Tom Hanks on the recently-departed Nora Ephron:

For a wrap gift, she would send you a note saying something like, “A man is going to come to your house to plant an orange tree — or apple or pomegranate or whatever — and you will eat its fruit for the rest of your days.” Rita and I chose orange, and the fruit has been lovely, sweet and abundant, just as Nora promised — a constant and perfect reminder of the woman we loved so much.

While they weren’t really written for my demographic, I was a huge fan of Ephron’s films, especially 1986’s Heartburn, written by her and directed by Mike Nichols. That film came out the first year after I left home for good, and seeing it felt like a window into what lay ahead.

As proof that anything you can dream the Internet will make for you: last night on our after-supper walk, [[Oliver]] and I came up with the idea of a mashup of Adele’s “Rumour Has It” and Goyte’s “You’re Somebody That I Used To Know.” Someone got to the idea first:

If someone releases a PEI-themed cover of “Rumour Has It” called “Boomer Has It” then I will now the Internet really is all-knowing.

Here’s a map of the last 7 days of my Google Latitude history, wherein my current location is grabbed by my mobile phone every 30 minutes and squirreled away by Google:

In an entire week I have not veered off the route of the University Avenue public transit line except for once.  And that once was to get my car repaired. Which I wouldn’t need to do if I didn’t have a car.

Things get more complicated if we back up to a 30-day view of my location:

But even there the further-afield trips aren’t really a challenge: I car-pooled to Summerside so didn’t need a car at all; the trip to Cavendish was to The Pearl for an opening I could have skipped if it came to that (although it was a nice opening); I’ve been needing to convince my Cornwall-based dentist to move to town anyway; and for the trip out to Dundas I could have rented a car.

Our second floor perch here in the Reinventorium on the corner of Queen and Richmond in Charlottetown gives us a great view of the old Dominion Building across the street as it springs back to life as a commercial and residential space. This week the team from Kings County Construction has been hard at work doing the landscaping in front of the building (their patio-stone-laying work looks top-flight, by the way) and today they’ve been moving around soil and planting plants and shrubs. Including under the Bluefin Bullet sculpture, where they planted sculpturally-appropriate grass:

This corner is a very popular one these days for tourist: it’s rare to head out and not see tourists taking a photo either of the Bluefin or of the Sir John A. Macdonald statue across Queen Street.

Throughout the day yesterday I was glued to my phone reloading the “how much of Prince Edward Island’s electricity is coming from the wind?” gauge as the percentage grew from 0% the day before to almost — almost — 100% at 8:30 p.m. yesterday evening.

For that brief period last night there was 96.47% of the Island’s electricity needs being generated from the wind: 154 MW of the Island’s theoretical maximum of 173 MW of wind energy.

If I every had an doubts about the power of open energy data to motivate and change behaviours, I had only to look at myself yesterday, and the sense of provincial pride that would allow such a thing to happen (yes, I know that perhaps excitement-over-wind-energy-generation might not be a universal trait, but still…). My immediate reaction was thinking “we all need to run home and turn off the oven and the clothes dryer and get ourselves over the top!”

Wind is fleeting, so as I type we’re down to 35% (which, 10 years ago, would seemed like an impossible miracle in itself). But what a day.

Oliver’s first day of Grade One, back in 2007:

Oliver’s first day of school back in the fall of 2011:

This morning, 8 months later, on the last day of Grade 5:

Some time ago I came across a letterpress hack from the 1890s:

Today I had cause to consider setting the Portuguese name Patrícia in metal type (note carefully: that’s a lower-case “i” with an acute accent over it) and as I only have fonts of English and French, I lack the required accented letter and so was force to apply the aforementioned “thought and ingenuity.” The result was this:

The acute accent is a comma set on the line above; I set this in upper case because it conveniently allowed me to avoid a conflict between the dot over the “i” and the accent). This might not be the best typeface for this, as the comma is more stylized than I’d like and a simple stroke would work better. But it’s a start.

Since I started experimenting with visualizing Prince Edward Island energy information over a year ago, one of the most important pieces missing from the data puzzle has been Island’s “load” — what the province calls “the amount of electricity required to power lights, motors, appliances and other users of electric energy in PEI.”  

So, in other words, “how much electricity we 140,000-odd people (and our machines) are using.”

But last week the province started publishing that figure in near-real-time and so now we can generate graphs like this one, showing the load over the past 5 days (you might very well ask “what the heck is using 100MW of electricity in the middle of the night?” and I’ve posed that question to Maritime Electric and await an answer):

Now that we have that “total load” number, we can compare it to the “how much wind energy are we generating on the Island right now” figure, and so get a near-real-time percentage figure that looks like this for the past three hours:

(As I write this the figure is 1.26%, in part because there’s not a lot of wind blowing today and the load, at 162MW, is high).

Overlaying the wind energy generated (orange) on top of the load (black) for the past five days, you can see that once during that period (around midnight on June 23) we came really, really close to meeting 100% of our load with wind energy:

(Cosm doesn’t have the ability — I don’t think — to generate graphs with two data values, so I grabbed these individual graphs and combined them together myself manually).

The logical next step here is to create a physical device that I can place on my desk — a siren? an LED slider? a VU-meter? — that will offer instant feedback about what the current percentage figure is.

Note: in my calculations I’m using the figure for wind energy generated on PEI, regardless of whether it’s being generated to meet an export contract; like the province says, “usually all electricity generated in PEI remains on-Island,” which is to say that the electrons stay on the Island, even if the dollars come from elsewhere.

I’ve just pulled the trigger on what promises to be a fun multi-city obstacle course through Europe for July.

I call it the “visit almost everyone I know on that side of the ocean in 24 days” trip.

The kind of trip that would drive [[Catherine]] crazy with the “wait, you’re taking a train for four hours just so you can have lunch with someone!?” of it all. So I’m doing it solo (Catherine and [[Oliver]] are visiting family in Ontario, so it’s not like they’ll be pining for me at home in the hot summer sun).

On July 3 I fly from Halifax to Frankfurt ($402, taxes and fees included, on Condor) where I hope to be able to have a quick visit with Ali.

Then it’s off to nearby Mainz for a pilgrimage to the Gutenberg Museum.

On July 6 I’ll head up to Düsseldorf to visit Pedro and Patrícia (who I’ve been trying and failing to visit since our aborted ships-crossing-in-the-night visit in 2010). And maybe João too?

Two days later it’s up to the Netherlands to Enschede to see Ton and Elmine for a couple of days, and then across northern Germany for a brief anti-respite in Berlin where I’ll spend three days at Betahaus doing so actual income-generating work, hopefully leaving some time to see my panoply of Berlin friends and to visit the usual haunts and find some new ones.

On July 13 it’s up to Malmö, Sweden by way of Copenhagen for what appears to be my now-annual visit to Luisa, Olle, Jonas and Morgan. And, if I’m lucky, also to be able to see Henriette and Thomas and Penny. And who knows who else?

On July 18 I’ll fly across Europe to Kiev (142 EUR all-in on Air Baltic) where I’ll meet up with family for my first visit to Ukraine, including a pilgrimage to the потягайло home place around the town of Horodenka).

On July 26 it’s back to Halifax via Frankfurt (somewhat inexplicably given how cheap it was to get there, $1105, all-in on Condor).

Given that seven years ago, when I made my first friend in Europe, I was starting from a blank slate, not knowing a single soul, to have such a diverse community there today means that my grand multi-year European experiment must be working. I’m quite looking forward to it.