Back in the beginning, I asked you in the readership to tell me who you are. It remains a great little snapshot of all of you.

I’d like to ask you to do it again: just make a comment to this post with a little biographical information and tell me how you found your way here — like “I am a shepherd from Bulgaria interested in open data. I found your blog through Peter Bihr in Berlin.”

I have an ulterior motive here, other than my usual curiousity: I’m testing the areyouhuman.com anti-comment-spam tool as a replacement for the increasingly annoying reCAPTCHA service (I too am tired of figuring out that text actually says “antiverticular”). Let me know if the new “CAPTCHA in a game” is more delightful or annoying, if you don’t mind.  (Or, if it confounds you altogether, and you cannot comment, drop me a line).

While I was in Enschede I was twice given mint tea made from, well, mint. It was a nice surprise. To make it you put mint in hot water, wait, and drink. Perhaps not novel to those more well-travelled than I, but to me, yes.

My friend Elmine graciously took me on a visit to the Fablab in Enschede yesterday — my first visit to a bona fide Fablab — and, to my surprise and delight, she asked “so, shall we make something.” It’s nice to have maker friends. So this is what we made:

The process started in Adobe Illustrator where we (and when I say “we” here I mean “Elmine”) set up the job, a simple alphabet in Futura, reversing it because, well, it’s type:

We “printed” this to a virtual printer set up for the Trotec laser cutter. The job then appeared in the queue in the Trotec job management software, where we aligned it on the cutting surface, set the DPI (the cutter will do up to 1000dpi) and selected the material (we cut both 4mm and 6mm plywood).

Then it was a simple matter, after placing the plywood on the cutter bed and focusing the laser, of clicking “go” and the job started; here’s a video (note that the job in the video is the one where we forgot to reverse the type first, which is why it’s right-reading).

The job took about a minute, and was incredible to watch.  When it was all done the letters popped out, and what was left was this (this is the reverse side, so it reads properly):

My next step, when I get home, is to figure out a way of mounting the letters so that they’re “type high” (0.918 inches) so that they work properly when mounted on a letterpress. Then the challenge becomes seeing whether the material is strong enough to withstand the pressure of being printed with, and whether I need to shellac the material before I use it (I suspect yes). My inspiration in all of this is this project to make a font of Winchell by a chap in Buffalo, NY. Stay tuned.

To create this post I had to create a new tag for the blog, The Netherlands, as it’s my first time in the country. And, apparently, my first time expressing anything about the country at all in public.

After a pleasant Sunday roaming around Düsseldorf with Patrícia and Pedro, my kind hosts in that city, and Ton and Elmine, my kind hosts-to-be here in Enschede, we headed out onto the autobahn toward The Netherlands, thus taking my summer journey into its second country (and into one of only two countries in the world with “The” in its English name — the other being The Gambia).

The drive through Germany was conducted, in part, at a thrilling 160+ km/h, which, thanks to Ton’s calm demeanour and driving skill, seemed like the most natural thing in the world (albeit the most natural thing in the world that moves really, really fast). Somewhere toward midnight we arrived in Enschede, a place I’ve heard about in folklore (or at least Foursquare), got settled, and fell immediately into a deep, deep sleep.

Today, after waking up late for the second day (travel is taking it out of me), we enjoyed a lunch together Forum Café, after which Ton left Elmine and I to our own devices: we launched out on an ambituous walking and cycling tour that took us through the city centre and then out to the campus of University of Twente and back. It was more cycling than I’ve done in a long time — likely since my last time in Copenhagen — but I survived, learned a lot and had a very nice afternoon. Fortunately we made it back home just before the heavens opened in a sudden and short-lived deluge.

We’ve plans to see more of the city tomorrow, and then, around supper time, I will dart back out of The Netherlands into Germany by train, where I’ll remain in Berlin until Friday when I fly up to Malmö by way of Copenhagen.

In retrospect this mid-trip work-break in Berlin was a really good idea: I love my friends dearly, but I’ve done more socializing in the last 6 days than in the last 6 months, and my brain’s social centres, atrophied as they are, need a rest after powering back up to full. Berlin will be a useful respite before I go back into the fray in Malmö and then head on to what promises to be a very full 8 days of visiting family in Ukraine the week after. Although now that I think of it, I’m made plans to have lunch or supper with more than a couple of Berlin friends, so perhaps I’ll just have to keep on going as I have…

As we were speeding along the highway from Düsseldorf to Enschede last night my friend Elmine asked me what the Canadian view of the situation in Europe is, and this led to a conversation about supply management and agriculture trade issues. There is no better observer of this topic in my network than Ian Petrie, both former-farmer and former-journalist and, and, now unshackled by the need to shape pieces around the demands of television, someone free to comment fully and intelligently about issues he knows very well:

It’s the import controls (high tariffs) that the business media and aggressive dairy exporters like the United States, New Zealand and Europe want rid of. What’s often forgotten is that Canada’s system begins with the producers’ real costs, then processors and retailers add their margins, and that’s what the consumer pays.  It’s farmers who get paid less in these dairy export countries that allow large processors to export so successfully, and they clearly want to add a wealthy country like Canada to the list of countries they sell too.  And recent data indicates that the consumers in these exporting countries  pay a price too to keep these countries competitive on the world stage.  Don’t forget that until UHT milk becomes more palatable/popular, it isn’t fluid table milk that’s on export markets, it’s dairy products like cheese, butter and yogurt.  While Canadians pay on average (varies in different provinces) $1.45 a litre for milk, consumers in New Zealand pay 20 cents more ($1.65) and Australians $1.55 per litre.

My first really nice-looking Polaroid photo taken on one of Pedro’s amazing collection of cameras, with film from The Impossible Project:

Pedro and said camera:

Kissing lovers atop a signpost near the city centre:

Pedro in café at the top of an historic tower:

Isis the top waits patiently at the bakery:

Sunset over the new harbour project; three Gehry buildings in the centre of the photo:

And more sunset:

On arrival Pedro and I made our way to his house in a SMART car share from Car2Go:

Send an SMS to +49 152 369 74123 and your text goes up in lights at The Gutenberg Museum in Mainz. It’s part of the Moving Types special exhibition. So here’s a message for Oliver. Or, indeed, for all the Olivers.

I’m in Mainz, Germany to spend time at the Gutenberg Museum. Yesterday I visited the excellent library at the museum, and this morning, at the very last minute, I made arrangements to spend some time setting type in the museum’s Druckladen — printing workshop.

And so I arrived at 10:00, was given a tour of the shop, got an explanation of how the catalog of metal typefaces works (they have a very large collection) and was set up with a workstation to set my type. Along the way I was quizzed on the English terminology for various printing terms, which stretched me to the limits of my printing knowledge (who needs terms when you have a one-man shop and can simple refer to things as “that thingy you measure things with”).

I needed to choose something to print, and a quick Google search for “Gutenberg quotes” produced this one:

It is a press, certainly, but a press from which shall flow in inexhaustible streams…Through it, God will spread His Word. A spring of truth shall flow from it: like a new star it shall scatter the darkness of ignorance, and cause a light heretofore unknown to shine amongst men.

Somewhat more religious a quote than I’d usually print, but when in the house of a Bible-printer, it seemed appropriate.

I choose to print the quote in a variant of the same Akzidenz Grotesk I’ve been borrowing from Holland College at home — in this case a combination of 20 and 28 point type. The actual printing was done on a flat-bed press by a printer — outsiders aren’t allowed access to the heavy equipment itself. He did an excellent job.

The plan was originally to print everything in the larger 28 pt. type, but I quickly realized that I didn’t have enough letters in that size to set the entire quote. I had to switch from breaking the sentence after “Word” to use a semi-colon instead because it turns out the 28 point type had no capital letter As. The yellow swish along the side is a nice flourish that one of the printers added for me after I left to let the prints dry.

If you look carefully at this type before I corrected it, you’ll notice that, among other things, I spelled Gutenberg wrong. Also the word “word.” Oops. Bs and Ds look so much alike when you’re reading backwards.

The typesetters and printers at Druckladen were very kind to accommodate me, and very patient with my clumsy homebrew style of moving type around (there’s nothing to humble a printer than to print in the company of people who actually know what they’re doing — real printers, in other words).

If you will be in Mainz — and you should really visit, as it’s a very nice little city with an excellent museum — I recommend you stop into the workshop and so some printing yourself. They’ll show you how. There’s no better way to grok Gutenberg.

I’ve just left the offices of The Gutenberg Society, a 101-year-old organization with a mission “to promote research into the history of printing and of the book, as well as to give moral and financial support to the Gutenberg Museum.”

If I was to become a member of any organization, this would be it (besides, membership lets me into the Gutenberg Museum for free!) and so I filled out the required form with my name and address and handed it to the friendly office clerk.

She handed me my membership card, my copy of The Gutenberg Yearbook (“the leading scientific yearbook worldwide in the fields of Gutenberg research and research into the history of the art of printing and of the book in general”) and sent me on my way with a a sheet of instructions on how to pay my membership fee via bank transfer or PayPal.

This kind of institutional trust seems typical here in Germany in my (admittedly limited) experience.

Last year at Druckwerkstatt in Berlin, for example, the situation was the same: I used their printing workshop, paper and supplies, and it was only when I got back to Canada that they emailed me a statement for payment. 

And, earlier last year at the Kreuzberg Museum, Luisa and I spent the day in their letterpress shop printing. All it had taken to arrange this was a bit of negotiation, helpfully mediated by Igor, earlier in the week. We didn’t need to sign anything, or fill out insurance documents, or really to anything other than shake hands and go to town. It was only because I insisted that any money changed hands at the end of the day.

In Canada I am used to institutions not trusting me at all: the default setting is mistrust, and thus it is typical to requirement payment, or proof of payment, in advance. 

Perhaps it’s just a thing in the printing community?

I’m off in a few minutes for the start of my Grand European Tour. A tour that starts, somewhat ignominiously, with a 4 hour drive to the Halifax airport. By the time most of you get up tomorrow morning I should be installed in my lovely AirBNB-sourced apartment in Mainz, Germany.

My efforts to stay in touch with home have reached new heights: calls to any of my PEI numbers (home. mobile, office) will now route to our office PBX which, in turn, will route them to Google Voice which, in turn, will route them to Google Chat running on any of my various devices.  I’ll be in touch, certainly, but it might sound like I’m climbing Everest what with all that re-routing.

Enjoy July.