My favourite kind of day.

Last Thursday I read that my friend and former client Anne MacKay had one of her photographs chosen to appear in a new series of Canadian stamps by Canada Post:

It’s a lovely photo, I am a passionate user of the mails, and take every opportunity I can to use interesting stamps, so I set out to order some of these stamps.

I could have gone out to the post office at lunch–it’s only a couple of blocks away, after all, and is staffed by friendly, unionized workers–but I decided, instead, to order the stamps from the Canada Post website, reasoning–incorrectly, as it turned out–that if anyone would be good at turning an order around and getting the stamps in my hands quickly, it would be those that deliver the mail. They have the source code in-house, so to speak.

And so at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday I placed my order:

I found the “your credit card or account has been authorized, but not yet charged” a little weird, but I figured that I’d shortly get a follow-up email with shipment details.

By Monday afternoon I still hadn’t received this follow-up, and the Canada Post website continued to give “Thank you for your order! We are preparing it and will ship it to you shortly.” as the order status, so I called their customer service line for an update.

After waiting for 6 minutes on hold, I talked to a friendly agent who began by telling me that their typical turnaround is 5 days to process the order, and then delivery 5 to 10 days after that.

For stamps.

I asked if, given this unreasonable level of service, I could cancel my order, but was told that I couldn’t: apparently even though my order is in the “We are preparing it and will ship it to you shortly” state, on January 12 it went through some transition in their system that prevents it from being cancelled.

If there was ever an opportunity to showcase Canada Post’s logistics services to small businesses, it would be in the ordering and delivery of Canada Post’s own products from its own website using its own delivery network.

What should have happened here is that I should have received my stamps in my mailbox the next morning. Or, given the late hour of my order, perhaps more reasonably on Monday morning.

Not in “around two weeks from now, but we can’t really tell you when.”

They have failed this test.

I will order my stamps from the post office up the street from here on.

Today was the first day of business for our new neighbour La Sazón de Mexico, and so I was able to have a shrimp taco combo for lunch:

Here’s a photo of their menu board (they don’t have their liquor license yet, so ignore the rightmost panel until they do):

The restaurant is cash-only until Thursday.

Oh, and the shrimp taco combo was very good.

About a year ago, when Amazon unleashed the ability for third-party developers to create skills for its Echo speaker devices, the first one I created was a skill that allowed you to ask questions about Prince Edward Island’s electricity load and generation.

But I never took the skill to certification (the review process by which Amazon certifies a skill and makes it available to everyone), and so while I continued to use it myself in “developer mode” on our Echo, nobody else could.

I decided to follow through on the last few bits of the skill development a couple of weeks ago, so that others could benefit. And at the end of last week I received a notification that the skill is now live for all Echo users in the U.S. and Canada.

This means that, if you own an Amazon Echo device, you can now ask it things like this:

• Alexa, ask PEI Power for a summary
• Alexa, ask PEI Power about the wind
• Alexa, ask PEI Power for the load
• Alexa, ask PEI Power for the peak load in 2014
• Alexa, ask PEI Power for the peak load in December 2017
• Alexa, ask PEI Power for the peak load yesterday.

Behind the scenes, this skill looks like this:

{
  "languageModel": {
    "intents": [
      {
        "name": "AMAZON.CancelIntent",
        "samples": []
      },
      {
        "name": "AMAZON.HelpIntent",
        "samples": []
      },
      {
        "name": "AMAZON.StopIntent",
        "samples": []
      },
      {
        "name": "GetLoad",
        "samples": [
          "the load"
        ],
        "slots": []
      },
      {
        "name": "GetPeak",
        "samples": [
          "the peak on {Date}",
          "peak on {Date}",
          "peak {Date}",
          "peak load on {Date}",
          "the peak load on {Date}",
          "highest load on {Date}",
          "maximum load on {Date}",
          "the maximum load on {Date}",
          "high load on {Date}",
          "the high load on {Date}",
          "the highest load on {Date}",
          "the peak load {Date}"
        ],
        "slots": [
          {
            "name": "Date",
            "type": "AMAZON.DATE"
          }
        ]
      },
      {
        "name": "GetSummary",
        "samples": [
          "a summary",
          "the report",
          "a report",
          "an update"
        ],
        "slots": []
      },
      {
        "name": "GetWind",
        "samples": [
          "the wind"
        ],
        "slots": []
      }
    ],
    "invocationName": "p. e. i. power"
  }
}

That’s a JSON representation of the skill on the Amazon end; when an Echo device sends a query, Amazon tries to figure out which “utterance” (like “an update” or “a report” or “the wind”) the user is looking for, sends a request to a PHP script on my server that queries the same load and generation data I scrape from the Province of PEI website for other purposes, and my server then returns a script for the Echo to read back to the user.

It’s fundamentally a pretty simple ecosystem to develop skills for; there are some fiddly bits on the initial setup my skill got kicked back to me several times for seemingly minor inconsistencies like “you called the skill p. e. i. power but your sample utterance used the phrase p.e.i. power,” but I managed to resolve those quickly.

If you have an Echo, please take this skill for a ride and let me know what you think.

It was 13°C today in Charlottetown, and that made for a foggy morning over the ice-filled harbour.

The last time I was on the grounds of an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium was in 2011 when Catherine, Oliver and I found ourselves in the woods outside Berlin with a ragtag group of artists and DJs on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’ve been feeling a little lost of late, lost in a fog of care-giving in two directions, worried about what happens next for our small family, more quick to anger than I would like, and generally unable to place myself on a solid mental footing inside the constellation of my lot.

A few months ago I remembered seeing something in the media about mental health walk-in clinics, and I kept the idea of walking into one in my back pocket in the weeks since. I wasn’t entirely sure whether I was the target market for these clinics, but it seemed that I might be, for their description positions them squarely in the “if you’re having some challenges” territory.

I finally decided that today was the day.

Not because of a particular crisis or confluence of events (although the death of a friend from metastatic breast cancer has weighed heavily on me this week), but mostly because I rationed that, if you find yourself Googling “PEI mental health walk-in clinic hours” more than once a week, you should probably go to the mental health walk-in clinic.

As with all previous self-directed mental health interventions I’ve undertaken, I had to confront a lot of monkeys on my back to get me from my lunchtime perch near the waterfront up to the McGill Centre: Was I really allowed to go? What if it’s full? What if the counselor is someone I know? What if I fall apart? What if I don’t fall apart? Why don’t I wait until next week! Surely there are others who need this service more than me! My, there are an awful lot of puddles near the road. Yah, right, maybe next week.

Fear and inertia are powerful, and I finally realized that if the only reasons for not going were fear and inertia, I owed myself the favour of ignoring them and pressing on.

And so I headed off to the northern regions of Brighton, through a neighbourhood both familiar and unfamiliar, toward the Mona Wilson Building at the corner of North River and McGill, located on the grounds of what, at one time, was Charlottetown’s tuberculosis sanatorium.

The walk-in clinic today was from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. I re-confirmed several times that the description could embrace my circumstances:

…offer immediate mental health support to help with anxiety, as well as life events causing stress and other mental health issues.

That seemed close enough.

I walked in the door, found my way to the reception desk, and was given a short form to fill out, a form that asked for my Health Card number, my name and address, and a brief description of why I was there.

I wrote “need to check in with someone on the state of my general mental health.”

There were a few people in front of me, so I bided my time in the waiting room for about 40 minutes, at which point a chap named Ian came to fetch me. He guided me up to the second floor, and into a room with a couch and chair.

And for the next hour, we had a chat.

What I ended up doing was the psychological equivalent of what’s called, in my trade, a core dump:

In computing, a core dump… consists of the recorded state of the working memory of a computer program at a specific time, generally when the program has crashed or otherwise terminated abnormally.

And that’s pretty well what I did: I described my circumstances, my challenges, what was going well and what wasn’t. What I dread and what I welcome. What I’ve done, and what I haven’t.

Ian chimed in with helpful insights from time to time, and his presence was vital to the exercise. But it was mostly about me structuring my consciousness in a protected space with a helpful interlocutor.

An hour later, I was still the same me, but the process of working through some things was undeniably helpful, and I left with a few references to other resources, a few new terms (“psycho-oncology,” “fullness of person”) and generally feeling like I’d done the right thing by going.

Late in 2017, the CBC ran a series on the radio about youth mental health on PEI and on one of the stories they posted to the web they chose a photo of a young person sitting, head-in-hands, alone, in front of a bank of lockers in a school. I took umbrage at that photo, for it telegraphed that mental health challenges are something self-evident and obvious, that unless you look sad and are hanging your head low, you must be doing okay.

I wasn’t in crisis today. Indeed it was, for most intents and purposes, a regular old day and I was my regular old self; I’d hazard a guess that, to look at me on my way to work you wouldn’t say “there’s a guy who could use a mental health walk-in clinic today.”

But I was. And it helped. And I’m thankful that it was there.

Walk-in mental health clinics are run every week in locations across PEI. They are free and confidential, and you don’t need an appointment.

For almost a decade, I’ve been engaging in various experiments related to monitoring and visualizing energy load and generation on Prince Edward Island.

And because of the scattershot, following-the-shiny-tin-foil nature of the way I’ve been working, various experiments have ended up on various servers with various URLs. It’s gotten confusing.

So today I created a page that, while not entirely bringing order to this universe, at least gathers links together.

Visit http://energy.reinvented.net/ and you’ll find links to everything I’ve got.

(I also used the opportunity to play with CSS Grid Layout for the first time).

Member of the Legislative Assembly for Morell-Mermaid, Sidney MacEwen, went where no member of the public had gone before: a meeting of the Health PEI board (CBC, The Guardian).

And he provided a compelling blow-by-blow account of the experience on Island Morning this morning.

I applaud Sidney’s efforts: he’s doing what opposition MLAs are supposed to do, shining light into some of the darker less-noticed corners of government (in this case, a corner with a $640 million budget).

Sidney’s efforts point to a larger issue: a growing schism between two views of the relationship between government and the citizenry.

The first is the “leave things to us” model, the predominant model of the MacLauchlan government and governments before it. In this model there is a professional public service, and a very clearly defined (and generally very limited) set of portals through which citizens can see and offer feedback on the policy-making process.

The second is the “we’re doing this together” model, and it’s a model informed strongly by the ongoing digital transformation. Under this model, government and the citizenry are involved in a joint, constant, ongoing, multi-faceted policy-making partnership that dramatically increases the surfaces over which the public service and the public collaborate. This model is messy, we’re not quite sure how it works yet, and it’s likely that many of the cherished institutions and approaches to governance will break when exposed to it.

On the floor of the Legislative Assembly, the Premier sits beyond the rail, where he is served chilled orange juice by pages, and citizens sit thirsty in the gallery, remaining silent.

On the Internet there’s no rail, and the Premier’s just like us.

How we rationalize that dichotomy is the project that Sidney MacEwen is ultimately engaged in.

It will be fascinating to see how we work this out.

I wrote in December about how PEI had reached a new peak electricity load on December 27, 2017; since that time the temperature has remained low, Islanders have continued to use a lot of electricity to heat, and so electricity usage has remained high. The peak on Saturday, January 6, 2018 was 279.71 MW, which was just shy of the December 27, 2017 record.

I pulled the peak load for each day in January from 2013 to 2018 and created a chart to allow for a visual comparison:

We’ve had 5 days in January 2018 so far that have seen the highest daily peak for that day of the year ever.

Here’s the raw data for the chart as a CSV if you want to create your own visualizations.

Oliver and I took our last run up to Sears tonight; it closes on Monday forever, so we didn’t quite make it to the end, but we were close enough. And given that we were pictured in The Guardian on opening day, we can truly say we were around for the entire 13 year run.

Sears in Charlottetown always seemed like an implausible proposition, and I can’t recall ever visiting the store when it seemed remotely busy. But we bought a lot of sheets and pillows and towels there over the years, a couple of appliances, three mattresses, several suitcases and a smattering of clothes.

For things like sheets and towels, I’ve no idea where else on Prince Edward Island one might buy such things now that Eatons and Sears are both gone. The Internet, I suppose?

The final weeks at Sears were a fascinating look at what’s left over when everyone’s bought everything: from the look of things tonight, it’s small men’s shirts, sheets for twin beds, Lagostina frying pans, and curiously compelling stationery.

It was the stationery that was my last purchase: we waited in line for 20 minutes for the privilege of buying half a dozen gold ink pens, a collection of beautiful, simple, colorful greeting cards and a pencil case.

Goodbye Sears: I never really loved you, but I’ve a feeling you will be missed.