Ever since I acquired a letterpress cut of an old candlestick telephone at the Printing Arts Fair I’ve had the notion of creating a telephone message pad bouncing around my head. When I heard from Kwik Kopy, the print shop up the street, that they could take my loose cards and bind them together with that magic rubbery “pad of paper” process, I was sold.

I’m using my line rule and stars (I like the idea of applying an “importance rating” to phone messages), also acquired at the Printing Arts Fair, along with my 18 pt. Gill Sans from M&H Type. Here’s the first print to come off the press, obviously in need of some modifications (mouseover to see my notes on what I plan to change).

Jane has only lived in downtown Charlottetown for two days, and already she’s named a ladybug after me. Alas my arthropodic namesake flew away.

Sometimes it’s useful to exist on the Internet as though you were in a different country. The reasons for this can vary: maybe you’re want to use a website that’s only available in your home country; or, like happened to me today, maybe you need to see how your clients in another country experience geo-targetted ads served onto their website.

There are many ways to achieve this, many of which either don’t work, involve some expense, or are complicated.

Here’s a simple solution. Or at least a simple solution if you already have SSH access to a host in the country you want to appear to be coming from.

First, from the command line on your local computer:

ssh -Nf -D 8080 username@example.com

Replace username@example.com with your username and host name of the remote host you’re going to use, the one that’s in Moldova or Berlin or wherever you need to virtually need to appear to be at.

Next, in Firefox, call up the Preferences dialog, and then navigate to Advanced | Network | Connection Settings, select Manual proxy configuration and in the SOCKS Host field enter localhost as the hostname and 8080 as the port number.

That’s it. You should appear to the world at large as though you are browsing the web from the remote host to connected to via SSH. You can test this by visiting WhatIsMyIP.com, which will report your IP address back to you (it should be the IP of your remote host, not of your local machine).

One of my favourite places to eat in Berlin this summer was Babanbè on Oranienplatz in Kreuzberg: it was a handy 2 minute walk from betahaus where I was working, has friendly staff, and serves terrific “Bánh mì” – Vietnamese sandwiches.

A couple of weeks ago when paying for my regular morning coffee at Casa Mia Café back here in Charlottetown I noticed that they’d added Bánh mì to the lunch menu and I was intrigued. But I resisted dropping in for lunch: I was afraid that Casa Mia’s take on the sandwich would be only a pale imitation of what I’d had in Berlin and I’d emerge disappointed.

But today I had a hankering for Bánh mì that I couldn’t shake, so I bit the bullet and went down to Casa Mia for lunch. I was not disappointed: their take on the Bánh mì has just the right amount of flavour and bite and crunch I was looking for. It’s official my new favourite lunch sandwich in town.

Dan Misener pointed to ifttt.com a couple of weeks ago and I curiously followed the link to see what it was. What it is: IF This Then That.

What is to say, a web service that lets you do things like “if I get a Twitter direct message, then call my mobile phone and read it to me.” Which looks like this:

The service has a rich array of triggers (things like “if I get an email message,” “if there are new photos in my Flickr,” “if something new shows up on craigslist.” “if the current temperature drops below X”) complemented by an equally rich array of actions (“call my phone and read it to me,” “send an IM to Google Talk,” “add to my Instapaper,” “post to Facebook”), all wrapped up in a nice, simple, bold user interface.

IFTTT is the kind of Internet plumbing that the open web was built to enable; in turn it enables building all sorts of new and interesting applications for the open web. I encourage you to check it out and if you develop interesting and useful recipes, post them in the comments as fodder for others.

I was talking with my friend and restauranteur Winnie this afternoon about the difficulty I have with making rice: somehow it just never turns our right. She said “how do you measure your water, with measuring cups or with your hands?”

“How would I measure the water with my hands,” I asked, believing her to be pulling my leg.

Winnie placed her hand flat on the counter and said she measures the water so that it it comes up to her knuckles.

“But for how much rice,” I asked.

“For any amount,” she replied.

So the idea is this: put the rice in the pot you’re going to cook it in. Put your hand on top of the rice. Add water until the water comes up to your knuckles.

Winnie says you need to experiment which exactly which knuckles as we all have slightly different hands (and taste in rice).

Perhaps everyone else already knows this technique; for me it’s a revelation.

Back at the end of July in Berlin [[Oliver]] and I went out one weekday morning for an adventure in deepest Kreuzberg. We had smoked salmon bagels at Barcomi’s, went comic book shopping at Grober Unfug, bag shopping at bagAge and generally enjoyed a fresh summer morning walking around the neighbourhood.

Walking toward home on Zossener Strasse we came across a photo booth, a photo booth taking black & white photos no less. As we have a long history of taking a father-and-son photo in a photo booth while traveling, we had no choice but to stop and have our photos taken.

There’s something magical about a photo booth, something that happens photographically or behaviorally that you can’t recreate with your own camera: in this case we came pretty close to capturing the essence of our father-and-son relationship.

It was only later, on finding a booklet at Modulor about the creative nexus at Morizplatz, that I learned that the Photoautomat brand that graced our local photo booth is a hipster revivification of the photo booth tradition. On the Photoautomat website you can see, in their Gallery section, yet more evidence of the magic of the phenomenon.

For someone who dresses as carelessly as I do, I spend an awful lot of time talking, mostly to myself, about fashion. I actually aspire to fashion greatness, but in a sort of hopeless mournful way.

And as my body sags evermore toward death, I’m finding the possibilities receding into the impossible future.

Take my midriff, for example: I’ve got no idea what’s going on there. But I’m finding it more and more of a challenge to find ways of aligning everything and also keeping my trousers up. To say nothing of the constant challenges of remembering to do up my fly (suddenly, about 5 years ago, I lost the muscle memory for this and it’s now necessarily a deliberate act).

All of which leaves me appreciating the video series Put This On all the more.

Hosted by Jesse Thorn (The Sound of Young America), it’s “a web series about dressing like a grownup.” And while I’m not sure could ever adopt the Put This On worldview completely – I am never going to have enough time in the morning to shave four times with a safety razor – I do find the discussions of things like how to get clothes that fit your body shape very useful. Even if I’m not going looking for a jacket and tie any time soon.

Back in the 1990s my then-colleague Steve Muskie maintained a local HTML page for staff at Yankee Publishing, a sort of “company dashboard” with links to the company’s websites, and to useful third-party sites like Yahoo and Altavista. It was a pleasantly graphical page, and I recall thinking “I should really do something like that for myself.”

Now, years later, I finally did:

I’ve been using this page as my browser “home page” for a week now, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how useful it is. The problem, though, is that to be really useful the page needs to adapt to my needs over time, and for that to work effectively, editing the page has to be friction-free.

It’s just a simple HTML page stored on my computer, which is pretty friction free. But over time, especially if I leave it alone for some time, I’ll forget where I stored the page (yes, yes, I know: the file’s location is in the browser bar; I have low thresholds). And the page will become static and less useful.

Back in 1999 Dave Winer mused about the complexity of editing the web. He titled his post “Edit this Page.” Which I recalled when I came across the TextMate URL Scheme. TextMate is my text editor of choice. And its “URL Scheme” is a way to construct URLs so that a click on a link in a browser can fire of TextMate to edit a given local file. Which means that if I link the “Edit this page…” link on my personal “dashboard,” to a URL:

txmt://open?url=file:///Users/peter/Documents/Browsers/index.html

then when I click that link TextMate will open the HTML source for the page, and I can easily edit it. Without having to remember anything. Which takes the friction down to zero.

In his excellent book The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World author Edward Hasbrouck includes a page titled “I couldn’t take a big trip like that because…” where he seeks to rebut the common excuses we all conjure up for why traveling around the world (or, for that matter, anywhere) isn’t possible. Like “I couldn’t get that much time off” and “I have children” and “I don’t have that much money.” His response to that last one is:

You can’t extrapolate from short vacations to long-term travel, or from package tours to independent travel. Most people who follow the principles in this book find that their total costs, including airfare, for an extended international trip are less than their living costs at home. If you can afford to spend a summer or a year sitting around your backyard doing nothing, you could afford to spend the same amount of time traveling around the world–for less than the cost of staying home.

Outside my personal interest in travel, I have a practical personal interest in seeing other people travel: experience has taught me that the most interesting, broad-minded Islanders are those that have traveled. The potent combination of a grounding in Islanderhood seasoned by experiences elsewhere in the world is, I would hold, an unbeatable education in how to be a human being.

To that end, here’s a breakdown of what it cost the three of us – [[Catherine]], [[Oliver]] and me – to spend 40 days in Berlin and 8 days in Sweden this summer. I present this fully aware that I’m in a higher income bracket than many, have a job that is flexible enough to allow me to work from anywhere there is bandwidth, and a partner whose universal answer to my crazy travel plans is “okay, that sounds like fun.” But, like Edward suggests, it’s possible to overcome almost any obstacle once you’ve resolved to travel the world.

Now there are a couple of things about our trip that don’t map entirely to “Hasbrouck principles.” Although our trip was longer than a usual summer vacation (at passport control in Frankfurt the officer’s only comment was “that’s a very long stay”), it wasn’t quite the kind of “extended international trip” that Edward describes in his book. And by traveling to northern Europe, especially to Sweden, we were going to among the most expensive destinations on earth, so our accommodations costs were much higher than they would have been if we’d opted to travel to, say, Thailand for 48 days. Also, if we’d stayed for much longer we could have secured a cheaper apartment by subletting or house-sitting.

I haven’t included food in my calculations because our food costs were roughly the same as they would have been in Canada, aided significantly by the Berlin’s very affordable restaurant scene. And I’ve left out “extracurricular activities” because, again, they didn’t amount to much more than what we’d spend here in Charlottetown (there’s lots to do for free in Berlin and Malmö). We spent money on public transit, but I didn’t run my car all summer. Because our trip was longer, we didn’t feel the usual impulses to purchase vast amounts of interesting European goods to take home, so our consumer spending was much less than it would have been on a shorter trip or, for that matter, at home.

The other economic benefit in my favour is that I was working all the while, so I didn’t have any loss of income over the summer (which also meant, of course, that it wasn’t 48 days of bacchanal but rather regular work days with slices of bacchanal squeezed in the free bits). If I’d had to take 7 weeks of unpaid vacation the net cost of the trip would have been much greater.

One thing that’s interesting to note: if we’d chosen, instead, to go to Berlin for a week, our air fare would have been the same, our accommodations costs would have been about $500, and so our average per-day cost would have been almost $500. We would have, in total, spent less, but the quality and quantity of our travel experiences would have been significantly less.

Every time I think about whether or not it’s possible, financially and logistically, to make a trip like this work, I think back to a note I received from my late friend and colleague John Pierce back in 2003:

I think you want to wander the world and still be able to make living with your computer sitting in little coffee shops or town squares from Provence to Croatia and anywhere else your whim takes you. Bangalore is so wired you probably don’t even need a computer to access the Web. Just inhale and you’re on line…

John grew up on a farm in New England not unlike the farms you see everywhere on Prince Edward Island. Partially by the lucky happenstance of marrying a woman with Indian parents, he saw far more of the world than most farm kids from rural America ever see. And he had a long list of places still to visit when he died unexpectedly in 2008.

Besides the great gifts (as my client) of giving me the work flexibility to travel and (as my friend) of giving me license to see this as being a perfectly valid way to live life, John’s untimely death also reminded me that the time to travel is not “someday soon,” but now.