From tbt, the free newspaper put out by the Tampa Bay Times, part of an article about a plan to force boats to slow down in areas of the ocean frequented by manatees:

Tea party members showed up at the hearing to picket the proposal. “We cannot elevate nature above people,” said Edna Mattos, leader of the Citrus County Tea Party Patriots. “That’s against the Bible and the Bill of Rights.”

The mind boggles.

I know that, after reading about our humidity challenges here in the Reinventorium, you’ve all been wondering “how’s the humidity in Peter’s office these days.” And so here’s an update.

The first humidifier I purchased for the office was a Honeywell Cool Mist Humidifier from Canadian Tire, advertised for “medium rooms.” It clearly wasn’t up to the task, as the humidity never went over 30% when it was running. I returned it and purchased a Honeywell Quiet Care Humidifier across the parking lot at Future Shop and advertised for “large rooms.”

This second unit worked like a charm, and kept the humidity in the office around 50%.

Life was good: the office was much more pleasant to work in, and the mid-afternoon dryness-induced headaches were gone.

For a week and a half.

Then, on Monday, [[Johnny]] arrived at the Reinventorium to a small-scale humidifier-induced flood. All Monday long we poked and prodded the humidifier trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Had we over-filled it? Was the filter broken? Was the o-ring that sealed the water in broken? Nothing seemed to be the culprit.

I got on the phone to Kaz, the company that sells Honeywell-branded products, and after 20 minutes on hold got to talk to a customer service rep, who asked me the same questions I’d asked myself, and concluded that the unit was broken and needed to be returned, either to Future Shop (no charge) or to Kaz itself (I pay shipping, and then $10 administration fee, for a replacement). Needless to say, I returned the humidifier to Future Shop for a refund.

No matter what the source of the flooding, and whether a replacement would fix it or not, I was uncomfortable with the notion of having a device in the office that was capable of flooding at all (I keep a lot of stuff on the floor, and would have nightmares about soggy bank statements).

Canadian Tire and Future Shop only had similarly-dangerous Honeywell humidifiers, or safer-looking top-loading ones that weren’t capable of humidifying our apparently-not-medium-sized room (it’s amazing the market dominance that Honeywell cum Kaz has in the box stores).

So I went to Home Hardware in Sherwood.

Which is what I should have done in the first place.

Home Hardware not only had a full selection of the same Honeywell humidifiers that others had, but it also had 3 or 4 other brands, or varying types, sizes and mechanisms.

One of those was a Venta Airwasher which immediately appealed to me on several fronts:

1. It isn’t made by Honeywell/Kaz.
2. It doesn’t require replacement filters (nor, indeed, filters of any type).
3. It doesn’t seem capable of spilling: rather than the “fill container and then turn it upside down” Honeywell system, filling the Venta involved simply filling up a base with water.
4. It is made in Germany.
5. It is guaranteed for 10 years.
6. It looks like a NeXTcube.
7. It was on sale for $99, regularly $299.

So I bought it.

It’s been running for the last 24 hours and we’ve got office humidity in the 45% to 50% range. It’s quieter, easy to fill, and is mechanically simply and pleasantly analog.

Stay tuned for reports after it’s been in place for a while.

On last night’s Tavis Smiley show on PBS:

Tavis Smiley: “Technology offers us a lot of good, a lot of advances, but it’s as fraught with as much potential danger as it is with the good stuff.”

Steve Martin: “Well yah, but so is a hammer.”

I used a variation of the same line last night myself, by coincidence, discussing acceptable use policies at our home and school meeting (“a kid doesn’t need an acceptable use policy for a chair to tell him not to pick it up and bop someone over the head.”)

Steve Martin’s timing was a lot better. And he plays the banjo. But it’s nice to see we’re on the same page otherwise.

Every year at our Annual General Meeting, the PEI Home and School Federation considers resolutions presented by our local associations and by the provincial board. This year many of the resolutions concern information technology: how it’s funded, how it’s managed, where the emphasis lies.

My favourite resolution, and one I forwarded and wrote, is the one titled “Simplification of the Acceptable Use Policy” and its “resolved” section reads:

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the PEIHSF requests the Minister of Education and Early Childhood Development replace the current “Minister’s Directive for the Acceptable Use Communication and Information Technology,” with a simple statement, to be signed by students and affirmed by parents: “I agree to use computers, the Internet and related resources in a manner that respects myself and others.”

Go and take a look at MINISTERS DIRECTIVE NO. MD 2005-04 Acceptable Use of Computer and Information Technology, the policy we’re seeking to simplify: it’s a confusing rabbit warren of language for which the maintenance and evolution of inside the education system has consumed hundreds of hours of time. 

I like our simplification resolution because it’s clear, simple, and addresses a needlessly bureaucratic overhead the system bears each year: a policy that few if any parents or students ever read (and yet are required to sign) that fruitlessly attempts to cover all possible calamities and misdeeds and offers penalties — “cancellation of access” — that are, in this day and age, effectively impossible.

The suggested replacement of:

I agree to use computers, the Internet and related resources in a manner that respects myself and others.

is simple, comprehensive, respects rather than assumes the worst, and recognizes that there are shades of grey in everything. We’ll be considering it at our Prince Street Home and School meeting tonight, and then at the PEI Home and School Federations Annual Meeting on April 14th.

If you’re anything like me you have a regular need to know that 1242007264 in “Unixtime” means Monday 11th May 2009 02:01:04 AM in plain-language UTC.

Up to this point I’d been calling up a Terminal session, and doing something like: 

php -a
print strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S",1242007264);

But there had to be a better way!  So, in Alfred I created a new custom search:

• Search URL is: http://www.convert-unix-time.com/?t={query}
• Title is: Convert Unixtime
• Keyword is: ut

Now all I need to do is activate Alfred and type ut 1242007264 and, voila. 

A couple of crazy, passionate entrepreneurs, Rebekha and Adam Young, have relocated from Ottawa to Charlottetown to open a coffee shop-cum-knitting café at 98 Water Street, a space formerly occupied by Ampersand and now christened Youngfolk & the Kettle Black (and thus severely in need of a nickname, quick).

They are clearly breaking several hard-and-fast Charlottetown rules, chief among which is that it’s impossible to make a go of a coffee shop in what, in Charlottetown terms, is the far-reaches of the marketplace’s geography.  Coffee shops are supposed to be on University Avenue or Queen Street, and the notion that someone would walk all the way down Queen Street and up half a block on Water simply for a cup of coffee… why you might as well suggest they walk to Summerside.

They’re also targetting what might appear to be a sliver of the coffee shop market in Charlottetown, that which caters to people who actually care about the quality of the coffee they’re drinking.  As you may recall from my 2007 survey of Charlottetown cappuccino, much of what passes for “coffee” in this town is tepid brown-flavoured water. Things have improved since then (I rather enjoy my morning coffee at Casa Mia every day), but we are not, as a rule, a town of coffee elitists.

That all said, if any couple is going to make a go of a high-end coffee shop on remotest Water Street, it is Adam and Rebekha.

These folks have energy. I suspect they may never sleep (in addition to all of the above, they’re also home-schooling their three kids). They have a frightening attention to the smallest details. They have tapped into the Island zeitgeist more quickly than almost anyone I’ve ever observed. And the coffee business is not new to them: their life in Ottawa was based around a similar place in the Byward Market.

They have not gone into any of this halfway: they’ve been working on transforming the 98 Water Street space since the early fall of 2011 (Adam orginally made contact with me with an offer of possible basement space for my letterpress back in October). And what was once, as Ampersand, a rather dark, claustrophobic space has been opened up and transformed into a sort of Scandinavian homage (and, indeed, it has good hygge). You won’t recognize it.

I had my first espresso macchiato there this morning. It wasn’t perfect, but imperfection at this level means “as good as anything you’re going to find in Charlottetown otherwise.” And they’ve an eager drive toward coffee perfection that you’ll have to look hard for elsewhere.

They’re open, to start, from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. daily. I suggest you stop in.

Some challenges still to work out. Not much to be done, using borrowed type, with the lack of A-V kerning in “HAVE” (if it was my type, and abundant, I could take a hack saw to it). Still working on the makeready issues with OBLIGATION. I’d like to eventually print the EXPLAIN in red.

Picked up my new eyeglasses today. Whoa, momma — hard getting used to the new “progressive” lenses. Everything’s alternately blurry and clear. They say you get used to it: I hope so. My patience for spatial discontinuity is not great.

The Visual Communications program at Holland College is essentially a digital program these days — when you visit their facilities in the basement of the downtown campus you find workstations and sophisticated printers — but there are vestiges of the program’s analog past still there, chief among which are the drawers of metal type tucked away in the corner. Thanks to the generosity of the program this is a resource that I’ve been able to borrow from over the last couple of years (I set my first business cards in type from their collection, and this Pecha Kucha poster).

I returned to the well this afternoon, and decided to spend some time organizing the typeface that seemed to have the most promise of forming a complete alphabet, a face that I’m assuming is Akzidenz Grotesk after walking through the helpful typeface identification tool Identifont.

After an hour or so of shuffing letters around drawers and plumbing the depths of the drawers of odds and sods of type, I managed to assemble a good collection of the face in alphabetical order, with several of each letter:

Once I’d organized things, I pulled out the letters in the best shape to use in a new project that’s been rattling around in my head for a while:

Watch for more on this project in this space in the days and weeks to come.

I was also lucky to meet another printer at Holland College this morning, a student who recently acquired an Adana Five Three, which is the junior of the Adana Eight Five I started out on. I’m hoping our paths cross again.