I set out after work last night for an address on Fitzroy Street for an appointment to swap one of my maps of Charlottetown.

As I walked farther and farther down Fitzroy, the advance of the house numbers appeared to slow to a crawl, and I realized that I was in danger of being late for supper; so I gave Catherine a call.

“This house is a lot farther from town than I realized!” I exclaimed.

And therein revealed not only that I’m Charlottetownocentric, but that my world can be described by a circle that extends only a view blocks radiant from my house; everything beyond is terra incognita.

I made a quick trip to the Atlantic Superstore last night to pick up a few things; we’re a Sobeys family, but, driving by the Superstore, I was reminded that they sell rather tasty smoky tempeh strips, and I temporarily switched my religion to accommodate.

The tempeh section of the Superstore is right beside the pharmacy, and while I was making the rounds I noticed a “wellness station” there.

While on the surface this looked like a version of a blood pressure station of the type that most pharmacies have these days, it turned out to be a more complete “personal analytics” pod that measures, in addition to blood pressure, pulse, weight and body fat percentage.

Starting a session requires an on-screen enrollment: creating an account with email address and password, and answering a few questions (height, sex, etc.)

The machine then measures blood pressure and pulse (using the traditional left-arm-in-cuff method), weight (you raise your legs to a bar and the scale measures you through the bench you’re sitting on) and body fat percentage (you hold onto a couple of handles, and are measured using bioelectrical impedance).

You get your results both on the screen and, if you like, via yourwellnessstation.ca:

The Superstore isn’t doing this for altruistic reasons: in addition to building foot traffic for the pharmacy, the privacy policy for the service discloses a range of other possible uses, including marketing back to you using the information gathered:

To support the Wellness Services, which we provide at no cost to you, we may use non sensitive Personal Information and data collected through cookies and similar technology to deliver Loblaw and third-party interest-based advertising to you on and off the Wellness Services. We will obtain your permission before we provide individualized Body Measurement data or sensitive Personal Information to third-party ad networks to deliver third-party interest-based advertising outside of the Wellness Services. Please note, and you agree through use of the Wellness Services, that we may personalize your experience, including by showing you advertising, on the Wellness Services using data we learn about you.

So one can anticipate ads in the style of “we noticed your blood pressure is higher this month, ask your pharmacist about Paltroxitron Alpha.”

Which makes “no cost to you” a semantically shaky statement to make.

Indeed, the technology driving all this is made by a U.S. company called Higi, and their marketing materials made it clear that this is the goal:

Users engage on our platform, track progress at our stations, online at higi.com and via mobile applications, engage in challenges and connect with their health community via higi’s omni-channel platform. For those with a stake in the health and wellbeing of their community, higi is a gateway, allowing our partners to:

• Engage with patients for better outcomes
• Drive at-risk patients to the pharmacy
• Find at-risk populations and become their partner in health
• Use our marketing channels to promote products and programs

The creepiness of this makes me think that personal analytics of this type are the sort of thing that we should consider investing in public infrastructure to support: if we install public analytics pods in places like community centres and libraries, and allow users to store the data gathered in a medium that they control, then we could have much more confidence over the privacy and security aspects of the tool, and could have complete, transparent control over who we choose, if anyone, to share the data with.

I’d be much happier having the option to share my personal analytics with the office of my family doctor than I would handing it over to Loblaw’s.

All that being said, looking under the hood of the yourwellnesstation.ca site, it turns out that the data gathered is conveniently available as JSON; for example:

{
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "REDACTED",
      "userId": "REDACTED",
      "serviceId": "higi",
      "referenceId": null,
      "deviceId": "14694",
      "categories": [
        "Health"
      ],
      "timestamp": "2017-07-06T20:01:41.000-04:00",
      "timestampUTC": "2017-07-07T00:01:41.000Z",
      "createdUTC": "2017-07-07T00:01:43.995Z",
      "updatedUTC": "2017-07-07T00:01:43.995Z",
      "selfReported": false,
      "anomalyCodes": [],
      "metrics": {
        "height": 1.85,
        "weight": 91.625658742027156,
        "pulse": 76,
        "fatRatio": 22.21,
        "hydration": "0.35",
        "bmcResistance": 665.2,
        "isAthlete": false,
        "systolic": 103,
        "diastolic": 74,
        "checkinHigiStation": 1,
        "gender": "m",
        "age": 51,
        "bpClass": "normal",
        "map": 83.666666666666671,
        "mapClass": "normal",
        "pulseClass": "normal",
        "bmi": 26.77,
        "bmiClass": "overweight",
        "fatClass": "acceptable"
      },
      "hasGps": false,
      "gpsUrl": "",
      "kioskInfo": {
        "kioskId": "49043",
        "mergeId": "14694",
        "address1": "465 Univerisity Ave",
        "address2": null,
        "city": "Charlottetown",
        "state": "PE",
        "zip": "C1A 4N8",
        "organizations": [
          "Real Atlantic Superstore"
        ],
        "gps": {
          "latitude": 46.2513,
          "longitude": -63.13864,
          "address": null
        },
        "type": "Retail",
        "hours": "{"Mon":"7:00 am-12:00 am","Tue":"12:00 am-12:00 am","Wed":"12:00 am-12:00 am","Thu":"12:00 am-12:00 am","Fri":"12:00 am-12:00 am","Sat":"12:00 am-12:00 am","Sun":"12:00 pm-8:00 pm"}",
        "weeklyHours": {
          "Mon": "7:00 am-12:00 am",
          "Tue": "12:00 am-12:00 am",
          "Wed": "12:00 am-12:00 am",
          "Thu": "12:00 am-12:00 am",
          "Fri": "12:00 am-12:00 am",
          "Sat": "12:00 am-12:00 am",
          "Sun": "12:00 pm-8:00 pm"
        },
        "timeOffsetMins": -240,
        "dma": "",
        "dmaName": "",
        "serial": "CSA-2016085107",
        "mapVisible": "true",
        "status": "Deployed",
        "locationId": "C1A4N8-002",
        "storeNumber": "Real Atlantic Superstore #00376",
        "storeDivision": null
      }
    }
  ],
  "paging": {
    "current": "https://coreapi.higi.com:443/activity/users/FRs6hh7KDUatmMMiIcG1kg/activities?sort=timestampDesc&metrics=weight%2cbmi%2cfatRatio&includeWatts=false&includeDisplayMetrics=false&includeKioskInfo=true&pageNumber=1&pageSize=200&cacheKey=pxB35KoiX0KVlLhUBdVhsg",
    "pageNumber": 1,
    "pageSize": 200,
    "total": 1
  }
}

This means it would be trivial to develop an app to harvest this data and use it for personal rather than corporate betterment, using the pod with a throwaway email address and thus taking advantage of the infrastructure without being subject to the sketchy marketing aspects.

On the chopsticks at Ta-Ke Sushi on Queen Street, instructions for use (emphasis mine):

Hold first chopstick in original position move the second one up and down now you can pick up anything.

The “Maki Lunch Special” at Ta-Ke is a bento box filled with a nice assortment of food. Recommended.

I found an interesting 2015 research paper from Montreal titled Identification of the minimum size of the shared-car fleet required to satisfy car-driving trips in Montreal, the abstract of which reads:

This paper examines how many cars would be required to fulfill all car driver trips in a metropolitan area if these cars were shared rather than privately controlled. It proposes a twofold analysis regarding the use of cars in urban areas using data from a large scale Origin–Destination travel survey conducted in the Greater Montreal Area in 2008 as case study. In a first step, the use of privately owned cars and their level of usage are assessed through indicators such as the proportion of daily time parked at home location, parked elsewhere and travelling. In the region, 27 % of the owned cars are not used during a typical weekday. According to the estimations, a car will, on average, be parked more than 95 % of the time. In a second step, the research simulates a full-scale mutualization of cars in the region. Cars required to fulfill all car driver trips observed in the survey are generated based on two hypotheses of access distance to the shared cars (250 and 500 m cells). It was found that between 48 and 59 % of the current fleet of privately owned cars would be sufficient to fulfill all car driver trips at the metropolitan level.

I like the phrase “full-scale mutualization.” I think many aspects of our lives could benefit from mutualization.

I was eating breakfast this morning on the patio at Receiver Coffee when I looked up and noticed an interesting detail in the Brown Block at 132 Richmond Street next door: there are ornamental heads carved into the stones above the storefront.

I’ve walked by this building thousands of times over 25 years and I’ve never noticed these. Take a look next time you’re walking by.

Our friends at Receiver Coffee opened a new branch on Water Street last week, in the old CN Rail Brass Shop. In doing so they’ve breathed new life into a building that, while its outsides sparkled with the brilliance of Island stone, never had the insides that it deserved.

They fixed this by removing walls and clutter, and creating a bright, open great room with kitchen and Breadworks bakery tucked away into the west side. And they outfitted the café with nice simple tables punctuated by comfortable simple chairs. It’s a nice place to spend a little time and have a little coffee.

If you’re going to be capitalists–and I’m still not sold on that point–being capitalists like the Receiver crew is the way to do it; kudos.

I’ve spent hundreds of hours in the Union Bank Building at the corner of Great George and Richmond in Charlottetown; it’s one of my favourite buildings in the city, and although I haven’t been inside in several years, I still walk by it, to and from work, at least twice a day.

When I first moved to the Island in 1993 the building was home to the PEI Council of the Arts. And so my first step inside the door was to drop off an arts funding application (it wasn’t accepted; if memory serves the project was called Mobile Logic Welders; I cannot recall anything other than that title).

Later in the 1990s, when I first started working with Elections PEI, its offices were on the second floor (except during general elections, when they temporarily moved downstairs), and I spent many hours plotting elections websites (and maps and lists and databases) on both floors; several years later the offices moved downstairs permanently, and the servers we were then maintaining moved into the d two-level bank vault in the back corner of the first floor. In later years, once the need for a large public site on election night was obviated by the Internet, all of the election action happened in this building too: a lot of election results flowed through my fingers as they came in from the 27 electoral districts over the phone and got entered into our digital system.

But that’s not all.

For a time the IslandCam was based in the fourth-floor “crow’s nest” of the building, pointed at Province House across the street; because it was a flaky system strung together with masking tape and baling wire (and an Apple QuickTake camera), I spent a lot of time in that crow’s nest fiddling.

And, years later, when I was involved in a project to put the statutes and regulations of the province online, Leona Nicholson’s door, at the Legislative Counsel’s Office, was a regular stop.

The building will forever be “180 Richmond” in my mind, because that was the door that I used during the early years; the other door, the front door to Elections PEI once it moved downstairs, was “94 Great George,” but I never completely embraced that address.

I sat on a picnic bench tonight and sketched the building and saw things I hadn’t noticed before despite my intimacy with the building over the years; that’s one of the joys of putting pen to paper.

For the month of July, you can use your membership card from one government department (the Public Library Service) to obtain a pass for free admission to the sites of another government department (the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation), thus affording you, through extra-special double-bureaucracy, admission to sites that you, by virtue of being a citizen and taxpayer, already own and should be entitled to free admission to regardless.

This program is well-intentioned, no doubt: an effort to get more Islanders to visit our museums.

But, rather than doing the obvious–removing the admission fees and throwing open the doors–the result is a more complicated, time-limited impediment to visitation.

A better solution, should universal free admission not be financially viable:

For the month of July, show your library card to get free admission to our museums.

Let’s do that instead.

Catherine is upstairs. She yells down to me; I’m sitting in the living room.

“Can you bring me my light saber?” she asks.

“What!?” I reply, wondering if she is delirious and channeling Princess Leia.

“In my purse…,” she replies.

The noise of the air conditioner is muffling her voice, so it’s possible I’m not hearing her clearly.

I walk upstairs to the bedroom.

“Why do you want a light saber?” I ask, trying not to appear judgmental.

“My lifesavers! The buttered rum lifesavers from my purse,” she pleads, with a hint of annoyance tempered by her cheery good nature.

Upon reflection, lifesavers made more sense.