Catherine and I have been dating now for 20 years. Because we don’t have the convenience of a wedding day to mark our anniversary, by tradition we use October 5. This is the date – you can read more about it here – when we first kissed, and that’s a pretty good place to start counting.

Over the years we’ve been together I’ve made up grander and more elaborate stories for Catherine’s initial characterization of our relationship back in the day.

I tried to convince her last week that her words were “we’ll stay together as long as I dig you.”

But, in truth, I’m pretty sure Catherine has never uttered the phrase “dig you” in any context. And that the essence of what she was communicating was “we’ll stay together as long as it’s the right thing for both of us.”

I liked her so much, I was down with whatever terms she wanted to describe us in. And, besides, although I didn’t have the “smashing the shackles of the patriarchy by not entering into a historically ownership-based state-sanctioned relationship” rhetoric to back it up, I had no great compulsion to get married anyway.

Moving across the country, buying a house, having a son, settling into the routines that, from the outside looking in (and often from the inside looking out) look awfully like the life of a young married couple: they’ve all added layers of complexity and commitment to that original model, but when you scrape that all away, I think we’re both solidly still in the “as long as it’s the right thing for both of us” camp.

Besides, I do still dig her, and I’m pretty sure she still digs me. What more could someone ask for?

(Photo of “20” by Bright Tal; Creative Commons licensed)

“Wow,” I say to myself, “Air Canada has terrific fares from Halifax to London.” Terrific like $361 return, which, at least on the surface, is the airline’s lowest fare on this route in years:

After selecting specific flights for these dates, though, the “deal” of a $360 return fare somehow adds up to $950.09, or almost $600 more than the fare first seemed:

I have no issue with Air Canada not including the items beyond its control – taxes and charges that the airline collects on behalf of governments – in the fare quote, but charging a non-specific “surcharge” of $30 and a “fuel surcharge” of $360 additional, seems just plain wrong to me.

Air Canada’s fare for Halifax to London return is $750, not $360.

I don’t have an issue with that $750 fare and, indeed, air travel should be more expensive than it is. But we wouldn’t condone being charged a “warming fee” at the coffee shop nor a “sidewalk clearing fee” at the hardware store, and we shouldn’t condone the artifice of late-stage surcharges for airline bookings.

It’s time that Air Canada simply and honestly communicated, up front, what it costs to fly.

In what is either the most or least brilliant acquisition of my life, I’ve purchased a Golding Jobber No. 8 letterpress, a press that looked like this back in the day and that weighs about 1,000 pounds more than the tiny Adana Eight Five I’ve been printing on for the past year.

Golding Jobbers are big to start with, and the No. 8 is particularly so; John Falstrom, the self-confessed “Golding nut” who helped me identify the model, called it a “BBBBBBBiiiigggggg press.” And it is: not only does it weigh, well, more than I can possibly conceive of, but it will print up to 15 by 21 inches.

In other words, were I to employ an army of printers, I could set and print a modest daily newspaper with it.

This is, at least right now, much more letterpress than my amateur needs dictate, but letterpresses don’t come on the market in Prince Edward Island very often (this is likely the last one of this size to ever come of the market), so I had no choice.

But now I need somewhere to house it.

Worst-case scenario, I’ll put it into storage until the right space comes along, but it would obviously be preferable to move it once, so I’m actively seeking a suitable rental location:

• prefer downtown Charlottetown, or at least walking distance from downtown Charlottetown, but I’m flexible,
• must be heated; prefer to have access to sink, and washroom,
• minimum 150 square feet,
• no need for general public access: can be a garage, basement, loft…
• ideally a separate space with a lockable door,
• and, most important, must have a floor capable of supporting 1,000 pounds.

I’m also open to renting a larger space and relocating my entire office/shop operation there (which would require slightly less grungy space, and 400-500 square feet with washroom), or to purchase rather than rent if a fantastic space came along.

If you’ve got space to rent please get in touch with me; if you know someone who might, please pass this post along.

I took a trip out to Campbell’s Printing in Tryon this morning – they are retiring after more than 30 years in the business – to see what equipment and supplies they might be selling that might help me in my letterpress printing exploits.  I came away with a near-lifetime supply of business card blanks, a couple of composing sticks, and a box full of various and sundry letterpress “cuts” – engravings in metal of graphics, logos and text.

Among the cuts was this one – the original is only 3cm wide so what you see here is digitally blown up many times – of a boat. You can only barely read the “Put, Put” in the original.

This “special offer” for shaving supplies (the original is 4cm wide):

And this intriguing “Ideal Telegraph Sending Receiving Set” graphic (original 3cm wide):

The Campbells are about the nicest printers you could ever meet, and they generously took me on a cook’s tour of their shop. There are a couple of larger items I’ve got my eye on now; just need to track down some downtown space capable of supporting 1,000 lb. pieces of machinery…

My friend [[Oliver Baker]] emailed today looking for some photos I might have. While I was gliding through my iPhoto I came across this photo of Oliver (wee Oliver, my son, and Oliver Baker’s namesake) and me wearing kippot. This will do nothing to dispel the myth, common in some circles, that young Oliver and I look alike.

So I dropped my letterpress-printed telephone message pad pages off at Kwik Kopy this morning and when I dropped back just before 4:00 p.m. they’d been “padified” (there must be a technical printing term for this, no?). I’m very happy with the result.

It’s not every day that Robert Fulford, a Canadian icon and the country’s preeminent man of letters, writes glowingly about a project you’re deeply wedded to. So today’s column on The Old Farmer’s Almanac – Farmer’s Almanac more ‘weed-dating’ than game-changing – has put an extra spring in my step. Here’s an excerpt:

The secret of the Almanac writers is poise. They know their worth and take a quiet pride in their heritage. They believe in their knowledge and believe in spreading it, just like Robert Thomas. The anonymous author of the 2011 Farmer’s Calendar describes his habits and outlook with a sense of authority no one would think of defying.

He discusses his treatment of the lawn on his property with the pride of someone who expects a medal for his accomplishment. The world is full of disorderly lawns, a frequent cause of neighbourhood scandal, but the Almanac guy brags about his. He’s proud of owning a messy, weed-strewn lawn. It’s environmentally sound, for one thing: It needs little water and no fertilizer or chemicals. Weeds attract bees, butterflies and other pollinating insects, good for plants in the neighbourhood. And, making this a perfect item in the Almanac, you can use the dandelion greens in a salad.

I interviewed Fulford back in the late 1980s for Trent Radio when he was on a swing through Peterborough; he was incredibly kind and patient, taking the time to respond with wit and intelligence to what must have been the annoyingly mundane questions of a 20 year old.

The architects of Prince Edward Island, vital to the public interest but not known for their public relations abilities, are holding an “Architecture Week” starting Monday, October 3, 2011. True to their labyrinthian style, web publicity for the event is locked up inside a PDF inside Google Docs, the digital equivalent of printing something on parchment and hiding it under a bushel.

To help mitigate the damage caused by this obscure form of proto-publicity, here’s what they’re up to:

• Tuesday, October 4, 7:30 p.m. – “What is Sustainability? A Built Environment Perspective,” a lecture by Professor Steven Mannell, Director of Dalhousie University’s College of Sustainability. Confederation Centre Art Gallery.
• Wednesday, October 5, 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. – Public open houses at architectural firms (map of Charlottetown firms):
  • BGHJ, 233 Queen Street, Charlottetown.
  • North 46, 77 Grafton Street, Charlottetown.
  • Chandler Architecture, 92 Queen Street, Charlottetown.
  • Open Practice, 63 Pownal Street, Charlottetown.
  • Coles Associates, 6 Prince Street, Charlottetown.
  • Architecture 360, 45 Harrington Lane, Rice Point.
• Thursday, October 6, 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. – Architectural Technology Program Open House, Room 114 at Holland College Centre for Applied Science and Engineering Technology.
• Thursday, October 6, 9:10 p.m. – Movie Night with My Architect at City Cinema. Regular admission.

I’ve created a public Google Calendar of all the events (iCal, HTML) so you can sync everything into your device of choice and be sure not to miss anything.

Presumably there will also be all sorts of underground after-hours architecture parties, but you’ll need to know someone who knows someone to get into those.

After I blogged about If This Then That a week ago, [[Oliver]] read the post, signed up for an account, and created his first “recipe,” which was to tweet out the time every morning at 2:30 a.m.

I know this because I saw his first auto-tweet the next morning and couldn’t for the life of me figure out how it had got there.

It’s a testament to the simplicity of ifttt.com, and to Oliver’s ingenuity, that he figured this all out on his own; last night we sat down together and worked out a few more recipes, like “if tomorrow’s forecast calls for rain, then send me an email” and “if I call this number, send me an email what the message I leave.”

On the way to school this morning we reflected on how so much of what we experience in the modern world is based on the same sort of “if this, then that” decision making… “if the light has just turned green and 10 seconds have passed, start counting down the pedestrian signal timer,” “if it’s 8:20 a.m. on a weekday, ring the school bell,” “if it’s the day after the day you had music, then you have gym,” and so on.

Indeed ultimately what I do for a living is string together interwoven series of “if… then” statements to make virtual things happen – computer programming is little more than layers upon layers of abstraction on top of this simple core.

So while ifttt.com is intended, I think, as a digital lifestyle plumbing tool, I think it also holds great potential as a tool that educates in the basics of digital logic: by making the triggers and actions real-world stuff that people actually care about (time, weather, Facebook updates, YouTube videos) rather than fictional abstractions (moving a turtle around a screen, converting temperature units and all the other “introduction to computer programming” tropes) programming logic immediately jumps to life as something with utility.

While it’s a stretch to say that “if it’s 2:30 a.m. then send a tweet” is Oliver’s first computer program, it’s not a big stretch; he’s got a visceral understanding of the atomic unit of digital logic now, and everything else is gravy.

After some adjustments to the type and the lines, here’s what I ended up with after tweaking version 0.1. I moved the heading to the right and adjusted the line thicknesses (still not perfect, but it will take me a while to figure out how to read line thicknesses; the body of the line rule is all the same thickness, lines that are thinner are shaved off with a bevel along the edge).

I printed off about 40 copies, cut out a 3” x 5” cardboard back, and just returned from dropping off the result at Kwik Kopy for “padifying.” They tell me the rubber binding takes a while to dry, so I’m to return at day’s end to see the result.