When I first acquired my tiny Adana Eight Five letterpress last year I was a little obsessed with tuning up and cleaning the press to “perfect” condition before actually getting down to printing. Then I read a post on the excellent letterpress-focused BriarPress.org website that said, in essence, “stop fussing about and just start printing!” So I did.

It was a good idea: there’s no better way to get to know the ins and outs of a letterpress than using it for its intended purpose. It will never be perfect, and, in the end, it’s far more important to develop a personal relationship with the physics of the press than it is to make sure every washer is polished.

With this in mind, after the press sprang to life on the weekend I was eager to print something — anything — on the Golding Jobber No. 8 that’s now playing the older-brother role to the Adana. I decided that a 1947 CFCY radio coverage map loaned to me by Ian Scott and Daphne Large would be the perfect thing: it’s too big to fit on the Adana so I’ve never had a chance to print it. And it’s a pretty neat map. Here’s the result:

It’s by no means a perfect print: it’s printing on rough cardboard; I only used one of the three rollers, so the ink coverage is uneven (the white line through the announcer’s body and Eastern Kings is due to a nick in the roller); and I haven’t learned yet how to make the subtle makeready adjustments on this larger scale that even things out. But it’s still pretty neat.

Here’s a short time-lapse video I made with my iPad (using iMotion HD) that covers the 30 minutes from when I first arrived until the first print came off the press:

As I’ve mentioned several times over the last couple of months, my “Cousin Sergey” — Sergey Datsenko, married to my third-cousin — has been here in Prince Edward Island studying English since the beginning of October.  Sergey and his wife Aleksandra made contact with us this spring, the first contact we’d had with the Ukrainian branch of our family since my great-grandfather immigrated to Canada in 1908.

Sergey’s decided that he likes Canada so much that he wants to move his family here from Ukraine, and to aid in that process he’s looking for work here in Prince Edward Island. So, dear readers, I’d like you to give him a job!

Sergey’s resume doesn’t really cover the depth and breadth of his technical skills: he is a true “jack of all trades,” with experience in everything from agriculture (running tractors, fixing machinery) to manufacturing (developing industrial processes at a company that makes construction cranes and refurbishes excavators) to auto mechanics (he ran his own garage, purchasing, restoring and re-selling cars) to retail (he and Aleksandra have operated a grocery store, gas station and restaurant) to construction (he’s been a contractor, and owns a company that makes foamed concrete blocks). He’s also an exceptionally good cook, as you can see from the potato latkes in the photo here.

One of the things that living through the last 30 years of Ukrainian history has provided Sergey with is infinite flexibility: he’s improvised his way through economic and political ups and downs with imagination and determination, and I have every confidence he would make an excellent employee for an Island company looking for someone with his skills.

You can email Sergey directly at bigcompany1@yandex.ru or contact me if you’d like more background or to suggest possibly employers.

After two months of struggle — finding it a home, finding a way of transporting it, finding a way to replace the part the fell off the truck during transport — my Golding Jobber No. 8 letterpress sprang to life again. 

Profound credit goes to Sergey, a true jack-of-all-trades, whose hours and hours of measuring, planning, fitting, grinding, filing, drilling, adjusting and wiring are the only reason at all the the press is working today; without Sergey it might have been spring before I managed to get it all together (if ever!). Here’s the video evidence (it’s an amazing machine to just sit and watch, let along for its ability to print!):

A big day of developments in the letterpress world. Or at least in my small slice of it. First thing this morning I headed out to the edge of Charlottetown to Precision Mechanical to pick up the newly-fabricated replacement part for my Golding Jobber No. 8 sent up from their sister company, Kensington Metal Products. I’ll get together with Sergey soon to see how it works on the press.

Next it was out to Tryon to Campbell’s Printing in my friend Nathan’s truck to pick up a Hamilton Type Cabinet that Bill threw in as part of the Golding Jobber sale. The drawers in the cabinet are filled with the kinds of bits and bobs — die cutters, leading, furniture — that it’s always useful to have around a developing letterpress shop. The cabinet is a big honking heaviness of a piece of furniture, and was quite a challenge to move.

To start I attempted to back Nathan’s pickup to the back door of Campbell’s shop. In doing so I only succeeded in chewing up their slightly-inclined and very slippery lawn and not getting within 20 feet of the door that was my target:

Bill has a defter hand at the wheel, and managed to easily manoeuvre his truck into place, onto which we slid the cabinet with little problem. We then backed the two truck beds up against each other and transferred the cabinet from his truck to Nathan’s. Fortunately Bill and Gertie are nothing if not patient and accommodating, so the extra time, the poor driving on my part and the chewed-up lawn did not ruin the day or even cause a ripple of stress (they’re moving out of the house and shop next week, which mitigated the lawn-chewing issue somewhat!).

I strapped the cabinet and its drawers into place, thanked Bill and Gertie for all their generosity, and headed back to town. When I arrived at 84 Fitzroy Street — the “compositing” base for my letterpress operation — and measured the doors I realized that there was no way the cabinet was going to fit through the doors, and so launched into a surprisingly easy disassemblage. Nathan showed up just as I needed someone to help me move the lighter-but-still-pretty-heavy pieces into the house, and 15 minutes later he was on his way and the cabinet’s pieces and drawers sit in the next room waiting to be put together again.

Map Tales is a lovely little tool for telling stories with words, maps and photos. Jeremy Keith tells the story of its creation; here’s a little story about our daily walk to school each day up Prince Street:

(Update January 25, 2019: Map Tales went offline; an incomplete version of this “story map” can be found in the Wayback Machine).

I was given a tour of the Prince Edward Island Museum and Heritage Foundation’s “Artefactory” storage facility in the West Royalty Industrial Park this morning: Linda Berko, Boyde Beck and Jason MacNeil kindly led me on a voyage through Prince Edward Island’s printing history. There is a nice collection of artifacts in the collection, ranging from furniture and metal type from Irwin Printing to a lovely collection of letterpress cuts from Rogers Hardware. There are one and a half letterpresses: a compact Kelsey 5x8 that’s the American cousin of my own Adana Eight Five, and, somewhat oddly, only one half of a larger floor-model press that I couldn’t identify. There are other interesting things like the paper “molds” of the Guardian and Evening Patriot “flags” and a Graphotype machine. Here’s a selection of photos I took during the tour:

The first car I ever owned was a blue 1978 Datsun 510. It was about 9 years old when I bought it, and it was the first in a long line of 8 or 9 year old cars that I owned over the course of 15 years: it was followed by a green 1979 Datsun 510, a Toyota Tercel, a Ford F100 half-ton truck, a Nissan Sentra, a Honda Civic and an Eagle Summit.

There would come a time in every car’s life when the cost of keeping the car running — and, on Prince Edward Island at least, passing its yearly inspection — would become prohibitive (“good money after bad”) and I’d move on to the next car. Along the way I replaced more than one transmission, many alternators, several starter motors and, courtesy of Catherine’s skills as a metalworker, a parking brake “Y” joint or two.

When Oliver was born in 2000, the combination of “we need a new car so we don’t put the new baby’s life in danger,” having a little spare money, and a desire to get off the yearly treadmill of exorbitant-seeming repair bills, or the prospect thereof, was enough to push us to purchase a brand new 2000 Volkswagen Jetta, and I’ve been driving it ever since.

For the first 2 or 3 years I didn’t need to spend any money on the Jetta at all — regular maintenance was included in the price, and nothing went wrong otherwise. After that I settled into a pattern of needing to replace something — usually some sort of confusing sounding part related to the “check engine” light being on — every couple of years, but some years I’d just replace a pollen filter and be done with it.

This year seems to be the year that things have tipped: 11 years (and only 75,000 km) into the life of the car and so far this year I’ve put about $2000 into it: new brakes, new oil pan, front and rear “control arm bushings” and various other bits and bobs. But that’s not it: now I have a power steering leak, a vibration in the front end (that the bushings and a front wheel alignment was designed to address but didn’t) and a small exhaust leak. The total estimate for these items comes to a whopping $3,242.94 (see the full estimate here).

Perhaps sensing a change in my tone from “okay, well, go ahead” tone to “whoa, Nellie, let me think about that,” the service advisor I saw today when I picked up the car came out in front of the desk and had a sort of counselling session with me in which he talked about various ways of knocking down this price, things like getting a muffler shop to replace the flexible tube where there’s an exhaust leak rather than repairing the otherwise fully-functional catalytic convertor ($924), putting up with the front-end vibration rather than replacing the struts and shocks ($707) and finding less expensive OEM versions of the power-steering hoses ($90 each).

I can’t help feeling that the car has “tipped” now, and that if I keep going this is going to be the start of a yearly subscription that will end up costing me more arms and more legs.

I have two options, as I see it: move from the VW dealer to an independent garage that’s prepared to be more “improvisational” with repairs (perhaps I should have done this years ago?), or just be done with it all, realize that I don’t need a car at all and cut my losses. I walk to work every day. The only regular thing I use my car for is a weekly trip to the Farmer’s Market and I could easily go back to taking the bus there (it was only habit that stopped me from doing that in the first place) and for everything else — the occasional meeting in Summerside or need for a trip to Halifax — I would probably come out ahead renting a car what with the combined yearly expense of insurance, registration, snow removal and repairs.

Anyone else want to chime in?

I was talking with a friend the other day who mentioned that he was surprised that he was seeing advertisements from a particular company on completely unrelated websites. The company in question was one he had an interest in, and had visited the website of, but he hadn’t signed up for anything, and he wondered how it was that he was seemingly being targetted in this way.

The answer: network advertising. These days almost every commercial website you visit will be running ads, and the networks that deliver those ads into your browser are not only in the advertising delivery business, but also in the “hey, he visits the New York Times website so he must be a middle-income professional between 46 and 62” business. And they use, and sell, this aggregate information about you to other advertisers to turn around and display advertising to you that they infer will be “interesting” to you.

For example, Google has a page where you can display and alter the kind of advertising you see on the web from its advertising network. Mine looks like this:

I’ve assumed all along that Google, and the myriad other advertising networks have been doing this kind of thing, I applaud Google’s transparency about it, and, indeed, I derive some of my income, indirectly, from my clients’ web advertising and the better-performing it is the better it is for me. But I still find the inference of my age, gender and interests from my web searchs to be deeply, deeply creepy.

It is possible to opt out of this custom-tailoring of advertising For Google, you need to click on the “remove or edit” link on the page above and then click the “Opt Out” button, at which point you see a confirmation page like this:

At this point it’s possible to go two steps further: first, you can install the Cookie Opt-Out Plugin and, second, you can visit the Network Advertising Initiative’s Opt Out of Behavioral Advertising page. Upping the creepiness factor, or at least the “wow, I’m being profiled a lot” factor, almost every one of the ad networks on the list of ad network I found there.

The matter here that I find worthy of discussion is why this is all positioned as a opt-out initiative when, for example, the email marketing world has moved, in general, to an opt-in (and often a double opt-in) model. Why is the assumption that we want to be behaviourly marketed to?

Here’s a quick solution to finding Government of Prince Edward Island telephone numbers using the excellent Alfred app for the Mac. Under Preferences | Custom Searches, enter the following:

• Search URL: http://www.gov.pe.ca/phone/index.php3?lname={query}
• Title: Government Telephone Number
• Keyword: gov

You can optionally copy-and-paste the PEI wordmark into the icon field.

With that set up you just hit your Alfred hot key, and then type gov [lastname] (where [lastname] is the last name of the person you’re looking for):

Results open in your browser in the regular Government of PEI Telephone and Email Directory.

Thanks to the efforts of Canadiana.org, the Journal of the House of Assembly of Prince Edward Island from 1852 has been digitized and is freely available online. The Free Education Act was passed that year, and the Journal records the discussion leading up to Royal Assent on Saturday, April 3 (thanks to the Public Archives for filling in that detail), including the report, on February 18, of the Special Committee:

Your Committee appointed, last Session, to enquire into the expediency of establishing a system of Free Education throughout the Island, have to report — that they find the present system of Education, although liberally supported by Legislative grants in aid of the salaries of Teachers, does not stimulate the inhabitants to that increased solicitude, and consequent efforts to educate their children, a measure which is of such vital importance to the well-being of every country, and particularly so to the inhabitants of this Colony.

Your Committee find, that during a series of years, different modes have been adopted to encourage good and efficient Teachers to locate themselves in the several Districts, but they are of opinion that unless School Masters’ salaries are wholly paid by the Government, and a system of Free Education established, many settlements will not be able to reap the benefits of Education for the rising generation, under the present system; for they find that in the year 1844 there were 126 Public Seminaries imparting instruction to 5,040 pupils, while, in 1850, there were only 130 Schools, including Primary and Infant Schools, and 4,547 pupils; showing a decrease of pupils, while during that period, the increase of children, under 16 years of age, was about 7,000; although the Legislative allowance had been increased from the year 1843 to 1850, from £1,349 18s. to £2,068 7s. 1-1/2d.; but as the present law allows two-thirds of the Districts to assess the remainder for the support of the Teacher, in addition to the public grant, litigation in many instances, has been the result; and in many cases parties have paid the assessment and kept their children at home, and frequently many are summoned to the Small Debt Court for the amount assessed, — Your Committee likewise find, that on an average, there ought to be from 8,000 to 10,000 children attending School, yet it is lamentable to reflect, that not more than half that number are receiving regular instruction.

In view of the foregoing data, your Committee would, therefore, recommend that a Bill be passed, providing means to establish Schools on the free system throughout the Island, and that a tax of one half-penny per acre, be imposed on all Lands in addition to the present Land Assessment, and eight-pence each on the pasture Lots in Georgetown Royalty; and 2s. each on Pasture Lots in Charlottetown and Royalty; and that a rateable tax be assessed on all property in Charlottetown, and Common, and Georgetown„ as Well as on all Shops, Dwelling Houses’, &c., throughout the Island, where there is not a certain number of acres of Land attached thereto, and the remainder to be taken out of the General Revenue of the Island; that one Visitor be appointed to superintend the Schools, who shall not have any other occupation; and that one Member be added to the Board of Education from Prince and King’s Counties; and that an extra allowance be given to Masters of the higher class, for every Pupil whom the School Visitor will certify has been taught, not exceeding Ten Shillings per Scholar, until his salary amounts to £60 per annum; and encouragement be given to Female Teachers for such Districts as would prefer them.

Your Committee have examined 50 Petitions in favour of the free system, bearing upwards of 1,700 signatures; two conditional, signed by 139 individuals; and three against the scheme with 200 signatures — all presented to the House in the present Session; and, although some of those in favour, differ in the detail, yet all approve of the Free system. With reference to the few against it, the parties seem to be under an impression, that a tax of Twenty or Thirty Shillings per 100 acres, would be levied to meet the expense; and should that be the case, they would prefer the present system; but your Committee are satisfied that when they are made aware that it is not contemplated to tax the land to a higher amount than Four Shillings and Two-pence per hundred acres, in addition to the present land tax, scarcely an individual will be found to oppose the principle.

You have to parse the thicknesses of the ye olde language to make sense of this, but the essence is clear: if families have to pay for education, fewer children will go to school.