I arrived in Vermont yesterday to a light drizzle. The rental car place dropped me off at the Brattleboro Coop, a brand new colossus of cooperation quadruple the size of the old coop grocery store they tore down next door. If I had any doubt I was in Vermont, the Kung Pao Seitan in the hot food bar was proof enough and after a quick lunch I headed up the hill to Mocha Joe’s for a coffee and then back down the hill to the Amtrak station to catch the train. I managed to get myself a little soaked through all of this, but nothing that an hour to dry out on the train couldn’t solve.

The train journey south to New York Penn Station was quite pleasant: power, wifi, leather seat that reclined almost fully and vegan burgers in the snack bar; what more did I need. I polished off an episode of Man Men and two of Mr. Selfridge and 6 hours later we arrived in New York.

Where it was raining.

Seriously raining. Torrentially post-tropical-storm raining. Taxi drives by you and you get splashed and suddenly your trousers are sticking to your legs raining.

I was determined, nonetheless, to avoid taking a cab to our rental apartment in Brooklyn: it’s so handy to the East River Ferry that it seemed a crime not to go by boat.

I found my way out of the station, found 34th Street, found out how to pay for the 34th Street bus, hopped on a bus and rode it down 34th, fortunately hearing the driver announce “next stop 28th and 2nd” while there was still time to jump off.

With the river in sight, I walked the rest of the way down 34th and got really, really wet in the process. Shoulder-bag-filled-with-water-passport-soaked wet.

I arrived at the ferry terminal just as the 7:19 boat was about to leave, but they held the gate for me and I stumbled on. Twelve minutes and $4 later I was at the North Williamsburg wharf getting wet again as I tried to find Kent Avenue and then, once found, tried to figure out where on Kent Avenue our apartment was.

After some wrong turns I righted myself and 5 minutes later I walked in on Catherine and Oliver negotiating with the landlord about the leak in the carriage house (nothing a pot and a towel wouldn’t solve).

I peeled myself out of my clothes, set my money and passports on the mantle to dry, and by 9:00 we were eating Sicilian Rice Balls down the street at Monk’s Pizza.

When we travel, it rains. It rained on us for 3 days in Bilbao when Oliver was young enough to be in a stroller (Oliver’s first words were “no bags on feet!). It rained on is in Porto. It rained on my father and I in Plitvice. It rained on my parents and Oliver and me at Fortress Louisbourg to the point where most of our weekend was spent drying out in the laundromat. It rained on us in Venice two years ago to the point where the platforms came out in St. Mark’s Square. We have acquired tens of umbrellas in as many cities. 

So we know how to do this and are undeterred.

Now, coffee. Fortunately we are in Williamsburg, where every second storefront is an artisanal coffee roaster.

Oh, and the rain has stopped.

I took the “desk hole filler” (naming things is obviously not my forté) and tinkered with it a little to create a hole for a USB extension cable. You can grab the upgraded design on Tinkercad. Here’s what it looks like in my desk (I’ve since corrected the type-the-wrong-way; you’d think if anyone could get that right it would be me, but I have a limited brain for 3D transformations):

This pierce by Laura Chapin broadcast last week on CBC Prince Edward Island’s Island Morning is a touching portrait of Eileen Higginbotham’s Prince Street Puppy Project. It’s a sad story – you will get tears in your eyes listening to it – but it also drives home why this project is a valuable and important one.  KaBoom was the resident dog in Oliver’s class this year, and several of the students you hear are his classmates.

About 8 years ago the word on the street here in Charlottetown was that you could get a great deal on adjustable desks at the Summerside Clearance Centre. I ended up buying two, one for myself and a smaller one for Johnny, and the boys at silverorange bought a number of them as well. They are great desks: solid, durable, and easily adjustable up and down. Here’s what mine looked line on moving-in-day at the old office:

There are two types of plastic parts on the surface of the desk, one type for the “cable pass through” holes and one for the crank that allows the desk to be adjusted up and down. Over the years we’ve had both go missing here in the office, and with nowhere to turn for replacement parts, we just lived with this.

With the availability of 3D printing at the University of Prince Edward Island, however, I realized that I could simply fabricate my own parts, using the originals I still have as models. The return of the browser-based Tinkercad design tool last week coincided with this inspiration, and so I set to work with my Canadian Tire digital calipers to take the measurements of the originals and translate them into Tinkercad models.

Once you grasp the basics of Tinkercad – assembling simple shapes together to make complex shapes – it’s surprisingly easy for a know-nothing like me to make a complex model:

That model is two cylinders in the base, with a box on top, four boxes for the “legs” and four “round roofs” for the little nubbles that hold the part in place inside the desk.

With the model designed and measurements checked, I fired up Tinkercad’s fuction for generating a .STL file:

…and sent the .STL file off to Don Moses at Robertson Library for 3D printing. The next day I got an email back from Don that the part had printed and was ready for pickup. And so here it is:

And here it is snapped into place in the desk:

If you have the same or similar desk, you can go and grab the Tinkercad model for this part, tweak it as needed, and print your own.

This was so much fun that I kept on going and designed up the “crank cover” in Tinkercad too:

It came out of the 3D printer looking like this:

You can grab the Tinkercad model for that part too.

Both parts, I was delighted to find, find into their respective holes like a glove.

To this point I’ve thought of 3D printing as a novelty, an impression only strengthened by the propensity of people with 3D printers to print cats and key chains and parts for more 3D printers. Being able to print parts for my desk, parts there was simply no way to produce until this point, has me thinking there might be something to all this.

I’m going up on Monday for a tour of UPEI’s about-to-be-a-Fablab, which is an exciting development in this regard; I’ll report back on what I learn.

While I reserve the right to have darts in my eyes with regards to past wrongs, it must be said that Tim Banks and his APM have done an absolutely stellar job restoring the Kays Building in downtown Charlottetown. The wrapping came off the building this week, and it’s obvious that the restoration involves good measure of both whimsy and careful attention.

Add that to the modernist palace of pleasure Mr. Banks is building from the ashes of the old Seaman’s warehouse on King Street (a development that, with every pass-along of gossip, gets more rotating Porsche elevators and helipads and tomato juice fountains), and suddenly APM emerges as an exceptional beacon of architectural courage in a city given to Homburg-style “preservations” and Atlantic Superstore disposa-buildings.

I don’t expect Tim and I will be going for coffee any time soon, but, kind sir, I tip my hat to you. Well done.

The plot of approximately 25% of Hollywood romantic comedies goes something like this.

Young couple meet, fall passionately in love, get married, have kids.

Then something happens – husband starts drinking, wife becomes head of multinational corporation, child lost in typhoon – that causes their love to be tested. Couple separates, then divorces.

Several years pass.

Husband stops drinking and starts an inner-city youth group, or wife resigns from corporation to become a bread baker.

Then one day, on the steps of the New York Public Library, they meet again. “How have you been?”

They go for coffee. That same old spark is still there. Cue the Billy Joel ballad. Roll credits.

Here in Charlottetown we awoke up to a headline in our morning paper “Homburg International buys Holman Grand”:

Richard Homburg, international businessman, impresario and megalomanic, a man who built a real estate empire in Charlottetown – a skyscraper, a hotel, a shopping mall – and then lost it all, has returned triumphant, reacquiring everything he lost.

He has a new name – Homburg Invest has been replaced by Homburg International – and a sassy new attitude: “we look forward to contributing valuable and successful properties, and relationships, in the community of PEI,” he’s quoted as saying in the paper this morning.

Richard Homburg is back, baby, and he’s ready for us to love him again.

And the strange thing is, maybe we’re ready to love him back.

Has anyone ever really understood why Homburg, if he is as high-flying and succcessful as he would like everyone to believe, would set his sights on reimagining downtown Charlottetown? Surely there are better places to make money than running a boutique hotel in a city that shuts down for 8 months of the year, a shopping mall that’s never really worked the way it was supposed to, or a skyscraper that’s mostly empty.

Now that the adulation of Islanders is gone, the shame of failure endured, can there be any explanation for Homburg’s return other than that he loves us?

Maybe it’s time for we Islanders to look into our hearts, realize how lucky we are, and welcome him into our arms.

“How have you been?”

“It’s been hard. I really loved you. I cried for months when you left. And then one day I woke up and realized it was time to move on. And so I did. One step at a time. But, you know, there’s always been a part of me that knows that I’ll never love anyone like I love you.”

One of my favourite books is Canoe & I or Around the Island in a Canoe (on $10.00) by Bill Reddin, the tale of his quest, starting in 1934, to canoe his way around Prince Edward Island.

His journey, with dog Bozo, begins with a paddle, in his canoe dubbed “Tota,” from Tea Hill to Governor’s Island; upon arriving there he realizes that he’s not brought any fresh water:

Proceeding to prepare our “noon-day dish” I discovered a real blunder — I had forgotten to take any fresh water. Later in the afternoon I set out to explore the Island. Bozo and I walked all over it. We found a number of old farm wells and two or three bored by the Henry L. Docherty oil men in 1926. All were foul.

Meanwhile the wind had risen to a strong gale. I decided to camp in an old shed and wait till the next day before going on to Point Prim.

Our thirst had likewise risen. Strawberry jam helped a little but was too sweet to be much good. I brought up a bucket of salt water from the shore, heated some in a kettle over a Coleman gas stove and held the bucket of cold sea-water over the steam. As the steam condensed on the bottom of the bucket it ran down drop by drop into a saucer and by this primitive still I obtained enough fresh water to let Bozo and me get to sleep.

His journey continues eastward by Point Prim, Belle Creek, Wood Islands (which he insists on calling Wood Island, as he could find only one island), Little Sands, Cape Bear, Murray Harbour, Panmure Island, and finally to Poplar Point, where he puts in for the season and retires to Charlottetown until June of 1935 when he picks up the journey again.

Along the way he provides descriptions of everyday life in Prince Edward Island, and of the people that he meets along the way (people that, more often than not, invite him in for supper and provide him with a place to sleep for the night). An uncommon number of these people are named John Dan, a fact he mentions when he reaches Monticello:

Surf breaking at the shore, I spent most of the day visiting at McCormick’s store, John Dan Maclntyre’s and other houses nearby, sleeping at Mel’s place overnight. (By the way, from Tea Hill to Monticello I met eleven (11) John Dans. How many more I missed, the Lord only knows.)

In 1935 his journey continues around East Point and along the north shore, past St. Peter’s Harbour and Cable Head, Savage Harbour, Stanhope, Rustico, and New London. He passes Cape Tryon and observes the cormorants:

Along the slopes of Cape Tryon about 115 feet high white with bird droppings and, I believe, the highest cliff along our Island shore, the roosting Cormorants (or “Shag” as the fishermen call them) stared down at the little craft passing so close just below their hundred or so nests. This was the only Cormorant Colony I observed on the whole coast.

He continued past Malpeque, Lennox Island, Alberton, Kildare Capes, and Tignish. At almost every stop he seems, somehow, to have a connection. Sometimes this is through his position at Prince of Wales College; for example, in Nail Pond:

Walking back to Nail Pond beach, I met and was warmly greeted by three girls, two being my students at Prince of Wales, Bernetta, and Cecelia, daughters of James Gallant. They had learned earlier from the Summerside Journal-Pioneer that I was coming along the North Shore (though how The Pioneer knew, I do not know). Once they had told my unfriendly French fishermen what I was doing and that I was the girls’ friend, everything changed. So much so that, in my absence, the fishermen had carefully carried Tota well up above the high-tide line to make sure that she would be safe and had pre- pared for me a great big pot of delicious cooked lobsters. I wondered if, perhaps, their initial distrust of an English-speaking stranger could be traced back to the time when their ancestors had been cruelly treated by the English with the Island “Exile of the Acadians.”

He passes Howard’s Cove and West Point and paddles toward Summerside, where he gets stuck on a sandbar and blames The Guardian, which he’d been reading voraciously that morning, having not “seen a newspaper for nearly two months”:

And now my lack of proper preparation and my failure to provide myself with marine charts (I had only a road map of P.E.I.) asserted itself. First thing I knew I was fast aground, or rather amud, in the middle of the Miscouche Shoals, the tide having receded as I paddled blissfully along. I blessed in blue language the dear old Guardian, the cause of my long delay in getting started. I suppose it was really not the Guardian’s fault, but at times like that, one has to have something else to blame for one’s own procrastination.

He continues east from Summerside past Borden (“just as the Carferry S.S. Charlottetown was pulling away from the Pier”), Augustine Cove, Victoria, finally arriving, on the afternoon of September 3, 1935, at Tea Hill.

Canoe & I is written in a breezy, familiar tone and is filled with interesting anecdotes. Even I, not an Islander, and several generations on, have enough familiarity with people and places to recognize more than a few characters (to say nothing of knowing many of Bill’s children, having worked with one of his grandchildren, and having just received word of another great-grandchild on the way).

Why did he make the trip?  In his introduction he says only:

Why did I make the trip? In Maugham’s “The Moon and Sixpence” the hero (villain) is driven by a daemon: “I’ve got to paint, I’ve got to paint!” Perhaps something of the same sort of daemon made me want to “create a picture”.

It is a lovely picture indeed, and an inspiring one: what a crazy idea, to canoe around the Island. And yet what a captivating one, and what adventures he had. It’s a clarion call to seek out audacity.

You can find Canoe & I in the IslandLives.ca collection where you can grab a PDF and read it yourself.

One of the nice things about the TP-Link MR3020 wireless router that powers my PirateBox is that it’s powered, via a mini-USB port, by a 5VDC/1.0A power supply. This makes powering it by means other than a plug in the wall trivial because you can use any power source with a mini-USB. Like a portable battery back, a solar panel or, as I tried yesterday, my 2000 Jetta.

Several of my Nokia phones over the years have had mini-USB power ports, and so I have a few spare mini-USB “cigarette lighter” adapters in my car. So at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market yesterday I plugged in my PirateBox to the car, tweeted that PEI community histories were available in the parking lot at SSID PirateBox, and let the public do what they might.

One of the limitations (or features) of the PirateBox is that it doesn’t log access, so I’ve no idea whether anyone actually did grab a copy of Attitudes toward the temperance movement among Methodists in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and P.E.I. or Freetown, Past and Present. But they could have.

There’s a helpful page on the LibraryBox website that discusses, in part, battery capacity issues and a page on the PirateBox forum where battery issues are discussed.

I love IslandLives.ca, Robertson Library’s digitization project for Prince Edward Island community histories (disclaimer: I played a small role in the project’s early days, coding some of the project related to automatic named entity recognition). And I’m recently in love with the PirateBox project, which lets you create a standalone wireless file-sharing device based on cheap hardware; you can create your own single-node Internet for distributing content where the Internet itself isn’t available, or where you don’t want it available.

So it seemed like a good idea to marry the two.

I bought a TP-Link MR3020 for $39.99 from The Source, and when it arrived a few days later I set it up with OpenWRT and PirateBox using the refreshingly clear instructions.

I then wrote some code, which you can grab here from Github that harvests data out of IslandLives via OAI, scrapes out PDF files and thumbnail images for every book that has a PDF copy available, creates an index.html file with an index of all the books linked from their thumbnails, and dumps this all into a directory suitable for copying onto a PirateBox USB drive, ready for serving.

Once the data is scraped and copied and on the USB stick in the PirateBox, then for users it’s a simple matter of connecting to the PirateBox SSID, clicking on “Browse and download files here”, selecting the IslandLives directory, and exploring. Here’s what it looks like on an iPad:

And here’s what it looks like on my Firefox OS phone:

In theory it should be possible to adapt the code to harvest data out of other Islandora instances, so creating a PirateBox version of the data inside islandvoices.ca or islandimagined.ca would be an easy next step.

At this end of this month I will make what, by my count, will be my 30th trip this decade to visit my colleagues at Yankee Publishing in Dublin, New Hampshire. Over those ten years (in in the years before) I’ve taken all manner of routes from Charlottetown to Dublin: I’ve driven straight there; I’ve driven the leisurely route with the family along; I’ve flown via Halifax, via Montreal, via Ottawa and via Toronto; I’ve driven to Montreal and driven south through Vermont; I’ve flown to New York City and then back to Boston and driven from there.

One thing I’ve never done, however, is take the train to Dublin. And so this time, at least partially, I decided to try that.

I don’t have the time nor patience to take the train all the way from Charlottetown, so I’m flying to Montreal first and taking the train from there. Sort of.

Amtrak doesn’t make it easy to get to southern New Hampshire from Montreal by train: its “Vermonter” route, which once went all the way into Montreal, now stops at St. Alban’s, Vermont, a town 25 km from the Canadian border. So here’s what I’m doing:

1. On May 30 I’m flying from Charlottetown to Montreal on Air Canada’s direct flight, arriving Trudeau Airport at 1:23 p.m.
2. I’ll hop on the “747” bus from the airport into downtown Montreal’s bus station where I’ll catch the 3:45 p.m. Greyhound bus to Burlington, Vermont.
3. I’ll stay overnight at the lovely La Quinta near Burlington Airport (which is where the Greyhound terminal is), and then on May 31 I’ll catch the 9:25 a.m. “Vermonter” Amtrak train south to Brattleboro, Vermont, arriving at 12:20 p.m.
4. In Brattleboro I’ll get picked up by Enterprise Car Rental at the station with a rental car, and I’ll then drive the 50 km to Dublin, NH.

So, despite my protests about having not enough time nor patience for the train, my journey will take me about 24 hours to complete.

Not content to let this wild adventure end, the following Friday I’ll return the rental car to Brattleboro and continue on the same train south to New York Penn Station where I’ll arrive at 6:24 p.m., rendezvousing with Catherine and Oliver who, being sane and all, will not take any trains at all and will instead fly to LaGuardia via Montreal direct from Charlottetown.

We’ll spend 4 nights in New York City before returning via Air Canada on Tuesday, June 11.

The total cost of my air, train and bus travel will be $546, which is not bad for Charlottetown-Montreal-Burlington-Brattleboro-New York-Montreal-Charlottetown.