Remember how I told you that my letterpress has found a home in the basement of The Guild? Well [[Catherine]] reminded me this morning that soon after arriving in Prince Edward Island back in the early 1990s she was on the board of the PEI Council of the Arts when the building now known as The Guild was being acquired from the Royal Bank.

Catherine and Ron Arvidson (see his sundial on the side of Charlottetown City Hall) were on the committee that was responsible for laying out the selfsame basement.

So, in other words, Catherine has my back to the extent that she preemptively arranges for suitable space to become avaialble to me 15 years in advance.

Thank you.

You may recall that when we last spoke my Golding Jobber letterpress had made it from Tryon to Clyde River — half way along its journey to town. It’s taken me almost a month to get it the rest of the way.

First, I needed to find a space. After a tour of what seemed like every light industrial space south of Allen Street, I finally made arrangements to share a space in the basement of The Guild and so with the space identified the next challenge was to get the press from Clyde River to town.

Fortunately my friend Tom Cullen at Purity Dairy heard my call for help and pointed me toward Austin McQuaid on Allen Street. Everyone thinks of McQuaid’s as a place to store things, but they’re in the moving business too, and Tom has used them over the years when he too has had heavy things to move around.

I gave Austin a call last week and he and his son met me at The Guild to see if it was something they could handle; I showed him a photo of the press, and he came up with a plan and asked that I arrange to have Griffin’s Towing in Clyde River move the press into his warehouse on Allen Street so they could prepare for the move into The Guild.

The press arrived at McQuaid’s yesterday afternoon and this morning at 8:30 a.m. I had an email from Kay in Austin’s office telling me they’d be at The Guild at 9:00 a.m. I made sure that the doors would be open and then headed down to guide them where to set it down.

By the time I arrived at The Guild 15 minutes later they had the press out of their trailer, in the front door and down the front stairs; just as I arrived their forklift was driving out of the front door of the building. Ten minutes later they had the press on a piano sledge and five minutes after that it was set down into place.

Austin brought a full team to the move and they were all the most good-natured, professional guys you’d ever meet: I can’t imagine a better moving team. If you got something heavy to move on PEI, I wholeheartedly recommend them.

At every step of this two-month process each new person to encounter the press adds a couple of hundred pounds to their guess of how much it weights: Bill Campbell, the previous owner, guessed it was about 800 pounds; the next mover thought it was more like 1,000 pounds and Austin was pretty sure it was more than that (one of his men estimated 1,725 with a twinkle in his eye).

On my way out the door this morning [[Catherine]] handed me a business card from our electric meter reader; he’d knocked on the door of our house yesterday looking for information about the Blueline Power Cost Monitor that’s strapped to our meter and wanted me to give him a call.

We spoke on the phone for 5 minutes this morning and any fears I might have had — “look, you can’t just go strapping unauthorized equipment to your electric meter” — were immediately assuaged: he just wanted to know where I got the monitor, what kind of information it gave me, and how much it cost me. He was just curious, in other words.

It’s nice to have an electric company with employees like this.

The Social Graph is Neither, an essay by Maciej Ceglowski on the Pinboard Blog lays out eloquently many of the thoughts about current Internet trends that I’ve intuitively felt for a long time but have never been able to express; the essay deserves to be read in its entirety, but in you want to skip ahead to the punchline, for me it is this:

Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.

Because their collection methods are kind of primitive, these sites have to coax you into doing as much of your social interaction as possible while logged in, so they can see it. It’s as if an ad agency built a nationwide chain of pubs and night clubs in the hopes that people would spend all their time there, rigging the place with microphones and cameras to keep abreast of the latest trends (and staffing it, of course, with that Mormon bartender).

There much more in the essay, including a cogent argument for, as the title says, “the social graph is neither.” Go read it.

Pachube, the “plumbing system for the Internet of Things,” has widened the range of services it offers at no charge. This means, among other things, that a much longer data trail is now available from their API and otherwise.  For example, here’s 6 month’s worth of PEI-New Brunswick Energy Interchange:

And here’s the same data, but for the past week:

Because those graphs are coming from Pachube’s web service, they are always up to date, meaning that if you’re reading this blog post in 6 months, then you’re still looking at “the last six months” and “the last week” of data.

I’m happy to report that after more than a month of searching, I’ve found a space to house my newly-acquired Golding Jobber letterpress, in the basement of The Guild, two blocks from my house and two blocks from my office. I’ll be sharing the basement space next to the gallery with This Town is Small and its screenprinting workshop and with Wendy Druet and her art classes for children.

It looks to be a great arrangement: none of us need a space full-time, and none of us need all the space. There’s also an opportunity, because it’s a larger space, for me to run the occasional letterpress workshop. The only downside, and it’s a small one, is that there isn’t a lot of storage space, so I may end up splitting my operation into “composing,” here at 84 Fitzroy Street, and “printing” down at The Guild.

Over the weeks I’ve been plumbing my networks, digital and analog, for pointers to spaces, I’ve met some people I should have, by all rights, met long ago. Like George Dow (who showed me the old Dillon Printing space under Leonhard’s Café on University Avenue, unfortunately being used as storage), Chuckie (who showed me the building he owns on Fitzroy Street where Condon’s Woolen Mill used to be), Ken Peters (who’s renting space in the basement of 1 Rochford Street), and Adam and Rebekha Young who are transforming the space formerly occupied by Ampersand on Water Street into a coffee shop cum knitting café cum bicycle shop. Everyone’s been very patient with me while I work to find a space that works in all the ways I need it to work (floor to support weight, ceiling high enough to work, access for movers, affordable rent).

I’ve also become aware at just how little non-residential space there is in Charlottetown, especially downtown: if you have an idea that needs space, whether it be artistic, retail, or light-industrial, there really isn’t much space left, especially if you don’t want to pay a lot of money and/or rent from an objectionable landlord.

The irony here is that I’ve always had a sort of “meh” attitude toward The Guild, thinking, naively as I now realize, that artists and craftspeople should just be able to work, well, anywhere. Now that I’ve got a Big Heavy piece of machinery, I’ve become aware in a visceral way that in the analog world space is a very important consideration for any sort of making activity. So thanks to all the backers of The Guild over the years, and retroactive apologies for my benign indifference.

The letterpress itself is about to start moving closer to town: Griffin’s Service Centre will drive it into McQuaid’s Warehousing on Allen Street where it will be readied for moving into The Guild. I did a tour of The Guild this morning with Austin McQuaid and his son (about the nicest movers I’ve ever met; thanks to Tom Cullen at Purity Dairy for the referral) and they’re in the process of figuring out the best way to wrangle the press into place, and how big a crew they’ll need to do it.

Things are so much simpler in the digital world: I want 32 webservers, I just hit a few keys on my keyboard and, presto, Amazon Web Services is firing up servers for me and billing my credit card; it’s good to be reminded, once in a while, that out here in the material world things are slightly more complicated.

It’s only fair, after I lavished so much praise on my Marimekko Cash & Carry bag, that I give credit to the bag that started it all for me, one designed and manufactured for me by [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]].

Back in April I was lucky enough to receive a surprise gift of an iPad 2 for my birthday; in the early days I snarfed up the bag that Oliver uses to carry his Nintendo DS to carry the iPad, but eventually Oliver wanted that back and so I was left with a need for a similar bag.

Fortunately I live with a talented designer and seamstress and so I received another surprise a few weeks later with the gift of a custom-tailored bag:

The exterior of the bag is made from an old pair of jeans, with multi-coloured circles appliqued on the outside. Inside there’s just enough room for the iPad and an accompanying analog book or magazine, with an inside pocket to hold a USB cable or other small accessory:

After I’d been using the bag for a week or two I had it in the shop for a few days (Catherine is nothing if not patient and willing-to-renovate) to take a few of the rough edges off (the iPad was getting caught on an inside seam every time I took it out of the case).

It seemed a little over-the-top to be carrying two bags around this fall, so I generally left the iPad at home; now that the Marimekko is up on jacks for the winter, the iPad bag is back out for the winter, working as well as it ever has.

My Cousin Sergey has been here on Prince Edward Island for a month now, and while he’s been learning English, I’ve been learning a lot about Ukraine, and the Ukrainian branches of my family tree.

Sergey’s command of English is improving every day, and for most “come by our house at 10:00 for breakfast” kinds of things we can leave the technology aside and use a combination of English and charades to communicate. For the tougher, more subtle things, however, we use a combination of Google Translate and Yandex and watching Sergey type in Cyrillic is giving me a good opportunity to casually have that alphabet and its 32 characters seep into my brain. “In two weeks you’ll be speaking Ukranian,” Sergey said yesterday. Probably not. But I’ll know a lot more than I did a month ago.

I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about language and everyday life, both because I spend an inordinate amount of time embedded in Germany, Denmark and Sweden, but also because many of the people I deal with in my day to day life around town don’t have English as their first language. What I’ve learned, most of all, is that there is no room for timidity in langauge-learning issues: you are never going to get things perfect, and to imagine that you can squirrel away on your own until you do is naive. Language is alive, and to trully stuff it into your brain requires using it actively, boldly and without hesitation every day.

I imagine that part two of this process will involve me spending time embedded in Ukraine with Sergey’s family and then the Ukrainian shoe will be on the other foot; let’s hope I have the courage of my convictions when that time comes.

(пітер Рукавіна, by the way, is Ukrainian for Peter Rukavina)

Nice to see that SoundCloud has upgrade to include the ability to embed an HTML5 widget, instead of a Flash one. Here’s an audio snippet I grabbed last night at the beginning of The National; it’s an audio montage of CBC news themes that they used to mark the corporation’s 75th birthday.

Here’s what it looks like on the SoundCloud side: you just go through the regular Share > Embed process, and then select the HTML5 tab.