And we’re back. Oliver and I landed in Charlottetown on the Westjet flight from Toronto yesterday, just in time to almost entirely miss the marking of the new year. We woke up this morning to -16º C temperatures and light snow; with the wind chill it felt like walking through shards of ice on the walk to the office.

I am a new fan of travel-on-major-holidays: there’s no traffic on the roads, the airports are relatively calm and, if you’re lucky enough to hit the weather right, which we did, it’s about as stress-free as air travel can get. We spent a very pleasant week in my hometown of Carlisle, Ontario with my parents, brothers, sisters-in-law and nephew. We ate, watched WKRP episodes, played gin rummy and went for a walk in the woods. It was a nice break. Here are some random observations from the road:

• We rented a car from Zoom Rent-a-Car: their rate for the week ($257 for a Nissan Versa) was about 50% of what we would have paid from any of the majors; saving that much made it worthwhile putting up with the slightly-less-convenient location (you take the airport train to the last station, Viscount, and they pick you up in a shuttle van to drive you to their office, about 10 minutes away). Besides the usual confusion about insurance (“you know your card doesn’t cover you for [insert random expensive horror here], don’t you?”), the service was quick and friendly, and if you don’t mind an extra 45 minutes on either end of your trip to Toronto, it’s a good alternative.
• On Boxing Day we went into Hamilton and discovered Sapporo restaurant downtown: it’s an all-you-can-eat Japanese/Thai place where you stay seated and just order, repeatedly, what you desire from the menu by writing numbers on an order sheet. The food was fresh and well-prepared and the menu was pleasantly wide-ranging. Recommended.
• On Friday, after a quick buying trip to Don Black Linecasting, Oliver and I visited the Ontario Science Centre, my first visit there in 27 years. The Science Centre is close to my heart as I spent my final semester of high school there at the Ontario Science Centre Science School, and I was eager to share the experience with Oliver. While our visit was lots of fun — what more can a father ask than the opportunity to show his son the Coffee Machine? — I was somewhat disheartened that once was an institution with a strong, clear, integrated vision now seems more of a disjointed buffet of experiences without a through-line.
• At the tail end of our Toronto trip we waded through downtown traffic — what the hell happened to the corner of Yonge and Dundas!? — and parked the car in Kensington Market and went off in search of supper. We ended up paying $6 for two very tasty bánh mi sandwiches, tofu and lemongrass, and drinks at Cali Bánh Mi & Che. A quick walk through Chinatown and we were back in the car and on the QEW speeding home.
• On Monday I took a few hours to myself to duck back into Hamilton: I picked up some jigsaw puzzle blanks at Curry’s Art Store, took a quick tour of the newly-renovated farmer’s market, grabbed a coffee from My Dog Joe in Westdale and made my usual pilgrimage to Steel City Surplus (now, apparently, part of a surplus-store chain, but as interesting as it ever was).
• In a mad dash against the clock, late on Monday I accompanied my Dad to the Apple Store in Burlington to pick up an iPhone 4s, meaning that my father now has a more advanced mobile phone than I do. The buying experience was quick and efficient — we were in and out in about 10 minutes. The experience at The Source signing up for a Virgin Mobile SIM took about 5 times longer, mostly because various phone calls to Virgin HQ were required; you’d like to think that, given that Bell owns both The Source and Virgin they’d have this down to a science, but no.

We didn’t go to the movies a single time over the holidays, quite a change from past years: there simply wasn’t a 12-year-old friendly movie on offer; indeed the entire genre of the “family friendly movie” seems to have disappeared from Hollywood.

I’m back in the office today; Oliver’s back in school tomorrow, and life slowly returns to normal for 2013.

Oliver and I are hopping on a jet plane tomorrow and herding up to Ontario for a week, leaving Catherine with the Christmas gift of an uninterrupted week in her studio, free from fetters of family to work 24/7 on her art. And so I’m powering down the Charlottetown operation for 2012 and, missing the opportunity to digitally dwell on 2012 that this week would otherwise afford, here’s the year in review.

Family

Oliver is in his last year, grade 6, at Prince Street School this year. His teacher, Jo-Ann Parsons, has been a dream to work with, yet another in the lucky string of “every year Oliver gets the teacher he needs” we’ve experienced at Prince Street. He’s been singing in the choir, going to after-school drama with the indominable Ruth Lacey, and had a part (“the old man”) in the school Christmas play. We still go to the Farmer’s Market every Saturday morning, as we have since time began, eating our smoked salmon bagels and drinking coffee (me) and smoothie (Oliver). Our bedtime stories have migrated to the fantastical this year, moving from The Steps Across the Water by Adam Gopnik to The Magic Thief by Sarah Prineas and now the Septimus Heap series by Angie Sage (all of which came from the excellent and invaluable Woozles Children’s Bookstore in Halifax).

Catherine, meanwhile, has had a creative year in the studio, continuing work on her expansive series of work on the land and water of Prince Edward Island; she has plans for a gallery show in the new year (hence the aforementioned need for an uninterrupted week of work). She took a “break” from all this over the summer with her collaboration with her studio-mate Lori Joy Smith for Art in the Open.

Catherine and Oliver continue to be the brighest and most important stars in my constellation, and often, in quiet moments, I ask myself how I was so lucky to have found such a wonderful partner and to have ended up with a son who constantly delights me with his humour, challenges, and insights.

Otherwise, our 100 Prince Street family has, at least temporarily, expanded by one more, as my Ukrainian cousin Sergey has been living with us for the past month while he’s been looking for work, with hopes of relocating to Canada (if you’re looking for a talented jack-of-all-trades with expertise in welding and fabrication, construction and vehicle repair, drop me a line). Sergey’s been teaching us Ukrainian, cooking us Ukrainian food and we’ve been buttressing his English, and cooking him Canadian food. He’s been a welcome addition to our mix.

Extended-family-wise, we had a nice visit with Catherine’s parents this fall: they took the train to Moncton where we picked them up and drove on to Halifax for the weekend, returning to Charlottetown for a week. And, the month before, we were descended upon, in a great and secret surprise project, by all of my brothers and their partners, along with my parents, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of my brothers Johnny and Steve. We now sit a table of 15, taking us beyond Waltons levels. It was a great event.

Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention G. here, although he would run quickly from any hint that I would do so. He’s a good friend and neighbour and an everpresent part of our lives, as close to being family as one can come without the family part.

Travel

I travelled south to New Hampshire to work with my colleagues at Yankee only twice this year, once in February and again in October; while it’s still an important part of our working relationship, face-to-face visits are less vital these days as we’ve got remote-working down to a science, using a combination of Trac, Subversion, email, telephone and weekly Google+ Hangouts to work together throughout the year.

Over March school break Catherine, Oliver and I travelled south to St. Petersburg, Florida to visit my vacationing parents for a week. Florida has never been high on my list of places I must visit, but the pleasures of spending time with family and, I must admit, the pleasures of being in a warm snowless climate for a week in the middle of the winter, made it all worth it. And, of course, there’s the Waffle House, which I love dearly.

The highlight of the travel year, though, was my mid-summer solo trip to Europe, a trip wherein I stayed in a welcoming collection of spare rooms of good friends, shared many good meals, got in a quick 3-day stay in Berlin, and ended up with an 8 day trip visiting family in Ukraine, my first visit there, and my first meeting with my long-lost Ukrainian family in my great-grandfather’s home village. It was a thoroughly enjoyable trip in all respects.

Outside of this week’s trip, I have no travels planned for 2013, but, if history is a guide, that won’t last long. If we can abide missing a few days of school, we might knit together March school break with the long Easter weekend the week after to make a 2-week long travel window for Oliver and I to return to our annual father-and-son-see-the-world tradition. And OHM2013 in the Netherlands in the summer looks plenty fun.

Writing

I made 313 posts in this space in 2012 (this will be post 314 once I hit “publish”). That’s 88,704 words. Or, it seems, about the length of a novel (albeit lacking a plot). What did I write about? In a Wordle, the top 1,000 words by frequency look like this (there’s a PDF here if you want to zoom in):

Looking at the 782 tags I applied to posts, my obsessions become clearer:

Printing

Letterpress printing has continued to be at the emotional heart of my work life this year: with the move in January to the Reinventorium the digital and analog parts of my work came under the same roof, with the office upstairs on the second floor of The Guild and the Golding Jobber No. 8 in the basement studio. It’s still something of a slog to shuttle type and paper from upstairs to downstairs between setting and printing, but two flights of stairs is a lot easier to manage than 3 city blocks in the cold and snow.

I never get as much time in the print shop as I’d like — digital work as habit of consuming all available time — but I’ve managed to scratch out some time, and was able to execute some satisfying projects: The Island Hymn, Obligation to Explain, gift certificates for Casa Mia, cards for Youngfolk & The Kettle Black, and a set of notebooks.

There’s still so much to learn about the trade, and it continues to intrigue and entrance me.

I held two workshop events in the letterpress shop this year: in August it was Type in the Open, a sort of public open house, and then, in October, I hosted a class from Birchwood Intermediate School. Both were a lot of fun and I hope to do more.

Work

This month we signed a new contract with Yankee Publishing, continuing into our 17th year working with them. Our work with Yankee on Almanac.com, YankeeMagazine.com has become very focused on making Drupal do new and interesting things, and while this is occasionally infuriating, it’s also often rather satisfying; our work this fall has focused on ecommerce-related projects (you are shopping it the Almanac and Yankee online stores, right!). Under the hood we’ve become masters of Amazon Web Services and have plumbed the depths of all its acronymic services (EC2, EBS, RDS, ELB, SES, S3) and I’ve finally made the transition to thinking about servers as emphemeral resources rather than pieces of hardware (a hard transition for someone used to have his hands on the iron). We’ve also been developing iOS and Android apps for Yankee — a nice collection of simple “of the day” apps for The Old Farmer’s Almanac and a refinement of the “Leaf Peepr” app for foliage reporting for YankeeFoliage.com.

While our work with Yankee takes up most of our time, I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to engage in some other projects, both paying and not: we’ve done a series of projects with my friend Ton in the Netherlands related to his open data work and various content management systems, we helped the PEI Home and School Federation recast its web presence in Drupal, and we’re working with Provincial Command of the Royal Canadian Legion on a similar project.

My two-year term as Secretary to the PEI Home and School Federation ends this spring; that work, along with my work locally as President of the Prince Street Home and School, has been engaging in a way I never thought possible. Public education is filled with passionate people who care about learning and citizenship, and home and school work, while occasionally straying into matters of policy, is most firmly grounded in practical projects. The personal highlight of my home and school work this year has been the planning and implementation of the TeacherNet wireless pilot project at Prince Street; I’ve become good friends with my coconspirator Ken Williams along the way, and I hope the TeacherNet model inspires other school technology projects in 2013.

My term as President of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust ended in May, but I continue to be a member of the board of directors; the Trust is in good hands with Bill Bishop stepping up to be President and Martha Ellis working as our Executive Director. There’s still so much work to be done to preserve coastal agricultural lands from development in the Trust’s area of interest, but we’ve made some good headway this year, raising funds and spreading the word about what we’re up to.

In Numbers

In the spirit of Feltron, here’s a statistical round-up:

• I turned 46 years old.
• I spent my 19th year living on Prince Edward Island (20th anniversary is next March).
• I sent 4,257 email messages.
• I received 510 telephone calls at the office, a total of 769 minutes of talking.
• I made 1015 telephone calls at the office, a total of 2,265 of talking; 20% of those calls were to Catherine.
• This blog had 373,037 unique visitors; they read 586,265 pages.
• I have 1,033 songs in my iTunes library.
• I have 34,233 photos in my iPhoto library; my Flickr holds 8,459 photos
• Google Latitude tells me I traveled 57,541 miles; I visited 7 countries this year: United States, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Latvia, Ukraine (I was only passing through the airport in Riga, so I didn’t really do justive to Latvia).

Best wishes to all for a healthy and productive 2013.

I encountered self-styled “ActorPreneur” Michael Ronen at a Thursday “betabreakfast” at Betahaus in Berlin this summer and was struck by his passion for an idea that has evolved in the interim into Capsuling.me, a “digital time capsuling” platform for creating geolocation-specific digital experiences. My favourite of the examples he cites in his video about the project is a piece of music that you can only listen to from a specific bridge while the sun is setting.

I’m intrigued by the project not only for Michael’s energetic evangelizing, but also because I think we are entering a time when we all seek less, not more, and one way of getting to less is to less is to use location as a filter. So much of the “location-based services” world is taken up with inane or annoying corporate “we could SMS past customers coupons when they’re within 200 feet of our new coffee ship” projects that it’s nice to see someone considering the artistic and personal potential of these technologies.

You can support Capsuling.me at its Kickstarter-like Berlin Crowd page; meanwhile, here’s Michael with an introduction:

I am a collector of notebooks. Other than (cheap, usually disposable) fountain pens, they are my only indulgence, and it’s rare that I don’t come back from a journey away with a few choice notebook finds (hence my great love for Berlin, with its excellent stationers).

And so perhaps it was inevitable that, like a lover of good coffee who starts to roast his own beans, I have branched out to become a notebook maker.

The immediate stimuli were the loan of a wonderful collection of letterpress cuts from my friend Ian Scott and a snowy Sunday afternoon with [[Oliver]] and the promise that we’d “do a project together.”

So, with Oliver at my side, we combed through the cigar boxes of cuts and selected three to build notebooks around: a nice rendering of a John Deere tractor, an illustration of a young scout wearing cap and necktie, and a bold motorcar graphic with the words “This is the Law: PEI” contained within.

Driver	Scout	Tractor

For the cover stock I picked up a package of 65 lb. card stock in multiple neon-like colours:

Oliver and I spent the afternoon printing the covers – the graphics and “Notebook” on the front and “Printed in Charlottetown / The Reinvented Press” on the back – and then I came back last night once they had dried and took a stab at assembling them into notebooks, a process made much easier by (a) the bone folder I ordered this summer and (b) the amazing PaperPro stapler that Johnny gave me for my birthday a few years ago.

Just as I was finishing up some prototypes I got a reply to my Tweet with some photos – the “it’s the law” car in pink. 25 of them please. And so, after agreeing to terms, I spent an additional couple of hours cutting, folding and stapling notebooks; Oliver and I dropped off the order this morning and I have a cheque in hand for payment.

Concept to product to order to payment: 18 hours. Welcome to the new (old) economy.

You can order Tractor Notebooks from my Etsy shop right now; if you order this week and live in Charlottetown, I’ll drop them off at your house before Christmas.

I’ve been keeping a watchful eye on Prince Edward Island’s electricity usage for the past couple of weeks, and noted that this Monday afternoon we hit what appears to be a new all-time peak load of 230 MW around 5:00 p.m. (the blue line at the top is electricity usage; the orange line under it is energy generated by the wind):

A figure of “more than 220 MW” has been used recently in reference to PEI’s peak load; the PEI Energy Commission, for example, said:

The peak electricity load for Prince Edward Island now exceeds 220 megawatts (MW) and total annual electric energy consumption is about 1.1 million megawatt-hours (MWh).

In an effort to learn more about the implications of a 230+ MW peak load, I learned the following quick facts about PEI’s electricity infrastructure:

• we can bring in 200 MW of generation over the undersea cables from New Brunswick.
• other than wind, which because of its variability can’t be considered as reliable capacity, there’s 160 MW of on-Island generation, all oil-fired and very expensive (in the last 30 days that I’ve been watching, we haven’t used more than 12 MW of this at any given time).
• the “largest contingency” that Maritime Electric has to meet is the loss of one undersea cable, which would reduce off-island generation to 100 MW and leave us able to meet a peak, at most, wind-aside, of 260 MW. On Monday we reached 88% of that figure.

Here’s a chart from the PEI Annual Statistical Review that summarizes this back to 2004:

It’s interesting to compare our figures here in PEI with those in Ontario (which, granted, because of industry and its urban character, would be expected to have a different energy profile). As I type the load in Ontario is 17,248 MW; with a population of 12,851,821, that means load is 1.4 kW per person. Here in PEI at the same time the load is 209 MW for a population 145,855, which makes our usage here almost exactly the same 1.4 kW per person.

Our yearly annual consumption of 1.1 million MWh makes the yearly average here on Prince Edward Island 7,541 kWh per capita, or about half the Canadian average (but 10x the usage per capita in Morocco).

This agrees roughly with this interesting infographic from Canadian Geographic that shows PEI as the province with the lowest per capita in-home electricity usage; the same infographic shows that where we’re really consuming in the energy on PEI — 4th highest province in the country — is in energy used for transportation, a good reminder that while electricity is easier to measure and report on, the real culprit we need to be concentrating on is oil consumption.

For the record, between gasoline and fuel oil, Prince Edward Island’s consumed 580,769 cubic meters of oil in 2011; that’s almost 4,000 litres per capita.

My friend Ian Scott dropped round the Reinventorium yesterday with an early Christmas gift: the loan of another set of cigar boxes filled with old letterpress cuts. By far and away the most brilliant one of the bunch is the Arms of Canada. From the look of it, this is the 1920s version — the telltale sign being the tails on the animals on the right and left, which are reserved in this version and wild and bushy in later ones.

It’s such a delicious cut that I couldn’t wait another day to get it on the letterpress, so I ran a quick test print this afternoon, which showed just how lovely it is (and how high-quality the craftsmanship of the cut itself is; it hasn’t deteriorated at all):

You can see some black dots around the edges, which were the impression of inked tiny nails that are holding the cut to its wooden base. I took the cut off the press and tapped those in so they lay flush, and ran another print, which I then scanned on my Doxie scanner; it is (perhaps in a way that only I can appreciate) positively dreamy.

Until I read about it in this Panic Blog post I’d been missing one of the new features of iTunes 11: in “Album View” (just click the “Albums” tab when looking at your music) the background and text colours for albums is derived from the album cover art. Here’s some examples from my collection (the Coldplay and Rheostatics albums are particular nice):

Maybe you’re looking for the 2015 Levee Schedule?

Here’s is the 2013 levee schedule for January 1, 2013 for Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island and area. This is the 8th year I’ve been collating and confirming this information; who would have thought! If you’re new to all of this and want to give it a try, read How to Levee. If you have additional levees to add, or changes to the information below, please drop me a line.

Notes:

• All levee times and locations have been confirmed by telephone or email as of Dec. 14, 2012.
• Updates since first publication:
  • Changed time of PEI Regiment to 12:00 Noon to 1:00 p.m. (was 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.) after receiving an update from the Regiment directly.
  • Added new PEI Women’s Institute levee (first ever!) at the Farm Centre.
  • Added new Water-Prince Corner Shop levee.
• This list will be updated if new information becomes available, so be sure to check back before January 1, 2013 for the latest.
• You can always get this calendar (or that for any future year) at ruk.ca/levee

One clear signal that you hanging out with an art-insider crowd is overhearing frequent use of the word maquette, a word almost never heard elsewhere. If you’re an art-outsider, dropping an m-bomb (“did you see MacDougall’s maquette for his biennale piece?”) will allow you to immediately blend in (note strategic use of word biennale to add spice). Thrown in an intentionality and a representational here and there and soon you’ll be going to the coolest parties.

All of which I say by way of introducing you to four interesting maquettes currently on display in the subterranean hallways of the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, all shortlisted entries for the Centre’s commission for a new piece of outdoor sculpture for 2014:

You can see these maquettes and learn more about the artists and their proposals by visiting the Centre and looking in the glass displays opposite Memorial Hall (as I write there’s still some documentation, and perhaps a missing maquette, still to come).

Many years ago, when Mark Leggott first moved to Prince Edward Island to become University Librarian, we had lunch at the old Interlude restaurant on Kent Street. Mark and I first met in 1994 in St. John’s at the Access conference, and kept bumping into each other at Access ever couple of years, so this was more of a “so, what are you up to these days” lunch than a introductory lunch. And, as is usual with Mark, the conversation was wide-ranging. I casually mentioned, at the tail end of our lunch, that one of my great desires was to see the archive of The Guardian, Prince Edward Island’s newspaper of record, scanned and made available as a digital archive.

Several months later I was happily surprised to find that a project was created at UPEI to do just this: meetings were held with The Guardian, scanners were acquired, software workflow developer, and the long job of scanning and archiving began. Early results — 890 issues wrapped inside a prototype — have been available for several years at IslandNewspapers.ca, and a new version, with a more extensive archive and improved viewer, is in development now. I’ve been poking around this beta for the last month, and figured out enough about how it’s structured to be able to automatically scrape scanned newspaper images out of it (in short, I wrote a PHP script that uses cURL to log into Drupal and then uses the fact that, in Islandora, the image path is standard and contains the date of the issue in question, to grab images for a given range of dates).

I’m a strong believer that projects like this need to have active hacking activity around their fringes to expose new opportunities for home information might be reused, resorted, redisplayed, reimagined. And so I decided that, by way of taking the expanded archive out for a ride, by way of marking The Guardian’s 125 anniversary this year, and by way of thanking the paper for its support of the archiving project, I’d make The Guardian a Christmas present.

I used my script to pull every cover from the 1912 volume of the paper — 304 issues in all — as high-resolution JPEG2000 images. I then converted these images to TIFF images (using Graphic Converter because my local Image Magick install can’t read JPEG2000 images), and then used Image Magick to create a very large composite image using the montage command:

montage 1912*.tiff -tile 16x19 -geometry +20+20 ../1912-montage.tiff

(This says “take all of the TIFF files with names starting with 1912 and make a 16 image wide by 19 image high composite, leaving 20 pixels of vertical and horizontal space between each image).

Generating the composite was surprisingly quick (I sometimes forget just how much raw horsepower modern computers pack). When it was generated I loaded it into Graphic Converter, added text at the bottom with title and credits, and then resized it to a more reasonable 8140 x 13300. Here’s a smaller version of what I ended up with:

Among other things, hidden away inside the composite you’ll find mention of the sinking of the Titanic:

I emailed the resulting TIFF to Kwik Kopy for some experimentation; they called me up the next day to look at some test prints, and after deciding to increase the size by 25% to make the covers slightly more readable, they went to print.

I picked up the result on Friday afternoon; I have a bad head for estimating size, so I was surprised by how huge it was:

I packed the print back in its box and ran it over to The Guardian office on Prince Street where I left it for editor Gary MacDougall. Less than an hour later a nice thank you photo showed up on Twitter:

You can grab the high-resolution image for yourself (100 MB TIFF image) if you’d like to explore it in more detail (headlines are very readable when you zoom in) or print a version for yourself (Kwik Kopy does great work and they’re familiar with the image now so printing additional copies shouldn’t be an issue!).