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!).

Every year the Prince Street Home and School holds a Christmas raffle to raise money. And every year for the past 5 years I’ve volunteered to produce the tickets; for the last three years it’s been a good opportunity to take the letterpress out for a ride. This year, partly because I was running out of time, and partly because of design inclination, I decided to go very simple:

If I had to do it all over again, I would have realized that when I flipped the “Phone:” and “Name:” around to face the other way (to let me slip a piece of steel under the perforation) their order was reversed. The perforation really is a perforation, and this was the first time I’d set up a job to print and perforate at the same time.

The type is the 24 point Bodini Bold I purchased from Atelier Domino in the spring. My favourite part of the job was the opportunity to use the ffl ligature — a ligature is a special piece of type that combines several letters that would otherwise run together unpleasantly, and most often involves the letter f — in the word Raffle (apologies for the obviously-not-cleaned-enough type!):

The tickets didn’t technically require numbers, but, well, I like using my numbering machine, if only because it’s just a lovely piece of technology: on every impression the number automatically increments, and the “No” is the trigger for this:

When you put it all together it looked like this:

It took me about an hour to run 300 tickets; it would have gone faster but I stopped the press every 30 tickets to carry a bunch of tickets across the room to set out to dry. I’m rather pleased with the result.

Tickets go on sale tomorrow, December 8, 2012 at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market (next to Lori and John’s perogi stand); you can also buy them at the Prince Street School Christmas concerts on December 10 and 12, and then again at the Market on December 15; the draw is at 2:00 p.m. on December 15 at the Market. Tickets are $2 each or three for $5.

I’ve had the theme for The Forest Rangers running through my head all morning. And now you can too!

While it is tradition for newspapers to not publish on Christmas Day, this hasn’t always been the case: The Guardian printed on Christmas Day in (at least) 1913 through 1920 and in 1926. Here are the covers from those editions, pulled from IslandNewspapers.ca and rendered with ImageMagick:

For those of you wanting the recipe:

1. Scrape high-resolution JPEG2000 images out of IslandNewspapers.ca (a non-public beta right now).
2. Convert to JPEG with GraphicConverter (could have also done this with ImageMagick).
3. From the command link, use the ImageMagick “montage” command to stitch them together:

montage *.jpg -tile 3x3 -geometry +20+20 ../montage.tiff

The population of Prince Edward Island is, according to the government, 146,105. If Prince Edward Island was a country, thus, it would be the 188th largest country in the world, and 53 other countries would have smaller populations (source):

188. Prince Edward Island
189. Curacao
190. Grenada
191. Aruba
192. Federated States of of Micronesia
193. Tonga
194. Virgin Islands
195. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
196. Kiribati
197. Jersey
198. Seychelles
199. Antigua and Barbuda
200. Isle of Man
201. Andorra
202. Dominica
203. Bermuda
204. Marshall Islands
205. Guernsey
206. Greenland
207. American Samoa
208. Cayman Islands
209. Northern Mariana Islands
210. Saint Kitts and Nevis
211. Faroe Islands
212. Turks and Caicos Islands
213. Sint Maarten
214. Liechtenstein
215. San Marino
216. British Virgin Islands
217. Saint Martin
218. Monaco
219. Gibraltar
220. Palau
221. Dhekelia
222. Akrotiri
223. Wallis and Futuna
224. Anguilla
225. Cook Islands
226. Tuvalu
227. Nauru
228. Saint Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha
229. Saint Barthelemy
230. Saint Pierre and Miquelon
231. Montserrat
232. Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas)
233. Norfolk Island
234. Svalbard
235. Christmas Island
236. Tokelau
237. Niue
238. Holy See (Vatican City)
239. Cocos (Keeling) Islands
240. Pitcairn Islands