Oliver’s MacBook Air broke. I got frustrated trying to get it repaired. I emailed Tim Cook at Apple about my frustration. Tim Cook’s office replied, and took on the case. We drove to Moncton. Oliver’s MacBook Air got repaired.

In an article on August 16, 2013, The Charlottetown Guardian newspaper referrred to Tim Banks as a “well-known businessman” (emphasis mine):

The provincial government is lending a total of just over $8 million to well-known businessman Tim Banks for an expansion of the redevelopment of the former Kays Bros. Building on Queen Street in Charlottetown.

Which prompted me to ask, via Twitter, “What is the threshold that causes @PEIGuardian to refer to someone as ‘well-known’?”, to which The Guardian replied:

@ruk Appeared in at least two Guardian articles? If someone says the name in the newsroom, we all say, “Oh yeah, him!”?

This made me curious: just what does trigger “well-known businessman” in The Guardian? So I decided to try and find out. From the UPEI Robertson Library record for The Guardian I made my way to the “Eureka” service, which holds a full-text archive of the newspaper (UPEI campus login is required to access this).

Here are all the occurrences of “well-known businessman” appearing in The Guardian in the last decade:

• The provincial government is lending a total of just over $8 million to well-known businessman Tim Banks for an expansion of the redevelopment of the former Kays Bros. Building on Queen Street.
• Griffin says [Wade] MacLauchlan is a well-known businessman and highly respected academic who has demonstrated a strong commitment to building better communities.
• Lt. Michael Campbell, a well known businessman, volunteer, and local board representative will act as host for the event.
• Murphy is also known to many Islanders as the wife of well-known businessman Danny Murphy, franchise owner of Tim Hortons and Wendy’s on P.E.I…
• A well-known businessman and sports lover who passed away at the age of 92 last year, [Edmund] Gagnon was considered a giant in the world of junior hockey and played a significant role in helping to establish the sport in New Brunswick.
• A well-known businessman and facilitator behind the Small Halls Festival, [Ray] Brow said it’s time to say goodbye to any long-distance charges in this province.
• [Harry T.] Holman, a wealthy and well-known businessman, purchased land in 1910 with the idea of building a home for his family.
• Well-known businessman [Peter Williams] offers for capital’s council.
• [Jospeh] Spriet, president of the 2009 Canada Games Host Society, is a well-known businessman who lives with his family in Valleyfield.
• “I’m here as a friend and neighbour on behalf of friends and neighbours,” said [George] Beck, a well-known businessman who was asked to act a spokesman for what he said was a large portion of residents opposed to the pay increase.
• Wayne Buote, a well-known businessman and community supporter in the Rustico and Cavendish areas, died suddenly on Sunday at his home in New Glasgow.
• He also said there is absolutely no connection between [Kevin] Murphy’s appointment and cabinet’s decision to hand the well-known businessman $250,000.
• Well-known businessman [Tim Banks] agrees with Charlottetown’s last-place finish in Maclean’s survey.
• Keith MacLean, a well-known businessman and member of P.E.I.’s construction industry, died Friday at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown.
• Well-known businessman and Tourism Advisory Council chair Kevin Murphy says he believes the Provincial Nominee Program was good for P.E.I. tourism operators, and admitted that he personally benefitted from it.
• Well-known businessman Elmer MacDonald dies.
• Well-known businessman and entrepreneur William (Bill Sr.) Hambly died at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital on Monday, Aug. 6. He was 87.
• But her father Robert [MacLean], a well-known businessman himself, took her aside with some advice.
• Roger Birt, well-known businessman in the Charlottetown area who has flourished with residential properties and commercial real estate.
• The Conservatives Best Hope For A Breakthrough In Prince Edward Island Is In Charlottetown, Where Well Known Businessman Tom Deblois Is Hoping To Turn The Capital City Blue On Monday.
• Chamber president Derek Nicholson presented the President’s Award to well-known businessman and town fire chief Harry Annear, who was shocked when called to the podium.
• The announcement was made this week by Mayor Richard Collins who said he was delighted the well-known businessman [Merrill Scott] and former town mayor agreed to take on the task.
• The mural on the Hardy building at the corner of Church and Main streets will honour the life and times of well-known businessman Gerald Rooney (1914-1983).
• He’s the son of well-known businessman Orin Carver, who passed away a few years ago.

During that same decade there were no references at all in The Guardian to “well-known businesswoman” and no references to “well-known businessperson”.

This brings to mind Jane Ledwell’s talk at Confederation Centre Public Library last year where she sought to answer the question “are women mentioned less-frequently in media in general.”

We held the Make Your Own PirateBox Workshop this morning, as scheduled, in Confederation Landing Park. Six people registered for the workshop: of these, two people sent regrets at the last minute and one person didn’t show up, so total attendance was four, including me.

We gathered under the gazebo at the end of the park, which turned out to be a great location, given that it was a sunny, breezy late-summer day.  After chatting about PirateBox in general for 20 minutes, we dove in an set out to make ourselves some PirateBoxes.

Among the bumps we encountered along the way:

• Several of the PirateBox installation steps require the router to be tethered via wired Ethernet cable to a host PC; modern Macs don’t have a built-in Ethernet port, and so unless you bring the “dongle” that adds and Ethernet port, your PC can’t be used for this step. This was an error I made at PirateBox Camp in Berlin last month – I left the dongle for my MacBook Air back here in PEI – and it was something that one of our number forgot this morning.
• Unless you do a 100% “use a PirateBox to make other PirateBoxes” install – which is something that we went through at PirateBox Camp, but which I wasn’t set up for this morning – you the router to have Internet access via wired Internet to install PirateBox itself. I thought we were going to be able to pull this off by using mobile phone GSM Internet access via wifi tethering with a host MacBook Air and then sharing that connection with the Ethernet port, but we never quite got that working. After 90 minutes of fiddling with various possible options – including an attempt to use a virgin TP-Link MR3020 to do what it’s actually designed to do – share Internet via wifi – we gave up and retired to my office up the street to use its wired Internet. After that, things went as planned.
• The Achilles heel of the install process is the vi editor that is used to change the network configuration half way through the install; while there’s a pointer to a cheat sheet included in the instructions, vi is just too weird for the uninitiated and so lots of “this is going to get really technical” disclaimers are required.
• Once vi has been mastered and the network configuration changes, the rest of the install process pretty well happens on its own and that part worked flawlessly.

The workshop broke up about 1:00 p.m. with two new PirateBoxes having been built – one person, our dongleless one, had to leave early. It was a good learning experience for how (and how not) to conduct a PirateBox workshop; everyone in attendance was patient and open to learning.

I have long been curious about Royalty Junction, the spot north of Charlottetown where the east-west railway line met the Charlottetown railway line. I could never figure out why I never ended up driving through Royalty Junction until today when, looking for a place for [[Oliver]] and I to take a quick later-afternoon walk, I came to realize that it’s a junction that doesn’t actually directly abut any roads. Here’s what it looks like from the air:

The historical plaque posted at the junction describes the it as a “wye”, which it clearly is looked at from any direction you might approach it in. Here’s Oliver illustrating this very fact:

The plaque goes on to describe the function of the junction:

The station itself was located in the “wye” between the diverging Souris and Kensington tracks with platforms on both sides for passengers who might be changing trains. The wye was a full triangle, with an additional siding across the middle. A Station Agent’s dwelling was provided on site beside a “teamway” (the antecedent of a driveway). Only the trail remains at the overgrown site today.

Royalty Junction is a really easy place to visit, as it turns out, and you can even visit without a car, as the “T3 Winsloe and Airport Connector” bus will drop you off nearby.

You can join the Confederation Trail in Winsloe where it crosses the Winsloe Road near Red Oak Landscaping (this is just 5 minutes walk from the PetroCan where the bus will let you off). The loop along the trail, through Royalty Junction, bearing off toward Charlottetown and then cutting back across to Winsloe on the Royalty Junction Road takes 45 minutes to an hour depending on how much dawdling you do. Here’s a map showing the route:

To make the journey by bus most conveniently, take the 1:45 p.m. University Avenue #1 bus from Confederation Centre of the Arts to the Charlottetown Mall where you’ll transfer to the 2:00 p.m. T3 Airport and Winslow Collector line toward Winsloe. Get off at the Winsloe PetroCan at 2:13 p.m. Spend a pleasant hour doing this trail loop, stop for a coffee at the Tim Hortons inside the PetroCan, then catch the 3:43 p.m. bus back to the mall, rendezvousing with the 4:00 p.m. bus south on University Avenue which will put you back downtown for 4:15 p.m. Can you get that much nature and that much heritage without driving a car anywhere else?

There’s a lot of Arthole to love, but my deepest love is reserved for the piece by Donnalee Downe titled The Mailroom: 59 Love Letters.

It really is 59 letters, 59 from-real-life-written-to-Donnalee love letters, each hanging, carefully catalogued and labelled, from a taut wire running along one wall of the gallery. We patrons are invited to become a part of the art by reading, editing and/or shredding any of the letters.

As Arthole is mounted in the basement gallery of The Guild, mere steps from the Reinventorium, I resolved to spend a little time each day reading a few of the letters. I made it through 5 minutes before I had to suspend the plan: the letters were just too difficult to read, too self-involved-20-year-old-angsty, too I-ache-to-see-your-breathy, too much a reminder of my own love letters from back in the day.

Which left me seeking another way of engaging with the piece.

So this morning [[Oliver]] and I hauled my little Doxie scanner down from the office to the basement, scanned the letters and envelopes from August 1982, came back upstairs and made a book. It’s called 0882 and it’s a different kind of slicing and dicing of the raw material. It was really fun to make.

I printed off three copies at Staples this afternoon – their 39¢ colour copies did a nice job of this, and the cerlox-binding-machine at Robertson Library did the rest – and left the books in the “edit bin” downstairs in the gallery. Where, I suppose, they are now a part of the piece too.

The coffee bags I designed and printed on Monday? On Tuesday morning they were on the shelf at Youngfolk & The Kettle Black on Richmond Street filled with coffee and ready for sale. I can’t tell you how enormously satisfying this short “press to shelf” window is; it’s like digital design timelines have been transposed into the analog realm.

I only printed 85 bags, so if you want your “Kettle Black Blend” in one of these bags, act now.

Adam Young, who runs the Youngfolk & The Kettle Black coffee shop with his wife Rebekha, thinks about service – real, genuine, human-level service – quite a bit.

Adam told me once that he makes a real effort, when someone walks into the coffee shop on Richmond Street, to nod, to make eye contact, to say hello; he makes an extra effort to do this if the shop is busy and it will be a minute before he can make coffee for the newcomer.

The glance, the nod, the hello, the “we’ll be just a minute,” beyond being simply decent, breathes some air into the customer-server relationship and gives Adam some extra time to spend making every coffee right. This is no small feat in a business where caffeine-starved customers arrive in a rush and blunder.

I am a strong believer in the notion that all business, no matter whether coffee or Internet or steam shovel or blue jeans, is, fundamentally, communications business. This has never been more true than now, when many products and services are commodities you can get from anywhere: honest, open, frequent customer communication is often the only way that one business can stand out from another.

If I walked into Youngfolk on a busy day and Adam didn’t give me a wink and a nod, I’d feel something was wrong, and I’d feel doubly-injured, once for the lack of recognition itself and twice for the lack of anticipated recognition: when a business that’s good a communicating, that prides itself on communicating, has communications go awry, the corollary to “all business is communications” kicks in: it’s like your best friend has stopped talking to you. And you don’t know why.

This is what happened to me earlier this week when I got frustrated enough with Apple and its response to a broken MacBook Air to write a detailed blog post about the incident: I was frustrated because I wasn’t getting customer service satisfaction, and doubly-frustrated because I expected more from Apple.

Fortunately it’s possibly to repair off-the-rails communications disasters with some effective intervention, and that, I’m happy to say, is what happened this afternoon on the MacBook Air file.

Just before five o’clock, the phone rang, with the caller ID showing a 408 area code. “Who do I know in California,” I thought to myself as I answered the call.

“This is Mac calling from Tim Cook’s office,” said the caller.

Oh, that’s who I know in California.

Yesterday, you see, after writing my “Dear Apple” blog post, I sent a note to Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, thinking, quite genuinely, that he should know when things don’t go right. I had some confidence that somebody – if not Tim Cook, at least somebody – would read of my plight.

Mac was calling to make sure things got back on track.

He’d read my blog post, had called Jump+ in Moncton, had a plan in place for me to drive over to Moncton and be assured that I could get a while-I-wait repair of the MacBook with a part waiting.

He was, in other words, on top of the situation.

And, more than that, Mac was an extremely skilled communicator, a sort of Jason Bourne of customer service intervenors: everything from the tone of his voice to the nature of his plan for us (yes, us – we’d be going through this together, Mac assured me) was equal parts warmth, professionalism and reassurance. If I was having a nervous breakdown, I’d want Mac on duty at the crisis centre to take my call.

So I’m driving over to Moncton on Friday to get Oliver’s MacBook Air fixed. I have no doubt that it will happen, and that I will be happy with the result.

And here’s the thing: that’s exactly the same thing I was going to do before Mac called, albeit in a pissed-off begrudged suspend-my-disbelief kind of way.

Adam Young isn’t in the business of selling coffee, he’s in the nod and wink “hey, Peter, how’s it going” business.

As is Apple, at least where service and support is concerned: it’s as important for me to feel good about the service and support I receive, to fell in control of the service and support I receive, and to believe in the quality of the service and support I’ll receive as it is to actually receive the service and support itself.

In a single 4 minute and 52 second phone call from California, Apple, through their man Mac, reestablished that confidence for me with Apple.

At the end of yesterday’s blog post I wrote “I will happily write a ‘wow, Apple knocked my socks off’ blog post when you come through.” This is that post. And I’m writing it now, even before the MacBook Air is repaired, because, to my mind, Apple’s on the job again.

The Province of PEI has a treasure trove of public GIS data available and using my GIS-data-grabber script you can slurp it all down easily to your local machine. Run that script and you’ll end up with a collection of ESRI shapefiles ready for exploring.

But what then?

What if you want to start using modern web-based GIS tools like OpenStreetMap and geojson.io?

Here’s what you need to do to take old-school PEI GIS data and make it web-tool-friendly (in technical terms, here’s what you do to transform the coordinate reference system of the GIS data from NAD83/PEI Stereographic to WGS84).

First, get the free Quantum GIS application and install it. Next, open a PEI shapefile in QGIS (Layer | Add Vector Layer). Here’s what the “bridges” shapefile looks like when I do that:

Next, right-click on the name of the layer – “bridges” in my case – in the list of layers in the sidebar and click Set layer CRS and select the coordinate reference system called NAD83(CSRS) / Prince Edward Isl. Stereographic (NAD83) and click OK:

Then right-click again on the layer and select Save as… and click on the Browse button beside CRS:

And for this export set the CRS for the layer you’re going to save to WGS 84 / EPSG:4326 and click OK:

Then just select the format you want to export as: KML for Google Maps or Google Earth, GeoJSON for geojson.io, for example. You’ll now have a transformed version of the GIS data in the WGS 84 coordinate reference system ready for use.

And here’s a KML file of the same data that you can load into Google Earth.

From [[Olle]] comes a pointer to this great news from GitHub about supporting GeoJSON in Gist (keep reading if you’ve no idea what that means; I promise it gets better soon).

In that announcment post is a pointer to geojson.io, which is a fantastic project that means “here’s that great beach” and “when you visit park your car over hear” and “the best places for coffee are” maps is very, very easy, with the side-benefit of being very, very open under the hood. As Google Maps becomes ever-more-drenched in monetization opportunities and complexity this is evermore valuable.

Here’s a quick guide to making your own map. Please try this out yourself!

Let’s say I want to tell my friend Ray where to find Youngfolk and The Kettle Black in Charlottetown.

I open up a web browser and go to http://geojson.io/ and click on the search icon in the top-left and search for “Charlottetown” and then click on “Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island” in the results:

This zooms the map in to cover Charlottetown. I can then zoom in further to locate Youngfolk on Richmond Street. Once I’m in the area I click on the “marker” icon to add a marker to the map:

I then move my mouse out onto Richmond Street and click it on the spot where I want to leave a marker:

Once I’ve dropped the marker there, I click on the marker to allow me to add a name; I add the name and click Save:

That’s it: you’ve made a map. Now you can spread it around: click the “Share” button in the top-left for your options:

By default you’ll be given HTML to paste into a web page.

But you can also share by Facebook or Twitter, or just copy-and-paste the URL from the browser’s address bar into an email:

Hey Ray,

Check out this great coffee shop in Charlottetown:

http://geojson.io/#gist:anonymous/6222023

Cheers,
Peter

It gets even more fun, though: click on the button in the top-left and you’ll see the source code for your map in GeoJSON form:

{
  "type": "FeatureCollection",
  "features": [
    {
      "type": "Feature",
      "properties": {
        "Youngfolk & The Kettle Black": ""
      },
      "geometry": {
        "type": "Point",
        "coordinates": [
          -63.126325607299805,
          46.234017721208055
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

You can use the source for all manner of interesting things.

Sending coffee directions easily is cool, but it starts to get really interesting when you think about the possibilities for using GeoJSON and geojson.io as DIY GIS tools. Here’s a map of all the public schools in Prince Edward Island.

Notice the fact that Spring Park Elementary is in the wrong location? You can take the raw GeoJSON, correct the location, and create your own update Gist for a corrected map.

Here are the tables from the 1975 Island Tel directory listing the cost of making “station-to-station” and “person-to-person” long distance calls to Canada and the United States. Wikipedia summarizes the two call types nicely:

• A person-to-person call is an operator-assisted call in which the calling party wants to speak to a specific party and not simply to anyone who answers. The caller is not charged for the call unless the requested party can be reached. This method was popular when telephone calls were relatively expensive.
• Station-to-station is a method of placing a telephone call, with or without assistance, in which the calling party agrees to talk to whoever answers the telephone.

On the Canadian chart the rates are per minute, with a one-minute minimum; the most expensive station-to-station call you could make was during the day from Monday to Saturday from Charlottetown to Manitoba or west for 95 cents a minute. This call would cost you $57 if you talked for an hour.

On the USA chart the charges are for a minimum 3-minute call, so you divide by three to get the per-minute rate. The most expensive call you could make within Canada and the United States in 1975 was to the west coast of the USA which, during the “prime time” of 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. would cost you 91 cents a minute, or $54.60 an hour.

Right now, 38 years later, the most expensive “station-to-station” call I can make is the $9.29 a minute ($557 an hour) it would cost me to call an Immarsat Atlantic phone.

But that’s an exception to what, otherwise, are frightfully low rates by comparison.

For the same 91 cents a minute I could call Seattle for in 1975, I can now call a mobile phone in Romania or a land-line in rural Chile.

For 80 cents a minute I can call Easter Island, Kiribati, or a mobile in Greenland.

For 50 cents a minute I can call a mobile in the Morrocan desert or land line in Senegal or Djbouti.

For 10 cents a minute I can call mobiles in the Czech Republic, Australia and Brazil and land lines in Bolivia.

And for a penny a minute – 1 cent! – I can call land lines in Korea, Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, and Taiwan and mobiles in India.

Calling someone at a penny a minute means that staying on the line for 24 hours would cost you about $14. Which is the same amount you could have spent in 1975 on a 15 minute call to Vancouver.

What I find facsinating about all of this is that for people of my generation and older this dramatic decrease in the cost of long distance has never really hit home: we still have, buried deep our our subconcious, the impulse to “wait until after 6” to call (for better rates) and the sense that calling anywhere beyond Summerside is something that you have to be careful about because you could go broke.

For me to pick up the phone in my office right now – in the middle of the day! – and call my friend [[Olle]] on his mobile in Sweden would cost me 5.5 cents a minute. And yet I would never, ever think of doing that. Even trans-Atlantic Skype, with no per-minute fee, seems exotic and like it must be rationed.

“Economic sense memory” is long-lasting and hard to shake: it’s why my grandmother would walk up the hill to Callbeck’s in Brantford to save 5 cents on yogurt when it was on sale; she came of age in the depression and saving 5 cents was something she would never pass up the chance to do, no matter how far she had to walk or how much time it took out of our day.

I’m pretty sure that Oliver has no notion at all of what “long distance rates” are: he’s been video chatting with his grandparents his entire life, and thinks of instant global communication as he thinks about shouting across the street. He’s shaken the curse. And that’s probably a good thing.