If you’ve been playing the home game, you’ll recall that when we last spoke yesterday I’d received a call from a Regional Manager at Bell Aliant letting me know that, after a day of wrangling with various parts of Bell’s operations, they were able to provide wireless Internet service to my Cousin Sergii in Green Meadows under the so-called “PEI plan.” He promised that a sales representative would call me today and, true to his word, I got a call from “Marcie” at Bell Aliant, a vision of courteous, professional, helpful service.

A “MiFi” unit has apparently been located — I was told yesterday that it might be a 6 month wait, so this is either extremely good luck or squirting oil on a squeaky wheel — and Marcie took my payment and credit information (it seemed easier for me to be the customer here, given that Sergii has no Canadian credit record) and promised to call me back later today when the hardware — a Novatel MiFi 2732 — is ready for pickup. Apparently the unit allows either a wireless or wired connection to devices, and works best when pointed toward the nearest Bell Mobility tower.

Piecing together anecdotal stories from other customers, and things told to me on the phone yesterday by Bell representatives, it seems that the “PEI plan” is an arrangement by which Bell Aliant buys wireless service from Bell Mobility, and covers the costs and obligations that would otherwise be billed to the customer — the hardware cost ($100+), the requirement for a contract, and the usage-based billing. I heard from one customer yesterday that, were they to have been billed for last month’s “PEI plan” usage at regular rates their bill would have been $468, so that’s a pretty sweet deal.

As a short nerd-out diversion, I looked up the geolocation of Green Meadows (thank you to 1996 Peter for putting the latitude and longitude on those pages) and then entered what I found — 462200 / 624400 — into the Industry Canada spectrum database, selected a radius of 10 km and a frequency range of 800 to 2000 MHz — and found the nearest active Bell Mobility tower is in Mount Stewart (map, photo), about 9.3 km away. There’s a closer tower, in West St. Peters (map, photo), about 6 km away, but Industry Canada records appear to suggest it’s not currently active, although that information might be out of date.

The specs on the MiFi 2732 suggest it’s capable of 7.2 Mbps down and 5.76 Mbps up, which certainly qualified it for “high speed”; I’ll report back what the actual throughput in the field is once it’s installed, which, I hope, will be later today.

The story of Prince Edward Island’s “holey dollar” is a fascinating one, and now the story is told in a new book, The Holey Dollars and Dumps of Prince Edward Island.

I’ve pointed to this before, but you can’t watch it too many times: this TV commercial from the days when Island Tel was a locally-managed company.

“When you call, I’ll be there. It’s good to know good friends are near, like Island Tel.”

Everyone at Bell and Bell Aliant should be required to watch this commercial, for the spirit it conveys is one that they should all aspire to, whether offering service to Islanders or to others. Island Tel may have never actually reached the intimacy they tried to describe in the commercial, but at least they believed enough in the mythical idea of good service enough to make a good job of trying.

Among other things, this might be the best locally-produced television commercial ever made on Prince Edward Island (produced by Moses Media for Island Tel).

I spent 2 hours this morning working to figure out how to get my newly-arrived Cousin Sergii outfitted with Internet at his farmhouse in Green Meadows.

It’s a house beyond the reach of either Eastlink or Bell Aliant’s wired Internet, and so, I assumed, eligible for the Government-negotiated “what to do about people who don’t have wired Internet yet” program of Bell Aliant, the one referenced in this 2010 CBC story that quotes Aliant’s Bruce Howatt describing a plan with:

• no up-front hardware cost
• no monthly bandwidth cap or usage costs
• a monthly flat-fee of $49.95

While much more expensive (and much slower) bandwidth than Sergii is used to at home in Ukraine, this was a reasonable solution, and, I assumed, would be easy to order. I thought I’d drive out to Green Meadows this evening to get Sergii set up.

Much of my 2 hours this morning was spent on telephone hold with various Bell, Bell Mobility or Bell Aliant offices, and with a couple of online chats on various Bell websites. Here’s a typical interchange (employee name redacted), an excerpt of a longer chat:

Bell: What I suggest is contacting Client care and asking you go about this, I would think that you need to go into the store and get this service started.

Bell: Just a moment while I check another source please.

Bell: Thank you for holding, do you happen to have a mobile account?

Peter: No.

Bell: That’s unfortunate, I have found a document on this and there is no explanation on who to talk to, however I wanted to note your account.

Bell: All I can suggest is calling Bell Aliant Client care, let them know that you were speaking with me on chat and that I was able to find the document about this service.

Peter: Can you tell me the name of the document or the name of the product/service so I can mention it to them?

Bell: You can let them know I looked it up in our Internal records and it shows that it is available. I am not able to provide the actual document.

Bell: I also referenced the link that you gave me, provide them with that link as well.

Peter: But can you tell me what the document is called, or at least what the product is called so I can reference it by name?

Bell: I can’t give you any information regarding Internal files.

Peter: Ok. Thank you for your help.

This chat was followed by an almost-Fawlty-Towers-like telephone chain that saw “client care” refer me to “sales,” and then “sales” refer me to “Internet department” and then “Internet department” refer me to “rural department.” Which told me that they only dealt with Quebec and Ontario and referred me to the “Atlantic number,” which rang and rang and rang and was never answered.

Some of the representatives I spoke to claimed no knowledge of the PEI-specific service, others, like my chat correspondent above, acknowledged it but refused to give it a name. Nobody could tell me how to order it, or where.

At this point — actually, it went on for a while longer, but I’ll spare you the details — I gave up.

And called my friend Perry.

Perry, it turns out, was a customer of this mysterious product that-must-not-be-named. He’s been a customer since January. It’s worked well for him. He’ll be sad to see it go when it gets replaced by wired Internet next week (in part because moving to wired Internet will be a step down for him bandwidth-wise and a step-up price-wise).

Perry told me that to learn the truth I needed to go to the old Island Tel maintenance shed at the corner of Belvedere and Queen Streets in midtown Charlottetown (I know this shed well because, in an earlier time, it was where all the cool kids went to get cell phone problems solved that couldn’t be solved next door at Island Tel Mobility HQ).

So I hopped in the car and drove up. Went to the old Queen Street door, but it was barred. Went around to the other side where I found a non-descript office.

I rang the bell.

A friendly woman came out to help me.

She was a little skittish about revealing the details at first, and was quick to dispell any notions I might have of leaving with the service in-hand. But she did give the background: the program still exists, is a good deal, and is still supported. The problem is that the hardware used to support it — MiFi — is no longer manufactured, and, as this is the only hardware they support, they’re unable to sign up new customers until used hardware comes back in and gets reconditioned.

I asked how long this might take — “a few weeks or 6 months?” — and was told that customers who’d showed up in the summer to start their vacations never received hardware. Coded message received: “don’t hold your breath.”

I left my name, and took their number, and was advised to “call back every 2 or 3 weeks” to see if they have any new hardware in stock.

Exasperated by the apparently shared delusion that there’s actually a service being offered — if you call something a “service” and maintain that it still “exists” but are unable to offer it, is it really still a service? — I responded to a Twitter request from CBC Radio’s Kerry Campbell and we made arrangements to come into the station for me to tell my tale of woe.

All I want it to get Sergii hooked up to the net so that he can chat to home, use Google Translate and do the normal things that normal people do online. I hope we can make that happen.

There is, of course, also a large issue: is Bell Aliant living up to the spirit of the arrangement it concluded with the Province of PEI to provide high speed Internet to all Islanders?

There’s a moral issue there, but also a very practical one: if any area of the province can truly benefit from being more “connected” it is rural PEI. For the eye to be so far off the ball on making sure that rural Islanders have as much bandwidth as it’s technically possible to provide them with, at a price point equivalent to urban Islanders, is an issue that has broad ramifications for economic development, education, and quality of life.

I hope that gets some attention too.

Update: at 4:40 p.m. this afternoon I got a friendly call from a director at Bell Aliant notifying me that I’ll be called in the morning by a service representative, who will take payment details and arrange to have high-speed wireless service provisioned for Sergii. This doesn’t solve the larger “why is this so difficult a program to find out about,” but I hope it reflects a new commitment by Bell Aliant to ensure that the wireless “stop gap” program continues to be available to rural Islanders.

It’s a bad couple of weeks for analog here on Prince Edward Island: first Queen’s Printer stopped printing and then, on Sunday, City Cinema projected its last 35mm film. In both cases the enterprises continue — Queen’s Printer duplicates digitally now, and City Cinema projects digitally — but their analog technologies, more than 100 years old in both cases, are retiring.

City Cinema’s 35mm projector had a rather more honourable retirement than the offset presses up the road: the 7:15 showing of Cloudburst was followed by a Q&A with the film’s writer/director Thom Fitzgerald, producer Doug Pettigrew, and stars Ryan Doucette and Marlane O’Brien, and then a reception at The Haviland Club.

Many years ago I was substitute projectionist at City Cinema for a week, filling in for owner Derek Martin who was traveling. It was, without a doubt, the most harrowing job I’ve ever had: an exhausting film-winding-on-to-big-reels process at the beginning of the week followed by night after night of waiting for the projector bulb to burst or the film to split or some other calamity to befall the operation (as it happens the film did split, delaying the start of the second show by 30 minutes; 30 very stressful minutes).

As with letterpress (and even offset) printing, there was a physicality to film projection, an intimate relationship between person and machine, that is almost completely missing from the digital era. While it’s easy to be needlessly nostalgic about all this, the simple notion that someone is paying attention to the craft is something to give thought to: it’s so easy to be completely absent from a process where media gets created and distributed by pressing “Play” or “Print” on a machine, and I can’t help but think that has an effect on the result.

We’ve survived and thrived in the post-analog world of so many other media — all my TV streams into the house on the Internet now, I haven’t used an analog phone in years — so I expect we’ll survive this to. And this week will be one of the weeks we remember when we’re trying to remember the time before the bits took over.

While going through a bag of old VHS video tapes yesterday I came across this recording of Matthew Rainnie reporting for CBC Compass on the then-new website for The Buzz newspaper that I launched as a side-project with Buzz owner Peter Richards and ISN owner Kevin O’Brien. Even though it’s only 17 years ago, the language — “information superhighway” comes up several times — and the technology — it looks like very-early Netscape running on Peter’s Mac — makes it seem like we’re talking about the advent of the telegraph. 

I digitized the video in the Collaboratory at Robertson Library at the University of PEI, which has excellent (and free) facilities for converted VHS videotapes, audio cassettes and vinyl records to digital files:

For most intents and purposes the camera on my Nokia Lumia 800 is a step down from the one on my old Nokia N95. The Lumia performs much worse on close-up work (like photos of letterpress projects), much worse in lower-light conditions, and it tends to leave a lot of indoor photos with an annoying green cast. This is not to say, however, that it’s not a camera capable of surprising me, like it did last week in Victoria; here’s a photo of The Orient Hotel that really turned out well:

I shot the photo late in the day — 4:39 p.m. — and jacked the Lumia’s “saturation” setting to the highest level.

For the past month I’ve been working on a letterpress project to render The Island Hymn, Prince Edward Island’s patriotic song, written by L.M. Montgomery in 1908, in a triptych. Yesterday I finished the third panel, and here’s what the three panels look like together (each is 5 by 6 inches; the photograph isn’t the greatest):

Printing the third panel yesterday was the hardest of the three, mostly because the paper had sucked up a lot of moisture overnight, and it was raining outside while I was printing, so everything was just a little more reluctant to flow together.

This project, like almost all of my letterpress work, was mostly an experiment, another job to stretch my typesetting and printing skills: every time I set time or print something I learn something new.

In this case I want to experiment with setting two typefaces together, and so I used 60 point Akzidenz Grotesk and 30 point “unnamed sans-serif face” together, using 30 point spaces to jigsaw-puzzle everything together. Because everything needed to be a multiple of 30 points, I didn’t use any leading at all, so the lines are spaced closed together than they would be otherwise. I also decided to leave no whitespace in areas where the two faces met each other, which is the only design decision I regret.

The selection of “what gets to be a big word” was informed almost entirely by happenstance and by what would fit where; that this led to “Hearts / Forever / Love So Well” on the last panel was completely (pleastantly) accidental.

On the last panel, only “Love” was to be set in the larger face, but there were a lot of words containing a lower-case l on that panel, and I ran out of that letter in the small face, so I had to improvise.

I was at an auction at Royalty Centre in uptown Charlottetown this morning at the offset-printing outpost of Queen’s Printer. While my own purchases were modest — a coat rack and an oily rag can — there was enough equipment on offer to outfit a small offset print shop, and, with only 5 bidders on hand, the equipment went for a steal (presses worth thousands going for $100).

While this small auction — just 17 lots in total — might appear an insignificant disposal of crown assets, it actually represents much more than that, for it marks the end of more than 200 years of history during which Queen’s Printer actually printed, committing ink to paper with a printing press.

With the disposal of this equipment, Queen’s Printer — or the “Document Publishing Centre” as it’s now known in common use — is a 100% digital operation, with large and powerful digital printing machines in the basement of the Shaw Building at its disposal, but nary a printing press in sight.

Under the Queen’s Printer Act, “The Lieutenant Governor in Council may appoint a Queen’s Printer for the province, and fix the salary and prescribe the duties pertaining to the office.” There has been a Queen’s Printer — or a King’s Printer, when we’ve had a King rather than a Queen — back to the earliest days of Prince Edward Island, and it has been their role to oversee the printing of the official documents of the province, documents like the Royal Gazette and the Journal of the Legislative Assembly.

While today the holder of the position is a public servant — currently it’s Mike Fagan, whose official job title is “Manager, Document Publishing Centre, and Queen’s Printer” — in earlier times it would be a local printing company that would be appointed to the role, such as those of James Bagnall and James Douglas Hazard, about whom Eminent Islanders says:

Looking back almost 200 years to the product of King’s Printer of the day, you can see they did beautiful work, work that’s more remarkable still when you consider that it was set by hand (mechanized typesetting was not to be invented for another 66 years when this example was set): every single letter of what you see below was picked out of a type drawer by a printer, assembled into a form, and printed on a letterpress.

While it was perhaps inevitable that Queen’s Printer would stop printing with printing presses (and perhaps, in the not too distant future, they will stop printing altogether and go all-digital), it’s still sad to see the end of this tradition, especially as it came to such an ignominious end, in the suburbs, without any sense of the great and longstanding trade of putting ink to paper in the name of the Queen or King.

I have been setting some type in Futura this week, and I noticed, to my surprise, that the lower-case t was much “stumpier” than I thought it should be — about three quarters of the height letter like l, h and f:

Surely this was unusual, and unique to Futura, I thought: when I print a lower-case t with a pen or pencil it’s always the same, full, height as other lower case letters.

But, looking at other typefaces, it turns out that the lower-case t is, quite often, the shortest of the tall letters; indeed, in Typologia, Goudy writes (emphasis mine) “lower-case t may be classed with the first or short letters.”

When people ask me why I’m interested in letterpress printing and working with metal type, I often talk about the “physicality” of it all; this is one example: I’ve been reading for more than 40 years, and working as a designer, of one form or another, for more than 20. But until I had a lower-case t in my hands, I really didn’t know all that much about it.