I had KKP print up some PDF extracts of OpenStreetMap maps of Charlottetown this afternoon.

And so here I sit in Receiver Coffee looking at a map showing Receiver Coffee.

Come see them tonight at the Delta Hotel from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.

I’m talking about OpenStreetMap tonight, and I thought it would be useful to have some cards to pass out to remind people of the web address. Fortunately, I own a printing press. I really hope the ink dries in time!

Every board I’ve sat on in recent memory has grappled with the issues raised in this article.

I always ask, at my first meeting, what the consensus on sharing discussions is, and how widely the minutes will be distributed. I have a strong personal belief in 100% transparency but I know enough from the conversations that have resulted to know not everyone shares that belief, and that some feel that the prospect of transparency inhibits free-flowing discussion.

See also Chatham House Rule and PEI Home and School Federation board minutes (which we publish online after they are approved at the following meeting).

We’re going to experience almost every weather condition today in Charlottetown: clear, partly cloudy, cloudy, light snow, heavy snow and rain.

And the wind is going to do a 180 as the day progresses and the temperature climbs from -11°C to 2°C.

(Screen shots from Forecaster, a nice little Android app that uses Forecast.io data).

I ordered a Rii wireless mini keyboard last week for $23 from Amazon and it arrived today.

I plugged it into the Raspberry Pi that we run Kodi on and, presto, now I have a supercharged remote control for our homebrew media centre.

Citizenship edge case:

I was born on an airplane while it was flying over the USA. Do I have a claim to US citizenship?

Answer: Maybe.

Hey, look, my picture was in the paper on Friday, raking the snow from our roof.

If you’re looking for a roof rake, I highly recommend the Garant Yukon model. It costs about $45 and has stood up to a winter and a half of punishment.

You may recall that I’ve been working on massaging Charlottetown-area transit information into open data suitable for feeding to things like Google Transit.

I’ve made good progress. There’s now a draft version of a GTFS-feed that gets spit out by a purpose-build Drupal module that assembles all the route, schedule, and stop information and outputs it in a ZIP file according to the GTFS specification.

Working with T3 Transit and the City of Charlottetown, I’ve set up a Google Transit account and I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the helpful, quick support guiding me through the process of establishing Google Transit directions for Charlottetown. While there’s an open source validator that can be used when developing the feed, a validator that’s quite capable and really helped work out the kinks, Google has a closed validation tool that is even more capable and that spotted an issue with some earlier drafts (I’d run the Winsloe/Airport Collector route counter-clockwise through Winsloe when it actually runs clockwise, and this didn’t sync with the sequence of the stops on the schedule). Once the validation passes, the feed moves on to a non-public staging system for testing, and that’s where we’re at now.

I’m meeting with the City and T3 next Tuesday to review progress, and to dig into some of the still-open issues (like “where does the QEH/East Royalty bus actually go?”) and it’s my hope that we’ll be able to move to the next stage, toward a public release, before the end of February. The first version will include Charlottetown routes #1, #2, #3 and #5 along with the Winsloe/Airport Collector; I’m shortly to meet with Cornwall and Stratford officials to get the go-ahead from them to also incorporate their town’s runs into the mix, and that will likely follow in a later update.

In the meantime, you can see evidence of my work via OpenStreetMap, where I’ve added all of the aforementioned routes and started in on the Stratford routes.

I’ve been playing The Dictionary Game (who knew it had another name?) for years; it’s second only to charades in the Pantheon of party games in my book.

My friend Stephen Southall sent me a recipe for granola after Christmas and the final phase of the preparation was titled Afterdamp, a reference to a word that featured in a game we played more than 25 years ago in which the definition of note was “the time after the moistening and before the drying off.”

Beyond its usefulness in the sexual arena, afterdamp turns out to be the perfect word to describe the phase after granola comes out of the oven and before it is bottled.

Indeed I’d forgotten that afterdamp actually has a real meaning, concerned with mining and off-gassing; in my mind, the fictional definition has superseded the real one.

Surely there must be a word for that.