For the last several months I’ve been working on printing a set of Prince Edward Island Terms of Union cards on my letterpress.

There are 18 cards in the set, each one summarizing a point in the 1873 agreement that saw PEI joining Canadian Confederation.

I’m now selling a limited quantity of the sets, each inside a custom-printed envelope, in my Etsy shop for $20 a set.

If you’d rather purchase for local pickup, I’m happy to arrange this directly; just drop me a line.

I’ve been using Bitly.com as a URL-shortening service for many years, mostly via IFTTT in a recipe that automatically tweets my blog posts here and post links to them on Facebook.

I took advantage of Bitly’s ability to configure a custom URL (they call it a “branded short domain”) to have my short links rendered under the l.ruk.ca subdomain rather than under bit.ly, something I did to allow me to repatriate the links under a system of my own control if something ever went wrong on Bitly’s end.

Recently I started to notice that my Bitly-hosted short links were showing up in a Google Search for site:ruk.ca and that made me uncomfortable, as, even though I’d been linking to whatever the destination of the link was at some time, I didn’t want the world, via Google, to think that the destinations were sites under my control.

I might post a link somewhere to the Republican Party, for example, and Bitly might give me a short URL like http://l.ruk.ca/1Y5vFet and then Google might index that and display it in search results. 

That felt creepy.

And so it was time to repatriate.

I found, to my surprise, that Bitly makes no provision, via its website, for exporting all the links I’ve shortened with it – I expected, but, alas, did not find a “export all my data” feature on bitly.com.

Fortunately Bitly does have an API that allowed me to do that export myself with a little coding.

I tracked down a handy Python script, py-bitly-exporter, to do the heavy lifting. I had to tweak the code a little to slow the export down, as I kept bumping into Bitly’s rate limit. To do this I inserted this in the head of the script:

from time import sleep

and this in the body of the script, inside the “while offset <= result_count:” loop:

sleep(0.3)

That slowed things down enough that I could export the 17,000+ links without hitting the limit.

The result was a file called links.csv that contained all my Bitly links, in comma-delimited form, like this:

http://l.ruk.ca/1OmlkZ7,"",http://ruk.ca/content/terms-union
http://l.ruk.ca/1QQHiWz,"",http://ruk.ca/content/five-islands
http://l.ruk.ca/1MQgW5h,"",http://ruk.ca/content/reinvented-vinyl

Once I had the links exported, I created a new Drupal site, installed the ShURLy module, and imported my exported data into the Drupal table shurly, putting in dummy values for fields like created and last_used, ending up with a table like this:

With that done and everything working as it should, I simply changed the DNS for the domain l.ruk.ca to point to my new Drupal site and, when I’m logged in, I can create new short URLs via a bookmarklet in my browser toolbar:

I’m missing all the Bitly razzmatazz with the migration — all the graphs and charts and other reports — but I never used the information anyway. The only thing I miss now is that Bitly support is burned into products like IFTTT and TweetDeck and these services don’t support roll-your-own link shorteners; so I’ll need to leave them to their own devices to shorten URLs as they like. At least the shortened URLs will no longer live under my domain.

To complete the process I added all manner of “no Google, not index this site nor the links on it” verbiage to the repatriated l.ruk.ca site so that, presumably, over time the links in Google’s search results will wither away and die.

Five years ago, on a walk through Old Montreal, I spotted a sign for Musée de l’imprimerie du Québec – the Printing Museum of Quebec. I didn’t have a chance, back then, to investigate what lay behind the sign, but the idea of a future visit was planted in my mind, and a trip back to Montreal this weekend provided the chance.

The museum can be visited by appointment only; fortunately I had some advance notice of our trip, so I emailed a request a week in advance and a tour was arranged for Friday morning at 11:00 a.m., in English. The museum is housed in the building of Lovell Litho, the city’s oldest printing company, which provides the space at no charge; the entrance to the museum is, literally, through the shop floor of the printing plant, dodging around print jobs in mid-creation by the company’s printers.

Tucked into the first floor corner of the print shop is the museum’s collection of equipment: an Intertype machine (a Linotype clone), several flatbed presses, a couple of platen presses, and a newspaper press that used to print Le Devoir, one of the city’s daily newspapers. We were greeted, on arrival, by the collegial and knowledgable Benoît, our guide and, for the next 90 minutes we received an expert tour through printing history over three floors of the building.

We learned about the printing newspapers, and about how the Linotype machine was the technology that allowed the daily newspaper in its current form to be produced, as it accelerated so dramatically the amount of type that could be set in a 24 hours period.

We learned about hand-set type, with a notch on every letter to indicate how each should be aligned with the other, and about how type is locked into forms for printing.

We visited the small metal-lined room where lead was melted into moulds for the Monotype and Linotype machines, and that the building was vacated while lead was being melted to mitigate the negative effects of breathing the fumes.

We learned about bookbinding and hot foil stamping, and about the limited-run books the museum produces to raise funds and to train a new generation of printers and designers in the trade.

While much of what we learned was familiar ground for me, Benoît’s exposition and enthusiasm meant I learned a lot, and that my mother and Oliver learned even more.  That the museum is housed in a building that has printing both bred in the bone and happening all around – the bookbinding shop sits directly beside the digital printing shop – made everything more real and meaningful. 

We’ve visited a lot of printing museums over the years, from Mainz to Tokyo to Venice to Basel, and while we’re seen grander museums, with more impressive collections of equipment, we’ve never learned as much, in as authentic a setting.

Sadly, we also learned that Lovell Litho, which has occupied the building on 423 Rue Saint Nicolas since 1835, will close next year, and so the museum will lose its patron and its home. We saw evidence of this during our visit, as the equipment was being packed up and readied for storage; indeed Benoît suspected that we might be the last group to tour the museum before it closes in mid-December.

Fortunately there are plans to find both a temporary short-term home and, the museum hopes, a permanent space to tell the story of printing in the Quebec context.  If you’d like to help the museum live to see another day, you can make a donation online.

Five years ago in Montreal, on a trip to celebrate my brother Steve’s wedding, Catherine and Oliver and I had lunch at Cluny ArtBar on 257 rue Prince; I described the place like this:

A little out of the way, but worth the walk. Very nice room, excellent food, pleasant service. Their coffee is fantastic and the tiny Belgian chocolate mousse is a perfect dessert.

Last Friday, my mother, Oliver and I found ourselves in Old Montreal looking for lunch after a tour of the Musée de l’imprimerie du Québec and so, to save ourselves the curse of choice, I suggested we walk over to rue Prince and have lunch there again.

It turns out that in the intervening five years the space had turned over, and was now a restaurant called Le Serpent. In the process, it had become a considerably more sophisticated restaurant and one that likely, in the natural course of affairs, we never would have sought out.

But by the time we knew this we were being seated and menus were in front of us.

And what a meal it was.

My mother and I both had the salmon, served over a bed of potatoes, which was excellent, and Oliver had the risotto nero with cuttlefish, stracchino and fennel; from his eager consumption thereof, I intuit that his was equally good.  The wine list, longer than my arm, was sufficient to lure us into having a glass of wine, sold by the glass for $6. We finished up with coffee and Oliver had the maple pudding, biscuit Breton with olives and compressed apple for dessert.

The service was transcendent: friendly, helpful in unexpected ways, welcoming of Ethan without question; a model for others to follow.

It was the best meal of the weekend, and, perhaps, the best meal of the year for me. And all the better for being an unlikely discovery in a familiar place.

In mid-2014, I switched the bandwidth provider here in the Reinventorium from Eastlink to Bell Aliant.

While I’d previously been using an Apple AirPort Extreme wireless router hooked up to the Eastlink modem, I put this away in the cupboard when Bell Aliant installed a wireless-capable router — an Actiontec R1000H — as part of its service. Why complicate the setup, I reasoned, with possibly-dueling routers.

And things worked well, with bandwidth of 50 Mb/s down and 50 Mb/s up  consistently since the original install.

Last week, though, I got a letter in the mail from Bell Aliant (curiously addressed to “Catherine Treasurer”) revealing that my (theoretical) 50/20 plan had been upgraded, at no additional cost, to a 100/50 plan; I saw no evidence of this in practice, however, with a Speed Test showing only 50/50:

I called Bell Aliant and asked them to check their modem, and they couldn’t find anything untoward, and so they scheduled a service call.

In the meantime, though, I wondered if it might be the wireless router, or my mid-2011 MacBook Air, that was the limiting factor, not the bandwidth into the office. So I plugged my MacBook directly into the Ethernet, and, presto, I was seeing much more bandwidth hardwired than I was seeing wirelessly.

I tried fiddling with the settings on the Actiontec R1000H to see if I could take advantage of heretofore-untapped capabilities of the router, but, try as I might, I couldn’t make it work any faster than 50/50.

So, on a lark, I took the old AirPort Extreme router out of the cupboard and set it up, plugging it directly into the Actiontec and creating 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz wireless networks.

On the 2.4 GHz AirPort network I got much the same throughput as with the Actiontec router; on the 5 GHz network, however, there was a dramatic uptick to 150/100, which is more than Bell Aliant tells me I should be getting (I’m not complaining):

So I’ve canceled the service call for Bell Aliant, and am now happily booting along the information superhighway with three times the horsepower.

Last last week Oliver and my mother and I visited the exhibit La bibliotheèque, la nuit — “The Library at Night” – at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec in Montreal.

We weren’t really sure what we were in for, but the keywords “Alberto Manguel,” “Robert Lepage,” and “360° video immersion technology” were enough to get us to book tickets.

Which is how we ended up walking into a recreation of Manguel’s own library, set up in the basement of the Grand Bibliothèque downtown, on Friday afternoon at 4:30 p.m.

After an introductory exposition — in French, so the signal to noise ratio for us was low, but the general idea was “libraries are great!” – we were told to open the hinged benches we were sitting on and remove virtual reality headsets. These turned out to be Samsung Gear VR units, which are, in essence, a headset wrapped around a commodity Samsung mobile phone.

With some instructions on how to operate the headsets – again, in French, so we had to fumble along and then ask for help – another door opened and we were ushered into a simulated forest of birch trees, filled with solid tables and swivel chairs of the sort you would find in a well-outfitted old library. The lighting was subdued and the tone hushed and reverent.

And we were then left to our own devices to explore the virtual worlds that had been created for us, 10 libraries from around the world.

The UI of the headset was a little tricky to figure out, but eventually we did: we were presented with a series of icons, spread out at eye level inside a virtual representation of the same simulated birch forest we were actually sitting in (thus a virtual simulation of an analog simulation). Each icon represented a different significant library, some contemporary, like the Library of Congress in the USA and the Parliamentary Library in Ottawa, and some recreations of lost libraries, like the Library of Alexandria. To visit one of the libraries you simply stared at the icon long enough and were then transported there, into the middle of a scene playing out around you – all around you, in 360 degrees.

The quality of the virtual reality was awe-inspiring: there was no lag as I moved my head around: I looked up, and there was the ceiling; I looked down, and there was the floor (only that my feet weren’t there, which was the only disconcerting aspect of the constructed reality). People moved about. Things burned down. Someone played the cello. It was the first demonstration I’d ever had that it was worth donning a clunky, ugly set of head-goggles to experience, in a surprisingly visceral way, another place and time.

We spent about an hour wandering about the libraries of the world: the narration of each library, which played along as one moved about, was helpful. I learned about the destruction of the National Library in Sarajevo, the whale skeleton that forms the spine of the Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City, the copy of Birds of America at the heart of the Parliamentary Library collection in Ottawa. I missed one of the ten recreations, a fictional “Nautilus library” from Jules Verne, but I found my way to the other nine.

It was an enjoyable, revelatory, educational experience, a rare piece of evidence that digital technology affords opportunities that analog technology could not, in any way, reproduce. That it was done with a sense of flair and theatricality, and in the heart of a lovely library itself, was even better.

The exhibition runs through August 2016, so you have plenty of time to plan a visit.

We’ve been traveling in airplanes with Oliver since he was 2 months old. He loves to travel, is comfortable in different places — sleeping, eating, exploring — and travel is one of the defining shared experiences of our family life and of Oliver’s education.

In recent years, though, the airport security screening experience has become a trigger for him, causing extreme anxiety and, a lot of the time, a meltdown that’s out of his control. It’s made travel more stressful for him, and for us.

The key issue has been that Oliver has had to go through the scanner by himself, leaving him across a great divide, in stressful, noisy, chaotic environments, from me or from Catherine. “Lost and lonely,” he describes it. Every new experience became worse because of the memory of all that which had come before.

We didn’t really know what to do, except to grin and bear it and try and get everyone calmed down as quickly as we could.

And then Ethan came into our lives.

And all of a sudden we started getting invited into “special services” security lines. They were still hell to pass through, but at least the lead-up to hell was abbreviated.

And then, during a particularly stressful, noisy and chaotic passage through Heathrow this October, a kind security officer said “would you prefer a manual search?”

“Yes!”, Catherine and I replied in unison.

We were ushered far away from the madding crowd into a quiet room with two friendly agents who did a manual physical search of Oliver and Ethan. It was calm. They were patient and communicated directly with Oliver. It was a very positive experience.

And so, on this weekend’s trip to Montreal, we resolved that was the way we were going to fly. We were bolstered by the helpful CATSA website Special Needs section that reads, in part:

Passengers with developmental or intellectual disabilities such as autism or Alzheimer’s disease can be screened without being separated from their traveling companions. If you need assistance, please inform the screening officer when you arrive at the checkpoint.

And so, passing through Charlottetown Airport on Thursday I simply told the officer “this is Oliver, he’s on the autism spectrum; we’ll need to stay together and he’ll need a manual search.”

They readily agreed, and forthwith Jeremy, who would be searching Oliver, invited me to walk through the screening machine while Oliver walked through beside and around with Ethan in-hand. He then went through a careful physical search of Oliver, communicating as he went through every step, working hard to respect Oliver and to establish trust. It was a dream compared to what we were used to. Oliver was happy. I was happy. Wow.

And tonight, heading back home through Montreal’s airport, we did the same thing. Here we had the added benefit of a special services security gate, so we were saved the wait and, again, I simply asked for a manual search and that we stay together. And, again, after a brief wait we were both guided around the screening machine; Oliver was searched by an officer with skills the equal of Jeremy’s, and then given a place to sit with Ethan while I went through a search. And, again, no stress. Happy travelers.

I wish someone had told us years ago that such an approach was possible, as it would have saved many, many stressful episodes – The Great Tokyo Meltdown of 2013 comes to mind.

And so I write this with the hopes that other travel companions of those on the autism spectrum might find it while Googling for a lifeline.

Oliver was watching over my shoulder as I wrote this post, and signed off on (and corrected spelling and grammar!) everything I wrote about him.

At the Lovell Litho & Publications plant in Montreal, home of the Musée de l’imprimerie du Québec.

In a laudable effort toward transparency and open data, the Office of the Third Party (the name bestowed on the Green Party in the Legislative Assembly) has released its expenses in comma-delimited ASCII format. In a blog post about the release, leader Peter Bevan-Baker requested feedback about the release and it seems only appropriate to provide the feedback in the open as well.

Format

The CSV file of the expenses appears to be simple a CSV export of the same spreadsheet used to generate the PDF file of the expenses, and as such it’s intended for human consumption not machine consumption.

Given that one of the benefits offered by open data is new opportunities for data visualization and analysis, machine readability generally trumps human readability (the PDF is fine for humans).

For example, if I wanted to track the expenses over the long term myself, to support longer-term analysis, the first thing I would do is to store them in a database. And to store them in a database in the current form would mean stripping out all of titles and subtitles, subtotals and grand totals intended for humans.

I would also need to convert the “amount” column to be simple decimal numbers, removing the “C$” from each figure so that these figures could be represented as numbers.

The result would look like this (visualized in a spreadsheet):

In this more machine-friendly format, I could simply import the CSV file directly into a database with no additional effort required.

Abbreviations, First Names and Context

What’s the CRRF-NAF 2015 Conference?  Who is Pat? Who is Peter? What is the WI (I know the answer, but does everyone? Will people know in 50 years?)

Using acronyms that aren’t generally understood, or only first names, means some of the meaning is lost. Spelling things out ensures everyone can understand, now and in the future.

Why did Pat go go the Cumberland Energy Symposium? And to the CRRF/NAF Conference and the Atlantic Summer Institute?

I don’t doubt that there are good reasons for all three, but it would be nice to know the context for expenses like this, even if it’s just a simple sentence like “Supporting the leader’s work on local energy independence.”

Why are the cell phone bills sometimes more than $200 a month when all-you-can-use cell phone plans are available for less than $60 a month. Maybe there’s a good reason for this; I don’t know (maybe there’s more than one phone? maybe they need to shop around for a better plan?). Explaining expenses that might appear unusual to the lay reader can head off misunderstandings. And, again, it adds helpful context.

Many of these issues can be solved simply by elaboration of the data already there — spelling out abbreviations, adding last names and titles — and in other cases it might be useful to accompany the data with a set of  explanatory notes that would add context (explaining conferences, cell phone plans, bank charges, etc.)

Hosting and Preservation

The release of the expenses was done through Peter Bevan-Baker’s own website. I would prefer to find the information under the Office of the Third Party website; I would expect the information there would have a better chance of being archived as part of the records of the Assembly than it would on Peter’s own website. It would also benefit being exposes to the Legislative Assembly’s search feature.

In any case, ensuring there’s a plan for long term preservation of the data is important.

Kudos

This is a great step forward, and my commentary above is offered in the spirit of “yes, and…” only. I hope the other parties quickly follow suit, and that this results in a sort of “openness arms race” where each tries to best the others in the degree of clarity, context and transparency offered to the public as spending of public funds is reported on.

This is the 2016 levee schedule for New Years Day, January 1, 2016 for Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island and area.

This is the 11th year I’ve been collating and confirming this information. If you’re new to all of this and want to give it a try, read How to Levee.

If you have additional levees to add, or changes to the information below, please drop me a line.

Changes from 2015

• Table now includes accessibility information.
• New levee at Andrews of Stratford.
• New levee at Upstreet Craft Brewing (well-timed for an uptown swing to UPEI and the Women’s Institute).
• New levee from Discover Charlottetown and The Guild.
• There is no levee at HMCS Queen Charlotte this year.
• Added the levee for The Kitchen Witch. Not technically in the “Charlottetown Area,” but included nonetheless.
• The Premier’s Levee returns to the Confederation Centre of the Arts.
• In a stunning blow to the “Charlottetown area” in the title of this post, I’ve added the City of Summerside levee for this first time. Welcome, western neighbours.
• Now that Summerside’s on the list, seems only right to add Borden-Carleton. And Kensington.

The code that generates all of the above is available on Github.

License

Like the rest of this website, the levee schedule covered under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike License. That means that you’re free to copy the data, publish the data, mash up the data, share the data, but that you must provide a credit to the source, like:

Schedule data from ruk.ca/levee-2016  under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike License.

You’re encouraged to spread the information here as far and as wide as possible.