In development: an Amazon Alexa skill that delivers information about electricity load, generation and peak on Prince Edward Island.

Spotted earlier in the week on a clear winter day.

It’s unseasonably warm this January in Charlottetown. Or, rather, unseasonably warm, then cold, then warm, then cold. Today is warm. Or warmish. And it is raining. Hard. Here’s the sound I hear in my office of the rain hitting the side of The Guild.

I’m working my way through the final season of The West Wing. Tonight’s episode: The Debate.

It’s remarkable how little has changed in the decade since: fix immigration, cut taxes, tax the rich, close the loopholes, raise test scores, fix health care.

The Debate is an intriguing bit of speculative fiction: in his opening statement Republican candidate Arnold Vinick suggests they throw out the rules and have a “real debate.” Democrat Matt Santos agrees and they’re off. It’s the kind of debate I’d like to see in real life.

The episode was broadcast live in two versions, one to the east coast, one for the west coast.

One of the things they never tell you about in prenatal classes is high school exam week.

Exam week starts tomorrow at Oliver’s Colonel Gray High School. He’s not writing exams, but there’s nothing happening other than exams, so he has what amounts to a late January week off.

Alas we just learned about this two weeks ago, so any “let’s go to Mumbai!” was off the table, replaced with “um, so what’s Oliver going to do all week?!” (we’ve figured it out, thankfully).

One area where our inclusive education system could use some mind-broadening.

Crossword puzzles have always confounded me. But it turns out that my problem was that I hadn’t lived long enough to drink in all the words required to tuck in far enough to be successful.

Now it seems I have. At least at the Tuesday level.

My longtime friend and colleague Morley Pinsent died on Saturday at the age of 73.

I wrote about Morley in 2014 on the occasion of a benefit his community held for him; what I wrote then is as true now as ever:

Morley was contracted by the PEI Crafts Council to manage the ACOA-funded project that originally brought me to the Island and it’s not an exaggeration to say that if not for the good humour and good welcome he gave me and, later, in the tutoring to understand “the Island Way of Life” that Morley gave me, I might not still be here. There’s not a better man to be found on PEI.

I last saw Morley at The Noodle House in mid-November. I was having lunch with a friend and was engrossed in conversation when Morley walked in and sat at the next table. We waved hello, and I planned to chat with him on my way out. But he ate and I dawdled and I missed him. The best laid plans.

The fire extinguisher we snagged at the silent auction at that 2014 benefit stands at the ready behind our kitchen sink; I think of Morley every time I see it. Is there any better totem to remember a man whose razor wit and sharper mind could slay many a conflagration?

I’ve been carrying Android phones for the past few years after a long period of self-imposed exile on the Firefox OS, Windows Phone and Nokia ice floes. My choice of Android over iOS is less a religious choice than a frugal choice: to get a well-resourced iPhone would cost me $1000, and it’s almost impossible for me to conscience carrying around something that costs that much in my EDC bag. By contrast, my Nextbit Robin cost me $299, and while it’s rough around some edges, at that price I can treat it less like an expensive totem and more like a disposable appliance.

What might yet force me to buy an iPhone, though, is the seeming lack of a capable email IMAP client for Android.

The world’s gone Gmail, it seems. At least the world outside of me. And so there seems to be little development happening for Android on creating an email client with the high standards of something like Spark for iOS.

And believe me, I’ve tried them all.

My needs, I would have thought, are simple and easily-realized: I need is an IMAP client that’s reliable, elegant, and that handles IMAP folders and email attachments without flakiness.

All of the clients I’ve tried–Gmail in IMAP mode, Microsoft Outlook, Blue Mail, TypeApp, K-9 Mail, Alto, Aqua Mail–fail to tick at least one of those boxes.

And so I’ve ended up using Fastmail app that’s provided by my email service provider. It’s not perfect: it’s sluggish, has an awkward UI for deleting messages, doesn’t support sharing images from the Android share sheet, and has unusual auto-correct behaviour when composing. But it’s reliable, elegant in it’s own quirky way, and has reliable handling of IMAP folders.

But given that at least half of my email handling is done with my phone, I pine for something better.

Any recommendations?

Made-on-PEI Heatherdale Wholesome Goods oats are now available at Riverview Country Market in Charlottetown.

While you’re at it, pick up some Mont Carmel cheese curds.

Two thoughts on the individual vs. the group.

First, via William Denton, the words of Michelle Dougherty from a BBC interview:

Dougherty: It’s to do with confidence, and that you only build up over time. But what I’ve found, after I turned fifty—I don’t really care what anyone thinks: if I think it’s the right path, I do it anyway.

Al-Khalili: All of us over fifty feel like that.

Dougherty: It’s great, isn’t it? It’s great! I just wish I could have been like that in my twenties, but what the hell.

And in the latest Alpine Review, in an interview with Barry Lopez:

We were hunting out at the ice edge, and a storm came up; the wind that had started coming out of the north was coming out of the south. Big transverse cracks in the ice were opening up, so we had to break camp and cross forty miles of ice to get back to land really fast. We came to an open lead and it was a lot of water. We were just on snow machines, we didn’t have anything that would float along with us. The approach these guys took was, everybody stood at the ice edge, and everybody said what they knew about this situation, and then everybody did whatever they wanted. There was no consensus, there was no spokesperson that said, “Here’s what we’re going to do.” Everybody was left to behave autonomously. Which is very much a part of the way traditional societies behave. They’re able to combine community and autonomy in a way we just don’t seem to be able to manage; we end up with these grotesque expressions of personal autonomy and these phony communities. So when I told that story in the group, this woman said, that’s so interesting because we’re trained with this idea of fight or flight. She said there’s a third alternative, and that’s gather . And I thought, right. You get together, and talk it through, but don’t make any joint decisions. Everybody does what they’re going to do.

With the inauguration of President Trump, we’ve reached the apotheosis of don’t-give-a-fuck-what-you-thinkism, and I would never recommend more prayer in that church.

But I’m also well-aware of the paralysis that comes from an unrelenting belief in the primacy of communitarianism, especially when practiced without a supporting framework. Collaboration can be great. But if you don’t know how to do it, it can be dreadful and soul-destroying.

In my own (having turned 50) life, I find myself, more often than not, swimming against conventional currents. Sometimes this is because I’m an idiot, sometimes because I’m a weirdo, and sometimes because I can see a better path leading off from the status quo that others cannot.

This is one reason why I’ve never been able to fit into traditional party-politics: the notion of snapping my thoughts and ideas into a rigid ideological grid—in this we believe—seems like it would drain away the most important parts of what makes me me.

I think the notion of gathering might be a way that avoids the worst of both steel-eyed individualism and doe-eyed consensualism: there’s a way to make decisions that requires neither a dictator nor an advisory council.

We gather at the ice edge, share our ideas, and then head out with whatever ad hoc affinity groups might emerge. Or by ourselves.