One might wonder how many times it’s possible for Nokia to recast its maps offering: in recent years we’ve seen Nokia Maps become Ovi Maps become Nokia Maps again. To say nothing of the myriad map-related side-projects, some of which have gone public and others not.

To make matters more confusing for we Nokia Lumia phone owners, there are 4 different mapping applications from Nokia available for the device: Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive (turn-by-turn navigation), Nokia Transit (transit directions, but only for 100 cities), and an app called simply Maps (which comes from Microsoft).

None of these apps share POI or favourites databases, meaning, for example, that if I look for a place to eat near the office in Maps I see China Garden, Globe and Cora’s, whereas in Nokia Maps I’m given Lot 30, the Claddagh House and Leonhard’s. If I ask Maps to route me to “100 Prince Street” it sends me 13 hours and 850 km to “Prince Street, NY” whereas Nokia Maps sends me 317 m down Richmond Street to my house, and Nokia Drive sends me 520 m up and along Grafton Street to Prince Street and home.

Today, at least in theory, it all becomes Here:

This is why today we are introducing HERE, the world’s first location cloud that delivers a location platform, location content and location apps across any screen and any operating system.

I’m not exactly sure what that means, but in practice it seems to mean little more than adding additional confusion to an already confusing mix.

For example, here’s my Here profile. You’ll find a “favourite” there for the Reinventorium. Confusingly, if you click on that favourite it will expand to show you the location of my office in the middle of Charlottetown Harbour (the location is correctly attached to the favourite as 111 Queen Street; it’s the map rendering that’s broken):

Click on the “More Details” link and suddenly you’re transported out of Here and back into Nokia Maps. And not actually shown “More Details” at all, but rather a map with nothing highlighted at all. Clicking on the “share” icon pops up a dialog box with a URL for the favourite that leads to a page containing only “Oops, something went wrong. Please come back later.”

Otherwise in Here you find essentially the same thing you found yesterday in Nokia Maps. Compare:

There’s been some evolution of the language between Nokia Maps and Here: what once were “Favourites” are now “Collections”. To Nokia’s credit, whatever these are called, they follow me from product to product: my thousands of Plazes are still there; although they seem to have stopped working in Nokia Maps, they’re present in Here:

Otherwise, as far as I can tell, Here is Nokia Maps with a new skin. There’s no trace of “the world’s first location cloud that delivers a location platform, location content and location apps” and, other than the ability to add a (non-working) “profile” page, and a “Map Creator” tab that doesn’t work in Canada, there’s no change in functionality.

All of this is frustrating for we on the using end of Nokia’s mapping applications because Nokia’s ace in the hole, the thing that holds it above other mobile-focused companies, is supposed to be its maps. This is why, we were told, Nokia acquired Gate5 and Dopplr and Plazes and Navteq. We’ve all been waiting for the day when this is going to pay off, when Nokia releases a single end-to-end mapping solution that does navigation plus social location plus POI management plus local mapping. Unfortunately, at least on first blush, Here ain’t it.

There is a transformation that something printed on a letterpress goes through as the ink dries.

It is, perhaps, an indescribable transition, but one that hits me over the head, every time, when I walk into my shop the morning after printing. I encounter objects that, only 12 hours earlier, were in some indefinite transtitional state, closer to raw materials than finished product.

Overnight, though, the ink has dried, and the print has settled into permanance. The raw materials — ink, paper, pressure — have become a real thing.

It is magical.

From last week’s sketches of a card for Youngfolk & The Kettle Black came these from the letterpress yesterday:

It was an challenging job to get the ampersand in red underprinted in the right position relative to the rest of the card overprinted in black: lots of fiddling and fussing. I ended up printing 375 ampersands in red, and then about half the cards for each address.

I’ll drop them off at the coffee shop later today when I retire for my afternoon macchiato.

When I was 12 years old my parents took me to see Pierre Trudeau speak in a high school gymnasium in Hamilton; tonight, 33 years later, I took Oliver to see Justin Trudeau speak here at The Guild.

We watched the speech from the balcony beside my office — the better to avoid the claustrophic partisan crowd below — and when the time for Q&A arrived, Oliver put up his hand. He couldn’t be seen, though, and question time quickly came and went.

I asked Oliver if he wanted to go downstairs and ask Trudeau his question directly and he said yes; so off he headed, bravely, by himself, wading through the teaming crowds, sneaking over chairs, saying “excuse me” to everyone in his way, to the front of the room where Trudeau was holding court. At the front of the room he waited his turn until he caught Trudeau’s eye.

Oliver’s question? “Do you do what Pierre Trudeau did?”

And Justin’s answer (to paraphrase Oliver’s report): “No, because that was in the past, with a past situation, and this is in the future.” He told Oliver that his father was important to him, though.

I’m so proud of Oliver for bravely overcoming his fear of crowds and making his voice heard.

A long-weekend trip with extended family demanded that we temporarily upgrade our vehicle to a minivan, so I rented a Dodge Grand Caravan on Thursday to take me, Oliver, Catherine and her parents to Halifax and back.

Pulling out of the Avis lot on University Avenue I was surprised to realize that this was the first time I’d been behind the wheel of a minivan, ever.

Indeed it was the first time I’d driven a Dodge of any sort since the days of learning to drive on a Dodge Dart in the 1970s. It only took a few minutes, fortunately, to recapture the muscle memory (wipers on the left, lights on the dash, and so on). It was like putting on an old pair of shoes. Albeit an old pair of shoes upgraded with myriad cup holders, “stow and go” seats, and Bluetooth audio. Even though the Grand Caravan felt impossibly big (2-1/2 feet longer than my Jetta), it turns out that it’s about the same length as the 1974 Dart. So I figured that out too.

The room certainly came in handy: we comfortably accommodated 5 people and had a seat to spare and room for lots of luggage. I moved a double-sized futon before we headed out and I could have easily carried 9 more with the seats stowed. It’s easy to see why the minivan format is preferred by families who need to move around a lot of bodies and stuff.

We pulled into Halifax on Thursday night in a driving rainstorm and found our way to the Atlantica Hotel (née Holiday Inn Select; $73/night on Hotwire). The hotel was perfectly fine: clean, central, comfortable, flawless wifi, and a servicable restaurant. The only weaknesses were the parking (and that only because the basement parking garage, while perfectly fine for a Fiat 500, was hard to navigate in the behemoth) and a gaggle of hyperactive kids that joined us on the 8th floor on Saturday night and decided not to sleep. But we worked around that, and everything worked out just fine.

Otherwise in Halifax:

• BOOMburger and the Orange Lunchbox have nothing to fear from Relish (opening in Charlottetown soon): I had dinner there by myself on Thursday night (after addressing a server issue while the rest of the clan ate elsewhere) and found the burger tasteless, over-priced and the concept pompous (staff were super-helpful and friendly, but that couldn’t save the meal).
• I’ve decided that my favourite place for coffee in Halifax is Just Us!: I had an excellent macchiato two days in a row, once at their Barrington shop and the next day at their massive Sankt Oberholz-like Spring Garden Road outlet. The coffee was great, as were the staff and the vibe.
• Catherine and I saw Midnight’s Children at The Oxford on Friday night, a wonderful old full-sized theatre (the last of its kind in the Maritimes?). The movie wasn’t life-changing, but it was a nice night out. We tried to have a quick bite to eat across the street at Wasabi House but they were slammed to the point where no eye contact was made after standing at the front door for 10 minutes, so we recoiled to King of Donair across the street for a (horrible) slice of pizza. We ended up the night at Jane’s on the Common where we had “I’ve got better things to do with my time” service, Catherine had excellent duck and I had bland and disappointing puttanesca.
• The museum at Pier 21 was as interesting as ever (we’d been there when Oliver was younger, but this was our first visit back in a decade).
• The new Halifax Farmer’s Market continues to strike me as soulless, unimaginative eco-architecture. But we did have some fine alcohol-free ginger wine samples, and a nice lunch at Selwood Green.
• Meanwhile, the rival Historic Farmer’s Market has all the soul, but, alas, a shrinking collection of vendors. Fortunately two of those vendors are Costas Halavrezos’s “The Spiceman,” selling a dizzying array of spices from around the world with wit and wisdom, and Big Life Whole Foods, which made me a stand-up spelt pancake covered in blueberries for breakfast. 
• The library at NSCAD has an impressive collection of books on typography, design and letterpress printing; I spent a pleasant hour there while Catherine and Oliver were at the Discovery Centre. Around the corner I picked up a packet of ink knives for $2, and some disposable fountain pens, from the NSCAD Art Supply Store, which is a pleasant place to shop for arty things.
• We had supper on Saturday night at Athens Restaurant on Quinpool Road. Generally good service, and a passable though not particularly inspiring menu of Greek food.
• There’s an Apple Store at Halifax Shopping Centre. Nothing to write home about, design-wise; otherwise like any Apple Store in any upscale mall anywhere. Still, handy.

We headed back to the Island on Sunday morning, making the trip in a quick 4 hours. 

Garth Taylor made his annual phone call to me tonight to alert me that he’ll be back at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market this Saturday. Given that Garth was threatening to retire 4 years ago, this makes for the slowest retirement ever. Stop by and welcome him back.

One more small contribution to the public understanding of the release of names of companies that received PNP investment: use this tool to search for specific companies.

Quickly assembled thanks to the very capable and flexible DataTables plug-in for jQuery.

Using open source tools to spread open source data: that’s what it’s all about.

Update: I’ve now got three searches in place:

1. Search the PNP list released by the Province
2. Search the PNP list merged with the 2008 OpenCorporations.org data — remembering that this is old data, this search allows you to search the “description of business”, and can be helpful in identifying numbered companies.
3. Search the PNP list merged with the 2008 OpenCorporations.org data, with shareholders and officers — again remembering that this is 2008 shareholder and officer data, and that the shareholders and officers involved in November 2008 may not have been shareholders and officers when the PNP investment was received, this search allows a “people search” of PNP companies by officer (president, shareholder, etc.).

I don’t have strong opinions about the propriety of the PNP program.

I do, however, have strong opinions about what it means for a government to “release data.”

The Province of PEI “complied” with a court order to release the names of companies that received investment under the Provincial Nominee Program by releasing a PDF file on its website.

PDF, while certainly readable on a variety of digital devices, is not “open data” in any real sense.

To solve that issue, I ran the PDF file through pdftotext and then stripped out the page headers with a text editor using regular expressions.

The result is pnp.txt, a simple ASCII text file with the 1,354 company names from the PDF.

Update: I’ve merged the PNP data with the 2008 OpenCorporations.org data and 933 matches (69% of the PNP companies); you can download this as pnp_plus.csv (comma-delimited ASCII) or pnp_plus.xml (XML). Or search with this tool.

Update: I’ve merged the PNP data with the 2008 OpenCorporations.org data and included the shareholders and officers of the company, getting 2708 matches. Use with caution, as this data is 4 years old now, and shareholders and officers listed were not necessarily in place when PNP investment was received. Download this as pnp_people.csv (comma-delimited ASCII). Or search with this tool.

Some experimenting, over the course of the last week, with a business card for Youngfolk & The Kettle Black. I’ve settled on the bottom-right as the design I’ll print (these are all rough proofs pulled with a stamp pad), with the ampersand underprinted in red and everything else in black. I was rather wedded to the “upside down Y” idea for a long time, but as soon as I overlaid the larger ampersand, and filled up some of that volume in the middle, a righways-Y suddenly became a lot more appealing (and, as it happens, a hat-tip to the erstwhile former occupant of 98 Water Street, Café Ampersand).

Actual conversation en route to school this morning:

“I got an email from your teacher last night. She said you had a good day yesterday.”

“She’s a Newfie.”

“Oh, from Newwfoundland. From what town?”

“Why?”

“There are a lot of towns in Newfoundland with funny names. Like Bay Bulls.”

“Oh, like the fish translator.”

“The fish translator?”

“Yes, on the Internet, the fish translator?”

“Oh, you mean Babelfish?”

“Yes, Bay Bulls Fish.”