One year ago today I started archiving the energy load and generation data that the Province of PEI makes available at 15 minute intervals on its website. I’ve collected 34,471 data points (if you like you can grab the entire archive as a CSV file for your own analysis).

I’ve been using this data, over the course of the year, to help build my own “peripheral awareness” of the Island’s electricity situation, using tools like this visualization of load vs. generation and this simple gauge showing how much of our load is being met by the wind.

I’ve had conversations with staff at Maritime Electric and the PEI Energy Corporation to try to better understand these numbers, and one of the things that I’ve learned is that “peak load” is an important number when talking electricity: utilities like Maritime Electric are contractually obligated to be able to meet the peak load – the maximum amount of electricity we might all collectively call for at any given time – and they have to build generation capacity or have a reliable import source to meet that obligation.

Over the last 365 days the Island’s peak load came on January 23, 2013 at 245.07 megawatts (MW). We had 75 days where the daily peak load was more than 200 MW and the lowest daily peak was 140 MW on May 26, 2013. This late-January peak represents trend away from the traditional “Christmas lights peak” in December and, I am told, comes as a result of an increasing shift toward electric-source heating.

Here’s what that daily peak load for the last 12 months looks like on a graph:

These are important numbers for Islanders to know and understand because it’s the peak, more may any other factors, that drives the cost (and complexity) of meeting our electricity needs.

The report of the PEI Energy Commission is an excellent resource in this regard.

From that report, for example, I learned that the yearly peak in 1977 was 95 MW – meaning that our peak in this year was 2.5x higher than our peak 36 years ago.

And that the capacity of the electric cables to the mainland is 200 MW. Which means that when the load goes over 200 MW – as it did on 20% of days over the last year – we need to make up the difference from local generation, either fossil-fuelled or wind-generated.

The wind, of course, wasn’t a factor in our energy mix back in 1977 and now it’s a significant one. But, as the graph below, showing the daily peak wind generation over the last year, shows, the wind is variable:

There have been some fantastic days for wind generation – 12 days, for example, where the daily peak was more than 150 MW – but also some bad days for the wind: on 59 days the daily peak was 10 MW or less.

That said, there were 1,546 intervals of fifteen minutes or less over the course of the year where wind generation exceeded load, making PEI, temporarily, an energy exporter. Granted, most of these intervals were in the middle of the night; but on October 8, 2013, for example, we were generating 56 MW more than we were using at 3:00 a.m.

It is de rigueur in energy and “personal analytics” fields these days to believe that the mere fact of monitoring behaviour affects behaviour: if you keep track of how many steps you’re walking every day, you’ll be more inclined to walk more steps every day.

I feel like that’s supported by my own electricity-using behaviour: I seems like I’ve become a more responsible electricity consumer since I started paying attention to PEI’s energy mix – like I’m turning off lights more often, unplugging things that don’t need to be plugged in.

So far, though, the evidence doesn’t really bear this out: here’s a chart showing our monthly electric bill at 100 Prince Street for two years, one in which I wasn’t paying attention to electricity and one in which I was:

Our total yearly bill for November 2011 to November 2012 was less than a dollar different than the bill for the following year (although, to my credit, the rate per kilowatt hour did incease, on our March 2013 bill, from 12.05 cents to 12.41, so it’s not quite an apples-to-apples comparison).

I’ll keep watching, and keep turning things off: knowing that my vigilance hasn’t really made a dent, at least for a while, will make me ever-more-vigilant.

When I read about Catchbox, a “throwable microphone,” on the Alibis for Interaction blog in September I didn’t get it.

“What’s wrong with regular old microphones?”, I thought.

Then I went to Alibis for Interaction and I saw a Catchbox in action – used it even – and I understood.

Then, this weekend, at the StopCyberbulling conference I saw “regular old microphones” in use to take comments and questions from the audience and it all seemed positively barbaric.

Here’s what I get now, that I didn’t get before, about Catchbox:

1. It moves itself around: you simply throw it to the person who wants to speak, and they throw it onward. You don’t need “microphone ushers” stumbling their way down the aisles.
2. It shocks people using it out of “I’m asking a question at a conference”-speak: it doesn’t look like a microphone, so you don’t fall into the (boring old) role of someone asking a question. That difference is small, but it’s important.
3. It’s fun to use, and fun to watch. It injects an element of whimsy into the proceedings.
4. It spaces out the conversation: at this weekend’s event, with the “microphone ushers” moving the microphone around, questions tended to be confined to the areas they could easily travel to quickly, and then fanned out from there. With a Catchbox the next speaker can be far across the room, and the microphone can be there as quickly as it can be thrown.
5. It’s obvious who “has the floor”: it’s the person with the bright pink (or orange or yellow or blue) box in their hand.

Having seen it work, I’m sold, and I’d encourage anyone who’s organizing an event that has an audience that you want to engage (or where you want to actively work to break down “audience” and “speaker” roles) to investigate. You can’t buy one yet, but you can rent one if you’re in Finland (or, apparently, Landskrona), and you can put yourself on the waiting list when they open up sales.

Applying what I learned from history along with some liberal interpretations of advice from my friend Fred the Printer, this has now become this:

I switched the drop cap from 30 point Univers to 48 point Akzidenz Grotesk, indented the second and third line by an en space, and switch the “he” in “the” to caps. It’s not entirely unpleasing.

Google Books is a treasure-trove of books from the 19th century, and thus a good place to turn if you are, as I, setting metal type and trying to get a feel for spacing drop caps. Here are some examples I’ve found tonight showing some interesting variations.

Common to these is that (1) the second line is indented slighly, (2) the first word of the paragraph beyond the drop cap is set in small caps (or simply all in caps), (3) the drop cap itself has its cap height aligned with the cap height of the remainder of the first word and (4) there isn’t much regard for where the baseline of the drop cap falls:

The Printers’ Handbook of Trade Recipes, Hints & Suggestions Relating to Letterpress and Lithographic Printing, Bookbinding Stationery, Engraving, Etc

English Country Houses

The compositor’s handbook

Love: A Poetical Essay

The Ladies’ Companion to the Flower-garden

I’m working on setting an excerpt of the lecture that Oscar Wilde gave in Charlottetown in 1882, and using the opportunity to experiment with setting a drop cap for the first time:

I’m setting the body in 12 point Bodoni and the drop cap is 30 point Univers. I’ve done a lot of experimenting with the vertical position of the ‘T’, and I think I’ve found a sweet spot that lines up its baseline with the baseline of the second line of the body. I’m looking forward to seeing how this looks once it’s printed.

A few weeks ago my friend Daniel Burka wrote something that continues to resonate with me, a personal essay about endeavouring to be “more wholehearted.” He wrote, in part:

I’m often sarcastic about, well, anything. I frequently err on the critical side of critique in my design career. I smugly make comments about other people’s attire when I’m in the safety of my car. Heck, I’ve tweeted plenty and as we all know Twitter is greased with the bile of cynicism. And when I consciously stop and think about it, it’s almost always totally unnecessary.

I guess I get a short sugar rush of superiority by belittling someone else and cynicism masquerades as cleverness. Also, there’s nothing wrong with criticism when you’re critiquing someone’s work, but it’s so easy and encouraging to point out the positives too. More often than not, sarcasm, criticism, cynicism, and snarkiness stem from either knee-jerk habit or come from a truly destructive place that most of us forget is hiding inside us.

This was, in a sense, only something Daniel could write: I’ve always considered him a master of the witty retort, and it’s never been difficult to imagine him sitting around the Algonquin Round Table drinking scotch with Tallulah Bankhead and making fun of Dwight Eisenhower’s floppy ears.

While I would have no seat at the table – I’m not quick enough of mind – I certainly am no stranger to sarcasm, criticism, cynicism and snarkiness, as regular readers of this space will know.

I’m not quite ready to throw myself wholeheartedly into the wholehearted lifestyle – sarcasm is currency in my family, and I’m not sure how I would communicate with that out of my toolbag – but remembering that, so often, “cynicism masquerades as cleverness” is useful. Thank you, Daniel, for pointing that out.

For as long as I can remember – for as long as avatars have been a part of the Internet – the visual representation of “me online” has been a photo I took a decade ago, in July of 2003, and then applied a whole lotta red to. I appreciated the photo for its slight hint of whimsy and for its ability to stand out in a forest of avatars. But this morning it suddenly struck me as “so 2003” and I resolved to update it.

Thanks to iPhoto’s automated face-detection, I had a lot of pictures of myself to choose from, 387 in all:

Alas I couldn’t find one I liked: once I eliminated the fuzzy ones, and the ones that made me look puffy, and the ones where I was wearing glasses that seem to be from 1974 and the ones where I had an unfortunate haircut, there wasn’t much left.

Fortunately I found the answer on Flickr’s Photos of Peter page.

Four years ago at the last reboot conference, in June of 2009, Alper Çuğun took a photo of me that I’ve always liked: it wasn’t posed, I had one of the best haircuts of my life, and, well, Alper takes a good photo:

I’m also wearing a slightly whimsical look – am I about to laugh? – that I like. So I took that photo – generously made available by Alper under a Creative Commons license that allows me to re-use and adapt it – and cropped out a chunk of it, and the end result is this:

With new avatar in hand, I set about updating the Internet. There are likely hundreds and hundreds of places of scattered ye olde avatar around the net, but fortunately there are a 5 or 6 places where it’s seen a lot that were easy to update:

Oh, and that “header photo” that you see in several of those screen shots above? It’s one I took in the Vitra Design Museum several years ago, near dusk, looking up at the sky out of the central courtyard of the main pavilion.

If you’d like to update your address books, instant messenger clients and so on, here’s a selection of sizes of the new avatar:

I expected the day to start with a small meeting – perhaps 3 or 4 people – around a table at Casa Mia Café: “teacher agent of change” Bonnie Bracey Sutton is in Charlottetown for the StopCyberbullying Youth Summit and I thought it would be good for our PEI Home and School Technology Committee to meet with her to share information and get her advice on how to forward the cause of educational technology in the province, a topic she is deeply versed in.

As it turned out this intimate meeting transformed before our very eyes into a sort of “A-Team” of smart, helpful experts in all things educational and digital: as our back table filled out I found myself in the company of Barbara Coloroso, Shadi Hayden, Allan McCullough, Parry Aftab, Kevin Harrison, and Sharon Rosenfeldt, along with my peers from Home and School, Shirley Jay, Chris Mears, and Heather Mullen. And, of course, Bonnie Bracey Sutton.

“How can we help?”, asked Parry.

I began by telling the story of TeacherNet, our project to outfit Prince Street Elementary School with wifi, a project that is a local success that we hope to spread to other schools.

I then laid out much the same tale as Frances Squire, Ben Boyle and Ghenyk McDonald told to The Guardian last week: we present Island students and teachers with a heavily filtered version of the Internet that renders it so much less than it can be, and leave them to use hand-me-down computers running a decade-old operating system that leaves them unable to experience many valuable tools and resources of the modern web. The end effect of which is to stymie much of the potential of the digital classroom.

“What can we do?”, I asked.

Their responses were universally supportive and practical.

No, you are not crazy, they told us: you’re facing the same challenges as digitally engaged parents, students and educators around the world. Keep at it.

You have allies, they told us: a bunch of smart students and adults, along with Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and LinkedIn will be here this weekend and we can rally them all to our cause, and shine light on the potential of Island schools with their help.

Shout about your successes, they told us: when a project like TeacherNet works, spread word of it far and wide.

And, perhaps most importantly, they each, to a person, confirmed my own belief that giving students agency in a digital era – rather than try to lock them inside leaky digital prisons – is not only the best way to engage them and to improve education outcomes, but it’s also, as it happens, the best way to counter cyberbullying.

Those around the table not only offered these wise words, but they offered to help us help those in a position to change policy and improve infrastructure understand the challenges and opportunities ahead: changing policy about technology, especially about filtering, is a significant step, and we need help making the case for these changes, and getting all concerned to understand the risks and rewards.

My fear going into this weekend’s StopCyberbullying Youth Summit was that I was going to be confronted by a philosophy that sought to address cyberbulling through the same “if we close the blinds we can pretend it’s not there” attitude that our education system manifests toward technology in general.

I thought I was going to meet people who wanted to build better filters, tighter firewalls, and to make the Internet even less of what it is in schools.

I was wrong.

Around that table of people who have thought long and hard about all of this was a surprising consensus: the way forward lies through giving students more control over the tending the digital ecosystem, not less.

I’m looking forward to diving deeper tomorrow; as it is, we have some new wind in our technology-advocating-sails, for which I owe a great debt of gratitude to all who sat around that table this morning.

In the fall of 1882 Oscar Wilde made a 9-stop tour of the Canadian Maritimes, a tour that brought him to Charlottetown on the evening of October 11, 1882 for a lecture, Decorative Arts, presented at the Market Hall. The lecture was advertised in the the local newspapers, including the Daily Patriot:

Newspapers also made editorial mention of the lecture; on October 10, 1882, this item appeared in the same Daily Patriot:

Oscar Wilde is after all coming to the Island. He is to lecture in the Market Hall to-morrow evening. There will no doubt be a great rush to hear and see the famous aesthete, and while his love of the beautiful and sense of the fitness of things will no doubt sustain many shocks in our town we think that he cannot but be pleased with the loveliness of our Island province.

The Patriot followed up the next day with a quick reminder – actually, two – in the October 11, 1882 “Local and Other Items” column, a column that also included notice of the Teacher’s Convention, Exhibition Day and disagreeable weather:

The following day, October 12, 1882, the Daily Patriot contained a report of the lecture, headed “Oscar Wilde’s Lecture,” which reads as follows:

This well advertised man lectured in the Market Hall of this city last night. Mr. Wilde affects singularity, but there did not appear to us anything very remarkable in either his dress, his personal appearance, or his lecture – certainly not enough to warrant one-tenth part of what has been said and written about him. His dress, neither in color or cut, was, as far as we could see, very different from that of ordinary young Englishmen. He evidently had on his ordinary travelling suit. It was grey, relieved by a bit of color at the neck and breast. He wore knee breeches which were decidedely baggy at the knees, and his blue stockings, although they displayed a well-shaped calf, were not at all different from the stockings we have seen on other young fellows. Mr. Wilde wears his hair long, but we saw not long ago a Quebec pilot with a longer and a handsomer head of hair, and his head, either for shape or covering, would not compare too favorably with that of a western Indian whom it was our privilege to see some time ago. Mr. Wilde is too effeminate in his appearance to be a handsome man, and he is too masculine to pass for a good looking woman.

His style of speaking is consistent with his personal appearance. It is odd, without being either very strong or very beautiful. His attitudes are not exceedingly graceful, particularly when he places his hands on his hip, as he is apt to do, and makes a handle to himself of his arm. He does not gesticulate much, but if he raised his other arm high enough he would not in that attitude make a bad model for an aesthetic coffee pot. Affectation is Oscar Wildes strong point – affectation in dress, affectation in manner and affectation in speech. His want of naturalness is we think, what affects many people so disagreeably when they hear him for the first time and causes them to rage against him so violently.

His lecture is a good lecture enough. It is a discourse teaching that honesty, sincerity, and fidelity to nature are the foundation of beauty in art, and that men would be wiser, better and happier than they are if they were surrounded from their childhood by things that are really beautiful. Mr. Wilde attributes a moral influence to the design and the tints of a wall paper, to the pattern and color of a carpet, to the form of a water jug, to the shape and ornamentation of a stove, and so on, of all common things by which we are surrounded. He believes because of the moral as well as the intellectual influence of beauty, they should all be as beautiful as the most cultivated taste can make them. We are not sure that he is not, to a certain extent, right. A thing of beauty is a joy forever for human beings of all ages, and all races, but men differ widely in their ideas of what is beautiful. Mr. Wilde teaches that nature in all her aspects is beautiful, and if his theory of the moral influences of beauty is true, those who live most of their time under nature’s covering and surrounded by nature’s works – the American Indian and the Afcrian negro for example – will be the most refined as well as the best of the children of men. Is this so? Mr. Wilde’s gospel of beauty like all other human gospels needs, we fear, a good deal of qualifying. One part of Mr. Wilde’s lecture deserves the serious attention of all parents and every one who has to do with the education of children, and that is, where he insists upon the necessity of teaching boys and girls of all ranks in life to use their hands. The number of men and women who are brought up in these days without learning to use their hands in any useful way is absolutely appalling. When reverses come upon these handless people, and when they are placed in a postiion – as nearly every man is at some period of his life – where his intellectual acquirements are of little use to him and where his very existence depends upon a more or less skillful use of his hands, he is the most helpless, and the most pitiable of creatures. No boy or girl is any the worse for learning some handicraft. Acquiring it will not retard, but assist his merely intellectual education. He will always be better of having learned it and it may be of the very greatest use to him. Mr. Wilde’s lecture teaches what many people to it hard to understand – the use of beauty.

Oscar Wilde was 27 years old at the time of his visit – he turned 28 the following week. The next evening he was in Moncton, then Saint John to finish, and on to New York City where he spent 10 weeks “flitting restlessly from hotel to hotel” and had all manner of adventures. On December 27, 1882 he sailed for London, a departure the New York Tribune reported like this:

Oscar Wilde has abandonded us without a line of farewell, slipped away without giving us a last goodly glance, left without a wave of his chiseled hand or a friendly nod of his classic head. This is the end of the aesthetic movement.

Oscar Wilde never returned to Charlottetown.

Credit to Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America and to Catherine Hennessey, who first blogged about Wilde’s visit to Charlottetown 13 years ago.