[[Oliver]] and I happened to be walking by the ticket booth for the Peake’s Wharf Boat Tours last night last as the 8:00 p.m. sunset cruise was set to depart. And so what started off as our regular after-supper walk along the waterfront turned suddenly into a spontaneous after-supper harbour cruise.

It can never hurt to see the place you live from a new perspective, and certainly Charlottetown-from-the-water is a different way of looking at the city: you see how everything fits (or doesn’t fit) together in a whole new way. And see things, like this retired oil tanker pylon, you never knew about before:

The night was balmy, the sea was calm, and, even though the “sunset” was mostly obscured by the clouds, the 70 minute cruise was an enjoyable way to spend the evening. We sailed up toward the Hillsborough Bridge, then circled back along the waterfront by the Charlottetown Yacht Club and Victoria Park and then out the mouth of Charlottetown Harbour until we were just opposite the Warren Cove lights. Then, under cover of darkness, we headed back to port.

There were only 6 others on the cruise with us, so we had lots of opportunity to move about the boat (they’ve got a full licensed bar and sell snacks too; we were the only ones who took advantage of this, buying a bag of chips for the sail toward home).

The cruise isn’t cheap — $25 for me and $12.50 for Oliver — but it’s a lot cheaper than buying a boat, and certainly the cheapest way of going overseas from home if you happen to live up the hill on Prince Street.

(“One if by land and two if by sea” is a line from Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow).

I’m going a little wild today with the animated metal type. Show on my iPod Touch with iMotion HD (tripping the shutter from my iPad using the companion remote app). Type is Akzidenz Grotesk, purchased in the spring used from Atelier Domino in Montreal.

Catherine has been busy for the last month — actually, it’s been two months — preparing for her contribution to Art in the Open on August 25th: you can’t take a step around our house these days without tripping over some sort of woodland creature or another. 

When Henk van Leeuwen tweeted this morning that galleries downtown, including the one here at The Guild under the Reinventorium, would be open late that night too, I reasoned that it was time to get in on the fun, and so an email here and a phone call there and suddenly I’m doing my own art out in the open.

Type in the Open
will run from 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
on August 25, 2012
in the basement of The Guild
(enter through the gallery at 111 Queen Street)

I’ll be demonstrating my 1915 Golding Jobber No. 8 letterpress (formerly of Campbell’s Printing in Tryon) as well as the smaller Adana Eight Five (formerly of Prince County Hospital in Summerside), talking about printing with wood and metal type, and sending everyone out the door with something letterpress-printed to take home.

Oliver and I drove out to Victoria-by-the-Sea for our annual summertime “lunch at the Landmark Café, dessert at Island Chocolates” excursion — we are such creatures of habit that we happened to pick the same day as we did 5 years ago. There’s no better way to spend a lazy Sunday: Eugene’s meat pie is fantastic (as is the service, and the iced tea), and the factory coffee at Island Chocolates is the best combination of coffee and chocolate ever devised.

We decided to make a day of it and see the matinee of Trudeau Stories at Victoria Playhouse while were were there.

Which is how we found ourselves setting in the calm, cool environs of the little theatre along with a group of perhaps twenty sexagenarians watching Brooke Johnson interpret her unlikely friendship with Pierre Trudeau.

Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister of Canada throughout much of my early life; as such he was both my archetypal Prime Minister, and, more generally, my archetype of what it meant to be a Canadian. So I found the notion that Johnson — herself roughly my own age — would become accidental friends with Trudeau late in his life an intriguing notion.

I enjoyed the show immensely: it’s more of a theatrical ode than an exercise in storytelling, but Johnson is a talented actor, and the ode is heartfelt and compelling.

Oliver, bless his heart, sat (mostly) silently through the 75 minute intermissionless show; it was only in the car afterwards that I realized that I probably should have explained to him who Pierre Trudeau was (Oliver was born three days after Trudeau’s death in 2000).

It’s a shame that the audience skewed older (there were many knowing laughs from the audience, suggesting some close familiarity with the subject): it’s really the younger generation that needs to understand more about what it’s like to have a Prime Minister who’s a facsinating, imaginative, iconoclast rather than simply economist-in-chief.

The show runs in Victoria-by-the-Sea until August 26th; I recommend you take it in.

Tonight marks the second of a three-date takeover of Richmond Street in Charlottetown by a concert series called “Rock the Row.”

Which means that if you walk from my house to my office you are greeted with signs like this:

This in addition to the specter of the entire neighbourhood being surrounded by 8-foot-high prison-like fencing to sequester the entertainment and the ticket-buyers away from public view.

I strongly disagree with the appropriation of public spaces for privately-run for-profit events.

I’m fine with the idea of privately-run concerts held on private land but the notion of closing a public street for commercial gain — especially age-discriminating commercial gain — seems just plain wrong.

Public space should be for the benefit of all the public, and I propose that the City of Charlottetown modify its bylaws with a simple requirement: if you want to use public land for your event, it must be free and open to all residents of the city.

Regular readers may recall my report of a visit to Dave’s Service Centre to fix a power steering leak in my 2000 VW Jetta last December. Well, last Saturday the same car sprung a leak in a different part of the steering system; fortunately it did this only 4 blocks from Dave’s, so I was able to hobble the car into the parking lot there. When they re-opened on Tuesday morning I dropped the key off, and on Tuesday afternoon I got a report on the problem: there was a leak in a steering component that isn’t available separately, meaning that one must purchase the entire steering assembly, a $500+ item.

Fortunately Dave was able to find a used assembly for $180 “on the other side” (in New Brunswick, not hell), and he got this shipped over, removed the parts I needed and used them to replace the leaking ones. Leaving me with a working power steering system and a saleable steering assembly minus tubes (watch for it online soon!).

What Dave couldn’t work his magic on, alas, was the front exhaust pipe, which I’ve known for a while also needs replacing. Unfortunately there’s a “flange” at the top of the pipe, also not sold separately, which needs replacing. Which means I need a new front exhaust assembly. Also $500+. And one of these wasn’t available on the other side. So I’m left to see if one can be found out there on the wild Internet.

Seeking some additional measure of control over my transportation system on a cheaper and more malleable level, I used this opportunity to drop my bicycle off at MacQueen’s Bicycle Shop for some much-needed attention; 18 hours later I picked it up and rode off on a freshly tuned-up bicycle complete with brand new tires (smoother “road” tires to replace the old, nobbly “off-road” tires; thanks to Rob for the suggestion) and new brakes:

This bike is about 10 years old now, and I’d never had the brakes replaced. They’d gradually worn down over the years, and while I knew that I needed new ones, I didn’t know how much I needed them until I tried out the newly-installed ones: wow, I can stop now! The old brakes were so bad as to be almost completely ineffective: the front ones squealed something awful and the rear ones were ground down to bare metal.

So now I have a smooth-riding bicycle. That I can stop whenever I like. With either hand. Combine that with the general lube and filter work by the folks at MacQueen’s and it’s like I’ve got a new bike.

Now, if I could only woo Oliver back to trying out bicycle riding, we would replace our weekly drive to the Farmer’s Market with a bicycle ride, and really and truly leave the car in the driveway 99% of the time.

In the meantime, if you happen to have a spare front exhaust pipe for a 2000 VW Jetta GLS 2.0 litre, please let me know.

In truest “if you have a problem, then build a solution and share it with others because they probably have the same problem” spirit, international gadabout Dan Misener today released The Kickback Machine, a “Kickstarter research tool for people who think it’s a smart idea to learn from the past.” Here’s Dan unveiling the machine:

What a wonderful little project. And so nice to see Dan migrate from “reporter of interesting things” to “maker of interesting things.”

From the Mexican Instituto de Políticas para el Transporte y el Desarrollo (Policy Institute for Transportation and Development), a video about the costs of car usage (in Spanish with English subtitles).

I got a chance, in clear skies, to see the International Space Station whiz over Charlottetown last night — it was only in the sky for 6 minutes, starting at 10:04 p.m. — and, despite the fact that I’ve almost zero interest in outer space nor its exploration, the thrill was palpable.

Here’s how Oliver and I figured out where and when to look in the sky last night (there are opportunities for sightings over Charlottetown again tonight, August 8, at 9:11 p.m. and 10:47 p.m.).

First, to get a general idea of when and where to look, consult the NASA ISS Sightings page for Charlottetown and scan down to today where you’ll find the time and duration of the sighting opportunity along with where to look in the sky:

So there’s a sighting possibility tonight at 9:11 p.m. that will last for 5 minutes and that Space Station will travel from the south-southwest (SSW) to the east (E) in the sky.

We found it helpful to be able to “pre-visualize” that path using the excellent and free Stellarium application, which is available for almost any computer you can imagine (Mac, Windows, Linux).

To see the path of the Space Station in Stellarium you need to do a couple of things once the application has started.

First, change your location by clicking on the “Location Window” tool in the bottom left. Enter “Charlottetown” in the search box and check the “Use as default” box in the lower left corner:

Next, make sure the Stellarium “Satellies” plug-in is turned on: to the “Configuration window”, select Plugins and then “Satellies” and make sure the “Load at startup” box is checked. If it wasn’t checked you should check the box and then restart Stellarium before continuing.

Next, make sure the Satellites view is turned on by clicking on the icon on the bottom left of the screen:

Finally, change the “Date time window” to the expected time of the observation — in tonight’s case 21:11 (9:11 p.m. in 24 hour time):

Now it’s simply a matter of scrolling the Stellarium view of the sky with your mouse so that you’re looking into the south-southwest — just swing things around so that you’re looking between the “S” and the “W” on the horizon.  And you should see the object labelled ISS (ZARYA) moving through the sky:

Now you’re prepared: at 9:11 p.m. tonight you’ll know where in the sky to look. If you don’t have a compass just remember that, in Charlottetown, south is pretty well straight out the mouth of Charlottetown Harbour, west is toward Summerside and east is toward Montague. So “south-southwest” is  in the sky over Rocky Point.

I was worried about how I would be able to distinguish the Space Station from other objects in space, but that wasn’t a problem: it was moving so fast, and was so bright, relatively speaking, that it was easy to spot. This photo, taken in haste, doesn’t do justice to it, but it gives you an idea:

Happy space exploration!

Once again this year I’ve taken the official Prince Edward Island School Calendar and created 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 2011-2012 Eastern School District Calendar integrated into your digital devices: you don’t need to do anything, as those addresses haven’t changed from last year).

Now that I’m a member of the official School Calendar Committee (representing the PEI Home and School Federation), I’m hoping, in the future, to be able to have the calendar released as structured data by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development itself.