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.

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.