Three years ago, my friend Krista-Lee wrote this:

Some things are just too hard to write about when they are happening. When you are in the midst of chaos, heartbreak, survival, and trying to find some order to life, you just can’t put it all into words.

I’ve written a lot of words about living with Catherine living with cancer for 6 years, words written in the thick of it all; but it’s only in recent years, with the gift of time, that I’ve been to be able to gain any clarity about what really happened, and what really happened next.

This morning, Christmas Eve, I joined Lisa for her regular morning workout, a workout that turned out to be a 12 Days of Christmas-style workout; if you know the song, you can imagine the mechanics of it. Here were the movements:

• 1 Hex Bar Deadlift 205/135
• 2 Push-Ups
• 3 Barbell Front Squats 135/95
• 4 Bent-Over DB Rows
• 5 Dead Bugs
• 6 Romanian Deadlifts (Db or Kb)
• 7 Reverse Lunges (per side, load optional)
• 8 DB Floor Press
• 9 KB Swings
• 10 Plank Shoulder Taps
• 11 Barbell Strict Press
• 12m Farmers Carry Steps

It was hard, by far and away the hardest workout I’ve done in the five months since I broke my elbow. But I did it. We did it, together with Lisa’s coach Matt.

Working out that hard, at this point, was something I never could have imagined when, back in post-operative August, I could barely manage the logistics of peeing, let alone lifting a dumb bell.

How did I get here? Incremental progress, every day, every week. 

Three-times-daily physio, at home, during September and October. Back to the gym, starting scaled, building. Learning how to listen to my body, and being willing to stretch it beyond what seemed possible in the moment. But not too far.

This morning, when I got to “10 Plank Shoulder Taps,” I was absolutely certain that I couldn’t do them, as I’d yet to support my weight with my injured arm. Matt adapted the movement so I could just lift my good arm off the ground, then quickly return it. But then, after 4 reps, I forgot that I couldn’t do it. And off I went.

When Catherine was living with cancer, we knew for almost six years that, at some point, it would kill her; the only question was when. We tried to inject as much levity into those years as we could: we celebrated six sets of birthdays, we travelled, we went to the beach, we celebrated Christmas six times. But, slowly and steadily, an invisible clock was ticking, a progression toward an inevitable sad ending.

Living that way for so long has a way of getting to you. “Hope” is a necessary fuel, but holding space for hope is exhausting, and it gradually eats away at you until it’s more masking than truth. It’s impossible to imagine the future, and so you stop trying. Acceptance is a balm, but it’s also a ceiling.

What I’ve learned, in the six years since, is a different kind of slow and steady, one where there’s forward movement, faith in the every-little-bit, belief in the future, and planning for it. 

Learning to ride horses. Psychotherapy. Working out in the gym. Performing improv. Physiotherapy. Helping Olivia rebuild. Loving, in all its infinite joys and challenges. 

Progress is neither automatic, nor always delightful, but, boy oh boy, do I prefer the kinetic sway of healing, building, and growing to the grinding attempt to keep heads above water.

My wish for all of you is that you find your own slow and steady, that it moves you forward, that you can start to trust the light.

New from Henry Jamison, Third Person, a collab with the great Jacob Collier (introduction).

From Jamison’s Instagram:

“Third Person” featuring the one and only @jacobcollier is out now. I couldn’t finish the song on my own, so I sent it to Jacob and he obliged, sending me files a few days after my wedding. I thought that the lyrics were about feeling poorly equipped for life and needing someone else to help me through, but Jacob’s additions put it all in a new light. The irony is that I did need him to finish it, but his section is all about inner resources and some mystical connection to the world and each other that turned the song on its head in the most beautiful way. I also got him at his most Carole King 😻 I hope you all like it.

What’s interesting about this collaboration is that Third Person is both two-songs-in-one—call it “a song in two acts”—and a sonic mind-meld, with  Jamison’s and Collier’s musical sensibilities overlapping and intermingling. 

It’s also delightful that Collier—confrère of Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, Quincy Jones, etc.—has collaborated with Vermont’s own Jamison. In PEI terms, this is like Shane Pendergast collaborating with Brian Eno.

My favourite posts on the Confederation Centre of the Arts blog (RSS) are the Faces of the Centre ones, each of which highlights the people at the heart of the operation. They’re light and breezy posts, pleasantly free from “animating Canada’s national conversation” rhetoric.

Today’s face was Jill McRae, the Confederation Centre Art Gallery’s Conservation and Display Technician, who revealed:

A fun fact about the Gallery team is that they keep tabs on Ada’s featured donut flavours. They have been known to take 11 a.m. donut breaks so they do not lose the best options to the lunch rush. 

Ada is Ada, the culinary studio on Kent Street run by Chef Adam Loo. The reference stuck in my head, and so when I needed lunch downtown today, that’s where I headed.

I had a tasty vegetable-on-focaccia sandwich, and learned more about the vaunted donuts.

• There’s a new flavour every week.
• They make about 100 a day.
• They sell-out fast, starting at 11:00 a.m.
• They recommend you pre-order donuts on their website.

Challenge accepted.

Chef Adam, by the way, has just released a book, Let Rise, which is available at Bookmark.

I decided this morning that I wanted to defeat the Jump to Recipe anti-pattern, so I asked Claude:

As you know, many recipes on the Internet are filled with all manner of SEO bait: photos, videos, long, textual descriptions. These recipes generally have a “jump to recipe” button at the top of the page, that lets you go directly to the recipe.

I’m interested in building an iOS shortcut which I could activate with a URL, which would go to the recipe page, and perhaps using an LLM, extract the recipe, and create a note, using the native Notes app, with just the essential recipe details and ingredients. Is that possible?

Claude dutifully responded with a creative, straightforward suggestion as to how to proceed. Before building it out, though, I asked Claude a supplemental question:

Does the iOS/macOS don’t have any native functionality related to recipe recipes that I should know about?

To my surprise, Claude responded with a description of functionality I didn’t know about:

Safari Recipe Detection

Safari can automatically detect recipes on websites and display them in a clean format:

• When viewing a recipe page in Safari, look for the “aA” button in the address bar
• Tap it and you may see a “Show Reader” option
• Sometimes there’s a “View Recipe” button that shows just the recipe in a clean overlay

Reminders App Recipe Support

The Reminders app has built-in recipe card functionality:

• You can save recipes directly to Reminders
• They appear as special recipe cards with ingredients and instructions
• You can check off ingredients as you shop
• Check off steps as you cook

I tried these new features out, but I saw no evidence of them actually existing, so I called Claude on its shit:

Are you sure you’re not hallucinating this functionality in Safari? I’ve tried it with several popular recipe sites, and although I can see the Show Reader, I don’t see anything recipe-specific.

It turns out that Claude made the whole thing up. 

It replied:

You’re absolutely right to call me out - I apologize for that confusion. I was indeed being overconfident about Safari’s recipe-specific features.

This isn’t something unique to Claude, of course: all LLMs make stuff up. Claude has an ever-present sentence to remind us of this—”Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses”—that links to a page with a more detailed explanation of why.

Instances like this are a good reminder of the truth of that “can make mistakes” statement, especially when asking more urgent questions, like “I’ve just swallowed a whole coconut, is that ok?” or “my penis fell off, is that normal?”¹, when LLMs’ propensity to provide compliant, hopeful answers is more life-threatening than a bum steer about recipe support.

1. For the record, Claude responded with an appropriate instruction to call emergency services when I raised either concern.

Kathleen Fisher, who is featured this week on People and Blogs, wrote about finding her voice as a writer while living through grief:

It was at that time that my husband ended his life. We had been married for 35 years and dated five years prior to that. It was devastating and a shock to everyone who knew him. He was my biggest cheerleader when it came to writing so it made sense that I would write the eulogy for his funeral and then read it in front of hundreds of people. To date there is no piece of writing that I am more proud of than that one. After that I kept writing and writing to try to process the all-consuming grief. What started as a light-hearted and fun blog became a real-time look into the life of someone whose entire life had been crushed beyond repair. I didn’t sugarcoat any of it and I think for many people it gave their own sorrow validity.

Last month, leading up to Thanksgiving, Fisher wrote some advice for living with the grieving during the holidays, advice I echo from experience, advice that will serve us all in the days to come this holiday season:

If you are in the room with someone whose loss is fresh and painful, please do not turn away. There is nothing worse than putting yourself out into the world after a death and feeling like a pariah because it makes people uncomfortable. Will it feel awkward? Yes. Will it be hard? Absolutely, and so maybe this will help. Ask them what their person’s favorite part of Thanksgiving was, what they most looked forward to eating, if they had a tradition that they never swayed from. It’s a neutral question that brings to the surface more happy memories than sad and everyone who has lost someone dear to them loves to talk about them.

Her words remind me of those of my old friend Ken Hone, who I interviewed about activism in the late 1980s:

Ken: And you know, I was thinking today, Passing people downtown on the sidewalk. Those people, you know, the ones who God knows where they sleep and where they eat and maybe they piss in their pants, I don’t know, but I was thinking that, in this homogenized world, talking to those people is a revolutionary act. 

Even, I know it very strongly myself: I want to rush by and ignore them. But who knows that maybe just stopping and talking to them for a couple of minutes and saying, “I see you there. You’re not invisible. I do see you.”

You know, and it’s not necessarily giving money. It’s, it’s giving recognition. That’s a pretty radical thing to do, I think. 

Peter: Do you think that, that not noticing those people, which is what most people seem to do, [is] sort of the natural way of being, or do you think that, that, that we sort of start off being compassionate, giving people or whatever, and we, we learn to be cold? 

Ken: Yeah, I think we learned to be cold. 

Peter: Or are we’re learning to be cold, or are we just, is it, is it a matter of something else? Is it? Is it wanting to ignore a problem we don’t feel we can solve? 

Ken: Well, I think it’s in a large part, I think it’s a defence mechanism. Because you have to be pretty dull not to imagine, you know, “there, but for the grace of God go I.” I mean, it could be us, and maybe it was me a few years ago. The line between them and us really isn’t very, very wide.

There but for the grace of God, indeed. 

We are all going to live through grief in our life, many times over. 

If you know someone who’s living through a “fresh and painful loss” this season, don’t spend a second thought worrying that, by being open and curious and vulnerable before them, you are going to remind them of their grief: they are in it, all the time. Giving them the gift of recognition—I see you there—is precious and human and what we all need to do more of to survive together.

My father spent his career studying the sediments of the Great Lakes (his Great Lakes Sediment Archive Database lives on as open data). 

Needless to say, much of my early life took place against the background of those lakes, and they loomed larger than they would for a typical kid. 

As such, learning that the singer-songwriter Donavan Woods releases a yearly ranking of the Great Lakes was of particular interest to me.

His 2024 ranking:

1. Huron
2. Superior
3. Michigan
4. Ontario
5. Erie

My own ranking would differ significantly:

1. Ontario
2. Superior
3. Erie
4. Huron
5. Michigan

Ontario for obvious reasons: I was born on one side of it, and grew up on the other. My father and my grandmother were both born on the shores of Superior. Erie is an underdog, and deserves more respect than it gets. I appreciate Woods’ love of Huron, and he has good reasoning behind it, but my own exposure to it was limited to time on Georgian Bay. Michigan might be amazing, but I’ve never been within a hundred miles of it.

In related news, Woods has, over the last year, become one of my favourite artists. He’s just released a 10th anniversary edition of his seminal Portland, Maine, a duet with LeAnn Rimes. I kick myself for missing him play in Rollo Bay last year.

After reading Matt Haughey’s tale of buying an electric VW van in Texas, and driving it home to Oregon, it occurred to me that the 6th anniversary of my own EV purchase must be coming up. 

Turns out that the date already passed: it was December 3, 2019.

Six years later, my Kia Soul EV is still on the road. 

While I’ve taken it to New Brunswick half a dozen times, and to Halifax a couple of times, mostly I’ve driven the car within 10 miles of home, so range anxiety has only very rarely been a thing.

The Soul has needed regularly-expected maintenance—brakes, tires—and got its battery replaced under warranty last year, but otherwise, things are much as I reported a year after purchase:

As to the Soul itself, I’ve no complaints whatsoever: it just works.

Lisa invited me to join her for Monday’s Choir! Choir! Choir! performance at Confederation Centre of the Arts.

Choir! Choir! Choir! is a roving “you’re not the audience, you’re the performers!” event run by Daveed Goldman and Nobu Adilman (Nobu is a de facto Islander, having summered in West Keppoch with his family for as long as forever; his  last appearance in this space was in 2007, when we spotted him at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market).

In recent years I’ve become way, way more comfortable than I ever was (“ever was” = “not at all”) singing in public, thanks to a combination of Lucy Farrell, performing improv, and Lisa’s influence. This was a chance to really take my new lack-of-inhibitions out for a ride, and I seized it, singing, relatively speaking, at the top of my lungs for the entire evening. I even threw in with the call to hand actions.

Nobu and Daveed have the form locked in: they are very good at it, and the whole night was a hoot.

I was especially impressed by their stage presence when the Confederation Centre’s projection infrastructure melted down before our very eyes: the entire operation relied on we gathered being able to read the words for what we were about to sing, and without the words, well…

This was eventually figured out, but it was frustrating for everyone; Nobu and Daveed handled it all with aplomb.

(The Centre itself offered an emailed apology for the schmazzle itself: “The ‘magic of live events’ was a little more mystery than magic last night and we really appreciate your patience and understanding.” Bravo!)

The heart of the night was singing a lovely arrangement of What a Wonderful World, and you can watch a video of what we came up with.

If Choir! Choir! Choir! comes to your city, I highly recommend joining in. They are on tour through 2026, and are hitting everywhere from Campbell River to Fairbanks to Berlin.

There’s no technical topic I’ve written about in this space more than DNS: 2001, 2003, 2007, 2009. My efforts to keep the Elections PEI servers online after a hurricane were valiant, but ultimately stymied by a DNS server in my basement that lacked power.

Needless to say, when I write about DNS, it’s generally an after-action review of some calamity.

Today is different!

I’ve been using Amazon Route 53 for DNS for some year now: it dovetailed well with my use of other Amazon services, both personally and for clients,  it was relatively simply to manage, and worked without fail.

When I migrated this blog, and other servers I manage, away from Amazon, though, it made less sense, especially as the absence of other services  made more evident that Route 53 not inexpensive. Here’s a chart that shows Route 53 charges relative to my monthly Amazon bill:

No, it’s not going to break me, but when I realized that Hetzner, where I’ve been hosting this blog post-Amazon, offers DNS for free, I was motivated to migrate.

What sealed the deal was realizing that I could use DNSControl to make the migration painless.

DNSControl supports managing DNS in both Route 53 and Hetzner via API, meaning I could import the existing zones from Route 53 and export them out to Hetzner. 

Here are the basics of what I did.

I installed DNSControl on my MacBook Air:

brew install dnscontrol

I created a skeleton dnsconfig.js file, with:

var DSP_R53_MAIN = NewDnsProvider("r53_main");
var DSP_HETZNER = NewDnsProvider("hetzner_v2");
var REG_CHANGEME = NewRegistrar("none");

I created a creds.json file with the credentials for Route 53 and Hetzner (after generating the API keys using the respective systems on each for doing so):

{
 "hetzner_v2": {
   "TYPE": "HETZNER_V2",
   "api_token": "REDACTED"
 },
 "r53_main": {
   "TYPE": "ROUTE53",
   "AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID": "REDACTED",
   "AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY": "REDACTED",
   "AWS_REGION": "us-east-1"
 }
}

Then, zone by zone, I grabbed the existing Route 53 information, for example:

dnscontrol get-zones --format=js r53_main ROUTE53 whatsmylot.com >> dnsconfig.js

This populated my dnsconfig.js file with sections like:

D("whatsmylot.com", REG_CHANGEME,
    DnsProvider(DSP_R53_MAIN),
    A("@", "135.181.248.33"),
);

To switch these over to Hetzner required a simply search and replace of DSP_R53_MAIN with DSP_HETZNER, followed by a:

dnscontrol preview

to check for any errors (there were a few edits require for zones that used Route 53-only features), and then:

dnscontrol push

to push the zones to Hetzner. 

All of which just worked.

After some testing to ensure everything imported cleaning, the final step was logging into Webnames.ca, where all my domains are registered, and updating the DNS servers to point to Hetzner’s instead of Amazon’s.

A side-benefit of all of this is that, per DNSControl’s founding principle number one, DNS should be treated like code. This means I can store it in a repository, maintain it with a text editor, and migrate it just as easily the next time I want to move.

There is a sense of deja vu to all this: back in the days when I ran my own DNS servers, I took a similar approach, with a homebrew system that took zone information from text files and created the files that BIND needed.

It’s nice to finally have been able to write a good news DNS post!

This comment from Miguel on my post The Best Place There Is deserves more attention:

I was born, raised, and live in both Mexico and the US, and it always amazes me how much Americans love places like this. They are ALL OVER MEXICO… do you know why? Because they can afford to be. No frivolous lawsuits, no over-code enforcement and building regulations lol. These are the places you expect to see in places like California… yet they cannot exist because of unionized labor, workers rights, and building regulations. That’s what is great about Mexico. Liberals from the USA always come to Mexico and fall in love with… essentially what they’ve made impossible!

Lord knows that, more often than not, I throw my lot in with the heritage preservationists, city planners, rule-makers, but there’s great truth in what Miguel writes: we get the world we plan for, and the dearth of interesting spaces in Charlottetown belies the extent to which we’ve planned away Stewart Brand’s “low road”:

“Low Road buildings are low-visibility, low-rent, no-style, high-turnover,” Brand wrote. “Most of the world’s work is done in Low Road buildings, and even in rich societies the most inventive creativity, especially youthful creativity, will be found in Low Road buildings taking full advantage of the license to try things.”