I recently bought myself a yellow alarm clock. One of the pleasures of adulthood is finding out that there are too many choices available for almost every class of consumer product. I usually hear it phrased like this: “has my life really gotten so boring that I get excited when…

I recently had a free day in downtown Vancouver. Yes, this really is how I spend all my vacations! Unlike my research excursions in Saskatchewan and Alberta, this was not a road trip, so at my Val Marie base station I got very invested in the task of planning the perfect route…

What? They're in Moose Jaw too??! Here are the M.J. basics: this small city is just 45 minutes from Regina, the provincial capital. The two communities used to have a fearsome rivalry, but the matter is essentially settled today, as Regina is 7 times larger and enjoys the…

A couple weeks of chilly midday walks, two archive visits, and 139 geo-located photos. In late December, I had walked a large portion of Old Strathcona looking for old fixtures, and by mid-January, I made my first visit to the City archives. This final post contains all that I…

If you've followed my work for a serious length of time, you've probably seen a lot of one of my favourite election mapping tools: the grid cartogram. I have made so many of these things over the years that I've almost forgotten how to explain the basics... but let's try anyway…

Where we last left off, I was walking old neighbourhoods to document historical house number plates in Edmonton. This empirical survey, besides wearing out my legs, had resulted in fifty geo-located photos of original house number plates in situ. Furthermore, going through the…

At this point, I'm just thinking of starting a second blog called "House Number Hunter". This year, my holiday schedule took me to Edmonton, and my insatiable curiosity took me around a large swath of the city's historical Strathcona neighbourhood. Guess what: there will be…

I've been hanging around Edmonton over Christmas, and wouldn't you guess what kind of familiar blue enamel rectangle I stumbled across at the Rocky Mountain Antique Mall!! As a quick refresher, this is a standard City of Regina house number plate issued before the Great…

In 2021, I was really interested in centres of population, and I decided to calculate them for everything I could imagine. It turns out the results are pretty entertaining for almost any section of a national census. Are Fijians a more westerly ethnicity than Acadians? (Yes, they…

As previously discussed, I am obsessed with the original blue house number plates in Regina. It's not the most popular hobby out there, but what would I do if I didn't have weird interests - watch TV? Play video games?? Relax??? Here's a map of the 104 known original house…

At the start of 2024, I bought a rustic old house in Val Marie. Turns out fixing up an old house is difficult, and draws on many skilled disciplines! So, rather than take on the most important tasks first (insulating the roof, insulating the basement, etc.) I thought I would…

Yes, the votes are finally in, and I lost by 36 to 45. It feels a little inappropriate to use percentage points to analyze a race where less than 100 votes were cast in total, but that's 44.4% to 55.6%, an 11-point loss. The closest analogue in provincial politics would be…

During the recent Saskatchewan provincial election, I was back in a traditional office environment for the first time in 5 years. I expected that the intense election environment would be taxing in unexpected new ways. Yeah, I ran into an unexpected one, all right: I actually had…

Here's a simple little map of Edmonton, Alberta. If you happen to be an Edmontonian, you might know something about the city's legal municipal boundary, and most people are generally aware that the North Saskatchewan River has a diagonal southwest-northeast course. But to…

Saskatchewan's fixed-date municipal elections approach on November 13, a date well-known to myself because I am currently running for mayor of Val Marie. (Please spare the applause, this is a contested race.) A mass mailout reminded me that, on the same day that I have the…

I am really proud of my work as a cartographer. There is one thing I feel is difficult to communicate to people outside the field: exactly how much effort it all takes!! On one hand, at my best I can make it look really easy. On the other hand, most people assume that my job is…