The Guild, which is home to the Reinventorium, is also home to a black-box theatre, a theatre that happens to be located less than an arm’s length through the wall in front of my desk where I type.

This theatre plays host to a rollicking schedule of productions over the summer months, and while I’m generally happy to have my work happen in a space that oozes creativity, sometimes that oozing interferes with the quiet contemplation needed to do complex digital work.

All of which is to say: sometimes it’s hard to get work done when a troupe of fresh-faced triple threats is belting out Anne of Green Gables-themed show tunes in the room next door.

So the question then becomes: when is this happening?

The snappy new Guild website has a helpful calendar right on the front page, but the schedule information there isn’t much use to me if I’m not making a daily visit to the website: I want the information on the same day-to-day calendar that I used to manage everything else in my life, a calendar that appears on my laptop, my iPad and my phone and automatically syncs among the three.

So the question becomes: how to liberate the calendar information of of its website prison and into a shareable object?

This turned out not to be too difficult; here’s how I did it.

Look under the Hood

Firebug is a very useful tool for looking under the hood of a website: it’s like a super-charged version of “View Source.” Using Firebug’s “Network” tab, I watched as the The Guild website loaded:

I noticed that one of the things to happen as an HTTP POST to a script called admin-ajax.php with the following parameters:

action=get_events
readonly=true
categories=0
excluded=0
start=1406430000
end=1410058800

The important bits here appeared to be the start and end, which were unixtime values for July 25, 2014 and September 7, 2014 respectively, which is that range of dates on this month’s calendar.

The response from this POST was a JSON-encoded array with the events taking place between these start and end dates, like this:

[
  {
    "id": "10",
    "title": "Anne & Gilbert, The Musical",
    "start": "2014-07-29 13:30:00",
    "end": "2014-07-29 15:30:00",
    "allDay": "",
    "className": "cat4 aec-repeating",
    "editable": "",
    "repeat_i": "1",
    "repeat_f": "1",
    "repeat_e": "2014-10-11"
  },
  {
    "id": "10",
    "title": "Anne & Gilbert, The Musical",
    "start": "2014-08-05 13:30:00",
    "end": "2014-08-05 15:30:00",
    "allDay": "",
    "className": "cat4 aec-repeating",
    "editable": "",
    "repeat_i": "1",
    "repeat_f": "1",
    "repeat_e": "2014-10-11"
  },

The important bits of information here were the title, the start and end date, and the “cat” in the “className” element. The “cat” was important because the calendar lists both theatre shows and art gallery shows, and I only want the theatre shows on my calendar, so I want to exclude any event with “cat1”.

Converting JSON to iCalendar

The iCalendar format is a simple, well-documented plain text format for representings events; it’s the lingua franca of calendaring apps, and you can import iCalendar files into Apple’s Calendar, into Google Calendar, and into most anything else that reads and writes event data.

To convert the JSON-encoded calendar data on The Guild website into an iCalendar-format file, I wrote a little PHP script called harvest-guild-calendar.php that uses cURL to issue the HTTP POST to The Guild website, requesting events for the next 90 days, and then parses the response and outputs each event – minus gallery shows – into a iCalendar file.

The resulting file (here’s a full snapshot taken today) looks, in part, like this:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
PRODID:-//Reinvented Inc.\, //TheGuild 1.1//EN
X-WR-CALNAME;VALUE=TEXT:The Guild Theatre
X-WR-TIMEZONE;VALUE=TEXT:Canada/Atlantic
VERSION:2.0
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Anne & Gilbert, The Musical
DTSTART;TZID=Canada/Atlantic:20140805T133000
DTEND;TZID=Canada/Atlantic:20140805T153000
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Anne & Gilbert, The Musical
DTSTART;TZID=Canada/Atlantic:20140812T133000
DTEND;TZID=Canada/Atlantic:20140812T153000
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Anne & Gilbert, The Musical
DTSTART;TZID=Canada/Atlantic:20140819T133000
DTEND;TZID=Canada/Atlantic:20140819T153000
END:VEVENT

Spreading the Calendar

With the iCalendar file in hand, it was short work to create a shareable Google Calendar for The Guild, and to make this available in several formats:

• iCalendar (suitable for importing or subscribing to in Apple’s Calendar for OS X or iOS, etc.)
• XML (suitable for viewing in feed readers)
• HTML (standalone viewing in a browser, or embedding in another website)

Using the Calendar

In my case, I took the iCalendar-format file and imported it into my ownCloud calendar, which then automatically echoed it the Calendar on my desktop:

And the calendar on my Android phone:

And to everywhere else I see my calendar.

As a result of all this, I have continuous awareness of when Anne & Gilbert are about to break out into song.

Like – as you can see from my phone above – in about 35 minutes from now.

Time for lunch.

Starting on January 1, 1914 and for every issue of the paper going forward, The Charlottetown Guardian ran some variation of “Confederation Celebration, Charlottetown” as part of its flag on page 1:

Until, that is, Tuesday, August 4, 1914 when it was changed to “Confederation Celebration, Postponed”:

As a page 1 story explained:

At a special meeting of the General Committee for the celebration of the Jubilee of Confederation held in the Council Chamber last night it was resolve to postpone indefinitely celebration of the event.

Hon. Mr. Justice Haszard presided over a full attendance.

The chairman opening the proceedings by referring to the crisis in Europe and asked an expression of opinion as to the advisability of proceeding with the celebration.

Hon. J. A. Mathieson, Premier, thought there was no alterative to postponement. In the present condition of affairs there was nothing else for it.

The chairman, Messrs. Pope, Tidmarsh and Ings concurred.

Mr. Pop this moved, seconded by Mr. Heartz:

“The in view of the fact that the Empire is at present engaged in a world-wide struggle and all lesser issues are sunk in our hopes and fears for the welfare of our country, it would, in the opinion of the Committee, be unfitting to hold the celebration at this time and it is therefore decided that it be postponed indefinitely, and that the Committee adjourn subject to the call of the chair.”

The following day, Wednesday, August 5, 2014, The Guardian reported that Britain had declared war:

I was intrigued to find this passage in the R. T. Holman entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography earlier this week:

R. T. Holman was a merchant who stood apart from the social life of his small community, who apparently neither sought nor gained political favours, and who possessed unorthodox religious beliefs. Though Holman had been born into a Baptist family, his father had left the church in 1835 following a doctrinal disagreement with a clergyman. It is not evident how Robert’s views on religion developed, but the census of 1861 listed him as a “universalist” and by the 1870s he had abandoned organized religion in favour of free thought. Not content to object passively to the predominant religious sentiment of the community, he brought speakers to Summerside to preach humanism. One example of his antipathy was his response to the province’s proclamation of Thanksgiving in 1899. He protested in a half-page advertisement in the Pioneer that the day should be “free from cant, free from hypocracy and free from policy” and that consequently his stores would remain open.

Prince Edward Island is a challenging place to be weird, and so it’s useful to look to history for examples of successful weird people like Holman.

The ad that’s referenced is an interesting one. Here’s the version that ran on October 18, 1899 – the day before Thanksgiving – in the Summerside Journal:

It reads:

Oliver’s MacBook Air power supply had become dangerously frayed, to the point where continued use would have involve low-level electrocution. Sugru to the rescue, and some personalization thrown in for effect (in 14 pt. Bodoni):

Usually I’m at the other end of the camera, so there are very few photos of me when I’m traveling.

Which is why this photo of Oliver and me in Berlin, along with Sam Stewart and Matthew Richard, taken in 2010, is such a nice thing to stumble across.

We all happened to be in Berlin the same week, and we met up at Yellow Sunshine on Weiner Straße one night for burgers and debrief.

I was reminded of that night this afternoon when I encountered Matthew behind the counter at The Kettle Black, where he’s working for the summer (and where he’s making fantastic coffee, having honed his skills, I am told, in the big city).

We were all so young then.

One of the confounding aspects of our two weeks spent in a VW camper in Europe this summer was that I struggled to keep my mobile phone charged from the camper’s electric outlets.

The design of the camper’s electrical system didn’t help: there are two power outlets behind the driver’s seat: one works while the camper is on the road, the other when it’s parked and plugged into the mains. Meaning that I had to switch back and forth at least twice a day, and, what’s more, to remember which was which.

But still, the phone would often end up dead in the middle of the day, for reasons I couldn’t explain, and I became convinced that the VW electrical system was flaky.

It never occured to me that the micro USB cable I was using to charge the phone would be at fault. But it was.

Returning home to the Reinventorium I found, sure enough, that this cable, the one that came with the phone, one worked if it was plugged in “just so,” and exactly what that meant changed every day.

Why I opted to believe that a brand new $60,000 vehicle was at fault when it was, in truth, a $2.00 cable, is beyond me.

Speaking of which: what’s up with the price of micro USB cables in retail stores? I went over to The Source in the Confederation Court Mall to buy a replacement for this faulty cable and all they could sell me was this $24.99 Blackberry-branded cable. I finally found one for “only” $14.99 up at Target. But still, when Monoprice retails these cables for $1.11 it makes the local pricing, even if you factor the acceptable cost of “I just had to walk a block instead of waiting a week,” seems like highway robbery.

For $93 I could buy 100 micro USB cables from Monoprice and just pass them out on the street as a public service. Hey, maybe I should do that.

The answer to the question “where to put the second wire hanging system to mount even more of my collected paper works” appeared today, on the opposite wall:

A few more items from the Gaspereau Wayzgoose along with a few more of my own items, including, from the right to left, the piece I printed in Mainz at the Gutenberg Museum, the Moon calendar I printed in 2011 in Berlin, and the You Have An Obligation to Explain I printed in the summer of 2012. And, of course, coffee bags.

I’ve again taken the official Prince Edward Island School Calendar and updated a set of public calendar files to make it easier for parents and others to shunt the information around their digital devices. Here you go:

• Google Calendar
• iCal format

(Note for those of you who already had the 2013-2014 School Calendar integrated into your digital devices: you don’t need to do anything, as those addresses haven’t changed from last year).

As a member of the School Calendar Committee for the PEI Home and School Federation I again asked to have the official calendar released as structured data by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development itself, but as yet this (still) hasn’t happened.

Back last year, when my friends Luisa and Olle put their Malmö apartment up for sale, they had some lovely photos taken by their real estate agent, including this one of the wall in their living room, a photo that, as it happened, featured a number of the pieces of printing I’d sent them over the years:

I closely associate such a wall-of-ephemera with Olle and Luisa, and I’ve always been jealous of their sophisticated Scandanavian hanging system that makes it possible.

I tried my hand at something similar in the old Reinvented HQ on Fitzroy Street using 3M damage free hooks and a roll of twine, but I was never satisified, neither with the tautness nor with the fact that it eventually all came tumbling down.

This summer, with a collection of my own printed ephemera growing by the month, I resolved to find a solution and, after banging away in Google with search phrases like “wire rope hanging system,” I found my way to Ikea’s Digniet curtain wire, which seemed like exactly the Scandanavian hanging system I was looking for. I ordered three sets – if I was going to solve this problem, I was going to solve it everywhere – and they arrived a few weeks ago.

Tonight I finally managed to assemble the screws and anchors (not included by Ikea), electric drill and level, and, along with a handy installation guide from a woman in California and I set to work. Thirty minutes later, this is where I’ve ended up:

The work is mostly by others, the exception being the alphabet book on the far-right, which is perhaps my favourite of all the things I’ve printed, and the Thor washing machine two spots to the left (from a letterpress engraving loaned to me by Ian Scott), which I’ve always liked. Otherwise there are a few pieces from the Gaspereau Wayzgoose, some colourful letters from Drukkerijmuseum Meppel and a few of my favourite calendar pages from the letterpress calendars I’ve collected over the years.

The Digniet curtain wire system’s instructions are a little complicated to parse, being delivered in traditional “why use words when complex illustrations will do?” Ikea fashion:

The news about the screws and anchors not being included is the only information delivered with words – in 29 languages, no less! The customer is advised “for advice on suitable screw-systems, contact your local specialised dealer,” wording that makes me perhaps thankful that they opted for the illustrations rather than the words for the rest of the story.

Once I parsed the instructions – something aided greatly by the advice from California – it all turned out to be rather ingenious and very satisfyingly taut when tightened. I’m very happy with the result.

Now, to find a place for the other two…

Since launching a few years ago, IslandNewspapers.ca would have been more accurately named without the final “s,” as The Guardian was the only newspaper you’d find there.

That all changed this week with the introduction of Haszard’s Gazette – “Farmer’s Journal and Commercial Advertiser” – covering the years from 1851 to 1857, a period that predates The Guardian by almost 40 years.

Here’s how it’s described there:

Haszard’s Gazette was established by James D. Haszard in 1851. Haszard had previously been the Queen’s Printer, and, on being displaced from this office by Edward Whelan, he immediately began the publication of his own paper, Haszard’s Gazette. He published it himself until 1853, when he retired in favour of his son, George T. Haszard. Several other publishers and editors followed. Haszard’s Gazette printed some foreign and local news, fiction, anecdotes and advertisements. It was largely nonpolitical, but its viewpoint did vary under its different editors Reform, biblical instruction in the schools and temperance were all discussed in Haszard’s Gazette. In March of 1857, Haszard’s Gazette was merged with the Protector and Christian Witness.

It’s a welcome addition to the almost 70 years of The Guardian now digitized and searchable, and I encourage you to take it out for a ride.