I was taking the bus by Enterprise car rental on University Avenue a few weeks ago when I spotted a Fiat 500 in the lot. When I got back downtown I called them up to see if it was available, but it was committed; they did, however, promise to give me a call when one became available, and a week later, this past Friday, they did, indeed, give me a call in the early afternoon.

I immediately hopped on the bus north and about 45 minutes later I was bopping around town.  I called up [[Catherine]] and arranged to head to the shore and soon thereafter we were motoring north toward Stanhope for an afternoon of trendy European fun.

We’d rented the long station wagony version of the Fiat 500 last year for a trip to Maine, the Fiat 500 L, and it was a nice car. But the tiny original model is a completely different beast: it’s the smallest car I’ve ever drive (save for a test drive of a Smart Car), and yet inside it was roomy (at least for 2 people) and it drove like a nimble spitfire.

My favourite part of the car’s design is its centre console instrument cluster, which is wonder of compact design:

Packed in there are the speedometer (outside ring), tachometer (inside ring), odometer, time, temperature, digital speedometer, fuel level and engine temperature, the gear the engine’s in (P for Park on this display) and – the “Time B” line – a line of text that can be toggled among things like the current trip’s time and the current track playing on the radio.

I much prefer this to the ubiquitous touchscreen displays mid-console that every rental car I’ve driven in the past few years has been afflicted with.

We had the car for the weekend, so after Catherine and I motored out to the beach and back on Friday, [[Oliver]] and I went up to Souris and back on Saturday: it proved a perfect car for a father, son & dog trip.

I drove 315 km in total, and put about $25 of gas into the car on the way back to Enterprise, meaning that the gas mileage was about 35 MPG or 6.67 litres/100 km.

It’s on my list of Things to See and Do on PEI, but it bears additional highlighting: the newly-opened Shore Market in Stanhope, next to Richard’s Seafood, is that kind of place you wish were just up the street from your cottage at the beach (assuming you have a cottage at the beach, which we don’t, but regardless).

They sell Receiver Coffee (both beans and to-go; the iced coffee is fantastic), milk, fruit and vegetables, breadworks bread, meat, beach supplies, band-aids, and the kinds of sundries¹ that you need when you’re out of the city. And capers: big jars of good-looking capers, for $8.35.

They also sell beer and wine, through an anachronistic “you can buy beer and wine if you show a food receipt from Richard’s next door” scheme that’s not their fault (someday PEI will fully recover from temperance, won’t it?).

It’s all wrapped up in a tiny, perfect, whitewashed wharf-shack.

So you can get head out to the shore, have your lobster burger and fries at Richard’s, then grab and iced coffee next door before you head out for more adventures.

A couple of times a year I get an email from faraway friends or family that’s some variation of “my buddy Gregor is coming to PEI in a few weeks: what should he be sure to see and do?”

I’ve just had another one, and rather than responding privately, I’ll respond here so that others in the same pickle have a place to look (or a place to point).

The things listed below are limited selection that reflect my own particular tastes rather than being any attempt at being broad and universal (of particular note: I’ve left out a couple of places that I don’t want tourists gumming up).

These are the places I take people when they visit, the ones that are not “generic anywhere.”

Where to Eat

Charlottetown

• Thai Pad Food Truck – excellent Thai food beside a brew pub
• Himalayan Curry – tasty Indian food
• Dave’s Lobster – modern lobster rolls
• Phở Hưng – Vietnamese food served by the nicest people on the Island
• Mr. Sushi – our go-to sushi place
• Water-Prince Corner Shop – the best fish & chips
• Sirenella – house-made pasta; the aglio e olio is excellent

Outside of Charlottetown

• The Pearl – quite possibly the best place to eat on the Island; dear, but worth it
• Landmark Café – another contender for “the best place”
• PEI Preserve Company – unsweetened iced tea; raspberry pie
• Richard’s Fresh Seafood – fresh fish, stone’s throw from the beach in Stanhope; tell the National Park attendant “we’re going to Richard’s” and you won’t have to pay park fee
• The Fifth Ingredient – a French bakery in the (relative) wilderness; excellent bread, but also pizza and sandwiches and smoothies of note
• Sheltered Harbour Café – never had a bad meal here; my go-to place in Souris
• Blue Mussel Café – fresh fish; no fries; stellar location; friendly staff

Where to Drink Coffee

Charlottetown

• Casa Mia Café – my go-to breakfast place
• Receiver Coffee – house-roasted coffee brewed with love and wit

Outside of Charlottetown

• Samuels Coffee House – unexpected gem in Summerside; even after the “good coffee… in Summerside?” surprise wears off, the coffee is still good, the space is nice and the folks are friendly
• Shore Market – ice coffee & capers; near the beach; amazing; beside Richard’s in Stanhope (see above)
• Island Chocolates – Factory Coffee = coffee + chocolate; in Victoria-by-the-Sea near the Landmark (see above)

Where to Beach

• Blooming Point – a spectacular semi-officially-recognized beach with no facilities other than parking
• Stanhope – inside PEI National Park; most remarkable for easy access to good food and coffee (see above)
• Argyle Shore Provincial Park – a nice place to picnic; water is shallow and calm and warm
• Canoe Cove Beach – another warm, shallow south-shore beach
• Sally’s Beach – not north shore, not south shore; not near anything; one of my favourites
• Tea Hill Park – an unremarkable beach with lots of mosquitos; but it’s very close to Charlottetown

What to See and Do

Charlottetown

• City Cinema – an “art house” cinema in downtown Charlottetown. Tiny, friendly and air conditioned with an eclectic program.
• Confederation Centre Art Gallery – austere, air conditioned, quiet space right downtown; a good place to get away from the crazy tourism-drenched streets on busy days

Outside of Charlottetown

• Yankee Hill Pioneer Cemetery – the most beautiful cemetery you will ever visit
• MacAusland’s Woollen Mills – worth the drive up west: the most interesting factory you’ll ever visit; you will leave having purchased a blank, I promise
• McKenna Road – one of the Island’s “heritage roads”; best avoided after a rain; drive along a clay road under a canopy of trees; spectacular
• Brackley Drive-in Theatre – the Island’s only drive-in; in the woods (so bring repellent) near the shore; we go at least once a summer
• Gardens of Hope – walking trails through forest and gardens along the river; beside the PEI Preseve Company (see above); excellent if you need a calm oasis
• Dunes Studio Gallery – most interesting for the architecture and the views; be sure to visit the gardens behind
• Trailside Café and Inn – it’s a café and an inn, yes, but most notably it’s a tiny perfect music venue; you will not be disappointed if you see a show here (and do go early and have supper before; you’ll get a good seat and a good meal)
• Kingfisher Outdoors – kayaking for non-kayakers: they have the kayaks, paddles and life-jackets, they drive you up the Morell River and put you in, you lazily drift/paddle down-river for two hours
• PEI National Park at Greenwich – hiking for non-hikers: the walk from the parking lot, through the woods, over the boardwalk through the marsh and out on to beach will take you breath away; it’s my favourite walk on the Island
• Belfast Mini Mills – most interesting to the fibre-loving tourist, but I love the simple pluck of the enterprise

A couple of years ago I bought canister of Red Rocket-brand breakfast tea at Sobey’s. I knew nothing about the brand, or the tea; I was 100% driven by the sharp-looking aluminum canister and its potential for becoming a box for some yet-to-be-determined electronics project.

The tea finally got finished up earlier this year – we’re not big breakfast tea drinkers, as it turns out – and I brought the box to the office.

Today was the day that the yet-to-be-determined project got determined: I’m putting together another electricity and water meter reader for a new location, and I needed something to hold the Raspberry Pi and the breakout board that go together to make it all happen.

And so, behold the Red Rocket Pi:

I’ve been using hard disk drives for more than 30 years. It was only today, during preparation of a load of e-waste that included an old iMac, that I opened one up and looked inside it for the first time. It’s a Maxtor, from 2002.

Thanks to Laura Chapin, who mentioned it on Facebook, [[Oliver]] and I headed to Cape Traverse for lunch at The Fifth Ingredient this at.

Part of what might be called the “Island Good Bread Explosion,” a miraculous happenstance of bakeries that’s transformed the quality of bread available on this Island, this French-style bakery offers all manner of bread, pastry, pizza and sandwiches.

Oliver and I each had a tomato and cheese sandwich on a croissant, and it was top-flight, especially when eaten in their front yard, overlooking the beach.

In the summer – Father’s Day to Labour Day – they’re open Monday to Wednesday from 3:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. and Thursday to Sunday from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., meaning that it’s possible to make a Sunday afternoon of it: drive out to Cape Traverse, pick up some sandwiches, head to the beach, and perhaps pick up some pizza on the way home. Just look up the tide to find the best Sunday for your particular taste in beach.

What was I thinking updating my avatar to one that made me look like a foreboding, drunken, bruised, giant-nosed weirdo?

I have recanted, and removed most traces thereof, replacing it with a variation of the same photo by Alper Çuğun from 2009 that I sliced and diced two years ago.

Same image. Just revealing more of myself.

Maybe that’s a better metaphor than “here, let me stick my nose in your face,” no?

I spoke to the Queen’s Printers Association of Canada this week and wrote a little bit about my experience and included the slides I used.

The Queen’s Printers Association of Canada is meeting in Charlottetown this week, and Mike Fagan, Queen’s Printer for Prince Edward Island, who is hosting the meeting, asked me to be the keynote speaker, speaking to the conference theme of “Open Government – Open Information.”

And so on Monday morning I joined Queen’s Printers from most of Canada’s provinces, along with their federal counterpart, for an hour long session I called “A Cook’s Tour of Open Data from a User’s Perspective.”

My focus was not on policy and portals – often the terrain when open data is on the agenda – but, rather, on real world examples of how I’ve consumed, created and written about open data over the last decade.

Right off the bat I used the example of the association’s own agenda, distributed to attendees as a PDF file with, I suggested, the information “imprisoned” inside it – unable to be used, for example, in a desktop or mobile calendar app, unable to have alarms attached to it, unable to provide driving directions. I showed how with some cutting-and-pasting, the calendar could be freed from its PDF prison and recreated as an open iCalendar file that could show up on my phone, my tablet, my desktop, or any other device or service that could speak iCalendar.

I then proceeded to tell a series of open data “war stories,” each designed to illustrate an “open data principle,” an arbitrary (rather than universal) list that dervices simply from my own experiences. The projects I discussed were:

• Electricity load and generation data for Prince Edward Island
  • New Brunswick System Operator open(ish) data
  • CBC Spark interview about my “turn energy flow into music” project
  • Archiving and visualizing electricity load and generation data
  • Mobile app displaying PEI energy load and generation in real time
  • The PEI Energy Thingy (a prototype of a device to provide in-home feedback)
• Making a Charlottetown Building Permits Map
  • KML file (load into Google Earth) of all building permits from 2007 to 2011
  • Heat map in CartoDB showing concentration of building permits, 2007 to 2011
• Making the Charlottetown Zoning and Development Bylaw easier to read
• WhatsMyLot.com
  • Creating the map layer of township lots
  • How many Samuel Holland Township Lots does the Confederation Trail pass through?
• Creating an interactive public transit map for the City of Charlottetown
  • WAP transit schedule for mobile phones
  • Charlottetown Bus Schedule by Telephone
  • The End of The Bus
• Supreme Court Reasons for Judgment (archived)
• OpenCorporations.org

The 7 “open data principles” that emerged from these projects, which I discussed in more detail in light of these examples, were:

1. You have no idea (at all) what open data might be used for.
2. PDFs are where data goes to die.
3. Sometimes “open” can simply mean following rules of design.
4. Open data is a conversation.
5. Sometimes your users will create open data for you.
6. “Opening” changes the audience.
7. “Opening”allows for new connections.

There was a good question-and-answer session after the presentation with some of the audience relating their own “war stories,” and we were able to pick up the conversation over lunch and delve into some additional areas.

It was clear that Queen’s Printers, as a group, are already well-versed in this area, and keen to learn more about how they can leverage the data and information they oversee the distribution of to increase citizen engagement through greater openness. I left the meeting enthusiastic that we’ll see great development in this area across Canada in the months and years to come.

In addition to the opportunity to speak with Queen’s Printers, the meeting also afforded me the opportunity to meet Krista Grant, Assistant Deputy Minister for Communications PEI, newly housed in Executive Council Office. Krista demonstrated a great understanding of the benefits of an open data philosophy, and indicated that there’s a strong will within government to move in this direction. Another reason for optimism.

Here are the slides I presented to Queen’s Printers as a PDF.

[[Oliver]] and I were having coffee this afternoon and I took this photo just to see how it would look if I held it up to my face:

Cropped into a square and filtered through Instagram, the photo ended up like this:

And, as I hadn’t updated my personal avatar since 2013, I decided to try it on for size:

I’m not entirely sold on it. Which is, I think, a good reason to leave it in place and see if it grows on me (and, I suppose, on y’all).