Back in late 1990s, Peter Richards, Kevin O’Brien and I went thirdsies on an Apple QuickTake digital camera. It was among the first of its kind, and it was amazing. One day I took a bunch of photos of the cows next door to our house out on the Kingston Road; I’d thought the photos were lost until this afternoon when I found a CD-ROM marked “My Documents Backup - 2000.” And there they were.

From my friend Laurie Kingston, who taught me much of what I know about metastatic breast cancer, years before Catherine’s diagnosis, a pointer to mBC Time, a video by Teva Harrison.  It is as Laurie describes it:

It’s about living with metastatic breast cancer, less than 3 minutes long and very, very worth it.

Harrison’s In-Between Days: A Memoir About Living with Cancer is another helpful window into this terrain.

On the way to school on Thursday, Oliver and I saw a personalized Prince Edward Island license plate that was 8-letters long, the longest that will fit on a standard license plate. I seized this as a teachable moment, and for the rest of the walk to school we tried to figure out how many possible combinations of personalized license plates this would result in.

Things went horribly wrong.

We reasoned that of there are 36 possible characters that can go in each of 8 spaces, the total number of possible license plates would be 8 x 36, or 288.

But that didn’t make any sense: there are obviously more than 288 cars on PEI, and so there must be more than 288 license plates.

So last night we returned to the problem, and started with something simple: a 2-character license plate, with the range of A, B, C available.

Our earlier (wrong) calculation would come up with 2 x 3 = 6 possible combinations. But look:

AA
AB
AC
BA
BB
BC
CA
CB
CC

That’s 9 combinations, not 6 combinations, so obviously our original formula was wrong.

The source of our error: simply multiplying the number of positions by the number of possible characters works fine if each possible character can only be used a single time.

So if you’re arranging Peter, Bobby and Sue into two seats, your options are:

Peter - Bobby
Peter - Sue
Bobby - Peter
Bobby - Sue
Sue - Peter
Sue - Bobby

In that situation, where there’s only one Peter, one Bobby, and one Sue, then 2 x 3 = 6 calculates the number of possible seating combinations.

But for license plates, there’s no such restriction: each letter can be used any number of times.

And so the proper calculation for our simple test is 3² — three squared. Or 3 x 3 = 9.

Or, more generally characters^positions. So for our PEI example, it’s 36⁸.

Or 2,821,109,907,456 combinations.

Which is to say, two trillion eight hundred twenty-one billion one hundred nine million nine hundred seven thousand four hundred fifty-six.

More than 288, thank goodness.

(It’s not exactly 36⁸, of course: some personalized combinations are disallowed by regulation,  like “any messaging related to public or well-known figures, including members of the government and other dignitaries.”)

This wasn’t first order I placed on Amazon.com – that came the year before, and resulted in this email exchange with Jeff Bezos – but this is still a very old Amazon.com packing slip. Twenty years old, in fact: order placed on December 22, 1996.

I visited our safe deposit box at Provincial Credit Union today for the first time in 12 years, looking for a copy of Oliver’s birth certificate. I didn’t find it. But I did find this 1924 receipt from the “American Consular Service” for $1 paid by my great-grandfather, John Pothalo (born потягайло and anglicized when he emigrated to Canada), “for preparing Alien’s Declaration and administering oath thereto as prescribed by regulations of the Department of State.”

I’ve no memory of how this receipt survived for 92 years in the family records, nor for how it ended up with me. But I’m glad it did.

If I recall what my grandmother told me properly, the trip to the US, from Fort William, Ontario, was to go to the Mayo Clinic, 700 km away in Rochester, Minnesota, for cancer treatment.

I am not a natural beach-goer, especially here on Prince Edward Island where that means saltwater beaches, which I’ve never quite taken to.

But having not as much as dipped my toes in the ocean this summer but once, this past Saturday, faced with a bright, warm, sunny day, and positing that the sun had spent the summer warming up the ocean for us, Oliver and Ethan and I headed off to Brackley Beach midday to at least have one day at the beach in 2016.

Despite his genetic background as a Pudelhund, Ethan has no love of water: he won’t even willingly get his toes wet, and seems deathly afraid of the idea of waves. So Oliver and I had to split into ocean-going squads, taking turns minding Ethan, and frolicking about in the water.

While the sun may indeed have been warming the ocean all summer, either it didn’t do a very good job, or the effects had waned, as the ocean was cold.

Not too cold for a quick run-jump-dive-run out, but certainly too cold for a frolic. So Oliver got his toes wet, I spent a quick minute running in, going under, and running out, and Ethan entertained himself digging holes in the sand.

As cold as it was, the pleasure of accomplishment made my quick dive worth it. We packed ourselves up and headed to the PEI Preserve Company for lunch, enjoyed a walk through the Gardens of Hope afterward, and were home for supper with the feeling of a bonus summer day well spent, two days before Thanksgiving.

For the past two years I’ve been living with a heightened thrum of emotional complexity.

The greatest survival advice I’ve received came from my occasional psychologist, who reassured me, in a moment of particular stress, that I will not break. Whether or not this is true, it was, and has continued to be, a great comfort. Believing I will not break allows me to bend more deeply than I ever thought possible.

Some days I feel uniquely unskilled at this dual role I am playing as supporter-of-partner-with-cancer and supporter of son-with-autism. What they never tell you, in emotional elementary school, is that it’s all very well and good to imagine yourself a Platonic provider of aid, support, and comfort, but you also need to be mindful of, and prepared for, the effects the swirling complexity have on you, yourself. I’m still here. In other words.

A few months ago I managed to leave the kettle boiling: a carelessly placed plate wedged itself on top of the automatic shut-off switch, and so the kettle just kept boiling and boiling and boiling until I returned, 15 minutes later, to find the kettle hot, angry and depleted.

Sometimes it’s like that. And sometimes it’s not.

All of this has made me more sensitive, in both helpful and unhelpful ways; being attuned and empathetic is great until you find yourself, however temporarily, unable to find your way home. And being more sensitive has led me to recognize renderings of emotional complexity with new eyes and ears.

Two years after first hearing it, for example, I am unable to listen to Ingrid Michaelson’s Open Hands without crying.

Look, there, it happened again.

In this regard I am greatly in debt to British writer and actor Phoebe Waller-Bridge for the gifts she’s given us in recent years. Chief among these gifts is the BBC television program she wrote and stars in, Fleabag.

In the fourth episode of the first series, Waller-Bridge’s character, Fleabag, goes with her sister (played by the estimable Sian Clifford) to a silent retreat in the British countryside. She escapes from the retreat and encounters, by chance, her bank manager, played by Hugh Dennis, sitting at the edge of the property.

What follows is four minutes of the best television I’ve ever seen.

Hugh Dennis’s soliloquy is a masterful display of pathos, and one that hits close to home, specific circumstances aside.

Waller-Bridge, sitting beside him, says only seven words in the entire scene, and yet conveys so much otherwise that it is breathtaking.

This scene too I cannot watch without crying.

You can find Fleabag on the BBC, and on Amazon Video, among other places (the music, by the way, is Allistrum’s March from the self-titled album of Irish supergroup The Gloaming; you should seek it out too).

“I want to take clean cups, out of the dishwasher, and put them in the cupboard. at home. And the next morning I want to watch my wife drink from them. And I want to make her feel good.”

I have no greater wish.

Four years ago my friend Ken Williams and I cooked up a plan, which we dubbed TeacherNet, to provide teachers at Prince Street Elementary School with high quality wireless Internet. As I detailed here at the time, the genesis of the project went something like this:

Following from the January meeting of the Minister’s Advisory Committee on CIT and the later meeting with Premier Ghiz, Peter Rukavina prepared a report on the state of the education technology landscape for the board of the PEI Home and School Federation.

During the consideration of this report, we became aware of pilot projects, under the aegis of the French School Board, to install low-cost wireless routers connected to the community office Internet feed, to support both community users and educators in French schools. 

Inspired by the French School Board project, with the Premier’s words in mind, and after discussion with educators and Terry MacIsaac, principal at Prince Street School, the notion of a similar wireless “pilot project” to test the viability of a low-cost parallel Internet network at the school was raised by the Prince Street Home and School. The principal encouraged the Home and School to pursue the project, and educators in the school were enthusiastic in their embracing possible uses of such a network in the school, so the decision was made to proceed.

With the support of the Prince Street Home and School, and with the cooperation and generosity of Bell Aliant, which provided the backhaul to the Internet, using low-cost wireless mesh routers Ken and I set up a network that covered the school. Every teacher and staff person had a username and password, and the Internet was completely unfiltered. After setting it all it, we stepped back and let things be, leaving the school to use its newfound superpower as it saw fit.

One of the things we had to agree to in our pilot project was that the provincial “help desk” wouldn’t be called upon to do support for the wireless infrastructure: Ken and I had to agree to handle this. Ken bore the brunt of this, but, fortunately, the network proved remarkable robust: most of the time it just worked.

It was reported in the minutes of the September Prince Street Home and School meeting that TeacherNet has served its purpose and will be shut down, replaced by government-installed-and-supported wireless Internet:

The school now officially has wifi provided by the Department of Education. The former TeacherNet, which was provided to the school as a project of Home and School, is being taken down —its work is complete. All the teaching staff has a laptop and there are computers in other locations around the school. There are also two full carts of Chromebooks plus 17 others to deploy as needed. Staff has been trained on the Chromebooks now. They are all web-based and memory is in the cloud. Work begun at school can be accessed at home and worked on from the home. Each student will have their own cloud account and sign-in. When people learn how to use it, it will be quite powerful.

None of this would have happened without the imagination and tenacity of Ken Williams, so please tip your hat to him next time you see him; he is a credit to technologists everywhere.

And it also wouldn’t have happened without being embraced by Bell Aliant, the Department of Education and the Eastern School District; we tend to think of bureaucracy, especially the technological bureaucracy, as being stubborn and implacable; one thing TeacherNet demonstrated is that if you make a solid technical and education argument, find the funds yourself, and are willing to roll up your sleeves and go into the school on a Saturday morning and string some cable, you can actually get things done.

TeacherNet may be dead, but the spirit of TeacherNet lives on.

Compelling real political protest in front of Province House meets a fake Father of Confederation and his confused-looking tourist group on a Sunday morning.

I’m traveling in New England this week, and having reconciled myself to the fact that most travel SIM cards I’ve purchased in past result in no mobile service, I’ve just left my Canadian Virgin Mobile SIM in my phone, and I’m going without cellular data and limiting myself to texting (75 cents each) and not using the phone as a phone (at $1.45 a minute).

Yesterday I got a notification on my phone that I had voicemail waiting. I didn’t want to spent a couple of dollars to pick up a voicemail, so I called my own phone number from Skype, expecting that I’d be able to press “#” and enter a PIN to pick up my messages.

Except that I wasn’t prompted for a PIN at all: I was immediately dropped into the voicemail menu, and I was able to pick up my voicemail without authenticating at all.

At first I couldn’t figure out what had happened: did this mean that anyone could access my voicemail?

Then I realized that I’d set my Skype “Caller ID” number to the same number as my mobile number:

So Virgin Mobile was simply looking at the Caller ID, thinking that I was calling myself, and dropping me into my voicemail without prompting for a PIN.

That’s a problem.

There’s a verification hoop that you need to jump through when you set up a Skype Caller ID number (Skype sends you an SMS with a code you need to enter, which verifies you own the number). But that’s not always the case with other voice-over-IP systems that aren’t Skype: in many cases you can set your Caller ID to an arbitrary telephone number.

All of which means that if I know your mobile number, and I set my Caller ID in a VOIP system to that number, and you don’t have a voicemail PIN, it’s possible, in theory, for me to access your voicemail.

So I recommend that you do what I’ve just done, which is to set up a PIN for my Virgin Mobile voicemail, and to ensure that the “skip PIN” option is turned off.