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.

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:

While it’s little-known outside of inner circles here on Prince Edward Island, each bona fide Islander is issued an “Islander Membership Card” in the hospital at birth. The card entitles one to experience the benefits afforded only to Islanders — things like exemption from Anne of Green Gables-related activities, discounts at Swiss Chalet, and access to the special version of Compass where the real news is delivered.

While not technically secret, Islanders aren’t exactly encouraged to tell others about the cards. And for many so-called “people from away” like us, getting access to a card — or even confirming that the cards exist — is a hard-fought battle.

So you can imagine my delight when I found, in a collection of letterpress cuts passed to me by an Islander just before Christmas, the original coat of arms of Prince Edward Island used to make the cards. As you might expect, my first action was to immediately run some off:

These are prototypes only — the ink impression on the Parva sub ingenti needs so work — but I’ll be able to run these things off by the thousands in a week or two. Prince Edward Island will never be the same.