Last August I announced the installation of some open Meraki wireless access points at [[100 Prince Street]], making free wifi available to my immediate neighbourhood. They’ve been running for a year now without problem, and although I’ve twiddled with the amount of free bandwidth available (turning it down when outsiders were sucking up enough to make in-home use sluggish), the free wifi has been flowing all year long.

Over the year, my Meraki management dashboard tells me, 371 users transferred 113 GB over the network. Although every one of those 371 has seen a splash page upon connection inviting them to send me an email if they find the access useful, the only person I’ve ever heard from is a newly-moved-in next door neighbour who thanked me for the access while he was waiting to have his own connection installed.

My rationale for leaving the access open to any anonymous wanderer-by is completely Marxist in nature. I think of it like I think of hitchhiking: I’ve used enough free wifi out there in the world that I feel I owe it to the world to serve up some of my own when and where I’m able.

Not everyone agrees with this approach, and, like hitchhiking, it has inherent risks. But I think, ultimately, the obivous good of sharing a useful resource outweighs the phantom bad of someone plotting the downfall of society using my bandwidth.

Last night after supper [[Oliver]] announced that he wanted to go out for dessert. We let him choose where, and he led us to [[Just Us Girls]].

We arrived just before 8:00 p.m. We found a table for three and sat down; a few seconds later the waiter came over and told us that he was sorry, but the kitchen was closed. I took this to mean “we’ve stopped making food, but we’re ready to rock into the late nite hours.” What it actually meant was “we close at 8:00 p.m.”

In my fog of misunderstanding I asked whether, despite the closed kitchen, we could still get dessert and coffee. He thought for a second and said “sure.”

Oliver ordered the crème brûlée and I ordered something I read incorrectly as “flawless chocolate cake” on the menu which was actually “flourless chocolate cake.”

Regardless, when it came out a few minutes later it turned out, in fact, to actually be flawless, and is perhaps the best dessert you can get in a restaurant in Charlottetown:

The cake has the moist richness of cheesecake, and the perfect balance of chocolate and sweet. What takes it over the top, however, is the tiny pitcher of warm chocolate that’s served with it: pour chocolate over cake and the result is an orgasmic chocolate delight.

It wasn’t until we prepared to leave and found the doors locked and the cash being counted that we realized that they’d actually closed the restaurant a few minutes after we arrived; it’s a testament to our excellent server (and perhaps to my general dullardness) that we never felt unwelcome or rushed.

Nigel Armstrong, the web editor at The Guardian, has been doing some interesting experiments with Google Maps. This map, for example, summarizes the actions of Charlottetown City Council at their Monday, August 11, 2008 meeting.

When I was in Copenhagen in the spring my rented bicycle had a wire basket on the back. I found it very useful for just dumping stuff into and going: groceries, a newspaper, a bottle of water, a sweater. And it worked well because the bike had a low crossbar, so I didn’t need to swing my leg over the back.

Here at home I’ve had pannier bags over my back wheel for the past couple of years. And while they’ve been convenient for hauling things around, the need to unbuckle and untether them has been awkward; they’re probably more useful for long-distance cycling where strapping things in securely is more important than ease-of-access.

Because my home bicycle has a high crossbar, a Copenhagen-like solution, with a full wire basket tethered to the rear carrier, wouldn’t work, as I’d always be banging my leg into it. Dan suggested I look at the Swagman Phatt Folding Basket from Mountain Equipment Coop; it looked promising, but I wanted to get something locally, and so I ordered something similar from MacQueen’s on Queen Street in Charlottetown. It arrived yesterday, and it’s exactly what I was looking for. Here’s a short demo video [[Catherine]] and I shot this morning that shows why it’s so great:

Now that Brightkite has an API, I took a few hours tonight baking Brightkite support into PresenceRouter, and I just released version 2.93. Brightkite has a somewhat different object model than Plazes does:

• Communities, street addresses and “places” all map to their own Brightkite location ID; for example:
  • Charlottetown
  • 100 Prince Street in Charlottetown
  • Reinvented Office at 100 Prince Street in Charlottetown
• You “check in” to a Brightkite location, which is simply a geopresence timestamp without accompanying text or status message.
• With or without “checking in” you can “post a note” to a Brightkite location, which is like setting a Plazes status message when you plaze yourself.

As such, the PresenceRouter-Brightkite connection grabs the current status message and Plaze from Plazes.com, then searches for the applicable Brightkite location ID, posts a check-in, and then posts a note with the Plazes status message.

Because this is all done in AppleScript I haven’t, for the moment, attempted to use Brightkite’s OAuth support (PresenceRouter does use OAuth for Fire Eagle authentication, but Fire Eagle supports the PLAINTEXT signature method, whereas Brightkite only supports HMAC-SHA1, which requires some signing voodoo that requires some additional heavy AppleScript lifting). Because of this, and because Brightkite doesn’t seem to support HTTPS, for the time being the Brightkite username and password are sent using HTTP Basic Authentication.

I have a few Brightkite invites available if anyone wants to experience the wonder of all of this first-hand.

Over the course of a month I accumulate a pile about 6 inches thick of postal mail consisting of bills, statements and junk mail for home and business. It takes me about 30 minutes every month to sort through it all, separating the few pieces of wheat from the endless mountains of “hey, shouldn’t you sign up for our Cardmember Protection Service” chaff.

Other people I know pay all their bills by automatic payment from their bank account or credit card, but I’m not trusting enough of corporations or banks to let it all flow that easily — I’m afraid that the phone company will take $1000 out of my account one month and it will take me years to get it back. It’s also a good exercise for me to go through the monthly bills to get a general sense of what I’m actually spending.

However I could do without the 6 inch mountain of paper, and Canada Post’s epost service has always held out the promise of allowing me to do this. The last time I checked, however — probably 4 years ago — only a selected few of my monthly payees could send their bills to me by epost, and I set it aside. Today I decided to take another look, and here’s what I found:

• Canada Revenue Agency (corporate and payroll taxes, GST): No
• CIBC (business Visa): No
• Charlottetown Water and Sewer (home water): No
• Co-op Fuels (home oil): No
• Canadian Tire (personal Mastercard): Yes
• Eastlink (business phone, home phone, Internet and cable TV): No
• Grant Thornton (accountant): No
• Hyndman and Company (home and auto insurance): No
• Maritime Electric (home electricity): Yes
• Message Centre (alarm monitoring): No
• Province of PEI (property tax): No
• Workers Compensation Board (business premium): No

So that’s 12 bills, two of which I can get through epost. Guess I’ll take another look in four years.

Circumstances conspired to leave you eleven days to read my update from Boston. In the interim:

• [[Johnny]] and I returned from our trip to [[Yankee]] after a brief stopover in Boston that facilitated the purchase of 4 pounds of [[Catherine]]’s favourite coffee in the North End.
• We hosted Ton and Elmine for dinner at the tail end of their month-long trip to Canada.
• [[Oliver]] and my [[Mom]] and [[Dad]] and I took a short vacation to Louisbourg at the far end of Cape Breton. It rained the entire time, but we had a good trip nonetheless, touring the Fortress of Louisbourg (in driving hard rain that soaked us all to the skin; still impressive and fascinating, though), catching a musical revue at the Louisbourg Playhouse (which has an odd history) and eating well every night at Grubstake. We rented a two-bedroom cottage at Peck’s Cottages: inexpensive, clean, and well set up.
• We made our first visit to Harmony House in Hunter River to take in a Bruce Guthro show. A great night in a wonderful new theatre (check out their calendar of upcoming shows; it’s a wonderful new venue).
• I somehow missed a few months in there somewhere and forgot to pay for the fire insurance for our house, to register my car, and to pay off my Mastercard bill. Just now catching up.

At the end of August I’m back to [[Yankee]] for two days, then up to Thunder Bay for a family wedding, then back on the Island for the start of school. At the end of September we’re taking a 7-day family vacation in Iceland, at the end of which we’ll hook up with [[Olle]] and [[Luisa]] in Reykjavik (en route from Copenhagen) for the start of their Prince Edward Island adventure. In mid-October there’s Zap Your PRAM, which is shaping up nicely. And then Christmas.

To avoid the usual pattern of “arrive at Logan, drive north, get hungry, end up at Applebees eating deep fried gunk,” I availed myself of the restaurant suggestions a smart friend and booked a table for me and Johnny at Hungry Mother in Cambridge. The vagaries of our Delta arrival in Boston — long delay while wheelchairless person sought wheelchair while we all waited on the bus to take us from Terminal A to Terminal E to clear customs — plus punishing Boston traffic meant that my 6:00 p.m. reservation was timed perfectly for our arrival, as long as we skipped my planned outing to The Dutch Bicycle Company.

Hungry Mother was great — a beet salad that knocked my socks off, honey-drenched cornbread and a gnochhi that rivaled the gnocchi-from-heaven that I had last year north of Milan. They also served a very pleasant sweet iced tea, and an excellent cappuccino. They have a great deal that we weren’t in a position to take advantage of: arrive before 6:00 p.m. and get $6.00 tickets at the Kendall Square Cinema next door, and they pick up the tickets for you. In any case, I’m sure to be back for a meal again.

After dinner we headed north and were diverted by the prospect of short-sleeved-shirt shopping at the mall in Burlington, Mass. A mall that now has a Nordstrom. A Nordstrom that had a 30% off sale on house-brand 100% cotton short-sleeved shirts, button-down collar, solid colours. $32. I bought two.

Back in the car around 9:00 p.m. we steamed north-west to Peterborough, NH where we’re now hunkered down at the [[Jack Daniels Motor Inn]], ready to launch into three days of intensive envisioning at [[Yankee]].

Cavendish Beach East, Friday evening, 7:19 p.m., looking east: