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?

I ran into my friend Susan this morning at Casa Mia Café and she mentioned that she and her husband Perry (reference) are making a list of things they want to do this summer.

This strikes me as an excellent idea: in previous summers (we’ve had 20 of them so far on Prince Edward Island) it always seems like Labour Day before I realize that it’s summer. And then the leaves are falling off the trees. And then it’s Christmas.

So remembering that it’s summer, that summer is finite (especially here), and that I happen to live in an Island paradise is a good idea. Note to self.

So far, we’re off to a good start, as it happens.

Last week was the second of four birthday agglomerations in our family (the first is in April, the second in October, the third in November). There were three family birthdays last week, and more than a few birthdays in my collection of friends near and far.

By way of celebrating Catherine’s birthday we headed out to The Dunes for supper midweek and had what turned out to be an excellent meal. The highlight was an appetizer they call “The Grazing,” which was, as it turned out, almost enough to feed all three of us for the night: sausage, olives, spiced almonds, salad, roasted onion jam, fresh bread and more. It was the kind of dish that makes Catherine swoon, so, only by coincidence and not by plan, the perfect dish to celebrate her birthday.

On Saturday night Catherine needed to work, so Oliver and I headed out to Covehead to Richard’s Fish & Chips (one of Catherine’s favourite places so, as you might imagine, she felt left out upon hearing this). Although I’ve been to Richard’s many times I never actually had the fish & chips itself until this visit: it turns out to be a tour de force. A large piece of well-cooked fish served over a bed of well-cooked fries and accompanied by a generous portion of homemade tarter sauce. That we enjoyed this with the third-floor deck almost all to ourselves as the sun was setting made it all the more excellent.

After fish & chips we headed to Brackley Drive-in (disclaimer: a longtime client) for Monster’s University, which we enjoyed with almost perfect drive-in weather under a bright full Moon.

A good start to summer, I think, and a good reminder to not forget to do more before summer’s over.

The School Calendar for 2013-2014 has just been released and I’ve again taken the official Prince Edward Island School Calendar and updated a set of public calendar files to make it easier for parents and others to shunt the information around their digital devices. Here you go:

• Google Calendar
• iCal format

(Note for those of you who already had the 2012-2013 School Calendar integrated into your digital devices: you don’t need to do anything, as those addresses haven’t changed from last year).

As a member of the School Calendar Committee for the PEI Home and School Federation I’ve asked to have the official calendar released as structured data by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development itself, but as yet this hasn’t happened.

Journalist Sonny Motké interviewed Richard Homburg for Quote magazine. The article summarizing the interview, Richard Homburg: ‘Nieuw management Homburg Invest pleegde een coup’ is in Dutch, so I ran it through both Bing’s and Google’s translator.

Bing has a much more colourful take of the first paragraph:

He was almost two years out of reach for an interview, but after many try took Richard Homburg then finally the phone on. And he told in scents and colors his view of the demasqué of Homburg Invest. In so doing, does he get fucked hard out to his successors: “they have screwed up the whole thing and now I believe it is all nothing more valuable.”

Google is considerable more sedate:

He was almost two years unattainable for an interview, but after much trying finally took Richard Homburg over the phone. And he told scents and colors his vision of the unmasking of Homburg Invest. In addition, he gets rock hard out to his successors: “They screwed up the whole thing and now I think it is all worth nothing.”

For some reason machine translation, in my experience, can almost never make Dutch-translated-to-English sound anything other than slightly bonkers; perhaps it’s an overly complicated language?

I received an automated email this morning from Robertson Library:

Dear Peter Rukavina,
Our records indicate these items are due in 3 days:
Please return or renew this material before fines accumulate.
Note that laptops and other reserve items cannot be renewed.
You may renew your material in one of 3 ways:
   - online with your "My Account" page
     (https://islandpines.roblib.upei.ca/opac/en-CA/skin/roblib/xml/myopac.xml?ol=4&l=4&d=2)
   - by phoning 902-566-0583
   - by replying to this email circdesk@upei.ca
Thank You.
   How we decide, by Lehrer, Jonah.
   Call Number: BF448.L45 2010
   Due Date: 2013-06-24
   Barcode: 37348007190119

What’s the first question that a patron like me asks when receiving an email like this? When exactly is this book due!

And where is that information? Buried down at the bottom in a difficult-to-parse date format:

   Due Date: 2013-06-24

We can do so much better than this. Here’s a quick prototype for a better format for this kind of email:

This prototype has several features that I’m looking for as a patron:

1. It includes the cover image of the book, so I can quickly remember which book it is from the several I might have checked out (the cover image is already in the Evergreen system that’s sending out the mail, so it should be trivial to include it).
2. The date due is bold and obvious.
3. There’s an option to add the due date to my calendar (clicking this would send me an iCalendar file).
4. Renewal options are clearer.
5. Useless information like the call number and barcode aren’t included.

This is only a quick first pass at what an improvement might look like, but I think it’s clear, regardless, that improvements can be made.

If you’re in the radio game – and it’s something of a family business for we Rukavinas – then This American Life is the bigs. Which makes it both unfortunate and somewhat delightful that there was a Rukavina appearance in this week’s episode. Unfortunate because it’s a not-directly-related-that-we-know-of Rukavina and because said Rukavina is pretending to put his (or maybe his wife’s) finger through a wood splitter, and delightful because, well, it’s This American Life and it’s someone named Rukavina. Gotta start somewhere.

OpenCellID.org is powerful project with a rich data set that can be used to drive development of location-based services for mobile devices without a GPS (or without the power to run a GPS all the time).

In a nutshell, it’s an open database of georeferenced mobile telephone network cell cites, built from a network of apps that send it data.

Mobile telephones are known as “cell phones” because they connect to a network of “cells” – radio transceivers – distributed around populated areas. As you move about, your phone hops from cell to cell seamlessly. Here’s a map of Charlottetown cell sites derived from the Industry Canada Spectrum Direct database:

Attached to each tower or structure on this map are one or more “cells” and each cell had a unique identifiier made up of four parts:

• MCC: mobile country code; the code for Canada is 302
• MNC: mobile network code; every mobile operator has one: Bell is 610, Rogers is 720, for example.
• LAC: location area code; identifies the geographic region; in PEI our LAC is 48000
• Cell ID: a unique ID for each cell within an LAC.

Right now my phone is connected to Cell ID 250014558 in LAC 48000 in MNC 610 in MCC 302. I know this because I wrote a little Firefox OS application to display this information for me:

The “glue” that’s missing between information about cell transceiver sites (what you see on the map above, and is freely available from Industry Canada) and what I can detect on my mobile device (using the app above) is the Industry Canada data doesn’t include the “Cell ID” in its data, so there’s no way to know, from public data sources, where the cell I’m currently connected to is.

That’s where OpenCellID.org comes in: using the site’s API I can query the database for the location of a given Cell ID, like this (where I substitute my API key, available for free by registering, for “KEY”):

http://www.opencellid.org/cell/get?key=KEY&mnc=610&mcc=302&lac=48000&cellid=250014558

What gets returned is:

<rsp stat="ok">
     <cell lac="48000" 
           mcc="302" 
           lat="46.2334785491667" 
           lon="-63.1262734316667" 
           cellId="250014558" 
           nbSamples="12" 
           mnc="610" 
           range="6000"/>
</rsp>

The location that OpenCellID.org returns is its best guess, from available reports, of my current location. As it turns out, it’s not a bad guess at all:

The pink X is my current location; the red marker is the location OpenCellID.org returned. The site build that guess using 12 reports (reports, as it happens, that I contributed using my device):

<rsp stat="ok">
    <measure lat="46.2341142" lon="-63.12629745"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23423571" lon="-63.1264044"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.2342632" lon="-63.12641408"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.2342976" lon="-63.12642024"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23397183" lon="-63.12654337"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23369234" lon="-63.12707633"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23305379" lon="-63.12726862"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23359937" lon="-63.12701882"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23346142" lon="-63.1267446"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23268702" lon="-63.12559536"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23210112" lon="-63.12496772"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23226499" lon="-63.12453019"></measure>
  </cell>
</rsp>

When you look at the locations of those 12 measures, it’s easy to see why OpenCellID.org returned the location it did:

Obviously with more reports the accuracy of the “guess” will increase. I’m running my app (you can grab it for Firefox OS) when I’m walking around and about downtown Charlottetown, so this should happen on its own, as my app gets GPS location from the device and reports this to OpenCellID.org every 30 seconds.

I’m posting this so that I can refer to it later, as I’m always finding myself looking for these numbers.

Latitude and Longitude of PEI Places

• Coles Building, Charlottetown (see here): 46.23536, -63.12549
• Charlottetown (City Hall): 46.23527, -63.12958
• Charlottetown (Harbour): 46.2179, -63.1342
• Summerside (City Hall): 46.39287, -63.78989
• My House: 46.23587, -63.12412
• My Office: 46.23361, -63.12738
• Center of Prince Edward Island Bounding Box: 46.50105, -63.2014

Bounding Box surrounding Charlottetown

• lonmin,latmin: -63.1977,46.2268
• lonmax,latmax: -63.0811,46.3065
• bbox=-63.1977,46.2268,-63.0811,46.3065

Bounding Box surrounding Prince Edward Island

• lonmin,latmin: -64.4534,45.9353
• lonmax,latmax -61.9494,47.0668
• bbox=-64.4534,45.9353,-61.9494,47.0668
• bounding box for Overpass Turbo: 45.9353,-64.4534,47.0668,-61.9494

Right around the corner from our apartment in Brooklyn was the Brooklyn Art Library, home to The Sketchbook Project. The walls are lined with sketchbooks from all over the world; you can browse through them by signing up for a free library card at the back of the shop and then browsing the catalog by tag, theme or artist to select a sketchbook to “check out.” The book you select is brought to you by a friendly librarian, along with another book, selected at random. It’s a lovely idea, very well executed, and we were captivated by it to the point where we purchased three of the blank sketchbooks to become authors ourselves. If you’re in the area, it’s a great place to spend a few hours.

The James Farley Post Office is an imposing behemoth of a building right across 8th Avenue from Madison Square Garden and Pennsylvania Station. To say it’s “abandoned” isn’t completely accurate: it’s still a functioning post office – you can mail letters and buy stamps there – but the building is slated for redevelopment and many of its vast interior spaces, from mail sorting rooms to the headquarters of the Postal Inspector, lie vacant.

It was in those abandoned spaces that Catherine and Oliver and I journeyed on Monday night.

It was raining. We followed the instructions on the tickets to gather at the 31st Street entrance. We found a rag-tag group there, from well-dressed society types to poorly-dressed bohemians, and everything in between, all huddled under umbrellas. As it turned out we’d all gathered by the wrong door, but fortunately someone figured thise out and we went around the corner to the other 31st Street entrance.

At the top of the stairs our tickets were checked on a list and we were assigned to a group. Our group, as it happened, was to be led by Jane Jacobs.

Well, not Jane Jacobs herself, as she’s been dead since 2006.

But a pretty credible facsimile: an actor playing the role of Jane Jacobs in Manna-Hata, a singing, dancing, projecting, acting, shouting, moving, hiding, jumping, drinking and wandering spectacle held in the upper levels of the Farley Post Office.

It was a show that I happened upon by chance while surfing the Village Voice website the week before. It looked just crazy enough to be interesting, and I immediately bought tickets for opening night.

And so, at 7:00 p.m., credible-facsimile-of-Jane-Jacobs emerged to collect our group of about 20 people to lead is inside the bowels of the post office to start the show. There were three other groups, the neighbouring one was led by Walt Whitman; sometimes we were together as one large audience, other times we were separated off into rooms for little shows-within-the-show.

It was, for us, something of an ordeal.

Not because of the show itself, but because we’d spent the day on our feet, navigating through New York in the rain. Out to 111th Street in Queens to the Hall of Science and back and then a quick tour around Rockefeller Centre. We were tired. And our feet were even more tired. So the prospect of spending 3 hours more on our tired feet navigating around the post office following Jane Jacobs had its challenges. But we forged on.

For a lover of all things behind-the-scenes, half the fun was being behind-the-scenes, getting to go through doors like this:

And into washrooms with signs like this posted on the wall:

The spectacle itself was far-ranging: a series of vignettes, each a slice of New York history, with a common focus on issues of land, ownership, control, power, race, planning and community.

Many of these vignettes happened with the audience lining both sides of an office hallway with the action playing out between us. Like the opening scene, an imagined confrontation between Jacobs and Whitman and a gaggle of well-dressed-tycoons who kept popping up as avatars for Big Development. We gradually made our way up to a large room, a mail sorting room I imagine, that looked like this:

There were many scenes set here, from an extended rumination on the role of the Dutch and the English to an impressive explanation of the grid-layout of the Manhattan streets, culimating in the unveiling of a model of the Brooklyn Bridge constructed of rope, ribbon and Christmas lights as we watched.

We were led from the native inhabitation of Manhattan through its various colonial periods, Tammany Hall, the ambitious (crazy) plans of Robert Moses, the social upheaval of the 1970s and finishing with a montage of images from the last 50 years.

Some of this was straight-ahead theatre, but much of it was conveyed through song, dance, puppetry, and projection. Cast members played multiple roles over the evening, and the sets and props were simple and elegant. We started at 7:00 p.m., ended at 10:00 p.m., and there was a quick intermission – pretzels and beers in the postal break room – about three quarters of the way through.

Some of the proceedings were unintelligible to a non-New Yorker, and some were unintelligible to almost anyone because of the echoes in the vast postal halls. But it was almost never boring, and there were several scenes that were crafted with considerable genius. If nothing else, it made traditional theatre seem like a severely limited medium: stages, who needs stages!

Manna-Hatta was presented by Peculiar Works, and aptly-named New York City company. I’m glad we went.