It was printing day for the second verse of The Island Hymn:

Here are some of the steps that got me to this point:

I’m thinking now that I’ll work on the first and third verses, printed the same size and in the same style, and then release them as a triptych (mostly because I love the word triptych).

Through my mother I inherited a book of my grandfather’s called Life and Adventures of a Pioneer by Hugh A. Campbell. My mother’s Caswell family — my great-grandparents and their son, my grandfather — were indeed pioneers and the book is, in part, a tale of the kind of experiences they faced in Northern Ontario over the last century as the north was “opening up.”

I pulled the book off the shelf last week to show something to Oliver and it opened to the epilogue, which I’d never read before; I struck me both as the saddest epilogue I’d ever read.

Just as this manuscript is completed, Flossie and I have been on a two week trip beginning with the wedding of our adopted granddaughter. We motored through Northern Ontario visiting old friends at Cochrane, Kapuskasing, Matachewan and Elk Lake.

On Friday, August the twenty-second, we arrived at our son’s home in North Bay to spend the week-end and had intended to leave on Monday for our home in Newmarket.

On Saturday, Flossie was feeling fine and as my son’s family were going to Trout Lake to swim, I decided to have a sleep but Flossie said she was going with the family for an outing to the lake. All was well and she enjoyed the outing but on her arrival home, she took a heart attack and died five minutes later.

Here is the sad ending of our fifty-seven years of married life. She lived a full and active life but now we must part and I realize and know that I will have many hurdles to cross without her love and encouragement.

As it is God’s will that she should leave me, I will carry on and endeavour to do my best, as we both did over our long and happy years together.

A sad ending to the story, yes, but ending with a note of resigned hope. The book is an interesting read if you every come across it.

School started today here in Prince Edward Island and you likely received a school calendar in your child’s backpack inviting you to “meet the staff” night some time later this month, and it may have mentioned “parent-teacher interviews” in the fourth week of October.

These are both great opportunities to engage with you child’s educators.

But you don’t have to wait until then!

Every teacher has an email address (you might find it on a card in amongst the papers you received home today) that you can reach them at; my experience, which might be unnaturally positive, is that teachers will often respond back within an hour or two, especially if it’s an urgent issue.

And every teacher should welcome you into the classroom before or after school if there’s something you want to talk about (ask the teacher for their individual policy on this, as it’s up to them to indicate when the best time for this).

You can also send notes to school with your child and ask for a reply.

Remember, in all communication with your child’s teacher, that educators live complicated and busy lives and we have a responsibility as parents to respect their time. 

But we also have a right to clear and open communication with our child’s teachers, and now is the time to be setting good habits and expectations.

Good home-and-school communication is, in my experience, vital to a positive school experience; it’s an “early warning system” in both directions for issues that otherwise might fester.

Oliver started grade six today, his last year at Prince Street Elementary, where he started in grade one 5 years ago. His teacher is Ms. Parsons, who taught him music in earlier grades, so they are comfortable with each other; we met with her last week and her underlying philosophy was “kids can’t learn under stress,” which is about as good a philosophy as I can imagine.

He’s a lot taller, obviously, and has a new lunch bag and a new briefcase replacing the backpack he used for the first 5 years of school. But he’s still got enthusiasm for school and a sprint in his step.

We calculated that we’ve walked up Prince Street to the school together about 800 times so far; by the end of this year we’ll be close to 1,000.

First Day, Grade One

First Day, Grade Six

I’ve you’re using the Panthernet-Open wireless network at the University of PEI from an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, you’ll be prompted to enter your username and password every time you go to use the network.

To get around this — and to make your use of the network more secure — visit this helpful page from IT Services and Systems from your device, and tap on the link Panthernet for OS X 10.7 (Lion) and Apple Devices

You’ll be walked through the process of installing a new “Profile.” You’ll be warned that it’s an “unverified profile,” which is okay, and you can click “Install Now,” after which you’ll be prompted to enter your UPEI network username and password and, if everything’s okay, you’ll see a final screen headed “Profile Installed” and you’ll be good to go.

Charlottetown Airport has recently gone through an expansion of the departures area, and this has involved, in part, a redesign of the departures entrance, complete with a new sign.

The design work was by N46, which confirmed for me that the typeface is Market Deco, with a custom “R.” I think it’s perfect for this situation: simultaneously modern and classic, well-proportioned under the arch above it, and a fine signature for the airport. Bravo.

(If the typeface looks familiar to you, take a look at the sign above the Pike Place Market in Seattle; it’s the same face).

We took a family trip out to Robertson Library at the University of PEI yesterday and spent a couple of hours using two very neat pieces of technology to do some scanning (if you are thinking “that is an odd way to spend Labour Day” then your thinking mirrors Catherine’s; the pay-off for her was an afternoon spent driving out and about the countryside, which is, in a sense, her library).

Technology number one is a large-format Zeutschel scanner. It’s located near the information desk and looks sort of like a giraffe. It will scan directly to a USB stick that you plug into it (so remember to bring one with you), and it will scan items up to 25” x 18” (I used it, in part, to scan a bunch of old tabloid-sized newspapers I’d created in the late 1980s). It works very quickly, is relatively easy to use, and the results are rather impressive; here’s an example (click to see the full-sized scan; this is just a thumbnail):

I scanned 80 large items, ranging from posters to newspapers to postcards, in about an hour. This scanner has special features that make it good for scanning books as well — the two sides of the scanner surface will articulate to allow one side of the book to be lower than the other, for example.

Technology number two are the regular-looking Xerox photocopiers out in the library lobby: you can plug a USB stick into these photocopiers too, and scan multi-page documents directly to them. It’s really, really fast — I scanned a 21 page document in about 30 seconds — and the results are of very high quality (enough to do OCR on). The result, A Gentle Introduction to Web (a manual I wrote in the late 1980s for the Ontario Environment Network), is a digital archive of a quickly-yellowing document that I never would have had the patience to scan using my slow flatbed office scanner.

Both of these scanners are free to use for the public. You don’t have to register or ask for permission, and you don’t need a library card or a university account: just show up at the library with your USB stick and start scanning away.

I showed Oliver the Codecademy website a couple of months ago, and we spent a little time going through a couple of lessons, but the programming bug didn’t bite. This week, though, Catherine complained to me that she’d been hard-pressed to help Oliver work through “some sort of programming thing,” and it turns out that he gone back to it, of his own volition, and needed some help.

This is why, if you ask Oliver how to calculate the length of a string in JavaScript, he will now happily tell you “dot length.” Like:

"Oliver".length;

We’ve moved on to learn about data types (numbers, strings, boolean — named after George Boole, we learned), comparisons, and if-else statements. So now we’re able to do things like:

temperature = prompt("What's the temperature?");
if (temperature > 30) {
    alert("Man, it's hot!");
}

Codecademy works quite well: the lessons are bite-sized, the explanations hit a nice tone between “hip” and “practical”, and, the evidence from Oliver suggests, it’s a good way to get grounded in programming fundamentals.

We’ll keep working through the lessons for a while and we’ll see where we are in a few weeks and report back; in the meantime, if you or your kin have an interesting in dipping your toe in the gentle waters of coding, Codecademy seems like a good place to start.

Cosm (née Pachube) is a really useful web service if you’re interesting in managing open data. It’s what I feed the energy load and generation data provided by the Province of PEI to; it’s useful for data logging and visualization, and it’s a useful “hub” for routing data in and out of different systems.

One of the handy features built-in to Cosm is being able to add “triggers” to any data stream so that when something happens — the level goes above or below or equal to a given trigger value, for example — you can have it do something. The “something” in this case it to make an HTTP Post to a third-party website, or to emit a tweet from a Twitter account you connect to it.

Here’s a trigger I set up so that whenever the percentage of PEI’s energy load generated by the wind goes above 100%, a tweet goes out from the @peiwind Twitter account: 

It turns out that the last few days have been good to Prince Edward Island, wind-wise, and so the trigger has gone of quite a bit. Here’s how the last 30 days of “how much of PEI’s energy load was met by the wind” graph looks like:

As you can see, we’ve tipped over the 100% level quite a few times, and the tweets have reflected this:

While tweeting is nice, what’s really nice is that the tweets themselves can then be considered data that can be fed to yet other systems. In fact with an account on If This Then That you can do that yourself; here’s a recipe, for example, that will send you an email every time the @peiwind account tweets:

Instead of emailing, you could have the recipe call you on the telephone, or make an entry in your Google Calendar, or update your Facebook status. Or, with a Belkin Wemo switch, you could have your clothes dryer turn on.

This Town Is Small — them that brought us Art in the Open and my studio-mates in the basement of the Reinventorium — have a new project, called Charlottetown Perspectives that, depending on your point of view, is either an exciting opportunity for culture sector involvement in tourism marketing or a complete cooptation of the culture sector by the tourismocrats. I go both ways.

But, it did get me thinking about how we market our city, which led me to make a submission, with the following “Description of Intent”:

Most tourism marketing is a collection of lies: a tale we tell tourists that reflects our perfect vision of how we want our city to be, not how it actually is.

In their heart-of-hearts, tourists know this, and so the matter of selecting a destination becomes a matter of sorting out one fake story from another. It’s a disheartening and deflating experience.

I’d like us to be honest about how things are in our marketing, and I think that honesty, because it is so uncommon, will make our marketing stand out from the crowd.

So I propose a series of advertisements centered around a simple index-card sized, letterpress-printed poster – Tourists Not Allowed In This Area – accompanied by supporting text that tells an honest story about our real relationship with tourists.

In addition to helping to pierce through the tourist marketing noise, I believe this approach will attract tourists who are actually interested in engaging with Charlottetown, not simply breezing through, resulting in a tourism economy far more reciprocal than the prostrative one we have built to date.

What is “culture,” at its core, more than the collective feeling of a population: culturally, Charlottetown citizens, outside of the tourism industry, grudgingly tolerate the presence of the yearly influx of tourists in our midst. We resent the clogged sidewalks and roads, yes, and we are, as all Islanders, suspicious of those from elsewhere, but perhaps the greatest cultural impact of the tourism industry is the tremendous stress of having affluent strangers relaxing in our midst when we’re working on the day-to- day stresses of feeding our families. We’re vaguely aware that someone is benefitting from the tourist economy, but also suspicious of their motivations and actions.

The people of Charlottetown do have tremendous capacity for generosity and kindness, but it’s a generosity that does not manifest easily nor at first glance: it’s something given only after an initiation, proof of commitment to and investment in a relationship. In the modern day “service economy” it is anathema. And yet is who we are.

I believe that if we are honest with the world about that, we will prosper, for it is an aspect of our culture that is deeply-ingrained and genuine, and it is that which, in a world increasingly disconnected and non-genuine, that travelers will increasing seek.

My entries were both built around the “Tourists Not Allowed in this Area” letterpress print I created last week during my “Type in the Open” letterpress studio open house, and they look like this:

The copy on the larger 11 x 8-1/2 inch ad reads:

Want to know a secret? We don’t really like tourists here in Charlottetown. Oh, sure, we’ll tolerate you. But combine our innate suspicion of anyone from “away” with the day-to-day annoyances of putting up with extra traffic and noise, and the simple stress of having so many people relaxing in our midst, and, well, don’t expect a big welcome.

But invest some time. Be patient, humble and curious. You’ll find that underneath that initial cold shoulder is a deep kindness and sense of community. The kind of thing you might have thought lost in this modern world. We’re hard to get to know, but when you do, believe me, it’s worth it. Come discover Charlottetown.

The copy on the smaller 11 x 3 inch ad is a cut-down variation of the same.

The original deadline for Charlottetown Perspectives was August 30th, but it’s been extended to September 30th; I’m quite excited to see what others come up with.