As part of the launch of the IslandNewspapers.ca project today, we arranged to have Transcontinental Printing in Borden – the branch of TC that prints The Guardian and the Journal-Pioneer – produce a facsimile of the February 11, 1914 newspaper, printed first 100 years ago today.

The process turned out to be rather simple: I grabbed high-resolution TIFF files from the IslandNewspapers.ca page for this date, uploaded them to Dropbox where the composing room in Borden could grab them, they sent along a proof press to the Guardian office in Charlottetown the next day, we agreed on a price and 500 copies showed up in Charlottetown this morning. Magic.

I’m very, very happy with the result: they were able to recreate the historical wide-broadsheet size of the 1914 paper, and while the source material – scans of microfilm of originals – wasn’t perfect, the paper is eminently readable and, for most intents and purposes, just like reading The Guardian 100 years ago.

Knowing we’d have more than enough copies to meet the demand at our launch event, I spent the late morning walking all over downtown Charlottetown delivering copies: the Coles Building, City Hall, coffee shops, the public library. My favourite stop was Hyndman & Company on Queen Street, my own car insurance broker and a company that was already established – and a regular Guardian advertiser – by 1914.

When I was done making my rounds, I sat down for an early lunch at Casa Mia Café and enjoyed the experience of reading the paper, 100 years on, as if it was today.

You can pick up a copy of the 1914 Guardian at the The Guild box office, at Confederation Centre Public Library or at ROW142 coffee on Richmond Street while supplies last.

I met Mark Leggott at the Access conference in St. John’s, Newfoundland in 1994. We kept in touch over the ensuing years, and renewed our acquaintance when Mark moved to Prince Edward Island in 2006 to become Chief Librarian, University of PEI. In the years since we had the occasional lunch or coffee and would often chat about the projects that Robertson Library was undertaking and how I might become involved with them in some capacity.

At our first such meeting I mentioned that, on my list of dream projects, was a digital archive of Prince Edward Island’s newspaper of record, The Guardian: as someone occasionally interested in plumbing the depths of the Island’s history, I knew firsthand how cumbersome using the microfilm version of the paper’s archive is, but also knew, from those times when I braved it, how rich a resource the historic Guardian is.

Mark is nothing if not a digital-projects-generating-dynamo, and he took this idea and ran with it, rallying resources, funding, expertise – and the cooperation of The Guardian itself – and it is with much joy that I can invite you all, all these years later, to attend the formal unveiling of the digitized Guardian, covering issues from 1890 to 1957, tomorrow, February 11, 2014 at 2:00 p.m. at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown.

As a special incentive, we’ll be distributing paper copies of the February 11, 1914 newspaper, being printed in Borden as we speak. It was municipal election day 100 years ago tomorrow, so the day’s paper is full of election coverage.

The archive is online at IslandNewspapers.ca right now, and I encourage you to take a look, plumb its depths, and offer the project team feedback. Their work to date, from the physical process of digitizing to the digital process of archiving, OCRing the text, and building a web front end, is impressive, and they each deserve a hearty congratulations at tomorrow’s opening.

Of course, as Hacker in Residence, I had to dip my own toes in the water, and so in addition to the IslandNewspapers.ca site itself, I’ve leveraged the openness of the project to build some side-projects around the 100-years-ago-today newspaper:

• A Twitter account, @peinewspapers that tweets the front cover from 100 years previous.
• A Tumblr blog, at http://peinewspapers.tumblr.com/ that does the same thing.
• A Facebook page, at https://www.facebook.com/dailynewspaperpei where, in the same vein, you’ll always find the day’s paper from 100 years ago.

I encourage you to befriend / follow / like any or all of the above and, even more so, to become a reader of the daily paper 100 years on: I’ve been reading The Guardian from 1914 every day this year, and the context the emerges watching stories evolve from day to day provides a new view into history. This will become even more interesting as 1914 marches on, with the 50th anniversary of the Confederation Conference and the start of World War One still to come.

From The Charlottetown Guardian, February 10, 1914, an advertisement for the Hotel Martinique in New York City, at the corner of 32nd and Broadway:

From Google Streetview, the Hotel Martinique today, now the Radisson Martinique:

In the intervening 100 years, the Martinique was a “notorious welfare hotel.” Today the hotel lists it’s lowest average daily rate at $175.00.

Yesterday my brother Steve, initially a Twitter-skeptic and now one of the most prolific twitterers I know, piled on to the #CBCBands hash tag with gusto ( “ ‘The National’ Research Council Official Time Signal,” “T-Rex Murphy,” “Radio Radio Noon,” etc.). I’m biased, but I’d say he led the pack.

At the end of which brother Johnny dropped in with “I thought it was too much until Dzintar Cers Mix-a-Lot.”

Which answered a long-burning question for me: how do you spell Dzintar Cers (one of the CBC’s best newsreaders and someone I’ve woken up to on the clock radio hundreds of times).

Which, in that rabbit-holey Internet way, eventually led me to this description, from Toronto’s Eye Weekly from 1998, of a Dzintar Cers side-project called Dzena’s Initiation:

This is what happens when you let one CBC sportscaster (Dzintar Cers) and one nutty freelance performance artist (Nina Hilger) loose in a digital portastudio with a computer music-generating program. He plays (in a prog-rock meets techno kind of way) and she rants. This goes on for over two hours. Occasionally Cers’ brother Aldis provides some wild acid-rock guitar. Song titles include “Nuclear Marionette’s Dinner Party,” “Mother Dominatrix” (the S&M crossover hit single) and, my fave, “India Nomo,” featuring thoughtful lyrics sung by Cers in his native Latvian tongue.

If the universe is just, someone will find a copy of this and send it to me. Right now.

I’ve been tying knots the wrong way, I have learned.

First, I’ve been knotting my shoes the wrong way, as I learned from this TED video. Six months ago I switched to the new system espoused there, and went from having my shoelaces becoming undone two or three times a day to having my shoelaces never becoming undone. I took about 2 weeks until my muscle memory learned the new method, but it’s now second nature.

Second, I’d been knotting my scarf the wrong way. Truth be told, I wasn’t knotting my scarf at all, simply draping it around my neck and holding it on with my coat. But then, two days ago, I carefully watched as my friend Shelley did what I’ve come to learn is called the “Parisian Knot,” a simple technique that is well-illustrated here:

I’ve only been Parisian for 12 hours now, but the change is palpable: I’ve moved from “vaguely warmed neck” to “warmly swaddled neck.

It’s Data Privacy Day today, and I started the day off by reading Five Potential Privacy Pitfalls for Developers from Mozilla. One these pitfalls Mozilla describes as “More isn’t always better,” described, in part like this:

The key is to collect only what you need. When you are in the planning stages for your app, document the data collection, usage and flows. You should be able to justify each piece of personal information and describe how it will be used. If you plan to collect personal information for future or extra features beyond core functions, always give users the ability to opt-out.

For the past 7 years I’ve been collecting Google Analytics data on every visit to this blog. This is typical behaviour for websites – even the Mozilla blog post above is collecting Google Analytics data – and is something that allows website owners insight into how their site is being used and by whom.

Google Analytics does this all anonymously: it tells me how many people from Virginia visited my blog yesterday, but not who they are.

But even though that’s true, as I related late last year, it’s not as though the collection of this information comes completely without a price for my readers, because Google aggregates the data I allow it to collect here with data from millions of other websites to form a sort of “behavioural fingerprint” for every reader, with a visit to this space being one small data point that helps to flesh out, to Google and its customers, if not who you are, at least how you are.

Sometimes this is a reasonable exchange – as Mozilla writes, “User data is undeniably valuable and collecting it isn’t inherently wrong, especially with consent.” – and when I am wearing my commercial hat I can attest that the data Google Analytics provides allows me to help build more effective (for both author and reader) websites.

But here on ruk.ca, well, not so much. I’ve glanced at Google Analytics data every few months out of interest, learning what posts here are popular, where readers are coming from, how long readers typically spend reading. 

But if the “the key is to collect only what you need,” then it’s hard to justify collecting even anonymous data about you readers, especially if, in doing so, I’m helping Google digitally fingerprint you.

So, starting today at 9:00 a.m. Atlantic time, I have removed Google Analytics tracking from this site. The line graph will flatline, and I will no longer know anything about who you are, how many you are, and what you’re reading.

I’ve always maintained that I write this blog mostly for myself, as a way of processing what happens in my life and what I’m thinking about; it’s not a diary, and its publicness has always been important to the rigour of the place, but I’ve never written for you.

And if I’m not writing for you, then I don’t really need to know that you’re a 46 year old woman from Idaho who likes TV and is in the market for a new motorcycle.

Enjoy your newfound anonymity.

I can’t imagine a better result from mailing out Christmas cards than the solving of a German postal mystery for my old friend James. It all comes down to whether the seven in the “78” in his address should be crossed or not

My friend Ann turned me on to the Danish television series Borgen, a political drama centred around the election and government of Denmark’s (fictional) first female Prime Minister.

Borgen isn’t an easy series to track down: KCET in the U.S. streams some episodes, but it’s neither on Netflix nor iTunes, so one must make due with what one can.

Borgen has some soap operatic qualities – romances, break-ups, scandals, etc. – but a lot of the substance of the drama focuses on the dual challenges of keeping a multi-party coalition working and keeping a family going while you’ve got a twice-full-time job as Prime Minister. For a Canadian used to a moribund democracy, it’s novel stuff all this “leader of the Labour Party is Minister of Foreign Affairs” kind of government. And it’s heartening to see a democracy where, vestigial old-boyism aside, women have as much a role to play as men.

The highlight of the series is its star, actor Sidse Babett Knudsen, who’s simply brilliant. But there’s a strong supporting cast, a cast that has improved and grown more textured through season 2.

If you can track down Borgen – it’s available on DVD here in Charlottetown at That’s Entertainment, I am told – I recommend it.

I’ve been a Flickr user for 10 years and I’ve uploaded just over 9,000 photos there. Over all that time, here are the most viewed of those photos:

The Minister of Tourism, quoted in The Guardian, describing what a visit to Prince Edward Island on a cruise ship is like:

“It’s a one-day infomercial for Prince Edward Island and we are seeing some of those visitors that are returning.”

I admire his honesty, but not his fondness for the genre.

Mostly because I live in the middle of the infomercial set, and those cruise ship visitors with their belching diesel buses and annoying horse-drawn carriages and vacant looks of expectant wonder add nothing at all to the experience of actually living here.

I think we should aspire to better, higher mechanisms of welcoming people to our Island.