One of the unsung aspects of the University of Prince Edward Island is its pioneering involvement in the early Internet: under the leadership of Jim Hancock (Director of Computer Services from 1972 to 1997), UPEI, among other things, participated in the NetNorth, CA*Net and CANARIE initiatives, hosted Prince Edward Island’s first connection to the Internet, and registered the country’s first “.ca” domain, upei.ca, in 1988.

The upei.ca domain name registration’s anniversary is coming up on Sunday: 25 years ago, on January 12, 1988, the domain was registered with John Demco at the University of BC, a name well-known to any of us involved in the early Internet in Canada, as he was the go-to guy for all .ca domain name registrations for many years (back when they were free, but encumbered by many restrictions; that’s how I ended up, for a time, with the domain name digitalisland.kingston.pe.ca).

While the university’s work in this regard had tremendous benefits for the institution itself, it benefited Prince Edward Island as a whole in many other ways. In my case it made for my first contact with PEI when I was applying for a job here – an email from Morley Pinsent using the CA*Net email system hosted by UPEI that was free to any Islander who asked – and, once I relocated here, it was my conduit to the greater world through my email address caprukav@atlas.cs.upei.ca (I still remember the day in 1993 when, as a meek 27 year old, Earlene Gallant handled the paperwork to sign me up for this).

UPEI’s work led to PEINet, which became (via a 14.4 kbps leased line connection) the conduit for the first webserver on PEI, at the PEI Crafts Council, to join the network; later, it was on PEINet’s web host that I created the first versions of www.gov.pe.ca. Through this all, the counsel of Jim’s successor as Director of Computer Services, Dave Cairns, was extremely valuable (the best piece of advice Dave ever gave me: hard drives will always fail, eventually, and maybe tomorrow).

All Islanders owe a great debt to the University of PEI for its vision in this regard; to help mark the occasion, I printed up a ceremonial poster on the letterpress this afternoon, and I’ll stick them up around town and campus over the next few days:

I began a new appointment today, as Hacker in Residence at Robertson Library, University of Prince Edward Island. Under the aegis of the university’s “visiting scholar” program, I’ll be a part-time member of the library community for the next year, with a mandate:

To bring the spirit and application of the ‘hacker ethic’ to the Robertson Library where the hacker ethic is defined as “access, freedom of information, and improvement to quality of life.”

That’s intentionally open-ended: while I have a grasp of the terrain I’d like to wander, what I’ll be doing specifically is to be seen. In general, I’ll be seeking to take the infrastructure, facilities, systems and special projects of the library apart and shed light on them by remixing, mashing-up, communicating and enlivening. I will be a “user in residence,” “patron in residence,” and “developer in residence” by times (and no, I will have nothing to do with “testing the library’s security systems,” which reflects a different (mis)use of the term “hacker”).

The appointment has its roots in conversations that University Librarian Mark Leggott and I started having when he was first appointed 6 years ago: I’ve long sought a way of becoming more deeply engaged with the work the library is doing, and it took 6 years for us to hack together a model that worked. In innumerable ways, it’s a dream position for me.

My role isn’t operational – which is good, because I’m not getting paid! – and has no specific research goals. If that sounds an awful lot like “hanging out around the library and doing stuff I find interesting,” that’s good, because that’s what I’m planning on doing. Beyond scratching my personal interests and  and curiousities, I’m a strong believer that a hacker presence inside any organization can be a force for good, and this is a good opportunity to put that belief to the test.

I’ll be on the University of PEI campus two or three times a week, working out of tiny room 322 of Robertson Library on the second floor beside the stacks, 50 square feet of highly-concentrated hackerspace that, right now, has a desk chair and an Ethernet jack waiting for me. Some time later this week there will be a website attached to me, where various reports of my exploits will begin to flow.

A brief summary of day one’s activities:

• Sampled the cinnamon-raisin bagels of the in-library café, a facility that, alas, does not serve espresso-based beverages (a coffee drought that afflicts the entire campus, it seems) and met the friendly café staff (man does that place get busy between classes!).
• Got a tour of the library, and introductions to most of the staff, from the ever-helpful and efficient Pauline MacPherson, library administrator.
• Met briefly with Peter Lux, a colleague from many projects in the past, to get a general lay of the systems and to talk about getting a virtual server set up for me.
• Met briefly with Don Moses, another longtime colleague and now Digitization Initiatives & Systems head at the library, about the general lay of his land.
• Took the measurements of my office (92” x 80” with a 92” x 25” counter/desk, a bookshelf, a single electrical outlet, a single Ethernet port, a wastepaper basket and a bulletin board).
• Make a request from Special Collections Librarian Simon Lloyd for blueprints of the library building (not currently in the collection, but perhaps available from the facilities branch of the university); figured a good way to start my term was to get a handle on the physical plant at the same time as I’m checking out the digital plant.
• Got myself hooked up to the wifi (only the barest dribble of a signal in my office, which I’ll have to fix somehow).
• Tracked down the history of Robertson Library.
• Bought a 10-pack of bus tickets to get me to and from the library.

Various bits of paperwork and bureaucracy are still in the works: security needs to cut me a key to my office and arrange for 24/7 access via the back door (so I can host raves, etc.), computer services needs to rejig my campus account so I can do things like print and access server resources. But, otherwise, I’m ready to roll.

A brief summary of day one’s activities:

• Sampled the cinnamon-raisin bagels of the in-library café, a facility that, alas, does not serve espresso-based beverages (a coffee drought that afflicts the entire campus, it seems) and met the friendly café staff (man does that place get busy between classes!).
• Got a tour of the library, and introductions to most of the staff, from the ever-helpful and efficient Pauline MacPherson, library administrator.
• Met briefly with Peter Lux, a colleague from many projects in the past, to get a general lay of the systems and to talk about getting a virtual server set up for me.
• Met briefly with Don Moses, another longtime colleague and now Digitization Initiatives & Systems head at the library, about the general lay of his land.
• Took the measurements of my office (92” x 80” with a 92” x 25” counter/desk, a bookshelf, a single electrical outlet, a single Ethernet port, a wastepaper basket and a bulletin board).
• Made a request from Special Collections Librarian Simon Lloyd for blueprints of the library building (not currently in the collection, but perhaps available from the facilities branch of the university); figured a good way to start my term was to get a handle on the physical plant at the same time as I’m checking out the digital plant.
• Got myself hooked up to the wifi (only the barest dribble of a signal in my office, which I’ll have to fix somehow).
• Tracked down the history of Robertson Library.
• Bought a 10-pack of bus tickets to get me to and from the library.

I am one of those “never quite got the hang of electronics” kids. Sure, I built myself a crystal radio. Got that drugstore prescription printer to work with my TRS-80 Model I. And I’ve wired up my share of connectors and cables. But soldering was always a roadblock. And don’t get me started on decrypting the coloured bands on resistors. It’s not that any of this was particularly impenetrable; it’s just that I never took the time, perhaps because sticking to software allowed me to do much more delightful things. But, now I’ve got a Raspberry Pi, and we’re in the Internet of Things era, so the least I can do is get some LEDs turning on and off with Python.

I used this tutorial as the basis for my coding – I just stripped out the IMAP-checking bits; the code looks like this:

import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)
GREEN_LED = 18
RED_LED = 23
GPIO.setup(GREEN_LED, GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(RED_LED, GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.output(GREEN_LED, True)
GPIO.output(RED_LED, True)

Can a “are we getting more than 100% of our electricity from the wind” alert system be too far behind?

Twenty years after I first installed Linux (on an IBM PS/2), I booted up a tiny deck-of-cards-sized Raspberry Pi here in the lab. It was dead simple to get running. And, once running, feels like coming home.

The British series The Hour, a period drama set in the 1960s in and around a current affairs program at the BBC. My favourite design element of the series are the title credits:

What I particularly like is that the visual metaphor of the credits is echoed in the design of the offices inside The Hour: the windows are covered with a lattice that shares the same design:

You can watch The Hour in Canada on Netflix, where two complete seasons are now available.

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.