I’ve been tying knots the wrong way, I have learned.

First, I’ve been knotting my shoes the wrong way, as I learned from this TED video. Six months ago I switched to the new system espoused there, and went from having my shoelaces becoming undone two or three times a day to having my shoelaces never becoming undone. I took about 2 weeks until my muscle memory learned the new method, but it’s now second nature.

Second, I’d been knotting my scarf the wrong way. Truth be told, I wasn’t knotting my scarf at all, simply draping it around my neck and holding it on with my coat. But then, two days ago, I carefully watched as my friend Shelley did what I’ve come to learn is called the “Parisian Knot,” a simple technique that is well-illustrated here:

I’ve only been Parisian for 12 hours now, but the change is palpable: I’ve moved from “vaguely warmed neck” to “warmly swaddled neck.

It’s Data Privacy Day today, and I started the day off by reading Five Potential Privacy Pitfalls for Developers from Mozilla. One these pitfalls Mozilla describes as “More isn’t always better,” described, in part like this:

The key is to collect only what you need. When you are in the planning stages for your app, document the data collection, usage and flows. You should be able to justify each piece of personal information and describe how it will be used. If you plan to collect personal information for future or extra features beyond core functions, always give users the ability to opt-out.

For the past 7 years I’ve been collecting Google Analytics data on every visit to this blog. This is typical behaviour for websites – even the Mozilla blog post above is collecting Google Analytics data – and is something that allows website owners insight into how their site is being used and by whom.

Google Analytics does this all anonymously: it tells me how many people from Virginia visited my blog yesterday, but not who they are.

But even though that’s true, as I related late last year, it’s not as though the collection of this information comes completely without a price for my readers, because Google aggregates the data I allow it to collect here with data from millions of other websites to form a sort of “behavioural fingerprint” for every reader, with a visit to this space being one small data point that helps to flesh out, to Google and its customers, if not who you are, at least how you are.

Sometimes this is a reasonable exchange – as Mozilla writes, “User data is undeniably valuable and collecting it isn’t inherently wrong, especially with consent.” – and when I am wearing my commercial hat I can attest that the data Google Analytics provides allows me to help build more effective (for both author and reader) websites.

But here on ruk.ca, well, not so much. I’ve glanced at Google Analytics data every few months out of interest, learning what posts here are popular, where readers are coming from, how long readers typically spend reading. 

But if the “the key is to collect only what you need,” then it’s hard to justify collecting even anonymous data about you readers, especially if, in doing so, I’m helping Google digitally fingerprint you.

So, starting today at 9:00 a.m. Atlantic time, I have removed Google Analytics tracking from this site. The line graph will flatline, and I will no longer know anything about who you are, how many you are, and what you’re reading.

I’ve always maintained that I write this blog mostly for myself, as a way of processing what happens in my life and what I’m thinking about; it’s not a diary, and its publicness has always been important to the rigour of the place, but I’ve never written for you.

And if I’m not writing for you, then I don’t really need to know that you’re a 46 year old woman from Idaho who likes TV and is in the market for a new motorcycle.

Enjoy your newfound anonymity.

I can’t imagine a better result from mailing out Christmas cards than the solving of a German postal mystery for my old friend James. It all comes down to whether the seven in the “78” in his address should be crossed or not

My friend Ann turned me on to the Danish television series Borgen, a political drama centred around the election and government of Denmark’s (fictional) first female Prime Minister.

Borgen isn’t an easy series to track down: KCET in the U.S. streams some episodes, but it’s neither on Netflix nor iTunes, so one must make due with what one can.

Borgen has some soap operatic qualities – romances, break-ups, scandals, etc. – but a lot of the substance of the drama focuses on the dual challenges of keeping a multi-party coalition working and keeping a family going while you’ve got a twice-full-time job as Prime Minister. For a Canadian used to a moribund democracy, it’s novel stuff all this “leader of the Labour Party is Minister of Foreign Affairs” kind of government. And it’s heartening to see a democracy where, vestigial old-boyism aside, women have as much a role to play as men.

The highlight of the series is its star, actor Sidse Babett Knudsen, who’s simply brilliant. But there’s a strong supporting cast, a cast that has improved and grown more textured through season 2.

If you can track down Borgen – it’s available on DVD here in Charlottetown at That’s Entertainment, I am told – I recommend it.

I’ve been a Flickr user for 10 years and I’ve uploaded just over 9,000 photos there. Over all that time, here are the most viewed of those photos:

The Minister of Tourism, quoted in The Guardian, describing what a visit to Prince Edward Island on a cruise ship is like:

“It’s a one-day infomercial for Prince Edward Island and we are seeing some of those visitors that are returning.”

I admire his honesty, but not his fondness for the genre.

Mostly because I live in the middle of the infomercial set, and those cruise ship visitors with their belching diesel buses and annoying horse-drawn carriages and vacant looks of expectant wonder add nothing at all to the experience of actually living here.

I think we should aspire to better, higher mechanisms of welcoming people to our Island.

I updated Charlottetown’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital in OpenStreetMap this morning, as it has undergone quite a bit of change since it was first added there. I didn’t really grasp how much change had happened there until I did this.

Here’s what it looked like in OpenStreetMap before:

And here’s what it looks like now:

From The Guardian, January 15, 1914, one hundred years ago today. No mention of a “Celebration Zone” at all.

Here’s a photo I snapped this afternoon with my Firefox OS-driven Geeksphone Peak mobile phone.  The Peak’s camera, as Firefox OS has improved and Geeksphone has applied its vendor-specific magic, has improved from a partially-functional mess into something that can take, on occasion, quite good photos.

There are very few historical photosgraphs of our house at 100 Prince Street in Charlottetown, and those that are tend to be photographs of something else – Trinity Church is just up the street for example, and sometimes our house is caught in a corner of a photo of the church. Our next door neighbour, at 98 Prince Street is much more of a “marquee” house, and there’s a lovely photo, taken in 1904, of that house that includes a sliver of ours on the left.

Today that house next door – “Houle House” – is divided into several apartments, many of which are occupied, it turns out, by members of the band Colour Code. And Colour Code has released an EP called, appropriately, “Houle,” with a detail from that photo on its cover (oddly, all of the versions of the cover I’ve been able to find online are cropped so that the band’s name appears as “Colour Cod,” which, now that I think of it, is a better band name):

The original of the photo continues on to the left and includes much more of our house:

Of course when my band releases its album – I guess it will be called “Smith,” if we keep the same system up, after the Smith family that built the house in 1827 – we’ll crop 98 out and it will look something like this:

Occasionally we catch glimpses of the Colour Coders as they go about their daily lives on Prince Street. In that way it’s sort of like we live, say, next door to Arcade Fire. Very exciting, in other words.

Colour Code is having a release party for the Houle EP this Friday night, January 10, 2014, at Hunters, just up the street.