As The Source (née Radio Shack) is in the death throes of its transition from a hobbiest-focused electronics retailer to a cell phone shop, I was happy to find EurekaTec, tucked away in a strip mall in Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia.

EurekaTec sells an impressive array of 3D filament (some of which they make in-house), as well as Raspberry Pi’s, Arduinos, and related accessories.

On my visit yesterday I picked up a carbon monoxide sensor, a spare DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor, an AA battery holder with cover and switch, a tiny breadboard, and an XTC 3D kit for smoothing out 3D printed models.

Yet another good thing to come out of Lower Sackville.

As I dropped various Europeans friends off in various places over the past two days, the minivan I’d rented for the journey became less and less appropriate for the size of our party, culminating  me driving around Halifax alone in a vehicle that can carry seven people. Realizing that I had an empty van in Halifax that I could fill with something to take back to Prince Edward Island, I decided to take yesterday to visit the bicycle shops of Halifax, with an eye to perhaps acquiring an electric-assist bicycle.

I rode my first ebike in Montreal 9 years ago; it was really more an emoped than an ebike, but the underlying idea was the same: could I make more places more reachable without my car by replacing it with something that makes cycling slightly less athletic.

I returned to the idea last year when I test-rode an Evox electric bicycle here in Charlottetown. At that point, even though I loved the ride and could see the potential, the $3,199 price tag put me off, and the idea returned to the back of my mind.

Over the last year, however, there have been new, cheaper imported ebikes available, in the $1500-ish price range, and I wanted to get a sense of how they compared. As Charlottetown only has one (and a half) bicycle shops, my opportunities for shopping around here are limited, hence my Halifax tour.

The eBike Centre

The eBike Centre is located in deepest light-industrial Dartmouth and shares facilities with NewStar Marine, which sells boats. They didn’t have a lot of electric bicycles in stock; their sales floor was more taken up with electric scooters. But they did have a folding Emmo F7 that I could test drive, and salesperson Celina took me on a cook’s tour of the bike and its capabilities. Because it folds, the F7 is also referred to as their “RV bike,” as it’s frequently purchased by people with motor homes for its more compact size when folded.

The bike retails for $1,699 plus freight and assembly, placing it in the heart of the “cheaper ebikes” category, and it does, indeed, feel slightly-less-than-premium in its build quality and ride. Of course a folding bike is, in part, optimized for folding, with smaller wheels and a different kind of frame, so it’s naturally got a different feel. But the F7 felt sluggish and more tank-like than I was comfortable with, and even its folding was unsatisfyingly un-Brompton-like, as it doesn’t origami together in its folded state, and just flops around (“most people use a bungee cord,” Celina said).

I was limited in real world test drive experience, as I was just riding around the shop’s parking lot, but I think I got a good sense of the bike; it wasn’t for me.

Dragon Ebikes

On the opposite end of Dartmouth, in a similar-feeling light industrial area, I visited Dragon EBikes.

Unfortunately, although their website shows a good selection of ebikes and accessories, they didn’t have any electric bicycles in stock, and their focus seems to be more on four-wheeled scooters than on bicycles. A wasted drive.

Cyclesmith

Across the harbour in Halifax proper I visited Cyclesmith, which is a traditional bicycle shop with all the good things (selection, expertise, bikes in stock) and bad things (intimidating vibe, bicycles mounted on inaccessible stands where you can’t get a visceral sense for them) that brings with it.

Cyclesmith’s ebike offerings are, as you might expect from the aesthetic and focus, on the high end: they had 10 models in stock, with the cheapest one starting at $2,499 and models as expensive as $6,199. This put things out of my price range, and it didn’t seem worth it to try to penetrate the bike-culture-wall to see if I could test drive one, so I took a browse around, looking mostly at non-electric bicycles, and then moved on.

Robertson C Business Equipment

My Google Maps searches for “ebike” kept surfacing Robertson C Business Equipment in the results, and I’d been assuming this was some kind of SEO error. But it turns out that in addition to selling computers and point-of-sale systems, they also sell electric bicycles from the storefront next door, under the Halifax Electric Bike Store label.

This was certainly the weirdest bike shop I visited, and the one with the most genial staff.

They had two models in stock, both from the Canadian iGO brand, the M29 and the Erö. I got a brief overview of the differences between the two (mostly styling and a difference in where the motor is located) and a recommendation that I try the M29 out on the road (“why don’t you take it up Citadel Hill to get a good test of how it handles,” it was suggested).

With a request to leave my wallet behind as collateral (a request that gave me no pause given the aforementioned geniality), I was given a helmet, a brief tutorial about how to use the bike, and sent on my way for an open-ended test ride. This is the way that testing should happen; the “no rush” is key, especially when dealing with things that cost multi-thousands of dollars.

I did as was suggested, and took off up Citadel Hill, enjoying Halifax’s considerably-better-than-Charlottetown bike lane infrastructure as I navigated around the neighbourhood.

The M29 was palpably different than the folding Emmo; some of this comes from the different form factor, but it’s also a much better-made bicycle, with a better, more responsive electric drive system. It was a joy to ride, and the pedal-assist felt sufficiently Superman-like on all but the steepest hill-climb (and even there, I didn’t sweat it to the top of Citadel Hill, I just had to pedal a little harder).

At $2,499 the M29 was still too rich for my blood, but I am happy to have test ridden it, and happy to have been able to do so outside of the confines of a mainline bicycle shop.

Sportwheels

My visit to Sportwheels, in Lower Sackville, was more about looking at adapted bicycles for Oliver than looking at ebikes, which was good, as they had only one ebike model on the floor.

While the shop is a straight-ahead bike shop (albeit with a significant hockey sideline), it was more workaday than elite, and I felt more comfortable there than I had at Cyclesmith.

I was referred to Sportwheels by the Recreation Therapy program at the IWK, and evidence suggests that they do a fair amount of business finding bicycles to suit people of all needs.

They didn’t have any adaptive bicycles in stock, but they were able to show me a Tri-rider, fitted with electric assist, that was a kind of hybrid between a standard trike and a recumbent. This seems promising, and like it might work for Oliver. It’s frustrating to not be able to have him try it out, however; it would be really great if PEI sported a program similar to the adapted bikes loan program at the IWK (perhaps that’s something Cycling PEI could take on?).

I didn’t buy an electric bicycle…

I returned home to Charlottetown with a empty van.

I decided that, as with the decision to insulate our house or purchase an electric car, the economics don’t make sense: I’m far better off, for now, continuing to ride the regular old Palomar that I’ve had for many years and to put my climate change-mitigation dollars into efforts that have a more substantial pay-off.

My tour of the bicycle shops of Halifax didn’t leave me with a lot of warm feelings about bicycle retailing in the 21st century: it appears to be a retail sector still very much rooted in sport rather than transportation, and for something that’s demands test riding to get a real feel for, the setup of shops isn’t optimized for this.

If my life was different and I was, say, commuting in to the city from Brookfield every morning, I’d certainly take a serious look at the iGO M29, as it would make a lot of sense for a longer-distance commute like this, and appears to have the build quality to stand up to daily use and the drive train to handle the varying terrain.

There was a baby crow born in our back yard last week that’s been learning to fly this week. Its parents have been understandably protective, and so every time Ethan the Dog goes outside they go on high alert, cawing and swooping. It’s been very effective.

With 105% of PEI’s electricity needs being met by wind energy this morning, it’s an auspicious day for newly-minted Green MLAs to take their seats in the Legislative Assembly for the Speech from the Throne.

On Strawberry Hill, in the heart of the opposite of Halifax’s café district, publisher Nimbus has opened a bookshop & café called Open Book. They sell books. And coffee. And they brew up an excellent iced tea.

On a corner of the straws-and-napkins counter I found this tiny handbill for Costas Halavrezos’ Book Me!.

Costas, ex- of the CBC, has been missing from the airwaves for too long; I’m loading up the car with Book Me! episodes for the drive home to PEI.

Hilton operates 13 hotel brands, helpfully thumbnailed here. The DoubleTree brand is listed there in the “upscale” category, and is described by Hilton like this:

Warm. Comfortable. Friendly. Providing true upscale comfort to today’s business and leisure travelers.

Wikipedia elaborates:

DoubleTree’s strategy to grow the brand has been to convince operators of other brands to switch flags. This is in contrast to brands like Marriott or Sheraton which rely on new construction to grow their footprint.

And this is true in the case of the DoubleTree Dartmouth where I stayed last night,  a Holiday Inn in sheep’s clothing; I know this because Oliver and I stayed here in 2002, the first time we’d left Catherine to her own devices. And because there are still vestigial Holiday Inn “no parking” signs in the back-back parking lot.

You can convince an operator to switch flags, but you can’t drum the essential Holiday Inn out of the Holiday Inn, and so this DoubleTree feels kind of like a faded movie star, with a lot of veneer and spackle to convince us that it deserves the “upscale” slotting.

I am here because the Halifax hotel market has gone crazy: it used to be easy to find a Halifax hotel room for under $200 and, if you booked through a consolidator, for under $100. I paid $207 for this room on Hotwire, and it was the cheapest room I could find in the city that wasn’t in the Stardust Motel on the road to Bedford.

But, despite the peeling paint and the toll plaza proximity, I opted to make the best of a bad thing, and discovered the following nearby delights.

Just down the hill, toward downtown Dartmouth, is St. Paul’s Cemetery. It’s easy to miss, as it’s hidden in a residential area and built into the side of a hill.

There are a mixture of very old and relatively new gravestones in the cemetery, including one for Aquila Maud Chapman Freeman, born 1907, died 1986, on the reverse of which is this puzzle:

On the other side of the road is Dartmouth Common, a large and rambling hillside green space surrounded by a fence that’s dotted with memorial plaques like this one, “in memory of John and Isabella Moir, by their Daughter Olive.” Which sounds like the title of a J.D. Salinger short story.

This morning I walked across the opening to the bridge toll plaza next door to Bagel Montreal Style and had a Zatar-spiced bagel that was, indeed, Montreal-style.

For my morning coffee I walked through the aforementioned Dartmouth Common to Two If By Sea. As finding parking near there as been a perpetual problem for us over the years, walking proved to be a much more relaxing approach, and it only took me 15 minutes in each direction. Along the way I got a fantastic view of the Halifax skyline:

As I drank my cappuccino out front, I made a sketch of the Quaker House across the street:

On the walk back through Dartmouth Common I spotted the Park Avenue Community Oven, which deserves further investigation on my next trip:

My psychogeographic wanderings prove that even in the faux-upscale confines of an evening in the DoubleTree there is beauty to be found.

My time in Dartmouth is drawing to an end; I’m off to shop for electric bicycles, and then back to PEI this evening. I decided to do the sensible thing and call Enterprise to extend my reservation into the evening so I don’t have to rush back, so as long as I time things to avoid moose-dusk, I should do just fine.

I type this from an easy chair in the lobby of the Killam Memorial Library at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

I am here in Halifax because today was a day of returning Crafting {:} a Life participants to their home jurisdictions: Juliane to Halifax to continue her Canadian journey, Morgan to YHZ to fly home to Berlin, Olle and Luisa to the bus in Sackville earlier today (where they traveled to YHZ themselves, for an earlier flight).

Because I am me, I thought it was a perfectly acceptable idea to agree to deliver a presentation to the Atlantic Association of Planning Technicians in the middle of this logistically complex week. It hardly seemed reasonable to ask they of the AAPT to reschedule their annual conference on account of me being exhausted from hosting our unconference.

The AAPT’s conference was, innovatively, bi-provincial, switching sessions back and forth between Sackville (New Brunswick) and close by Amherst (Nova Scotia). My session was in Sackville, on the beautiful campus of Mount Allison university.

After dropping Olle and Luisa off at the bus, and setting Morgan and Juliane loose on the town, I sought out my venue, and, it turns out, arrived about an hour early. So I set out to explore the campus.

I did not have to go far to find wonders: just across the path I found the Mount Allison Chapel, a remarkable 1964 building that took my breath away:

The chapel is entered through one of three sets of heavy, colourful doors:

Because, apparently, I have become the kind of person who can strike up impromptu conversations with strangers, shortly after entering I found myself in conversation with The Rev. John C. Perkin, the University Chaplain. I didn’t know this at the time: he appeared to be no more than a particularly knowledgeable-about-the-chapel regular person (excellent qualification for his job). We had a delightful chat about the chapel’s architecture, history and contemporary use.

Emerging from the chapel I realized that, despite my feeling that I needed to hurry to my talk, I still had 30 minutes left, and so I walked next door to the Owens Art Gallery, where, again, I chatted, this time with the person at the front desk, who ushered me into the collection, and, later, answered some questions (like “why did the Graduate Self-Portraits project stop in the 1960s?”).

The gallery sports a permanent homage to Alex Colville, along with temporary exhibitions by Carrie Allison, Alisa Arsenault, Maryse Arseneault, Rémi Belliveau, and Herménégilde Chiasson.

Alex Colville, Athletes, 1961

Alisa Arsenault, Still Life (or the Nesting of Memory), 2019

In the lobby there’s also a “Tiny Zine Library” (which is something every art gallery should have), as well as the aforementioned Graduate Self-Portrait collection:

Each year, in celebration of Spring Convocation and Alumni Reunion Weekend, the Owens Art Gallery displays self-portraits from the Graduate Self-Portrait Collection. From the late 1940s until the mid 1960s, Mount Allison University students in Fine Arts were required to paint a self-portrait in their fourth year, which they then submitted as their “Diploma Piece” before receiving the Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree. The portraits were to be life-sized, painted in oil on canvas or board, and measure 40 x 30 inches. An important archive of the Fine Arts Department, this collection consists of approximately fifty paintings that are now permanently housed at the Owens Art Gallery.

(The answer to my “why did it stop?” question was, in essence, “the 1970s came along and things got weird.”)

I didn’t have nearly enough time to enjoy the gallery fully, but I got a good taste, and the resolve to return on my next trip.

Emerging back into the crisp morning, with still a few minutes to go, I decided that it would be a nice gesture to build news of my discovery of Mount Allison campus treasures into my talk.

But how to get the photos from my Android phone onto my MacBook Air with my slides?

Eduroam to the rescue!

Eduroam being a system that, in essence, means that if you have network credentials at one university, you can use the wireless network at any other university. So, after uploading the photos to Google Photos via LTE on my phone, I pulled out my laptop, set it on the sidewalk and opened it up, found there was wifi with SSID of eduroam available, and authenticated with my University of Prince Edward Island credentials. Blamo: online!

I grabbed the photos, slotted them into my slide deck, and 5 minutes later I was in room 108 of the Dunn Building delivering my talk, Collecting and Visualizing Real Time Environment Data in the City of Charlottetown (slides), with a brief introductory diversion to point attendees at the chapel and the gallery, perhaps destinations for their generous 90 minute lunch break.

That I am sitting at Dalhousie University, some hours later, assembling this blog post, is also due to Eduroam, as Dal too is a participant in this great cooperative effort.

I am typing, at Dalhousie, partly because I arrived during the crazy-to-an-Islander Halifax rush hour, and have no wish to brave the traffic over to Dartmouth to get to my hotel, and partly because, suddenly devoid of my crew of European friends, I have sought solace in the anchoring port of the library.

I am overnight here tonight, e-bike shopping in the morning, and then back to the Island tomorrow afternoon.

I miss my friends dearly already; it will be good to have the airlock of an exotic Halifax rest to work through that.

Earlier this spring Oliver and I walked into the Sobeys grocery store on Allen Street in Charlottetown on a Tuesday night.

As soon as we walked in the door I noticed that something was different: the lights were lower, there wasn’t any Muzak, and I didn’t hear any announcements over the public address system.

It was as if Sobeys had opted to remove a bunch of the really annoying things about being in the store, things that we might not be completely aware are annoying until they’re removed.

It turns out that we had, by happenstance, walked into Sobeys during the two hour period, every Tuesday night, when they offer “Sensory Friendly Shopping,” an initiative undertaken in cooperation with The Autism Society of PEI.

This is a great idea, and one, I am told, that may in fact be spread to Sobeys stores across Canada in the near future.

Not only is it a gift to autistic people, but it is a gift to everyone, proving, yet again, that “accessible design” is most often synonymous with “good design.”

If you get a chance to experience Tuesday night shopping at Sobeys, and you agree, perhaps you could drop Sobeys a note of thanks?

A excellent tangible spin-off of Crafting {:} a Life: Rosie has started a new blog:

Who starts a weblog in 2019? This kid, apparently.

I’m sitting on my porch in Charlottetown on a sunny Sunday morning. It’s the first day I’ve worn shorts outside this season. Everything is fiercely green and the critters sing their existence from around the neighbourhood. Most I don’t know, but I can pick out squirrels, crows, and the grackles that have nested in our eves. Sam the cat kept me company on the porch while I set up a new VM, WordPress, Apache vhosts, and SSL certs – the method I’ve chosen to do this… new blog project thing. It’s not hard for me, I’ve set up websites before, but I find it hard to get through without a checklist – my brain doesn’t hold a stack well.

There was a lot of talk about blogging at the unconference–three sessions, by my count–and I’m happy to see the corner turn from “why did blogging die when we loved it so?” to “I’m going to start a new blog!”

After watching Andrea Ledwell receive her vegan powerball at Receiver Coffee in a coffee cup on Sunday, and hearing me joke that it was intended to have something poured over, Oliver went for it today, and poured blood orange Sanpellegrino over his own powerball. We dubbed it “The Andrea” in her honour. And he ate/drank it with a demitasse spoon. Ask for it by name next time you’re in for a snack.