After I blogged about If This Then That a week ago, Oliver read the post, signed up for an account, and created his first “recipe,” which was to tweet out the time every morning at 2:30 a.m.

I know this because I saw his first auto-tweet the next morning and couldn’t for the life of me figure out how it had got there.

It’s a testament to the simplicity of ifttt.com, and to Oliver’s ingenuity, that he figured this all out on his own; last night we sat down together and worked out a few more recipes, like “if tomorrow’s forecast calls for rain, then send me an email” and “if I call this number, send me an email what the message I leave.”

On the way to school this morning we reflected on how so much of what we experience in the modern world is based on the same sort of “if this, then that” decision making… “if the light has just turned green and 10 seconds have passed, start counting down the pedestrian signal timer,” “if it’s 8:20 a.m. on a weekday, ring the school bell,” “if it’s the day after the day you had music, then you have gym,” and so on.

Indeed ultimately what I do for a living is string together interwoven series of “if… then” statements to make virtual things happen – computer programming is little more than layers upon layers of abstraction on top of this simple core.

So while ifttt.com is intended, I think, as a digital lifestyle plumbing tool, I think it also holds great potential as a tool that educates in the basics of digital logic: by making the triggers and actions real-world stuff that people actually care about (time, weather, Facebook updates, YouTube videos) rather than fictional abstractions (moving a turtle around a screen, converting temperature units and all the other “introduction to computer programming” tropes) programming logic immediately jumps to life as something with utility.

While it’s a stretch to say that “if it’s 2:30 a.m. then send a tweet” is Oliver’s first computer program, it’s not a big stretch; he’s got a visceral understanding of the atomic unit of digital logic now, and everything else is gravy.

After some adjustments to the type and the lines, here’s what I ended up with after tweaking version 0.1. I moved the heading to the right and adjusted the line thicknesses (still not perfect, but it will take me a while to figure out how to read line thicknesses; the body of the line rule is all the same thickness, lines that are thinner are shaved off with a bevel along the edge).

I printed off about 40 copies, cut out a 3” x 5” cardboard back, and just returned from dropping off the result at Kwik Kopy for “padifying.” They tell me the rubber binding takes a while to dry, so I’m to return at day’s end to see the result.

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.