One of the unexpectedly helpful aspects of Spotify is its “Concerts” section, which shows me nearby concerts based on what it knows about my musical tastes.

This is how I ended up at the Martha Wainwright concert at the Trailside in September, and it’s how I came to know that The Weather Station is playing in Sackville on December 9, 2017:

Until I saw that concert coming up I’d never heard of The Weather Station, but since then I’ve become a fan, and so I was excited to see a new album drop on October 6, 2017, the self-titled The Weather Station.

I love this album, and I especially love the way the lyrics are presented as prose, not poetry, which explains something about the approach to songwriting that underlies the album.

Isn’t it great that this can be a verse in a song (Thirty):

Gas came down from a buck twenty—the joke was how it broke the economy anyhow. The dollar was down, but my friends opened businesses; there were new children. And again, I didn’t get married; I wasn’t close to my family; and my dad was raising a child in Nairobi—she was three now, he told me. Gas stations I laughed in, I noticed fucking everything: the light, the reflections, different languages, your expressions. We would fall down laughing, effervescent, and all over nothing, all over nothing. Just as though it was a joke, my whole life through, all of the pain and the sorrow I knew, all of the tears that had fallen from my eyes; I can’t say why. We walked in the park; under the shade, I avoided your eyes. I was ashamed of my own mind, no SSRIs, my day as dark as your night.

I wish I could memorialize the year I was 30 with such aplomb.

I hope to be at the bowling alley in Sackville in December to see The Weather Station live.

I showed Oliver a post from Brand New this morning about the redesigned logo of the Science Museum in London. The “before” logo looked like this:

Oliver said that this reminded him of a logo he’d seen before, something to do with the sun or with solar.

He searched Google for “sun logo” (no luck) and “solar logo” (no luck) and then for variations that described the logo he had in his mind “logo italics horizontal vertical.”

No luck.

I tried to walk him through different approaches to matching what was in his mind with what could be found on Google, but the exercise ended in failure.

Five minutes later, after I’d left the picture, I got an email from Oliver with the Sun Microsystems logo attached:

That was it.

This is remarkable because:

1. The old Science Museum and the Sun Microsystems logo do, indeed, share a fundamental design concept, but one that’s difficult to explain (“squared-up lettershapes arranged interestingly?”).
2. Through some mechanism that I didn’t bear witness to, Oliver completed the task once I was done interfering.
3. Sun Microsystems went out of business?!

Somewhere in the back of my mind I recalled that Sun had been swallowed up in the last decade (it was Oracle, 7 years ago, in 2010), but I’d lost track of how that proceeded, and that Sun had ceased to exist as a brand.

There was a time in the early 1990s when I used resources from the Sun-sponsored sunsite.unc.edu at the University of North Carolina several times a day; back in the day, this site, and its cousin at MIT, tsx11.mit.edu, were the place to go for Linux and related software.

The original PEI Crafts Council webserver, and much of what underlay the original Province of PEI website used resources from those two sites. At the time it was impossible to imagine a world where Sun Microsystems didn’t play a significant role in the Internet. And now it’s gone.

Also, my son is pretty sharp.

Back in the early 1990s I was working as an apprentice printer in the Composing Room of the Peterborough Examiner newspaper. Eager to earn the trust of my union brothers and sisters, I worked hard, and I volunteered for things as I much as I could. Which is how I ended up the Composing Room representative on the Joint Occupational Health and Safety Committee.

Anxious to understand what the role of the committee was, I called the provincial Labour Department for guidance. The person I was transferred to when I called happened to be the workplace inspector responsible for the Examiner, and my call prompted him to realize that he hadn’t made a surprise inspection in some time. So he decided to make one, and said he’d be there in 20 minutes. He told me inform the Publisher of his impending visit.

This was not my original intention, and it could have put me in a sticky wicket, especially as he went on to find a number of health and safety violations, things like a printing press running without proper guards in place.

Fortunately I had the protection (and respect) of my union, if not the thanks of management.

Thirty years later and here in Charlottetown, Oliver and Catherine and I headed to a local restaurant for supper one day this summer.

Oliver and I, and Oliver’s service dog Ethan, had been there a couple of times together; we’d always been greeted warmly, and the food was always good.

This time, however, the server who greeted us at the door told us that Ethan would not be allowed in the restaurant.

We explained that he was a service dog, and she said that, as much as she realized that he was allowed in, her manager had told her not to admit us, and there was nothing she could do.

We left (and then followed up later to ensure this wouldn’t happen again).

My worry was that we’d put the server in a difficult situation, one where she was forced to do what she knew not to be the right thing. She didn’t have a union to back her up, and if she’d pressed the issue I’m sure there was a risk that she’d be putting her job in jeopardy.

I thought of both incidents when I read of Peter Bevan-Baker’s plan to introduce a Private Members Bill in the fall session of the Legislative Assembly that would see “whistle blower” protection afforded to all PEI workers.

As Peter explained it on his blog today:

Just in case this excursion into statutory minutia has been so gripping that it has got your heart racing at dangerous levels, I shall protect you from the rapture of what a jurisdictional scan is, and cut to the chase of why I’m doing this. Imagine you worked in a private nursing home, and your boss was not following provincial guidelines, and that concerned you because you cared deeply and above all for the safety and well-being of the people in your care. After speaking with your employer and trying to fix things internally with no success, in the absence of legal protection, it would be a risky thing to do to expose those concerns to the appropriate licensing body, and you may well jeopardize your job. Imagine the same dynamic in a restaurant where health and safety protocols are being ignored, or on a farm where the application of pesticides may not be following provincial regulations. In all of these cases, currently there are no protections for people in the private sector who bring these concerns to the appropriate body.

As my own experiences suggest, I believe Peter’s on to something here, and I encourage you to participate in the discussion of the draft bill to ensure that it receives fair hearing and passage.

Baker John, down at Breadworks, has been workshopping a new olive bread on Saturdays. It gets better every week, and this week’s version was particularly excellent. It you’re a fan of olive bread, watch out for it.

Oh, and Breadworks has a slicer now, which has much-improved my relationship to their bread. Bravo.

I’ve had Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet running through my head all weekend. I finally found an outlet for my earworm in the public piano in Confederation Landing Park.

It’s impossible not to hear this without thinking of the last episode of M*A*S*H.

Oliver and I took Ethan for a windy Thanksgiving Sunday walk around the waterfront. When we got to the Charlottetown Yacht Club we were greeted by a cacophony of jingle-jangle. Here’s 23 seconds of it.

It’s been fourteen years since Catherine Hennessey last posted on her blog, but I remain ever-hopeful.

I just now moved her blog, which I coded up for her from scratch in PHP oh those many years ago, to a modern webserver–the same one that runs this blog–and, while there were a few rough edges to the PHP code that needed filing off, it all went rather easily.

Catherine remains, in many ways, Prince Edward Island’s alpha blogger–back in 2003 she was the Island’s authority on the topic.

When Catherine turned 75, I took her collected blog posts and turned them into a book; you can still but one, print-on-demand, from Lulu; if you’d like to print one yourself, or just scroll through it digitally, here’s a print-ready PDF file, and here’s the cover.

The Crown Princess called at the Port of Charlottetown this morning, disgorging more than 3,000 iPad-picture-taking, Tilly-hat-wearing day visitors into the streets and motor coaches of Charlottetown.

No matter what evil you might think of cruise ship tourism, the ship is a truly impressive marvel of marine engineering.

And even though it looks huge, it’s only 52nd on the list of the largest cruise ships in the world.

Crown Princess fun fact: the ships “godmother” is Martha Stewart, having christened it in 2006, only a year after being released from prison.

From this week’s Cool Tools podcast: Rebecca Romney, rare book dealer, blows the lid off the need for white gloves in archives:

White Gloves — The “Anti” Cool Tool — “I would love to take a moment to debunk the myth that I should be wearing white gloves when I handle printed books. From the British Library to the Houghton, none of the major conservators and rare book curators recommend these. And for good reason: with gloves, you lose your tactile sensitivity and are much more likely to damage the book while handling it. Just wash your hands first and you’re fine.”