When Matt Rainnie was host of Mainstreet on CBC Radio we produced a couple of summer’s worth of eclectic radio pieces, like Everything You Wanted to Know About Ice Tea in 2004.

Matt is inveterately curious and a great interviewer, so when I wanted to flush subscribers to The New Yorker out of the bushes I dropped him a line, and he quickly bit, coming along to the Reinventorium yesterday morning to tape a short piece that aired this morning.

The awesome power of radio has resulted in a half dozen more subscribers outing themselves.

Two items of note on the typography trail this morning:

1. Maria Montes (you’ll remember her from Scared Shitless) posted a comprehensive list of typography events in 2018 on the Alphabettes site (itself a constant source of inspiration).
2. A fascinating post about the “angled terminal” on London street nameplates (via the Fresh Signals RSS feed from Coudal Partners)

It turns out that I’ve misunderstood the meaning of “Always Open With” on a Mac for all the years I’ve been using one.

Here’s where I’ve been going wrong.

Let’s say I have a PDF file on my Desktop, and I want to open it with the Mac Preview.app. I right-click on the PDF, select Open With, then Other…, then select Preview.app and, finally, check the Always Open With checkbox. Like this:

I’d always assumed this means “always open PDF files with Preview.app.”

But it doesn’t.

It means “always open this specific PDF file with Preview.app.”

The real way to change the default app for all PDF files is to right-click on a PDF file, select Get Info, then, in the Open with: section, select Preview.app and click the Change All… button. Like this:

Thanks to The Mac Observer and Smile technical support for steering me straight on this one.

We workers of Queen Street arrived Monday morning this week to find that the Freshii location in the old Woolworth’s was closing up shop.

When Freshii first opened I was a regular customer, often getting lunch there two or three times a week: the food was, true to the name, fresh, the staff were friendly, and it was handy-by.

Over the last while, though, I soured.

From a quality and service perspective things never seemed to be the same once partner-business Dynamic Fitness moved to Pownal Street. The Freshii online ordering app, which I tried to use as an early-adopter, was an unmitigated disaster. Other places opened nearby that were more on their game.

The straws that broke the camel’s back happened at a brand level: first came the refusal to abide by Ontario’s requirement to publish calorie counts for menu items, and second was what appeared to be a doubling-down on the “juice cleanse” fad, something that is absent scientific evidence.

And so I hadn’t been into Freshii for more than a year when the news came. And so I was right: 2016 was Peak Juice Bar in Charlottetown.

The Guardian reports that the City of Charlottetown Planning Department is seeking input on any amendments to the Zoning and Development Bylaw that might be required once the retail sale of cannabis becomes legal later this year.

Here’s the input I offered:

This email is in response to reports in The Guardian that you are seeking input from the public on any amendments that might be required to the Zoning and Development Bylaw regarding the retail sale of cannabis, and, specifically, distance limitations with relation to “schools, daycares and places where children assemble.”

My input is: there is no need to any amendment to the Zoning and Development Bylaw at all. 

The retail sales of cannabis should be permitted anywhere that the retail sale of anything else is permitted.

I see no conflict between the retail sales of cannabis and the presence of children, or of anyone else.

I am fascinated by how provincial and municipal politicians are riding a knife-edge of favouring legalization while feeling an obligation (or genuine feeling) to express vague discomfort about the entire notion. Former Finance Minister Albert Roach, for example, was quoted on the CBC in December discussing locations for provincial cannabis stores:

“To ensure that wherever we put them, that they are not in any sort of a co-location, next door or in the same mall as a current liquor store … We don’t want to locate near schools or playgrounds … we want to be very clear that that’s a concern to us,” he said.

I’m not sure what evils Mr. Roach, or the City of Charlottetown, might come from playground-cannabis store-proximity; it’s truly perplexing. Are they expecting gun play? Do they imagine stoned people milling about expressing dangerous, divergent thoughts?

I hope the City does the sensible thing, and simply proceeds business-as-usual.

The Government of PEI is seeking input on a proposed update to Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy legislation, with a deadline of this Friday, February 23, 2018.

Here’s the submission, sent today:

Please accept the following comments from me in response to your call for feedback in the ”Modernizing the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act” paper.

I am a longtime user of the FOIPP mechanisms afforded by the provincial and federal governments, as well as, more recently by the University of Prince Edward Island. I’m also a longtime practitioner of, and advocate for, open data use.

I have two general comments to make, focused on the intersection of open data and FOIPP legislation.

1. While the Government of PEI, in recent years, has begun to establish the technical and policy groundwork for a more open approach to data, there remains an attitude in the public service that the role of a public servant is, writ large, to act as a gatekeeper for data. This role is only reinforced by the dynamic of the access provisions of FOIPP legislation which, by carefully defining the mechanisms for access, serve to enhance the notion of the public service as guardians of a bank vault of data that is only to be parcelled out carefully, on a cost-recovery basis, in response to specific requests. A truly open and transparent approach to data would see public servants mandated to release as much data about what they do, how they do it, and how it went, as often as possible; their job performance should be judged, in part, by their success in doing so, in much the same way as academics are rewarded for the volume of their publications.

2. In a similar vein, it is at our peril that we continue to regard open data and FOIPP as in opposition. The public service, because of resource constraints, is often faced with the question of where to turn its open data efforts first: tremendous benefit would come from using access requests themselves as semaphores for public interest, and to use access requests as the trailheads of proactive disclosure. Not only would this be an effective use of resources, but it would also result in a change, on a technical level, from treating access requests as one-of technical jobs to treating them as prompts to build systems that are open-data-enabled. For example, if I submit a FOIPP request for a list of survey markers, the likely response currently would be that a technician would prepare a one-time data export of survey markers from an internal system, and I would receive this by email or on physical digital media; a more effective response, in contrast, would be to use the same resources to extend a bridge between the internal survey marker system and open data infrastructure so that the data becomes open to all as a regular course of action, without the need for additional FOIPP requests.

In addition, I have some specific responses to points you raise in your paper:

Information and Privacy Commissioner: In 2006 I submitted an access request to Health PEI for information related to financial transactions related to my personal health care. Health PEI denied my request, and I appealed to the Information and Privacy Commissioner. The adjudication of this appeal was delayed multiple times, over the course of several years, and it was not until 1007 days later, in 2014, that I received the information I’d requested. In letters from the Information and Privacy Commissioner regarding the delays it was made clear to me that the reason for the delay was simply that her office did not have the capacity to deal with its workload. As such, I believe that effective administration of the FOIPP Act requires that the Information and Privacy Commissioner’s office be sufficiently resourced to carry out its duties under the timelines laid out in the Act.

University of Prince Edward Island: The University of PEI updated its own FOIPP policy last year, and I find it problematic in two ways. First, there is a $25 non-refundable processing fee for each request, which I find onerous (especially when contrasted to the more reasonable $5 established under provincial FOIPP legislation). Second, the policy does not apply retroactively, so that information and data gathered before May 2015 is not subject to the policy. While I can appreciate that there are limited situations where this might be appropriate, I believe the starting point should include retroactivity, with only specific limitations to this. Ultimately, I believe that it would be more sensible and efficient to have the University of PEI covered by provincial FOIPP legislation.

Municipalities: As a longtime resident of the City of Charlottetown, I have found access to information and data maintained by the City to be effectively unavailable in many situations. This is particularly problematic as the City holds data that in many ways is the most relevant to the day-to-day life of citizens, data that could most effectively be used by citizens to advocate and analyze. While the Province of PEI has made progress on the “open data culture shift,” in my experience the City is still working in a “tell us why you want this data, and what you’re going to use it for” era. For example, several years ago I asked the City for a digital copy of the GIS layer for its Zoning and Development Bylaw, and this request was arbitrarily denied at a bureaucratic level (ultimately I was given a copy by a City Councillor, something no less problematic). As such, I believe strongly that the FOIPP Act should be extended to municipalities. 

Fees: Pursuant to my comments above related to using access requests as a semaphore for public interest and an opportunity to build open systems, I believe that processing fees should be eliminated entirely. They are a barrier to access and, ironically, are highest for information that is, from a technical perspective, the most technically challenging to make accessible. Citizens should not be punished financially for requesting information that is, by dint of history, buried the deepest, so to speak. FOIPP requests should be looked upon as a gift from citizens to the public service, and the technical expenditure an investment in openness.

If you have thoughts about FOIPP legislation in PEI, I encourage you to submit something before the deadline at week’s end is up.

Longtime readers may recall that two years ago I wrote about the 25 subscribers to The New Yorker magazine on Prince Edward Island.

At the time I wrote:

Perhaps I can cement up the list and organize some sort of gathering for us all. We could find a big wooden table in a corner somewhere and chat for hours about William Shawn and Tina Brown and our feelings about the reordering of the front matter.

The time has come.

Next Wednesday, February 28, 2018 at 7:00 p.m. I’m organizing a little gathering of Prince Edward Island New Yorker subscribers in Charlottetown.

If you’re in that group, and you’d enjoy an informal drink with fellow New Yorker readers, please contact me for details.

Oliver and I took Ethan for a walk along the boardwalk yesterday, and I took this photo while standing in front of the Culinary Institute facing Government House. Google Photos automagically transformed it into a striking black and white photo, so I can’t claim any credit for that.

There were two Senator McCarthys, one (Joseph) from Wisconsin, the anti-Communist, and the other (Eugene) from Minnesota, a candidate for President in 1968.

I had long-conflated the two; realizing my error, suddenly American political history makes a lot more sense.

It was a day off school for Oliver today, so we walked from downtown to the Charlottetown Mall to see Black Panther. Added to the rest of our walking around today, Oliver’s Fitbit counted 11,849 steps. That’s a new record for him, since Christmas.

Such a long walk was more possible today because of the mild temperatures: it hovered around 2°C for most of the day.

A side-effect of of this was that the sidewalks and trails were very muddy: by the time we arrived at the mall Ethan the white dog was almost solid brown in places, and Oliver and I had trousers caked with mud.

We avoided a repeat performance by taking the bus home. Ethan got a bath, and our trousers went into the laundry, and things have just about returned to normal now.