I am chairing my first PEI Home and School Federation meeting tonight. We have a full agenda, and I’m equal parts daunted and excited.

I stand on the shoulders of giants in this new role: both the presidents who have come before me in the 61 years of PEIHSF history, and those Islanders I’ve looked to as mentors in the ways of Roberts Rules of Order over my time on PEI: people like Leonard Russell, Sterling Stratton, Marion Murphy and Hon. Marion Reid, each of whom has taught me so much about how to conduct meetings efficiently and earnestly, and how paying attention to process, even if it might feel like acting in an Edwardian play, is important.

I will never forget Leonard’s stentorian voice when he was chair of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust putting motions to a vote:

“All those in favour, signify by saying aye,” he would say, and then “contrary-minded, nay.”

So much better than “those in favour, those against.”

And so that will be my clarion call in his honour. Even if it does feel like 1877 all over again.

Wish us luck.

Epilogue: I couldn’t say “signify by saying aye” to save my life and eventually resorted to “those in favour”; and in my drive to keep things moving along smoothly, I ended up speaking about 4x faster than the secretary could reasonably be expected to keep up with. But we had a good turnout and some good discussion and learned some lessons for the next meeting.

Our great benefactors – indeed, the great benefactors of the entire dog guide community – the Lions Clubs across Canada each year organize local Purina Walk for Dog Guides events in their local communities on this weekend in May. There are a lot of Lions Clubs in PEI – 22 in total – and a number of those are in the Charlottetown area. We knew we wanted to participate in a walk – but with which club?

Fortunately Easter interceded and answered the question for us: [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] were out at the Charlottetown Mall the weekend before Easter and were flagged down by a couple from the Winsloe Lions Club who saw Ethan. They were operating a “have your picture taken with the Easter Bunny” booth in the mall, fundraising for Dog Guides, and offered to take Oliver and Ethan’s picture. Catherine struck up a conversation with them, and they invited us to walk in the Winsloe walk.

Which is how the Ethan’s eye view this afternoon looked something like this:

There were 9 dogs in total who turned out. Ethan was the only service dog in the bunch: the rest were just regular everyday dogs doing their part to raise money for Dog Guides Canada.

For Ethan it was a little bit more than a challenge to be in the midst of a bunch of interesting-smelling dogs while “on the clock” for Oliver, and therefore unable to dive in for some dog-on-dog smelling action (we did give him a little break halfway through to make the acquaintance of his fellow dogs).

We all walked out of the Winsloe Lions Club building (just of Rte. #2 in the heart of Winsloe) and up the handy-by Confederation Trail toward Royalty Junction; halfway out we stopped for a rest (and the aforementioned smelling), and then headed back for a hot dog BBQ.

Ethan got a chance to meet some other dogs; we got a chance to meet some other people, and to talk about Ethan and Oliver and Dog Guides Canada.  It was a good way to spend the afternoon, and we came away with an even warmer feeling about the Lions’ involvement in the dog guides program. The club raised over $2000 for Dog Guides Canada through this event.

We’re back out to Winsloe on June 7th to take the club up on its kind invitation to their “Charter Dinner” where we’ll get another chance to talk about Ethan, this time to the whole club.

It’s an open secret that my colleagues at ROW142 are decamping thirty-nine steps down Richmond Street to occupy the space formerly occupied by Ristorante (and before that, Café) Diem. Which brings to an end the ROW142 coffee brand and the coffee bags I’ve been printing since it started.

During this transitionary period, while the coffee’s still roasting and brewing at 142 Richmond Street and the renovations are proceeding down the street at 128 Richmond Street, there was a need for a transitionary coffee bag, and I was left to my own devices to conjure something up.

After some orienteering work on Friday afternoon, this is what I came up with:

I should caution that this isn’t the new name of the coffee shop or the coffee – it’s just an catalyst to tell a story about whatever is to come.

For six months, between October 2013 and April 2014, I walked around Charlottetown with my iPad in my pack running the Moves location-tracking application in the background. It was, and remains, an elegant app, and a great, simple way to track “moving around,” whether by foot, bicycle or otherwise. Alas Moves was acquired by Facebook at the end of April, and I just couldn’t conscience the idea of constantly telling Facebook my whereabouts, so I uninstalled the app and cancelled my account.

Before I did so, however, I requested an archive of my data, and, to the credit of Moves’ developers, what I received in return was an elegantly-structured data dump of everything in formats ranging from iCal to GeoJSON. I took one of the GeoJSON files provided – a record of all of my Moves “activities” over that six months, and loaded into Quantum GIS and the result was a rather accurate (and beautiful) picture of my day to day life in Charlottetown:

Between Moves and Foursquare and Plazes and Twitter and Flickr and the late Google Latitude and all of the other applications I run that leave a geotrace, I have almost a decade’s worth of my geolocation archived away in various formats; one of the items on my Hacker in Residence to-do list is to develop a unified visualization tool for all that data so that I can fly through time and explore my whens and wheres.

While we’re on the subject of newspaper design and newspaper flags, get a load of this version of The Guardian’s flag from 1919:

(Did you know that those boxes to the left and right of the flag are called “ears” in newspaper parlance?)

Here’s a look at “Guardian” up close:

Is that not a dreamy typeface that makes you want to go back and live in 1919?

Thanks to Isaac L. Stewart for the pointer to 1919.

As someone who used to make up the front page of a daily newspaper using bits of paper and wax, I take more than a usual interest in the design of newspaper front pages. And so it was interesting to see the redesigned Ottawa citizen today.

Here’s Saturday’s paper, with the old design, on the left, compared to today’s paper, with the new design, on the right:

The new design certainly owes a lot to the USA Today redesign from 2012, albeit using squares rather than circles and a calmer colour palette. I was always a fan of the old flag – the “Ottawa” and “Citizen” separated by a rendering of the clock tower on Parliament Hill – but I admire the newly-conceived “works as an icon” version too. I’d love to get my hands on a paper copy; I’ll have to wait until it arrives at the public library later this week.

You may recall my “krisis,” written about here last week, wherein I found myself without any capital K in 12 point Bodini, an important gap as I had to set the name Carl F. Klinck as part of the Confederation Country Cabinet project.

I’m happy to report that the krisis has been averted: my typefounder performed yeoman service and quickly cast and shipping sufficient K to keep me going. While he was at it, I had him cast some capital G, some capital B and some quotations marks, the later allowing me to change:

— from Letter to Canadians by Jack Layton (1950-2011), August 20, 2011.

into:

— from ‘Letter to Canadians’ by Jack Layton (1950-2011), August 20, 2011.

The type arrived on Friday, and I sorted it into the type case this morning and in doing so I learned that not all quotation marks are created equal: there are “droopy quotes” and “66/99” quotes.

For my #375 Bodini, the Swamp Press type catalog entry looks like this:

Notice how the quotation marks in the face look like this (and are “droopy”):

Compare this to the Swamp Press type sample for #137 Caslon Old Style:

where the quotation marks provided are of the “66/99” style:

What this means is that there are actually two ways of setting the quotation marks for ‘Letter to Canadians’:

These variants are described in the book Designing Type as follows:

Although modern digital systems now provide a specific key and code for quotation marks, the form of the quote remains the same: a pair of evenly-spaced commas. While some designers prefer a top-heavy orientation (also called ‘droopy quotes’), the normal configuration is ‘66’ and ‘99’.

In my case it will be less “preference” and more “circumstance” that makes me a “droopy quote” man.

I thought it might be useful to print myself a visual aid to help setting quotes droopily, but it turned out that all I need to concern myself with is that the “tails” of the quotation marks point inwards:

I had no idea about any of this until an hour ago: setting type is a neverending learning experience.

It’s 24ºC outside as I write, the warmest it’s been all year. And so it’s a good time to revisit this CBC Mainstreet piece I recorded a decade ago in 2004 about iced tea many years ago with host Matthew Rainnie.

It may be my favourite piece of radio of all those I’ve ever produced, and it’s clear that I was channeling both Ann Thurlow and the late, great Marg Meikle, my radio mentors.

Matthew was, and remains, one of the easiest people to do a back-and-forth on the radio with: he’s inveterately curious and has an appreciation for the quirk. I had so much fun doing the research for this piece.

So pour yourself a tall glass of iced tea, sweetened or not as your preference dictates, and have a listen…

(In September of 2004 I went on to do the piece in radio syndication, deliverying a variation of what I did with Matt with 12 CBC radio hosts across the country in the course of a single afternoon; it was both facsinating and mind-numbing).

Over the last six months I have become intimately aware of what a great organization Dog Guides Canada is. From initial application for an autism assistance dog for [[Oliver]] a year ago, through our in-home interview in the fall, our acceptance in early 2014, our 10 days of training at their facility in Oakville in March and the follow-up they provide now and onward, Dog Guides is an amazing group of dedicated people devoted to a noble cause: provide dog guides to Canadians who need them, at no cost.

It’s hard not to feel a tremendous urge to financially support the efforts of Dog Guides when you’re living the benefits every day, and when, like us, you’ve been embedded in their Oakville facility and have learned about how dogs can assist a broad range of people live better lives.

And so next week we’re launching ourselves into a week of fundraising for Dog Guides Canada.

On Saturday, May 24 at 2:00 p.m. Oliver and I are sponsoring a screening of the film Hachi: A Dog’s Tale at City Cinema in Charlottetown. Tickets are $20 each, $15 for children, and are available online in advance or at the door. All proceeds from ticket sales go directly to Dog Guides Canada. If you are a lover of dogs (or even if you aren’t), Hachi is, dare I say, a “heartwarming tale” about the love between a man and his dog. It’s a tale of both sadness and joy. I really enjoyed seeing it in London, by chance, and I’m happy to bring it to Charlottetown. Please come if you can (there’s even a Facebook Event if you want more information and to share with friends and family).

The next day, Sunday, May 25 starting at 1:00 p.m., Oliver and Catherine and I are walking in the Purina Walk for Dog Guides as “Team Ethan” with the Lions Club of Winsloe. Lions Clubs across Canada are generous benefactors of Dog Guides Canada: the walls of the Oakville facility are recognize millions of dollars of support that have come from Lions over the years. The “Walk for Dog Guides” is a great opportunity for those with dog, dog guides and not, to go for a walk on a crisp spring day to raise funds for the program.  If you’d like to support Team Ethan with a donation right now, please visit the Team Ethan page and click “Make a Donation.”

And if you’ve got a dog in your life you’d like to take for a walk, and you’re willing to help raise a little money, whether you’re in Charlottetown or not, visit the Purina Walk for Dog Guides website and find the location nearest you.

I’d been hearing Frances Squire talk about the Virtual Poetry Summit for several years now, mostly in the vein of “gee it would be nice of the technology in Island schools supported this sort of collaboration,” but I hadn’t really been paying close attention to what the summit was actually all about.

Until this morning when it came time for Oliver to share his poem with students in New Jersey, Iowa, Pennsylvania and PEI over a Google Hangout. He came up with the poem on the way to Louisbourg in 2008.

When we talk about “computers in the schools,” it’s easy to fall into the trap of imagining the “data processing” aspects of computers as being what we’re talking about – and it’s rare in these discussions that poetry is top-of-mind.

I’m so proud of Oliver for participating, and proud of Frances and Birchwood for overcoming significant technical hurdles to allow them to be part of this event.