When I was 16 years old, my father and I started a company together called Cellar Door Software.

We got the name from the CBC: one day we were listening to the radio in the car and heard a segment where listeners had been invited to submit nominations for the most mellifluous words in the English language; someone suggested cellar door. We agreed. And that became the name.

(We also had a pretty nice-sounding cellar door at our family home in Carlisle).

The personal computer was the grand overlap between my life and Dad’s: he was an early adopter of computers, using them from the punch-card days onward in his work as a scientist. We both became fascinated, in the early 1980s, with personal computers, eventually acquiring a Radio Shack Color Computer for the family.

Cellar Door Software became an umbrella for two projects: my work as a programmer, and our joint work offering computer courses, both at the local high school at at the Hamilton YMCA, to children and adults.

We borrowed $2000 from CIBC to start the business in September of 1982 and we ran it for three years until we closed it down–likely, if memory serves, because I moved away from home–in August of 1985.

We used the $2000 for a bunch of capital expenses, which my brother Mike found in a PDF file this week:

• Grand & Toy filing cabinet ($64.64)
• Centronics printer ($616.25)
• Sears cassette recorder ($40.53)
• Texas Instruments cassette recorder ($69.00)
• Used Atari 400 computer ($80.00)
• Two used 5-1/4” disk drives ($10.65)
• TRS-80 Model 4 computer ($1000.00)
• Electrohome monitor ($170.13)

The printer (a dot-matrix) and the TRS-80 Model 4 were both in service of my work for Neil Evenden at Skycraft Hobbies, where I modified an inventory control system to better suit the needs of his hobby shop.

Our primary source of income otherwise were our courses at the high school and at the Y: in both cases we used Sinclair ZX-81 computers and black and white televisions, one setup for every two students. We taught the very most basic programming, like:

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"
20 GOTO 10

It was my first exposure to teaching, my first exposure to “entrepreneurship,” and helped me pay for university.

Over the three years we ran the business we earned a total of $3946.30.

At some point during our business tenure I had an opportunity to take a batik course, and I created a sign for the business; it’s hung in Dad’s workshop ever since:

When my father retired from his position as a research scientist at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters, he took on the task of editing and distributing a monthly newsletter to his fellow retirees. By the time he handed over the editorial reins in 2018, he’d put out 100 issues, filled with announcements, jokes, cartoons and updates. He took the newsletter very seriously, and my mother, brothers and I all have memories of various family vacations and functions requiring time set aside to allow Dad to set up his laptop in an impromptu workspace to ensure the newsletter went out on time.

When Dad died two weeks ago, I sent a note to the new editors of the newsletter, and they sent word of his passing to the retirees mailing list, which prompted a flood of messages of condolence, often with work stories from the early years.

I offered to send a brief note for inclusion in the newsletter, on behalf of my brothers and I, which they generously agreed to include. This is what I wrote:

A Special Note from Norm’s Son

Our father, Norm Rukavina, longtime editor of this newsletter, died this week at the age of 82.

There has never been a time in our lives when we didn’t closely associate Dad with “The Centre”: the family moved from Ottawa in 1968 so that he could take up work at CCIW, and he remained there for his entire career. His involvement with CCIW and, later, NWRI, was the backbone of his life and, as his kids, the backbone of our childhood. During the late 1960s and through the 1970s we joined Dad in the field each summer on the shore of whatever Great Lake he was focused on the nearshore sediments of at the time; while he took core samples, we learned about salamanders from park rangers. We watched the Moon landing in the back of a Government of Canada VW bus while in the field. We all remember the experience of getting presents from the CCIW Santa Claus every Christmas in the auditorium, and we marvelled at how closely our presents matched what we’d discussed with our parents. Other memories include the CCIW open houses, getting to eat in the cafeteria when Dad would take us to work, being on a first name basis with the Commissionaires. And nightly references around the supper table to mysterious places like “Hydraulics” and “Tech Ops” and “Drafting,” of which we knew little.

It took Dad a long time to retire: we always got the impression this was a combination of there actually being follow-up work that needed doing, with, perhaps, a sense that he wasn’t quite sure what would happen if he stopped working altogether. Eventually, however, there came a day to load the last cardboard box into the car, hand in his pass, and drive home for good. After retirement Dad took great pleasure in editing the retirees’ newsletter: it kept him in touch with good friends, kept him wise to the latest technology, and provided him with a steady stream of jokes to send his children. He also enjoyed the get-togethers enormously, and would speak to us of people he’d meet up with, names we’d been hearing for years and years and years.

From the day he started work in Burlington, Dad kept a daily journal, mostly just bullet points about what had been achieved that day. We picked some off the shelf tonight and were amazed that the cast of characters in his working life in 1968 included many people we’ve heard from on the phone or by email this week with memories and messages of condolence. It’s brought us tremendous comfort to know that Dad was a part of so many people’s lives. Working at The Centre was, to we kids, simply what a Dad did, and so formed our assumption about how working life worked. It was a pretty good template to start out with.

Thank you to everyone who’s reached out this week to us; it’s truly appreciated. We’re suggesting that those who want to memorialize Dad make a donation to the Joseph Brant Hospital Foundation (jbhfoundation.ca): Joseph Brant took excellent care of Dad in recent years, and in his final weeks. It’s also been an important part of our family’s life for more than 50 years, most recently with the more than 1,500 hours of volunteer work Dad did there after retirement.

The editors, Jo-ann and Clint, added a note of their own:

Norm was instrumental in starting our CCIW retirees coffee club, which now has over 200 members, and produced 100 issues of this newsletter, up until May 2018. We have big shoes to fill. It’s a great help in keeping the retirees in touch with each other, and our monthly coffee meetings are well attended, usually numbering 25 to 40 people. Norm was a wonderful man, very well liked and respected.

Norm was also one of the original Research Scientists at CCIW working in the then Limnogeology Group. He was one of the “Trailer Trash”, working on site in the trailers before the current building was erected. He was a good friend and colleague and he will be long remembered and missed by many.

Until last week I never truly understood how valuable, important and comforting condolences are: the notes, cards, and emails we’ve received, and the people who’ve stopped me on the street, or at the market, to express their sympathies have all offered tremendous comfort. Who knew.

I had the pleasure of speaking at the Annual Meeting of Engineers PEI today in Charlottetown, with a talk I called The Government That Swallowed a Pond (Using Open Data and GIS to Inform Policy and Influence Behaviour).

I used the opportunity to expand on my August talk at the Applied Geospatial Research in Public Policy Workshop, Where PEI Public Servants Live and Work (and can we get them to leave their cars at home?); since I prepared the data for that talk I’ve received additional data from the Province of PEI on the home and work locations of government workers (up from 4,519 people to 13,211 — it turns out that if you ask for “each employee of the PEI public service, across all departments and agencies” you don’t actually get everyone; I had to submit three additional access requests). I’ve also explored additional capabilities of QGIS, especially its ability to bulk-calculate driving directions using Openrouteservice.

And I added some images of lovely postcards of Government Pond collected by the late Boyde Beck:

Images that look a lot different from the view of Government Pond one sees today:

Fortuitously, two days ago I received an email from a member of Bike Friendly Charlottetown asking if I might have data that could bolster their case for building the active transportation lane across the Hillsborough Bridge that the previous government committed to. Always ready to do just-in-time research, I dug in yesterday, and the result was an additional act in my talk on that very topic.

First, I plotted the home postal codes of the 404 people who live in Stratford and work at Queen Elizabeth Hospital (the largest public employer of people who live in Stratford):

Next, I used the Openrouteservice plug-in for QGIS to calculate their combined total daily commute: Openrouteservice provided me with a driving distance for each postal code that I then merged with my employee count table to get the total commute distance, which I multiplied by two to get the commute to and from work. The result: 6,540 km of driving between Stratford and the QEH every day:

I took that 6,540 km of daily driving, and estimated the carbon emissions of those drives, using the EPA average figure of 251 grams per kilometer of driving, and then multiplying by 251 workdays to get a total emissions per year figure of 412 tonnes:

Next I used the Openrouteservice isochrone tool to determine that 333 of those 404 workers can cycle from home to the hospital in under 30 minutes:

I used the Openrouteservice directions tool to calculate the driving directions for each of those 333 people, determining that if they’re each driving to and from work right now, they’re collectively driving 2,378 km every day:

Finally, I calculated the emissions savings if all of those drivers switched to cycling: 149 tonnes of CO2E per year.

I’m only showing maximum potential, of course: 333 people could cycle to Queen Elizabeth Hospital, it doesn’t mean that they will, or that they’re physically capable of doing so, or that they have bicycles, or that it’s safe to do so, even with a lane on the bridge. But it’s a place to start: it shows us what we’re missing, and what we can strive for.

The engineers were a friendly, welcoming lot (and there were a lot of them — more engineers that I ever imagined PEI might have). They asked some good questions, told me some things I didn’t know (like the time in 1997 that the government closed the Provincial Admin Buildings parking lot for a week!). I’m hopeful that some of the data and approaches I demonstrated might prove useful as they conjure our transportation future.

You can download the slide deck I presented as a PDF; I’m working on assembling the data I used, and documenting the analysis I did in more detail, and you can stay tuned for that.

3 Al Purdys, from Bruce Cockburn’s 2017 album Bone On Bone, has been running through my head since I first heard it last week.

It may have inspired in me a newfound love for poetry, especially the poetry of Al Purdy, from which much of the lyrics of the song are drawn:

Stand in the swaying boxcar doorway
moving east away from the sunset and
after a while the eyes digest a country and
the belly perceives a mapmaker’s vision
in dust and dirt on the face and hands here
its smell drawn deep thru the nostrils down
to the lungs and spurts thru blood stream
campaigns in the lower intestine
and chants love songs to the kidneys

(Excerpt from Transient, by Al Purdy, from Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems 1962-1996).

In Rukavina family written history, perhaps the preeminent distillation of my grandmother Nettie came in a note she left for my father (her son) one day, taped to the back window of her house in Brantford, Ontario:

For those of you who don’t read Pig Latin, that’s “the key is under the back porch in basket.”

My grandmother placed a lot of faith in the notion that those of the criminal element were not skilled at foreign languages.

And in her son (who was).

It worked.

My father saved the note all these years, in an accordion file marked “Rukavina Memorabilia.”

Oliver and I arrived home last night on the Maritime Bus around supper time to find the larder in need of replenishing, so my first task on this bright fall day was to head to Riverview Country Market and Sobeys to do just that. Along the way I stopped at Charlottetown Vet Clinic for Ethan’s dog food, and at The Bookmark to pick up a just-arrived pre-order of Danny Gregory’s new book How to Draw Without Talent (based on his online course of the same name).

By the time I was done, the bicycle trailer was fully-loaded, and my body was a little weirded out by my sudden request that it spring to life and cycle 6 km after a week of sedentary reflection.

With no snow on the ground, and temperatures still mostly above zero, I’m managing to extend cycling season much longer than I have in years previous; I’m very happy about this, and thus somewhat dreading the coming of the bleak midwinter.

Toward the end of his career as a nearshore sedimentologist, one of the tools my father spent a lot of time working with was RoxAnn, which a paper of his describes like this:

RoxAnn is an acoustic processor which analyzes echo-sounder returns to produce a classification of bottom-sediment types which is then confirmed or adjusted with independent sample, diver or television data. Acoustic data are logged and displayed on a notebook computer running the survey program, Microplot. Microplot logs RoxAnn data and associated GPS positions at one-second intervals or about 2-3 m for the standard survey speed of 2-3 m/s and within the depth range of 2 to 30 m. Acoustic bottom types are displayed as they are collected on an electronic chart of the survey area within the Microplot program.

Put simply, RoxAnn bounces sound off the lake-bottom to see what’s down there — mud, sand, gravel, and so on.

As a RoxAnn survey proceeded, the position of the survey vessel would be logged, and could then be visualized as “tracklines,” like this:

One of the last areas that Dad focused his research on was the St. Clair river, which runs between Lake Huron and Lake Erie, past Sarnia and Detroit.

One day, during a RoxAnn survey of the river, unbeknownst to him, Dad’s technicians secretly arranged to send him a message via these tracklines. As he described it to us, when Dad got back at to his home base at the National Water Research Institute after the Sarnia trip, he was analyzing the data in Microplot and, the, as he watched the RoxAnn tracklines progress through the Government Dock in Sarnia, he watched his name spelled out in GPS traces — N O R M.

When he retired, he was presented with a poster of the result, which hung on his office wall for all the years after his retirement:

What a lovely parting homage to a distinguished career and a good working relationship it was.

Walking downstairs into my parents’ basement involved navigating a dark patch before you could get to the light switch for the basement lights, so my father installed a battery-powered motion-detecting LED light on the wall opposite that turns on as soon as you’re halfway down.

I walked up and down those stairs a lot this week, and every time that light came on I thought of my father, wherever he is now, whispering quietly “here, Peter, let me turn the light on for you.”

It has been a sad, hard, happy, brutal, emotional, lovely, intense week here in Ontario. It was all made fuller, more survivable, more possible, by the presence of my Mom, my three brothers, my sister-in-law, my nephew, and Oliver, all of whom rose to the challenge of helping all of us make it through a week of remembering Dad’s life, attending to the bureaucratic details of death, and remembering to eat.

Oliver and I are in Toronto tonight; tomorrow we board the VIA Rail train for Montreal, and tomorrow evening we’re overnight from Montreal to Moncton. It’s the slowest possible way home, but that’s exactly what we need right now.

Oliver and I were out for a walk yesterday in downtown Burlington, a brief bit of exercise between breakfast pizza and a family donut run, when I spotted this interesting typography on the side of 1355 Elgin Street.

I have a perverse admiration for the R. It’s weird, but somehow it works.