Last week Mozilla unveiled Mozilla Location Services, which it describes as “a new experimental pilot project to provide geo-location lookups based on publicly observable cell tower and wifi access point information.”

In other words, it’s a system to allow mobile devices send information about (a) where they are, from GPS and (b) what cell tower they’re connected to and/or what wifi networks they can see, to Mozilla in a way such that mobile devices can then, without GPS, extrapolate their location from this same information.

Similar more-closed systems are already run by Google, Apple and others: this is why, for example, your wifi-only iPad can approximate its location. There are also several other more-open systems in place that do the same thing, OpenCellID.org perhaps the most capable.

An odd irony to Mozilla’s project is that Mozilla’s Firefox OS mobile operating system doesn’t currently allow apps in the Firefox Marketplace that are capable of accessing the device’s cell tower information; such apps must be “certified” and this is something that only “core” apps support.

So Mozilla has released a mobile service that devices running its own mobile devices are essentially incapable of contributing to.

Fortunately it’s only essentially incapable, as it’s possible to install apps to Firefox OS devices directly, through the Firefox OS Simulator. Which is how I’ve been able to modify my app, Get Cell ID, to support reporting to Mozilla Location Services.

I built this app some months ago to send data to OpenCellID.org, and I’ve extended it to support sending both to Mozilla Location Services and to a custom URL of your choosing.

Because the app now supports reporting to a URL of your choice, it’s possible not only to log the data to third-party services, but to use the app as a sort of “digital bread crumbs” tool; for example, here’s a map showing my own reported locations over the past few days here in Charlottetown:

I made a hacky little AppleScript to sort through the birthdates for the 90 of my 784 contacts (11%) where I have record of something. Of those 90 contacts:

• 41 are older than me (45%)
• 4 are the same age as me (5%)
• 44 are younger than me (49%)

So I think that means I am neither old nor young but rather just right.

Back in July I wrote about the need to improve the “courtesy emails” sent to patrons in advance of items being due.  At the time I proposed a new graphical format for the notices; at present, though, the Evergreen system Robertson Library uses doesn’t support MIME email, so these emails must be plain ASCII for the moment.

What I’m proposing instead, is to replace the existing notice template that results in notices that look like this:

Subject: UPEI Robertson Library Courtesy Notice

Dear Peter Rukavina,

Our records indicate these items are due in 3 days:

Please return or renew this material before fines accumulate.

Note that laptops and other reserve items cannot be renewed.

You may renew your material in one of 3 ways:
   - online with your "My Account" page
     (https://islandpines.roblib.upei.ca/opac/en-CA/skin/roblib/xml/myopac.xml?ol=4&l=4&d=2)
   - by phoning 902-566-0583
   - by replying to this email circdesk@upei.ca

Thank You.

   How we decide, by Lehrer, Jonah.
   Call Number: BF448.L45 2010
   Due Date: 2013-06-24
   Barcode: 37348007190119

With a template that results in notices that look like this:

Subject: UPEI Library books due in 3 days

You have UPEI Library books due in 3 days:

+- Due Saturday, June 24
+    "How we decide"

You may renew these:

1. Online at http://library.upei.ca/renew
2. By telephone at (902 )566-0583.
3. By email to circdesk@upei.ca

Laptops and reserve items cannot be renewed.

Here’s what’s changed:

1. Modifed the subject line to describe actual contents of email (“courtesy notice” doesn’t mean anything to real people).
2. Removed references to “Robertson Library” and replaced with “UPEI Library”, which is more widely understood.
3. Removed salutation (“Dear Firstname Lastname”) - it serves no purpose, as the email is already addressed to the recipient in the header.
4. Put the due books up front rather than buried at the bottom.
5. Removed the useless item-related metadata (call number, barcode, author) and just display the title.
6. Changed the date format from the hard-to-parse “2013-06-24” to a human-readable “Saturday, June 24”.
7. Replaced the complicated-looking URL for online renewal with a shortened URL (that would redirect to the Evergreen page).
8. Remove “Thank You”.

I welcome comments on the proposed new format.

I have known about the Nordic “Live Action Role Playing” (LARP) movement since my friend [[Olle]], one of its practictioners, first told me about it when we met all those years ago.

For someone like me with no connection to LARP, it has always been a hard practice to understand, taking place in an unfamiliar nexus of theatre, improvisation, make-believe and board game playing. Over the years I’ve been able to eke out a basic understanding from [[Olle]], and from his partner [[Luisa]], who’s also an adherent, but I’ve always felt it was an incomplete one: there are only so many detailed questions you can ask your friends about something that’s so familiar to them.

And so when the opportunity to attend some sessions at Alibis for Interaction that, together, formed a sort of “LARP 101,” I jumped at the chance.

The first was Why We Play – Larp As A Tool For Learning by LARP evangelist Miriam Lundqvist; her company, LajvVerkstaden – The Larp Workshop – uses LARP as an educational tool, and she gave a good summary of how, in her words, “narrative games on all platforms are increasingly also designed on serious topics.”

She was followed by Jaakko Stenros, who delivered on the dauntingly-title talk Living The Story, Free to Choose – Participant Agency in Co-Created Worlds. He provided a detailed look into the world of LARP, both in theory and practice, and in the transcript of his talk you can tease out a lot about what’s essential to LARPing in the Nordic countries, including this characterization of what it is like to LARP:

Let us consider the form of larp. Larp is embodied participatory drama. As a participant, you are experiencing the events as a character, but also shape the drama as it unfolds as a player. You have a sort of dual consciousness as you consider the playing both as real – within the fiction – and as not real, as playing.

You are both a player and a character, which creates interesting frictions since you inhabit the same body.

There is no external audience in larps. However, there is an audience, the audience of the participators. The performer and the spectator are also brought together in one body. In larp, we talk about the first person audience; in order to see and witness these works, you must participate.

I now feel well-grounded in the basics of what LARP is, how it is practiced, and for what ends.

I remain, however, completely mystified by it.

Not because I don’t understand what it’s about, nor because I don’t see its value. Indeed, it seems like something amazing.

But I’m someone who, at least as I conceive of myself, is incapable of taking on a persona: I feel skittish giving an assumed name at the Starbucks counter, so seeing myself as a butter forger seems beyond my capabilities.

I remain curious, however, and so perhaps given the right situation I will through caution to the wind and adopt the persona of someone who can imagine himself playing a LARP. At least now I know more about what I’d be getting myself into.

Yesterday was a long travel day home to Charlottetown: I woke up at 5:00 a.m. local time in my Malmö apartment and went to sleep in my Charlottetown bed at midnight, almost a 24 hours later.

One of the legs in that journey was a British Airways flight, № 811, from Copenhagen to London, a flight scheduled to fly as a ferocious wind storm was making its way through Europe. So I expected the worst.

I first noticed that something was untoward when I tried to do the machine self-checkin at the Copenhagen Airport: I was directed to the counter to check in manually, which is never a good sign.

The clerk at the (mercifully short) line told me that the flight might be delayed, but that I should proceed to the gate for the scheduled 8:05 a.m. departure time. She was friendly and efficient, and there was a printed “hey, this might be a rough travel day” letter on the counter in front of her to reinforce what she told me.

A quick pass through security (I believe I may have been misidentified as priority passenger “Herr Bergmann,” but I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth) and I was enjoying a coffee and sandwich at Joe & The Juice ten minutes later (it’s a distinctly un-airport-feeling kind of place, and thus an excellent place to fool yourself into thinking you’re just hanging out).

During this time the British Airways mobile app was displaying a rather odd situation, where the plane was departing on time, but arriving more than 90 minutes late:

The reason for this became apparent when I got to the gate: Heathrow airport had moved the flight’s “landing slot” to 10:40, but the airline’s plan was to board everyone as schedule with the hopes that we could get an earlier slot and be ready to go just in case.

And so that’s what happened: acting as though everything was perfectly normally, the flight boarded for an 8:05 a.m. departure.

And then, once we were all aboard, the captain, a pleasant chap with a dry wit and hearty laugh, came out into the cabin to break it all down for us: if everyone had been left to mill about the terminal and an earlier landing slot came up, they wouldn’t be able to pounce on it, so their plan was to load us all up, do the safety demo, and then pull back from the gate, fire up the tea boiler, and tuck in for a wait.

As it happened, as soon as we pulled away from the gate and taxied out to the area where tea boiling is permitted (by virtue of being allowed to run the auxiliary power unit, which isn’t allowed at the gate), a landing slot did come available at Heathrow, and we took off shortly thereafter.

Our actual departure, thus, was 8:42 a.m. and we landed at 9:50 a.m., only 35 minutes late.

Communication was clear; expectations were communicated (“we might be really late, but we’re going to try to see what we can do”); and so when we arrived late, it seemed like a gift rather than a customer service issue.

Bravo, British Airways, for doing what so many other airlines cannot seem to do. I will fly with you again.

An eagle-eyed reader of the blog spotted this notice in the 1970 Prince Edward Island Official Road Map and Tourist Guide:

The Alibis for Interaction conference is over, my final goodbyes to European friends have been said, and I am packing up the Malmö operation for return to Charlottetown tomorrow (it’s a long day of travel that starts at 1:00 a.m. Atlantic and ends at 11:00 p.m. Atlantic; with a stopover at London Heathrow where, as I type, “the worst weather since 1987” is happening, so, who knows).

I came to Sweden for Alibis for Interaction on the strength of my good friend Luisa’s role in helping to organize it and because encapsulated in the name was a notion that lies at the heart of my own confused relationship with the universe: bridging social gulfs. The simple idea of the “alibi for interaction” – an excuse, an inspiration, a cue, a setting, a framework or, as I came to learn, a “magic circle” – seemed like a powerful way of expressing this.

And so, in truth, I knew I was coming as soon as Luisa told me the name.

It’s hard to summarize a two-day immersive experience like Alibis: this wasn’t a “I learned some new tricks for optimizing JavaScript callbacks” conference, this was a “can you reverse engineer mingling for me, please?” conference. That the conference involved some siginficant personal transformation for me makes it doubly difficult to describe, both because it seems sort of unbelievable and absurd as I write about it and because, well, personal transformation is difficult to describe.

Suffice to say, perhaps, that when I asked that question – “I don’t understand mingling, can you explain it to me?” – to someone chosen at random, someone who turned out, by incredibly lucky happenstance, to be a kind-hearted writer with a deep awareness of the mechanics of mingling, her own struggles with it, and Olympic level social skills to boot, I got an answer. A helpful, thoughtful, practical answer. Or, really, set of answers and techniques and tips. Like “when you’re in a room full of people you don’t know, smile; make eye contact with people; if they make eye contact with you and smile back, that’s a good cue to go and talk to them.”

It wasn’t as much the advice itself that was the transformative aspect (although it was truly helpful): it was the context, the relationship to the formal “how to design positive experiences for groups” talk from the podium, and to the exemplar exercises in everything from LARPing to “deep dating” that, taken together, put forward the idea – perhaps obvious to you, but novel to me – that social dynamics are something over which you can exercise control.

So I learned two important things at Alibis.

First, despite my insistent protests to the contrary, I am not shy. That was a surprise, and the revelation came simply by suddenly realizing, unprompted, that the bulk of my shyness was a result of self-identifying as shy.  I may not be an extrovert (although even that’s up for debate), but being an introvert doesn’t mean that I’m terrified of social situations, or at least doesn’t have to mean this.  In short, I’m calling bullshit on myself on this one.

Second, and as important, is that being skilled at making connections with other people, something I had heretofore regarded as a God-given miracle talent of everyone else but me, is, in fact, a learnable skill.

If there was an aggregate message of Alibis for Interaction it was “we can design positive social experiences that can change the world.” In my case the spin-off benefit of having this notion coursing through the air was the sudden recognition that I have agency in the social sphere: I can design positive social experiences that can change the world. And me.

I can’t overstate how profound, quantum and useful this revelation was: upon realizing it, I proceded through the rest of the conference as a substantially changed actor. My interactions with others seemed free and easy and unpanicked in a way that was, dare I say, fun. I learned things. I shared experiences, related stories, listened, chatted.

The seminal experience of the conference, the one where I got to take my newly renovated brain out for a ride, came on the evening of the first day when the conference relocated up the Skåne coast to a restaurant for a multi-course vegetarian meal. Seating was at random and I happened to end up at a table with three Swedish women in their twenties, interns from the local event-planning program who were helping to run the conference,

Rather than an awkward stumbly evening of terrified shyness this ended up being a delightful evening of conversation about myriad topics with a diverse and fascinating trio with whom I might have no other opportunity to interact in such a way. I learned about their lives, their plans, their struggles, and they learned something of me.

And this worked – and this seems crazy as I write it, but it’s true – simply because I sat down thinking “I can help make this work out” rather than “oh no, I have to get out of here.”

I can help make this work out.

That’s a powerful notion. And perhaps it’s a simpler way of summarizing what Alibis for Interaction was all about.

I had an hour or two in Landskrona late this afternoon. Most of the shops were closed, rain was threatening, and it was getting dark. So I did what the son of a librarian does: I sought out the Landskrona public library, the “Bibliotek.”

The downtown is relatively well-signed, and I was able to intuit the way to the library by piecing together the evidence: it’s in a cobbled-together collection of buildings a few blocks from city hall and a block from the Landskrona Theatre.

Despite its multi-building-cobble, it’s a bright, pleasant library, with many nooks and crannies to explore. Among other things, I leafed through Stephen Fry’s introduction to Douglas Adams’ last book (I photocopied a particularly good page; 3 SEK, or about 50 cents Canadian), read parts of a book on calligraphy, and browsed through their good collection of graphic novels.

As I wandered about I realized that the system used to organize the books was neither the Library of Congress nor the Dewey Decimal system, but something that seemed uniquely Swedish. I asked at the information desk and a helpful librarian gave me a thorough 10 minute introduction to what is called the SAB:s klassifikationssystem, the SAB being the national association of librarians in Sweden.

It’s an intriguing system of letter combinations where different letters are ganged together to specify topic, chronology, language and form. The librarian told me that it was a system developed by Swedish librarians to “represent the Swedish mindset,” which is a nice way of thinking about a cataloguing system.

Little did I realize that I stumbled on a bibliographic hornet’s nest, however: apparently there is a movement to migrate Swedish libraries to use the Dewey system, a movement that is meeting with some resistance.

You can dive down into the SAB system here: you’ll find, for example, that code lc:d is “Architecture Theory and Psychology” while P:oa is “General: sociological aspects.”

Enjoy it while you can.

I am just back from Landskrona, site of Alibis for Interaction, where those who were in town on conference-eve gathered for a bowl of lentil soup and some early introductions.

I realized, while sipping my soup and drinking in the room, that I am going to a conference with a bunch of professionally social people who are gathering, in part, to discuss the engineering behind their profession.

My participation is either a really good idea (a master class in “not being so terrified of conversation with strangers”) or an inane one (suiting up to play offensive tackle for the Los Angeles Rams with a mortal fear of footballs).

One way or the other, tomorrow morning I dive in with both feet.

This visit to Sweden I’ve decided that rather than throwing my hands up in stunned amazement at the variety of sounds in the Swedish language, I will make some effort to understand them (it only took eight years for me to come to this!).

Yesterday’s revelation was that the letter k has two distinct pronounciations, which seems freaky to an English speaker.

I’ve been reading the signs in front of churches – kyrka – and saying (in my head), something like kirk-ah.

I have been wrong.

Kyrka is pronounced more like sheer-ka because the first k is pronounced “like ch in check, but without the initial t sound” when it comes before a “soft vowel” like y, and the second k is pronounced as one might in English.

As it is in kaffe (for “coffee”), which is pronounced as you think it might be: calf-eh.

All of which means that the Swedish for “church coffee,” which is kyrkkaffe, and which has a stunning number of ks, sounds something like sheer-calf-eh.

What wonders will I find today?

Thanks to [[Olle]] for turning me on to k’s wonders.