Yesterday my kayak did what it was meant to do: went on top my car to a group paddle on Branch Pond, about 30 minutes away. A lot of talking with people on the two hour paddle actually made me steer smoother; when I wasn't paying attention, some adjustments became automatic. One of the people I talked a while with was Julia who has an AirBnB space in Freedom. I've been doing our studio apartment downtown as an AirBnB space for less than a month and it is fun and profitable. Our September reservations will double the revenue we were getting from it as a regular rental. I really like how AirBnB works, the way they handle the money so I don't have to, the way arrangements are made by text and email, the system of hosts and guests reviewing each other. I'll bet a lot of people in Unity and nearby have rooms or cabins they could rent. If the town had 20 or 30 AirBnB spaces, that would be like a distributed lodging system. And then we could get some of our unemployed folks to drive for Uber...

The AirBnB thing is about one fourth of what I think of as my job or income portfolio. Another part is the programming work I still do. The job portolio is probably what a lot of work looks like in the future. There are already a lot of tools to let you handle job search, contracting, billing, taxes, etc., kind of like AirJobs. But don't call this the "sharing economy." I hate that phrase. Nothing is being "shared." Everything is being worked for, everything is still bought and sold. Some phrases that will replace that one include gig economy, rental economy, 1099 economy, on-demand economy.

We had good adventures in St. Andrews, including twice walking across the bar at low tide to Minister's Island. The first time was at the early morning low tide when everything was socked in with fog. It was really an act of faith stepping out onto the sand bar without being able to see the island. People walking back the other way appeared like ghosts out of the mist. At the pm low tide we walked over again to see the famous house and barn and bath house. After we walked the perimeter trail back, a lovely cosmo on a deck looked like the best thing ever.

On the island there was a path through what was once a trimmed cedar hedge, but the trimming was abandoned many years ago and it has since reached for the sky in a lot of loopy ways.

We stayed at a place on the water with this view (high tide) from the balcony. The tide variation is 22 feet there. Farther up the bay of Fundy where its narrower and shallower, the tide variation is over 50 feet. On the way home we stopped at West Quoddy Head, the easternmost place in the U.S. As we approached the ocean there, the temperature dropped about 20 degrees (81 to 61), with a bit extra if you were standing in the fog. Some great views from there. Lots of meals on decks this trip; we never ate inside. I'm always looking for the table with the best view and the all time winner of that category is the deck above a wharf in Lubec where we had a 270 degree view of water and islands. The haddock sandwich wasn't bad either. On the way up we ate at a stand called Joshy's in Milbridge. Also good for the haddock sandwich/lobster roll combo we always get. Finished off the trip eating with Morton's Moo in Ellsworth.

I walked down to the dock this morning and saw this; it was perfect for putting a a kayak in, but I had responsibilities, so I postponed, hoping for some equally calm sunset weather. This week has largely been devoted to the rollout of a web app I've been working on for a year for this non-profit in Augusta. It's Java talking to MySql on the back end, with an AJAXy web front end. The hardest thing was finding a host for it. MochaHost was just awful. I finally discovered eApps.com which lets me manage a cloud server. It's the best thing ever, a configurable server without an arrogant sysadmin. The server is in Atlanta, but the app is more responsive than the company's old system in their own network. The rollout went smooth enough, which is to say no data was lost and nobody died. I'll continue to tweak it for the next two weeks. A cron job backs up the database nightly and their IT people pull it down and store it each day. Ok, ready for my next customer.

I've convinced Melissa that birthdays are best observed out of the country, so we will be driving up to St. Andrews in New Brunswick this weekend. It's only 3 hours away; I don't know why we don't go to Canada more often. I hope that little hardware store that sells proper tea cups is still there and that we get to walk the sea floor to Minister's Island.