[[Catherine]] and I arrived on Prince Edward Island in the spring of 1993; our first Christmas Eve here was that December.

We opted not to travel back to family in Ontario for the holidays; thus left to our own devices, we were childless, had no family and few friends here, and were only in the very early stages of acclimation to the Island way of life.

I imagined that we could spend Christmas Eve having a nice meal out followed by a movie.

What I didn’t factor in is that Prince Edward Island shuts down completely about 4:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve, and so not only could we not go to the movies, but there was not a single restaurant open for as far as the eye could see.

And, of course, we’d nothing in the pantry.

What were we thinking?

(I should add here that all references to “we” should more honestly be attributed to “me,” as Catherine’s head is screwed on much more tightly than mine, and it’s likely as not that our errors in this regard were entirely due to me.)

What were we to do?

Improvising, we headed down the street to the CP Hotel (now the Delta) and booked ourselves a room for the night.

It turns out that even the hotel’s restaurants had the night off, so all thoughts of room service were out and we were left to forage supper from the vending machines. Fortunately we had plenty of pocket change.

We spent Christmas Eve eating potato chips and chocolate bars and watching cable TV – a novelty for us at the time, as we only had rabbit ears in our apartment.

These days we’re much farther along the road to Island acclimation — halfway, perhaps? – and we know full-well that we need to not only arrange for all meals well in advance of the Island-wide shutdown, but that we also need to stock up on milk, eggs, coffee and entertaining diversions.

Our pantry is full this year. And we have tickets booked for the 6:20 showing of Star Wars (the last show of the night). We have dog food.

We’re set.

But we’ll always hold that first Christmas on the Island dear.

For future reference, mostly my own.

I was given a disk with almost 100 PDF files containing form data that I wanted to be able to analyze. Every one of the PDFs had an “owner password” assigned – a password I wasn’t given – that prevented copy-and-paste and various other automated things I might wish to do to the files.

I hasten to add that I have permission to  use the PDF files, they were given to me specifically for this purpose, and the presence of the password is an inconvenient bureaucratic hurdle; I’m not trying to “crack” anything I’m not supposed to have access to.

To work around this, I did the following:

1. Found the password using pdfcrack. The password turned out to be a common dictionary word, so using a word list like those found here allowed me to find the password in a few seconds.
2. Removed the password from the PDF files using qpdf along with this helpful shell script.
3. Using pdftk I extracted the form data from the files like this:

for file in *.pdf; do
    set -e
    echo "Dumping $file"
    pdftk "$file" dump_data_fields_utf8 > "text/$file.txt"
done

What I ended up with was a folder filled with text files with the data that had been entered into each of the PDF files. Now I can load that up into a spreadsheet or database for analysis.

The Premier tweeted his Seafood Pie recipe. I turned it into open data.

Fortunately, the Premier received this in the helpful spirit in which it was offered:

Go forth and make pie!

While we’re talking about Tryon and roads, I note for the record that the Tryon highway realignment plays in role in how I came to acquire my Golding Jobber № 8 printing press.

The former owners of the press were Bill and Gertie Campbell of Campbell’s Printing. The press was housed in their print shop, out in back of their house in Tryon, a house and shop that were scheduled for demolition because the Branch Road and the Tryon Mill Road were to be rejigged as part of the larger process.

You can see the former location of their print shop in the Google Satellite view below, with the current, up to date, Google Maps road map overlaid. If you drive through Tryon today you’ll notice that neither house nor shop is there any longer.

Here’s a photo I took on the day the press started its trip to town, showing the shop that’s no longer there, with Bill in the background (you can read the whole story here):

I’ve been spending time this fall volunteering with Bryson Guptill and his team at Island Trails to improve the representation of hiking trails on Prince Edward Island in OpenStreetMap (here’s a list of relations I’ve been working on, and you can see the results of my labours in maps like this one of the Bonshaw Trails).  

As part of this work I sought an updated map of the Confederation Trail that’s more up to date than the 2010 version on the province’s website. My man in the Department of Transportation noted, when he was preparing this for me, that OpenStreetMap didn’t include the realignment of the Tryon section of the Trans Canada Highway that was constructed over the last couple of years, and he helpfully sent along a GIS file of the change. Reasoning that this will eventually make its way to the National Road Network, which is licensed for incorporation into OpenStreetMap, I incorporated the changes into the highway.

Here’s a GIF animation showing the changes, which I’ve found helpful in visualizing what’s happened there:

Longtime readers will recall that, for as long as either of us can remember, [[Oliver]] and I have been going to the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings.

I first wrote about this back in 2005, when Oliver was 5 years old; I know, from evidence like this TV commercial from 2001, that we’ve been going for longer than that – on and off for 14 years and, I suspect, almost every Saturday for more than a decade.

There’s this CBC Land & Sea documentary, to add to the pile of evidence; around 19:05 in, you’ll find Oliver and I, sitting in the same place we sit every week, enjoying our smoked salmon bagels:

Of course these days we have [[Ethan]] in tow, so our footprint is a little wider and more complicated to maneuver, as you can see in this photo taken this summer by my friend Julie:

While we’ve varied our routine over the years, the inviolable stop on our weekly schedule is at the Medallion Smoked Salmon booth. For years it was Kim Dormaar behind the counter; for the last couple of years it’s been Ross Munro, who acquired the business from Kim. Our stop is inviolable as is our bagel order, which always takes new staff some time to commit to memory: two bagels, both with no onions, one with no lemon. Oliver doesn’t like lemon.

In the early days of our stop for smoked salmon, Oliver wasn’t tall enough to see over the counter, so I would, with the help and permission of Garth Taylor from the Taylor’s Taters booth next door, hop up on their potato shelf so he could see what was going on. Medallion is moving its booth after Christmas – across the market to the corner occupied by Avondale Meadows Farm, which it’s switching spots with – and so I thought it a good idea to snap a photo of Oliver at the old place one last time:

And although we’ll continue to buy our carrots and potatoes from Garth and Peggy, it seemed like a good day to get a picture of them and Oliver together too:

‘

For the last several months I’ve been working on printing a set of Prince Edward Island Terms of Union cards on my letterpress.

There are 18 cards in the set, each one summarizing a point in the 1873 agreement that saw PEI joining Canadian Confederation.

I’m now selling a limited quantity of the sets, each inside a custom-printed envelope, in my Etsy shop for $20 a set.

If you’d rather purchase for local pickup, I’m happy to arrange this directly; just drop me a line.

I’ve been using Bitly.com as a URL-shortening service for many years, mostly via IFTTT in a recipe that automatically tweets my blog posts here and post links to them on Facebook.

I took advantage of Bitly’s ability to configure a custom URL (they call it a “branded short domain”) to have my short links rendered under the l.ruk.ca subdomain rather than under bit.ly, something I did to allow me to repatriate the links under a system of my own control if something ever went wrong on Bitly’s end.

Recently I started to notice that my Bitly-hosted short links were showing up in a Google Search for site:ruk.ca and that made me uncomfortable, as, even though I’d been linking to whatever the destination of the link was at some time, I didn’t want the world, via Google, to think that the destinations were sites under my control.

I might post a link somewhere to the Republican Party, for example, and Bitly might give me a short URL like http://l.ruk.ca/1Y5vFet and then Google might index that and display it in search results. 

That felt creepy.

And so it was time to repatriate.

I found, to my surprise, that Bitly makes no provision, via its website, for exporting all the links I’ve shortened with it – I expected, but, alas, did not find a “export all my data” feature on bitly.com.

Fortunately Bitly does have an API that allowed me to do that export myself with a little coding.

I tracked down a handy Python script, py-bitly-exporter, to do the heavy lifting. I had to tweak the code a little to slow the export down, as I kept bumping into Bitly’s rate limit. To do this I inserted this in the head of the script:

from time import sleep

and this in the body of the script, inside the “while offset <= result_count:” loop:

sleep(0.3)

That slowed things down enough that I could export the 17,000+ links without hitting the limit.

The result was a file called links.csv that contained all my Bitly links, in comma-delimited form, like this:

http://l.ruk.ca/1OmlkZ7,"",http://ruk.ca/content/terms-union
http://l.ruk.ca/1QQHiWz,"",http://ruk.ca/content/five-islands
http://l.ruk.ca/1MQgW5h,"",http://ruk.ca/content/reinvented-vinyl

Once I had the links exported, I created a new Drupal site, installed the ShURLy module, and imported my exported data into the Drupal table shurly, putting in dummy values for fields like created and last_used, ending up with a table like this:

With that done and everything working as it should, I simply changed the DNS for the domain l.ruk.ca to point to my new Drupal site and, when I’m logged in, I can create new short URLs via a bookmarklet in my browser toolbar:

I’m missing all the Bitly razzmatazz with the migration — all the graphs and charts and other reports — but I never used the information anyway. The only thing I miss now is that Bitly support is burned into products like IFTTT and TweetDeck and these services don’t support roll-your-own link shorteners; so I’ll need to leave them to their own devices to shorten URLs as they like. At least the shortened URLs will no longer live under my domain.

To complete the process I added all manner of “no Google, not index this site nor the links on it” verbiage to the repatriated l.ruk.ca site so that, presumably, over time the links in Google’s search results will wither away and die.

Five years ago, on a walk through Old Montreal, I spotted a sign for Musée de l’imprimerie du Québec – the Printing Museum of Quebec. I didn’t have a chance, back then, to investigate what lay behind the sign, but the idea of a future visit was planted in my mind, and a trip back to Montreal this weekend provided the chance.

The museum can be visited by appointment only; fortunately I had some advance notice of our trip, so I emailed a request a week in advance and a tour was arranged for Friday morning at 11:00 a.m., in English. The museum is housed in the building of Lovell Litho, the city’s oldest printing company, which provides the space at no charge; the entrance to the museum is, literally, through the shop floor of the printing plant, dodging around print jobs in mid-creation by the company’s printers.

Tucked into the first floor corner of the print shop is the museum’s collection of equipment: an Intertype machine (a Linotype clone), several flatbed presses, a couple of platen presses, and a newspaper press that used to print Le Devoir, one of the city’s daily newspapers. We were greeted, on arrival, by the collegial and knowledgable Benoît, our guide and, for the next 90 minutes we received an expert tour through printing history over three floors of the building.

We learned about the printing newspapers, and about how the Linotype machine was the technology that allowed the daily newspaper in its current form to be produced, as it accelerated so dramatically the amount of type that could be set in a 24 hours period.

We learned about hand-set type, with a notch on every letter to indicate how each should be aligned with the other, and about how type is locked into forms for printing.

We visited the small metal-lined room where lead was melted into moulds for the Monotype and Linotype machines, and that the building was vacated while lead was being melted to mitigate the negative effects of breathing the fumes.

We learned about bookbinding and hot foil stamping, and about the limited-run books the museum produces to raise funds and to train a new generation of printers and designers in the trade.

While much of what we learned was familiar ground for me, Benoît’s exposition and enthusiasm meant I learned a lot, and that my mother and Oliver learned even more.  That the museum is housed in a building that has printing both bred in the bone and happening all around – the bookbinding shop sits directly beside the digital printing shop – made everything more real and meaningful. 

We’ve visited a lot of printing museums over the years, from Mainz to Tokyo to Venice to Basel, and while we’re seen grander museums, with more impressive collections of equipment, we’ve never learned as much, in as authentic a setting.

Sadly, we also learned that Lovell Litho, which has occupied the building on 423 Rue Saint Nicolas since 1835, will close next year, and so the museum will lose its patron and its home. We saw evidence of this during our visit, as the equipment was being packed up and readied for storage; indeed Benoît suspected that we might be the last group to tour the museum before it closes in mid-December.

Fortunately there are plans to find both a temporary short-term home and, the museum hopes, a permanent space to tell the story of printing in the Quebec context.  If you’d like to help the museum live to see another day, you can make a donation online.

Five years ago in Montreal, on a trip to celebrate my brother Steve’s wedding, Catherine and Oliver and I had lunch at Cluny ArtBar on 257 rue Prince; I described the place like this:

A little out of the way, but worth the walk. Very nice room, excellent food, pleasant service. Their coffee is fantastic and the tiny Belgian chocolate mousse is a perfect dessert.

Last Friday, my mother, Oliver and I found ourselves in Old Montreal looking for lunch after a tour of the Musée de l’imprimerie du Québec and so, to save ourselves the curse of choice, I suggested we walk over to rue Prince and have lunch there again.

It turns out that in the intervening five years the space had turned over, and was now a restaurant called Le Serpent. In the process, it had become a considerably more sophisticated restaurant and one that likely, in the natural course of affairs, we never would have sought out.

But by the time we knew this we were being seated and menus were in front of us.

And what a meal it was.

My mother and I both had the salmon, served over a bed of potatoes, which was excellent, and Oliver had the risotto nero with cuttlefish, stracchino and fennel; from his eager consumption thereof, I intuit that his was equally good.  The wine list, longer than my arm, was sufficient to lure us into having a glass of wine, sold by the glass for $6. We finished up with coffee and Oliver had the maple pudding, biscuit Breton with olives and compressed apple for dessert.

The service was transcendent: friendly, helpful in unexpected ways, welcoming of [[Ethan]] without question; a model for others to follow.

It was the best meal of the weekend, and, perhaps, the best meal of the year for me. And all the better for being an unlikely discovery in a familiar place.