It’s nice to know that my city is capable, on occasion, of living up to its inspired city propoganda. Witness this sign, spotted on the way to work this morning:

It’s such a great initiative: it encourages people to walk by defeating the perception by all Islanders (myself included) that to go more than a few blocks will take an hour to walk so you’d better take the car. Bravo, city, bravo.

(The QR code, if you scan it with a mobile device, leads to a Google Map of the route from the sign to the destination).

I’ve been intrigued by the word-building game Minecraft since my friend Morgan turned me on to it a couple of years ago. I’m not a devoted player – I need to preserve my hands and forearms for revenue-generating typing – but I recognize a lot of potential for creativity and exploration and learning in the game, something that’s being focused by the MinecraftEdu project.

To help stimulate the Minecraft community in Charlottetown, I’m hosting an Open Minecraft Lab at Robertson Library, University of PEI, this Saturday, April 20, 2013 from 10:00 a.m. to Noon. There are 25 spots, and you must pre-register. It’s all ages, all abilities, and parents and guardians are encouraged to attend.

About the Lab

An informal opportunity to come and play Minecraft, the popular world-building game, with other people.

The emphasis will be on sharing what we know, on learning new tips and techniques: so please come with questions and answers, and your curiousity.

Who can attend?

You can be an absolute beginner, or a longtime player: we want to create an space for players of all skill levels to teach each other.

There is no age limit; people under 18 are asked to obtain permission from parent or guardian to attend, and parents are welcome to attend too, either to play or just to learn and help.

The lab is limited to 25 attendees, and you must register a spot in advance if you want to attend (parents or guardians accompanying player do not need to register).

Where is it?

The lab will be held in the Modern Language Lab at Robertson Library, University of PEI.

There is free parking on the UPEI campus, and the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market is just across the street and is a good place to stop for breakfast before or lunch after.

The lab is equipped with thirty 20” iMacs and a SMART board. We’ll be running our own Minecraft server in the lab so that players can play together.

How much does it cost?

The workshop is free.

You do NOT need to have a Minecraft account (but you can use your Minecraft account if you have one).

What do I need to bring?

If you have a Minecraft account already, please bring your username and password.

Question from Parents?

Minecraft is being used by educators to teach everything from technology to engineering to math to architecture. The MinecraftEdu website is a good clearinghouse for information about the use of Minecraft in schools.

This lab is being organized by Peter Rukavina, Hacker in Residence, University of PEI. You can phone me at (902) 892-2556 or email prukavina@upei.ca is you have any questions or concerns.

Over on my Hacker in Residence blog I’ve been doing some experimenting with the City of Charlottetown zoning map, taking the raw map from the city, massaging the data and merging it with provincial civic address database information to end up with a Google Earth-friendly KML of the zoning map that makes it much easier to search for and visualize zoning.

So you can see the entire city, with each properly colour-coded by zone:

Or you can zoom in and turn off all the zoning other than “open space” to see where there’s parkland downtown:

What’s really nice is that because Google Earth is being used to view the information, all of the other Google Earth layers, from 3D buildings to Wikipedia annotations, can be overlaid:

You can get Google Earth for free from Google and the KML file for free from:

http://charlottetown.reinvented.net/zoning/charlottetown_zoning_enhanced.kml

There’s nothing worse than someone hijacking their own blog for weeks after returning from a trip with tales of their adventures: travel tales wither quickly on the vine. And so I’ll shut down the Japan-trip-travel-tale operation with a final few observations:

1. I continue to be facsinated by the fact that in Tokyo metro escalators people stand on the left and walk on the right, whereas in Kyoto and Osaka they stand on the right and walk on the left. We never really did figure out which side of sidewalk to walk on, nor the proper pedestrian-yielding technique at scramble crossings like Shibuya.
2. Because so many people have asked me: we had no problems whatsoever with language. Outside of “hello” and “goodbye,” we didn’t know any Japanese; through a combination of English-speaking Japanese people (in hotels, trains, larger restaurants, and on street corners) and effective pointing, we made our way without incident. Almost every restaurant we visited had some semblance of an English menu, and it’s very common to have pictures or models of food in restaurant windows.
3. If you’re looking for a clean, relatively inexpensive, well-located hotel in Tokyo, we recommend The B Akasaka. We paid about $110 a night for a twin room (the rate varied from night to night), which included a very nice buffet breakfast (number one tip for successful travel: eat a good breakfast every day). The staff was friendly and helpful. The room was clean and well-equipped (robes, toothbrush and toothbased, shampoo, soap) and had a space-age toilet. There’s a coin laundry on the first floor. The key to accessing the hotel is to walk out of the metro (Akasaka station, exit 3B) and around the back of the Akasaka Theatre beside the TBS building and then take the outdoor TBS elevator up to the fourth floor: this saves walking up the hill to the hotel, and makes the hotel about 5 minutes from the metro. It’s really easy to get anywhere from The B Akasaka: it’s within 15 minutes walk of three different metro lines. And there are a lot of places to eat in the neighbourhood, from fancy restaurants to the 7-11.
4. Speaking of the 7-11: many Japanese ATMs don’t accept North American cards, but all 7-11 stores seem to have machines that do, and it’s always really easy to find a 7-11 store, as they’re everywhere. 7-11 is also a good place to pick up a quick bite to eat, especially if you’re catatonic after a trans-Pacific flight and you’re not prepared to decrypt a restaurant experience quite yet.
5. We snagged a last-minute weekend rate of $123/night, which included a lavish buffet breakfast, at the Hyatt Regency Osaka, and it was a great hotel, the likes of which we could otherwise never have afforded. The hotel seems out of the way, as it’s located in the port district and to reach it from the Cosmosquare metro station requires a 15 minute walk or a free hotel shuttle (every 15 minutes from the top of the escalator at the metro); for all practical purposes, though, it’s as central as anything else in Osaka, and we found the location suited our purposes well. The ATC mall across the street (take the pedway for easy access; ask the concierge for directions) has a good selection of outlet stores and restaurants, and you can also catch the “new tram” metro line there if you’re heading south.
6. To pay for something in a shop or restaurant, place your money on the tray you’ll find in front of the cash register. Your cashier will take your money, count it, ask you to confirm the amount, and then give you your change in two parts, bills first (counted in an interesting reverse-over-the-hand move) and then your change. This ritual makes the Canadian way of paying for things seem barbaric and prone to error.
7. Make sure you visit a so-called conveyor belt sushi restaurant; you can get a filling meal for a good price, you can see what you’re going to eat in advance, and the technology (race car models that deliver special orders placed on a touch screen, for example) is very neat. Each has its own particular system for special orders – sometimes it’s on a touch screen, sometimes you order from a server who’s roaming around – but in our experience the payment system is common: plates on the conveyor belt are colour-coded and when you’re ready to go they are tallied up and you’re given a receipt and take it to the cashier.
8. There are vending machines everywhere: metro platforms, building lobbies, street corners. It’s easy to tell what you’re buying because there are models of the cans or bottles displayed and you just press the button under what you want to order. You can get both hot and cold drinks (look for the word “hot” on the bottle in the display).
9. It’s very easy to find public washrooms: every public building and restaurant has them, they are universally clean, and generally have modern fixtures. We only encountered the older “squat” toilets in a few metro stations and at a mountainside shrine; you’ll figure out how to use them (and note that in some older buildings you’ll find a few stalls with squat toilets and a few stalls with modern ones). In facilties catering to children there are often excellent diaper changing rooms, special in-stall highchairs in one or two stalls if you need to take a baby in the stall with you, and tiny toilets for kids.
10. If you’re going to take the metro — and you are — then invest in a Suica or Passmo card. These are pre-paid rechargable cards that you wave up against the “IC” logo at metro and bus turnstiles on both the way in and way out. If you’ve got sufficient balance on the card to cover the cost of the trip you just took then it’s deducted; if you don’t then you can top-up at a touchscreen that’s generally located right beside the turnstiles. We found the staff in the metro stations very patient and helpful in explaining the ins and outs of all this. Note, too, that transit isn’t the “pay one price to go anywhere” that you might be used to from North America or Europe: you pay a different fee depending on the length of your trip. Which is another reason why having a card is helpful, because it saves you from the burden of having to calculate this in advance: just keep 1000 Yen or so on your card at all times and you’ll be set to go anywhere.
11. This might be obvious, but it took me a while to figure out: if you’re searching the web for something – a cinema, a restaurant, a museum, whatever – use Google Translate to find the Japanese word first, and then search for that. If you search in English you’re artificially limiting your search to information that happens to be in English; you’ll find a lot more if you search in Japanese.
12. There are coin lockers in every train station and in a lot of metro stations (post 9-11 they’ve been removed from almost everywhere in North American, so this was novel for us). They’re not cheap – $4 or $5 seemed to be the rule – but they’re a great place to stash your stuff if you’re between hotels. Most museums also have lockers at the entrance, and it seems common to have “umbrella lockers” too public buildings.
13. People take pictures of their food in restaurants even more than they do here in North America, so you won’t stick out if you do this. And everyone has a mobile device. Just be sure to turn off the ringer in the metro.
14. We found poster advertising – in metro stations, mostly – to be a really good source for information about things to do. It’s how we found our way, for example, to the “House Vision 2013” exhibition. And the “Design Ah!” installation. And the “TECHNE” digital art show. Posters were generally in Japanese-only, but we just jotted down the web address or took a photo of the poster and then Google Translated the result back in our hotel.
15. If you’re looking for airfares from Canada to Japan, look at routings that go through the USA, as you can avoid $500 or so in fuel surcharges that you’ll pay on Air Canada. They routings this way are a little less convenient, but you can save a lot, especially if you’re flying a family.

I loved Japan, and I regret not having visited sooner: the country was a feast for the senses, and a wonderful fountain of new ideas in design and behaviour and culture. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, it’s a very child-friendly place to travel, and it’s hard to say whether it was me or Oliver who enjoyed the trip more. We only scratched the surface of the country – we never left the big cities, and even then we only visited a small cross-section of neighbourhoods. I think you could happily spend years in Japan and never lack for something interesting to see or do.

All told it cost us about $4000 for two people to spend 13 days in the country: $1500 to get there and back (assisted greatly by having 100,000 Aeroplan miles to contribute to the cost), $1300 for hotels, and about $100/day for food, entrance fees, metro fares and sundries.

Here’s how you get to Omotesando Koffee in Tokyo: take the Chiyoda (C) metro line to the Omotesando station. Once you arrive at the station, walk to exit A2 (there are a lot of exits in this station, and if you take the wrong one you could be wandering around for hours). Walk out the exit up the stairs (taking care to note the “up” and “down” arrows on the stairs so you know what side to walk on).

At the top of the stairs walk out and then take the first street on the right, a tiny alley-size street. Watch out for cars and trucks and bicyles, all competing for space. Walk up this street, past the Lawson’s and the HMV on the right, past the Starbucks on the left, until you come to a T-junction wih a chopsticks shop on the right and a Royal Host restaurant on the left. Turn left.

Walk past the See’s Candies on the right and then, the next block, past the parking lot on the right, and then take the next street right, along an even-smaller residential street. Just after you cross the next street, look for Omotesando Koffee on your left; watch out for the square metal sign near the opening to a small courtyard. It looks like this:

If I had to pick one transcendent destination on our trip to Japan last month, it would be Omotesando Koffee, this tiny perfect coffee shop in a quiet residential neighbourhood. We visited half a dozen times over two weeks. I loved the coffee; Oliver loved the cubes of baked custard; we both liked enjoying the March sunshine sitting on a bench in the small garden.

You walk into Omotesando Koffee through this garden, and then up a step into the main room of an old, simple house (be sure to watch your head on the way in; you’ll bang it if you’re anything like me). Inside there is a steel frame cube containing a counter, a coffee machine, and a single person, a friendly man who will take your order and make your coffee.

The coffee is really, really good. The “kashi” – Oliver describes it as sort of like crispy crème brûlée – was Oliver’s favourite morning food in Japan. There’s jazz on the stereo inside which drifts out into the garden, where there are a couple of benches to sit on, one of which you can – almost – keep dry on if it’s raining. It’s amazing that it’s such a quiet, calm and peaceful place given the crazy busy intersection that’s only 5 minutes walk away. Here’s what our coffee sounded like one morning:

I found Omotesando by way of Peter Bihr, who has now steered me right on two continents. If you’re a lover of coffee and design and calm, I highly recommend a visit next time you’re in Tokyo.

Since receiving a copy of the City of Charlottetown Zoning Map in digital form (as an ESRI shapefile), I’ve been thinking of various ways of using the data. An obvious one is to build a tool that allows a civic address to be entered and the current zoning designation to be returned; there’s no online tool that supports this sort of lookup right now (there’s this tool on the city’s website; it’s not pretty or particularly intuitive, but it will return the information), and, partly as a result, I think most city residents are ignorant of the zoning of their own property and those around them.

I decided that I wanted to build this as a standalone browser-based tool, which meant nothing on the server side (MySQL, PHP) would be required, and the tool wouldn’t need to rely on a data connection to be used, making it more suitable for mobile use. Here’s how I did it.

Convert the dBASE Database

The attribute data for ESRI shapefiles is stored in a dBASE-format database. To get this data out I needed a tool that would dump data out of dBASE files and into plain ASCII, and shapelib fit the bill. I downloaded the latest source code and then simply:

With this done, I could now use the dbfdump utility to convert the dBASE file:

I now had a fixed-width ASCII file that looked like this:

Get the Civic Address Data

For the civic address data I was able to leverage some work I did many years ago that automates the download of the civic address data from the Province of PEI’s website, giving me a companion ASCII file, also containing the PID number, which I could then use to merge with the zoning information.

Merging Zoning with Civic Address

To ease the merging of the civic address and zoning data, I dump both datasets into SQLite3 tables; I chose SQLite3 because it’s pre-installed on my Mac and easily available otherwise.

Rolling all of the above and this together, I ended up with a PHP script to download and convert the civic address and zoning data, merge it together based on PID, and dump out the result to a JavaScript file. This JavaScript file looks like this:

For each zoning designation that matches a civic address (there are 942 that don’t) this newly-defined zoning object holds information about the PID, the civic address and the zoning.

Making it Searchable

There are plenty of ways of searching through a JavaScript object; I opted for jSQL, a JavaScript library that offers some SQL-like features, allowing me to search for addresses in my zoning object as simply as this:

Which returns all of the addresses where the street number is 222.

I wrapped this all into a single HTML file (you can try the search out here at this live demo) that looks like this:

The 20th anniversary of our “short visit to Prince Edward Island” passed unmarked in mid-March. I first applied for a job here in February of 1993, foolishly saying, in my job interview, that I could start work “in a couple of weeks.” Apparently it takes longer to move your life across the country than “a couple of weeks,” but we made it happen by leaving [[Catherine]] back in Peterborough, Ontario for an additional month to mop things up and to wind down her own committments there.

I started work at the PEI Crafts Council, on an 18 month contract, on March 15, 1993. It was an ACOA-funded project to develop a database of suppliers to the crafts industry and Catherine and I never talk seriously about the idea of staying on the Island once the contract was up. But, as it happened, we ended up buying a house (a tiny house on the Kingston Road for about $40,000; how could we not!), and Catherine built herself a studio, and I transitioned from local database work to work on the (then novel) Internet with the Province, and we had [[Oliver]] and before we knew what hit us, we’d stayed a lot longer than 18 months.

Half the time I’m pretty sure that we’ll live out our years on Prince Edward Island, happy in the community we’ve developed around ourselves; the other half of the time this prospect deeply disturbs me and I start browsing the apartments for rent in Kreuzberg or Malmö or Tokyo or Bilbao. Presumably it’s this duality that prevents me from ever attaining full-Islanderhood.

In the meantime, let me take this opporunity to thank all the people who’ve helped us along the way; Prince Edward Island is an easy place to love and a hard place to like, and your kindnesses to us have made our lives richer and easier. I hope we’ve been able to reciprocate even a little.

In April of 2033 I’ll either be posting my “40 Years on Prince Edward Island” post as a 67 year old or I’ll be fondly recalling our two decade stint on the Island from the porch of my villa on the Adriatic. Only time will tell.

Regular readers may recall that I’m somewhat stationery-obsessed. Drop me in a new city and I’d far rather visit the local stationery shop than almost anything else. It’s why, in part, I love Berlin so much.

Stationery is obviously an important part of the cultural landscape in Japan: the quality, and breadth of products available was awe-inspiring. The Ito Ya store in Tokyo Ginza was dizzying: 5 floors of everything from name seals to date books to fountain pens to fine Japanese paper. It was a miracle we emerged with me only having spent $100. But it’s not only at the high end: I saw a better selection of stationery in “100 Yen shops” (aka “dollar stores”) than at any dedicated stationery shop in Canada.

One of the items seemingly unique to Japan was the pack of “word cards.” I saw these for sale everywhere, and the form-factor was pretty standard: a deck of small blank white cards, perhaps 50 or 100, bound together with a locking metal ring. 

I’d never seen anything like these in other countries, and I asked my Japanese friend Nori about them; he confirmed that they’re extremely popular in Japan, and that they’re a “tool for students for remembering foreign words, historical facts, chemical formulas and so on, writing a name or title on one side and something need to remember on the other side.” The name for these in Japanese is is 単語カード, or “tango kādo” and a Google image search shows the variety of designs they’re available in.