Seven years ago I posted the text of a talk I gave 25 years ago in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Adventures on the Information Red Clay Road: Getting Wired Cheap. I was able to do this because my friend Art Rhyno had kept a copy of the text and sent it to me.

At the time I didn’t have the slides that I used to accompany the talk–this was 1994, before Powerpoint and Keynote, so we used slide projectors for our “decks”–and so I could only post the text.

But a lucky bit of slide scanning yesterday produced the slides I’d used all those years ago, and so, with those slides scanned, I was able to update the post with the images that were projected while I spoke.

My favourite part of the talk–and the part that the images best help to illustrate–was a series of slides showing the route our leased copper connection to the Internet took from my office in the PEI Crafts Council on Richmond Street, into the basement, out the back of the building, along to Sydney Street, and up Queen Street to Island Tel and the Internet.

As I wrote in 2012, “It seems as though every decade or so I’m destined to revisit a talk I gave…” I’m 3 years early this time around. Perhaps someone will unearth the audio for the 2022 update?

A month into my /now experiment, I’ve updated my /now, editing to reflect what’s actually happening and, inspired by Belle B. Cooper (whose Exist.io I’ve started to use, inspired by Jeremy Cherfas), I’ve added a section about the tools I use on my Mac and on my phone.

Robertson Library at the University of PEI has a Jumbl slide scanner available, for in-library use, at the service desk. It doesn’t look like much–it’s smaller than a bread box–but it turns out to be a very capable, easy to use way of quickly scanning a lot of 35mm slides.

I know this because last night, as Oliver was attending a Young Greens meeting on campus, I set myself up with the slide scanner and a Mac in a corner of the library, and tried my hand at it.

At my side was a cache of slides that I discovered last fall when we were emptying our attic: I’d forgotten that, until Catherine and I bought our first digital camera in 2000, a lot of the photographs we took got developed as slides. I also somehow came to be the holder of a certain subsection of the Rukavina family slide archive. And so I ended up scanning a mixture of Rukavina baby pictures, photos of Catherine’s art work from the years before we met, photos of Great Lakes core samples, travel photos from my childhood, pictures of trips Catherine and I took before Oliver, and a fascinating collection of photos of my project at the PEI Crafts Council 25 years ago that I thought were lost to time.

Here’s a random selection of what I scanned last night:

My brother Mike in Europe in 1972.

My brother Mike, my Mother, and me, at Stonehenge, in 1972.

A photo from our hotel in Dubrovnik (I think) of the daily market, in 1972.

Clay road in Queens County, 1994, part of my Adventures on the Information Red Clay Road talk.

Road sign on a clay road in Queens County, 1994, part of my Adventures on the Information Red Clay Road talk.

Armed Services YMCA in Texas, taken on a 1980 bus trip with my father.

Sample cores, Canada Centre for Inland Waters (my father’s workplace).

Sign from PEI government campus, mid-1990s.

Catherine, in our Nissan Sentra station wagon, mid-1990s.

Paperwork for the PEI Crafts Council CANARIE application, 1994

Prince Edward Island’s first webserver, an IBM PC Junior, at the PEI Crafts Council, 1994.

That last photo, of the Island’s first webserver, was a particularly happy find, as there’s precious little documentation of that project and of my early work on Prince Edward Island. I spent hours and hours and hours in front of that machine over the first 18 months we lived here, and was able to squeeze so much out of it that it was never intended to do.

In 2014 I posted about our energy consumption at 100 Prince Street: that year we used 3,710 litres of home heating oil.

I asked Kenmac Energy for a statement of the three years we’ve been a customer (we switched from Coop Energy when it shut down) and they helpfully provided it. Combining that with data from Coop Energy, here’s what we consumed:

• 2016: 3710 litres
• 2015: 3920 litres
• 2016: 4264 litres
• 2017: 4391 litres
• 2018: 4421 litres

Here’s a visualization of our usage, contrasted with the annual heating degree days for Charlottetown (from here: a measurement designed to quantify the demand for energy needed to heat a building. It is the number of degrees that a day’s average temperature is below 65^o Fahrenheit):

Our consumption has gone up 711 litres/year from 2014 to 2018, but otherwise appears to be generally related to the number of heating degree days, which makes sense; given the number of degree days in 2014, though, I’m wonder if I under-reported the figure for that year.

I do all this calculating by way of trying to determine the way forward for how we heat our home.

We got a (very) ballpark estimate of $36,000, all-in, for replacing our oil-fired boiler with a high temperature vertical closed-loop geothermal system; while such a system wouldn’t take our energy costs to $0, as the system requires electricity, it would be dramatically less expensive.

We spent $4500 for our 4421 litres of home heating oil last year, so, very crudely, the geothermal system would have a payback period of 8 years. Which seems pretty amazing (assuming, of course, free and ready access to $36,000).

Our EnerGuide home energy audit last year estimated that we’d consume 4881 litres annually, which would emit 13.4 tonnes/year of greenhouse gas emissions; at that rate, we emitted 11.6 tonnes/year of greenhouse gases from home heating last year, and a geothermal system would take that down much closer to net-zero, which must be figured into any calculations we make.

Jacqueline Mabey makes a case for meditation in a most eloquent and convincing fashion. I would quote from it, but it demands to be read as a whole.

There’s a bug in Charlottetown’s crow population operating system that’s caused hundreds of birds to congregate in our back yard. It’s very weird. See also The Crow Agenda.

This season I’m deeply invested in two television shows Counterpart and Berlin Station.

That they are both set in Berlin, and that they both feature the actor James Cromwell, to say nothing that Counterpart requires intense concentration to keep track of (without giving too much away, there are two Berlins involved), means that I’m forever getting characters and situations confused. But I persevere, as both are compelling television.

While Counterpart has a grey palette appropriate to its dystopian nature, Berlin Station is full of the colour of the city, and no colour is more dominant than yellow, as you can see in the opening credits, which start with the approach of a yellow U-Bahn train and go on to feature more yello trains, buses, street art, sunsets and sunrises:

The Berlin Typography blog, as it happens, has a feature, The Colours of Berlin: Yellow, posted today, that furthers the case for yellow being Berlin’s colour.

Libby Osgood writes from El Paso where she’s supporting those just released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement:

That’s not what shocked me. The nurse agreed we needed the papers also asked if they had their chargers. I was surprised that she would be so involved with their phones, but then the mama lifted her jeans to reveal a tracking device bolted to her ankle. It seems Maco learned this same harsh reality when one of the teenage boys asked if they had to tell security about their device. Fighting back tears, she nodded her “yes”. These ankle bracelets need the battery changed/charged every 3 hours, effectively anchoring the people to a wall plug until they go to court. How they handle the 2-day greyhound trip, I can only wonder.

Today I finished binding the last of the 23 notebooks I’ve been printing, folding, perforating and binding all month; while making the penultimate notebook I stopped to take photos of each step of the process, both as a guide to my future self and as a guide to others who might like to follow my lead.

Design

My decision to use standard letter-sized paper for the notebooks played a part in dictating their size: I decided to take each 8½ by 11 inch piece of paper and to first cut it into two 8½ by 4 inch strips, each of which got folded, with the help of a bone folder, into a 4¼ by 4 inch signature.

This left me needing front and back covers of the same 4¼ by 4 size; I cut these out of unbleached letter-sized card stock.

Printing the Covers

I decided that “Perforated Notes” would appear on the cover, as that’s what was going to be in the tin, so to speak; I also decided to add a credit to the front cover, which is something I seldom remember to do. As I related here in more detail, I set the Perforated Notes in 36 point Tourist Gothic and the credit line in 18 point Gill Sans:

After setting the type and going through the laborious make-ready process to make-it-so, I printed about 40 covers, a number balanced between having too many and having too few.

Perforating

To perforate the signatures that I’d cut and folded earlier, I locked a piece of “perf bar”–hardened steel with a perforated cutting edge running along one side–into the chase and into the press, and set a piece of hardened steel for it to land on the platen (so as to not damage the press).

My initial attempts at perforating were frustrating because the paper would get caught in the perf bar on each run and I’d have to stop the press to remove it. I cured this problem by realizing that’s why all of the die-cut rigs that I inherited with the press have pieces of foam arranged around the cutters: the foam gets compressed on the cutting stroke, and then gently pushes on the perforated paper to release it; once I added this I made short work of the perforating.

After some prototyping, I decided that each notebook would have 10 signatures, or 20 pages in total; once I assembled all the perforated signatures into piles of 10 I had enough to produce 23 notebooks.

Punching Holes

The raw materials for each notebook, before binding, looked like this:

Each notebook had a printed front cover, 10 signatures of perforated insides, and a plain back cover.

The first step in binding was to gather these together in order, to align them with the top edge, and then to clamp the assembly together with a binder clamp wrapped around a piece of card (to avoid damaging the covers):

Next, I placed a template with five holes, over the notebook, aligned with the top edge, to act as a guide for punching holes:

Using a template was a good idea: it’s fine to eyeball a single notebook, but to ensure consistency and levelness, the template was invaluable when binding multiples.

There are five holes in the template because an odd number of holes is required for the stab binding technique.

I used an awl, newly-arrived in the London Centre for Book Arts Bookbinding Toolkit, to punch the five holes; the limit of 10 signatures per notebook was, in part, informed by how much paper I could reasonably expect to punch through.

The notebooks with holes punched looked like this on the front:

And like this on the back (just enough hole to be workable):

Sewing the Binding

I used a variety of thread and cord for the binding, experimenting to see what worked best. I was aided greatly by having my fibre-artist-girlfriend across the hall with her endless cache of options.

When I started sewing, each notebook was a struggle as I struggled to thread the bookbinding needle, with its very small hole; this process was aided greatly by purchase of a set of needle threading tools from the dollar store (3 for $1.50 in Crapaud):

With the needle threaded, I ran off a length of about 24 inches of thread, and then tied a knot in the end:

Stab binding starts with taking the needle through the inside from the middle out, using the first hole in from one side or the other, like this:

I pulled the thread taut to the knot, with the rat’s tail of thread left inside for use on the final step.

Once out through the top, I looped back around through the bottom and back through to the top, leaving this hole “bound”:

Once back out the top I moved along to the second hole, went down through the top, looping back around and back out the bottom:

From there it was simply a process of continuing the same looping until the last hole, at which point I looped both around the end and then in the usual manner:

From there–and this is where it all began to seem kind of magical as everything fell into place–I repeated the same process back down to the opposite end:

Once I got to the other end, stitched around the end and then the regular loop through the first hole, I stitched back through the middle to find the rat’s tail that I started with, cut the thread, and tied the two tails together in a knot:

With the knot tied off, the binding was complete:

And from the back:

Trimming

Despite my best efforts, some of the notebooks ended up slightly ragged at the bottom end:

The solution to this was to hold a line rule along the bottom and then to gently trim the excess:

23 Notebooks Bound

I went through this same process 23 times, which was a very valuable process, as I got better at something every time through (i.e. not puncturing my fingers with the needle, or not tangling the thread, or figuring out how to keep the thread taught). Here’s what the final fleet of bound notebooks looks like:

In documenting this I’ve come to realize how very, very difficult it is to write about a physical process–especially the sewing–in a way that does it justice and allows it to be repeated. I had the great gift of having taken Jennifer Brown’s bookbinding workshop twice, once in 2013 and again in 2017, and there was nothing like her patient explanations and demonstrations to get me to the point where I could do this myself. So, I apologize, both to you, gentle reader, and to my future self, for all my “and then just loop around and you’ll be done” vague brevity.