Halifax’s Ardmore Park has a fenced-in exercise area that’s set aside just for service dogs:

“It is important hard-working service dogs get a chance to exercise and have some off-leash down time, like any other dog. The creation of this small exercise facility will provide a safe, place for me to take my guide dog without the worry of losing track of her, like I might in a big park. It’s also easy to get here by bus,” said Helen McFadyen, Chair of the municipal Advisory Committee for Persons with Disabilities.

An estimated 75-80 registered, professionally- trained service dogs provide assistance to people with disabilities in the Halifax Regional Municipality. They include; guide dogs for the blind, ‘hearing’ dogs for the Deaf (which alert to bells, knocking, and alarms), seizure alert dogs for people with epilepsy, and ‘special skills’ dogs trained to perform specific tasks for a person according to their disability or medical condition.

What a fantastic idea!

To get access to the service dog park you need to have a registered Halifax service dog: this is easily accomplished, even for temporary visitors, by visiting the Halifax Service Centre in Scotia Square.

It took us about 10 minutes to register: we needed to show proof that Ethan is a service dog (we used Oliver’s Dog Guides ID card for this), and to provide Ethan’s breed, colour, and date of last rabies shot. We were issued–at no cost–a Halifax service dog tag and a credit-card-sized key card that unlocks the magnetic gate at the park. We’re allowed to keep the card between visits, meaning that Ethan will always have a place to run around outside when we’re visiting Halifax.

We visited the park every day of our trip to Halifax, and Ethan absolutely loved it (so much so that he decided to steal Oliver’s glove and run around with it as a demonstration of his freedom; the only way I got the glove back was to trade him for my hat: poodles).

Thank you, Halifax.

Sometimes you open a magazine and find an article about the young lad you once looked after as a two year old, now a successful water buffalo cheese maker.

Between Catherine and Oliver and I, we have failed to eat at Wasabi House approximately a dozen times.

It always plays out the same way: we decide to go to the Oxford Cinema, right across the street, to see a movie. We show up early to grab supper at Wasabi House. Wasabi House turns out to be very, very busy, and we give up and go elsewhere.

Tonight we were smarter: we went to an early 4:30 movie, and made a reservation for supper after the movie immediately upon arriving.

The plan worked like clockwork: we exited The Sense of an Ending at the Oxford, walked across Quinpool Road, and sat down at our table

We then enjoyed our very first Wasabi House meal. It was very good.

We’ve been in Halifax less than 24 hours. We’ve already, completely by happenstance, run into four groups of Islanders, including our next-door neighbours.

If you know me at all, you know that I’m a sucker for a good tea slash craft supply shop, and Halifax has not disappointed: out of the corner of my eye this morning, while walking the waterfront boardwalk, I spotted Yu Yo, tucked into a corner of the Brewery Market building on Lower Water Street.

We entered tentatively, as we weren’t sure they were open–it’s not a splashy place with flashing “come in we’re open” signs–and I immediately recognized this as a shop placed on Earth specifically for me.

We started out with a bracing flagon of strong, hot ginger tea, the kind of tea that warms you to the bone:

We then adjourned to the other half of the shop, where all manner of interesting crafting items are on offer. In lieu of my first impulse to just say “wrap up one of everything,” I carefully curated a selection thereof, and emerged after 30 minutes with what you see here:

Four notebooks, two boxes of business card-sized brown card stock, two travel diaries, 10 bookmark-sized envelopes, a small rubber stamp set of numbers and days of the week, and two dozen tiny binder clips.

As Yu Yo is just up the street from the new Discovery Centre, where we plan to spend a good part of the upcoming week, I suspect we’ll be back.

Recommended.

Oliver and I started the tradition of father-and-son March Break vacations when he was 9 years old–shockingly, almost half-his-life ago.

I cannot recall what prompted the idea in the first place, and, in retrospect, the idea of heading to farthest Slovakia as a temporarily-single parent seems foolhardy: what if I’d turned the other way and Oliver had run off into the sewers?

But he didn’t, and so the template was set and it’s a tradition we’ve continued ever since, with only one exception, in 2015:

• 2009: Kosice, Vienna, Nuremberg, Paris, London
• 2010: Düsseldorf, Wolfsburg, Berlin, Mälmo, London
• 2011: Florida
• 2012: Florida
• 2013: Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka
• 2014: Toronto
• 2016: Halifax

While getting to all of the above has involved different degrees of arduousness, it’s not really been the journey that’s switched “vacation mode” on, but rather the first supper out on the town of each trip.

The first time out, in 2009, it was a smoky Mediterranean second floor pizza-and-beer joint called Amir in downtown Kosice.

In 2010 we arrived so late in Düsseldorf that we missed supper altogether, so the suppertime portal to vacation had to wait until the next night where we ate more ćevapčići than I ever thought possible at the Lika Grill.

In 2013, we arrived in Tokyo late at night after an exhausting day of travel halfway around the world, so our first supper was at 7-11 (we made up for it the next night with an excellent sushi supper, the first of many).

This year, like last, we’re more modest in our ambitions, and have again come to Halifax for our vacation.

But the meal we had tonight, at Edna, ranks among the best we’ve had anywhere: it was simply fantastic on every level. Good food, great service, a comfortable room.

We’re here in Halifax until Wednesday, and plan to engage in all manner of father and son fun. It may not be Osaka, but that won’t keep us down.

Sarah Forrester Wendt has launched a Kickstarter campaign to open whole foods restaurant in downtown Charlottetown.

It would be a self-defeating move if I didn’t get behind that. So I did. Won’t you join me?

Jason Scott, who’s doing God’s work at the Internet Archive, writes with commendable detail about his efforts to preserve vintage Apple software in Thoughts on a Collection: Apple II Floppies in the Realm of the Now.

His piece reminded me of something that was once second nature, but which I’d long since forgotten:

Each floppy is 140k of data on each side, and in this case, all the floppies had been single-sided and clipped with an additional notch with a hole punch to allow the second side to be used as well.

There are innumerable other hacks involving floppies and cassettes and Commodore PET peek and poke secrets that once stuffed my brain but that have now FIFOed out.

Earlier in the year Jason wrote, also with commendable detail, about his work to preserve himself, in The Other Half and The Followup.

Jason, in writing with such grace about his medical adventures, joins an (unfortunately) long line of bloggers—Doc Searles and Om Malik, to name but two—who’ve done likewise by times. In doing so they do all of us a great service.

Every Friday afternoon I gather around the Skype with my remote colleagues at Yankee Publishing for a weekly review. Often, after the business is done, we use the opportunity to catch up on things not specifically work-related; for me, squirreled away in a bunker all by myself all week, this is invaluable workplace-social-time. Indeed, sort of saying hello to Sarah, Julia, Lloyd, Michelle and Alanna here at The Guild every day as I arrive, it is my workplace social life.

Today colleague Lou showed off his snazzy new iPhone 7 Plus by taking a photo of a soda bottle, using the phone’s portrait mode; as a result, you can see a fuzzy abstraction of me in the background. The effect is rather striking.

Claudia O’Doherty is the best thing about the Netflix series Love. Her comedic timing is brilliant; her deadpan style unique.

Witness this exchange, from season 2, episode 7 of the show, where O’Doherty’s character Bertie consoles Chris Witaske’s character Chris Czajkowski; I love how it’s both a conversation and a monologue.

How can you not love an actor about whom the headline O’Doherty hits pay dirt with soil erosion comedy appeared in her hometown newspaper.