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.

I’ve been carrying a mobile phone of one description or another for about 15 years. Originally this was almost entirely so that various servers for which I’m responsible (or clients to whom I’m responsible) could get in touch with me in case of trouble; in recent years, in addition to this, it’s so that I can talk to [[Catherine]], so that I have a camera in my pocket, and for all of the digital ephemera that have gathered up inside smart phones over the decade that there’s been a Twitter.

I’m on the precipice of acquiring a new mobile phone, to replace my increasingly creaky Moto G, and so I thought it would be a good time to catalogue phones-past.

The Pager (1997 to 2002)

My first mobile phone wasn’t a phone at all, but rather a pager, from Island Tel. It had the handy number 902-557-5787 associated with it. The model itself is lost to history, but because I’m a saver of bills I know that I signed up for service on June, 12, 1997 and that it cost me $30.50 a month: $16.50 for service and $14.00 to rent the pager. The bill went down to $28.00 when I switched from “Maritime Access” to “Provincial Access.”

Nokia 3285 (2002 to 2005)

In 2002 I switched my pager for a bona fide mobile phone, a Nokia 3285, again from Island Tel. This was my first mobile phone, a compact CDMA phone almost exactly the height of the phone I carry now, but about 5 times thicker and sporting an external antenna. It’s the phone I learned to type T9-style on (the system we used to have to use to enter text of phones that only had a numeric keypad).

Back in the day when you wanted to get a cell phone from Island Tel you had, confusingly, two options: you could go to the Phone Centre on Belvedere Avenue or you could go next door to the maintenance shop. I was never completely sure why there were two service points; but it was always clear that the maintenance shop was the place to go, as they could solve more problems and answer more questions. This was before the age of “professional” mobile phone sales people: the folks behind the counter at Island Tel came from the mobile radio heritage of the company, and were businesslike and aimed to please.

Catherine had a mobile too (what model it was I’ve no record) and between the two of us we paid about $70 per month between monthly fees and usage charges.

Sony Ericsson T68i (2004)

I never actually owned this phone, simply borrowed it from my friend Kevin for my first stab at having a GSM phone on-hand while traveling in Europe in October of 2004, on a trip to Croatia.

I’d first laid my hands on this phone at MacWorld in 2002 with my friend Dave. It was one of the first phones (maybe the first?) to support iSync on the Mac, and so it figured prominently in the Steve Jobs keynote that year.

Eventually a unit made its way to Kevin, and he loaned it to me. It served me well on the that trip.

Sony Ericsson T610 (2005 to 2006)

After giving the T68i back to Kevin when I got back from Croatia, I needed another GSM-capable phone for a family trip to France in the following spring of 2005.

This was the first unlocked phone I bought, and the first phone I bought from something other than Island Tel.

I paid $150 for it on eBay, unlocked. I used it in France and then, after we returned home, I used it at home on the Rogers network for a year.

Nokia N70 (2006 to 2007)

After seeing my friend Henriette with a N70 at reboot in Copenhagen in 2005, I knew I had to have one of these phones, which were the cat’s pajamas back then and, arguably, the start of Nokia’s erstwhile golden period at the leading edge of the convergence of phones and the Internet.

I paid $335US for the phone on eBay.

Besides being able to easily connect to the Internet, the phone boasted a much, much better camera (compare the first photo I took with it to the last photo I took with the T610).

The N70 was the phone I got most emotionally attached to: it was lovely to hold in the hand, did what it promised and it just kept going and going and going.

Nokia E61i (2007)

This was a mistake: it was a larger Nokia phone, with a physical QWERTY keyboard that was, in theory, a jump in capabilities over the N70. But I found it too large, and I never took to the keyboard, so I sold it on eBay and went back to the N70.

I paid $525US for the phone retail from Mobile Planet in the U.S. in June and sold it for $399CDN in September.

Nokia N95 (2008 to 2012)

While I loved the N70, I may have even loved the N95 more, as it was the perfectly-designed phone for my use of it, and sported things like slide-out audio controls that I wish modern day phones featured.

I bought the N95 in April 2008 by mail from J&R in New York City for $685US, the most I’ve ever paid for a phone.

The N95 took the N70’s tentative toe in the water of the Internet and took it out for a ride, helped by a then hacker-friendly Nokia. You could run a webserver on it. It had a web browser. It had a GPS. You could listen to podcasts.

I used the N95 for 5 years — and I’ve gone back to it a few times, for it’s easy to use and high-quality camera, several times since – only replacing it when the “smartphone” era was inevitable and Nokia gave me a free developer phone to replace it.

I got my money’s worth!

Google Nexus One (2010)

Another phone I bought, tried, and returned. Except this time I only used it for a week. And went back to my N95.

Nokia Lumia 800 (2012 to 2013)

As Nokia was dying a slow, painful death in the shadow of iOS and Android, it was grasping at enough straws that it would send developer phones to almost anyone.

So in January of 2012 a box from Nokia arrived and inside with a Lumia 800 running Windows Phone.

As I wrote in my wiki, I didn’t hate it. The Windows Phone metaphor of typographically-rich tiles was something that I appreciated and kind of came to love. I used the phone for 18 months, trying to embrace Windows Phone to the greatest extent possible as a Mac user. It was pretty clear from almost the beginning that neither Nokia nor Windows Phone had much of a useful life, but it was fun while it lasted.

HTC Evo (2013)

When Oliver and I went to Japan in the spring of 2013 we needed a phone to travel with. We couldn’t use my North American phone, as it wasn’t possible to use a Japanese SIM in a North American unlocked phone, so I had to rent a phone locally. It wasn’t too expensive, and it was an invaluable tool for getting around, taking photos and looking things up. The phone we ended up with was an HTC Evo; it wasn’t top-of-the-line, but it worked (and sported some weird features like 3D photos).

Geeksphone Peak (2013 to 2014)

When Firefox announced it was developing an open source operating system, Firefox OS, I dove in: ever since the heady early days of the N95 I’d longed for the opportunity to really dig into the guts of my phone, and having a phone with Firefox’s rendering engine at its core, and being able to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to develop native applications, seemed liked a wonderful opportunity.

And it was. I developed a bunch of apps for Firefox OS, some for my own use and others published to the Firefox Marketplace.

I paid 172 EUR for the phone directly from Geeksphone in Spain.

For a beta-program phone with a brand new operating system, the Peak lasted me well for the year I carried it around.

Geeksphone Revolution (2014)

The Revolution promised the best of both worlds: it would run both Android and Firefox OS. And so I replaced my Peak with a Revolution in March of 2014.

I paid 243 EUR for the phone, directly from Geeksphone in Spain.

While I had visions of an easily dual-bootable phone dancing in my head, running both Android and Firefox OS proved challenging, and the shiny app-rich Androidness of the phone won me over. And so, for most of the time I used it, it was an Android phone, not a Firefox OS one.

Then, one day, the phone just wouldn’t boot. I tried and tried to get it to work, but it was dead. Faced with the horrors of trying to do an RMA with a tiny Spanish company, I looked for its replacement closer to home.

Moto G (2014 to present)

I’ve owned three Moto G phones since the Revolution died, all of them purchased unlocked, retail, from Staples here in Charlottetown. I haven’t paid more than $250 for any of them.

I started off with the smaller original model when it first became available, then passed this on to [[Catherine]] (who continues to use it), replacing it with the larger Moto G 2014. I had to purchase a third Moto G last October when, in a fit of insanity, I tried to trim down a full-sized SIM card to travel with, managed to get the card, which didn’t work, stuck in the phone and then managed to crack the phone while trying to get it out.

The Moto G’s primary attraction to me, beyond being a capable Android phone, is its price: I like the thought of carrying around a phone that’s not precious enough that I have to be afraid of dropping it or scratching it or even losing it. It’s got a solid camera, acceptable performance from Cyanogenmod 13’s take on Android Marshmallow, and it generally does most everything I want it to do.

What Next?

You’ll notice that I’ve never owned an iPhone. Originally this was because you couldn’t buy unlocked iPhones and I needed a phone I could travel with without being shackled to a Canadian carrier’s overseas rates. And then, as time passed and you could purchase an iPhone unlocked, it just became a thing, a sort of perhaps-irrational commitment to trying to maintain some separation between my computer’s OS (owned by Apple) and my phone’s (owned by someone else).

But as my Moto G is starting to get pokey – mostly because it has limited internal memory and limited internal storage, both of which I’m forever bumping up against these days – I’m looking for something new, and, for the first time, I’m considering an iPhone.

What stops me every time I start down this road, though, is that a reasonably-equipped modern iPhone will cost me roughly 5 times the cost of my current phone:

While I’m not averse to spending that much if there’s a payoff in terms of, well, something, spending so much for a phone (more than the computer I’m typing this on!) would mean that I would be carrying around a precious, expensive, fragile totem. And I’m not sure I’m ready for that. Or, indeed, that it’s rational.

So while I haven’t closed the door on an iPhone, I’m looking more seriously at whatever’s cool and interesting in the Android world, focusing on the Nextbit Robin (which I love the design of and which, at $299, is relatively inexpensive) and the Oneplus 3, which is more expensive, but appears to be on the top of everyone’s “blazing fast new giant killer” list.

Or perhaps, as I think often, I should endeavour to enter the post-phone era and carry nothing in my pocket. I’ve a feeling that might be the healthiest – and certainly the cheapest – option of all.

Yes, Oliver really is that tall.