Today was moving day for the Golding Jobber letterpress that’s coming into town from Campbell’s Printing in Tryon. The goal for today was to get the press – in all its giganticness – from Tryon into a Queen Street basement. In the end, we made it half way.

I started the day out at the Campbell’s working with Bill to peel of the removable parts of the press – the ink disc, engine, and various other bits and bobs – and get them into my car.

At 10:30 a.m. the mover arrived and from 10:30 to just after noon they tried, really really hard, to move the press. What was originally estimated at “700 or 800 pounds” ended up being, in their estimation, about 1500 pounds of letterpress, and top-heavy at that. These guys are piano movers, and they really struggled to wrangle the press in a way that didn’t wreck the press, or themselves. In the end it was beyond the tools they had available to them, and the press had only moved from the middle of the room to the door. They apologized for not being able to go any further, I paid them for their time and gas, and off they went.

Next up was Griffin’s Towing on the Bannockburn Road. Bill and Gertie’s son works for them, and they knew that Griffin’s had serious “big stuff moving” gear. A call was made. Tea and turkey sandwiches were had.

And then, while we were waiting, Bill and Gertie and I managed to lower the behemoth from foot-high position on wooden blocks where it had been left and onto metal rollers. I don’t want to gloat, but the three of us did a pretty good job, and lived to tell the tale.

Twenty minutes later a flatbed tow truck pulled up, negotiations about position and approach ensued, and within half an hour the letterpress had been winched out the door and onto the bed of the truck and secure in place.

With new-found knowledge of the Golding’s heaviness, and given that I didn’t have a crew of skilled burly movers at the ready to help negotiate into a Queen Street basement, I happily took Griffin’s offer of leaving the press in an disused corner of their shop in Clyde River until alternate arrangements could be made.

And so we set off, tow truck and letterpress leading the convoy, me behind (and thus the victim of any freak cable snap sending 1500 pounds of Massachusetts-crafted iron through my windshield).

The first six feet cost me $100, the next 30km cost me $60 (I like the was this is trending).

Lessons learned: I know absolutely nothing about how much things weigh; you need serious kit to move 1500 pounds of iron; Griffin’s Towing is quick, efficient and super friendly and if I ever need anything big or heavy moved, they are now my go-to guys; Bill and Gertie Campbell are among the most kind, good-humored, and patient people I’ve ever met.

If you had any advice on who to turn to for moving a really heavy something into a tricky basement location, please let me know.

Hard to believe it’s been a year since the last Wayzgoose at Gaspereau Press in Kentville, Nova Scotia, but it’s coming up again this weekend. Last year Erin Bateman and I went, making a Herculean trip over and back in one day; it was a great trip, and I’m thinking of going over again this year, a trip the possibilities of which are made more interesting by Thursday and Friday being days off school for [[Oliver]]. I’ve spent a total of 6 hours in “the valley” of Nova Scotia in my life: perhaps a time to experience a little more of it?

A couple of days ago I got an email from Stephan MacLeod, one of our Zap Your PRAM Fellows, inviting me to dinner with his boss, Evan Jones.

In general I’m not the kind of guy who people invite out to dinner. Unless you’re [[Catherine]], or one of my brothers, you’ve probably never said “hey, I should invite Peter out to dinner.” So I have little experience in this realm. But I’m always game for adventure and, heck, Evan’s bio billed him as a “two-time Emmy award winner,” so he had to be at least somewhat interesting, didn’t he?

Yesterday morning I got an email from Evan’s assistant Natalie.

In general I’m not the kind of guy who interacts with a lot of people who have assistants. Unless you’re my doctor or my dentist, it’s likely that if we communicate we do so in a disintermediated fashion. If you’re important enough to have an assistant, then you’re likely too important to talk to me. So, two Emmys and an assistant: what was I getting myself into?

I arranged with Natalie to meet Evan at Sushi Jeju at 7:00 p.m. and so, after working a little later than usual, I hopped on my bicycle and rode over. Walking in the door I suddenly realized that, what with all the Natalie-mediated communication, I’d completely forgotten what’s-his-name’s name.

(In general I’m not the kind of guy who meets a lot of new people, so my new-person-name-remembering skills have atrophied).

Fortunately I was there first, and a quick check of my inbox revealed that what’s-his-name was Evan and 30 seconds later, as I rushed to clear the evidence of my forgetfulness from the table, Evan walked in the door.

As it turns out, Evan, in addition to having an assistant and being a two-time Emmy-award winner, grew up in Copetown, Ontario. Which is about 30 minutes from where I grew up in Carlisle. He was from West Flamborough, I was from East Flamborough. We were practically brothers.

And so we had an interesting 2-hour long conversation over Indian fried rice and Sapporo beer and I learned an awful lot about an awful lot.

All of which has me thinking that I should be more actively seeking out dining opportunities with Emmy-award-winner people who have assistants. If you happen to be one of these people, please have your assistant call me and we can set something up.

Eve Goldberg, who falls into my “favourite people who I haven’t seen face to face in 25 years” category of friends, sent me an email this morning.

I met Eve in high school in Toronto where we were both budding scientists at the Ontario Science Centre. We kept in touch for a few years off, then lost touch for an awfully long time, and then a few years back I heard from her again, perhaps as a result of her instrumental Watermelon Sorbet being used as the theme song for Richardson’s Roundup on CBC Radio One.

That Eve is a professional musician and I am, well, whatever I am, and that neither of us is curing cancer nor splitting the atom¹ is a testament that science is not for everyone. But I think we count ourselves lucky for our early dabbles in that world.

Anyway, Eve emailed today to tell me that she’s coming to Prince Edward Island to play three “house concert” dates on October 29, 30 and November 1 in Bedeque, Summerside and Charlottetown respectively (details).

I never knew Eve as a musician back in the day, so this side of her is all new to me – it’s sort of like learning she had a secret superpower all those years that I never knew about – and I’m quite looking forward to seeing her play.

1. In addition to her musical work it’s possible that Eve also has a sideline as a cancer-curing atom splitter.

If you’re a geonerd like me, finding a whole new level of geography somewhere is like discovering gold. When I used the parishes of Prince Edward Island as an example of the map layers available from the Province of Prince Edward Island I had no idea what I had accidentally discovered: I’d assumed these were some sort of religious slice-and-dice of the province.

Talking to G. last night, though, I came to learn that the “parish” level of geography here on the Island goes back to Samuel Holland, the surveyor who originally laid out the “lots” system for Prince Edward Island. At the same time as he surveyed the lots he also created parishes, collections of lots, and gave each a name. Here’s a map from the National Archives that illustrates this:

And here’s a list of all the parishes, with locator maps for each. Each parish has a story behind its name – North and East are self-evident, and Wikipedia has the story behind some of the names but it would be nice to see this agglomeration get the documentation it’s due.

G. says that parish boundaries never really came into fashion in bureaucratic use; does anyone have example of situations where they were used (or still are in use)?

The Province of Prince Edward Island has a large collection of “free” GIS data on its website (that’s “free” as in “you can use it if you agree to our crazy license terms” not free as in “go forth and live, fair data”).

To download any of the data files is a cumbersome process that requires agreeing to license terms and then entering your name, email address and occupation. All of which makes getting all of the data rather time-consuming.

Fortunately all the files are actually there, sitting unencumbered on a webserver waiting to be downloaded, so it’s relatively easy to scrape the free GIS data file lists (here and here), extrapolate the names of the data files, and then automatically download them.

That’s what this PHP code does for you: download it, configure, let it run and shortly you’ll have a few gigabytes of GIS data – everything from school board boundaries to walking trails to soils – sitting on your local machine ready for use (the script, by default, just grabs the ESRI Shapefiles).

Given the rather violent response to making public data, well, public, that the province has shown in past, I recommend you grab your data now, before this is made more difficult and cumbersome still.

I recommend the free Quantum GIS application for manipulating the files once you have them: it reads Shapefiles natively and is quite feature-rich. Here’s a map of the parishes of Prince Edward Island inside Qgis, for example:

I had a request from the Executive Director of the PEI Home and School Federation earlier this week for a map of schools on Prince Edward Island. The Federation is putting together an “info kit” for local home and schools and wanted a map to include as a resource.

I went looking for the information in a couple of places – the province’s GIS Data Catalog, the Eastern School District and Western School Board websites, for example – but found nothing. The closest I came was the School Finder on the Department of Education’s website.

As most of the data required to make a map appeared to be buried inside the HTML of the School Finder, I set out to scrape the data out of that page and into a format suitable for mapping. The primary challenges in doing so were related to the poorly-formed HTML of the page, which made automatically pulling out certain elements more challenging, and the poorly-formed and somewhat inaccurate civic address data – addresses like “3326 Trans Canada Highway Route No 1” that conform to the Civic Addressing Standards (the proper form would be “3326 Trans Canada Hwy - Rte 1”).

But with a mixture of manual and automatic data wrangling I ended up with a CSV file of civic addresses that I could then match against freely-available civic address data to get the latitude and longitude of each school.

The result of this process was a CSV file of school locations which I then ran through the excellent KMLCSV Converter application to make a KML file of schools suitable for mapping.

You can see the result overlaid on a Google Map or overlaid on a CloudMade-powered OpenStreetMap:

My next challenge – only because I think it’s information that should be freely available – is to find GIS data for the “school zone boundaries” that indicated which kids from which neighbourhoods go to which schools.  For the time being this information for the Western Board, is only available as a textual PDF file of School Attendance Zones, for the French Language School Board as a series of PDF files of “territory served” by school, and for the Eastern District has PDF maps by “family of schools” (Bluefield, Charlottetown Rural, Colonel Gray, Montague,
Morell, Souris).

As we’re inevitably going to have to take the Eastern District through a “rezoning” exercise – it’s been put off for far too long – it behooves we parents to equip ourselves with the planning tools now so that we can make meaningful contributions to the process.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner in Little Sands yesterday, packed into a very full house with a group of friends and family new and old. The house is 5 minutes walk from the beach and so after a supper of turkey and turnips and mashed potatoes and apple pie and pumpkin pie and untold other delights Oliver and Sergey and I took a walk down to the shore. We got there just as the sun was going down.

The following notice appeared on the City of Charlottetown’s website this morning:

City Council will hold a Public Meeting to hear comments on the following:
Property Adjacent to 4 Prince Street (portion of PID# 841536)
An amendment to Appendix “G” of the City of Charlottetown Zoning and Development Bylaw – List of Approved Properties in the Comprehensive
Development Area Zone and Their Permitted Uses, as well as an amendment to the Waterfront Concept Plan to allow commercial, office and residential units for the vacant lot adjacent to 4 Prince Street (PID# 841536).

This is an area I know well – I walk by on the way from my house to the Charlottetown waterfront – and have some interest in. I’m part of the public that should be involved in a public meeting like this.

But reading this notice I’m left with a lot of questions:

• Where exactly is this property? What “portion” of PID #841536 is the meeting about? A map or even a sketch of what’s being talked about would be useful here.
• What’s “Appendix G” of the Zoning and Development Bylaw? Yes, I know I can download the bylaw and figure that out, but the web, if anything, is about making connections between documents. The bylaw should be in HTML, not PDF, and there should be a link from this meeting notice directly to Appendix G.
• What is the “Comprehensive Development Area Zone?” I have no idea.
• What is the “Waterfront Concept Plan?” Also, no idea.
• What is actually being proposed that requires a change “to allow commercial, office and residential units?” Does someone want to build a Tim Hortons or an apartment building or a single-family house?

Apologies for my flippant indignation, but surely, after the buckets of money that has been poured into inane “smart communities” projects in the city over the years, the least we citizens can expect is a clear, well-organized public notice about a public meeting with links to relevant resources; proper execution of our role as citizens would seem to require no less.

As mentioned in this space last week, today was the day that many of the architects of Charlottetown held open houses as part of Architecture Week.

The weather didn’t cooperate: hurricane-force winds and driving rain made the prospect of strolling the streets of downtown from firm to firm somewhat unappealing. But I was not to be daunted: if we are to teacher our architects to become more socially engaged, we must seize every opportunity, especially when it is they who are doing the opening.

I started off closest to home at BGHJ, a firm I know well not only because my office is in the house once occupied by the B and H, but also because I know B, G, H and J, as well as the uncredited S, as friends as much as architects (I also interviewed both J and B as part of my video series on climate change two years ago). They are arguably the most social firm in town: their annual party is a renowned for its excellent food, good music and diverse company.

Architect S welcomed me at the door to BGHJ and put me in the capable hands of Carol, an architect intern, who responded with enthusiasm and patience to all of my arcane questions like “what’s the difference between architects and architectural technologists?” and “if you had to design seniors homes for the rest of your life wouldn’t you go crazy?” I was joined by another audience member half-way through the tour, and together we got to see exciting sections of the office like “the shelves where we keep the sample catalogs” and “the couches” (it turns out that architecture firm open houses are much more interesting for the people, and (mostly) not at all interesting for the infrastructure).

I came away from BGHJ having learned a lot about “working drawings” and how they’re made, and the role they play in the construction process, and also about how architects take a sketchy vision from a client – “we’d like a house like this…” – and turn it into something the client can afford, that is physically possible, is well-designed and original (hint: it’s complicated).

BGHJ is runner up for “Best Food” (cookies, grapes and coffee) and wins the award for “Otherwise Most Hard at Work During Open House.”

Down Queen Street and around the corner to North 46, another firm I have more than passing familiarity with because of their Rform side-project, something that’s managed by principal architect David Lopes’ brother Paul, who’s a friend.

N46 was seemingly less prepared for holding an open house (no food, for example, and a somewhat surprised look when I showed up looking for action). But they made up for it with enthusiasm.

As at BGHJ, I was handed over to an interning architect and given a quick tour of the office. Fewer sample catalogs than BGHJ, and a smaller space to start with, so the tour was over as quickly as it started. My fellow tourer and I were then ushered into the board room and taken on an interesting journey through the working drawings for the new Holland College Centre for Applied Science and Technology, which N46 designed and project-managed.

All the talk about working drawings had me wondering about where Rform fit in: I knew a lot about it from the technology side from Paul, but not much about it from the architect’s side. David caught wind of this thread, and this led into a very thorough and interesting discussion about and demonstration of Rform, using the Holland College building as an example.

In addition to learning even more about working drawings and change orders and other aspects of the paper side of making buildings, I came away realizing that the day-to-day life of the small town architect is a lot more mundane than I’d imagined.  I went in thinking “Frank Gehry drinking scotch and dreaming wild and crazy spacial dreams” and came away realizing it’s all far more about carpet samples and sheet rock tolerances and what to do if the concrete doesn’t dry.

North 46 receives the award for “Most Enthusiastic Product Demo” and another for “Best Integration of Recently Completed Actual Project in Open House Tutelage.”

Back out into the hurricane and along Grafton to Pownal, left, and down to the corner of Sydney to Open Practice, the firm operated by Aaron Stavert. I first met Aaron in the spring of 2010 when I wandered into his office and found him a kindred spirit; later in the year he was one of the participants in our Pecha Kucha in New Glasgow where he spoke about Sustainable Architecture (are you beginning to notice a theme here: PEI is a very small place, and everyone knows everyone).

Aaron’s practice is the smallest of those that I visited: just a single room, Aaron and an intern. There was nothing to “tour,” technically, as it once you walk in the door you’ve seen it all. But I did get a chance to ask Aaron about his seemingly impossible floor, which is made out of cheap coated particle board of the sort that you’d imagine would have dissolved by now simply from the occasional spilled cup of coffee, to say nothing of the rigours of Island winter boots. But it’s in excellent shape, and Aaron explained that when a part wears out you can simply peel off that section and lay down a replacement for less than $10.

The open house at Open Practice was more “kitchen party” than “tour,” with a changing cast of characters over the hour I spent there. Conversation ranged from “so, if you were the architect working on the Dominion Building, would you have chosen those windows?” to “does Charlottetown really need a new convention centre?”

Things really got interesting when Aaron pulled over a model of the house he’s designed for himself for Upper Hillsborough Street and took us all on a cook’s tour of its whys and wherefores.

Open Practice is hands-down winner for “Best Food” (hot apple cider, tiny cupcakes, fresh blueberries and blackberries, pumpkin pie) and also for “Best Description of a Personal Project by an Architect.”

With the hour drawing late and only another 20 minutes of the 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. open house window left, I dashed up Sydney Street to the corner of Queen and up the stairs over Ta-ke Sushi to the office of William W. Chandler Architects.

I worked a very little with Bill Chandler, the principal architect, back in the late 1990s when we were both involved in the Gateway Village project (he as architect, me as installer-of-Macintoshes and partner of museum exhibit builder [[Catherine]]) but I don’t know him well.

When I arrived at the firm it appeared deserted but for a slideshow running in the board room and some sparking water on the table. This turned out to be due to this being only the shared second-floor space and not the heart of the firm. Bill was fetched for me and we immediately launched into a tour of their facilities, which are vast and make for a compelling tour.

Chandler Architects and related firms are spread our over the third floors of three buildings on Queen Street – on the corner above Ta-ke Sushi, Burke Electric and China Garden – as well as the aforementioned second floor space at the corner. All of the third floor spaces are interconnected, and they’re an interesting mixture of “attic” feeling spaces and straight-ahead office spaces. They do all their own printing in-house so there’s a large print shop at the back (with the largest cutting mat I’ve ever seen). And there are interesting views of the courtyard in the back formed by the Olde Dublin Pub, Fishbones, the Globe and the buildings along Queen.

After the tour of the rabbit warren Bill took me back to the board room and we spent a long while talking about the convention centre that’s being built at the foot of Queen Street that his firm has designed. I got a look at the final renderings of the building, along with a conceptual drawing of a possible later-stage addition that engineering allowances are being made for that might one day see an extension of the Delta Hotel rise out at the end (it’s actually quite interestingly designed and works in a way you wouldn’t initially think it would).

I came away with a much deeper understanding of a building that, to this point, I’d only see renderings of in news stories about the project.

Chandler Architects wins the award, obviously, for “Most Interesting Tour” and also for “Best Description of a Commercial Project by an Architect.”

I didn’t manage to complete my entire dance card in the allotted time – I missed out on Coles Associates on the waterfront and Architecture 360 in Rice Point. Fodder for next year’s Architecture Week, I hope.

Thanks to the Architects Association of PEI for organizing this excellent opportunity for we civilians to learn more about what they do and how they do it.