Six years ago I first met Martin Roell thanks to a Plazes-fired happenstance at the reboot conference in Copenhagen. It was and remains the nonpareil Plazes moment: a geo-social meetup of the like-minded. It never, alas, happened again. At least in that happenstancy a way.

But the echoes of that moment keep resounding: Ton was also there that night, and I’ve been doing some Drupal migration work with him on the ePSIplatform (we’re also both shareholders in a boat); we had Skype call just yesterday from here at Betahaus where I’m renting a desk for the summer to his office in

And this morning the happenstances kept stancing: walking into Betahaus this morning I found the “betabreakfast” about to start – it’s a sort of one-hour Zap Your PRAM held every Thursday morning – and who should I see sitting at the breakfast table but the selfsame Martin.

Once the festivities were over, we had a good chance to catch up on the last 4 or 5 years since we’d seen each others – monasteries, children, travel, work, life – and we made plans to reconnect in August. It was like meeting an old friend. Actually, it was meeting an old friend.

The moral of this story: fleeting connections, no matter whether they are geo-enabled or happenstance of a very analog sort, can be a wonderful, enabling thing. Perhaps the best reason to jam shyness propensity into the deeper recesses.

As a somewhat frequent transatlantic flyer, most recently earlier this week, I’ve developed a survival routine. Flying at all, let alone across the ocean overnight, is brutal to mind and body and there’s no way around that. But you can take the edge off.

• Drink water. Lots of water. You cannot drink enough water. Really. Drink more. Flying in an airplane for 6 or 7 hours is like putting your body inside a food dehydrator. How do you know if you’re not drinking enough water? You don’t, until it’s too late. But if you find yourself not having to pee a regular amount that’s a good signal.
• If traveling as a family, or group, establish clear ground rules that permit and accept irrational behaviour. Travel is stressful. Normally happy people will snap and fly off the handle and sink into fits of despair. This is okay. You need these rules even more if you’re a new couple or a unfamiliar group of people: travel together is the acid test for a new relationship, and if there are breakup fissures already in the air, transatlantic air travel is the best way to crack them open. So talk about this, in advance.
• Face it, you’re not going to get any sleep. There are exceptions to this rule: my dentist has a drug-induced sleep plan that seems to work for him, for example, and there’s always the chance that you’ll luck into some magic across-three-seats sleeping position that will work out for your body. But probably not. Don’t worry about it. The best you can do is try to squeak out some REM sleep here and there.
• Your mind will not be working for the first 24 hours after arrival. You will forget things. You won’t remember what day it is. You will tell border guards completely made up stories because you believe them to be true (note to authorities: I have never done this). Relax into this, don’t fight it: treat it like an expensive drug you’ve taken that confers temporary dullardness.
• Upon arrival, eat breakfast. Don’t worry about what it costs. Try and find a sit-down place, especially if you have some time to kill in a transfer airport in Europe. Have coffee, fresh fruit, whatever. So what if you spend 30 EUR on a 5 EUR breakfast: it’s a one-time investment in your physical and mental sanity.
• Take a taxi from the airport. Public transit is great, but there’s nothing like trying to negotiate a new transit system when your mind is working at 30% capacity. Write the address of your destination on a piece of paper and hand it to the driver and then just relax. Your mind will try and convince you, in its paranoid sleepness state, that the crazy taxi driver is taking you to the wrong side of town, but this is unlikely.
• Arrival day is a write-off. Remember, your mind is not working. Relax, eat, drink, be merry. Don’t schedule anything important. Ice cream is good. You’re going to have a sleepless night anyway, so don’t pay any attention to people who claim to have a foolproof system for beating jet lag.
• Expect pooping irregularities for a while. Your body and mind are confused (“why did he feed us at 4:00 a.m.?!”).
• It’s possible that your mind will convince you, during the first 24 hours, that you’ve made a horrible mistake leaving Mayberry for the Left Bank. Your mind is just complaining to you and will get over it. After 24 hours you will wonder why you didn’t kick Mayberry years ago.

As I write this I’m starting out on day three – we landed in Berlin 19 hours ago after leaving Halifax the night before – and the fog is just beginning to clear. We all went to bed last night at 9:00 p.m. and we all woke up at 1:30 a.m. thinking it was time to start the day and we were all groggy when we actually did start the day at 8:00 a.m. There is, I can attest, light at the end of the transatlantic tunnel.

My friend G. and I drive out to Montague this morning for the open house at the Great Enlightenment Buddhist Academy, brought to us by the same group that’s taking over 186 Prince Street. Here’s the map we were presented with on arrival:

Everything was held in tents set on in the front yard of what once was the Lobster Shanty; it’s a beautiful spot overlooking the Montague River and, as I heard several times, The Irish Rovers used to play there.

Each of the tent was staffed by volunteers and covered a different part of the involvement of the Great Enlightenment Buddhist on Prince Edward Island, or of Buddhism in general; there was a great emphasis on vegetarianism and organic agriculture as well as on Chinese culture.

Everyone was incredibly friendly and somewhat earnest on their comportment, and attitude not uncommon to strong believers in, well, anything (see also Apple staff at the booth when the company used to display at MacWorld).

There was a free lunch of noodles, spring rolls and pineapple cake provided by the Splendid Essence, a lecture tent with speakers covering, well, I’m not sure, as it seemed to involve something called “OMAK” that I couldn’t make out the definition of.

I can’t say as though I left with a profound understanding of Buddhism, but I met some nice people, had a meal, and count the visit as a positive one.

I decided that before I leave for the summer I had to take my new set of line rule out for a ride on my letterpress. So I decided to whip up a quick book, a sort of “two-panel comic storyboard” book. Here’s the walk-through.

First I set up up the line rule in the letterpress chase (this photo from The Museum of Printing gave me a good head-start as to how line rule is set):

I put the set rule on the press and printing up 10 pages on half-letter-sized card stock that was leftover from my Kwik Kopy printing demonstration:

I stapled one end in three places (using the new “one touch” super-stapler that Johnny gave me for my birthday; it can staple, with no effort, through up to 25 pages!):

Next, for the cover, I cut and scored a piece of yellow card-stock that Catherine brought back from Halifax last fall:

I glued the cover to the stapled pages:

And clamped the glued-up result with binder clips to dry:

Here’s the finished book:

What might you use it for? With apologies for my still-at-grade-two-level drawing skills (is it any wonder I seek solace in the arms of metal type), something like this:

As usual when book-making is the subject, tip of the hat to Hamish and his DIY Book podcast, the source of everything I know about making books.

You can tell a lot about a person by the car they drive. And, I presume, by the television series they have set up to record on their DVR. I was cleaning up the DVR last night in anticipation of going away for the summer, and here, in chronological order of date of first entry, are the television series I had set to record. Of particular note are series like ER that have been off the air for a while, and series like Journeyman, Flash Forward and Dirty Sexy Money, that were short-lived.

• The Unit
• Saturday Night Live
• Journeyman
• 30 Rock
• The Office
• ER
• House
• Lost
• Dirty Sexy Money
• Fringe
• My Own Worst Enemy
• The Apprentice:UK
• NUMB3RS
• Worst Week
• 24
• Chef School
• Lie to Me
• Amazing Race 14
• Southland
• Extras
• Shark Tank
• NCIS
• Flash Forward
• Law & Order
• Amazing Race 15
• The Deep End
• Kitchen Nightmares
• Amazing Race 16
• Daily Show With Jon Stewart
• Californication
• Mad Men
• Community
• Rubicon
• My Generation
• Amazing Race 17
• Human Target
• Modern Family
• The Event
• Blue Bloods
• The Big Bang Theory
• CBC News: Compass
• V
• The Opener
• Season 25: Oprah Behind Scenes
• Amazing Race: Unfinished Business
• Glee
• CHAOS
• Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution
• Happy Endings
• The Kennedys
• The Voice
• Love Bites

I presume that a trained psychographic artists could, with that list in hand, tell my birth date, brand of shampoo and political tendencies.

As reported in this space last month, after more than 10 years in operation Formosa Tea House in Charlottetown is closing.

But, as it turns out, it’s not really closing at all, simply reinvented itself under new stewardship.

If you’ve been around the neighbourhood over the past few weeks you’ve probably noticed the new paint job and the bevy of volunteers swarming over the building at 186 Prince Street. I was as curious as the next guy as to what was going on, and while I heard suggestions of the involvement of The Great Enlightenment Buddhist Academy in its re-imagining, I didn’t really know what this would mean.

Early this week, though, I was sent word through an intermediary that my presence was requested at 186 Prince on July 7 at 7:00 p.m. (7/7 at 7) for either a closing ceremony or an opening ceremony, or perhaps both. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but as a longtime member of the Formosa Tea House family, I felt duty-bound to attend.

On arrival I was greeted by both Mr. Lu, the new owner of the soon-to-be-named Splendid Essence, and by my old friend Chien-Ming Yeh founder, with his wife Fen, of the Formosa Tea House:

What followed was a fascinating cross-cultural three hours of food, fellowship and leaning.

And what I learned is this: in the practice of Buddhism there are, shall we say, “sub-religions” – followers of particular strands of the faith, adherents to a particular spiritual leader. In this case, the same Buddhist sect from Taiwan involved in the The Great Enlightenment Buddhist Academy and related monasteries in Montague and Little Sands has a group of lay adherents who have purchase the Formosa Tea House and will run it as Splendid Essence, evolved but following the same general “tea house” model as Chien and Fen have established. This effort appears to be a part of a broader economic and educational effort that in Taiwan involves organic farming, vegetarian food manufacturing and other endeavours.

The large crew of workers we’ve seen in recent weeks painting and renovating 186 Prince Street are a group of visitors to the Island, adherents of the faith, here volunteering their time and energy. Among those that I met last night were a retired colonel in the Taiwanese army, a computer engineer and a former graphic designer for Honda cars and motorcycles. I also met Geoffrey Yang, already here on the Island for two years and living in Stratford, who’s a sort of “real world liaison” for the monks, conducting their business affairs, and acting as assistant to Mr. Lu.

Mr. Lu is here to run the Splendid Essence; also a lay member of the sect, he has a background in organic agricultural and non-food additive manufacturing in Taiwan. His plans for the tea house include expanding its menu (while keeping the core than Chien and Fen established), and engaging in other educational and economic pursuits in the community.

This is all at once interesting, heartening and deeply, deeply weird to me. I’m very attracted to the notion of “non-capitalist enterprise,” and there’s a lot of philosophical overlap between my approach to economic matters and theirs. And it seems that if anything the special place that Formosa Tea House has had in the community will only be enhanced under this new ownership.

But I find the Buddhism angle perplexing – faith and religion of any sort are, as regular readers might recall, all a great mystery to me – and I’m not quite sure where to slot the laypeople I met last night in my everyday cast of characters: missionaries? religious people on retreat? CUSO-like volunteers? As much as I enjoyed myself last night, and was engaged by their company, there’s also a certain amount of “so this is how you win over converts through food and subtlety” paranoia in the background of my mind.  I don’t wish to ascribe ulterior motives to this group; this is simply a case of that which confuses me makes me suspicious and afraid (a solid Prince Edward Island trait if there ever was one).

All that aside, the tweaks that have been made to 186 Prince are quite nice; the old back room – the original Live from the Formosa Tea House recording studio – has been transformed entirely:

And the main room has been simplified and softened, with the booths reupholstered, pillows added, and some of the clutter removed:

The spread they put out for we visitors – mostly Formosa regulars – was about as good as it gets in the “vegetarian buffet” world: some Formosa standbys like spring rolls and dumplings supplemented by some spicy new dishes, fresh watermelon, a very tangy soup, and some packaged desserts from the home office in Taiwan:

Fen will be staying around until the end of July to help the new owners with the transition; Chien left at the crack of dawn this morning for the North Sydney ferry and the drive onward to St. John’s where he and Fen will make a new life for themselves. They both seem very happy with the new path the Formosa is set on, content that they’ve left a legacy of a special and important place in Charlottetown that will stay that way.

If you’re curious about all of this, one opportunity to learn more is the Gratitude Fest this Sunday that the Great Enlightenment Buddhist Institute Society is hosting in Montague from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. This is the Montague outpost of the group; it’s the old Lobster Shanty location for those of you that remember where that was. It’s describe as follows:

GEBIS and followers from Prince Edward Island, Ontario, British Columbia, New York, California, and elsewhere, will organize exhibits, seminars, family activities, and storytelling, on issues such as organic farming, saving the planet, gratitude, and Buddhism.
Chinese delicacies will be provided courtesy of Splendid Essence Restaurant.

If I can find the time in my busy Sunday – I’ll be madly making last-minute preparations for my Monday departure for Berlin – I’m going to try and make it out.

Three months ago I reported on a personal effort I’d undertaken to work to get real time wind energy generation from provincially-owned wind farms here on Prince Edward Island available to the public as open data. My reasoning was two-fold: I want the public to be more aware, even if only peripherally, of how much wind energy we’re generating here, and I want to be able to build – and stimulate others to build – applications on top of this and other open energy data.

My meeting in March with Hon. Richard Brown, Minister of Environment, Energy & Forestry was positive, and Richard is behind this effort entirely; I had high hopes we were on the right track.

The first work to come out of this effort was a stop-gap project based on abstract data; at best it allows us to infer wind energy generation, but not to get at the real numbers.

To get at the actual data requires tapping into what I’ve learned is called the SCADA system for the wind farms – this stands for “supervisory control and data acquisition” and it’s a favoured buzzword of the industrial monitoring crowd. In the case of provincially-owned wind farms this means tapping into the SCADA system provided by Vestas, the wind turbine manufacturer and the company that has the contract to maintain the wind energy infrastructure on PEI.

Unfortunately there are a few technical challenges in achieving this “tapping in,” primary among them is that VestasOnline, the company’s SCADA system, isn’t designed with “open data” in mind; indeed it seems specifically designed to prevent wide-scale distribution of data: it’s a PC-based proprietary system that requires an expensive “dongle” in the computer it’s running on and while it seems to be perfectly fine for someone to monitor wind farms from their desktop – this is how department staff monitor wind farms from their desks in Charlottetown – there’s no obvious way to get real time data out of the system and onto the web.

There’s another problem that’s limited to the North Cape wind farm, and that is that the SCADA system there is only reachable by a single dial-up connection, so the best one might achieve is occasional “polling” of the data rather than real time access.

My working theory on how we might open up the data – and when I say “we” I mean me and the province working together in a completely voluntary effort – is to write some custom code that would pull data from the database that the VestasOnline software archives its data into. Because I don’t have technical documentation on VestasOnline I’m only assuming that it uses some non-encrypted open database format; I may be naive in this assumption.

To be able to find this out – to test my naive assumptions, in other words – requires access to an actual VestasOnline system: fortunately there’s a secondary system that the province owns that could act as this testbed; unfortunately after three months this system is still awaiting installation and configuration, so I haven’t been able to make any progress on this front.

I had another meeting with Minister Brown this week to get updated on the project, a meeting prompted, in part, by the CBC Spark episode on my early efforts; Richard’s office is going to work with the computer services folks to gear up the VestasOnline server, and they’ll either take over the “can we get the data out” effort themselves, or get me access to it to find out.

So we’re not there yet, but we’re heading in the right direction.

About once every 5 years I need to buy a new Sharpie brand marker. I don’t use a Sharpie very often, but there are two or three things – writing on CD-ROMs, labeling file folders, etc. – that I only use a Sharpie for, and a single one thus lasts me half a decade.

Yesterday I went up to Staples in Charlottetown to buy this lustrum’s indelible marker. Except at Staples – a big box office supply store – you cannot buy a single regular old Sharpie:

The best I could do was, for $2.49, buy a single “Two Tips in One!” Sharpie that’s actually much heftier than I prefer.

An example, alas, of everything that’s wrong with the way retailing is trending.

You know those commercials they ran a few years ago espousing the virtues of flying from Charlottetown rather than from Moncton or Halifax because of the savings in time, gas, bridge tolls, hassle, etc. It turns out they’re true.

I’m rendezvousing with Catherine and Oliver in Halifax next Monday – they’re flying in from Ottawa – and we’re flying on Condor to Germany.

Because we’re going away for 6 weeks, the usual “drive to the Airport hotel, park the car, get 14 days of free parking” plan doesn’t work this time, leaving me looking for alternatives ways to get to Halifax for a late evening departure. And then getting all three of us back to Charlottetown on August 26 in the late afternoon.

Here are our options:

• PEI Express Shuttle – Leaves Charlottetown at 11:15 a.m., presumably arriving around 3:00 p.m., so a 8-hour wait in the airport. Only returns to Charlottetown at 7:30 a.m., so would require an overnight stay in Halifax on the return journey. $230 for the shuttle plus $100 for hotel for a total of $330.
• Advanced Shuttle – Leaves Charlottetown at 7:45 a.m., arriving 11:30 a.m., so an 11 hour wait in the airport. Only returns to Charlottetown at 3:45 p.m., to early for us, so would require an overnight stay in Halifax on the return journey. $245 for the shuttle plus $100 for hotel for a total of $345.
• Acadian Lines – Leaves Charlottetown at 7:45 a.m., arrives at 12:30 p.m., so a 10-hour wait in the airport.  Only returns to Charlottetown at 8:05 a.m., so would require an overnight stay in Halifax on the return journey. $228 for the shuttle plus $100 for hotel for a total of $328.
• Drive my own car and park at the Halifax Airport Hotel – I can leave and arrived whenever I want. $80 for gas, $50 for bridge toll, and $40/week for parking, for a total of $370. (Parking at Holiday Inn Express is the same $40/week; at the Hilton Garden Inn it appears to be $29.95/week, but their clerk seemed very confused at the question; the Inn on the Lake has a 2-week maximum).
• Drive my own car and park at the airport Park’N Fly. Rate is $361, plus $80 for gas and $50 for tolls for a total of $491.
• Air Canada, on Aeroplan points – Leaves Charlottetown 1:00 p.m., arriving 35 minutes later, so a 9 hours wait in the airport. 10,000 Aeroplan miles and $72 in taxes and fees on the way there. No availability for 3 people on August 26th, so we’d have to fly on the 27th and spend most of the day in a hotel. Return would be 30,000 Aeroplan miles and $238 in taxes and fees. So a total of $410 and 40,000 Aeroplan miles.
• Air Canada – flying without Aeroplan means a much more flexible schedule, leaving Charlottetown at 7:45 p.m. on the way there and leaving Halifax at 6:50 p.m. on the way back, so no need for a hotel. But convenience costs: total air fare $876.
• Renting a car and driving – Hertz is $149 one-way rental on the way there and $223 on the way back. Plus $80 in gasoline and $50 in bridge tolls for a total of $502.
• Driving to Sackville, NB, parking (somewhere) and taking VIA Rail to Halifax, then shuttle to airport – Leaves Sackville at 1:34 p.m., arriving Halifax at 5:10 p.m. Return requires an overnight stay, leaving Halifax at 12:15 p.m. Train fare is $129, shuttle from Halifax to Airport is $19.50 each. And then bridge tolls of $50, gasoline of $40 and hotel for a total of $297 plus whatever it would cost to park.

I’m welcome to other suggestions!

When [[Dan]] and [[Steven]] and I recorded a new episode of Live from the Formosa Tea House last week one of the things I was reminded of is that it’s been almost 8 years that Reinvented has been resident in 84 Fitzroy Street with silverorange as our landlord. Here’s what my office looked like the day I moved in:

Since that day my office has seen the gradual accumulation of cruft: piles of file folders tucked into the corner with my 2004 tax receipts and cancelled cheques, transit tickets from Copenhagen, ferry tickets from Venice, currency from a half dozen countries, boxes of various cables and connectors that I might someday need again, a closet full of boxes for things like “iWork ‘05” and the Linksys router I bought 7 years ago. And install CDs from Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, etc.

I’d mostly thought of this digital and analog detritus as benign and inevitable; I reasoned, in the rare occasions I noticed it all, that when I had a free moment I’d clean it all up and return the office to its virgin state. And then I wouldn’t.

This week, though, circumstances conspired me to action. First, I leave in a week for almost two months, and there’s nothing like the procrastinatory energy of an impending immovable deadline to get one moving (in this case I should be doing the corporate year-end paperwork, but I’m not). Second, I was reminded of Bruce Sterling’s take, which I was first exposed to at the closing of reboot 11 two years ago and more recently in his The Last Viridian Note where he writes, in part:

The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

Do not “economize.” Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It’s melting the North Pole. So “economization” is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less. Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.

While a lot of my accumulation of dross was due to sheer laziness, a lot of it was, indeed, routed in this false notion of “economy.”

What if I ever needed to return that mixing board I bought; shouldn’t I keep the original box around just in case?  What if Oliver wants to see what the original iPod looks like; shouldn’t I keep it around, even though it doesn’t work any more? You can never have too many cable ties! Or 4-foot lengths of Ethernet cable. Or CDMA mobile phones from the 1990s. Or John Kerry for President buttons. Or Altoid tins.

Well, actually, it turns out that you can.

So yesterday I spent much of the afternoon in a wild cleaning frenzy. And I lowered the economy bar much, much lower than I ever had. I threw away those shoes that I loved but that were worn out. And that electric fan that wobbled too much. And all the software and hardware empty boxes. And the Altoid tins (“but what if I want to hack together an Arduino-based geolocation device and house it in an Altoids tin” my mind screamed; I ignored it). And the John Kerry for President button.

I shredded two bags worth of paper (scanning what I needed to retain for posterity or legality), almost burning out the shredder in the process.

My office isn’t quite back to its virgin 2003 state, but I’m getting closer than I’ve ever been, and the number of piles of things on the floor has diminished greatly and I can actually use my office closet to store actually useful things for the first time.

Today’s task is to attack the tower of CDs still lurking in the closet, and then to look at the 3 or 4 linear feet of files piled over there in the corner. With those done, and a rationalization of the milk crates and cardboard boxes filled with serial cables and broken routers and old copies of The Old Farmer’s Almanac, I’ll perhaps be as close as it’s possible to get.