Eighteen years ago tonight Catherine and I were having supper at the Town & County the night before Oliver was born. Tonight we celebrated his impending adulthood at Papa Joe’s. With him.

I first signed up for a Flickr account in May 2004, three months after it launched, and in the intervening 14 years I uploaded 19,932 photos there.

I’ve used Flickr as a combination of photo backup and as a way to share photos with others, both through Flickr itself (especially in the early days, when I had an active community of friends and followers there) and here on my blog; for many years my standard method for embedding a photo in a blog post was to copy the Flickr embed code into the HTML, like this (from here):

<p>
  <a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/reinvented/27037231145/in/dateposted-public/" title="St Bride Foundation Wayzgoose">
    <img alt="St Bride Foundation Wayzgoose" height="768" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7114/27037231145_ae6fcaf911_b.jpg" width="1024" />
  </a>
</p>

When my yearly Flickr “Pro” invoice for $US49.99 arrived in my email this week I decided that it was time to move on: as Flickr usage has decreased generally, it’s no longer a place to go for community built around photos; and I’ve got all the storage and management functionality I need here on the blog to bring things in-house.

The only thing standing in my way was about a thousand blog posts that, like the one above, had Flickr photos embedded in them. I needed a way of bringing those photos home and updating the HTML to reflect his; so that, for example, instead of the HTML above I’d reference a locally-hosted photo, like this:

<p>
  <img alt="St Bride Foundation Wayzgoose" class="flickr_image" height="768" src="https://ruk.ca/sites/ruk.ca/files/flickr/27037231145_ae6fcaf911_b.jpg" width="1024" />
</p>

This turned out to be an interesting task:

• Over the years there have been various URL schemes at Flickr for referencing photos: what started out as static.flickr,com later became staticflickr.com, for example (although Flickr, to its credit, never broke URLs).
• As digital cameras have evolved, and as the width of my blog template has expanded, I’ve taken and embedded ever-larger photos; Flickr has different URLs for different photo sizes, and I generally wanted to find the largest one available and use that, even when I’d previously embedded a smaller version.

To achieve all of the permutations and combinations I needed to handle, I hacked together a Drupal module to look at every post on the blog, see if it had embedded Flickr photos, download the largest version available of any embedded photos from Flickr, modify the HTML for the image to point to the new local image locations, and update the blog post.

I’ve run this on the 8,600 posts here and updated 1,044 images. There a few stragglers to handle manually–embedded Flickr videos, links to photos rather than embeds–and I’ll mop those up before the October 19 drop-dead date.

In the meantime, here are the numbers for fourteen years of Flickr photo storage:

• Individual photos were viewed 1,422,328 times.
• My “Photostream”–my Flickr “home page,” if you will–was viewed 138,865 times.

My most popular Flickr photos, by number of views, were these:

While I quit Twitter and its brethren for reasons of geopolitics and addiction, I’m leaving Flickr as a happy, satisfied customer: the site seems in good hands now that it has left Yahoo! and joined SmugMug, so all the geopolitical fears of Yahoo! dominating the world via my baby photographs have long since passed. I simply want to be in more control of my digital data, and to have everything that’s part of a blog post fall into terrain that’s under my dominion.

The BBC turned a summer day of its Radio 4 programming into art (via Brendan Dawes).

Like many of you, perhaps, I’ve never completely forgiven Google for killing off Google Reader, its excellent standards-setting RSS reader.

After flirting with commercial competition, like Feedly, for a time, I finally settled on a self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS (along with its companion mobile app) as a serviceable replacement.

It is really only possible to love Tiny Tiny RSS in the way that one would love a Lada: one respects its fortitude, appreciates that it gets you were you need to go, and admires that it comes with a toolkit in the trunk. But the love is necessarily capped, and one hopes that, eventually, one might trade in the Lada for something slightly jazzier.

That something, in the case of Tiny Tiny RSS, might be FreshRSS, a new self-hostable RSS reader from Framasoft. I installed it this evening, and it is, indeed, beautiful, capable and jazzy. The requirements for running it are modest: a relatively modern LAMP server. There’s no mobile app required as the design is pleasantly responsive, and works equally well on desktop and mobile.

Framasoft is “people working together with the same desire: promote digital freedoms.” In FreshRSS it appears to be doing just that.

I’ll report back after a few weeks of using FreshRSS as to how it performs as my daily RSS driver.

The Adirondack chair doesn’t quite follow physical laws, but that yellow, oh my. A recent refill of the yellow half-pan in my watercolour set from an art supply shop in Amsterdam.

I’m still waiting for the job of making me a window here in my subterranean office to rise to the top of the to-do list, so unless there’s a hurricane going on, I have no way of knowing what the weather is like outside.

As a proxy for this I can connect to the “live view” of my Ring Video Doorbell, across the street. It’s fuzzy, but clear enough to let me know if I need an umbrella or not.

Although the races for the New York 25th congressional seat and for New York Senate are not expected to be close (Kirsten Gillibrand is given a 99.9% chance of winning for the Democrats in the Senate), I am, like many, particularly motivated to vote in the US midterm elections this year.

So I filled in my absentee ballot this morning, well in advance of the deadline, and it’s going out in the mail today, complete with a beaver stamp, as befits a dual national.

I got to know George Guimond many years ago, both through his work as an architect here in Charlottetown and by virtue of his family being neighbours, in a country sense, when we lived out on the Kingston Road in the mid-1990s.

George retired from architecture some years ago, he and his wife Sherrill moved to Forest City, New Brunswick, and George found a second career as a woodworker:

After working 30 years as an architect, it came time for a change. A few years ago a work colleague loaned me a copy of  the book, “The Soul of a Tree” by George Nakashima and I immediately knew that  fine woodworking would become my new career.  The interest in wood follows a tradition of woodworkers with both my father and grand father being accomplished  woodworkers. I now see those years of experience as a design architect have served as a training ground for designing my original pieces. The furniture is constructed using traditional joinery and assembly, using solid woods, something not found in today’s mass produced furniture. Joinery includes hand cut dovetails, finger joints, mortise and tenon, wedged through tenons, etc…

You can see samples of his work on his Applewood Studio website.

“A dual purpose cabinet, a stair for a loved pet and storage cubbies,” by George Guimond.

I’ve been going through my back issues of Whole Earth Review lately; I’d forgotten what a healthy classified section the magazine had, and that you needed to be a subscriber to place an ad, which seems an excellent idea.

I have known Catherine Hennessey for 25 years, and I’ve always delighted in the numerical twist that unites us: she was born in 1933, I was born in 1966. So when I turned 33, she turned 66; when I turned 44, she turned 77.

And so when I turn 66, she will turn 99.

This year Catherine turned 85, and I wanted to make something to mark the occasion, so I combined my love of letterpress with my newfound love of bookbinding and made the guest book for her birthday party.

The covers are heavy green Saint Armand paper covered book board. I printed Catherine’s name on the front cover before affixing the paper to the book board. It’s set in 30 point Futura Bold. For the endpapers I used orange Japanese paper from a pack I purchased in Halifax in March from The Ikebana Shop.

The inside signatures are of cream-coloured Saint Armand tag paper which was a joy to work with: more a living thing than something manufactured. I printed Catherine’s name at the top of each page, along with her birthday date, in a casual script that Sarah Saunders left a font of on my doorstep one day several years ago.

I bound the cover and signatures together using a coptic stitch, something well-suited to a book that’s meant to lay open flat. My stitching needs work, as it’s something completely new to me, but it did the job and held everything together: as I wrote to Catherine in my colophon at the back, “the book feels like it’s improbably held together, but, somehow, it stays bound–like Ms. Hennessey.”

I was very happy to see the book well-used on the evening of Catherine’s party.