Thinking of my newspaper days led me to a column by Ed Arnold, who was Editor at the Examiner during my time there. Back in 2009, Ed wrote about Terry Keating, who was the foreman in the composing room; Terry was the man who hired me. Ed wrote:

He’s not quite 100 yet, a mere 43 years away, but it was 40 years ago last week that Terry Keating started working at The Examiner.

He worked his way from the mailroom to composing room foreman during those years.

That’s more than 14,600 days ago.

Through those years he has seen amazing changes — from hot lead to cold type, ticker tape to no tape, typewriters to word processors.

When he began there were no computers, now it’s a world of computers.

He has been through such publishers as Bill Garner, Bruce Rudd and Darren Murphy (we have both worked here longer than Darren Murphy has been alive!) and remembers his fellow tradesmen when he started such as Ken Underhill, Bill McKelvey, Dan Cannon, Len Appleton, John Braine, Gerry Armstrong, Vince Donohue, John Wickert, Bob Noble.

TK jokes that his hair was jet black when he arrived and solid white today.

Working in a daily newspaper environment is like no other job.

No day is the same and none will ever be routine. While some people watch the clock hoping its hands move faster, we watch the clock begging for more time because our hands can’t move any faster. Congratulations to TK.

Those people that Ed lists, Terry’s “fellow tradesmen,” were almost all working in the composing room when I was there. I heard hundreds of stories from and about each of them over the short two years I worked at the paper. Their influence on my personal and professional life continues to this day.

As it happens, Terry retired last month after 47 years on the job; the Examiner had that story as well:

“It was never dull. It was exciting. It was stressful at times, but you were never bored,” he said.

Back then, more than 100 men and women - journalists, ad salespeople, circulation staff, compositors and press operators - were responsible for putting out each daily edition. They used typewriters and hot wax and blades to cut and paste, literally, stories and advertisements, before computers revolutionized production in the 1980s, 1990s and beyond.

It’s hard to put into words just how much the the digital era changed everything, Keating said, calling computers the move that “changed the whole ballgame.” Each leap forward allowed the paper’s succesion of owners to put out the same paper with far fewer people.

“It’s just incredible,” he said, pondering the technological evolution. “Where will it end up?”

Terry was a victim–or perhaps beneficiary?–of those technological changes. After spending most of his career in the composing room, he became a real estate account manager once production was consolidated elsewhere.

This blog and its design are a constant work in progress.

For the last couple of years it’s been peachy to read on mobile devices like phones and tablets; indeed it’s almost a better reading experience.

But that bit down there at the end of posts with all the metadata, that’s never been very nice looking:

So I took a few moments this afternoon and cleaned it up:

I adjusted the line breaks, made the category links bigger (and so easier tap targets, in mobile parlance), and, my favourite change, switched the rendering of “am” and “pm” to “a.m.” and “p.m.”

That last change is one the importance of which was ingrained in me on the first day of my apprenticeship as a printer in the composing room at the Peterborough Examiner: John Braine, longtime journeyman and the man I got sat down beside that first day, in front of a green screen terminal, saw me type “pm” and immediately schooled me in the proper composition thereof. Thank you, John.

Pablo Martínez, of NRMAL, on starting your own festival:

You do have a calm, almost zen demeanor. Do you maintain this calm during the festival or do you ever melt down?

No, not during the festival. For example during the festival, I don’t use a radio. Normally people who are producing festivals, they are using a radio and what I do is I just walk around the festival and try to solve problems on my own and try to enjoy all the bands I can. I try to keep it chill. Normally it works.

Does this tie in with your decision not to use social media?

Well, I remember, early on, trying to use a radio, I couldn’t focus on important things. I was just hearing whatever was happening around other areas of the festival. So I decided not to use the radio and just focus on the things I could solve with my own hands. Maybe it’s a thing about focus.

From time to time I want to include video clips in my blog posts, but I end up not doing this very often because I forget the steps for doing it.

So I’m noting them here so I can refer back to them later.

First, I capture the video somehow. Often I do this with Voila, a screen-recording app for the Mac (since renamed Capto).

Voila has a basic video-trimmer built into it, so I trim the video down to that part I want to include.

The result is a H.264-format video file with a .mov extension.

Next, I use VLC to convert this to a Webm-format video (File > Convert / Stream and then select “Video - VP80 + Vorbus (Webm)” as the profile).

When that conversion is done, I upload both the H.264 and Webm files to Amazon S3, and make sure they’re world-readable, and that the MIME type on the Webm file is set to video/webm (or else more recent versions of Firefox will refuse to play them).

It seems that VLC doesn’t properly leave the resulting Webm file with a duration that can be read by browsers; this can be fixed with ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i original-file.webm -c copy -fflags +genpts /tmp/fixed.webm
rm original-file.webm
mv /tmp/fixed.webm original-file.webm

Finally, I reference them both from my blog post:

<p>
  <video controls="" style="width: 100%; max-width: 100%; height: auto;">
     <source src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.ruk.ca/abstract-clip.mov" type="video/mp4; codecs=avc1.42E01E,adpcm_ima_qt)" />
     <source src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.ruk.ca/abstract-clip.webm" type="video/webm; codecs=vp8,vorbis" />
  </video>
</p>

And that’s it. Between the H.264 and the Webm, the video will play in most modern web browsers.

And I save myself the indignity of using YouTube or Vimeo.

The first episode of the documentary Abstract: The Art of Design (see also here) profiles Christoph Niemann.

Toward the end of the episode, Niemann discusses the difference between being a creator and being an editor of his creations:

I need to be in control and I need to have a very clear sense of where I’m going and why something’s working and not working. On the other hand, I’ve also realized that being more free-spirited is necessary. I’ve found that I need to develop these two personas separately. Be a much more ruthless editor, and be a much more careless artist. This I find physically exhausting, but there’s good stuff happening there.

As a printer, the time I’ve found myself the most free-spirited was the summer I spent printing in Berlin. Every Tuesday I showed up at the print shop with nothing but a day reserved to print, and I dove right in, with no distractions and the only limit that I had to be done by the end of the day. The work I did that summer is the work I’m most proud of, and it’s been a challenge to recapture that spirit in the years since.

This is not to say that my printing life here in Charlottetown is a strict (ruthless) regime: it’s not a business, it’s an avocation. But because it’s co-located with my business, it tends to inherit the underlying psychology of the business, and so even setting aside time for printing seems reckless and indulgent. I could be using that time to fix code!

But Niemann’s elegy was enough, at least for today, to get me over this.

And so I spent a part of the day printing a grid of yellow squares.

There’s more method to my madness than the yellow squares convey–this will become evident in later posts–but this is an idea I dreamed up on the spur of the moment, an idea that I couldn’t have planned for it required some typographical improvisation that can only happen at the bench.

It was a lovely feeling.

Many, many years ago when we were both wearing different hats, Bryson Guptill and I went on a “prospecting” trip to Toronto on behalf of the Government of Prince Edward Island. I was along as a sort of “technical advisor” and Bryson was leading the charge. It was a bizarre trip the likes of which I was never asked to go on again. And as far as I know it bore no fruit for the province.

But it did introduce me to Bryson, and we’ve maintained an acquaintance in the years since.

These days Bryson’s passion is hiking, and the most recent manifestation of this was a 34-day walk of the Camino Francés from St. Jean Pied de Port, France to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. He turned the tale of the walk into a book, Camino Francés: A Practical Guide to Walking the Pilgrim’s Path from France to Spain, and asked for my help in creating a companion web-map for the book.

Bryson’s been an avid OpenStreetMap contributor for the last 8 years, and so he had the forethought to drop GPS breadcrumbs as he was walking, and the technical savvy to get these into a Google Map on his return. He wanted my help to create a purpose-built map, using OpenStreetMap rather than Google Maps, and so that’s what I built.

The first thing Bryson needed to do was to create a simplified route: he’d been dropping breadcrumbs with enough frequency that the resulting GIS data was much too detailed for our purposes. So he retraced the route by hand, and created a much more reasonably-sized layer.

I exported this from Google Maps into a KML file, and then transformed the KML into a GeoJSON file using geojson.io. I split the route–a line–from the overnight stops along the route–points–into two separate GeoJSON files, cleaned up the order of the waypoints, and added some metadata to them (the name of the lodging, the distance traveled that day, etc.).

With the data in-hand (camino-frances-route.geojson and camino-frances-waypoints.geojson) I created a web app, using the excellent Leaflet JavaScript library, the Awesome Number Markers plugin, along with jQuery and jQuery Mobile. For the base map and hill-shading layers, I used tiles from the OpenStreetMap-derived Hike & Bike Map.

You can see the result at caminofrances.info and you can learn more about Bryson’s walk at the Charlottetown launch of the book, Tuesday, February 21, 2017 at 7:00 p.m. at Confederation Centre Public Library. I’ll be there too if you’d like to chat about the map.

I noticed last night while stacking used egg carton, that they are labelled “1/2 DOZ.” on either end, which gives one tacit permission to rip them in half and purchase only 6. I’d seen people do this before, but always assumed it was a risky renegade move.

Apparently it’s expected.

The best time to do the weekly grocery shopping, in my experience, is on Saturday night: our local Sobeys is all-but-deserted, but still well-stocked, there’s The Eric MacEwen Show to listen to on the radio on the drive home, and an interesting collection of Charlottetown luminaries have also figured out the Saturday-night-shop-secret, and so there are always people to keep me entertained (Fred Hyndman shops: who knew!).

Because Sobeys is deserted, I usually don’t have a problem finding a free cashier, and while there are some experienced and hyper-efficient staff working Saturday nights, it seems to attract the silent rather than the voluble, so our conversations at the cash are seldom any more than “Do you have an Air Miles card?”

Last night, though, a young man named Jonathan was at the cash. When he asked me “so, what are you up to tonight?”, I gave him a dismissive small-talk answer, assuming that was what he expected.

Except he didn’t: somehow we ended up chatting about Netflix while he was ringing me in, and what we were watching on Netflix. I told him I’d just finished Black Mirror (which he misheard as Black Mayor, and claimed no knowledge of), and he told me about the new documentary series Abstract.

And so this morning over waffles that’s what I watched.

And it’s a great series: an imaginative look at the imagination and the art of design and creation. I’m so glad he recommended it to me.

Jonathan, I think, is what’s standing between us and robotic-overlord cashiers: a genuinely social and curious person who humanizes a job that so often seems anything but.

Watch for him on Saturday nights when you’re doing your shop. And say hi to Fred for me.

After 45 days of making up crossword puzzles for Oliver as he’s going to bed, tonight we tried our hand at the New York Times mini-crossword together.

Oliver solved 7 of the 10 clues on his own, including MONET, which he came to well before I did.

(My favorite crossword moment so far was when Oliver filled in ANTEATER when my design called for ANTELOPE; both fit the space and the clue).