’t think any of this would be wrong if it’s all public information. Since it was public, I thought it was free to just download, to save,” he said.

The sad irony of this tale is that it was freedom of information documents that the accused downloaded, and in among those files were ones that had not been properly redacted. That is certainly a lapse in security on the part of the government that bears investigation, but the accused bears no responsibility for downloading publicly-available files, whether mistakenly made public or not.

As you can imagine, I feel a great sense of solidarity with the accused, and I’ve reached out to their lawyer with an offer to help in any way I can. Beyond the immediate concern for them, however, I’ve a broader concern about the chilling effect of this heavy-handed action against the freedom to iterate the Nova Scotia government has launched.

They are threatening one of the pillars of a free and open Internet; we need to stand up for that.

A GoFundMe page has been established to support the accused.

So far today I have:

1. Taken Ethan to be groomed (they shaved great gobs of hair from him; he looks like a naked mole-rat now).
2. Inspired by Ethan, gone to get my own hair cut at Ray’s Place. I do not look like a mole-rat. At least not completely.
3. Donated plasma at Canadian Blood Services.
4. Ordered a new pair of Brax trousers from Dow’s, something that’s been on my to-do list for ages.

I’m always asking questions of the friendly and helpful nurses at Canadian Blood Services, and here’s what I learned today:

• My hematocrit reading was 42%, which means that 42% of my blood is red blood cells; this means, give-or-take, that 58% of my blood volume is plasma for the taking.
• Each plasma donation involves extracting 500 ml out of me.
• The average person has 5 litres of blood (I learned this from Wikipedia)

If my math is right, that means that roughly, 2900 ml of my blood (58% of 5 litres) is plasma, and that I donated only 17% of that to the cause, leaving me with 2400 ml still sloshing around inside me to do whatever it is that plasma does.

It’s only 3:35 p.m.–I have high hopes for the remainder of the day.