This is a useful apple hack from my colleagues at Yankee Magazine.

Here’s what happened when Ólafur Arnalds invited Nils Frahm up on stage to improvise a composition with him (I was at the same concert, but the night before). It’s very well shot and edited video that provides some insight into how wordless musical improvisation works physically.

Nils Frahm is releasing a new album, Felt, next month.

I paid my first visit to the new Charlottetown Post Office last week – it has moved up Kent Street to the corner of Kent and Queen – and on my way in the front door I noticed a step up that would prevent access by anyone in a wheelchair or with other mobility issues. There was nothing on the door to indicate means for alternate access.

I asked the clerk at the desk and they told me that the accessible entrance was off Queen Street, but when I investigated I found that, although there is indeed an accessible entrance from the street into the post box annex, the door between the annex and the counter service area of the office is not accessible. Which means that it’s essentially not accessible at all.

While all public buildings should be accessible to all, federally managed buildings should be in the forefront, especially buildings that have recently undergone a complete renovation.

The clerk at the Post Office recommended that I call Canada Post to complain about this. This Make a Complaint page seems to be the proper starting point for this process. If you feel as I do, I invite you to join me in asking Canada Post to right this.

Update: The toll-free number on the Ombudsman page doesn’t appear to work. I was able to get through to 1-416-979-8822, but there’s no option there for making a complaint, so I pressed ‘0’ to talk to an operator. After about 15 minutes of looking things up and taking my details I was given file number 101402302, while you may wish to quote if you call yourself. I was promised a call back within 5 business days.

It’s the first day of school today – Oliver’s starting Grade 5, which seems somehow impossible. One of the secrets you learn early-on as a parent of school-age children is that teachers can be enormously helpful if you reach out to them; in our case Oliver’s new teacher, Mrs. Kiley, has already hosted us in his Grade 5 classroom twice already, once last week and once yesterday (on Labour Day, no less!), as it’s helpful for Oliver, when launching in to bold new projects, to have some idea of the terrain before things start in earnest.

Something new this year that I really appreciated: Charlottetown City Police had a cruiser with lights flashing on the street in front of the school and an officer stopped every car that passed and handed them a “traffic calming” brochure.

First Day, Grade One

First Day, Grade Five

On a visit to do you read me? (the excellent Berlin magazine and book store) back in July, I picked up a copy of I like your work: art and etiquette, an interesting collection of essays on the social aspect of the art world. My favourite is from artist David Levine who writes, in response to the prompt “How should people behave? What would be a maxim for appropriate conduct?”:

Try to make those around you as comfortable as possible. Try to ignore apparent slights. Remember: everyone is totally freaked out all the time.

Those are useful words, not only for survival in the art world, but for life in general. I decided they were words that warranted a larger audience. Or at least a slightly larger one. So I set some type this afternoon and printed the result on my letterpress on some Indian paper made from recycled cotton that I purchased in February at Modulor in Berlin, and also on some paper that [[Catherine]] made with [[Oliver]]’s grade 4 class last winter:

I’ve sent a selection of these off to a cross-section of my letterpress subscribers (not everyone, alas, as I didn’t end up with 40 copies!).

If you’re interested in etiquette, social behaviour and/or the art world’s eccentricities, I recommend you purchase a copy of the book for yourself: it’s a great read from an interesting cast of art world characters.

Back in June when I visited the Printing Arts Fair in Massachusetts, I bought a book called The Land of Evangline, letterpress-printed by Robert Metzler in Vermont. The book reprints a collection of 19th century engravings by an artist known only by the initials “FHH” of scenes from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Among these is a very nice rendition of Queen’s Square:

Our house is just out of view, tucked in behind the church on Prince Street.

A couple of weeks ago [[Oliver]] and I were in the Malmö record store and café called Folk å Rock, one of my favourite places. I heard a singer on the radio that intrigued my ears: sharp, languid country folk that I didn’t recognize.

I asked the clerk (Ulf, as it turns out) what I was hearing.

“Gillian Welch,” he said, “an American. First album in 7 years. Fantastic, isn’t it.”

Needless to say, I bought the album: stores that hire clerks that know their music need our support.

I’ve been listening to The Harrow & The Harvest ever since, and I’ve only grown fonder of it. My favourite track is from Tennessee, with the following passage:

Why can’t I go and live the life of riley?
Why can’t I go back home to apple pie?
Because your affront to my virtue was a touch too much
But you left a little twinkle in my eye

I don’t know quite why, but I love those last two lines.

Welch, it seems, has been around for a while – you might remember I’ll Fly Away from the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a duet she sang with Alison Krauss – and has four earlier albums left for me to plumb the depths of.

Once again this year I’ve taken the official Eastern School District School Calendar and created a set of public calendar files to make it easier for parents and others to shunt the information around their digital devices.  Here you go:

• Google Calendar
• iCal format

This process was made slightly more difficult this year because the Department of Education released the calendar as an image rather than as a text PDF, which meant that I had to retype everything rather than simply cutting and pasting. I’ll mention this to the Department with hopes that in future they can be friendlier about this.

Today’s project: providing access in XML to data about provincial electoral districts and polling divisions from Elections PEI via the Elections PEI API. The API saw initial use last year when we exposed municipal election ward and poll information; it’s now been extended to cover provincial election data as well.

Through the API you can get programmatic access to things like:

• a list of electoral districts
• KML files of district and polling division boundaries, like District 12, or District 12, Poll 5
• information about returning officers (name, address, telephone)
• information about regular and advance poll locations for each poll

It’s a simple REST API that associates each of the electoral district’s regular HTML web pages with an equivalent XML page. So the regular old human-readable page of information about District 12, Poll 5 at:

http://www.electionspei.ca/provincial/districts/district12/poll5

Has its XML cousin at:

http://www.electionspei.ca/xml/provincial/districts/district12/poll5

The development of the API with Elections PEI is a long-term effort and will continue; as such, we welcome feedback to api@electionspei.ca about how it meets, or does not meet, your data needs.

A chunk of my summertime work this year was consumed with coding up a mobile version of the foliage-reporting tool we created for Yankee Magazine 7 years ago that’s been running on the web every autumn since.

The free app, called Leaf Peepr, is now available for both iOS (App Store link) and Android (Market link); it lets people report foliage conditions – i.e. what colour the leaves are – while on the go, and to submit photos and descriptions of foliage at the same time. These reports get aggregated together and are used to colour the live fall foliage map that’s on the web and also viewable from within the app.

Although I’ve been making websites targeted at mobile devices for many years now – the mobile City Cinema timetable, for example, and the mobile bus schedule – this was my first time developing a bona fide installable application for mobile devices, and it was a good learning experience.

The app shares a common HTML and JavaScript code base for both iOS and Android, uses jQuery Mobile as its UI framework, and is wrapped inside PhoneGap to allow it to be distributed as an executable through the App Store and the Android Market.

While this isn’t quite “write once, run anywhere,” it’s certainly a more streamlined process than coding native apps in their respective native languages of choice, and the common browser engine parentage of iOS and Android meant that, UI-wise, everything pretty well “just worked” on both platforms. Response time of the UI isn’t quite as fluid as it would be with a native app, but it’s certainly more than acceptable.

The only place I ran into some difficulties during development was with slight variations of returning network status information (“is the device online?”) and geolocation (we need to know where the device is so that we can associate reports with a location); PhoneGap has a standard method for obtaining these, but there are quirks that I needed to work around for various edge cases (i.e. device was online when app launched, then went offline, etc.).

Because the development is in HTML and JavaScript, the designer at Yankee, who coded up the UI elements, was working in a familiar environment, and the learning curve for me was primarily getting the development and compilation environments set up in XCode and Eclipse respectively (along with the frustration of the slightly-different key bindings for each).

Our initial submission to the App Store was rejected on a technicality: the Google Maps log was scrolling out of view on the map view, which violates the requirement that it be always visible. We re-submitted the app and it was approved; total time from initial submission to being available to the public was 10 days. For the Android Market, because it lacks this review process, the turnaround was about 30 minutes.

If you’re in New England this fall and want to help in the foliage reporting effort, please install the app on your device and let me know how it goes.