If you’re someone who requires a support person when you travel, that person can travel with you on Air Canada, WestJet and VIA Rail at no cost; our family has benefited from this several times, and I’ve always appreciated the moral underpinning of this policy, which is known as “one passenger, one fare.”

We didn’t learn until this trip that the same policy extends to the UP Pearson Express and GO Train as well.

For the UP Pearson Express, which runs from Pearson Airport to Union Station, you simply by one ticket, and declare the support person to the ticket inspector on the train. Details here.

For the GO Train, you buy one ticket and have it stamped with a blue “Attendant” stamp on purchase, and the ticket is used for both people. Details here.

The TTC—public transit in Toronto—has a similar policy, but it requires the support person to have a special “Support Person Assistance Card.”

I wish that someone had told us about all of this at raising-a-child-with-autism school.

If you take the elevator from the main concourse at Toronto Union Station down to the GO Train concourse, you pass a room marked “New CACF Room.”

Croatian American Charitable Foundation? Common Application Configuration Framework? Camara Argentina de Contratistas Forrajeros?

No.

It’s the Central Alarm and Control Facilities room.

From the 2006 Ontario Building Code:

3.2.6.7. Central Alarm and Control Facility

(1) A central alarm and control facility shall be provided on the storey containing the entrance for fire fighter access referred to in Articles 3.2.5.4. and 3.2.5.5. in a location that,

(a) is readily accessible to fire fighters entering the building, and

(b) takes into account the effect of background noise likely to occur under fire emergency conditions, so that the facility can properly perform its required function under such conditions.

Now I really want to see what’s behind the CACF Room door.

I am so enormously proud of Oliver for breezing through airport security this morning like it was the most natural thing in the world.

This was a Herculean effort for him, and the culmination of 18 months of working on his anxiety (see here).

The world is his oyster!

When I agreed to make up the tickets for this year’s Kindred Spirits Quilt Guild raffle, I bit off a little more than my time would allow to print on the letterpress (they need 1,500 tickets, perforated; not beyond my capacity, but a big job). So I reverted to my previous career as a graphic designer and produced a PDF for someone else to print, in this case Kwik Kopy, which did a nice job. Buy your tickets starting next week from Kindred Spirits members!

I wonder how often this presents a practical impediment.

I’ve spent the week experimenting with The Things Gateway and The Things Uno, with hopes that we might deploy them as the basis of a low-cost sensor network in Charlottetown. I’ve written about this on The Things Network website.

My friend Catherine Hennessey has called me twice in the past week, claiming to have heard me talking about rabbits on CBC Radio.

It turns out that, in celebration of its 400th episode, CBC’s Spark took a look back at the weird and wonderful it’s covered over the last 11 years. And I qualified, by way of the piece I recorded with host Nora Young about my Nabaztag rabbit back in 2007.

Nora’s such a great interviewer: she’s naturally curious and she made it easy to talk to her on the radio about a weird little magic French digital rabbit.

Mystery solved.

There are a lot of reasons to take on a job: love, money, fame, power.

Today’s job, however, I took on almost entirely because it afforded me the opportunity to see inside the bell tower of Charlottetown City Hall.

When I say “job,” in this case, I mean “another wild unpaid pursuit,” and, in this case, that means setting the city up with a LoRaWAN network to allow citizens to contribute all manner of sensor data via a central, managed gateway.

I’m experimenting with gear from The Things Network, an ambitious Dutch effort to build simple low-cost LoRaWAN hardware and supporting server infrastructure: the idea is that you stick one or two gateways high up somewhere in central locations in a city, and each is able to drink in data from thousands of sensors located within range.

The bell tower at City Hall is not the tallest place in Charlottetown, but it is somewhat high, and does have the benefit of being publicly-owned with sustainability-minded people at the helm. So it’s a prime candidate.

The original plan was to do a test of the LoRaWAN gateway’s range from the very top of the bell tower, but once that idea saw the cold light of day, notions like “have you had fall-protection training?” came into play, and we down-scaled to do the testing from the top floor of City Hall instead, at least for now. But given that the bell tower door was right beside us, I was offered a look up. And seeing the ladder that leads upward, and then, worse, looking down, I realized that this was all for the best. If City Hall turns out to be a good location, then we’ll get a trained climber-of-high-things to mount the gateway high up.

As it happens, the test never got to happen: it turns out that The Things Gateway needs to have outbound access on a variety of ports to send its messages up to the MQTT server on the other end, and those ports are currently firewalled on City Hall’s guest wifi. So a request for firewall updates has been submitted, and we will bide our time.

But I did get to see the bell tower, and that was neato.

Among the highlights, was spotting what I have to assume are the hooks around which firehoses of yore were hung to dry (my initial assumption was that this is where City Hall would hang its beef to age, but that seemed implausible):

There’s also a very nice view down Queen Street from the windows at the bottom of the tower:

Stay tuned for the next chapter in this exciting saga.

After a few years of forgetting to go to Leonhard’s, a café just up the corner and around the bend from our house, I’ve started dropping in again, from time to time. As I did today. Where I encountered their lovely new menu, a menu so lovely that it changes the entire character of the place. Watercolour illustrations are by the talented Bayside by Sam.

After a lifetime of combative relationships with gasoline-powered lawnmowers (and, by times, those that would force me to use them), I cannot do sufficient justice to the joy I have found in this cordless electric one.

At $368 from Home Depot, it’s in the same price range as its belching cousins. But it needs neither gas nor oil (nor some alchemical combination of the two; I’m looking at you Lawnboy), and starting it is a simple push of a button rather than an arm-wrenching pull of a rope.

Our lawn is mowed. The Ryobi 40180 is folded up in the mudroom, ready for its next call-out. I am happy. Who would have ever thought.