Matt Webb on Scope.

All digital problems are ultimately caused by DNS issues, all analog problems are ultimately caused by grounding issues.

Consider a science fiction story in which there are two classes of people: those who have arrived, and those who aspire. The Aspirants, as they are called, spend a life damned to aspire to but never achieve a comfortable role in society. In this story I would be an Aspirant and the role to which I’d aspire would be at the heart of the demographic of Mountain Equipment Coop.

I mean, what’s not to like: it’s a coop, their stores are beautiful and ecologically tilted, and they sell cool, intricate purposes-designed gear.

In my role as a MEC Aspirant I almost always visit a MEC store when I find myself in a city with one, and tonight was no different: driving home from supper with [[Mike]] I spotted the new Burlington store on Brant Street and pulled a quick U-turn with the car. Once inside I was left, as usual, to gaze forlornly at the grappling hooks and kayak racks and extra-bright bicycle lights and the trousers with pockets for ice axes, wishing only for one little slice of a hobby that would cause me to need any of these wonders.

Sure, I bought a kids travel backpack there back in March, but a kids travel backpack is surely not at the heart of that to which I aspire. It’s no ice axe, no extra-large BPA-free Nalgene water bottle, no bear can.

When they announced that the store was closing for the night in 15 minutes I panicked, knowing that unless something changed I would end up in the parking lot with my Aspirant frown still painted on. I couldn’t face the prospect. So I bought myself a spork. A nice titanium spork.

I don’t actually need a spork: there is no activity in my life that would be weighed down too much by carring both a spoon and a fork. But I’ve always wanted a spork. I’ve gazed at the sporks on every previous visit to Mountain Equipment Coop. And so I’m hoping that by quenching my sporky desires I will somehow, if not give up my role as Aspirant, be at least able to move on.

I took my parents out to see Public Enemies tonight (capsule review: avoid at all costs; a dreadful, unfocused movie the only redeeming feature of which is the typeface used for the credits). Because it was opening night I thought buying tickets online in advance would be a good idea, and as we were going to the SilverCity in Burlington, this led me to the Cineplex website for ordering.

Other than being forced to become a “member” of Cineplex in order just to buy tickets, the purchase process went smoothly. The confirmation screen contained this strong directive:

You might think, from this message, what with all its MUST emphasis, that I needed to print the form out and enter my “booking number” to be able to pick up my tickets. Lacking a printer with which to do this, I ended up creating a PDF of the confirmation, transferring it to my mobile phone, and then ensuring that my mobile phone had enough juice to stay alive until we got to the theater.

When we arrived at the theater I went straight to the ticket pick-up machine, clicked on the “Pick Up Tickets” option, and was presented with the option of simply swiping my credit card to pick up the tickets. I did this, the tickets spit out, and I was on my way in about 8 seconds.

I wish they would align the instructions on their ticket-buying website with the reality of their ticket picking-up system: it would save a lot of needless confirmation form printing and hassle.

I had the pleasure of a brief chat with Steve Coast, OpenStreetMap progenitor, at reboot11 last week. Steve is a kind and voluble man, and I learned a lot about the skills you need to propose a crazy idea (“let’s make an open home-brew street map of the world!”) and have people follow you.

Now that vast tracts of the world are actually in OpenStreetMap, Steve suggested that the next level of data gathering might be collecting points for street addresses. This isn’t exactly at a “we’ve 100% decided how to do this” state in the OpenStreetMap universe, but there’s a generally accepted standard that people are using and the map is rendering, so that’s good enough to plunge in. So I did. Here’s how.

First, I headed out into the field with my GPS-equipped [[Nokia N95]] mobile phone running the free WhereAmI application that allows GPS waypoints to be annotated (note that, because of nature of the N95, you likely have to sign this application before installing on your mobile).

Once the GPS had found enough satellites to find its location I started walking down the street. With the Annotate tab selected in WhereAmI I pressed the centre button on the N95’s joystick when I was walking by the centre-point of each house, and added the house number as the “Name” of the annotation:

One way up the street I did this on foot; the other way I did it on a bicycle (the street’s not very busy, so it was easy to amble). When I was finished, the WhereAmI Named tab had annotations for every house number on the street:

When I got back home I selected Options \| Named \| Save Named To File… in WhereAmI, and this exported all of my annotations as a GPX file to the E: drive of the phone:

Next I started up the built-in File Manager application on the phone, navigated to the E: drive (or “memory card”), found the exported file — called wami-annotations-03.gpx — and sent it to my Mac laptop by Bluetooth:

With the annotations file on my laptop, I was now ready to add the addresses to OpenStreetMap. Because of a peculiarity with OpenStreetMap importing — it won’t import a GPX file that consists entirely of waypoint and no tracks — I first had to use GPSBabel to convert the GPX file into a native OSM-format file. I selected “GPX XML” as the Input File Type and “OpenStreetMap data files” as the output file type:

With the OSM-formatted file now in hand I fired up JOSM, the desktop OpenStreetMap editor, downloaded the existing map data for my neighbourhood, and then loaded (simply with File \| Open) the OSM file with my annotations: this loaded my house number points into the map, and I was then able to edit each one, placing it to the right or left of the street and adding metadata to each point, specifically:

• addr:housenumber - for the house number, i.e. 343
• addr:street - for the street name, i.e. Progreston Road
• addr:city - for the city name, i.e. Carlisle
• addr:state - for the state abbreviation, i.e. ON
• addr:country - for the country abbreviation, i.e. CA

More details on the standards to use are on the OpenStreetMap wiki. The result was a map that looked like this:

Finally, I uploaded my changes to OpenStreetMap — File \| Upload to OSM — and then went to the web-based Potlatch editor where I was able to see the satellite layer under my newly-loaded points and fine-tune the position of each housenumber so that the point fell over the house itself:

The result should is that now, a few hours later now that the map tiles have rendered, you see house numbers on the street my parents live on in Ontario:

It’s not hard to imagine a modified OpenStreetMap-house numbering-optimized version of the WhereAmI application that would smooth over some of the steps in this process, but even with the standard setup I used it wasn’t all that difficult, and the entire process, including field time, was less than an hour.

I test-drove the Nihola three-wheeled bicycle at the Fridhems Cykel shop in Malmö.

All the Swedes I’ve talked to refer to the # sign as square. Like “to get your balance you press star 1 2 0 square and then call.”

At Folk å Rock in downtown Malmö: