I’ve returned again to the task of sorting through my various bits of sound scattered across servers and hosts. Deep among them I found this recording of [[Oliver]] when he was three years old, singing a song about pie.

Summer thirty years ago, 1986.

I was 20 years old.

I’d just completed my first year at Trent University.

I’d moved from Champlain College residence into John Muir’s house at 640 Reid Street in Peterborough.

Did I have a summer job? I can’t remember.

I was hanging out a lot at Trent Radio, I remember that. Listening to a lot of Suzanne Vega. Going to the Shish Kabob Hut. Taking my once-a-week turn at cooking supper for my roommates. Developing a crush on a girl for the first time.

My year at Trent had been neither a failure nor a success. I went in with no particular sense of purpose, and emerged mostly the same.

About this far into the summer I was debating whether to return to Trent or not, a decision that represented an opportunity to stake my own claim on life, but that was also tinged with a large amount of guilt for turning my back on, well, everything.

In mid-July it was all just theoretical. Stirrings.

By mid-August the die was cast.

I announced my decision to drop out by cowardly calling home at a time I knew my parents wouldn’t be there.

“Tell Mom and Dad I’m dropping out of Trent and hitchhiking out to the east coast,” I told my brother Steve when I called.

(In retrospect: what was I thinking?! What a phone message to receive from your son. I’m sorry.)

And that’s what I did. From Toronto to Montreal to Lévis to Rivière-du-Loup to Fredericton to Saint John. Across the Bay of Fundy to Digby by ferry, then by thumb to Pointe-de-l’Église and Yarmouth. Student standby on Air Canada from Yarmouth to Boston, Greyhound to St. Albans, and then hitchhiking to Montreal and back to Peterborough. How long was I gone? A week. Or two.

I must have phoned my parents back at some point. We must have had an animated conversation or two about my plans.

On my return to Peterborough I found that I’d received a partial scholarship for my second year at Trent, but by that time it was too late.

I’d staked my claim.

My walk to and from the office everyday takes me along the pedestrian mall known as Victoria Row, a stretch of Richmond Street that’s closed to vehicles in the summer months.

I have more than a passing familiarity with this stretch of street: not only to I walk it perhaps more regularly than anyone, but I was the founding president, back in 1993, of the Victoria Row Business Owner’s Association (I was the compromise candidate: as neither a shop owner nor a restaurateur – I worked for a non-profit – I was a neutral third party in situations where the interests of each were seen to be at odds).

Victoria Row has always been full of political intrigue: there was the Clarinet Man controversy, the kiosk debacle, the issue with the water feature in the middle of the street, debates about music or no music or what kind of music or how loud the music should be.

This year the issue is vehicles; specifically, how frequently there are vehicles on a theoretically vehicle-free street: Vehicles on Victoria Row ‘out of control’ reads the CBC headline; Row rage as vehicles ignore signs to keep off Charlottetown’s mall in The Guardian.

The city’s response to this has been to plaster the end of the Row with more and more signs:

From left to right you’ll see:

• PEDESTRIAN MALL / Closed to Traffic (x2)
• EMERGENCY VEHICLES / UNLOADING BETWEEN 7:00AM - 10AM
• DO NOT ENTER (x2)
• CLOSED TO VEHICLE TRAFFIC (x2)
• ROAD CLOSED

In total there are 8 signs there, all with some variation of KEEP OUT.

And yet these signs have seemingly no effect. Other than to make the street seem rather more unwelcoming than I imagine the merchants and restaurants would like, and creating a grove of signposts more at home at the entrance to a toxic waste dump than a tony urban oasis.

All of this brings to mind my first encounter with signage on Prince Edward Island almost 25 years ago: when my friends and I pulled up to the University Avenue Visitor Information Centre. At the end of each parking space was a sign titled “POLITE NOTICE” that went on to indicate that the parking was only for visitors. For a time you would see these signs dotted around the Island, and while you might consider them to have a sort of passive-aggressive tone, I always admired them for leading positive.

Cheekiness like this can backfire too: [[Oliver]] and I take issue with the David’s Tea window sign “Sorry pets, humans only” every time we visit with [[Ethan]] at his side; in their quest to be witty they’re also saying, by implication, “service dogs are not welcome here.” Sometimes it’s better to be plain and direct.

In other words, whether you are a pedestrian street or a tea shop, maybe it’s better to be welcoming with exceptions rather than all-out unwelcoming.

In this spirit, I present herein my proposal for a replacement of the current signage grove with a single plain and welcoming sign. It dispenses with the “no, no, no, keep out, you’re not wanted here” and replaces it with a “come on in, except you vehicles.”

The City of Charlottetown is welcome to use this without recompense.

Back in 2003 I had occasion, due my work in publishing, to meet with a mailing list broker.

Mailing list brokers are companies that work for magazine publishers. When you check the box to decline “from time to time we will send you valuable offers from our trusted marketing partners”, you’re telling them to leave you alone: they take publisher’s subscriber lists and sell them to third parties who might want to market to that group.

You can imagine, for example, that if you’re in the fishing tackle business, the list of people subscribing to Field & Stream is filled with just the kind of people who will buy your products. Or so the theory goes.

Learning about this business made me curious to know if I could use a mailing list broker to learn more about the subscribers to the one magazine that I subscribe to, The New Yorker.

As it happened the company that I met with also handled The New Yorker account and so I knew where to write. Here’s what I asked, with a mixture of authenticity and conceit:

I am the secretary to the Board of Directors of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust, a non-profit land conservation charity in Prince Edward Island, Canada.

We would like to send a fundraising letter to subscribers of The New Yorker magazine who live in the province of Prince Edward Island.  I’ve examined your web page on the magazine, but as we are amateurs unfamiliar with the language of list rental, I’m having difficulty figuring out what fees would be involved.

Can you tell me what the cost would be to our organization for one rental of Prince Edward Island-resident New Yorker subscribers?

Less than 24 hours later came the reply:

Unfortunately, there are only 25 subscribers to The New Yorker that reside in PEI.  I’ve checked the Canadian Database, which is a compilation of all of the magazines published by Advance Magazine Group (the publisher that publishes The New Yorker), but there are only 209 subscribers in PEI.  The minimum order size is 3,000 names.  I’m not sure if there are other provinces that you would be interested in mailing into.  If so, please let me know and I’d be happy to get those counts for you as well.

This was, perhaps, the most intriguing email I’ve ever received: I’ve spent the 13 years since, slowly and deliberately, trying to learn, by word of mouth alone, who those 25 subscribers are.

There’s me.

And Catherine Hennessey.

I was pretty sure that Harry Holman would have a subscription, wouldn’t he?

The public and university libraries would surely take up 4 or 5.

But who else?

From time to time, in the intervening years, I will meet someone at a party, and they’ll say something like “Oh dear, did you read that Talk piece by George Packer this week; wasn’t it droll!”¹ and I’ll quietly take the list from my pocket² and add their name.

I think I outed Susan Brown on Christmas Eve this year, but I may mis-remember.

Bob Gray just outed himself to me on Facebook.

All told I have probably accounted for 10 of the 25.

But who are the rest?

Please feel free to out yourself in the comments here.

Even if you don’t live on Prince Edward Island.

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. Apparently I’ll only need 25 chairs.

Current temperature in Charlottetown: 26°C.

Current temperature in my air conditioned bunker deep inside The Guild, as Anne & Gilbert plays in the next room: 15.8°C.

My tenancy comes with some enviable privileges on days like this.

Every year around this time I receive a letter from The New Yorker subscription department informing me that my subscription is to be automatically renewed in the fall.

And every year that letter is signed by Michael Spencer.

Michael has no job title listed. He’s not “Director of Circulation” or “Subscriptions Manager” or “Customer Service Agent.”

He’s just Michael Spencer, The New Yorker:

I am a longtime and contented subscriber to the magazine. Reading it every week is one of the central activities of my life.

So I’ve no grudge with Mr. Spencer.

Other than wondering whether or not he exists.

There’s always been something vaguely suspicious about the generic nature of his name (like the G. Raymond that TD Visa uses in its marketing).

And about his lack of job title.

And about the fact that he maintains the same role, signing these letters, year after year after year. Why is he never promoted?

His name even appears in materials released by WikiLeaks under the The Global Intelligence Files project. That’s surely suspicious.

Others have wondered about this before. They’ve been irate, however, whereas I’m simply curious.

Like those others, my first impulse was to call Mr. Spencer at the number on the renewal form.

After wading through a robotic telephone tree, I provided my subscription information to an agent and asked to talk to Michael Spencer.

“In what department?”, the agent asked.

“He signed my subscription renewal letter,” I replied, “and I’d just like to talk to him about the design of it.” (Which was true – the bit at the top about October appears to conflict with the bit in the middle about September).

“Alright,” came the reply, “I’ll have to put you on hold.”

After about 7 minutes on hold I was transferred to “her supervisor” who asked me for Mr. Spencer’s extension number. I replied that I didn’t have his extension number, as it wasn’t listed on the letter. She asked me what department he works in. I didn’t have this either, obviously.

“We’re a very large corporation, Sir,” came the reply, “and I cannot transfer you without an extension. Is there something I can help you with?”

“I just wanted to provide Mr. Spencer with some feedback on the subscription renewal notice,” I told her.

“I could pass that along to our publisher,” she replied.

“Perhaps I could just call the magazine directly,” I suggested.

“You are calling the magazine,” she answered.

At this point I rang off, as it was clear that Mr. Spencer was not there.

So I’ve no recourse but to send Mr. Spencer a letter. I will let you know his reply.

In recent years I’ve ended up using Sublime Text as my coding editor of choice. From time to time I go back to BBEdit, where my heart lives, or to TextMate, but something or another ends up driving me back to Sublime. A lot of the time that something is git-related. Sublime, through the SublimeGit package, has excellent git support, but, as with all things Sublime, using it requires some keyboard fu.

For example, to make a “quick commit” it’s Shift+Command+P and then typing (at least) “quick”. And then if I want to push my commits, it’s Shift+Command+P again and then “push”.

I do this hundreds of times a day, so that adds up to a lot of typing.

To reduce some of the typing, here’s what I did.

Withing Sublime Text I selected Sublime Text > Preferences > Key Bindings - User, like this:

In the resulting (for me, empty) file called Default (OSX).sublime-keymap I entered the following key bindings setup:

[
  { "keys": ["f1"], "command": "git_quick_commit" },
  { "keys": ["f2"], "command": "git_push" }
]

With this in place, to make a quick commit I just press F1, and then to push the commit I press F2.

Thousands of keystrokes a week saved!

Casual is a television sitcom directed by Jason Reitman.

A Hologram for the King is a film starring Tom Hanks and directed by Tom Tykwer.

Neither will find a large audience, both because of distribution (Casual airs only on the streaming service Hulu and A Hologram for the King had limited cinema distribution) and because their subject matter concerns the tribulations of people over 40 trying to right the course of their social lives.

Casual is about Valerie, a recently divorced psychotherapist in her mid-40s trying to re-learn how to make friends (she’s also trying to re-learn how to date, but that’s a secondary thread).

A Hologram for the King tells the story of Alan, a recently divorced salesman in his late-50s who is sent by his company to Saudi Arabia. Once there he struggles with carving out a new social place for himself; like Valerie, he’s also trying to re-learn how to date but, also like Valerie, he’s rediscovering how to make friends.

The perils of reverse-engineering friendship as an older person was also the subject of a recent segment, Why Can’t We Be Friends?, on This American Life, part of the episode The Perils of Intimacy.

Here’s how host Ira Glass introduced the topic:

OK, fellow adults, here’s a question. When did you last make a friend? Like, I mean an actual friend who you see regularly, you talk about actual, personal things. It’s hard, right? To make a new one? To get to that point? To get through the awkward “hey, you want to hang out sometime” phase?

I’m in this thing right now with this guy who, honestly, I thought like maybe we’re going to become friends. And he sent me an email saying, like, hey, let’s have dinner. And I thought, great. And I responded with a specific time. I said Thursday, how about Thursday? Heard nothing.

Then a few days later, in an email about something completely else, he suggested again, like, hey, we should do dinner sometime. And again, I was like, great, how about Thursday? Again, heard nothing.

What is that, people? How do adults become friends? Neil Drumming, on our staff, has run a little experiment with human guinea pigs on this particular subject.

As an old(er) friend-making-challenged adult, there’s much to be mined from this material. The machinations that play out in all of the above bring to mind What is Friendship?, a chapter in one of Oliver’s books. It’s helpful to see the struggle played out in the adult population, in drama and documentary form: it gives me hope that it’s a thicket that can be untangled.

Now that I can blog by email, posting sounds here is as simple as hitting record and sending an email. Which means I’m posting more sounds.

Recalling that what we know as a “podcast” is simply RSS wrapped around audio files, turning that flow of sounds into a “podcast feed” proved relatively simple in Drupal.

And so you can now “subscribe to my podcast” to receive the occasional bits of sound that appears here, in your podcast player of choice:

• http://feeds.ruk.ca/ruk-podcast is the podcast feed itself.
• Or you can subscribe in Google Play directly.
• Or you can subscribe in iTunes directly.

This isn’t a daily or weekly or even monthly thing: random sounds will show up on a seemingly random schedule. Enjoy.

Premier MacLauchlan has posted the video of our chat last week, part of his Island Entrepreneurs web series. I like the fact that YouTube’s automatically-generated thumbnail for the video is of me scratching my head.