If I was writing my list of best things on Prince Edward Island, somewhere near the top would have to be the Factory Coffee from Island Chocolates in Victoria.

It’s a chocolate-lined glass filled with coffee and topped with whipped cream. And it’s pure heaven: I literally have dreams about it.

I’ve cut way, way back on sugar over the past 2 years, to the point where the amount of chocolate I consume in a year would fit in the palm of one hand. The Factory Coffee is one of the few things I make an exception for.

Do yourself a favour: some day this summer head out to Victoria, order yourself one, find a seat on the front porch, and drink it slowly.

So not only was R.P. Haythorne Prince Edward Island’s Premier-that-time-forgot, but he was also involved in the hunt for the last bear in Marshfield, as he reported in The Examiner on July 27, 1863 (a letter that appears in the excellent Marshfield and area: A Grand Legacy:

To the Editor of the Examiner.
Sir:—

Rumors of a Bear being amongst us have been current for some time past, which received tangible confirmation by the slaughter of certain sheep and lambs on the farms of Mr. Alexander Stewart and others. Being disturbed in that direction, Bruin shifted his quarters to the farm of R. P. Haythorne, Esqr., where on Thursday night last, he destroyed five sheep and a lamb. Measures were immediately adopted for a general hunt; and on the same afternoon between thirty and forty persons, resident in the neighborhood, met at St. Cuthbert’s Mills for that purpose.

The hunt was joined by His Excellency the Lieutenant Governor and Mr. Atkinson, and by several gentlemen from Charlottetown. After a long and tedious search, the bear was at length started [sic] on the western side of Gough’s Creek, and fired at without success. He re-crossed the creek and in an incredibly short space of time had crossed the St. Peter’s Road, in the vicinity of the Marshfield School House, where he was headed by Mr. Alexander Robertson and his sons and some others. The fatal shot was fired near the schoolhouse by Mr. James Wyatt. The animal proved to be a full grown male, of enormous dimensions, and was estimated by experienced judges to weigh not less than 300 lbs. The skin, it was unanimously voted by the assembled hunters, should be presented to His Excellency.

Your obedient servant,
R. P. HAYTHORNE. 1863.

I am happy to report that since my missive lamenting the lack of recognition for Premier Haythorne in this year of Confederation memorializing that word has come in from Marshfield that there is, in fact, an event planned:

A display board will be established to preset the details of the life of Premier Robert Poore Haythorne on the site of his Haythorne family home. Premier Haythorne’s provincial government negotiated the terms under which PEI would enter Canadian confederation with the Canadian government of Sir John A. MacDonald. A community celebration will occur at the unveiling.

I can think of no better kickoff for the drive to rename a significant Island building after Haythorne, and invite all Haythornites to make an effect to attend this event.

Who’s ever heard of Robert Poore Haythorne? Certainly not me. Perhaps it’s because I lack a Prince Edward Island public school education, but I’ve never heard mention of the man who, says his official biography, “could be regarded as being the true Father of Confederation.”

Many of the figures of Confederation are honoured here in Charlottetown: Coles has a building named after him, Gray had a ferry. Even Palmer, an anti-confederate, has Palmer’s Lane.

But there’s no Haythorne Building or Haythorne Boulevard or Haythorne Centre for the Arts.

Sure, Haythorne “in extending the railway, and placing the Island in an extreme financial situation, brought the Island to a point where union with Canada was necessary,” but Palmer and Coles “fought a bloodless duel with pistols” and we venerate them nonetheless.

Haythorne, by all reports, was a wise and sensible man; the Dictionary of Canadian Biography writes:

The writers of his obituaries described Haythorne as an “estimable neighbour” and an example of a “reasonable man” who assisted the “struggle for freedom from proprietory bondage.” He would have welcomed these summations of a life.

Perhaps, in this year of ceaseless celebration of Confederation, we should consider celebrating the man who brought us to the point where it was inevitable and negotiated its terms, despite his own misgivings about the very idea.

Oliver took my Drink the Other Macchiato post from a few days ago and turned it into an infographic:

Out of the corner of my eye I caught, just over a year ago, some mentions in the media that the NDP had “softened its socialist language.” I paid it no need at the time, but this week, confronted with a near-toxic dose of wholesale-unquestioning-belief-in-the-redemptive-power-of-capitalism, I went in search of the NDP’s constitution for solace.

The version I found first, dated November 2011, had this delightful preamble:

The New Democratic Party believes that the social, economic and political progress of Canada can be assured only by the application of democratic socialist principles to government and the administration of public affairs.

The principles of democratic socialism can be defined briefly as:

That the production and distribution of goods and services shall be directed to meeting the social and individual needs of people within a sustainable environment and economy and not to the making of profit;

To modify and control the operations of the monopolistic productive and distributive organizations through economic and social planning. Towards these ends and where necessary the extension of the principle of social ownership;

The New Democratic Party hold firm to the belief that the dignity and freedom of the individual is a basic right that must be maintained and extended and

The New Democratic Party is proud to be associated with the democratic socialist parties of the world and to share the struggle for peace, international co-operation and the abolition of poverty.

That’s the kind of talk I can get behind, and was the tonic I was looking for.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I went looking for an up to date copy of the NDP constitution only to find that all of this language was “softened” right out of the party’s constitution, replaced with a 400 word preamble that makes no mention at all of profit or capital, and denudes the mention of democratic socialism down to this:

New Democrats seek a future that brings together the best of the insights and objectives of Canadians who, within the social democratic and democratic socialist traditions, have worked through farmer, labour, co-operative, feminist, human rights and environmental movements, and with First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples, to build a more just, equal, and sustainable Canada within a global community dedicated to the same goals.

That’s more like an homage to socialism than a commitment to it.

This repositioning – leader Thomas Mulcair was quoted as explaining it away as “a better way for us to reach out beyond our traditional base, talk to Canadians who might share our vision, who might share our goals, but who weren’t too sure” – may make the NDP more palatable, but it also excises the very heart of what made the party a compelling alternative to the Conservatives, Liberals and Greens, all of which embrace capitalism with ferocity and disagree simply on the degree to which it should be allowed to be unfettered.

It’s possible to argue that this softening was simply an exercise in catching New Democratic language up to New Democratic reality: when, after all, was the last time you heard an NDP candidate singing the virtues of emancipation from capitalism on the doorstep. But it’s a significant shift, nonetheless, and one we should all mourn.

Mourn not necessarily because we are socialists at heart – and I’m not sure that I am – but rather because in decapitating its principles, the NDP makes the political landscape even more homogeneous than it was before, and turns most political arguments about the economy into non-productive arguments about how to tweak capitalism this way or that rather than discussion about serious alternatives.

For those of you who have been following along with my telephony exploits, an update.

When we last left the issue a year ago, I’d migrated all of my telephone numbers to Vitelity, including local Charlottetown numbers for home and office, something enabled by Vitelity’s then-new ability to port 902 numbers to become DIDs. That’s worked very well for the last year.

This year, as part of a gradual plan to wean myself from the aging server that’s sitting in the server room at silverorange, I’ve taken another couple of steps:

1. I migrated from Asterisk running on ye olde server to Asterisk running on a Raspberry Pi sitting beside me here on my desk in the Reinventorium behind a Bell Aliant Fibre Op connection with a dynamic IP. Unbelievably, this works extremely well, given that it’s running on a $35 piece of hardware: the RasPBX, which wraps up Asterisk and FreePBX into an easy-to-install distrubution for the Pi. And it just works.
2. This change then left me with a conundrum: my home phone, a regular old cordless phone connected to a Sipura 2000 box, was no longer to see my Asterisk box, obscured as it now is behind a dynamic IP. Rather than trying to configure a dynamic DNS or some such solution, I simply created a Vitelity sub-account, moved my home phone number to that, and then connected the Sipura box directly to Vitelity, using their own (free) Voicemail system as a replacement for my own Asterisk voicemail.

All of this took more fiddling that this description suggests, but it’s working well now.

For reasons I don’t completely understand, when the friendly coffee agents at Receiver Coffee make me a decaf macchiato every afternoon conditions require they make two macchiatos.

Heretofore, in the old ROW142 days, the second macchiato would generally be consumed, for quality control purposes, by the agent themselves, but under the new regime, with the volume of coffee going out having increased exponentially, this doesn’t scale, and thus the second is now being offered up to me.

Which begs the question: what to do with the other macchiato?

And so I propose an arrangement: if you are in the Queen-Richmond area in downtown Charlottetown some weekday afternoon and are prepared to offer up some insights, witty anecdnotes, makeup tips or tales of woe while we sit drinking macchiatos on the Receiver Coffee balcony, the other macchiato is on me.

Just ping me on Twitter to proceed.

Penny, who was once four years old (I know, because I was there) is now ten years old. I’ve known Penny for longer than I haven’t known her, but we’ve never had a conversation because, at least up until the time I saw her last 3 years ago, she didn’t yet speak English and I didn’t yet speak Danish.

But, as my friend Ton relates, this didn’t prevent some indirect knowledge transfer from happening, with Ton and his partner Elmine as the midwives.

Reading that story I’m inclined to jump up and shout “yes!”, as that’s the way the world is supposed to work.

Thank you to Ton and Elmine for their activism, on both ends.

I look forward to discussing this with Penny in a few years in person.

One of the more recognizable features modern-day additions to Province House in Charlottetown are the beautiful cast “Rockwood | Worcester” alarm bells on the outside:

I’ve been walking by these for years, and it was only today that I learned that the former home of the Rockwood Sprinkler Company in Worcester, Massachusetts is now home to a large art studio and gallery complex called The Sprinkler Factory.

One of the delightful aspects of visiting my colleagues at Yankee Publishing is that, as a publisher that’s nearing 80 years in business, there’s been a substantial opportunity for the company to have acquired a lot of interesting tools of the trade.

Last week, for example, I discovered that the Xerox DocuColor copier, scanner and printer in the Production department (itself interesting tool of the trade) has a booklet-making feature: from my Mac it’s very easy to say “take this PDF file and make it into a booklet,” with the resulting booklet having each page of the PDF printed on half of an 8½x11 inch piece of paper, and everything collated so that when folded in half it reads in the proper order.

Once I’d made a booklet, I needed a way to staple it, and a path of inquiry through the company led me to the Yankee Magazine editorial department, where I found exactly what I needed, a Swingline stapler with an extended arm:

The stapler does exactly what you think it should, with a very satisfying clunk on every staple. (Those metal bars running along the wall, by the way, are where pages of the next issue of Yankee get posted for everyone to review).

My company Reinvented renewed our contract with Yankee last week to take us up to 2016, a year that will be our 20th anniversary of working together. Which means there’s plenty more opportunity to discover interesting tools in Yankee’s nooks and crannies.