Archive

Johnny and I moved office just over a week ago. Before then we used the same network for both our own work activities — emailing, browsing, uploading, downloading — and for the server that runs this site and several others. Now these two functions are split: the old network still runs the server-side, but our day-to-day work bandwidth comes from elsewhere.

Here’s a graph that shows network traffic before-and-after (the graph reads from right to left, starting with the last week of December 2011 and ending today).

Interesting to see visually the effect of pulling ourselves out of the mix.

The Grand Homburg may be an ugly colossus, but its multi-coloured facade can have its moments; here are four shots over four minutes last night, with the Moon high in the sky above.

For five Tuesdays, starting July 19, 2011, I spent the day at the letterpress studio at Druckwerkstatt in Berlin making printed things; I made enough of everything I printed to send a copy to people around the world who had signed up for something I dubbed Mail Me Something. Here’s what I produced:

1. Postcard from Berlin
2. Alphabet Book
3. Vollmond Kalender 2012
4. Frühling, Sommer, Herbst, Winter
5. Thank You Card

I had so much fun with the project, I’ve decided to keep going.

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If you’d like to get added to the list of Mail Me Something subscribers, just click here to register, and make sure you check the “Mail Me Something?” box and enter your mailing address.

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If you’ve already signed up, and want to stop the torrent of mail, or change your mailing address, login here and edit your profile.

Mailings are irregular, and not every mailing goes out to every person.

Thanks for your interest and support!

Just over six years ago, in October of 2005, I released thebus.ca, a Google Maps-driven public transit schedule for Charlottetown. I was scratching my own itch by doing so: I wanted the transit system to succeed, and I was afraid that its labyrinthian printed schedules might turn potential riders off; my little project was intended to be a nudge toward simplification and rationalization.

My motiviation for “The Talking Bus” — a telephone information line delivering real-time schedule information for the University Avenue line that I launched in November of 2008 was the same: increase ridership by making it really easy to find out when the next bus was coming (you can imagine my surprise when I found the number on the side of my bus one day!)

The transit system has grown and improved over the years and, with a relaunch today of a new route and schedule system, information about how and when to catch the bus is now considerably easier to understand. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t need me anymore.

And so today marks the end of thebus.ca, m.thebus.ca (its mobile-friendly version) and of the telephone information line.

Some closing statistics, from November 2008 to January 2012: thebus.ca served 65,000 pages to just over 30,000 unique visitors and the telephone information line answered just over 10,000 calls.

The source code for thebus.ca and a how-to guide for implementation are still online.

If you’re anything like me, forever mailing odd-sized things around the world, you’ve probably had cause to wonder “what’s the limit on how big or small I can mail things?” So, to help you and to help me, I took Canada Post’s information on this and made printable size-guides, one for mailing in Canada and the other for mailing to the USA or elsewhere. They look like this: