The office paper towel dispenser has been broken for months, and we’ve been forced to use loose rolls of towels.

But today the last loose roll random out, leaving the only the paper towel in evidence the one locked in the broken machine behind a lock only opened with a proprietary key that I don’t have.

Wet hands. What to do?

It turns out that a standard-issue spork can unlock the machine.

The Guardian reports today that Vehicle hits pole after swerving to avoid fox on Charlottetown road.

The first time I ever touched an Apple Macintosh was the fall of 1984. I was a high school student embedded in the Ontario Science Centre, a position which afforded the privilege of 24/7 access to the building and its many wonders.

Somehow our tiny cabal of students managed to secure a “master key” that opened every door there, and it was behind one of those doors, a temporary cabin that had been set up in an unused exhibit area, that we came across a collection of Apple Lisa and Macintosh computers; the Lisa had been released the year before, the Mac just that January. We figured out to turn them on. And I was immediately mesmerized.

For context: I’d just that same month purchased a new PC for my own use, a Sanyo MBC-550 that existed in a mysterious realm between a bona fide IBM-PC and a completely proprietary computer; it ran a flavour of MS-DOS, and operated just like a PC. Or at least just enough like a PC. Many essays were typed on that computer. And many BBS systems were dialed into.

But that computer was nothing like the Macintosh: there were no graphics to speak of (Windows 3.0 wasn’t to be released until 6 years later), and so whereas at home it was all backslash-this and backslash-that, in the secret Science Centre Mac lab I got to use a mouse, a desktop, a drop-down menu, and all the other innovations that, 33 years later are still very much part of how I use the MacBook Air upon which I now type.

All of which is to say: isn’t it great that, thanks to the Internet Archive, you can now run a classic Mac in a web browser!

Some years later, at Trent University, I had more permanent access to a Mac, and got to dive deep into HyperCard, the hypermedia authoring tool that still, all these years later, so many of us from that day pine for lovingly. HyperCard was, for me, the gateway drug for everything that I’ve done since: the agency that it gave one to shape digital information landscapes was profound. This 1987 episode of The Computer Chronicles–also hosted by the Internet Archive–is a delightful look into the mind of Bill Atkinson, the man who created HyperCard, and about the uses it had been put to in those early days, including an effort to digitize The Whole Earth Catalog.

Since he revealed it last year, I’ve been very fond of Premier MacLauchlan’s conception of Prince Edward Island as “the mighty island” and, even better, the “isle of might.”

I was disheartened, however, by the facile video that unleashed this notion on the larger world. I couldn’t put my finger on the heart of my discomfort, though, until I rewatched it with Oliver tonight and heard the following line:

We didn’t get the memo that said “you can’t,” we got the one that said “anything is possible.”

The thing is: there aren’t two memos.

Wiktionary describes the idiom like this:

To be aware of the current state of affairs.

He hadn’t gotten the memo that there were too many strip malls.

Didn’t you get the memo about gasoline prices?

So let’s assume a memo that went out that said “you can’t.”

The idiom works if, say, Bob then goes out and runs a marathon. “I guess Bob didn’t get the memo!”, his friends could rightly exclaim.

But in this or no other situation is there a competing contrary memo; Bob didn’t run a marathon because he read an “anything is possible” memo, he ran a marathon because he didn’t read the “you can’t” memo.

The use in the “mighty island” video thus breaks the idiom, and not in a witty way, but in a “bad copywriting” way.

And this bad copy not only harms the video directly, but it serves to accentuate that the overarching “rah, rah, we’re totally plucky and awesome” tone of the video is a bad fit for a metaphor that is, at its heart, proud, humble, and ironic.

It’s time to go back to the drawing board and get “the mighty island” the brand support it deserves.

Once you start knolling, you can’t stop.

We used to be religious followers of the 70 Mile Coastal Yard Sale, held each September along the southeastern shore of Prince Edward Island. Among other things the sale allowed us to gain insight into the Christmas gifts of the previous year that didn’t “take”–the bread makers, exercise devices, etc. that had been gathering dust long enough to get put out for sale. Sometimes you’d see the same items available for sale the next year further down the road, as they gradually got repurposed through the community.

I spotted this Mikinduri Children of Hope Yard Sale notice this morning and noticed they include a list of items that are simply unsaleable enough to be useless for their fundraising purposes: baby equipment, tires, old computers, TVs (except flat screens) and encyclopedia sets.

On our walk the other night, passing by 35 Prince Street, I told Oliver about the history of Eddie’s Lunch, Viva’s, Marina Grill and Kozy Korner, which have occupied the corner storefront, in succession, over the last 20 years.

Here’s Eddie’s Lunch in 1999:

And here’s Kozy Korner, now closed and to be replaced, we are told, with yet another restaurant:

Update in November 2017: the store at 35 Prince Street is again being renovated–from the looks of things it’s a “down to the lathe” renovation inside. A new covering on the old sign has gone up. The new place hasn’t opened yet, and the sign’s already peeling, which doesn’t bode well; perhaps it’s only temporary.

Update in December 2017: the temporary, peeling sign that was pasted over the old sign, has been replaced with a purpose-built sign. There’s a lot of activity inside this week, and the convenience store shelves are stocked with M&Ms, so I suspect that the re-opening is imminent.

Update in April 2019: The Eat & Enjoy Restaurant opened in January 2018 and lasted about 9 months before it, at its companion convenience store, closed. We ate there once, and had a nice hot pot meal.

On April 25, 2019 a new place, Saigon Bistro, opened in its place:

As of July 27, 2020, Saigon Bistro’s signage was replaced with Sai Gon Cuisine, and a repainted-in-green building. For the first time since the Eddie’s Lunch days the main sign is now mounted flush on the building rather than on the hanging signpost:

Update October 30, 2026: Sai Gon Cuisine operated, off and on, for 6 years. Tonight Taco Libre, serving Mexican street food opened in its place. While the building has been repainted on the outside, the interior decor harkens back to the Eat & Enjoy days, complete with the hot pot elements in the tables.

Semantic Web Systems resources, by Amy Guy, is a remarkably clear-worded introduction to triples, ontologies, and related topics. If, like me, things like RDF have always existed in the “yah, okay, I sort of understand all that enough to get on” space of your brain, this is a good primer. Especially if you’re trying to grok Solid (in the introduction for which I found the pointer to it).

Triples are almost-human-readable statements, made up of [subject, predicate, object]. When you put lots of triples together and there is overlap in subjects and objects, they form a graph; subjects and objects are nodes (circles), and predicates are arcs (lines).

Sarah put a letter S on the night train from Borden to Charlottetown, and it was hanging outside our front door when we opened it late last night, thanks to the kindness of a Handpie Company customer who’d been headed our way.

This was the key to unlock the secrets of taking Pie Man № 1 and adding struts (wings? arms?) to allow him to slot into Sarah’s menu letterboard.

Using my calipers, I measured the depth of the strut and found it to be 3.45 mm deep; earlier Sarah had told me that the spacing between the slots on her letterboard are spaced at 1/4 inches. So I altered the original model of Pie Man in Tinkercad and added two 3.45 mm struts, spaced 1/4 inches apart:

I loaded this new model into Cura, exported it as a G-code file, and set it printing on the Monoprice Select Mini. To ensure that it adhered to the bed, I told Cura to give it a wide “brim,” which is a single layer surrounding and loosely coupled to the model.

When Pie Man № 2 emerged, it was immediately apparent there was a problem: because the “face” was now printing face down on the bed, it was gnarled and ugly in a most unappealing way. I was able to clean it up somewhat by slicing off the remnants of the brim with a knife, but it still wasn’t Handpie Company-worthy:

For Pie Man № 3, I decided to try to solve this problem by flipping him over in Tinkercad, so that the face would be face up on printing:

To allow this to print without collapsing in on itself, in Cura I selected the “enable support” option to print support material around the struts that I could later strip away; here’s what Pie Man looked like in Cura just before I output the G-code:

Pie Man № 3 also took 35 minutes to print, and when he emerged from the digital womb, he was a much more impressive sight:

Curiously, I did something wrong when I flipped the model in Tinkercad, so only a single one of the “joiners” that keep Pie Man’s hair attached to his face ended up printing (you can see this on the left side). This turns out to have been a fortuitous mistake, as it turns out to be just strong enough with a single connection, and the result is more visually pleasing.

I’ll get Pie Man № 3 up to Sarah for field testing as soon as possible (Are you headed to Borden this weekend? Do you have space for a small, friendly Pie Man in your car? Please let me know).

If it looks like he’ll work out, I’ll print a whole family. Stay tuned.

The water at Confederation Landing Park was as smooth as glass last night, so photos we took across the marina look remarkably realistic when turned upside down.