In a way that would be anathema to more sedate dogs-off-the-furniture families, Ethan has the run of the couches and chairs in our house – how else could he cozy up to Oliver, after all. Sometimes he takes his dominion over the human world very liberally; witness the position I found him in this morning after breakfast:

Here’s a photo of delegates at our PEI Home and School Federation Annual Meeting yesterday engaged in what we called “Success Story Speed Dating.”

The idea was that rather than focusing on “I wish they would do X” discussion, we would instead focus on “we did Y and it really worked well discussion: sharing stories of successful initiatives of local home and school associations that could be cross-pollinated to others.

We pre-selected 10 topics and our members picked 5 each, spending 10 minutes on each “round” until they stood up and moved on to the next one. The topics were:

1. Increasing Transportation Safety
2. Breakfast and Lunch Programs
3. Influencing Education Policy
4. Building Better Playgrounds
5. Parent Leadership Grants
6. Making our Schools Greener
7. Fundraising
8. Building Engagement in Home and School
9. Engaging Volunteers
10. Working with Our Principal

This was going to be something that either worked well or flopped colossally, and signs are that it was the former, which was great. We’re going to summarize up the success stories shared and distribute them back to our members to use in their plans for this spring and forward.

I sat in on the “Building Better Playgrounds” session and it was fantastic: lots of talk about using natural areas around the school, about adventure playgrounds, about risk vs. reward.

One of the duties of the President of PEI Home and School Federation is penning a monthly columns for The Guardian newspaper; as I hand over the position to someone new this Saturday at the Federation’s Annual General Meeting, this week’s column was my last, and my editor at the paper crafted a lovely headline to go with it – “Be part of the superpower” – that neatly sums up why I’m so passionate about Home & School as a vehicle for change.

The headline extends from this paragraph:

What is unique about this meeting is the breadth of the participation: a table at the meeting might include the Minister of Education, a local union president, a teacher, a principal, and several parents and guardians. The superpower that this affords Prince Edward Island is estimable: what might take years to develop consensus around in larger jurisdictions can happen in a morning here in Prince Edward Island. It’s a superpower that Home & School members are rightly proud of. Next month’s column will summarize the results of these discussions.

And I genuinely believe that.

Although I cede the presidency to someone new on Saturday, I’ll continue to be involved in home & school: Oliver, after all, has three more years of public education left, and I continue to sit on the Federation’s executive as Past-President for another two years. 

Twenty-year-old-Peter would never believe that fifty-year-old-Peter would feel so warmly about such activities, but I do.  Weird.

I turn 50 today (see also turning 48, 47, 45, 43, 42, 41, 40, 39, 38, and 36; before age 36, apparently, I was young enough not to notice my age).

The day started with Oliver secretly passing a note to his vice-principal at school when I dropped him off asking her to make an announcement about my birthday, which she kindly did.

The day continued with PEI Home and School Federation-related duties at the PEI Science Fair, where I selected and then awarded special prizes. This was great fun, both because I got to have many interesting conversations with young scientists about their projects, and because, being special prizes, our awards fall outside of the normal structure of the fair, and thus, as long as they recognize projects that “focus on the total well-being of children, including health, safety and learning,” are completely left to the discretion of the judge. Such freedom! I’ll never be able to go back to regular prize judging, with its onerous rubrics and forms.

As is usually the case, I’m at my least pensive on my birthday, so I’ve no wise words for my future self. Actually, scratch that: future self, remember to look up from time to time, take stock of things, turn down a different path, try on a different hat, say hello to someone unexpected. Please report back.

Photo by Paul Kalupnieks, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Via Alphabettes, a link to Beyond TYPO, a whimsical new font that’s free to download:

The Beyond TYPO Font is a hybrid creature, mixing hand-made letters and amœba. A high saturation of OpenType makes the font come to life: auto-shuffling characters, fun alternates, crazy ligatures, and plenty of initial and final forms that grow one-celled creatures, trunks, legs, and miscellaneous biomorphic extensions at either end of your words and sentences.

Here’s an example:

Among the maps in the Island Imagined collection at the University of Prince Edward Island, my favourite are the Charlottetown Fire Insurance maps from the turn of the last century.

One of the great things about the digital versions of these maps is that it’s possible to experience them in great detail; here’s part of our block, for example, showing the Hickey & Nicholson tobacco factory:

While the digital has its distinct advantages, sometimes having an analog map in your hand has its own particular benefits. And so on the weekend Oliver and I, with an hour to kill out by Staples, decided to make some printing Charlottetown Fire Insurance maps of our own.  Here’s how we did it.

You’ll need a USB flash drive to copy map images onto.

First, we commandeered one of the display computers at Staples. We selected a MacBook, but there are many computers on display, and any of them will do. We went to the IslandImagined.ca site, and located the map we wanted to print first, the index map:

There is, unfortunately, no mechanism in the IslandImagined.ca viewer to request a high resolution suitable-for-printing version of the map, but it’s possible to obtain one through a little bit of manipulation:

Don’t zoom in: work from the map as it loads initially. With your mouse pointer over the map image, right click and select “Open Image in New Tab”:

In the new tab that opens up you’ll see a URL in the address bar that looks like this:

http://137.149.200.109:8080/fedora/get/imagined:208604/
ilives:jp2Sdef/getRegion?
uid=
&level=3
&region=0,0,505,429

You need to edit that URL to produce a higher-resolution version of the entire map by:

1. Change level=3 to level=10.
2. Remove the &region=0,0,505,429 entirely.

The resulting URL is:

http://137.149.200.109:8080/fedora/get/imagined:208604/
ilives:jp2Sdef/getRegion?
uid=
&level=10

Load up this URL and you’ll receive a very high resolution image. Copy this to image onto the USB stick, eject it, and take it over to one of Staples colour photocopiers in the print centre (be sure to look at the copier labels: only a couple of them are colour).

Insert the USB stick in the standalone terminal that’s beside the copier and follow the instructions to print a file from a USB stick; select the file you just copied, and, for best results, print on 11x17 inch paper.

Staples charges about $1.00 per copy, and the results are very impressive. We repeated the process 4 more times to get good coverage of our block and down to the Charlottetown waterfront.

You’re not limited to Charlottetown Fire Insurance maps, of course: there are over 1,000 maps in the Island Imagined collection to choose from, from very early maps to more recent ones, like Atlas of Province of Prince Edward Island, Canada and the World from 1927.

And of course you should note any rights restrictions in the map metadata (click the “Description” tab for any map) — many maps are labelled “This material is provided for research, education, and private use only. For all other uses, please contact the Prince Edward Island Museum and Heritage Foundation,” which shouldn’t prevent you from printing them for your own use, but likely means you shouldn’t print them on T-shirts and sell them.

While we’re on the topic of my eyes, here’s a snazzy scan of my left eye that Charlottetown Vision Care sent me after my last eye exam:

My optometrist Dr. Judson helpfully took me on a tour of what information is communicated here during my exam; I was distracted enough by the fact that I was looking at a detailed scan of my eyes with those same eyes themselves that I retained very little of what she told me, save “there’s nothing to worry about here.”

Here’s a selfie I took yesterday, retouched by my father; it’s becoming my new avatar, replacing the one that stood me in good stead for a year:

I’m wearing my new eyeglasses, just arrived Friday from Gaudet Optical in Halifax where I ordered them a couple of weeks ago. I ordered a pair of “computer glasses” at the same time, to use while I’m at my workstation, and I’ve been alternating between the two pairs over the weekend.

As the bifocal prescription in the glasses above — my “everyday” glasses — is someone increased, and the shape of the glasses is round as opposed to rectangular, and as the computer glasses have a completely different lens designed specifically for viewing a computer screen, my brain is exhausted at all the rewiring it’s having to do. I need to take a day and sit in a dark room just to give it a rest.

The “everyday” glasses come from the French company Anne & Valentin; the model is called “On the Wave,” a model that a Japanese website describes like this (in translation):

Full of handmade feeling like carved from stone texture features. A sense of volume that stand out with precisely machined edge, of Anne & Valentine unique to stick to handwork, our eyewear that captures the essence of beauty.

Something gets lost in the translation, but there are elements of truth there.

Something I hadn’t noticed until now — it’s hard to notice things on your eyeglasses when you’re wearing your eyeglasses — is a thin metal strip inlaid into the left arm:

I’ve no idea what the meaning of this is. But I’m the kind of guy who likes having mysterious symbols hidden in his eyeglasses, so it works for me.

Beyond the wonky brain adjustments required, and the secret inlay, the new glasses are something of a bold departure from the “get as innocuous a pair of glasses as possible” approach I’ve taken to eyewear selection in the past. The Gaudet Optical slogan is “fine eyewear from functional to outrageous,” and while these are by no means on the outrageous end of their spectrum – I saw some pretty amazing eyeglasses that hover around or beyond that end — they are by no means wholly functional either. They say something – I’m not sure what – and that’s a completely foreign concept for me. Needless to say, it took some gumption to go out of the house for the first time.

I was sad to learn this morning that architect Zaha Hadid has died.

My first experience of her work was when, in 2010, Oliver and I visited the Phaeno science museum in Wolfsburg that she designed. It’s a remarkable building: somehow it’s both round and jagged, existing on a single level and yet very deep. We’ve visited many, many science museums over the years and Phaeno was, by far and away, my favourite of the lot.

Later that same year we took a family trip to Basel, Switzerland and hopped across the Rhine one afternoon to visit the Vitra furniture factory where Hadid had been commissioned to design the fire station; it became the first of her buildings to be realized.

She was a great architect — perhaps the best of her generation. I’m so sad we won’t get to see what the next 30 years of her career would have produced.

It gives me no end of joy that what The Guardian describes as the “younger wing of the talented fiddling family,” the Chaissons, have stepped up to keep the Rollo Bay Fiddle Festival going. If you’ve never been to the festival, this year would be a good year to start: it’s July 15th to 17th, 2016.

And of course you should also go to the PEI Bluegrass and Old Time Music Festival, on the same grounds, from July 1 to 3, 2016; that this festival can live on at the same location is another spin-off of the youth wing doubling down.