We opted for a slow drive home today from Wolfville, starting with breakfast at the Wolfville Farmers’ Market and then heading east toward home around noon.

Rather than a straight shot across to Brookfield, or the reportedly-faster dip down to Halifax and slingshot back out the 102, we opted to hug the coast, spending most of the day on Rte. 215 along the Bay of Fundy. Autumn foliage was at the peak of its peak, and we could not have picked a better day to drive through the Nova Scotia hinterland.

The highlight of the day was coming across a camera obscura perched on a hill in Cheverie. You’d think such a wondrous attraction would deserve a sign, but there was none, and most drivers, I suspect, speed by unaware.

It’s a fascinating construction of three interlocking brick cathedrals, entered through wooden doors into a darkened room above which is a system of lenses that reflects the scene of the shore, and the Bay of Fundy beyond, onto the floor.

If you are in the Annapolis Valley, and are traveling east toward Truro, it doesn’t take much to detour up to Cheverie.

(Just up the road from Chevrerie lies Walton, which I recalled was the birthplace of my old friend Stephen Southall, something I confirmed with a phone call from the car. His late father George ministered to five United Churches in the area in the 1960s; apparently there is a plaque on the wall in the United Church in Cheverie, which is enough to inspire me to return on our next trip that way).

Back in the early 1990s, Laurie Brown moved from MuchMusic VJ to CBC Television’s flagship The Journal as arts correspondent and, in the process, defined a new kind of cultural journalism for the country. Inside the confines of the musty corporation she reported on Canadian art, music, movies and theatre with a leather jacket, a distinctive voice, and approach that was curious, innovative, and owed little to the CBC’s usual way of reporting on the arts.

Contrast this 1981 CBC interview with Robert Bateman by Barbara McLeod with this 1996 CBC profile of the Rheostatics by Laurie Brown, for example: McLeod was a docent whose style typified the kind of arts journalism I grew up with; Brown’s approach was so much more immersed and engaged, so much more “art is of us and for us and by us.” It was a style that she took to everything she reported, and I became a regular and devoted viewer.

Moving on from television, Brown hosted The Signal on CBC Radio 2 from 2007 to 2017, years that happened to coincide with Oliver’s bedtime, and Oliver having a radio next to his bed; he fell asleep to Laurie Brown for most of his formative years.

When Brown moved from the CBC to a self-produced podcast, Pondercast, Oliver, now with a podcast-playing Google Home in his bedroom, followed her there, and has been a devoted and regular listener.

And so when an Atlantic Canadian tour of live podcast tapings was announced for this fall, Oliver let it be known that he needed to attend one; as Oliver has seldom expressed such a definitive need for any activity, I jumped at the chance to build a visit to the Wolfville taping into his “birthday season.”

Which is how we found ourselves in the famed Al Whittle Theatre tonight listening to Laurie Brown’s words and Joshua Van Tassel’s sounds.

It was a delightful show, one that brought to mind Oscar Wilde’s similar tour of the Maritimes in 1882, a tour described like this:

In an era that saw rapid technological changes, social upheaval, and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, he delivered a powerful anti-materialistic message about art and the need for beauty.

The episode we witnessed tonight was very much in that spirit: over a bed of Van Tassel’s sonic creations, Brown delivered an extended rumination on the sea, the horizon, on memory and repetition and learning, on Darwin and evolution, on whales, and on what it is that we call home.

When I was Oliver’s age, Laurie Brown was the apotheosis of cool in Canada, turning a format on its ear and injecting new life into it; 30 years and several reinventions on, she’s managed to continue to be that still.

Do attend a taping if you’re near, you will not regret it.

The final event of Oliver’s Birthday Season, a trip to Wolfville to bear witness to a live taping of Laurie Brown’s Pondercast podcast.

So, of course, we recorded a podcast while waiting for the show to start.

I can’t figure out whether this bus stop bench was mis-installed, got hit by something, is buckling under pressure, or was just artfully designed.

At the end of my “stakeholders tour” of Province House back in June, I mentioned the work that my friend Perry Williams has been doing with photographing and editing “3D tours” of places on the Island, and suggested that it would be great if he could expose the under-renovation building to this treatment.

Parks Canada subsequently connected with Perry, and the result is this fantastic look inside the deconstructed home of our Legislative Assembly.

This is as good a use of virtual reality as I’ve ever seen, and provides so much more context than simple photographs would.

Almost twenty years ago, with the assistance of Brian Simpson, the Provincial Photographer, and using a complicated QuickTime VR authoring tool, we did some early experimenting with virtual reality at Green Gables; the quality of what Perry is doing these days, and the usability of his tours, far outstrips what we were capable of back then.

XYZ CARGO designs and manufactures bicycles in Hamburg and Copenhagen using a novel and humane business model:

Fair pricing: We ask ourselves how to give access to XYZ CARGOs to as many people as possible and how to do this in a fair and symbiotic way. We wouldn’t try to get the biggest profit, but balance a fee for our work with the costs and the time we have invested. All persons should be able to access XYZ CARGOs in a way, that fits both: their means and their needs.

We offer a range of ways to get hold of a XYZ CARGO: we sell readymade, assembled cycles and we arrange workshops for those who want to build their XYZ CARGO themselves. Finally people can also build their XYZ CARGOs from scratch on their own, according to the Creative Commons license above. However we do not give away blueprints for the commercial models.

Being “fair and symbiotic” are excellent business goals.

(via Low-tech)

From Olle, a tip about making events that include everyone, especially newcomers:

There were at least two new faces at the meetup, and I had been given a hint by Morgan about the article Breaking Cliques at Events. In it, a method for reminding people that the longer they’ve been in a group, the more responsibility they have to welcome newcomers to it: “Take the number of years you’ve been in the group. That number is how many new people you say hello to at a meetup.”

Most groups I’ve been a member of give little thought to this, adopting a “it was hard for me to become a part of the group, so don’t expect a free pass, newbie” attitude. That’s not a good way to run a railroad.

From How to Build a Low-tech Website:

In contrast, this website runs on an off-the-grid solar power system with its own energy storage, and will go off-line during longer periods of cloudy weather. Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system, because above a certain threshold the fossil fuel energy used for producing and replacing the batteries is higher than the fossil fuel energy saved by the solar panels.

The “less than 100% reliable” design pattern is a powerful one.

I get pinged on my mobile phone, for example, if this website goes down. But only between 7:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m.

I could hire a antipodean doppelganger to keep the watch in small hours, but the risk-reward of that wouldn’t be worth it. If MySQL crashes at 3:00 a.m., y’all are on your own until I wake up.

If you search for help downloading all of your Flickr photos, along with the metadata, you will, no doubt, get trapped in a jungle of old advice about how you must do this page by page from your “camera roll.” Or use arcane scripts that probably use an out of date Flickr API.

The modern answer, it turns out, is much simpler: on your Flickr account page, in the lower right, you’ll find a tool called “Your Flickr Data” that allows you to submit a “data takeout” request. It took about 18 hours to process mine, and when it was done I got an email directing me back to this page, where the section was now populated with links to ZIP files of the photos and metadata:

Very helpful.