Our headquarters here at Reinvented Inc. has been at 84 Fitzroy Street for as long as I can recall: we started renting our two first-floor rooms from silverorange in the fall of 2003, more than eight years ago. Oliver was only three years old. Johnny didn’t even live on PEI yet. And the world was a calmer, gentler place. Here’s what my office looked like on day one:

That’s an almost-new iMac sitting on my desk; it was replaced by one with a larger screen, and then by a MacBook, and finally, most recently, by a MacBook Air. The plant died shortly after I moved in (I never watered it), I replaced the chair with a better one (although I’m still looking to sell the one in the picture; let me know if you’re interested). I’m still using the same desk, but there’s a lot more stuff piled on and around it.

We’ve been happy here: silverorange has been a good landlord, and they of silverorange good friends. We’ve done a lot of good work here, held a lot of meetings, built a lot of technology, had a lot of fun. 

But it’s time for a move.

“A change is as good as a rest,” they say. And so for that, and because silverorange is about to launch an ambituous multi-year interior renovation, and because my tiny letterpress shop is expanding every month, we’re picking up shop and relocating to the 2nd floor of The Guild at the corner of Queen and Richmond.

It’s a space I know well as Oliver’s music teacher Peter Mutch had his studio there for several years, and, of course, I’ve had my letterpress housed in the basement of the building since last fall (it will be nice to have “composing” and “printing” co-located).

The new space is bright — it has a lovely view down Queen Street (which will be nice in place of our lovely view of the back of the Queen Parkade right now) — and is one large room 26’ x 11’ room. If you know the theatre at The Guild, imagine sitting in the audience facing Richmond Street: with x-ray vision you could see our office by looking up and to the left.

So my January will be partially taken up with hurrying about to make arrangements for Internet access, moving our desks and gear (and figuring out what of the piles of things here in the old office I can sell, give away or trash so as to avoid moving them).

The move will also mean something of an “office culture” change for Johnny and me: for 7 years we’ve been ensconced in our own little offices here in the back of Fitzroy Street; we’re now entering into much more of a “co-working team” environment, albeit with a small team of two. Which will, I’m sure, take some getting used to.

And of course all that proximity to the art, music and theatre pulsing through The Guild likely won’t hurt our creative process (I feel good that our monthly rent dollars will be helping to support and arts space).

This new location marks the third time I’ll be working from an office on Richmond Street: when I first moved to the Island in 1993 I worked at the PEI Crafts Council office at 156 Richmond, later, during the Okeedokee years, I had a tiny office at 75 Richmond. So it’s familiar territory.

My morning commute will be cut almost in half from its current, punishing, 600 m in 8 minutes to a much more reasonable 350 m in 4 minutes. Of course I’ll only be getting half the exercise I get now, but perhaps now I’ll be able to go home for lunch, and there’s all that new opportunity for letterpress workouts. And we’ll only be 43 seconds walk from Casa Mia. The mind boggles.

Once the new base of operations is up and running we’ll have a drop-in; watch this space for notice.

I my process of getting my Golding Jobber No. 8 letterpress up and running I’ve had a lot of help from Gota in Sweden who has the same press. She connected me with Stephen O. Saxe in White Plains, New York, who has written a history of the Golding company and could, she told me, tell me the age of the press if I provided the serial number.

I learned here that to find the serial number on Golding presses is located “top center of the bed of the press, just under the rim of the ink disk,” or right here:

Try as I might, I couldn’t see any evidence of a number there. Then I read on: “it may require some kerosene and steel wool and a flashlight to make it visible, but it’s there.” And, sure enough, after about 20 minutes of scraping off years and years of ink and dirt, and with the help of a little acetone, here’s what I found:

I emailed the number — 1786 — to Stephen O. Saxe, and just received work back from him:

“Jobber 8s with serial nos. from 1782 through 1806 were ‘Finished August 1915.’”

So my press is 97 years old this year. 

I was in the letterpress shop this afternoon printing up some note cards (New Year’s resolution: send more thank you notes!):

While I was there I shot some video on my iPad of the Golding Jobber No. 8 press in action. I never tire of watching the mechanisms of the press go through their magical dance. I edited up the shots in iMovie on the iPad itself (a magical mechanism in its own right that app) and here is the result:

If you’re a Mail Me Something subscriber from the summer, you received a Vollmond Kalendar 2012 in the late summer. Vollmond is German for “Full Moon,” and the calendar kicks into relevance next week with the first Full Moon of 2012 on Monday, January 9. I’ve got mine up on the wall now at the office all ready to warn me of impending lunar action. Do you?

Back in the spring I did some work on extracting and reporting on the current “PEI Energy Interchange” figure: the amount of electricity that Prince Edward Island is pulling from (or pushing to) the mainland. When my Nabaztag rabbit sprang to life on Christmas Eve after a year of dormancy I reasoned that it was time to get the rabbit involved in the project. The result:

The code that does this is here and the process is simple:

1. Pull the previously-scraped-and-XMLified energy interchange data.
2. Use Swift to turn the PEI figure into a WAV file with a message message P E I energy interchange is XX megawatts.
3. Use the Nabaztag API (with the API key from nabaztag.com) to have my rabbit read the WAV file.

I’ve got this set up to read the figure to me every hour here in the office and after two days I’m finding it (a) not annoying and (b) a helpful way of building up peripheral awareness of PEI’s energy usage (like, hey, what’s happening today: we’re pulling almost 190MW from the mainland! We max out at about 210MW).

Lest Peter-of-the-future wonder “what happened to Peter over the Christmas week in 2011?”, here is a quick update.

After flirting off-and-on with various rhinoviruses over the fall, which made for a season of coughing, sore throat and general out-of-shapedness, my body seemed to be healthy come Christmas time. We had an excellent pre-Christmas fest with our friends A. and D., followed by an excellent Christmas Day made all the better by the inclusion of Sergey, who was here until the 27th when he flew back to Ukraine (where he gets another Christmas in January!).

On the Thursday of Christmas week I woke up with a mild sore throat which got steadily worse over the course of the day. Mid-afternoon I took the bus up to CBC Charlottetown to tape a piece for the afternoon Mainstreet CBC Radio One program on New Year’s levees and it’s a wonder I made it through (if you listen to the final result you’ll notice that I sound vaguely head-stuffed and my voice starts to fall apart in the final minutes).

By the end of the day I felt like hell, and when I woke up on Friday morning I had the mother of all sore throats: this wasn’t a rhinovirus this time, I realized, but something far more evil. Mindful that I was just ahead of a 3-day holiday, I rallied myself down to the Boardwalk Walk-in Clinic for 8:00 a.m. By the time I got there, 5 minutes after the doors opened, there were already 11 people ahead of me; and the clinic doesn’t see patients until 9:00 a.m. So I was glad to be there early.

I got myself number 12 and was told to come back at 10:10 a.m. and, sure enough, when I came back I was seen right away.

There are two types of doctors when it comes to dealing with patients presenting with strep-throat symptoms, the “yah, it’s strep throat, here’s the antibiotics” doctors and the “we’ll do a swab, send it to the lab, and get the results back in 3 days and decide on a course of treatment” doctors. Suffice to say that I had my fingers crossed for the former and was lucky enough to end up with just that: 10 minutes later I was lined up for an amoxicillin prescription and 30 minutes later I was at home, under 13 blankets, shivering away in the knowledge the, eventually, the end was near.

Amoxicillin promised to smash the streptococcus bacteria within 48 hours and it did: by midday on Sunday I was starting to feel better. Not wanting to inflict the infection on others I opted to miss the aforementioned New Year’s levees and instead stayed home on the couch watching endless Netflix movies and reruns of Big Bang Theory and Storage Wars.

By yesterday morning I was at about 90%, well enough to come into the office, and today I’m feeling better than I have in weeks.

With network television on hiatus over the holidays, we turn to Netflix for our entertainment. Here’s what I’ve enjoyed so far:

• The Hour — A 1956 period drama set at the BBC. I’d describe it as “Mad Men in London,” but it’s far more interesting then that, both because of its insights into politics and class, and because the cast is far more well-rounded. There is, however, about just as much smoking and drinking.
• Transsiberian — Started watching it months ago and abandoned it. For some reason it seemed more compelling last night. Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer take the train across Siberia where they run into Ben Kingsley. Murder and mayhem ensue. Not a great movie, but if you’re interested in trains and/or Russia in winter it has its moments.
• Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? — A well-produced documentary about a truck driver who finds what she believes to be a Jackson Pollock painting in a thrift store and her attempts to get it authenticated. Read The Mark of a Masterpiece from The New Yorker for some background before you watch.
• The Yes Men Fix the World — If you enjoyed the 2003 movie The Yes Men, you’ll likely enjoy this too: although it’s slightly less earnest and a little more goofy, it features more of the same news-hoaxing-antics of The Yes Men, this time focusing on everything from Bhopal to Katrina to producing a wishful-thinking issue of The New York Times.
• Designing a Great Neighborhood — A poorly-produced, rather boring documentary about a very interesting project to transform a former drive-in movie property in Boulder, Colorado into an ecological community. If you can bear to sit through it there’s some interesting material covered.

There’s a lot of chaff in the Netflix selection — seemingly endless direct-to-video movies that involve some combination of babysitters and the occult — but it has an uncommonly strong documentary selection, and next to the wasteland that is our local cable company’s “On Demand” selection, it’s positively brimming with content.

From Wayne MacKinnon’s book The Life of the Party: A History of the Liberal Party in Prince Edward Island:

The 1966 Provincial election in Prince Edward Island remains perhaps as the most novel in Canadian political history. It ended (after a series of close recounts) in a tie, and it was left for a deferred by-election in one district to determine a winner.

The reason for the deferred by-election was the death of 1st Kings district Liberal candidate William Acorn after the writ had dropped but before election day. The was an era when the Island had 16 two-member districts; on May 30, 1966 there was a general election in only 15 of those districts, and the result was 15 Liberal members and 15 Conservative members.

This morning at Elections PEI I got a look at the sheet used to tabulate the results of that election; you can see 1st Kings is blank, as no election was conducted there on regular polling day:

The Chief Electoral Officer’s report picks up the story from there:

A writ was forthwith issued, setting July 11, 1966 as the date for the deferred election in the First District of Kings.

What followed, according to Francis Bolger’s Canada’s Smallest Province, was an orgy of patronage in the district:

Some observers estimated that the crucial constituency received thirty miles of paving in the midst of the pre-election fever. One local citizen with a sense of humor was moved to erect a prominent sign which read: “PLEASE DON’T PAVE. THIS IS MY ONLY PASTURE.” It was widely reported that the government was adopting the slogan: “If it moves, give it a pension, if it doesn’t, pave it!”.

In the end, it didn’t work: 1st Kings returned two Liberal members, Daniel J. MacDonald and Bruce L. Stewart, with margins of victory of 207 and 158 respectively, suggesting that there’s only so much you can achieve through paving.

As a result of the win, Canada’s youngest political leader, Liberal Alex Campbell, replaced Canada’s oldest, Conservative Walter Shaw, as Premier. Campbell would go on to transform Prince Edward Island more dramatically, perhaps, than any of his predecessors.

Senator Percy Downe posted the text of a 1990 New Year’s Eve address to the nation by the late Václav Havel; it’s a stirring speech, the heart of which, for me, is:

The previous regime — armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology — reduced man to a force of production, and nature to a tool of production. In this it attacked both their very substance and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to the nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy and stinking machine, whose real meaning was not clear to anyone. It could not do more than slowly but inexorably wear out itself and all its nuts and bolts.

When I talk about the contaminated moral atmosphere, I am not talking just about the gentlemen who eat organic vegetables and do not look out of the plane windows. I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all — though naturally to differing extents — responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.

We would all do well to consider these words as we think about your own society and how it operates.

[[Oliver]] is quite resourceful when it comes to navigating the alleys of the Internet, and his creations are a constant source of surprise and delight. Here’s a word search he made for Christmas (you can download a printable PDF for your hometime enjoyment).