I had the honour, after lunch at today’s PEI Home and School Federation Annual General Meeting, of posthumously awarding the late Shirley McGinn the Steve McQuaid Volunteer of the Year Award.

I was so happy to learn that the Prince Street Home and School had nominated Shirley for this award, and that the Federation’s board selected Shirley from those nominated to be recognized.

Here is the text of my remarks:

There are many reasons we give people awards.

When President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he had been on the job for less than a year, and the award was widely seen as an aspirational one: this is the kind of President we hope you will be.

Sometimes we give awards to people to thank them for their many years of service, to highlight a job especially well-done, or to encourage them to stick around and keep doing what they’re doing.

And sometimes, when we award someone posthumously, we’re saying look how this person lived: we all need to be more like that.

This is the case with the late Shirley McGinn, who we are recognizing today.

I met Shirley for the first time when we both volunteered as judges for the Heritage Fair at Prince Street School, when my son Oliver was a student there. To my surprise, Shirley not only knew who Oliver was, but appeared to have a pretty good understanding of him.

It was only later that I learned that Shirley was a regular volunteer at the school, and had been, for several years already, part of Oliver’s school life.

And later still I learned that when Shirley retired from a long career as a public school teacher, finishing at Parkdale, she started volunteering at Prince Street the very next day.

Shirley had the gift of being able to remember people, and, after our first meeting at the Heritage Fair, every time I ran into her she called me by name, and asked after Oliver.

It didn’t surprise me when, last spring on a visit to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital information desk, it was Shirley I found there, at one of her other volunteer jobs, one she held for 23 years.

There are people who volunteer in Island schools whose acts of service and dedication improve the lives of students, teachers, and all who come into contact with them: Shirley McGinn was one such person.

Even after retiring as a school teacher, she knew that there was more that she could be doing to support students: she volunteered at Prince Street School for more than 15 years, right up until her death last December.

Students always looked forward to spending time with Shirley, and she worked with them in many ways:

• She provided students with needing one-on-one time with a caring adult; she greeted everyone with a warm, welcoming smile; she believed in the value of conversation, social time, and the importance of having fun.
• She enjoyed playing engaging games with students to make learning fun, as well as keeping students interested in learning.
• She gave students a chance to have a voice, engaged them in conversation, as well as lending them a caring ear.
• She helped students to improve their reading, writing, and math skills through her patience and strong commitment. She would come every morning to help tutor students who needed extra help.
• She was dedicated to supporting the breakfast program: before tutoring students, she would come in early to prepare breakfast for 60 to 90 students.  She believed that a smile and some nutritious food would help their learning for the day. 

Home and School is an organization driven by dedicated volunteers, interested in strengthening the bond between home and school, to better the education of our children.  

Shirley accomplished this with her personality, and willingness to serve, and she will always be part of the family that she helped create at Prince Street, and in the Island community at large.

Shirley was a school teacher with a distinguished career, and after retirement chose Prince Street Elementary School as the place where she could continue to touch the lives of students, staff and families. She made a difference in students’ lives: because of her, they learned more, and developed a greater sense of belonging.

The Prince Street School community is convinced that no one could be more deserving of this award.

Shirley’s brother Brendon McGinn accepted the award on Shirley’s behalf; there were not many dry eyes in the house when he did.

Look how this person lived: we all need to be more like that.

Until today I’d had an election sign on my lawn twice in my lifetime.

The first time was short-lived: as a teenager I signed up to have a sign on the lawn of our family home for whatever federal candidate I was supporting at the time. The day the sign was installed, my father returned home from work and I caught hell, both because I hadn’t checked with anyone else in the family, and because my father, as a federal public servant, wasn’t actually allowed to have campaign signs on the lawn of his house.

The second time was when I was 18, living safely away from home, and decided, on a lark, to run for the local school board. The signature achievement of my campaign was some very smart “Rukavina for School Board” campaign signs. That this was the signature achievement of my campaign is, in part, why my campaign was unsuccessful.

As of this afternoon our house at 100 Prince Street proudly sports a Karla Bernard sign. This time I checked with my housemates to make sure they were down with this. And this time the candidate is worthy of a vote.

I knew, when I bought the sledgehammer from Rogers Hardware for $10.00, many years ago when it was closing down, that I would find a good use for it some day. Today was that day.

Like my father, it’s not everyone who has the privilege to have a campaign sign on their lawn, and not only because their job prohibits it: making a (very) public declaration of ones intent to vote for a particular candidate is a self-inflicted violation of the secret ballot. It’s also, on a close-knit Island like this, a social and, some might say, spiritual declaration. That we’ve taken the leap is a testament to our family’s conviction that Karla is the right person for this job.

Oliver will vote in his first Provincial General Election this month. Raising an engaged, curious citizen, who takes his franchise seriously, is the greatest thing Catherine and I have ever done.

At my monthly plasma donation this afternoon they went to put blue wrap around my arm just before I was done.

“You don’t have any green wrap do you?”, I asked.

They did. So that’s what I got.

It was a very Green donation otherwise: the man at the bed next to me was sporting a Peter Bevan-Baker button, and my nurse mentioned that he sister lives on the same street as Karla Bernard and has a Green sign-making operation in her garage.

I have been immersed in election geography this week, and by way of procrastinating I made this visualization that connects every address on Prince Edward Island to its polling station on election day.

Here’s a similar visualization, but for the advance polls:

I shared the map with a friend, and they asked me if I could tell them, as the crow flies, which addresses were the greatest distance from their polling station on election day, so I made this map to illustrate this. There’s one dot on the map for each civic address on PEI; the darker the colour of orange of the dot, the greater the distance to the polling station for electors at that address.

The greatest address-to-poll distances are from Goose River and Little Sands.

There are, it turns out, two places in New England named Salem, one in New Hampshire and one in Massachusetts.

I learned this on Saturday morning when I woke up in the wrong one.

My plan for the day was to attend a book sale at the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Massachusetts.

On Friday morning when I took a cursory look at a map of New England–Yankee Publishing, as you might imagine, is bursting with maps of New England–I saw that Salem was nearby and thought “oh, that’s interesting, I’ll spend tonight there.”

And so I booked myself a room at the Merchant Salem, a smart looking hotel downtown. On Friday afternoon I dutifully followed Google Maps’ driving directions to Salem, arriving around supper time; a night of merriment ensued.

On Saturday morning I woke up, had breakfast, and then asked Google Maps to take me to the Museum of Printing.

Which, it turned out, was not just a hop, skip and jump next door, but rather nearly an hour’s drive north. Near the other Salem. The one in New Hampshire.

This map illustrates Salem, NH (in green) versus Salem, MA (in red) versus the Museum of Printing:

The error of my ways was twofold.

First, I reasoned, naively, that if the Museum of Printing was in Massachusetts, then I should–obviously–stay in Salem, Massachusetts.

Second, I paid no heed to ground truth, instead relying entirely on Google Maps to route me around. And thus developing no “lay of the land” that would have shown me immediately the error of my ways.

Fortunately, the only penalty for my foolishness was driving an extra hour up and and extra hour back. I enjoyed the Museum of Printing nonetheless. And maybe even a little more for the effort.

The museum, since my last visit in 2011, when it was located in North Andover, has relocated to a smart new location in Haverhill.

The book sale was, as it turned out, poorly attended, and for most of my visit I had the room to myself:

The books on offer ranged from type catalogues to biography to books that were simply examples of fine printing. There were an uncommon number of books about Benjamin Franklin, and almost as many books about Gutenberg, not surprising given the Boston birthplace of the former and the historic contributions of the later to the printing trade.

Another New Englander, at least for a time, was Frederic Goudy, type designer and printer, whose Village Press was, from 1904 to 1906, located in nearby Hingham, Massachusetts. Goudy is well-represented in the museum proper, with a collection of his books and papers, including this sketch of his personal monogram:

Goudy was also well-represented in the book sale and, as a longtime Goudy fanboy, this made me happy. And allowed me to return home with several Goudy-related items in my satchel.

The first was this book, Type Design, a 1961 edition produced by The Press of the Good Mountain at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

The book is derived from a Goudy essay in the 1934 Vol. 1, No. 4 of Ars Typographica, and while the cover is worn and ragged, inside is what might be not only the most beautiful book I own, but the most beautiful anything I own:

The book is set in Goudy’s Medieval and Californian typefaces and  100 were produced.

My next purchase was a book I appreciated initially because of this bookplate:

The idea that one would have a “Library of Books about Books” is delightful. When I purchased the book, The Dutch Claims to the Invention of Printing from 1928, I didn’t know anything about Frederic Melcher; he turns out to have been an estimable person who did, indeed, collect books about books:

A man who knew the insides of many books, he also cared about how a book is made, and encouraged graphic artists in the 20th century renaissance of American book design.

Mr. Melcher was a man who liked to put things in a historical perspective, and began collecting books about books almost as soon as he entered the business. More importantly, he encouraged young researchers and other scholars to use his collection in writing about book trade problems and history. He assembled noteworthy collections, too, in the fields of fine printing and children’s literature. As a personal publishing venture, he issued facsimile editions of several miniature books first published in Colonial America.

Much of Mr. Melcher’s accomplishment stemmed from a capacity to crystalize the essentials of an issue or an idea, and then, with infectious vigor, to impel groups of people to take action.

I only hope that some of that infectious vigor rides with the book.

The book is set in Nicolas Jenson, a face that, while no Californian, is lovely in its own way:

My final purchase from the book sale was a small book, priced at just $1, titled Fifteen Years of Bookbuilding, that jumped off the table at me for the craft that went into its creation.

The book was produced in 1951 to mark the 15th anniversary of The Bookbuilders of Boston, an organization that, remarkably is still very much alive. The book was a group project, and is printed on very pleasant paper and is beautifully set in an uncredited typeface.

Once I’d spent 90 minutes in the book sale, I adjourned to tour the museum itself–an excellent overview of printing history, plus a printing workshop and a sizable library. I then finished my visit with a trip to the museum’s well-stocked shop.

My first purchase from the museum shop was this tiny, perfect font of type, on sale for just $16:

Purchasing this required that I bear the additional scrutiny that people carrying chunks of lead through airport security are subject to; as a result the package bore the branded tape of both the TSA and CASTA by the time I got home:

I’m happy to report that the agents from both agencies were careful and accommodating my requests to not spill the type, and it arrived home in good sorts.

In addition to the type, I found this letterpress cut from the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire, where I’d spent the week previous; it was only $5 and of course I purchased it:

After two hours of shopping and browsing, I finished up my visit with a chat to the voluble and friendly volunteers at the front desk and bid farewell, happy that, despite having bunked in the wrong Salem, I’d found my way.

My friend Andrea writes about her experiences working as a tea lady in 1990s London.

On the Joe Moakley Courthouse in Boston, the words of Felix Frankfurter.

On the road from Dublin, NH to home, the slow way.

Tonight I’m in Salem, MA trying to effect a small birthday celebration for myself: fish tacos and beer, and a movie at what might be the world’s smallest cinema (and certainly is the once with the seating angled most weirdly). Just me and one other person watching Transit at 9:15 p.m.

I’m staying at the Merchant Salem, a “let me show you to your room and explain how to turn on the fireplace and the heated floor in the bathroom” hotel with just 10 rooms. An indulgence sponsored, unwittingly, by my parents and their generous birthday cheque.

Tomorrow I’m up to Beverly for a letterpress book sale, then to Boston for the night before heading home on Sunday morning.

In my spare evening hours here in New Hampshire this week I worked on a “Find your Green Candidate” widget for the Green Party campaign website.

This turned out not to be a trivial thing do to, in part because I couldn’t find a ready-made open data source of which civic addresses are in which electoral district. So I had take the electoral districts GIS layer and the civic address layer and use QGIS to run a point-in-polygon process to marry the two. The result was a MySQL table that looks like this:

The table maps each civic address to its electoral district: like 71 48 RD is in District 2, for example.

Next I had to create a table of Green Party candidates, also keyed to electoral district:

With this table I can look up who the Green candidate is for District 2, Susan Hartley.

With the data in place, I wrote an API, in PHP, that accepts a civic address fragment and returns matching addresses as an HTML fragment. For example, if I POST 99 B to this API, I get back:

<ul id="addresslist">
    <li class="oneaddress" id="23|Tyne Valley - Sherbrooke|Trish Altass|https://www.greenparty.pe.ca/trishaltass_d23|https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/greenpartype/pages/2026/attachments/original/1554002031/smaller_trish_altass.png?1554002031|99 BAGLOLE WHARF RD">99 BAGLOLE WHARF RD, SOUTHWEST LOT 16</li>
    <li class="oneaddress" id="21|Summerside - Wilmot|Lynne Lund|https://www.greenparty.pe.ca/lynnelund_d21|https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/greenpartype/pages/2026/attachments/original/1554002024/smaller_lynne_lund.png?1554002024|99 BALCOM DR">99 BALCOM DR, SUMMERSIDE</li>
    <li class="oneaddress" id="8|Stanhope - Marshfield|Sarah Donald|https://www.greenparty.pe.ca/sarahdonald_d8|https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/greenpartype/pages/2026/attachments/original/1554350635/smaller_sarah_donald.png?1554350635|99 BALD EAGLE LN">99 BALD EAGLE LN, MILLCOVE</li>
    <li class="oneaddress" id="11|Charlottetown - Belvedere|Hannah Bell|https://www.greenparty.pe.ca/hannahbell_d11|https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/greenpartype/pages/2026/attachments/original/1554002022/smaller_hannah_bell.png?1554002022|99 BARBOUR CIR">99 BARBOUR CIR, CHARLOTTETOWN</li>
</ul>

In other words, the first four addresses that match that address. If I send a longer address fragment to the API, like 99 BAL, I get the subset of addresses that continue to match:

<ul id="addresslist">
    <li class="oneaddress" id="21|Summerside - Wilmot|Lynne Lund|https://www.greenparty.pe.ca/lynnelund_d21|https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/greenpartype/pages/2026/attachments/original/1554002024/smaller_lynne_lund.png?1554002024|99 BALCOM DR">99 BALCOM DR, SUMMERSIDE</li>
    <li class="oneaddress" id="8|Stanhope - Marshfield|Sarah Donald|https://www.greenparty.pe.ca/sarahdonald_d8|https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/greenpartype/pages/2026/attachments/original/1554350635/smaller_sarah_donald.png?1554350635|99 BALD EAGLE LN">99 BALD EAGLE LN, MILLCOVE</li>
</ul>

You’ll notice that the ID of the list items returns contains all the data I need to render the candidate information for any address; while this isn’t efficient in terms of the size of the API payload, it does mean that I don’t need to make a second API call to get candidate details.

With the API in place, I wrote a JavaScript app to manage the actual candidate lookup.

The nice thing about this approach is that it’s a standalone tool that can be used in the field to help electors find their Green Candidate (it’s installable as a progressive web app) and it’s also embeddable in any other website:

That’s how you see on the Green Party candidates page, and how you can put it on your own website by pasting in:

<iframe scrolling="no" src="https://c.ruk.ca/election/index.html" style="width: 100%; height: 250px; border:0; margin-bottom: 20px; overflow: hidden"></iframe>

Since first releasing this a few days ago, I’ve been tweaking the design so that it integrates well with the Green website, and so that it behaves well inside an iframe on both desktop and mobile. It’s been a fun exercise.

I welcome any feedback you might have on how it works (or, if it doesn’t, how it’s broken!).