On the wall at Beijing Restaurant in Charlottetown are two facsinating charts: on the left is a chart showing foods you should eat together; on the right is a chart showing foods you shoul not eat together.

So, yes to “pineapple and pork,” yes to “mushrooms and cauliflower,” but no to “bananas and sweet potatoes,” and no to “carrots and parsnips.” I think the right-hand chart also suggests that you shouldn’t eat garlic-flavoured dog, but I might be misreading that.

Other than what shows up every night in the bookbag, the “feedback loop” that we’re all used to as parents of kids in elementary school mostly happens at the two parent-teacher interviews that happen each school year. We might see the teacher in between these interviews, especially if there’s something of particular concern, but for a lot of parents information about how things are going in school is packed into those often-all-too-short meetings.

At least that’s the way it used to be.

Here’s what happens these days: [[Oliver]] and I will be walking to school in the morning and he’ll mention something to me — “I lost my gymnastics sheet!” or “What’s the difference between a homophone and a homonym anyway?” If it’s something I know is going to affect his school day, or that’s going to confuse his teacher when he mentions it in class, I’ll send off an email when I get to my office 10 minutes later, and I’ll often get a reply back later in the day.

This is a feedback loop that happens 2 or 3 times a week, not 2 or 3 times a year, and I know, from talking to Oliver’s teacher this year and from our own experiences, that it’s been a big help in maximizing opportunities for learning and minimizing potentially stressful issues.

We’re lucky, of course: Oliver’s classroom teacher is open to this communication, has the tech-savviness to figure out how to handle her email efficiently, and we have the sense as parents to know where the line between “effective communication” and “teacher harrassment” lies. 

I know from talking to other parents and teachers that our experiences are by no means universal: there are teachers in the system who simply don’t know how to use email, or at don’t care to. The Groupwise email system provided to teachers by the Department of Education is generally acknowledged to be too slow to be practically useful (smart teachers route around it). There are parents whose sense of the help-harrass line is different than ours. And many families without computers or the Internet at home.

But the upsides, if we can figure out the technology, access and etiquette parts of the equation, are tremendous: parents are more engaged, teachers have a “rapid response” way of working on issues with parents, and because home and school are each more aware of what’s happening in the other, the opportunity for the curriculum to spill over into the home, and for home to spill over into the curriculum is much enhanced.

The problem is that the “technology, access and etiquette parts of the equation” aren’t something that anyone’s paying particular attention to. The capital budget for education technology for 2012-13 has been reduced to $0. Absolutely nobody is talking about how to solve the “digital divide” issue and get technology into every home. And teachers and parents are left to ourselves to work out the etiquette (which, truth be told, we might be able to do, with a few loose guidelines in place).

Technology in education is a difficult issue overwrought with funding, policy and infrastructure issues. At the very least, though, focusing on the simple ability to get email back and forth between home and school seems like a good place to focus some attention.

My go-to place for coffee when I’m down here working with my colleagues at Yankee Publishing is Countryhouse Corner, down the road in Dublin. It’s an unassuming little place, built into an old barn, that serves good coffee, breakfast and lunch.  It’s family-run, and the family in question is incredibly friendly.

I didn’t realize quite how friendly until this week.

I’m generally down here in southern New Hampshire about 4 times a year, but this visit is my first since last June so I haven’t been here for a while.

Nonetheless, when I stopped in for breakfast on Monday morning, I was handed a small plastic bag of Canadian spare change, which they’d been saving for me. There’s probably $2 or $3 in the bag, so it’s not a great cash windfall, but the thought that goes into remembering that I’m Canadian, that I visit a few times a year, along with the logistics of setting aside the spare change and remembering where it is is staggering to me.

Needless to say, they have a customer for life.

A brief update from the home and school front, a little corner of my life that, when you combine activities at Prince Street School locally with the crazy projects I’m working on for the provincial federation, seems to consume most of my spare moments these days. Against character and probability, it’s work I love doing: it’s grounded and productive and, by times, involves handing out popcorn, buying several gallons of apple juice, and working with people that, in the regular course of my daily life, I’d never meet.

Two items of note on the calendar right now:

1. Prince Street School is in the middle of an ambitious fundraising campaign to raise the money needed to resuscitate our condemned school playground (gory details here). There’s a big event coming up on February 24 at the Murphy Centre, a fashion show and silent auction. If you’d like to attend the event itself, call 902-368-6950 to buy tickets: $25 each, $150 for a table of 8. But you can bid online right now in the silent auction. You’ll find everything from an hour of ice time at the Civic Centre to two hours of a luxury limosine rental to a Blackberry Torch up for bidding.
2. Together with home and school associations at West Kent, Spring Park, St. Jean, and Parkdale, Prince Street is organizing a program of informal recreational activities for parents, students, teachers and staff this winter and spring.  With $4,400 in funding from the PEI Home and School Federation, we’re looking to bring people in different neighbourhoods together for fun and fellowship. You can read all the details on the home and school site, including the results of a family activity survey we did to gauge interest in different types of fun (punchline: swimming, bowling and movies are very popular; charades, broomball and bike repair are no).

If you happen to find yourself saying “you know, I’ve really got too much money right now, and I’m really concerned about kids having a safe outdoor place to play at school,” then please send some of your spare cash Prince Street’s way; if you’re an elementary school family in downtown Charlottetown, watch your child’s backpack in the months to come for fun activities you can do together.

I’ve decided that unless I block out regular times during the week to spend at the printing press, the seemingly endless digital task list will always win out, and the press will lay fallow. So every Friday morning and all day Sunday are letterpress days now.

This Sunday I decided to make use of a nice little collection of Swedish wood type that [[Luisa]] gave me when we were visiting last summer. It’s a random collection of letters and numbers, with nary a word to be made from them, so I needed to come up with something wordless and decided to make a “concentration” card game using some of many boxes of business card blanks I inherited from Campbell’s Printing.

I selected my 9 favourite pieces from the Luisa collection and printed 48 copies of each on pale yellow business cards so as to end up with 24 sets of 18 cards each.

There are a nice variety of shapes and sizes and type styles in the group; the pieces of type were a little shopworn, but still in relatively good shape, and I was really happy with the results:

There emerged, however, a standards issue. North America and Europe use a different standard for “type high,” which is to say “the thickness of the metal or wood letters use to print.”  In North America it’s 0.918 inches; in Europe it’s 0.928 inches. It’s not a huge difference — about a quarter of a millimeter — and it didn’t prevent me from printing. But it was enough of a difference to do this:

Which is to say, it made a visible impression on the reverse side of the print. Martha Stewart notwithstanding, this is a crime against letterpress humanity in many circles, and though it’s possible to consider it endearinly concrete evidence of the process, in a game of concentration it presents a serious functionality issue, as the whole point of concentration is not being able to see what’s on the printed side.

So now I have 24 sets of “Concentration” that can’t really be played. I’ll still send them out to a random collection of Mail Me Something subscribers, as the cards are beautiful in their own way. They also serve as a cautionary tale for the value of standards, and the value of turning things over before you print 432 of them.

We are the way we are because of an irrational collection of biases. Take winter boots. I haven’t owned a pair for more than 25 years. Why? Because I remember tramping around the Burlington Mall with my parents when I was a kid wearing winter boots and my feet getting really, really uncomfortably hot. “When I grow up, I’m gonna wear shoes all the time,” I likely said to myself. And so I have.

Generally this works out just fine. Except when there’s a lot of snow on the ground, or a lot of slush, or it’s raining really hard. Which, these days, describes a lot of the time. But I push through, with soggy feet that may not be dry, but at least aren’t really, really uncomfortably hot.

But yesterday, mindful that left to our own devices Oliver and I would fall into our usual pattern of spending Saturday afternoon watching YouTube videos (Oliver) and Seinfeld reruns (me), I reasoned that we should do some sort of outdoor winter activity. As the folks from PEI National Park had recently been singing the virtues of visiting the park in winter, that seemed like as good a choice as any.

Except that even I knew it was foolhardy to go tramping through the woods wearing only bright red Simple-brand sneakers.

So it was off to Marks Work Wearhouse to try and find a pair of boots. Fortunately it’s late in the season, so boots were 60% off. I zeroed in on a pair of rough-and-ready looking camelskin boots (if you’re going to kill something to keep your feet dry, it might as well be a camel, I suppose). $59.95. Sold.

And so, an hour later, we were pulling the car into the parking lot at the Stanhope branch of PEI National Park, ready to tackle the 2.5km long Bubbling Springs Trail. It was cold, but not too cold. There was a harshy wind coming off the ocean, but not too harshy. And so off we headed. After visiting a couple of scenic lookouts, talking about animal tracks (Chapter One for “things every parent must do when walking with their children in nature”) and remarking several times how nice it was to have dry feet, we arrived at the Bubbling Springs.

Eager to capture the moment on film for posterity, I took out my phone and started shooting video. At which point, as you might except, [[Oliver]] almost fell into the Bubbling Springs:

Fortunately he didn’t fall into the Bubbling Springs, we carried on our way, and 30 minutes later we were safe in our car with the heat blasting, ready to head back to town.

The PEI National Park really is quite nice in the winter, and if you’re looking for something to do on a crisp winter day, I highly recommend it.

[[Johnny]] and I moved office just over a week ago. Before then we used the same network for both our own work activities — emailing, browsing, uploading, downloading — and for the server that runs this site and several others. Now these two functions are split: the old network still runs the server-side, but our day-to-day work bandwidth comes from elsewhere.

Here’s a graph that shows network traffic before-and-after (the graph reads from right to left, starting with the last week of December 2011 and ending today).

Interesting to see visually the effect of pulling ourselves out of the mix.

The Grand Homburg may be an ugly colossus, but its multi-coloured facade can have its moments; here are four shots over four minutes last night, with the Moon high in the sky above.

Just over six years ago, in October of 2005, I released thebus.ca, a Google Maps-driven public transit schedule for Charlottetown. I was scratching my own itch by doing so: I wanted the transit system to succeed, and I was afraid that its labyrinthian printed schedules might turn potential riders off; my little project was intended to be a nudge toward simplification and rationalization.

My motiviation for “The Talking Bus” — a telephone information line delivering real-time schedule information for the University Avenue line that I launched in November of 2008 was the same: increase ridership by making it really easy to find out when the next bus was coming (you can imagine my surprise when I found the number on the side of my bus one day!)

The transit system has grown and improved over the years and, with a relaunch today of a new route and schedule system, information about how and when to catch the bus is now considerably easier to understand. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t need me anymore.

And so today marks the end of thebus.ca, m.thebus.ca (its mobile-friendly version) and of the telephone information line.

Some closing statistics, from November 2008 to January 2012: thebus.ca served 65,000 pages to just over 30,000 unique visitors and the telephone information line answered just over 10,000 calls.

The source code for thebus.ca and a how-to guide for implementation are still online.