Before Ethan came into our house, I was the last person on Earth who would consider posting a hilarious dog video online.

But that was then, this is now.

And so, witness this hilarious video of Ethan who, faced with a CD of traditional Venetian barcarole on the stereo, decided to join in.

This is not something that Ethan does regularly; the only time we’ve witnessed him howling at anything before is at an ambulance.

From an interview with Robert Rowland in The Alpine Review № 3 on “The Post-Idea World”:

Alpine Review: I wonder, though, what kind of education system we are going to need to prepare the next generation of people operating in an Age of Intuition, or in a world beyond ideas. Because it seems we are caught in so many frameworks. It’s interesting to envision a world beyond ideas.

Rowland: I think, in terms of education, it is actually much simpler than that. In this country, we have gone backwards in terms of education. If you think about where education was a generation ago, we have now gone back to more kids taking more exams, at a younger age, with more and more testing. It is becoming more like a Japanese system. The opportunity for kids to develop emotionally, physically and so on, that has been cut back. Time for games, for sport, for emotional exploration, talking in a more open, unfettered way about the world—all of that time in the curriculum has been cut back. In a certain sense, I think, it is just about more of that: more time for kids to play, more time for them to do sport, more time for them to talk about their feelings, more opportunity for them to have emotional tools, I suppose, to help them understand their world. Just a bit less math and science, certainly fewer tests. It is crazy, just crazy.

A series of communications related to Twitter coalesced in front of me this week.

Warren Ellis, in his Orbital Operations newsletter, mentioned that he’d purged his Twitter archive back in December. Much in the same way it had never occurred to me that one could stop consuming sugar, it had never occurred to me that this was something one could do, or that one would want to do.

So I was, of course, immediately intrigued.

Then I read in The Guardian that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has added a (currently) optional request for social media account information to its visa application form. It wasn’t so much that I was fearful of being personally affected by this–I don’t need a U.S. visa, as I’m a citizen–as I was woken up to the fact that the tweets in my timeline are, in aggregate, a digital paper trail of my comings and goings, feelings and actions. A trail that government agencies think it useful enough to mine.

The creepy feeling this engendered was only amplified by reading a CBC story this morning that the Canada Revenue Agency–our tax agency–is starting to do much the same thing.

The combination of realizing that I could delete my archive–in the spiritual as opposed to technical sense–and that the only loss suffered as a result will be my data mining attack surface, combined with an increasing realization of how useful (to others) that attack surface is becoming, was enough to push me over the edge.

So I downloaded my Twitter archive, then fired up a Windows 7 virtual machine on my MacBook Air, installed Twitter Archive Eraser, and went through the process of deleting the 36,318 tweets I emitted over the last decade.

It took about 30 minutes to get it all done; I deleted my thousands of direct messages and my 3,314 favourites while I was at it (these are more cumbersome to erase because of Twitter’s rate-limiting; patience is required).

This process was, it turns out, incredibly freeing.

So freeing, in fact, that another mention of Twitter, in this week’s edition of The New Yorker Radio Hour, also caught my attention. Dan Savage talked to David Remnick about Twitter:

Savage: Twitter. I’m addicted to it. Literally it’s the last thing I look at every night in bed before I fall asleep and the first thing I look at every morning on the way to the bathroom. And as I do it I’m like “why am I putting this needle in my arm.”

Remnick: I don’t understand why you do it. I get hit on this all the time. I’m not on it, and yet I read it. I peek over the hedge as it were. But I just know if I went on it, it would be a time suck.

Savage: It is.

In Savage I saw myself.

I love Twitter (how could I have tweeted 36,318 times without loving it). And yet, as Remnick fears and Savage confirms, it is a time suck. Like Savage, checking Twitter has been a morning habit, an evening habit, and a standing in line to get coffee habit. I had cause to wonder not so much “why am I putting this needle in my arm?” as “if I stop putting this needle in my arm, what else could I spend my time doing?”.

I’ve tried and failed before to quit, most splashily back in 2009.

So this time I decided to try a more nicotine-patch style withdrawal: after I deleted my archive, my direct messages and my favourites, I also unfollowed everyone but Catherine and Oliver, reasoning that if there’s nothing on my timeline, what’s there to be addicted to?

Time will tell whether the patch works.

From the book Gondola, a rumination on Venice by Donna Leon:

The cruise ships, long a sore in the eyes of most residents, have been slipping in and out of the city for years, though it is only recently, as their effects on the welfare of the city and its residents have become more evident, that the infection been recognized as a full-blown disease.

There’s almost no criticism of the many cruise ships that sail into Charlottetown Harbour every summer: despite the tolls, hidden and obvious, they place on our infrastructure and our souls, they are regarded almost universally as a thing we want more of. Venetians know better.

This can’t be good: chaise plus blanket plus Apple TV plus The Office. In the office.

The hand-lettering on this fire insurance map of Cardigan, Prince Edward Island from 1910 is beautiful:

When the PEI Home and School Federation was invited to provide feedback on the then-draft School Change Policy to the English Language School Board, among the recommendations submitted was one related to open data:

Provision of open digital data to aid external organizations in contributing to the process.

While the Board did integrate several of the Federation’s recommendations into the final policy, this open data recommendation was not one of them.

Now that the school change process is well-underway, the absence of this open data is compromising quality of the consultation process, most prominently in the provision of draft school attendance zone boundaries.

Many of the draft recommendations concern modifications to these boundaries, and they are, understandably, of great interest to families who will be affected.

And yet these boundaries are being communicated to the public using cartographically-dreadful low-resolution PDF maps that look like this:

This is a clear example of why open trumps closed: there is tremendous depth of cartographic experience on Prince Edward Island, and if open map data was made available the community would be able to create maps of far higher quality and utility than these.

I spent a good part of 2015 telling public servants that “PDF are where data goes to die” and there is no more clear an illustration of this.

If you’re engaged in the school review process, and want better maps to aid better decision making, I encourage you to ask for them.

Update: Bob Andrews from Public Schools Branch got back to me very quickly in response to an email where I asked him for GIS data related to the boundaries. We had a good conversation about the possibilities and limitations of providing open GIS data. I learned that the PDF maps in the reports are created by exporting PDF files from Baragar Systems’ GeoSchool application, so the poor quality of the maps is not a reflection of local cartographic capabilities but rather a reflection of that application’s limitations.

I followed up with a call to Baragar to see if it was possible to export GIS data from GeoSchool and was told that although this isn’t built into the GeoSchool application, it’s possible for Baragar to export ESRI Shapefiles for an additional fee; they would not agree to do this, however, without an agreement that the resulting data files not be shared with the public, which makes the notion of doing this with open data in mind moot.

This is an example, thus, not of reticence by the public service to release open data, but rather a situation where a commercial third party enforces a restrictive license on data created using its software that specifically prevents the data from being released in the open. And thus, for the longer term, it’s a matter of reevaluating our software choices to those that favour open data.

There’s too much choice in the toothpaste aisle, but I’ve got a system: in my Evernote I keep a photo of my go-to brand, Colgate Sensitive Pro-Relief.

Toothpaste is toothpaste is toothpaste as far as I’m concerned, and I buy this brand not because of its multiple adjectives, but rather because I really like the cap.

Old-style screw-on caps fly away too easily, and require the tube to be stored horizontally; newer-style hinged snap-shut caps allow vertical storage, but get clogged too easily.

The cap on the Colgate Sensitive Pro-Relief is rather ingenious. On first use the tube gets “cracked open” by using the top of the cap as a sort of wrench; from then on the substantial hard-to-lose cap screws on with a very satisfying click; it never gets clogged, and it allows the tube to stand vertically.

I don’t know why this isn’t the standard on all toothpastes.

I stitched together a time-lapse of this morning’s sunrise over the headquarters of The Old Farmer’s Almanac in Dublin, NH, using images from the Almanac.com webcam. The sequence runs from 5:00 a.m. to just before 9:00 a.m.

I have been an enthusiastic patron of Prince Edward Island’s Public Library Service for more than 20 years, but I didn’t learn until this weekend that it had what’s called a “floating collection.”

On Saturday, Oliver and I traveled up to Summerside to see the new Inspire Learning Centre, and, because the collection is so well-displayed, I quickly found some books I wanted to borrow:

Except I wasn’t sure this was allowed: could I, a Charlottetowner, borrow Summerside books and, what’s more, could I return then to Charlottetown?

“Yes!”, the enthusiastic librarian an l at the checkout desk told me.

And—here’s the floating bit—the books I borrow and return to Charlottetown will stay in Charlottetown.

I’d always imagined that each library branch had its own collection and that there was a complicated scheme for returning them “home” if they left. But there isn’t: the books float from branch to branch organically.

This raises two interesting possibilities:

First, if one could get anonymized data on the flow of books from branch to branch, maps of “interest flow” could be drawn. That would be cool.

And, because we all have the power, through our borrowing and returning, to change books’ locations, it’s possible to influence that same interest flow. If I want to increase chainsaw literacy in Cornwall, or tip the discussion of early English drama in Tignish, I simply need to borrow-and-transfer the right books.