I’ve been a member of the home and school association at Prince Street School since my son Oliver started there six years ago. Oliver’s moving on to intermediate school in the fall, and I’d been searching a way of marking the end of his time at the school; when I heard Mark Leggott sing the praises of the library’s Espresso Book Machine as a community resource at a conference session in May, I decided that “making a book” seemed like a good project to take on.

Literacy is important at any elementary school; there’s a particular focus on literacy at Prince Street, and the school holds a “Young Author’s Night” to celebrate student writing every May; every grade 6 student prepared a piece of work for that night, and, upon hearing of my idea, the school’s two grade 6 teachers, Jo-Anne Parsons and John Macfarlane reasoned that those pieces of writing would make good material to assemble into a book.

Robertson Library’s Espresso Book Machine is an amazing piece of technology: you send it a PDF of the insides of a book and a second PDF of the cover and it spits out bound paperback books that look, well, just like bound paperback books. The machine is available to any individual or group on Prince Edward Island who wants to publish a book; it’s not difficult to do, and I thought I’d outline the process I went through so that others can follow, especially others who want to assemble student writing into a book.

Getting the Writing

The plan was to set aside a single page of the book for a piece from each student. The writing was already typed into a word processor – Microsoft Word on the computers in the school’s lab, stored in the individual students’ personal account.

For John’s class, the technology coordinator at the school, Philip Brown, had the smart idea to use the opportunity to teach the students how to send an email with an attachment to me; as a result I ended up with 17 email messages in my inbox one day, one from each student in John’s students.

For Jo-Anne’s class I received a single Word document with all of her students’ writing, directly from her by email.

I double- and triple-checked the documents to make sure I had something from every student, and asked Philip to double-check every name for spelling.

Assembling a Book

I use the Mac OS X Pages word processor every day, so I decided it was the tool I would use to make the book.

I like books that are tall and narrow, so after playing with some different sizes I decided on 6”x10” for this book (the Espresso Book Machine will print books as small as 4½”x5” and as large as 8¼”x10½”). So to start I set up a custom page size in Pages (File | Page Setup | Paper Size | Manage Custom Sizes) of 6”x10”:

I then opened each of the Word files I received and cut-and-pasted the text into a new Pages document, removing any formatting in the process (Edit | Paste and Match Style) and inserting a page break at the end of each piece.

I then created “styles” in Pages for the author’s name (“Author”), for the title of the piece (“Title”), and for the body text (“Body”) and went through the document highlighting text and assigning styles as needed:

It became apparent that the plan of “one page per student” wasn’t going to work out: some of the pieces were only a paragraph, some were 5 or 6 paragraphs. It turns out, however, that a technical requirement solved this problem for me: the Espresso Book Machine needs books to be 80 pages at minimum, and so I needed to make the book “thicker” and I did this by assigning two pages per student, a right-facing one to start and then, if needed, continuing onto the next left-facing page:

This format made for a nice 76-page book, which was close enough to 80 pages to make it workable for the machine.

I decided to organize the book by alphabetical last name of students so, with some additional cutting-and-pasting, rearranged the pieces into this order. I then decided that it would be nice to have a table of contents, so I used the “Table of Contents” feature on Pages (Insert | Table of Contents) to do this, setting the “Author” style that I’d already used for formaating to be the paragraph style that defined a table of contents item:

Finally I created the introductory pages of the book, starting with a blank right-facing page, then a “thank you” page with credits, and finally a “title” page:

Making a Cover

My original thought was to use something photographic for the cover (the Espresso Book Machine can print black and white on the inside and full colour for the cover), but I was too late to have time to assemble photos of all the students, didn’t have a good photo of the school itself, and nothing else presenting itself, so I decided to use the students’ names as the cover.

The helpful Creating an EBM Ready PDF prepared by the library has a formula for determing the size of the cover. My book was 6”x10”, so to begin with the cover (back plus front) would be 12”x10”, but there needs to be an allowance for the spine, and this depends on the number of pages and the thickness of the paper. In my case the calculation went like this:

76 pages ÷ 377.3585 = 0.2014 inches

I opened a new Pages document and created a second custom paper size of 12.2014”x10” for the cover:

I copied the names of the students from the table of contents in the book into the cover document, removed all of the carriage returns, and then set each student’s last name in a different colour, choosen at random. And then copied-and-pasted the names until they filled up the page and inserted a text box (Insert | Text Box) for the title:

I made sure that the title box was centred inside the right-hand 6 inches of the front cover so that when the book was printed it would be centred.

The names ran over to a second page, but that was fine as when I printed the cover to a PDF I just limited the printing to the first page (having them run over meant that the last line, ending with Dil, was fully justified).

Printing the Book

With the inside and the outside of the book in Pages my final step was to print to a PDF (File | Print | Save as PDF). There was nothing special that I needed to do when I did this; it was just a regular old PDF.

I emailed the two PDF files up to Robertson Library, and the next day was alerted that the was a proof copy of the book ready for me to take a look at. I jumped on my bicycle and was there 30 minutes later, eager to see what the final product look like.

Here’s what the book looks like coming out of the Espresso Book Machine:

And here’s what the printed book looks like:

I read through the proof carefully, didn’t find anything that needed changing, so gave the go-ahead to print 50 copies of the book. By the end of the week they were ready and so I drove up to Robertson Library on Monday morning and picked them up and dropped copies off at the school for distribution – on the second last day of school, as it turned out.

Reaction from the Students and Teachers

I wasn’t at the school when the books were distributed, but fortunately CBC’s Island Morning radio programme sent a reporter up to the school to interview Jo-Anne Parsons and some of her students; I think the piece captures the reaction well, and listening to it made me feel happy that we’d done it.

Distribution of the Book

It was important to me, and to the teachers, that book be available not only to the students – who each received a copy to take home, for free – but also that the book enter the collections of the school, public and university libraries, so copies were sent to each and they’ll be catalogued and available to the public.

I also uploaded the book to the Internet Archive for preservation, both as a PDF (the same PDF that was printed), and as an ePub-formatted ebook.

I created using the ePub version of the book with the Sigil open source ePub editor); I’d originally tried Pages’ own “Export as ePub” function, but I found that this resulted in an ePub that was too heavily-formatted to be useful on ereaders, so I started from scratch in Sigil, exporting the text from Pages as “Plain Text” and then cutting and pasting into Sigil with one ePub “section” for each piece. When it was done, it looked like this:

And in Readmill the ePub is quite readable:

This popped up on my Macbook Air’s screen a moment ago:

It appeared there because I finally got around to adding a feature to the City Cinema website that I’ve been meaning to add for years: for any film on the calendar you can now click a handy link and add that day’s show of that film to your local calendar (technically it sends you an iCalendar format; on a Mac this will just magically load into iCal; not sure what it does for Windows or Linux).

So when you’re looking at a film’s details, like Mud you will see tiny calendar icons beside each time on the calendar; click them to experience the magic:

I expect this tiny update to increase my City Cinema attendance by 200%.

Remember the Evans McKeil, the tug that visited Charlottetown Harbour last week? Well I noticed last night that she was back, and I decided that I couldn’t let this second visit pass without going down to the Port of Charlottetown to take a look up close. After all, had my father had his way, I would have once worked for McKeil Marine and the tug might have been my workplace.

Regular readers may recall that Catherine, having grown up on a farm, is the most trespassing-averse person you’ll ever meet. She simply won’t trespass, or even engage in anything which has the slightest whiff of trespassing. Fortunately, Catherine is 1,500 km away as I type, visiting family in Ontario. Although her trespass-averse ways have infected me, there lurks inside me the kernel of a trespasser, and it was that kernel that I called upon to allow me to breach the tight security at the port.

As it turns out, all those “RESTRICTED AREA: Authorized Persons Only Beyond This Point” signs that greet you at the end of the wharf appear, at least on Canada Day, to be security theatre. After cycling through the (wide-open) front gate, I dutifully knocked on the door of the “Port Security” shed, thinking that I should at least check in.

But there was nobody home.

I cycled to the end of the cruise ship side of the wharf but was greeted by 12’ high fencing that extended out over the water (apparently keeping cruise ship passengers penned-in is the highest priority of the port).

On my way back I noticed that the high security fencing separating the cruise ship side of the wharf from the working wharf had a convenient passageway in it at the end, just the size of a stout middle-aged man riding a bicycle.

I pedalled my way through, and, shortly thereafter, was standing in front of the Evans McKeil, perched with her bow abutting a football-field-long gravel barge that she’d nudged here from Nova Scotia.

It bears mentioning at this point that I have an almost-pathological fear of burly working men. This is why Catherine handles relationships with the trades in our household, and it’s likely the aspect of my personality that my father though might get toughened out of me if I went to work on a tugboat when I was 16.

So introducing myself to the crew of a gravel-barge-pushing tugboat – perhaps the burliest of burly working men – is not in my nature. But now was not the time to be a shrinking violet.

“Hello there,” I yelled down to the crew, a group of 3 or 4 men gathered in the stern.

“Happy Canada Day!” they yelled back. “You’re not the guy who’s bringing us beer are you,” one of the crew joked.

“Sorry, no,” I replied. “I’ll see what I can do, though,” I joked back.

“Is this the Evans McKeil that was built in 1936?”, I asked.

“She is,” an orange-suited crewman replied. “She’s riveted together,” he said proudly as he pointed out the rivets in her hull, “made before welding.”

“She’s beautiful,” I said.

They nodded.

“Have a good holiday,” I yelled down as I pedalled off.

“You too,” they replied.

Now I may have a pathological fear of tug boat crewmen, but I also know that if a tugboat crew jokes about beer, they’re probably thirsty for beer. And it’s Canada Day. And they’re stuck on a 77-year-old tugboat behind hundreds of tonnes of gravel.

It was time to spring into action.

Fortunately the recent liberalzation of liquor laws here in Prince Edward Island means that the liquor stores are open on holidays like today. I pedalled up to the Queen Street store, made my way to the cold beer cooler (reasoning that cool beer rather than warm beer is best to ward off the taste of gravel barge in your mouth), and picked up a 12-pack of made-in-PEI Beach Chair Lager (my choice made both in support of a PEI brewery and also because their 12-pack of cans seemed like it would fit in the carrier on the side of my bicycle).

I made my way back to the Evans McKeil, once again breaching the stringent security perimeter, and found two of the crew, including the one I’d chatted with, up on the wharf.

“You didn’t think I’d really bring you beer, did you?”, I asked.

They had a puzzled look on their faces.

“Happy Canada Day!”, I said, as I handed over the beer. “My father knew Evans McKeil, and I’m just passing this along.”

Somewhat disbelievingly – who is this strange man on a bicycle bearing gifts of beer, their look said – they thanked me warmly.

I pedalled off into the sunset, safe in the notion that I’d done the right thing, and made a tugboat crew’s hard life just a little easier.

I hope I did my father proud.

Happy Canada Day!

Remember frozen yogurt? It was big in the early 1990s. For a time there it seemed that you couldn’t escape it, whether you were filling up your car with gasoline or buying chicken. I went to the big franchise show in Toronto back then and everywhere you looked it was frozen yogurt franchise opportunities.

And then, mysteriously, it went away.

Even Dairy Queen stopped serving frozen yogurt a few years ago.

But it’s back.

And, as it turns out, I happen to have two friends in the business, running competing frozen yogurt places in Charlottetown mere blocks from each other. Downtown froyo and midtown froyo, you might say.

Downtown it’s Berry Healthy, owned by former provincial government mandarin Chris Leclair and aided by my friend Cynthia King. Located on Kent Street in the old Captain Submarine space on the first floor of the Royal Trust Tower beside the police station, it opened this weekend and I’ve just returned from my first visit.

Inside it’s all hypergreen and hyperpink, mirroring the colours on the logo. The interior architecture was by N46, the interior design by Ottoman Empire, and the graphic design was by Kate Westphal (who I worked with many years ago at the Anne of Green Gables Store where, among other things, she designed the labels for a line of preserves that I sourced; she’s very talented).

The format is much as you’ll encounter in any latter-day frozen yogurt place: a bank of machines, each dispensing two flavours with the capability of swirling the two together. You serve yourself and then move on to a “toppings bar” filled with all manner of things, from crushed Skor bars to (as the name would seem to demand) blueberries, pineapple and kiwis. It’s sold by weight, so to pay you place your cup on a scale and you pay by the ounce.

Blocks away, at the University Avenue end of the Holiday Island Motor Inn, is “midtown froyo,” Islands Frozen Yogurt Bar, the new Charlottetown branch of a shop that opened last year on the main intersection in Cavendish.

Islands is run by my friend Linda Lowther and her family (Linda herself is a former provincial government mandarin), and while I have yet to visit, I understand the format is in the same mold: squirt yourself some yogurt, lavish on the toppings, pay by weight.

The palette at Islands is also rich, albeit not so “hit you over the head with a colour hammer” as Berry Healthy; a pale blue accented with a vibrant orange.

And so, where you’d be hard-pressed to get a cup of frozen yogurt in Charlottetown last summer, this summer we’ve got our very own frozen yogurt showdown happening.

Both shops opened this weekend.

Both are running promotions (Islands is giving away 1000 bowls of yogurt, Berry Healthy is handing out discount cards that give you your first 5 oz. for free).

And both are promoting themselves on Facebook (as of this writing Berry Healthy has a slight “likes” edge, with 719 likes to Islands’ 658 likes) and Twitter (@berryhealthypei vs. @islandfroyo).

It’s like 1998 all over again – the year Deep Impact vs. Armageddon both asteroids-vs-Earth movies, opened the same summer – but more local and more frozen.

Fortunately, as anyone in the more-than-a-dozen coffee shops that have opened in the last 20 years can tell you, competition can grow the market, and so we might find ourselves with a burgeoning longterm frozen yogurt duopoly in the city.

Or we might mysteriously all lose our taste for frozen yogurt, as we did the first time around, and move on to kale frappes or icy pickles or marmalade taffee or whatever the next dessert trend to come along is.

In the meantime, enjoy your embarrassment of Skor-bar-sprinking opportunities, Charlottetowners.

And best wishes to my friends Linda and Cynthia as they square off, froyo vs. froyo, in friendly frozen competition.

I have a MarineTraffic.com alert set up to let me know when vessels arrive and depart Charlottetown Harbour; early Friday morning one of these alerts landed in my email:

Not so remarkable, perhaps: it’s shipping season and with oil delivery and pleasure craft and cruise ships I get several alerts like this a week. But this one was different: I recognized the name “Evans McKeil.”

My father spent much of his career studying the nearshore area of the Great Lakes and this meant that he spent a lot of time on and around boats. By virtue of this he knew Evans McKeil the man and his company, McKeil Marine. A 1996 article in the Hamilton Spectator describes McKeil’s early life:

Boats have been Evans McKeil’s life since he was a youngster in Pugwash, Nova Scotia.

In the 1930s, Mr. McKeil watched fishing boats head out to sea from the port of 600 souls.

His uncles sailed cargo-laden schooners across the Bay of Fundy to St. John, New Brunswick.

And following World War II, a teenaged Mr. McKeil helped his father, lumber mill owner William McKeil, build a few boats.

At one point when I was a teenager my father suggested the I look for a summer job with McKeil; I think the idea was that this would toughen me up and perhaps teach me how to drink beer. I went to work for Canadian Tire instead and as a result missed out on a career on the water (and never really learned how to drink beer).

The Evans McKeil that arrived in Charlottetown yesterday morning at 6:28 a.m. UTC is a tugboat. According to information my father passed along, she was built in 1936 and christened “Alhajeula” by the Panama Railway in the construction of the Panama Canal. The tug left Charlottetown yesterday at 23:29 UTC, bound for Nova Scotia. As I write she is making her way through the Canso Strait:

Some might consider it odd that I went to the trouble of setting up an AIS receiver in Charlottetown to monitor port traffic; it’s precisely for stories like this that I did so, though. While not the port it once was, Charlottetown Harbour still plays host to vessels from around the world; every one has a colourful past.

[[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] are spending two weeks up in Ontario visiting her family and mine and they took the opportunity to stop over in Ottawa for a couple of days to give Oliver his first opportunity to visit Parliament Hill.

Remembering my own first visit to the Hill in the late 1970s as a high school student, when I was taken for lunch in the Parliamentary Restaurant by my MP, Geoff Scott, I encouraged Catherine to get in touch with the office of our MP, Sean Casey, to see if they could facilitate a tour. They got back to her quickly, and generously offered to meet Catherine and Oliver yesterday morning at 10:30.

Their tour guide was an Islander and long-serving Parliament Hill staffer, Mary Gillis. As it happens, Mary is retiring today, and their tour was her last. All reports are that she was an excellent, thorough guide with a deep knowledge of the Hill.

Mary mentioned to Catherine that she is a sometime-reader of this blog, and so I wanted to take the opportunity to tip my hat to her, both for her service yesterday and for her service to our Members of Parliament over her time there.

The First Day of Grade One

The Last Day of Grade Six

I spent this morning being trained to use an Objet30 Desktop 3D printer up in the nascent fablab in the Engineering Department at the University of PEI.

Remember last week when it was announced that an “old line” 3D printer company called Stratasys was going to purchase the “young upstart” 3D printer company Makerbot? Well one of Stratasys’s projects is the Objet30, and as of today there’s one set up and running on the 3rd floor of Dalton Hall at UPEI.

Andy Trivett, Chair of Engineering at UPEI, has been spearheading an effort to create a Fablab at the university, and in addition to acquiring equipment – 3D printers, a laser cutter/engraver, a CNC milling machine – he’s been working hard to involve the university community and the community at large in the effort, with hopes that it will become a broadly-used laboratory for making and experimenting.

The Objet30 is complex enough that the dealer – Javelin from Halifax – insists on sending over a technician for a familiarization exercise, and that’s what I attended this morning, along with a motley collection of people from the university community.

The Objet30 is quite different from the consumer 3D printers that are becoming popular (and cheap) these days: it uses (rather expensive; ballpark is $7/square inch) photo-polymer liquid to “print” in much the same way an inkjet printer prints, albeit with a third axis to allow it to print in 3D, and with a second “support material” jet to allow it to print material that will later wash away but that can support overhangs and other complex bits.

The 3D objects that the machine can produce seem awfully impressive, and lack the “jagginess” that you might be used to if you’ve seen the projects of printers with lower resolution.

What’s unclear to me at this point is whether the cost and complexity of the Objet30 will be worth it for everyday hacking around; fortunately now that UPEI is host to (at least) three 3D printers (the Objet30 and a uPrint in the Fablab and the Ditto in Robertson Library) it’s possible to contrast and compare.

If you’re interesting in “making” and would like to participate in getting the UPEI Fablab up and running, I encourage you to drop Andy a line, he’s very approachable, very committed to this not being a “university only” lab, and a man full of advice and eager to try new projects to boot.

As you will know if you follow me on Twitter, from a series of alternately mournful and celebratory tweets of late, the musical Anne & Gilbert is running in The Guild this summer. And by “in The Guild” I mean “in the theatre that is 6 inches on the other side of the wall directly in front of where I sit and work every day.”

We learned that Anne & Gilbert would be moving in back when there was still snow on the ground, so we’ve had a lot of time to dwell on the implications of sharing a tiny space with effervescent singers and dancers professing Anne’s love for Gilbert daily. All we really had to go on when pondering what it would be like was our experiences last spring when the Holland College Performing Arts showcase was held in the theatre and we were subjected to entertained by endless iterations of Queen songs rehearsed by a impossibly keen bunch of triple threats.

So, let’s just say there was some dread.

All the more so because, despite numerous career turns that have seen me employed in the “Anne” industry (promoter of Anne on www.gov.pe.ca, drafter of business plan for Avonlea Village, procurer of Anne-themed preserves for the Anne of Green Gables Store, purchaser of Belmont school house for aforementioned Avonlea Village, etc.), I’ve never completely bought into the idea of celebrating Anne through singing and dancing and carrying on.

There’s a solid novel underneath it all, a story that I am happy to have my adoptive province hang its tourism hat on. But I only lasted through half of the other Anne of Green Gables musical before I had to leave from the sheer frivol of it all. And all I knew of Anne & Gilbert was Oliver – perhaps the Island’s biggest fan of Anne musicals, as it ironically turns out – belting out “You’re Island, You’re Island, You’re Island through and through” for several weeks after returning from the old Summerside-based production.

Now that we’re a week in to a season of 134 performances – 8 shows a week from now until October – I am happy to report that all the dread was for naught.

Well, okay, not exactly naught.

That “You’re Island” song still drives me bonkers.

And it is slightly distracting to have your office break out in applause every 5 minutes (although, if you’re distracted and forget where you are, it can enliven the soul too).

And there are a couple of numbers where it seems (I haven’t seen the show yet, so I’m guessing) the entire cast is jumping up and down, an act that makes the building shake.

But, otherwise, it’s really all quite delightful.

It turns out that I’m actually quite keen on many of the musical numbers. Indeed I can sing lines from many of them by heart now, and, as Oliver can attest, have been known to belt out “Anne of Green Gables loves Gilbert” at the top of my lungs while driving around town.

And, above anything else, there’s a tremendous energy in the building. The staff at The Guild have a new sense of purpose. And there are happy people singing and dancing and carrying on every day. Which turns out to make not for an oppressive workplace but for a more creative one.

At least that’s the theory so far.

Anne’s presence in our midst has had additional implications, as the basement space where my Golding Jobber No. 8 letterpress is based has been transformed from a seldom-used arts education and screen printing studio into an oft-used costume shop and dressing room for the show. Where once was a pressure washer for cleaning screens, there is now washer and dryer to launder the costumes; where once children’s art supplies stood you will now find wigs and suspenders and leather shoes.

To the enormous credit of The Guild, I wasn’t evicted: the letterpress still has its little corner, with enough space cleared around it to allow me to work.

What’s been restricted, however, is the time available for me to do so. Running a 97 year old, one ton iron machine is incompatible with the needs of Anne and Gilbert switching costumes, so I have to squeeze in printing time around the showtimes (yes, there’s an app for that). But even in that there is a silver lining, as having only a very few times during the week where I can print, instead of “any old time,” turns out to be the call to action I need to get me back into the shop.

So, at least at this hour, with a few weeks done and more than 3 months to go, living with Anne of Green Gables turns out to be a turn for the better, not an occasion for despair.

(And you should really come and see the show; I’ve not seen it myself, as I said, but I’ve heard it more than anyone outside of the cast, and it’s impressive!)

On Sunday afternoon I was sitting at the front table at Casa Mia Café here in Charlottetown eating lunch. As I have many times before, I watched new customers walk in the front door, stop, and, looking confused, wonder what they should do. Should they sit down? Wait to be seated? Order at the counter? At various times of the day for various customers Casa Mia supports all of these. Which doesn’t make it any easier if you’re new in down and looking for a sandwich.

So I sent my friend Mehrnoosh, co-owner of Casa Mia, an email:

Sitting at the front of Casa Mia and watching how many new customers get confused, I recommend a sign on the podium:

Please Take a Seat!
(For take-out, feel free to order at the counter)

Or something to that effect.

This afternoon, walking by Casa Mia on my way uptown, I noticed this:

Okay, so there’s an extra space between “take” and “-out” and there should be a comma between “take-out” and “feel free” – but there was a sign! In less than 24 hours! Behold my awesome consumer power!

What have you recommended to your coffee shop today?