What was I thinking updating my avatar to one that made me look like a foreboding, drunken, bruised, giant-nosed weirdo?
I have recanted, and removed most traces thereof, replacing it with a variation of the same photo by Alper Çuğun from 2009 that I sliced and diced two years ago.
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So what was once this:
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is now this:
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Same image. Just revealing more of myself.
Maybe that’s a better metaphor than “here, let me stick my nose in your face,” no?
I spoke to the Queen’s Printers Association of Canada this week and wrote a little bit about my experience and included the slides I used.
The Queen’s Printers Association of Canada is meeting in Charlottetown this week, and Mike Fagan, Queen’s Printer for Prince Edward Island, who is hosting the meeting, asked me to be the keynote speaker, speaking to the conference theme of “Open Government – Open Information.”
And so on Monday morning I joined Queen’s Printers from most of Canada’s provinces, along with their federal counterpart, for an hour long session I called “A Cook’s Tour of Open Data from a User’s Perspective.”
My focus was not on policy and portals – often the terrain when open data is on the agenda – but, rather, on real world examples of how I’ve consumed, created and written about open data over the last decade.
Right off the bat I used the example of the association’s own agenda, distributed to attendees as a PDF file with, I suggested, the information “imprisoned” inside it – unable to be used, for example, in a desktop or mobile calendar app, unable to have alarms attached to it, unable to provide driving directions. I showed how with some cutting-and-pasting, the calendar could be freed from its PDF prison and recreated as an open iCalendar file that could show up on my phone, my tablet, my desktop, or any other device or service that could speak iCalendar.
I then proceeded to tell a series of open data “war stories,” each designed to illustrate an “open data principle,” an arbitrary (rather than universal) list that dervices simply from my own experiences. The projects I discussed were:
The 7 “open data principles” that emerged from these projects, which I discussed in more detail in light of these examples, were:
There was a good question-and-answer session after the presentation with some of the audience relating their own “war stories,” and we were able to pick up the conversation over lunch and delve into some additional areas.
It was clear that Queen’s Printers, as a group, are already well-versed in this area, and keen to learn more about how they can leverage the data and information they oversee the distribution of to increase citizen engagement through greater openness. I left the meeting enthusiastic that we’ll see great development in this area across Canada in the months and years to come.
In addition to the opportunity to speak with Queen’s Printers, the meeting also afforded me the opportunity to meet Krista Grant, Assistant Deputy Minister for Communications PEI, newly housed in Executive Council Office. Krista demonstrated a great understanding of the benefits of an open data philosophy, and indicated that there’s a strong will within government to move in this direction. Another reason for optimism.
Here are the slides I presented to Queen’s Printers as a PDF.
Oliver and I were having coffee this afternoon and I took this photo just to see how it would look if I held it up to my face:
Cropped into a square and filtered through Instagram, the photo ended up like this:
And, as I hadn’t updated my personal avatar since 2013, I decided to try it on for size:
I’m not entirely sold on it. Which is, I think, a good reason to leave it in place and see if it grows on me (and, I suppose, on y’all).
It’s Autistic Pride Day today, a day that, Wikipedia tells us, is “is a celebration of the neurodiversity of people on the autism spectrum.” I know this because Oliver, who’s the person in our family who’s on top of what-day-is-what, told me so.
My favourite explanation of what this day might mean comes from the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and its poster “Why Acceptance?” that reads, in part:
What is autism acceptance? Autism acceptance means embracing and valuing autistic people as autistic people instead of being afraid of us, having low expectations, or trying to find a way to make us not autistic.
and then continues:
Acceptance is not passive. Acceptance is an action. Acceptance means doing everything you can so that your autistic child will grow up into the best autistic adult they can be, supporting your autistic friends in a world that is not designed for us, and working to make our world a better, more inclusive, safer place for autistic people of all ages and abilities.
It is, in other words, not a day for me to mark how proud I am of my autistic son (although I am enormously proud, every day, of the man he is becoming), it is a day for us all to celebrate the pride that Oliver takes in being who Oliver is.
If I could snap my fingers and change the world, I wouldn’t change a single thing about Oliver: he is a funny, creative, perceptive, compassionate, person who I love dearly.
My job, as his father, is to ensure, to the extent that I can, that the world – the world that is, in many ways, not designed for him – greets Oliver on his terms.
We were in Nova Scotia for a long weekend, and on the spur of the moment Sunday decided to drive up the Valley toward Wolfville, an area of the province we hadn’t been to, as a family, in more than 15 years ago.
When we saw the sign on the highway pointing to “Coffee Museum” at the Grand Pré exit, I quickly signaled to exit, and 10 seconds later we were pulling into the driveway of the Just Us! café, retail store, roastery and coffee/fair trade museum. It’s an impressive operation and the museum in particular is of note for it covers not only the world of coffee, but the worlds of fair trade coffee and of cooperative enterprises (like Just Us!). Plus, they make an excellent cup of coffee.
As we’d left the highway anyway, I cast about for other things to see and do in Grand Pré, and the nearby National Historic Site because our next destination.
This too is an impressive destination: a well-done film and exhibit on the history of the expulsion of the Acadians all set in one of the most scenic areas of the country I’ve ever come across. Here’s a picture I casually snapped with my phone while walked back from the blacksmith shop on the edge of the site, looking over the rich farmland of the area, all reclaimed from the sea by Acadians more than 250 years ago:
We finished up the visit to the Valley with a jaunt into Wolfville for lunch at The Library Pub and a shop next door at The Box of Delights. Save for a brief oh-my-we’re-almost-out-of-gasoline panic on the other side of Windsor, it was an entirely pleasant day, and we’ve lots of reasons to go back before another 15 years passes.
This week I had occasion to learn about pin marks, courtesy of Ed from Swamp Press, who replied to a query I’d sent him asking “what about the pin marks?”
Which prompted me to wonder “hmmm, what does he mean by pin marks?”
So I set out to learn, ending up at Identifying Metal Type: Pin Marks, an excellent resource that says, in part:
A “pin mark” is a distinctive, usually circular, depression which appears on the side of some (but not all) metal printing types. It may be relatively simple … or quite elaborate … It is only one of many features which may assist in the identification of type.
My question for Ed was prompted by a careful reader of my Twitter feed noting that, in this proof of a poster for Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids, the U in “GUILD” appeared out of sorts.
And it was (I’d used a U of the wrong weight for that letter).
Which further prompted me to look more carefully at all the type and realize that the “S” in “AS” appeared out of sorts as well.
A closer examination of this “S” (on the right in the photo below) compared to other “S” (on the left in the photo) in the drawer revealed the, indeed, although they were all on a 36 point body, the one I’d pulled out was of a slightly larger size:
I sent a query to Ed – who knows more about metal type than I will ever know – and he asked, as indicated earlier, “what about the pin marks?”
So what about the pin marks!
Here’s a close-up of the pin marks on a “regular S” (left) and on an “oversize S” (right). What I learn from these is that the letter on the left was cast by Caslon, whereas the one on the right was cast by Stephenson, Blake. Both are marked “36,” for 36 point. Among other things this tells me that company that cast each, that it’s European type (as Caslon and Stephenson, Blake were both UK companies; indeed Stephenson, Blake acquired Caslon in the 1930s) and, generally, that it’s “foundry type,” as opposed to type cast on a Monotype casting machine.
The shocking thing is that this type has been in my midst – less than a metre from where I type, in fact – for two years, and it’s only now that I’ve come to learn that this helpful information is imprinted on every letter.
So much to learn!
Here’s the finished print, with both the U and the S corrected:
Writing my “10 years after Reboot” post yesterday afforded me a good opportunity to discover how much of the web gets broken after a decade of being left fallow. Here’s what I learned:
The greatest asset to my archival research was that time of my life, the spring and summer of 2005, being the high-point of my blogging volume: I wrote 850 posts that year, and was experimenting with with personal podcasting (after recording the first episode of Live from the Formosa Tea House the September before). I was also relatively disciplined with categorizing the posts I wrote here, so I found a rich Reboot7 tag when I went looking yesterday.
In retrospect I wish I’d taken more photographs of people rather than of Danish buildings. I wish I’d kept up my early-trip habit of reflection-through-podcasting, as I would like to hear myself ruminating on the conference after it happened in the same style as I did before. But, when all is said and done, there’s was a healthy enough collection of writing, audio, video and photographs to recall enough of the details of the event to memorialize it.
Ten years ago today, on June 7, 2005, almost exactly at the time I’m writing this post, I boarded an Air Canada flight to Copenhagen, via Montreal and London.
I was off to attend my first Reboot conference.
I’d first learned about Reboot through Ben Hammersley: a video of his talk at Reboot 6 in 2003 prompted me to send him an email in the summer of 2003 asking him to come and speak at our nascent Zap Your PRAM conference here on Prince Edward Island. To my surprise, he agreed. And we built a conference around him. And then, for complex reasons related here, he had to pull out. But we went ahead with the conference anyway, and it was a rousing success.
A couple of years later, I reasoned that, given that Reboot had been the spark that inspired Zap Your PRAM, I should visit the “mothership.”
The stars aligned to make this happen when, on June 2, 2015 Air Canada announced a no-advance-purchase-required seat sale. I booked flights ($1273 return), registered for the conference, and found a hotel. With 5 days to spare. I sent an email to conference organizer Thomas Madsen-Mygdal letting him know that, after earlier sending a “sorry, I can’t come” email, my story had changed:
This morning I opened my morning paper to find that Air Canada started a seat sale, with headline “Fly to Europe on a whim…” I took this as a sign. I’ve made room in my calendar, and rearranged some finances, and I’m coming to reboot.
I’ve registered on the reboot website, and sent payment in by Paypal.
And, on June 7, 2005, I headed to Copenhagen.
During my stopover in Montreal at Dorval Airport, I recorded a strangely-detailed podcast from the airport parking garage.
The next day, June 8, after flying overnight and transiting at Heathrow, upon my arrival in the CABINN Hotel I recorded another podcast.
And then, later that night, after several adventures involving my hotel room door not locking properly, I recorded yet another podcast, on that topic.
Although they were strangely-detailed, I’m glad I recorded those podcasts, as they are a pleasant little glimpse at younger-me through an audio time machine; I ruminated about this at the time.
By the morning of June 9, I was rested and fed and almost ready for Reboot to start.
I went out and about by bicycle for the day, recorded another podcast, where I reflected on my Copenhagen setup (iBook, Griffin iMic), on bicycling on the free Copenhagen bicycles, and on my visit to the Danish Architecture Centre.
After that full day of rambling around Copenhagen, I found my way to the pre-conference meetup at a bar downtown; at that event I met Jyri Engeström (memorialized in this photo) and then, a while later, Olle Jonsoon (memorialized in a story we both have versions of). One of the things Olle and I talked about that night was podcasting, and this prompted Olle to record one of his own, speculating on what was to come.
Reboot-proper started early the next morning, June 10, at Keddelhallen, and I recorded a little atmospheric sound from the front yard and then, a few moments later, some of the sounds from inside the main hall just before things got started.
And then Reboot began.
I learned. I ate. I met people.
Among those I met were Felix Petersen and Stefan Kellner, who presented (audio) about this thing they called Plazes, at the time a spare-time-hack, something I’d signed up for the September before and then promptly ignored. I re-installed Plazes on my iBook that night, and so my second Plazes “checkin” came on June 10 at 7:53 p.m. at Keddelhallen (something I know because I preserved my complete Plazes archive from checkin number one onward).
Last on the program on that first day was a showing of The Mother of All Demos (I captured a little audio here).
And then I came back the next day for Day 2, on June 11.
For that second day I opted to leave my iBook at the hotel and to use my Moleskine to “blog on paper,” which I described here and the results of which are here.
That night, en route to the post-conference supper, I met Mark Wubben and Anne van Kesteren – at the time young high school students. As it turns out, Mark was an enthusiastic listener of my friend Steven’s podcast.
That supper was, as it turns out, a big step for me in my rage against the shyness: I met a great collection of new people, simply by deciding that it would be a good idea.
That night, after the supper and the after-party, back at the CABINN I fired up Plazes again, and this gave rise to the Plazes-mediated meeting of Ton Zijlstra and Martin Röll.
The next day, June 12, I had another unexpectedly interesting supper, and then, on June 13, a walk in the countryside followed by supper in Sweden.
On June 14, I flew back to Prince Edward Island, via Frankfurt and Montreal. Exhausted but happy and very, very changed.
So many of the people I met at that first of the Reboots I attended are friends to this day; it seems like impossibly long ago that I met them all, but the intervening decade has been all the more interesting because of them.
I went back to Reboot in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 (that last year with Catherine).
And then, after five consecutive spring trips to Copenhagen, Reboot came to an end (or, perhaps, a multi-year hiatus?).
Dan Misener is bringing Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids to The Guild in Charlottetown on July 8, 2015.
Dan is one of my favourite broadcasters – indeed, one of my favourite people – and the evening promises to be rollicking good fun.
I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
To learn more about me, read my /now, look at my bio, listen to audio I’ve posted, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, see things I’ve favourited elsewhere, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way).
I have been writing here since May 1999: you can explore the 25+ years of blog posts in the archive.
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