Surely the brand book for Pepsi has some sort of “advertising that appears to suggest mixing gasoline with our beverages is to be avoided” guidance.

The Island’s record store, Back Alley Music, has a new home at 257 Queen Street, between Fitzroy and Euston, and the expanded space has afforded it the opportunity to welcome a vegan take-out, called Stir It Up, to its midst.

This places Charlottetown in the remarkable position of having, along with My Plum, My Duck, two vegan restaurants. Our corned-beef-and-cabbage-eating ancestors wouldn’t know what to make of the place.

I’ve been by Stir It Up for lunch a couple of times now, having the “FLT“–a vegan take on the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich–both times.

I’m not 100% sold on the sandwich–if their goal is to recreate the BLT faithfully in vegan form, they’ve a ways to go on issues like “lettuce crispness” and “fake bacon snappiness”–but I laud the effort. And the space, the staff and the idea of the place are enough to bring me back again.

The service is a little pokey, for which I’m willing to hand them a “good food, well-prepared takes time” get-out-of-jail-free-card. Fortunately, the environs are pleasant enough, and when you run out of energy for flipping through the vinyl record bins, there’s a comfortable mid-century modern chair to set down in, complete with a view of Stompin’ Tom.

It was a year ago today that I cleared out my Twitter archive, emitted one last Tweet, and decamped from social media altogether.

In the same way that it took me a while to kick a sugar habit, it took me a while to deprogram my brain from its Twitter-dependence. For weeks afterward I continued to think in the pithy ironic thoughts that Twitter demands, and, without an outlet, would get momentarily frustrated.

But like the jones for a Snickers, this too passed, and I’ve never looked back.

All the “oh my, I’ll have no idea what’s going on!” fears that my mind stoked up for me didn’t come to pass: I didn’t leave the Internet, after all, didn’t retire to a cabin in the woods. And Oliver is as voracious a citizen of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook as I ever was, and he keeps me in the loop on things I really need to know.

It turns out that the much-vaunted “continuous partial attention” isn’t all its cracked up to be, and I’ve discovered that the thin simulacrum of “connection” that Twitter afforded was meaningless from a practical and spiritual perspective.

I say all this not to proselytize–those still inside the matrix won’t believe anything I’m saying in any case–but simply to mark the anniversary, and to remind myself that it’s a good idea to stand up and pay attention once in a while to the habits, especially the digital ones, that are so easy to get lost in.

Meanwhile, I wrote more here in 2017 than I did in any of the eight years previous. And I started to draw. And I set and printed more. And paid more attention to those around me.

There’s a tiny “return to blogging” movement that I’m happy to see in progress (Ton, for example, and Dries) and to be a part of.

I’m into 33rd year on the Internet this year, and I continue to be fascinated by it as a medium for writing and making connections; we’re not done yet.

I was back in the classroom at the University of PEI this week, guest-teaching two classes of Philosophy 105, Technology, Values & Science, the same course I audited in 2009 and guest-taught for two weeks in 2016.

It was a shorter stint this time than last. And of course the world has changed, and my interests have evolved. So rather than simply carting out the PowerPoint presentations from two years ago, I created two entirely new lectures from scratch. Which was exhausting. But, after the fact, extremely satisfying.

There are about a dozen students in the class, from several different disciplines. I dropped round to Main Building № 116 last Wednesday for their regularly scheduled lecture by Prof. Neb Kujundzic, introduced them to some of the terrain I planned to cover, and got a sense of their interests and Neb’s approach.

This Monday at 3:00 p.m. I was back, this time at the head of the classroom.

Monday’s topic was an exploration of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a sweeping update to Europe’s access and privacy regulations that takes effect in May. I used my own challenges in requesting access to my own healthcare spending data as a jumping off point, reviewed the main pillars of the GDPR (consent, breach notification, right to access, right to be forgotten, data portability, privacy by design), and then had the class break itself into small groups for discussions on a website of their choice that collected personal data, where its data collection process might be problematic under the GDPR, and what concrete steps could be taken to improve compliance. Before we finished for the day, we reconvened to summarize their small group discussion: two groups had selected Instagram, one YouTube, one Google and one Facebook. The students raised interesting points, and came up with some novel access-and-privacy-increasing solutions. The slides for Monday’s lecture are here.

We reconvened on Wednesday for an exploration of the technical and cultural shift from hardware to software. Again, I used some stories from my own experience–OpenCorporations.org, for example–as a jumping off point, and then we returned to small group discussion, focusing on the implications of this transition, on who’s getting left out of this transition, and whether we could make it stop if we wanted to. The slides for Wednesday’s lecture are here.

Teaching is, at its heart, equal parts performance and listening, and I find the run up to the experience to be all-consuming: it’s all I think about for the week leading up, and I’m forever refining my thoughts and my slides. I don’t really realize exactly how all-consuming it is until it’s over and I regain the cycles that I’ve been expending full-tilt. By that all-consumption is worth it for the opportunity to discuss interesting issues with curious young minds.

If nothing else, the experience reminds me yet again how much we owe our teachers for their dedication to the craft; I’m certain it’s not a profession I could take on full-time, but I appreciate the opportunity for brief windows into it every year or two.

There was a long, long period after Apple Maps launched during which it showed Charlottetown Harbour to be land rather than water. And in my experience, it’s remained the perennial also-ran of the web-based mapping game: it never seems as accurate or up to date as Google or Bing or OpenStreetMap, its map styles hearken to a 2005 map aesthetic, and its satellite layer, at least for Prince Edward Island, looks like it was photographed through a sock. Oh, and it’s also not a web-based map at all: you can only use Apple Maps through its Mac or iOS applications.

True to this form, when I happened to check in on my house at 100 Prince Street this afternoon in Apple Maps I found that its location was identified as the home of the East Wiltshire Cafeteria. Which is odd, because East Wiltshire Intermediate School is located 9 km away. In East Wiltshire.

Granted, its address is 100 Kingston Road, which bears passing resemblance to 100 Prince Street as an address. But that hardly seems reason enough to conflate the two.

I’ve filed a problem report with Apple.

When we watch CBC Compass on our Kodi, the closed captioning is automatically turned on. The result is often equal parts hilarious and disturbing.

Hilarious because the captioning is so bad so often, presumably a side-effect of it being done in real time by computers or humans.

Disturbing because although it’s hilarious for me, if I relied upon the captioning in lieu of being able to hear the newscast, I can’t imagine being able to abide it, the signal to noise ratio being so poor.

Every morning around 9:00 a.m. Ethan (the service dog) needs to get his vest on and start his formal work day. He generally does everything he can to avoid this: he’ll hide in his crate, he’ll run upstairs and hide in our beds. And, even once he’s suited up, he’ll try to camouflage himself.

“Maybe if I shrink down low and out of sight behind this blanket they’ll go to school without me.”

More than 10 years ago, following the example of my friend Lowell, I started to donate plasma, every 56 days, at Canadian Blood Services here in Charlottetown.

At the time my office was right across the street, and it was a pleasant, stress-free way to take part of an afternoon off, and do some good.

After a few years, though, things fell off the rails: I got sick just before an appointment and had to cancel it, and then neglected to re-book, and I fell off the call-back radar. Then I moved my office, and didn’t have the visual reminder to donate every day on my way in.

Back in December, though, I had coffee with Lowell, and he mentioned a recent donation of his, and I realized that 10 years had passed since my last donation.

So when I got back to the office I called 1-888-2-DONATE and booked myself an appointment, and today was the day.

In the intervening decade they’ve really upped their game over there: they now email out a link to an online questionnaire on the morning of your appointment so that you can fill out the “Have you ever had Chagas’ disease, Babesiosis, or Leishmaniasis?”-style questions in the privacy of your own computer; the end of this process is an encrypted QR code that the nurse scans at the start of the donation process. It shaves 10 minutes off the appointment.

They’ve also removed the requirement to provide a complete history of all the countries you’ve visited recently: during my heady travel days that alone used to take 5 minutes.

The donation clinic has been renovated, and now operates more like an (efficient, friendly, no-waiting) airline check-in counter.

And the Haemonetics PCS2 machines that do the plasma extraction have been upgraded to work almost twice as fast (an upgrade, my nurse told me, that was done entirely in software).

And so for my 1:20 p.m. appointment I was in, donated, feed cookies and juice, and out the door by 2:30 p.m.

And most of the nurses, bless their hearts, remembered me from the last go-around.

Donating plasma has always been easy and painless; now it’s easier and painless. If you’ve ever considered doing it–or if you’re just casting about for a regular selfless act to fill out your schedule–I encourage you to book an appointment.

I’ve already booked my next one.

The only “loyalty card” program that I have the patience to participate in is Air Miles. There’s only a small real-world pay-off for doing this, as its reward levels are so high that using its points to actually fly anywhere requires years. But I like having a thing that I do as part of the weekly grocery shop. It is, in other words, a completely irrational surrender of my purchase data with little reward. The gamification of shopping.

So, what better thing to do that to pull data out of my purchase habits; that way at least I learn something.

Air Miles does not make this easy: there’s no Google-style “takeout” option, only an Account Statement History page that defaults to showing the last 31 days of transactions:

There’s an option in the top-right corner of this page to change the date range, but the maximum time period is the last twelve months, and I want all the transactions, not just a year’s worth.

Fortunately, it’s possible to hack the page. If you select “the last twelve months” from the selector, you’ll see that the URL changes to:

https://www.airmiles.ca/arrow/AccountStatementsHistory?range=-11

The key here is the -11 which, it turns out, is a parameter that determines the number of months to go back in time; you can manually override this by changing it to a higher number, like this:

https://www.airmiles.ca/arrow/AccountStatementsHistory?range=-144

I found, by trial and error, that I could go back to April 2012–almost 6 years–by doing this. I know I had Air Miles transactions before then, but perhaps 6 years is the limit of their current system.

With 6 years of data in my browser, I used the Table to Excel Firefox plug-in to save the data in the table to the clipboard as tab-delimited ASCII. I pasted the result into an ASCII text file that looked like this:

   Date    Sponsor       Description   Reward Miles    Bonus   
 13 Jan 18      SOBEYS INC    CHARLOTTETOWN   1 REWARD MILE FOR EVERY $20    +9           
 23 Dec 17     SOBEYS INC    CHARLOTTETOWN   1 REWARD MILE FOR EVERY $20    +9           
 22 Dec 17     IRVING    SACKVILLE CIRCLE K    2X REWARD MILES FOR 20L FUEL           +2     
 21 Dec 17     SHELL CANADA    ELDON PE    EVERYDAY IN-STORE OFFER    +1           
 16 Dec 17     SOBEYS INC    CHARLOTTETOWN   1 REWARD MILE FOR EVERY $20    +1           
 09 Dec 17     IRVING    SACKVILLE CIRCLE K    1 REWARD MILE PER 20L OF FUEL    +2           
 27 Nov 17     SHELL REGULAR MILES   NORTH RIVER PE    STANDARD OFFER     +1           
 25 Nov 17     SOBEYS INC    CHARLOTTETOWN   1 REWARD MILE FOR EVERY $20    +2

I loaded this file up into LibreOffice, and created some pivot tables to do some analysis.

Air Miles by Sponsor

Transactions by Sponsor

What did I learn?

I earn most of my Air Miles at Sobeys, which makes sense as this is a grocery store where I shop almost every week, and where the cashiers make a point of asking me for my card: there have been 303 weeks between April 2012 and today, and I’ve shopped at Sobeys 233 times, or 77% of those weeks.

Setting aside various “buy 3 barrels of pickles and get 10 Air Miles” bonuses, I’ve earned those miles at Sobeys’s standard rate of 1 mile for every $20 spent, so the 2,665 Air Miles came at a cost of roughly $53,300 in grocery shopping.

In addition to travel rewards, Sobeys allow redemption for cash of Air Miles at a rate of $10 for 95 miles, so my 2,665 miles earned from Sobeys can, in theory, be redeemed for $280 in groceries; that’s 0.5% in savings when compared to the amount I had to spent to earn those miles.

What is left out of that equation, of course, is what changes in my purchase habits Air Miles was able to shape, either through steering me to buy different products, or more of the same product.

Redeeming miles for travel, on the other hand, sees my 2,665 miles earned from Sobeys lands me in the 2500 mile tier, which, no matter high or low season, will fly me, return, as far west as Ontario (1,700 miles), as far east as Newfoundland (1,200 miles), and as far south as Virginia (1,500 miles):

That ain’t nothing. But then again, “get a free flight to Ontario for every $50,000 you spend on groceries,” doesn’t exactly sound like the greatest bargain in the world.

Why is this important?

You only have to look to the psychology of Amazon Prime to see analytics and incentives being used by companies trying to manipulate our purchasing at a deep level. Generally the data underlying these manipulations is opaque to us, designed to put the incentive program in the best light, and to prevent us from making educated choices that might ultimately benefit us and not the company.

It’s no surprise, for example, that Amazon doesn’t provide a tool to allow you to analyze your spending and discover whether Amazon Prime is actually saving you money or not; Amazon has significant stock in maintaining the illusion that it is.

In the same way, the Air Miles transaction dashboard is organized to give the appearance of transparency, while skewing the options and the presentation to de-emphasize the negative. When I earned 9 Air Miles on January 31, for example, I got myself 0.52% of the way to a flight to Ontario: there’s a reason Air Miles chooses to express that as a “9” rather than as a “0.52%.”

There’s only going to be more of this, more often, in the future, and if we want to assert our rights as consumers to make this incentivizing transparent, now is the time to do it.

To that end, following the guidelines on the Air Miles privacy page, I emailed the following access request yesterday to privacyoffice@airmiles.ca:

Under the provisions of the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, I would like to request a copy of personal information held by Loyalty Management Group Canada Inc. or its affiliates about me.

Specifically, I would like a CSV, Excel or other machine-readable file containing information about transactions recorded resulting from my presentation of my Air Miles card, since the card was issued to me, with the following data for each transaction:

1. Date and Time of Transaction
2. Sponsor of Transaction (i.e. the business where the card was presented)
3. Location of Transaction
4. Description of Transaction (i.e. “1 REWARD MILE FOR EVERY $20”).
5. Reward Miles accumulated as a result of Transaction
6. Bonus Miles accumulated as a result of Transaction
7. Any other personally-identified information transmitted by the Sponsor to Loyalty Management Group Canada Inc. or its affiliates about me, or about the Transaction, at the time of Transaction.

The Act gives Air Miles 30 days to respond. Stay tuned.

In The Surprising Success of America’s Oldest Living Magazine, journalist Marin Cogan goes deep on The Old Farmer’s Almanac that’s been my professional home for more than 20 years (which, given its longevity, is only just under a tenth of its life).