File this under “things I always thought were true, but realized couldn’t be true, that actually are true.” Sort of.

From the Wikipedia entry for Armand Hammer:

In the 1980s Hammer owned a considerable amount of stock in Church & Dwight, the company that manufactures Arm & Hammer products; he also served on its board of directors. However, the Arm & Hammer company’s brand name did not originate with Armand Hammer. It was in use some 31 years before Hammer was born. He was spurred to buy shares in the company as a result of often being asked about the brand being so close to his name.

Late last week I received an email from our Executive Director at Stars for Life asking me if I could attend a meeting of the Standing Committee on Education and Economic Development this morning as our Chair, Carolyn Bateman, presented a “briefing on conditions for people with autism in PEI.” I happily agreed, and went along just before 10:00 a.m. this morning, assuming I’d be shown to a seat in the public gallery from where I could offer my (silent) moral support to Carolyn as she presented.

When I arrived in the legislative chamber, however, the Committee Clerk told me that, “as a witness,” I’d be sitting “inside the rail,” beside Carolyn, in chairs facing the chair.

If you are a student of the Legislative Assembly you will realize that “the rail” represents the dividing line between the profane and the sacred, and traversing the rail a ceremonial act of ascendance. Not a place, in other words, for the everyday likes of me.

Fortunately, the rules of Standing Committees are somewhat more relaxed than the rules of the Legislative Assembly when it’s in full-throated session, and so although there was still a prohibition against non-witnesses crossing the rail, we were allowed to address members by name, not district, we could speak directly to questioners, rather than through the chair, and the entire operation was more probing than jousting.

If you are so-inclined, you can listen to what happened next on SoundCloud, as our testimony was recorded and archived there for posterity (there’s also a video stream, but I believe this is more ephemeral, and that link might not stand the test of time).

Carolyn did an excellent job at making the case for sustainable, long-term, sufficient funding for Stars for Life, and the larger discussion about how we support people young and old with autism toward full citizenship was wide-ranging and positive. I was impressed by the questions the members asked, by their willingness to admit what they didn’t know, and by their understanding that we can move forward, to begin, simply by coordinating the approaches we’re already taking in a way that focuses on the individual, not the bureaucracy.

Through the 90 minutes there was frequent reference to the never-adopted “Autism Action Plan” from 2009; fortunately a PDF of the draft plan still exists in a corner of the province’s website, and I encourage you to read Recommendations Toward A Prince Edward Island Autism Action Plan: Another Piece of the Puzzle. Much of what I tried to emphasize today in my comments was much better summed up by the committee that formulated that draft in its recommendation on internal communication:

Once the trans-departmental governance structure and process is ascertained, clear and sustained channels of communication will be the glue that holds the structure together. While the Ed & ECD has had an unofficial strategy from which to work, the lack of a published strategy and policies have left various stakeholders to deal with service design and delivery with a level of uncertainty. Driven by an ‘officially’ adopted Strategy, interdepartmental communication and service delivery will be strengthened at all levels in the departments, from front-line service providers to managers, Directors and Deputy Ministers. Measures to improve internal communications need to focus on:

• Clarifying roles and responsibilities across departments and school board-based autism professionals;
• Establish channels for information sharing within teams and across teams; and
• Accountability for initiating information sharing meetings.

If we had followed that recommendation in 2009, we’d be in a much better place today; I was encouraged that the members of the Standing Committee seemed to understand that, and, somewhat against type, I have hope for what comes next.

Oliver, with his father, grandmother, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and great-great-great-grandfather.

We are the parents of Oliver, a 17 year old young man on the autism spectrum.

We’re looking for a support person to work one-on-one with Oliver through the day during the summer, and for occasional overnight respite care. We’re primarily looking for someone to provide supervision and guidance and to allow Oliver to participate in community activities.

Oliver is a bright, funny, creative person with wide-ranging interests. He gets along well with adults, and has enjoyed working with one-on-one assistants for many years, developing strong bonds with them that have benefited both. While he has some challenges with communication, he’s verbal and expressive. He’s very digitally-engaged and has a broad online presence. He’s also very engaged in progressive issues, with particular interest in environmentalism, LGBTQ issues, and political and social collaboration.

Starting June 11, 2018 we’re looking for someone to spend time with Oliver on weekdays through the summer.

This doesn’t need to be every day, and we’re flexible on the schedule, but it will be a maximum of 30 hours per week. This could involve spending time at our house, doing activities downtown (bowling, library, art gallery, going for coffee), and going to the beach, etc. Oliver’s also enjoyed going overnight camping in previous summers, and he was a volunteer photographer at the Cloggeroo music festival last year.
 
Because Oliver’s interests are so wide-ranging, what we’re primarily looking for is someone engaged, flexible, and interested in many things. Oliver has a basket of challenges related to autism – anxiety, communication challenges, working memory issues – so you must be adaptable. Some experience with, and understanding of autism is preferred. We’ve had good experience with students in and graduates of the Human Services program at Holland College, but formal training is not a absolute requirement.

Oliver has an autism assistance dog, a hypoallergenic 6-year old poodle named Ethan that’s a trained and registered guide dog, so you must be comfortable working with and around dogs (we can provide training in how to work with Ethan).

We live right in the heart of Charlottetown, a block from Province House.

Pay is $15/hour plus vacation pay, and, as funding comes in part from the Disability Support Program, candidates must be at least 18 years old as of June 11.

Is this you? If so, please contact Peter Rukavina by email at peter@rukavina.net.

Oliver and I returned home from an errand this afternoon to find Ethan the Dog using his laptop.

Oliver is slowly surveying popular music of the 20th century via Spotify.

Which led him to exclaim to me tonight “Joni Mitchell has albums after Ladies of the Canyon!”

Oh to be 17.

Oliver sent me an email last night with subject line “Your Point of View” and a body that was simply a link to this YouTube video, a trailer for the film The House of Tomorrow.

This email precipitated an ongoing conversation about what exactly he meant by “your point of view.”

During one of the episodes of this conversation the following words came out of Oliver’s mouth:

You know, like you and Stewart Brand…

What a son I am raising.

Via my friend Elmine’s blog, a pointer to an appearance by man of letters Stephen Fry on Dutch television. What an insightful, reflective and brilliant person he is.

A month ago I wrote about analyzing my use of the Air Miles program by scraping data from the Air Miles website.

I concluded by mentioning that I had followed on with a formal data access request, under the provisions of the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

Yesterday I received a thorough response by email to that access request, a response that included everything I had requested.

Here’s what I learned.

Personal Information About Me

The letter I received (a PDF attached to the email) summarized the “personal information” about me that Air Miles holds. This is described as:

In accordance with Principle 9 - Individual Access, as outlined in the AIR MILES® Privacy Commitment, the following is personal information on record with the AIR MILES® Program.It is important to note that the demographic information listed below represents what was provided at the time of enrollment, unless updated by you during subsequent contacts with our company, as well as any information you or your household may have provided to us through your participation in optional surveys. This is a summary of the personal information currently held about you and your household.

The information Air Miles holds on me is:

• My date of birth.
• My gender.
• My language preference.
• My “enrollment source” (how I originally signed up for Air Miles).
• My enrollment date.
• The total miles I’ve earned to date.
• The total number of “partners” where I’ve earned miles.
• My account type (business).

The information Air Miles could record about me but had no data:

• My household size.
• My income range.

Redemption

A summary was included of the single redemption I’d ever made of Air Miles for a travel reward, 4090 miles in March of 2016 for a room in Halifax at the Best Western Chocolate Lake.

Disclosure

A list of 46 third party “partners, agents and research organizations” that Air Miles has shared my contact information with “in order to fulfill the stated purposes of the AIR MILES® Reward Program” was provided:

1. airmilesshops.ca
2. Alamo Canada
3. American Express
4. Bank of Montreal
5. Boston Pizza
6. Budget Rent a Car
7. Canadian Springs
8. CarStar Automotive Canada
9. Century 21
10. Club Voyages
11. Foodland
12. Forzani
13. Global Pet Foods
14. Goodyear Canada
15. HBC Rewards
16. Hilton
17. Holiday Inn
18. Homecare Building Centres
19. Intercontinental Hotels
20. IRIS
21. Johnson Inc.
22. La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries
23. Lawtons
24. Manulife Financial
25. Maritime Life
26. Marlin Travel
27. National Tilden
28. Pharma Plus
29. Pharma Save
30. Primus Canada
31. Purolator
32. Reno-Depot
33. Rogers Media
34. Rona
35. Royal & Sun Alliance
36. Safeway
37. Shell
38. Sobeys
39. Sport Chek
40. Sports Experts
41. the Shoe Company
42. Tim-BR Mart
43. Travel Plus
44. UPS
45. VHQ Video Headquarters
46. Westjet

Air Miles Earned

Confronting the PDF File

Finally, in a separate PDF file were the “transactional details” of every Air Mile earned from 1999 onward, sorted by the partner’s name:

PDF files are where data goes to die, and while providing me with this information in this format technically meets the provisions of my request for a “CSV, Excel or other machine-readable file,” it would have been nicer to receive it in something more portable.

Using pdftotext

By running the PDF file through pdftotext, using the “-raw” flag, I was able to get something more useful:

pdftotext -raw airmiles.pdf

This produced airmiles.txt that looks, in part, like this:

CENTURY 21 Thank You From CENTURY 21 7/12/2000 192 1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT 6/28/2002 75 1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT 5/28/2002 45 1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT 4/26/2002 13 1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT 3/28/2002 6 1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT 2/28/2002 49 1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT 1/28/2002 47 1

Somewhat inconveniently, this file is neither fixed-width nor helpfully delimited, but there’s enough structure, working from the end of the lines back toward the beginning, to split components into individual fields.

Using Tabula

To save myself the trouble of hacking the data out this way, I deployed the excellent open source Tabula tool for the job; it  “a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files.” Or, in other words, exactly what I need.

It was shockingly easy to install Tabula, have it auto-identify the tables on the Air Miles PDF, and spit out a CSV file that looks, in part, like this:

CENTURY 21,Thank You From CENTURY 21,7/12/2000,192,1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD,AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT,6/28/2002,75,1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD,AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT,5/28/2002,45,1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD,AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT,4/26/2002,13,1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD,AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT,3/28/2002,6,1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD,AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT,2/28/2002,49,1
BMO M/C BUSINESS CARD,AIR MILES BUSINESSCARD ACCOUNT,1/28/2002,47,1

Now that is useful data.

What did I learn?

Some of the things that I was able to learn from the CSV, after loading it into LibreOffice for analysis, were:

• My first Air Mile came from buying gasoline at Shell on August 21, 1999.
• I’ve earned 7,021 Air Miles in 434 transactions from that date until my most recent transaction at Sobeys on January 13, 2018.
• I’ve earned Air Miles from 26 partners in total.
• Most of my Air Miles–2,729, or 39%–have come from Sobeys.

Other insights to follow.

How did Air Miles do?

Good Points

• Quick turnaround on the request, within the timelines laid out in the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.
• Provided everything I asked for.

Needs Work

• Data provided locked in a PDF file that I had to work to liberate; I’ve asked if they can give me a CSV, TSV or even an Excel file instead.
• Summary letter total Air Miles earned (7,168) doesn’t add up to the aggregate of the Air Miles reported in the transaction report (7,021). I’ve asked for an explanation of the difference.
• Summary letter total partners (20) doesn’t match the partners listed in the transaction report (25). I’ve asked for an explanation of the difference.

In general terms I think Air Miles lived up to the letter and spirit of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, which is not surprising given its profile and that it is essentially only in the data management business. If Air Miles wasn’t good at this, what hope would we have for others?

How to Request Your Own Data

To get your own data from Air Miles, refer to the Protecting Your Privacy page on its website, which provides the email address privacyoffice@airmiles.ca for making access requests. Feel free to copy and paste the language I used in my request as a starting point.

It being International Women’s Day I thought, yesterday morning, that it would be a good idea to send my young nephew in Montreal something to commemorate the day and to up his feminist game (he’s already doing gangbusters in this regard, but we can always do better).

So, over breakfast, I ordered him a copy of Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World by Rachel Ignotofsky.

I had no expectations it would actually arrive today and, indeed, Amazon gave me a delivery date of Friday on the order confirmation:

But this morning, almost exactly 24 hours after I placed my order, I got an email from a courier called Intelcom Express:

Your order XXXXXXXXXX is scheduled to be delivered in the next 3 hours by our driver Yassine.

Yassine is currently completing delivery number 1, you are delivery number 7.

Just 18 minutes later I got another email:

Your order XXXXXXXXXX has been delivered without signature today at 08:17 AM.

You’ll find attached the delivery proof.

I scrolled down. The “delivery proof” was a photograph of the package, in my nephew’s mailbox in Montreal, presumably taken by Yassine (photo cropped to remove the house number):

Whatever you think of Amazon, and its impact on the retail book industry, and its labour practices, this is an impressive end-to-end feat of logistics, and likely something that no other company is capable of achieving now or anytime soon with any consistency.

Contrast this to my order of a Bolstr bag, from it’s Cleveland manufacturer, back in January.

I placed the order on January 9, the bag arrived on January 25, 16 days later. That period included a full week between the printing of the shipping label and provision of the tracking number and the actual shipment.

And that was with a payment of $21 CAD in shipping (Amazon’s shipping cost, because I’m a Prime subscriber, was nothing).

A decade ago, that a package from Cleveland to Charlottetown would take only 16 days to arrive, and only cost $21 in shipping would have been considered an impressive feat; in the shadow of Amazon’s raised bar it seems slow enough to exist in an different fulfillment universe.

I’m not sure, from a bird’s eye view, how I feel about our new Amazon overlords, but man oh man are they game-changing.

Postscript: I suggested this minute-by-minute shipping update approach in an email to Jeff Bezos 23 years ago. His reply was “We’ve received several good suggestions from customers, but I think this is a particularly good one.”