When we watch CBC Compass on our Kodi, the closed captioning is automatically turned on. The result is often equal parts hilarious and disturbing.

Hilarious because the captioning is so bad so often, presumably a side-effect of it being done in real time by computers or humans.

Disturbing because although it’s hilarious for me, if I relied upon the captioning in lieu of being able to hear the newscast, I can’t imagine being able to abide it, the signal to noise ratio being so poor.

Every morning around 9:00 a.m. Ethan (the service dog) needs to get his vest on and start his formal work day. He generally does everything he can to avoid this: he’ll hide in his crate, he’ll run upstairs and hide in our beds. And, even once he’s suited up, he’ll try to camouflage himself.

“Maybe if I shrink down low and out of sight behind this blanket they’ll go to school without me.”

More than 10 years ago, following the example of my friend Lowell, I started to donate plasma, every 56 days, at Canadian Blood Services here in Charlottetown.

At the time my office was right across the street, and it was a pleasant, stress-free way to take part of an afternoon off, and do some good.

After a few years, though, things fell off the rails: I got sick just before an appointment and had to cancel it, and then neglected to re-book, and I fell off the call-back radar. Then I moved my office, and didn’t have the visual reminder to donate every day on my way in.

Back in December, though, I had coffee with Lowell, and he mentioned a recent donation of his, and I realized that 10 years had passed since my last donation.

So when I got back to the office I called 1-888-2-DONATE and booked myself an appointment, and today was the day.

In the intervening decade they’ve really upped their game over there: they now email out a link to an online questionnaire on the morning of your appointment so that you can fill out the “Have you ever had Chagas’ disease, Babesiosis, or Leishmaniasis?”-style questions in the privacy of your own computer; the end of this process is an encrypted QR code that the nurse scans at the start of the donation process. It shaves 10 minutes off the appointment.

They’ve also removed the requirement to provide a complete history of all the countries you’ve visited recently: during my heady travel days that alone used to take 5 minutes.

The donation clinic has been renovated, and now operates more like an (efficient, friendly, no-waiting) airline check-in counter.

And the Haemonetics PCS2 machines that do the plasma extraction have been upgraded to work almost twice as fast (an upgrade, my nurse told me, that was done entirely in software).

And so for my 1:20 p.m. appointment I was in, donated, feed cookies and juice, and out the door by 2:30 p.m.

And most of the nurses, bless their hearts, remembered me from the last go-around.

Donating plasma has always been easy and painless; now it’s easier and painless. If you’ve ever considered doing it–or if you’re just casting about for a regular selfless act to fill out your schedule–I encourage you to book an appointment.

I’ve already booked my next one.

The only “loyalty card” program that I have the patience to participate in is Air Miles. There’s only a small real-world pay-off for doing this, as its reward levels are so high that using its points to actually fly anywhere requires years. But I like having a thing that I do as part of the weekly grocery shop. It is, in other words, a completely irrational surrender of my purchase data with little reward. The gamification of shopping.

So, what better thing to do that to pull data out of my purchase habits; that way at least I learn something.

Air Miles does not make this easy: there’s no Google-style “takeout” option, only an Account Statement History page that defaults to showing the last 31 days of transactions:

There’s an option in the top-right corner of this page to change the date range, but the maximum time period is the last twelve months, and I want all the transactions, not just a year’s worth.

Fortunately, it’s possible to hack the page. If you select “the last twelve months” from the selector, you’ll see that the URL changes to:

https://www.airmiles.ca/arrow/AccountStatementsHistory?range=-11

The key here is the -11 which, it turns out, is a parameter that determines the number of months to go back in time; you can manually override this by changing it to a higher number, like this:

https://www.airmiles.ca/arrow/AccountStatementsHistory?range=-144

I found, by trial and error, that I could go back to April 2012–almost 6 years–by doing this. I know I had Air Miles transactions before then, but perhaps 6 years is the limit of their current system.

With 6 years of data in my browser, I used the Table to Excel Firefox plug-in to save the data in the table to the clipboard as tab-delimited ASCII. I pasted the result into an ASCII text file that looked like this:

   Date    Sponsor       Description   Reward Miles    Bonus   
 13 Jan 18      SOBEYS INC    CHARLOTTETOWN   1 REWARD MILE FOR EVERY $20    +9           
 23 Dec 17     SOBEYS INC    CHARLOTTETOWN   1 REWARD MILE FOR EVERY $20    +9           
 22 Dec 17     IRVING    SACKVILLE CIRCLE K    2X REWARD MILES FOR 20L FUEL           +2     
 21 Dec 17     SHELL CANADA    ELDON PE    EVERYDAY IN-STORE OFFER    +1           
 16 Dec 17     SOBEYS INC    CHARLOTTETOWN   1 REWARD MILE FOR EVERY $20    +1           
 09 Dec 17     IRVING    SACKVILLE CIRCLE K    1 REWARD MILE PER 20L OF FUEL    +2           
 27 Nov 17     SHELL REGULAR MILES   NORTH RIVER PE    STANDARD OFFER     +1           
 25 Nov 17     SOBEYS INC    CHARLOTTETOWN   1 REWARD MILE FOR EVERY $20    +2

I loaded this file up into LibreOffice, and created some pivot tables to do some analysis.

Air Miles by Sponsor

Sponsor	Miles
Air Miles	50
Boston Pizza	2
Budget Rent-a-Car	14
Eastlink	79
Foodland	14
Irving	27
Kent	90
Lawtons	40
Michaels	12
Needs	1
Old Navy	11
Rexall	5
Shell	9
Sobeys	2665
Staples	39
Toys R Us	1
Total	3059

Transactions by Sponsor

Sponsor	Transactions
Air Miles	1
Boston Pizza	1
Budget Rent-a-Car	1
Eastlink	17
Foodland	2
Irving	14
Kent	3
Lawtons	20
Michaels	6
Needs	1
Old Navy	1
Rexall	1
Shell	6
Sobeys	233
Staples	8
Toys R Us	1
Total	316

What did I learn?

I earn most of my Air Miles at Sobeys, which makes sense as this is a grocery store where I shop almost every week, and where the cashiers make a point of asking me for my card: there have been 303 weeks between April 2012 and today, and I’ve shopped at Sobeys 233 times, or 77% of those weeks.

Setting aside various “buy 3 barrels of pickles and get 10 Air Miles” bonuses, I’ve earned those miles at Sobeys’s standard rate of 1 mile for every $20 spent, so the 2,665 Air Miles came at a cost of roughly $53,300 in grocery shopping.

In addition to travel rewards, Sobeys allow redemption for cash of Air Miles at a rate of $10 for 95 miles, so my 2,665 miles earned from Sobeys can, in theory, be redeemed for $280 in groceries; that’s 0.5% in savings when compared to the amount I had to spent to earn those miles.

What is left out of that equation, of course, is what changes in my purchase habits Air Miles was able to shape, either through steering me to buy different products, or more of the same product.

Redeeming miles for travel, on the other hand, sees my 2,665 miles earned from Sobeys lands me in the 2500 mile tier, which, no matter high or low season, will fly me, return, as far west as Ontario (1,700 miles), as far east as Newfoundland (1,200 miles), and as far south as Virginia (1,500 miles):

That ain’t nothing. But then again, “get a free flight to Ontario for every $50,000 you spend on groceries,” doesn’t exactly sound like the greatest bargain in the world.

Why is this important?

You only have to look to the psychology of Amazon Prime to see analytics and incentives being used by companies trying to manipulate our purchasing at a deep level. Generally the data underlying these manipulations is opaque to us, designed to put the incentive program in the best light, and to prevent us from making educated choices that might ultimately benefit us and not the company.

It’s no surprise, for example, that Amazon doesn’t provide a tool to allow you to analyze your spending and discover whether Amazon Prime is actually saving you money or not; Amazon has significant stock in maintaining the illusion that it is.

In the same way, the Air Miles transaction dashboard is organized to give the appearance of transparency, while skewing the options and the presentation to de-emphasize the negative. When I earned 9 Air Miles on January 31, for example, I got myself 0.52% of the way to a flight to Ontario: there’s a reason Air Miles chooses to express that as a “9” rather than as a “0.52%.”

There’s only going to be more of this, more often, in the future, and if we want to assert our rights as consumers to make this incentivizing transparent, now is the time to do it.

To that end, following the guidelines on the Air Miles privacy page, I emailed the following access request yesterday to privacyoffice@airmiles.ca:

Under the provisions of the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, I would like to request a copy of personal information held by Loyalty Management Group Canada Inc. or its affiliates about me.

Specifically, I would like a CSV, Excel or other machine-readable file containing information about transactions recorded resulting from my presentation of my Air Miles card, since the card was issued to me, with the following data for each transaction:

1. Date and Time of Transaction
2. Sponsor of Transaction (i.e. the business where the card was presented)
3. Location of Transaction
4. Description of Transaction (i.e. “1 REWARD MILE FOR EVERY $20”).
5. Reward Miles accumulated as a result of Transaction
6. Bonus Miles accumulated as a result of Transaction
7. Any other personally-identified information transmitted by the Sponsor to Loyalty Management Group Canada Inc. or its affiliates about me, or about the Transaction, at the time of Transaction.

The Act gives Air Miles 30 days to respond. Stay tuned.

In The Surprising Success of America’s Oldest Living Magazine, journalist Marin Cogan goes deep on The Old Farmer’s Almanac that’s been my professional home for more than 20 years (which, given its longevity, is only just under a tenth of its life).

I only knew John Bil as the owner of the Ship to Shore, the erstwhile restaurant in Darnley where I had the pleasure of eating several times, most notably on the night of Reuben’s Jamboree back in 2009.

John, it turns out, was a great friend to the Pendergast family, and they to him, and Shane Pendergast captures that connection, and John’s essence, poignantly in this short film about him.

John died this week, and so Shane’s film serves as a remembrance of his life for those that knew him and those that didn’t.

Toward the end of the film, Shane asked John if he had any regrets; he replied:

I’m really fortunate: over the years I did whatever I wanted to do.

So I don’t really have a bucket list. Which is great, because it means I didn’t have to start looking back and figuring out things that I didn’t do before that I should do now. It meant that I could just keep living. And keep doing whatever I wanted to do.

And now I’m so happy that I did that the way that I did it over the years, because it means that I can live in the now, without regretting, without wondering.

I look at my life as a semi-random collection of amazing things that have happened.

You know, I’m probably gonna die. It sucks. But it didn’t change me, it reaffirmed the choices I’d made.

Das letzte Hemd hat keine Taschen.

Oliver was experimenting with a Spotify-playlist-generating website called Momixa last night: you enter two songs and Momixa generates a Spotify playlist from your choices (there’s a rich ecosystem of sites like this; Oliver’s explored almost all of them).

I asked him to try it out for me, and, on the spur of the moment, rattled off two songs from my youth: Baby Come Back by Player, and You Light Up My Life by Debbie Boone. Here’s the playlist that got generated:

If you’re a Spotify user, you can load up the playlist yourself simply by clicking on that link.

There are a couple of issues worthy of note here:

1. Both of the anchor songs were released in 1977, when I was 11 years old.
2. I owned copies of both songs on 45 rpm records (this likely raised their profile on the tip of my tongue).
3. Listening to that playlist immediately transports me back to the mid-1970s. I think I know the words, on some level at least, to all of those songs.

Thinking back, I imagine that 1977 was a formative year for me music-wise. I was likely taking the Canada Coach Lines bus into Hamilton every Saturday morning and stopping in at the record shops to buy 45s and albums (But what record store was it? It says here that Sam’s didn’t open in Hamilton until the late 1980s). I had a hifi in my room, and a radio under my pillow to listen to while falling asleep.

Oliver’s 18th birthday is still 7 months away, but he’s decided that he needs to start planning his birthday party now. As part of this effort he’s developing a guest list for the party that includes everyone who’s every been to one of his birthday parties (his self-selected theme for the party being “goodbye childhood, hello adulthood”). This is turning out to be tricky, as my documentation on the blog of his birthdays ranges from the detailed to the vague (will we ever learn the true identify of “little girl”?).

For this reason I decided it was important to take a photo of my breakfast, the “veggie toast” and a cortado from Receiver Coffee.

Back in 2011 I wrote about how the Marimekko Cash & Carry bag, I’d found the perfect bag for carrying around all my stuff.

In the intervening years this sort of bag has come to be known, by both preppers and hipsters, as an “EDC” bag—for every day carry. It’s a linguistic trick to avoid “purse” that I don’t think we really needed, but that’s where the SEO is now.

The Marimekko bag has served me well for almost 7 years, but has started to fall apart of late; most noticably there is an ever-widening rip in the top corner, and the top and interior zippers have started to go bad. I wrote to Marimekko about getting it fixed, but they demurred, and so I went looking for a replacement.

I ended up finding the Bolstr EDC on Kickstarter, where it’s described like this:

A few extra pockets - bolstr is the perfect crossbody bag for guys and their smartphones, keys, wallets, sunglasses, but not much more.

A lot of what you end up looking at on the end of an “EDC” Google search is from the prepper end of the spectrum: bags designed to carry keys, wallet, phone, hunting knife, ammo, dried food, matches and binoculars.

The Bolstr bag was a more modest offering, and allowed me to support a product that’s not serving the post-apocalyptic market.

And so I ordered one, and it arrived today.

First impressions are good, and the bag will be over my shoulder tomorrow for the first time.

Full review to follow when it’s got some miles on it.