Oliver is slowly surveying popular music of the 20th century via Spotify.

Which led him to exclaim to me tonight “Joni Mitchell has albums after Ladies of the Canyon!”

Oh to be 17.

Oliver sent me an email last night with subject line “Your Point of View” and a body that was simply a link to this YouTube video, a trailer for the film The House of Tomorrow.

This email precipitated an ongoing conversation about what exactly he meant by “your point of view.”

During one of the episodes of this conversation the following words came out of Oliver’s mouth:

You know, like you and Stewart Brand…

What a son I am raising.

Via my friend Elmine’s blog, a pointer to an appearance by man of letters Stephen Fry on Dutch television. What an insightful, reflective and brilliant person he is.

A month ago I wrote about analyzing my use of the Air Miles program by scraping data from the Air Miles website.

I concluded by mentioning that I had followed on with a formal data access request, under the provisions of the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

Yesterday I received a thorough response by email to that access request, a response that included everything I had requested.

Here’s what I learned.

Personal Information About Me

The letter I received (a PDF attached to the email) summarized the “personal information” about me that Air Miles holds. This is described as:

In accordance with Principle 9 - Individual Access, as outlined in the AIR MILES® Privacy Commitment, the following is personal information on record with the AIR MILES® Program.It is important to note that the demographic information listed below represents what was provided at the time of enrollment, unless updated by you during subsequent contacts with our company, as well as any information you or your household may have provided to us through your participation in optional surveys. This is a summary of the personal information currently held about you and your household.

The information Air Miles holds on me is:

• My date of birth.
• My gender.
• My language preference.
• My “enrollment source” (how I originally signed up for Air Miles).
• My enrollment date.
• The total miles I’ve earned to date.
• The total number of “partners” where I’ve earned miles.
• My account type (business).

The information Air Miles could record about me but had no data:

• My household size.
• My income range.

Redemption

A summary was included of the single redemption I’d ever made of Air Miles for a travel reward, 4090 miles in March of 2016 for a room in Halifax at the Best Western Chocolate Lake.

Disclosure

A list of 46 third party “partners, agents and research organizations” that Air Miles has shared my contact information with “in order to fulfill the stated purposes of the AIR MILES® Reward Program” was provided:

1. airmilesshops.ca
2. Alamo Canada
3. American Express
4. Bank of Montreal
5. Boston Pizza
6. Budget Rent a Car
7. Canadian Springs
8. CarStar Automotive Canada
9. Century 21
10. Club Voyages
11. Foodland
12. Forzani
13. Global Pet Foods
14. Goodyear Canada
15. HBC Rewards
16. Hilton
17. Holiday Inn
18. Homecare Building Centres
19. Intercontinental Hotels
20. IRIS
21. Johnson Inc.
22. La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries
23. Lawtons
24. Manulife Financial
25. Maritime Life
26. Marlin Travel
27. National Tilden
28. Pharma Plus
29. Pharma Save
30. Primus Canada
31. Purolator
32. Reno-Depot
33. Rogers Media
34. Rona
35. Royal & Sun Alliance
36. Safeway
37. Shell
38. Sobeys
39. Sport Chek
40. Sports Experts
41. the Shoe Company
42. Tim-BR Mart
43. Travel Plus
44. UPS
45. VHQ Video Headquarters
46. Westjet

Air Miles Earned

Confronting the PDF File

Finally, in a separate PDF file were the “transactional details” of every Air Mile earned from 1999 onward, sorted by the partner’s name:

PDF files are where data goes to die, and while providing me with this information in this format technically meets the provisions of my request for a “CSV, Excel or other machine-readable file,” it would have been nicer to receive it in something more portable.

Using pdftotext

By running the PDF file through pdftotext, using the “-raw” flag, I was able to get something more useful:

pdftotext -raw airmiles.pdf

This produced airmiles.txt that looks, in part, like this:

CENTURY 21 Thank You From CENTURY 21 7/12/2000 192 1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT 6/28/2002 75 1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT 5/28/2002 45 1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT 4/26/2002 13 1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT 3/28/2002 6 1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT 2/28/2002 49 1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT 1/28/2002 47 1

Somewhat inconveniently, this file is neither fixed-width nor helpfully delimited, but there’s enough structure, working from the end of the lines back toward the beginning, to split components into individual fields.

Using Tabula

To save myself the trouble of hacking the data out this way, I deployed the excellent open source Tabula tool for the job; it  “a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files.” Or, in other words, exactly what I need.

It was shockingly easy to install Tabula, have it auto-identify the tables on the Air Miles PDF, and spit out a CSV file that looks, in part, like this:

CENTURY 21,Thank You From CENTURY 21,7/12/2000,192,1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD,AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT,6/28/2002,75,1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD,AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT,5/28/2002,45,1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD,AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT,4/26/2002,13,1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD,AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT,3/28/2002,6,1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD,AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT,2/28/2002,49,1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD,AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT,1/28/2002,47,1

Now that is useful data.

What did I learn?

Some of the things that I was able to learn from the CSV, after loading it into LibreOffice for analysis, were:

• My first Air Mile came from buying gasoline at Shell on August 21, 1999.
• I’ve earned 7,021 Air Miles in 434 transactions from that date until my most recent transaction at Sobeys on January 13, 2018.
• I’ve earned Air Miles from 26 partners in total.
• Most of my Air Miles–2,729, or 39%–have come from Sobeys.

Other insights to follow.

How did Air Miles do?

Good Points

• Quick turnaround on the request, within the timelines laid out in the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.
• Provided everything I asked for.

Needs Work

• Data provided locked in a PDF file that I had to work to liberate; I’ve asked if they can give me a CSV, TSV or even an Excel file instead.
• Summary letter total Air Miles earned (7,168) doesn’t add up to the aggregate of the Air Miles reported in the transaction report (7,021). I’ve asked for an explanation of the difference.
• Summary letter total partners (20) doesn’t match the partners listed in the transaction report (25). I’ve asked for an explanation of the difference.

In general terms I think Air Miles lived up to the letter and spirit of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, which is not surprising given its profile and that it is essentially only in the data management business. If Air Miles wasn’t good at this, what hope would we have for others?

How to Request Your Own Data

To get your own data from Air Miles, refer to the Protecting Your Privacy page on its website, which provides the email address privacyoffice@airmiles.ca for making access requests. Feel free to copy and paste the language I used in my request as a starting point.

It being International Women’s Day I thought, yesterday morning, that it would be a good idea to send my young nephew in Montreal something to commemorate the day and to up his feminist game (he’s already doing gangbusters in this regard, but we can always do better).

So, over breakfast, I ordered him a copy of Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World by Rachel Ignotofsky.

I had no expectations it would actually arrive today and, indeed, Amazon gave me a delivery date of Friday on the order confirmation:

But this morning, almost exactly 24 hours after I placed my order, I got an email from a courier called Intelcom Express:

Your order XXXXXXXXXX is scheduled to be delivered in the next 3 hours by our driver Yassine.

Yassine is currently completing delivery number 1, you are delivery number 7.

Just 18 minutes later I got another email:

Your order XXXXXXXXXX has been delivered without signature today at 08:17 AM.

You’ll find attached the delivery proof.

I scrolled down. The “delivery proof” was a photograph of the package, in my nephew’s mailbox in Montreal, presumably taken by Yassine (photo cropped to remove the house number):

Whatever you think of Amazon, and its impact on the retail book industry, and its labour practices, this is an impressive end-to-end feat of logistics, and likely something that no other company is capable of achieving now or anytime soon with any consistency.

Contrast this to my order of a Bolstr bag, from it’s Cleveland manufacturer, back in January.

I placed the order on January 9, the bag arrived on January 25, 16 days later. That period included a full week between the printing of the shipping label and provision of the tracking number and the actual shipment.

And that was with a payment of $21 CAD in shipping (Amazon’s shipping cost, because I’m a Prime subscriber, was nothing).

A decade ago, that a package from Cleveland to Charlottetown would take only 16 days to arrive, and only cost $21 in shipping would have been considered an impressive feat; in the shadow of Amazon’s raised bar it seems slow enough to exist in an different fulfillment universe.

I’m not sure, from a bird’s eye view, how I feel about our new Amazon overlords, but man oh man are they game-changing.

Postscript: I suggested this minute-by-minute shipping update approach in an email to Jeff Bezos 23 years ago. His reply was “We’ve received several good suggestions from customers, but I think this is a particularly good one.”

I had to start somewhere, so with boxes from No Frills (thanks for the tip, Ray!) I moved the first load from Reinventorium v1.0 to Reinventorium v2.0 this morning.

It was just the books and notebooks—for a digital worker I seem to have a lot of them—but it was good to take the first step.

One of the great things about the former Sunday School classroom I’m moving into is the array of bookcases and shelves; everything has a new place, and I took the boxes back for the next load.

Every time I go to write bánh mì, a type of Vietnamese sandwich, I get stuck on whether it’s “nh” or “hn.”

Because the subway in Berlin is called the U-Bahn, I fall into the trap of thinking that bánh mì should be spelled the same way.

But it isn’t.

So that’s what I need to remember.

When I was booking my trip to Ottawa for this weekend, several factors conspired to make it sensible to fly to Montreal first: the barrier between the Aeroplan 15,000 and 25,000 mile reward levels, the opportunity to see Montreal family, and a curiousity-driven desire to always take the road more complexly traveled.

All of which resulted in me taking VIA Rail’s Business Class back from Ottawa to Dorval last night.

On the way up from Montreal on Friday I’d been in the regular Economy class, as the price difference between the two classes then was more than $100. But for yesterday’s train the $66 fare was only $16 more than economy.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

Ottawa’s train station is inconveniently located some distance from downtown–its original Union Station was conveniently across from the Parliament buildings, but it fell victim to urban renewal in 1966. It’s a just 20 minute ride to the station on the OC Transpo bus, so it’s not particularly arduous to get to.

I arrived characteristically early for my 6:30 p.m. train at 5:00 p.m., both because I had little else to do, and because I could relax in the Business Lounge in the station.

The station was deserted when I arrived, in part due my earliness, and in part, I expect, because all VIA’s trains to and from Toronto were cancelled for the rest of the day due a freight derailment outside of Kingston.

When I entered the glass sliding doors of the Business Lounge it too was deserted, and so I cannot write about the check-in procedures there as I was not subject to them (a few minutes later I ran into the lounge attendant while I was getting tea and she said “you’re going to Montreal?” and I replied “Yes!” and that was it).

The Business Lounge was not life-changing in the “allow us to custom-tailor a taco based on your chakras” style. But the chairs were comfortable, there was a Saturday Globe and Mail to read (prohibitively expensive on PEI so something I never read otherwise), crisp Granny Smith apples and a nice peppermint tea. I busied myself with catching up on email, listening to music, and trying not to stare at Gilles Duceppe as he entered the lounge with his posse and sat directly in front of me.

At 5:45 p.m. came the call to pre-board the train (marking another stage in my ever-higher ascendance), and after a short walk through the underground tunnels I was comfortably seated in seat 7S, a single seat, rear-facing, with ample room to stow my gear above and to the side.

The seat had a regular power outlet, and a tiny laptop-width shelf to the left, and so enough room to get all my devices charging. There was remarkable-easy-to-connect-to wifi with no need to authenticate other than entering the train number.

Onboard service started soon after we left the station: the drink cart came around and offered a selection of soft drinks, hard drinks and wine (I had a glass of red wine). Shortly thereafter we were offered a hot towel, and after about 15 minutes airline-style meals. Mine, because, apparently, I remembered to sign up for a vegetarian meal years ago when I enrolled in VIA’s loyalty program, was a vegetarian ravioli with cheese and spinach served with an olive bun. It was hot and tasty. Midway through eating, the drink cart rolled by again and I asked for a “tiny splash of red wine” and the porter filled my plastic cup almost to the brim. Which makes me think, apropos of Le Pure Café, that I should not interject lingual fancy into my wine ordering; it never goes well.

By the time I’d eaten, finished my gallons of wine, and written a difficult blog post, we were 5 minutes from Dorval and I quickly packed up my gear in preparation for disembarkation.

The front desk staff at the Aloft hotel where I’m staying assured me on the telephone that I could walk from the station to the hotel in 5 minutes. This proved to be inaccurate.

To walk from the VIA Dorval station to the Aloft hotel, I:

• Walked down the road leading up to the station, without a sidewalk, to the main access road.
• Took a series of turns and pedestrian-signal-guided road-crossings to travel, ultimately, 40 feet from where I started but across the road.
• Encountered a closed sidewalk through the underpass under the rail tracks.
• Ran across the busy road back to the station side where I’d started.
• Navigated over a muddy pathway through to the sidewalk on the other side of the underpass.
• Walked through the underpass, which was not cleared of snow and thus was icy and treacherous. And pitch black.
• At the end of the underpass sidewalk encountered a piece of plywood with “barré” spray-painted on it, with an arrow pointing me up a staircase that was almost sheer ice.
• Walked up the sheer ice staircase to find no directions at the top indicating where this detour went to next.
• Walked into a parking lot with no way out.
• Walked back out of the parking lot, over the road, through another parking lot, and apparently rejoined the sidewalk originally intended to take me to the hotel.
• Had a pleasant 5 minute walk on a plowed sidewalk, through several intersections with non-functioning pedestrian signals, to the hotel.

It’s always struck me as odd that the intermodal connection between VIA and Trudeau Airport is as clunky as it is given their proximity, but at least there’s a shuttle than runs between the two; the airport hotel shuttles don’t stop at the VIA station, meaning that if I’d wanted to avoid the treacherous ice-stairs I would have to take the VIA shuttle to the airport, then wait for the hotel shuttle from the airport.

Here’s a view of the VIA Rail Dorval station from my Aloft Hotel window, 456 metres and half a world away:

And here are the route of my walk traced on a Google Maps satellite view:

But I made it.

And a comfortable bed was waiting for me in the hotel.

Where I lounge now until my 1:00 p.m. flight home.

You gotta love a day when the National Post runs a correction that touches on math and physics. I found this video in helping to understand this.

Many years ago, on the shore of Lake Simcoe, with an early paramour.

We were squirreled away at her parents’ cottage for a weekend of assignations. We rented The Big Chill on VHS, shopped for groceries, and tucked in for a couple of days away from the world.

As we started the videotape playing we indulged in whatever illicit hallucinogen she’d secured (she was older, more worldly, and my spirit guide as regards mind-altering).

The call comes: there’s been a suicide at the summer home. The word goes out to old friends, and they make their way to the countryside.

Tom Berenger, Mary Kay Place, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, JoBeth Williams, Don Galloway, Meg Tilly.

We get hungry, and pause the video.

We retire to the kitchen, and make a fantastic meal (see also hallucinogens).

After perhaps 45 minutes of cooking and eating, we resume The Big Chill.

Oddly, everyone–Tom, Mary Kay, Jeff, William, JoBeth, Don, Meg–is packing up and getting ready to leave. This seems premature: shouldn’t there be more plot development in this movie? Where’s the chill?!

And then the credits role.

We are perplexed, but still mind-altered enough that we’re willing to accept the working premise that The Big Chill is a very, very short film that was very, very over-rated.

The next morning we realize that rather than pausing the film, we’d let it run during our meal break. And so had simply let the meaty heart of The Big Chill pass us by.

I have yet to re-watch it.

But let’s set that aside for moment and address the real question of the film.

How did the old friends from The Big Chill recognize each other after so long?

I spent the meaty heart of my day today at the celebration of the life of my friend Laurie Kingston. In so-doing I found myself in the company of both many unknown strangers and many long-ago-and-far-away-known familiars. While I recognized some of those familiars, many of them I didn’t recognize at all. And some of those, even once introduced to me, rang no bells.

There was a man I will call David, for example, who provided strong documentary evidence that he and I were once, if not friends at least of the same tribe. He quoted the details of events and conversations in which we’d both participated. Referenced common friends. Inside jokes. And yet, even with all this, I drew a complete blank. We had obviously been there.

But, nothing.

I had difficulty falling asleep last night due this absence in my memory: I was worried that I’d suffered targeted memory loss. Or that the whisky that my friend Tim kindly served me as a nightcap had broken my brain.

David is a thoroughly engaging fellow, quick with a comeback, easy with a story, kind of disposition and demeanour, and not the sort of person I would have cause to erase from my memory.

But, nothing.

Other cases were less severe: the midwife I convoyed to Texas with in the late 1980s who I didn’t recognize (although, to my credit, once she reminded me who she was, I at least recalled her existing).

But there was a pall of time over the proceedings which gave lie to the notion that I have complete recall of the events in my life.

And yet the group from The Big Chill all seemed to have immediately picked up from where they left off.

This seems implausible, and doesn’t prompt me to revisit the missing hour of the film.

––––––

The event in celebration of Laurie’s life was held in the Glebe Community Centre, a grand former Methodist church re-purposed for the neighbourhood. 

Hundreds of people from all parts of Laurie’s life–teenage roommates to later-day book club pals. About a dozen spoke, with heart and humour and grief and grace, from the podium.

Truth be told, although I call Laurie my friend, we never really met.

We attended the same university.

The Venn diagrams of our groups had significant overlap.

She married a wise and thoughtful friend.

And yet it wasn’t until recent years that we became acquainted, and even then it was primarily an email friendship circling around breast cancer, something originally a passing interest of mine when we first corresponded about her book, Not Done Yet, and then, suddenly, after Catherine’s own breast cancer diagnosis, a dramatically more personal one.

Despite her own significant medical concerns, Laurie was a frequent source of education, enlightenment and humour over the past 4 years.

From June of last year:

My kids were 2 and 7 when I shaved my head.

We ended up having a spontaneous head shaving party. We had temporary hair colour for us all. Our friends Eve and Ellen were in town, along with my mother. My friend Liam came over with clippers to do the honours. We took lots of photos. It all made it so much better.

On the other hand, I have a very distinct memory of sitting on my kitchen floor as a child and my mother coming home with new glasses. I burst into tears and would not stop until she put her old ones on.

Our kids don’t want us to change.

And none of this is easy.

And from May:

That palliative program sounds incredible. I think it’s really important to make the point that palliative care and hospice care are not the same thing. This shows that palliative care is about continuing living as best you can.

And from August of 2016, when I sent a note that Catherine was out of hospital:

That is fantastic news.

I am so glad. This is such a hard road but it sounds like you are getting good care moving forward.

I am obsessed with explaining palliative care too. I think there are people who avoid taking advantage because they think that palliative is the same think as hospice care. And then they miss out on resources that can really improve quality of life.

I have to share one last thing. I snorted at one point in your letter. Tim asked me what could have made me do that. I told him to read and he would know. Hit the sentence that included the word “bored” and snorted too. We have so been there.

And from June before then:

I got my first tattoo at 44, when I was well into cancer treatment. It’s also on my left calf. :)

Laurie and I came face-to-face only twice.

In 2009 Tim and Laurie and their boys had supper with us in our back yard on a beautiful August evening. Before they arrived, she emailed me about arrangements, and added:

Peter, it will be so nice to finally meet you. At Trent, I referred to you as the Snuffleupagus (had to google the spelling on that). My friends would say, “I just saw Peter Rukavina!” or wave at a passing car and say, “That was Peter Rukavina.” Everyone seemed to know (and like) you. But I was becoming convinced you didn’t really exist.

But I did exist, and so did she, and it was a lovely evening.

And then, in the fall of 2015, we stopped over to visit them while we were en route to Oslo and had an Ottawa stopover.

By that time it was a year after Catherine’s diagnosis, and yet an evening of tacos around their dining table that could have been maudlin was simply two families having supper with each other. We knew.

As you might imagine, the memorial for Laurie was packed with some additional resonance for me.

Last night I had the chance to get together with my friends Chris and Lene and their son Graham (fortunately we all remembered each other). While making our arrangements for supper, Chris texted “My first thought is of Tim.”

Which was entirely appropriate. And yet, I realized, that was not where my first thought was.

To come around to the point where I could confront both the loss of Laurie and the grief of my friend Tim, I had to swim through that resonance, and come to see today’s proceedings not (simply) as a template for what looms, eventually someday, in my life. Not an easy thing.

But here I am, on VIA Rail № 38 from Ottawa to Dorval, with tears streaming down my face, thinking about my friend Laurie and my friend Tim and how much they’ve meant–and do mean–to me.

At the end of the proceedings today someone said that although today was a celebration of Laurie it was hard not to be sad, and it is hard not to be sad. As I’ve just suddenly discovered.

In the words of one of the speakers was a story about how Tim and Laurie decided at one point that they needed to resolve to have more fun, despite it all.

And so they did. Not an easy feat, and by no means a universal salve. But important and helpful.

And so the other side of resonance is not only about shared grief and loss and sadness, but also about inherited hope. Not hope for the impossible or unreasonable but simply hope for as much of a fullness of life as we can muster.

As I listened to Laurie’s roommates and activist co-conspirators and book club friends and coworkers and MBC travelers today, Laurie emerged to me as a fuller person than I’d ever known. That both amplifies the sense of loss, but also makes me feel all the luckier for eventually convincing Big Bird to let us meet.