Back in 2015 I wrote about my first experience with Bitcoin: I exchanged $20 CAD for 0.06218887 BTC from a Bitcoin ATM in the back of Calories restaurant in Saskatoon.

Since that initial purchase, the value of Bitcoin has fluctuated a lot, but it’s had a general upward trend, and, recently, a dramatic surge; here’s the XE.com conversion chart from Canadian Dollars to Bitcoin from late May of 2015 until today:

As a result of this, the $20 I converted to Bitcoin in 2015 is now worth $445.83 CAD.

Or at least it would be; in the intervening years I’ve spent some of my original Bitcoin stake, mostly for donations to the Internet Archive and OSMC, and through my experiments with the Brave browser’s ad model.

I’ve also been paid back by Brave (0.00530655 BTC, at the time about $13 CAD, but now worth $38 CAD), and I purchased an additional chunk of 0.02 Bitcoin, online from QuickBT (no endorsement implied), which cost me $23.17 CAD at the time and is now worth $143.37 CAD.

Today the balance in my Bitcoin wallet is 0.00999723 BTC, or, at today’s exchange, $71.66 CAD.

So my spend in Canadian dollars, all-in, has been $43 and, despite having paid out several donations, I’m ahead $33.

While my head dances with dreams of having, say, purchased $20,000 in BTC and now having $445,830 CAD, what would have been both beyond my means and an absurd risk. But what fun it would have been.

Stay tuned.

When I was a kid somebody told me that Jello was made out of dinosaur bones.

This could have been a schoolyard misunderstanding.

Or perhaps my mother thought that it would be more palatable for me to eat my Jello thinking of dinosaur bones–ancient, lumbering, precious–instead of something “extracted from the skin, bones, and connective tissues of animals such as domesticated cattle, chicken, pigs, and fish.”

Regardless, the dinosaur bones left a lasting impression on me, and I’ve avoided gelatinous things since.

But what of this gelatin.

We met again today when I googled “make your own gummed envelopes” and ended up at DIY Envelope Glue for Handmade Envelopes. Which provides a recipe that calls, in part, for “1 packet granulated gelatin.”

“Gelatin?” I asked myself, “What is this gelatin?”

Which is how I learned about the cattle and chicken and pigs and fish.

It did not seem appetizing, especially for one such as me who wanders mostly on the fringes of vegetarianism.

Some more Googling. Led me to animal bones, which sets the scene:

So I did a little of my own research on this topic. I found out that gelatin (the stuff that is used to make jell-o, custards, marshmallows (yes, even PEEPS!) is made from the bones, connective tissues, organs, hooves and some intestines of animals like cows and horses. A lot of glues also contain these same animal byproducts.

And then provides the antidote, in the form of agar agar.

Agar agar and I had crossed paths before, in biology class in high school, where we used it as a medium for various things the details of which escape me.

Then, as now, I got mildly distracted, in a Boutros Boutros-Ghali way, by the name: what’s with the double-agar? I’ve been unable to find an answer to this: indeed, the Wikipedia for Agar Agar redirects to Agar and then, without explanation, starts:

Agar (pronounced /ˈeɪɡɑːr/, US: /ˈɑːɡər/) or agar-agar is a jelly-like substance, obtained from algae.

But I didn’t want to continue down that rabbit hole. Just call me Boutrous. Onward.

On my lunch hour I stopped in at the Root Cellar and picked up the necessary ingredients to made vegan envelopes: 2 oz. of “agar power” (confusingly: “Ingredients: Agar-Agar Powder”) and a bottle of apple cider vinegar:

This being the Root Cellar, the total bill was $20; not sustainable for bulk envelope production, but unarguably close at hand.

Back at the office, I decided to proceed with a prototype of an ex libris before getting tied up in envelopes, so I cobbled one together with a snippet of acetate and a green Sharpie:

Next I poured some apple cider vinegar–about 5 or 6 tablespoons, eyeballed–into a china coffee mug and heated it up in the Guild’s microwave for about 45 seconds (until the pungent aroma of sweet vinegar filled the air).

I sprinkled about a tablespoon of the agar powder into the hot vinegar (again, eyeballed), and mixed together until, like the blog said, it was the “silky consistency of maple syrup.” It was actually more like honey.

I took a throwaway paint brush and coated the ex libris prototype from side to side to side:

After about two minutes the agar agar had dried, and the ex libris had curled up a little:

I waited a few more minutes, then grabbed a book at random from my bookshelf–What Color is Monday?, as it happened–licked the back of the ex libris (“mmmm, no dinosaur bones!”), and stuck it in place.

The effect was dramatically unsatisfying: it didn’t “stick” like glue, it merely “flopped” like a wet dog.

I was ready to count the effort a failure when I decided to be patient: I closed the book’s cover and compressed it in the office book press for 10 minutes.

That worked.

It’s still wet (hence the discolouration), but the parts that are dry have seemingly fused with the book.

Amazing.

I’ll fine-tune the agar agar-vinegar ratio as I experiment further, but now it’s to the type cabinet to set up a real live ex libris for the books in my library.

I feel satisfyingly alchemical today.

The case I carry around with my sketchbook and the supplies I stuff inside it. The Tile tracker is a recent addition, because I’m always misplacing the case.

This sketch was a revelation to me because I realized I don’t have to colour inside the lines.

I read about Meguiar’s PlastX Clear Plastic Cleaner & Polish on Cool Tools, and immediately ordered some, as the prospect of being able to polish the headlights on my aging VW Jetta was alluring.

It worked as promised and new breath was blown into the eyes of our car.

I’ve taken to sketching what I eat.

There’s a downside to this: I have to sketch first, eat later. Otherwise the source code gets eaten up before the program has run.

Receiver Coffee’s been making a Oliver, Pepper and Feta Pinwheel this season that was ripe for the sketch-eating.

The real thing is more complex that I’ve rendered it. But I like the way the olives worked out (I am to be the Island’s foremost olive sketcher). And the sketch makes me jones for a pinwheel, so there’s that.

I made the sketch on a Strathmore Watercolour Postcard, which really loves the paint in a way that’s novel and interesting. Once the paint dried I put a couple of stamps on the back and mailed it to my friend Tom.

One of the unexpectedly helpful aspects of Spotify is its “Concerts” section, which shows me nearby concerts based on what it knows about my musical tastes.

This is how I ended up at the Martha Wainwright concert at the Trailside in September, and it’s how I came to know that The Weather Station is playing in Sackville on December 9, 2017:

Until I saw that concert coming up I’d never heard of The Weather Station, but since then I’ve become a fan, and so I was excited to see a new album drop on October 6, 2017, the self-titled The Weather Station.

I love this album, and I especially love the way the lyrics are presented as prose, not poetry, which explains something about the approach to songwriting that underlies the album.

Isn’t it great that this can be a verse in a song (Thirty):

Gas came down from a buck twenty—the joke was how it broke the economy anyhow. The dollar was down, but my friends opened businesses; there were new children. And again, I didn’t get married; I wasn’t close to my family; and my dad was raising a child in Nairobi—she was three now, he told me. Gas stations I laughed in, I noticed fucking everything: the light, the reflections, different languages, your expressions. We would fall down laughing, effervescent, and all over nothing, all over nothing. Just as though it was a joke, my whole life through, all of the pain and the sorrow I knew, all of the tears that had fallen from my eyes; I can’t say why. We walked in the park; under the shade, I avoided your eyes. I was ashamed of my own mind, no SSRIs, my day as dark as your night.

I wish I could memorialize the year I was 30 with such aplomb.

I hope to be at the bowling alley in Sackville in December to see The Weather Station live.

I showed Oliver a post from Brand New this morning about the redesigned logo of the Science Museum in London. The “before” logo looked like this:

Oliver said that this reminded him of a logo he’d seen before, something to do with the sun or with solar.

He searched Google for “sun logo” (no luck) and “solar logo” (no luck) and then for variations that described the logo he had in his mind “logo italics horizontal vertical.”

No luck.

I tried to walk him through different approaches to matching what was in his mind with what could be found on Google, but the exercise ended in failure.

Five minutes later, after I’d left the picture, I got an email from Oliver with the Sun Microsystems logo attached:

That was it.

This is remarkable because:

1. The old Science Museum and the Sun Microsystems logo do, indeed, share a fundamental design concept, but one that’s difficult to explain (“squared-up lettershapes arranged interestingly?”).
2. Through some mechanism that I didn’t bear witness to, Oliver completed the task once I was done interfering.
3. Sun Microsystems went out of business?!

Somewhere in the back of my mind I recalled that Sun had been swallowed up in the last decade (it was Oracle, 7 years ago, in 2010), but I’d lost track of how that proceeded, and that Sun had ceased to exist as a brand.

There was a time in the early 1990s when I used resources from the Sun-sponsored sunsite.unc.edu at the University of North Carolina several times a day; back in the day, this site, and its cousin at MIT, tsx11.mit.edu, were the place to go for Linux and related software.

The original PEI Crafts Council webserver, and much of what underlay the original Province of PEI website used resources from those two sites. At the time it was impossible to imagine a world where Sun Microsystems didn’t play a significant role in the Internet. And now it’s gone.

Also, my son is pretty sharp.

Back in the early 1990s I was working as an apprentice printer in the Composing Room of the Peterborough Examiner newspaper. Eager to earn the trust of my union brothers and sisters, I worked hard, and I volunteered for things as I much as I could. Which is how I ended up the Composing Room representative on the Joint Occupational Health and Safety Committee.

Anxious to understand what the role of the committee was, I called the provincial Labour Department for guidance. The person I was transferred to when I called happened to be the workplace inspector responsible for the Examiner, and my call prompted him to realize that he hadn’t made a surprise inspection in some time. So he decided to make one, and said he’d be there in 20 minutes. He told me inform the Publisher of his impending visit.

This was not my original intention, and it could have put me in a sticky wicket, especially as he went on to find a number of health and safety violations, things like a printing press running without proper guards in place.

Fortunately I had the protection (and respect) of my union, if not the thanks of management.

Thirty years later and here in Charlottetown, Oliver and Catherine and I headed to a local restaurant for supper one day this summer.

Oliver and I, and Oliver’s service dog Ethan, had been there a couple of times together; we’d always been greeted warmly, and the food was always good.

This time, however, the server who greeted us at the door told us that Ethan would not be allowed in the restaurant.

We explained that he was a service dog, and she said that, as much as she realized that he was allowed in, her manager had told her not to admit us, and there was nothing she could do.

We left (and then followed up later to ensure this wouldn’t happen again).

My worry was that we’d put the server in a difficult situation, one where she was forced to do what she knew not to be the right thing. She didn’t have a union to back her up, and if she’d pressed the issue I’m sure there was a risk that she’d be putting her job in jeopardy.

I thought of both incidents when I read of Peter Bevan-Baker’s plan to introduce a Private Members Bill in the fall session of the Legislative Assembly that would see “whistle blower” protection afforded to all PEI workers.

As Peter explained it on his blog today:

Just in case this excursion into statutory minutia has been so gripping that it has got your heart racing at dangerous levels, I shall protect you from the rapture of what a jurisdictional scan is, and cut to the chase of why I’m doing this. Imagine you worked in a private nursing home, and your boss was not following provincial guidelines, and that concerned you because you cared deeply and above all for the safety and well-being of the people in your care. After speaking with your employer and trying to fix things internally with no success, in the absence of legal protection, it would be a risky thing to do to expose those concerns to the appropriate licensing body, and you may well jeopardize your job. Imagine the same dynamic in a restaurant where health and safety protocols are being ignored, or on a farm where the application of pesticides may not be following provincial regulations. In all of these cases, currently there are no protections for people in the private sector who bring these concerns to the appropriate body.

As my own experiences suggest, I believe Peter’s on to something here, and I encourage you to participate in the discussion of the draft bill to ensure that it receives fair hearing and passage.

Baker John, down at Breadworks, has been workshopping a new olive bread on Saturdays. It gets better every week, and this week’s version was particularly excellent. It you’re a fan of olive bread, watch out for it.

Oh, and Breadworks has a slicer now, which has much-improved my relationship to their bread. Bravo.

I’ve had Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet running through my head all weekend. I finally found an outlet for my earworm in the public piano in Confederation Landing Park.

It’s impossible not to hear this without thinking of the last episode of M*A*S*H.