Remember back in December when I took a drive out to Campbell’s Printing in Tryon to pick up a type cabinet?

Well the cabinet made it to town, got assembled (with some help from Sergey) at the old office, and then got moved this weekend to the new office.

Yesterday I set out to reassemble it again, which is something of a challenge for a mind like mine that doesn’t naturally work in three dimensions. It took a while, and a night to sleep on the challenge of getting the top to snap on (this is where Sergey came in hand last time around!), but this afternoon I finished the job, loaded up the cabinet with its drawers and am almost back in action as a typesetting shop:

The cabinet was made by the Hamilton Manufacturing Company in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, the famous maker of wood type and all manner of accessories (now home to the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum). It’s built like a tank, and is caked with grease, grime and ink accumulated over its lifetime. I love it dearly, and it wasn’t until it arrived that I truly felt ready to set type.

It was a wonderful surprise to find that the case of Bodini I bought two years ago slid right into place: some kind soul’s drive for standards paying off many years later.

At lunch at Tai Chi Gardens this afternoon there were half a dozen other customers in the house, and all of the men present were wearing those sort of “too tall floppy toques” that are popular with the young rocker crowd these days (do these have a name?).

On my way out the door a woman who’d been sitting at the next table approached me.

“Are you from Iceland?” she said.

“No,” I replied, “why do you ask?” 

“Your 66 North hat!”, she answered.

It turns out that she is from Iceland, saw my 66 North hat, and thought she’d spotted a countryman. Alas I am only an Icelandic poser.

Ian Petrie’s recent post on the “potato shortage” on Prince Edward Island, Mashed Potatoes, is a worthwhile read. He writes, in part:

What’s really at play is a kind of psychological warfare:  once one of the hundreds of potato sellers agrees to a price, then everyone else is expected to match it, and it’s hard to say no to sale. Producers constantly live with the anxiety that they won’t sell their potatoes and will end up feeding them to cattle in the Spring. And it’s THESE producer/dealers that the United officials were really trying to talk to this past week: “There’s no over supply, don’t worry about moving your crop, and make sure you’re getting as much money as possible” Industry watchers know this kind of market situation doesn’t come along very often, and farmers can’t squander it.

We’re all lucky to have Ian’s deep knowledge of the primary industries still available to us; and it’s even better now that it’s not cloaked in the limitations of the CBC.

Regular readers may recall the photo of my virgin office at 84 Fitzroy Street on the day I got everything set up there back in December 2003:

Well, here’s the same photo for the 2012 version of Reinvented Inc. now that we’ve moved office around the corner and down Queen Street to the second floor of The Guild:

What you don’t see in this photo are the piles of boxes holding myriad bits of metal type and bank statements, and the as-yet-unassembled analog typesetting part of the operation. But thanks to a morning’s work of hard work by me, [[Johnny]] and G., we’re completely moved out of the old office and into the new one (for the record, that “Rent me for $19.95 a day” ad you see on the side of U-Haul vans — in the end, with insurance and fees it actually comes out to $48).

Given that it’s all de rigueur to give your digital office space a fancy name these days — see also The Makers Loft — I have, with [[Oliver]]’s help, christened the new space The Reinventorium

reinvent |ˌrē-inˈvent | — verb [ with obj. ] — change (something) so much that it appears to be entirely new: he brought opera to the masses and reinvented the waltz.

orium — suffix — forming nouns denoting a place for a particular function: auditorium | sanatorium. ORIGIN from Latin; compare with -ory.

So, in other words, this is the place where all the reinventing goes on.  It’s where stuff gets reinvented.

Oliver is proud of the new name, [[Catherine]] doesn’t like it at all and [[Johnny]], I think, is trying it on for size and reserving judgment. But it’s too late: there’s already a Twitter account, domain name, and an SSID that you’ll see when you’re in the neighbourhood.

Once the letterpress operation is up and running again I’ll be setting and printing invitations to an office open house where you’ll all be welcome to come and reinvent yourselfs. Or at least have a coffee.

Back in the fall, when I was spending time out at Campbell’s Printing arranging to purchase and the get delivered my Golding Jobber No. 8 letterpress, I had a good opportunity to talk with Bill Campbell about his life as a printer.  Part of Bill’s working life was spent at the Journal-Pioneer newspaper in Summerside, and Bill had many stories to tell about his days there, the people he worked with, and the equipment he used.

This afternoon I found myself in downtown Summerside for a meeting and, after lunch at Samuel’s Coffee House (very highly recommended: espresso, in Summerside — who would have ever thought!), I decided to drop in to the Journal-Pioneer office next door to see if there was any vestigal printing or typesetting equipment around that I might take a look at.

At the front desk I introduced myself and the friendly woman there asked me to wait a moment and then disappeared around a corner. A few seconds later she motioned for me to come around, and I was ushered into the office of Publisher Sandy Rundle with whom I spent a very pleasant 30 minutes swapping newspaper stories and learning more about how production and printing work in the digital age (when I worked in the composing room of the Peterborough Examiner we were still a decidedly analog shop).

Prince Edward Island’s scale can be frustrating, confounding and stiffling; it can also result in happenstance like this, where guy off the street is invited in to chat with the publisher of the daily newspaper.

Within a few kilometers of each other in downtown Charlottetown are 5 elementary schools — Parkdale, Prince Street, Spring Park, St. Jean, and West Kent. Each school serves its own neighbourhoods, and while all the students from these schools will eventually end up in high school together at Colonel Gray together, there’s remarkably little communication among the schools, especially at the home and school level.

When the PEI Home and School Federation announced its Parent Leadership Grant program last fall, we at Prince Street School thought it would be an interesting idea to make a joint application as a five-school consortium.

And so, late in 2011, we had a meeting of the home and school executives of the schools. It was one of those meetings that work as meetings are supposed to: we started with a blank piece of paper, with no real idea of what we might do and emerged 2 hours later with a joint proposal that, we thought, would address a real need.

The very fact of the meeting itself was a very positive step: just getting us all in the same room as each other, talking about our school communities, we all learned a lot. And therein lies a sort of alterior motive on my part: we all know that in the years to come there will be changes in the education system that will likely see, at the very least, school attendance zones reconfigured, and perhaps even one or more of our schools closed or changing its role.  In light of the chaos the reigned when the Eastern School District went through its school rationalization 2 years ago, it seemed wise to get out in front of this as parents, and the first step in the process is to get everyone comfortable with each other, and get everyone knowing a lot more about the other downtown schools.

And, in part, that was the “real need” that our application for funding sought to address; here’s the preamble to our application:

Each school has experienced challenges with parental involvement in the school: while each has a core of parents who are highly involved in school life, comfortable in the school, and participating in the home and school association, there are many more parents who have very little or no involvement at all. We recognize that there are many reasons for this, and further realize that is unreasonable to expect all parents to participate to the same degree; however we also realize that a very small amount of “engagement” with their children’s education can pay off significantly. Knowing this, our primary goal is simple and modest: to create informal recreational and social activities, inside and outside the walls of our partner schools, to bring together parents, students and teachers and staff.

Secondarily, by working together on a joint project, we five downtown Charlottetown elementary schools wish to strengthen the connections between our school communities. Our schools have much in common: we are each small elementary schools of a similar age, we are all located within a few kilometers of each other, we each serve socio-economically and ethnically diverse communities. And yet, historically, our school communities have had little contact, meaning that opportunities for sensible cooperation are missed, and preconceived notions about each school have been allowed to fester. We seek to address this first by the mere fact of our cooperation and, second, by creating opportunities for parents and students to visit and participate in activities in other downtown schools.

You can read the entire application here; the heart of it is, in essence, “let’s get parents together, across school boundaries, for activities that are engaging and fun.” (And by “engaging and fun” we really mean “that are not like the usual home and school activities like ‘Help Protect Your Child from Internet Predators’).

Late in 2011 we received word that our application was successful and we were awarded $4,400 for the project; we have until the end of August to complete it.

We held a follow-up meeting last night with an even larger group of parents from the schools, along with a couple of principals. We’ve got subcommittees looking into things like space, transportation (many of our school families actually live in the suburbs), and groups we might partner with. We’re working on a survey to sent home with the combined 1,121 students in the schools to gauge their interest in various sorts of activities.

I’m really excited about this project: my experience over the past 5 years that [[Oliver]] has been in elementary school has been that being a parent or guardian of an elementary school student is a great leveller: no matter income, language, neighbourhood or situation at home, the challenges we all face are the same.  That great commonality is, I think, an excellent base upon which to build increased parent engagement in education, and, outside of school completely, stronger communities.

On first blush the Popular Names Directory on the Canada411.ca website (the site through which most of Canada’s telephone companies make their white pages searchable online) is a great resource: for any community on Prince Edward Island you can see a list of the most popular surnames. You start from a page that lists every community in their database (and ignoring the fact that they don’t control or clean up the geodata, leaving you to choose from among Abrahams Village, Abrahms Vlg, Abram Village, Abram’s Village, Abram-Vlg, Abrams Village, Abrams Vlg, or Abrams-Vlg):

From there every community has its own page which, in theory, lists the most popular names in that community, each with the number of listings (I assume) for that name in that community.  Look at Souris, for example, where you’ll find the last starting “Adams (2), Alexander (1), Allen (1), Anderson (1), Andrews (1), Armstrong (1), Arnold (2), Arsenault (2), Austin (2)…”.

The problem is that this data doesn’t seem to be accurate.  Take Giesbrecht, for example. There’s an interesting name. So I click on it to see who the single Giesbrecht is in Souris only to end up on page with the error message We did not find “Giesbrecht” in “Souris PE”, but we found results in “PE”:

The page shows a single listing for Giesbrecht in Charlottetown below, with no hint at all of a Giesbrecht in Souris.

I thought this might be an isolated incident, but it’s the same for Russell in Georgetown, Ford in Miminegash and Morris in Wheatley River. It’s not that everything is wrong — some of the name listings produce real data — but so much of it is inaccurate or broken as to make the resource effectively useless.

Anyone have any idea what’s going wrong here?

It’s been a busy week here at Reinvented HQ as I prepare to move said HQ three blocks south while, at the same time, attending both to regular day-to-day jobs and also doing the paperwork for our corporate year-end at the end of the month. And helping to organize a project that will see five downtown home and school associations cooperating on a parent leadership grant. And whipping up plans to commemorate the 160th anniversary of free public education in Prince Edward Island. And helping to coordinate the efforts of our land trust as we seek to raise money for the L.M. Montgomery Seashore. And, oh, did I mention it’s science fair time for Oliver?

So, yes, busy. But lots of fun too. I’d rather be busy than bored.

Plans for the move to The Guild are proceeding well, aided by the deft and efficient organizational hand of Executive Director Ghislaine O’Hanley.

After lots of back and forth with Eastlink we’ve finally got an install date for broadband (next Friday, January 20); part of the hold-up on this was that they were initially uncomfortable having us use the existing inside LAN wiring and wanted to run new coax directly to our office (and charge us $170 for doing so). They agreed, in the end, to do it our way, and we should be wired up by this time next week.

[[Johnny]] had his first visit to the new office yesterday (in part so we could test the aforementioned LAN wiring to make sure it works), and side-effects of this visit include a plan to paint the space next week sometime (Johnny’s aesthetic tolerances are much more finely-tuned than mine, which tend more toward “subsistence hovel”), and an accelerated plan to outfit the windows with blinds (there’s already some semblance of vertical blind hardware, minus the actual blinds themselves; blinds supplier references welcome).

Meanwhile, the linoleum floors in the new space are being stripped and waxed today, and I’m slowly making my way through the barrels of stuff here in the old HQ trying to determine what to move and what to keep.

If all the cylinders fire as they should, we should be working from the new space on Monday, January 23.

Here are some of the rules I learned from Sergey:

1. Don’t cross over two lanes of traffic in one move: the police will give you a ticket.
2. When you’re meeting someone, and when you’re saying good-bye, shake hands. Never shake hands across a doorway: you need to be in the same room.
3. When visiting family for the first time, bring gifts.
4. Vodka with vodka, beer with beer. Don’t mix them up in one meal.
5. Always have bread with a meal.
6. It’s okay to have borscht for breakfast.

I’m particularly fond of rules #2 and #5. I’m not sure how to follow rule #1 when turning right out of the PetroCan at University and Belvedere and heading toward the Farmers’ Market.

So, like I said, we’re moving office over the next few weeks, and we’re starting with what amounts to an empty 26’ by 11’ white box that looks like this right now:

We’ve got to figure out both how to best arrange our various bits of furniture and infrastructure into the space, and how to creating a pleasant working atmosphere.  We’re not going to paint, or add walls, or change the floor, so it all comes down to positioning. And anything we might want to hang on the walls or from the ceiling. Here’s the layout of the room, to scale, with the various pieces of furniture we need to fit:

There’s really only one practical constraints imposed by the space: there are only electric outlets on the right-hand side, so our desks, and anything else that needs power, has to be on this side.

I’ve prepared the plan above in various formats — OmniGraffle, EPS, PDF — should you wish to have a go at arranging the objects on the right side inside the room on the left side; feel free to point to your mashups from the comments.