I just submitted a grant application to the City of Charlottetown Micro-Grant Community Initiative for an idea I’ve come to call “The Social Consumption Project.”

I propose to undertake to develop the prototype of a system that would allow households to, at their option, expose data about their water and electicity consumption to the web, turning consumption data into a “social object” that can be shared in the same was as weight loss data, fitness data, and “here’s what I had for dinner” data has come to increasingly be shared online.

Why?

Under the “please explain what is unique and creative about your project” section of the application I responded:

There are many ways to reduce consumption: education, legislation, rationing, pricing. This project seeks a simple approach, leveraging our increasing propensity to gather and share information about our daily lives through applications like RunKeeper, FitBit, and on blogs, Twitter and Facebook.

Our hypothesis is that two things – the mere fact of monitoring consumption itself, and the social pressures and “game mechanics” of sharing consumption data – can work to lower consumption.

Our project has the virtue of being low-cost, easy to manage, and fun to participate in, which are three elements not often found in behaviour-modification projects surrounding consumption.

Technically my working assumption is that it should be possible to interogate the Itron meters used by Charlottetown Water and Sewer and the Itron meters used by Maritime Electric using the Digi ERT/Ethernet Gateway and configure the gateway to forward data to a server where it would be archived, visualized and turned into something that householders could share, compare absolutes and trends with others, and so on.

I’m happy to have secured the cooperation of both Charlottetown Water and Sewer and Maritime Electric in helping to make this happen, and support from my colleague Scott Bateman in the UPEI Department of Computer Science and Information Technology and from the PEI Energy Corporation. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Martin Spindler, a conversation in Berlin over lunch with whom, back in 2011, got me thinking about this sort of thing.

If the grant application is successful, I’ll start work in August and the project will run through December.

You can review the complete grant application here (1.8 MB PDF).

Catherine, Oliver and I are traveling to Europe in June to attend Ton and Elmine’s mid-summer unconference and do some camping in the Netherlands and northern Germany. And, of course, we’ll be taking Ethan, Oliver’s service dog, along with us.

As a service dog, Ethan is generally entitled to go anywhere we go, including inside the airplane cabin, and into Europe. But special arrangements are required to make sure this all goes smoothly; our advice from Dog Guides Canada in all such matters is to communicate early and often, and so over the past month I’ve been working to cross all the Ts and dot all the Is. Here’s what I’ve done:

Before even making the decision to go, I needed to find an airline with the combination of reasonable airfares and a progressive service dog policy. Fortunately we found that in Condor, which flies from Halifax to Frankfurt (the other alternative was Icelandair, but as all its transatlantic flights involve a change of planes in Iceland, and Iceland requires some additional government paperwork just to allow service dogs inside the terminal, we opted against).

After making the Condor reservation online, I contact their Special Services department (“sonder reservierung”) and provided them with a letter from Oliver’s psychologist and a certifcate of Ethan’s training from Dog Guides Canada; a few days later they send an updated booking confirmation with reserved seats:

As Lufthansa is carrying us from Frankfurt to Düsseldorf I then had to contact their Canadian call center and ensure that Ethan was added to our flights in their system; they didn’t require any advance documentation, but I was advised that we’ll need to show proof-of-service-dogness at the gate before boarding.

With the flying handled, I then turned to matters of border control.

The Germany Embassy in Canada has a very helpful page of information about travel with animals and the section Accompanied Noncommercial Movements of Pets (Cats, Dogs and Ferrets) spelled out what we needed to do: within 10 days of travel we needed to have Ethan inspected by his vet and a Veterinary Certificate for non-commercial movement of up to five pets filled out. With this in hand we need to then visit the “official veterinarian,” which, in our case, is one of the vets at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency out by the Charlottetown Mall (that long, narrow building you’ve always wondered about beside Boston Pizza); they charge $20 for the certification.

There are a few other requirements that Ethan has to meet to enter Germany, all of which were in place already: he needs an ISO-standard microchip (fortunately Canada went with the European dog chip standard instead of the American one, so we’re set), and rabies vaccination.  Our helpful vet did some research for us and found that there aren’t any strange European dog maladies for which Ethan would need any additional vaccinations.

As far as lodging on our trip, we decided that, although it would likely not be an issue to take Ethan into hotels and motels with us, we would, instead, rent a VW camper (from DRM), which will give us a self-contained rolling home (we had the benefit of the experiences of my friend Bill and his family, who took a 5-week trip across Europe in a VW van several years ago and rave about the experience).

And so, in theory, we’re set and ready. I’ll be double-checking all of the above as our June 17 travel date draws nearer, but if all goes according to plan we’ll drive over to Halifax on the afternoon of June 17, park the car, gather up our suitcases and our dog, and head off to our next European adventure.

Next week will be the 15th anniversary of the founding of Reinvented Inc., and the week after that is the 15th anniversary of the ancestor of this blog. For the first 10 years of writing in this space, I used a homebrew system that I hacked together; in July of 2009 I migrated everything into Drupal, coincident with the migration of my longtime client, The Old Farmer’s Almanac, of Almanac.com into Drupal.

By way of celebrating all these anniversaries, as a learning experience, and to get with the times, over the last month I’ve been slowly migrating from ye olde Drupal 6 into sleek, modern Drupal 7. Today I flipped the switch, and if you’re reading this then I was successful.

At the same time as I made this switch, for the first time I am serving ruk.ca from a server that I don’t own: since the site went live in 1999 it has been served by a series of owned-and-operated PCs. In the early days these were housed in the basement of my house at 100 Prince Street; more recently the server, known as “ross” internally, has been based in silverorange’s Fitzroy Street data center.

Starting today the site comes from a virtual server in Amazon Web Services’ North Virginia data center. As much as it pains me to move away from a custom-crafted piece of hardware that I can see and touch with my own eyes, that the power supply on “ross” died a month ago served only to reinforce to me that it would be kind of nice not have to worry about keeping the now-decade-old piece of iron rattling along.  And, besides, I use Amazon’s product every day otherwise, and I have come to have a grudging love for it: it’s feature-rich, hits a good sweet spot between 100% DIY and completely-managed, and it’s relatively inexpensive (it costs me 7 cents an hour to run this server).

There are a few other changes around here that came as a part of this big migration:

1. I’ve turned off comments. Dealing with comment spam has been a factor of maintaining this blog since I started; at the same time, the conversation that used to happen in the comments has either disappeared or moved elsewhere; as I noted in 2011, the number of comments has fallen off dramatically in recent years, and spam, even with good spam filtering, has exceded “ham” in recent months. It’s no longer worth the trouble to keep up. If you want to speak amongst yourselves about something you read here, do it on Twitter or Facebook or Google+. Or go for coffee.
2. I’ve turned off user accounts. Without comments, there’s not really any need to support user accounts, so I’ve disabled them all. Thanks to all of you who enjoyed the always-promised, never-delivered privileges of membership over the years.
3. Really fast search. There are 15 years of my life poured out here (1.4 million words in 6700 blog posts). So in addition to a resource for the web to find SIM cards for Berlin, it’s a useful archive for me to recall what happened when. So I’ve put some additional work into making the site search work better, faster and stronger. And it’s now a lot more obvious, with a search field sitting up there in the left corner. So I’m primed and ready with quick access to, say, everything I ever wrote about Island Tel (a lot, as it turns out).
4. Mobile-friendly. The site has always been mostly-readable on phones and tablets; now it should be more so.

There will likely be a few broken links and other things you’ve come to know and love; I’ll be mopping up the damage over the next few weeks. In the meantime, I look forward to another 15 years of writing about what’s happening.

For posterity, and to show off the throughput of the new digs, here’s an Apache ab test on the old site:

Concurrency Level:      5
Time taken for tests:   11.266 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      2612300 bytes
HTML transferred:       2548900 bytes
Requests per second:    8.88 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       563.309 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       112.662 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          226.44 [Kbytes/sec] received

And here’s the same test on the new site:

Concurrency Level:      5
Time taken for tests:   5.299 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      4505500 bytes
HTML transferred:       4460400 bytes
Requests per second:    18.87 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       264.945 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       52.989 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          830.34 [Kbytes/sec] received

For the technically-minded among you, the server now uses an Amazon Web Services m3.medium instance with 3.75 GB of RAM, 1 “virtual CPU unit” and a single 4GB SSD root drive supplemented by a 20GB EBS volume; this replaces “ross,” a 10-year-old plain vanilla PC with 1GB of RAM and a processor so old that it likely doesn’t compare at all in the modern era.

From the CBC’s archives, by way of CBC Books, young Farley and Francis Mowat:

I have never been one of those Canadians wrapped up in the romance of the North. Except that I have been: when I was a kid, Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens was a transformative book for me; I truly could picture myself as Jamie Macnair, lost in the barrens, forced to fend for myself. Nothing could be further from my truth, of course.

The krisis set aside for the moment, I’ve moved on to setting Jack Layton’s “Letter to Canadians.”

Now that the cabinet itself is springing to life I feel the hot breath of urgency on my neck.

Next up: Adrienne Clarkson.

You may recall that four years ago I found myself spending 3 weeks sorting type, the result of having purchase 30 pounds of Bodoni 12 point that came to me slightly out of sorts.

One of the things I discovered during that process is that my font of Bodoni 12 point was missing the capital K entirely. How this might have happened along the road that drawer of type took from founding to me is a mystery: perhaps it was cast for someone with fear of the letter K? perhaps a printer setting type in a K-less language?

Fortunately this K-drought was the spark that led me to Swamp Press, which was in a position to cast me some supplemental K. I mailed down a type sample for matching, the match was confirmed, and the order was left to me to complete.

Which, procrastination being procrastination, I didn’t.

How often does the capital letter K appear anyway, I thought in the back of my mind.

And so life was good.

Until today.

When, as part of my sesquicentennial setting of type, I had cause to set the credit line for a section of the poem Jacques Cartier by Thomas D’Arcy McGee. The edition from which the poem was taken was, as it turned out, edited by Edited by Carl F. Klinck and Reginald E. Waters.

I am setting the body of the passages in Bodoni 14 pt. and the credit lines in Bodoni 12 pt. Eagle-eyed readers will have already noticed by this point that Klinck starts with a capital K.

Oops.

Panicky emails ensued to my typefounder with hopes that the K-thirst can be slaked; stay tuned.

In the meantime, I will continue on with setting additional non-K-containing passages. Already, though, I see a section from Klee Wyck by Emily Carr on the horizon.

Moral of the story: when you are without K, act immediately.

Remember that Bodoni 14 pt. that arrived earlier in the week? Well type is useless if you don’t have a holder for it, and so today the solution to that issue arrived: two California job cases from Don Black Linecasting arrived by post. And so this afternoon it came type to unwrap the type and sort it.  I took about 90 minutes, and here’s the photographic evidence.

The type itself came (very well packed) from Swamp Press in Northfield, Massachusetts (a town that has an excellent drive-in theatre, by the way; we were there for the closing weekend 12 years ago).  I ordered 2 caps, 3 lower case of a 36a 16A font scheme: this means, for example, that I received 108 lower case letter a’s (which is 36 times 3) and 32 capital A’s (which is 16 times 2). When the type arrived, it looked like this (sorted in an order I couldn’t divine, but easy to manage nonetheless):

The California job cases arrived (also very well packed) from Don Black looking like this:

And after 90 minutes of eeeeeee, aaaaaa, ggggggg, and so on, the result was this:

I am now primed and ready to begin the process of actually using the type to set the passages needed for the Confederation Country Cabinet.

The sorting process was a revelation: not only did I get acquainted with specifics of each Bodoni letterform (it has a beautiful capital Q, by the way), but also with the font scheme (which reflects, in theory, the relative frequency of letters in the English corpus). You would think, for example, that p and b would pop up more frequently, but for every p there are 3 a’s.  And there are 9 times more a’s than j’s (which isn’t as surprising).

I sized my type order based on the size of the longest passage I needed to set in one go, an excerpt from Our Hero in the Cradle of Confederation by J. J. Steinfeld (147 words, 851 characters), but also from maximum number of any given letter, a high water mark also set by J. J.’s passage, which uses the lower case r 55 times.

My relationship with Bodoni has never been more intimate.

Another cruise ship season starts next week – May 8, 2014 – here in Charlottetown. Over the period from then until November there are 68 scheduled visits by 12 cruise ships.

The Charlottetown Seaport continues its unhelpful practice of locking the schedule data inside an HTML table and so again this year I have liberated into more useful forms:

• Is there a cruise ship in Charlottetown today? (simple yes/no website)
  • Same thing, but as JSON
  • Same thing, but as XML
  • Same thing, but as a Twitter account
• 2014 Charlottetown Cruise Ship Calendar (complete calendar of arrivals for this year)
  • Same thing, but as an RSS feed
  • Same thing, but as a iCal subscription (you can feed this into your mobile device or desktop)

As in previous years, this is unofficial, subject to be wrong, etc. etc. But it’s a much richer set of data that supports myriad ways of maintaining continuous partial awareness of whether the city is to be overrun or not.

I’m working on a tiny part of a 2014 Sesquicentennial Public Art Program piece with artist Brenda Whiteway. Ironically, Brenda and I came together by way of Papeterie Saint-Armand in Montreal, where she went looking for paper and found me in addition, via a reference from owner David Carruthers.  I met David back in 2010 and have been a happy customer of his paper ever since; that he could play letterpress matchmaker only adds to his halo of wonder.

Brenda’s piece is titled Confederation Country Cabinet and my small part of it consists of hand-setting the type for, and printing, 6 passages of sesquicentennially-appropriate text selected by Brenda. She’s very kind (and brave) to trust me with this, as it’s by far and away the biggest letterpress job I’ve ever taken on (“biggest” inasmuch as there’s a lot of type to be set; ultimately I’m only printing one of each piece).

Which is how I came to accept delivery of this in the mail today from Swamp Press in Northfield, Mass.:

Swamp Press is, among other things, a type founder, and what you see here is part of a font of 375 Bodoni 14 pt. that I ordered from Ed the typefounder a couple of weeks ago. It is, in other words, fresh type.

I selected the Bodoni for several reasons: 375 Bodoni 12 pt. was the first face I ever owned; I purchased a job case from Don Black Linecasting four years ago (before I even knew how to spell it!) and then later acquired a font of Bodoni 24 pt. from a printer in Montreal (type I used to set, among other things, raffle tickets, Catherine’s art show poster and Lubricate Often).

It’s a typeface that pre-dates Confederation: Giambattista Bodoni designed it in 1798, 66 years before the Confederation Conference that we’re celebrating this year.  Bodoni, writes Robin Dodd

…a best known for bringing the modern typeface to its height of elegance and sophistication. His modern typeface reached its peak of perfection in the late 18th century, and remained popular throughout the 19th century.

Could there be a better typeface for commemorating this occasion?

To arrive at 14 point as the size I needed necessitated a lot of futzing and fitzing to arrive at a paper size and type size that would suit pieces that range from a single sentence to multiple paragraphs, and which include both poetry (and thus hard line-lengths) and prose.  I even, in a daring fusion of my analog and digital selves, coded up a purpose-built tool for placing the order:

I think this is going to work out; it will all play out, one way or the other, in the next week or two.

Ed at Swamp Press, by the way, has become the caretaker of a collection of Monotype punches that were rescued from the Mount Stewart dump by my friend Heather dump after Gerald Giampa’s left them there following the auction held after he was flooded out.  I made Ed’s acquaintance, in turn, via the selfsame Don Black who sold me my original Bodoni: that font was missing upper case K, and Don referred me to Ed as someone who could cast me some. A few years later I met him face-to-face at the Printing Arts Fair north of Boston and it gives me great pleasure both that he’s taken on the punch stewardship and that I’ve had occasion to have him cast type for me.