I’ve been driving a Nissan Versa for the past 5 days – I rented it from Hertz at Boston’s Logan Airport when I arrived in New England on Wednesday. It’s a nice little car – dead basic minimal in terms of features, but nice nonetheless – with one tragic flaw: every time I get out of the car it gives me a whopping electric shock.

I’m particularly averse to electric shocks of any sort since my nerve conduction study back in October, and it had reached the point last night, after a day with many stops, where I was ready to admit that the car was doing this to me on purpose, perhaps as payback for some long-forgotten slight against the several Datsuns and Nissans I’ve owned over the year (there was that blue 1978 Datsun 510 that I abandoned on the side of the road after a nicer green 1978 Datsun 510 fell into my lap).

In frustration I turned to Twitter for help and my friend Morgan in Sweden came through with something that, while not a solution to the larger issue, certainly mitigates the torture:

So my getting-out-of-the-car ritual now goes like this: turn off the car, open the door gingerly, get out of the car, touch the door with my knuckles and receive painless shock, proceed.

The car still bears a grudge, obviously, but at least I’ve taken the edge off its reign of terror.

I spent a good part of today at the Printing Arts Fair at The Museum of Printing in North Andover, MA. It was my first visit to the museum (they’ve an excellent collection of type and presses), and the fair provided a great opportunity to meet other letterpress nerds.

In particular I got to meet Ed from Swamp Press (Northfield, Massachusetts) who’s casting me some 12 pt. Bodoni to fill in some of the gaps in the job case I acquired last year, John from Letterpress Things (Chicopee, Massachusetts), a store I need to make arrangements to visit sometime soon (for what am I if not someone in need of letterpress things) and Robert from Green Mountain Letterpress (No. Thetford, Vermont).

Robert was an especially fortuitous man to meet: he had a pop-up shop set up in the front yard of the museum selling his works, and one of those was a book The Land of Evangeline and The Provinces by the Sea which, among many other things, features an engraving of Queens Square in Charlottetown facing toward our house. Also – and this was the bargain of the day – Robert sold me 17 pounds of line and perf rule for $1. A single dollar! Now all I need to do is figure out how to ship 17 pounds of lead and brass back to Prince Edward Island.

The Printing Arts Fair was well-organized and full of activities: lithography in action, a Linotype machine being operating, an old Heidelberg press running, and many chances for visitors to, well, print. 

As Catherine would no doubt attest, if left to my own devices and with no other cares in the world, I’d likely spend most of my time at the movies. Two or three a day. Okay, maybe just two, but just so I don’t run out of good movies. Oh, and I’m always willing to sacrifice my way through a bad movie for the opportunity to sit in an interesting theatre. How else do you explain The Avengers in České Budějovice in Czech back in 1998. (See also Four Movies, Three Days).

I’m spending the weekend on a furlough from [[Yankee]] here in North Andover, MA, about 30 minutes north of Boston (I usually travel down for these week-long trips over a week of weekdays, but this time circumstances necessitated a split-week). Which left me a unique opportunity, freed from responsibilities and from “we can see movies anywhere – there’s only one Milan!” protests by other family members, to go wild on the film front.

I started with Super 8, which I knew almost nothing about other than its Spielberg/Abrams provenance (enough); my proximity to the The Tempurpedic IMAX Theater at Jordan’s Furniture sealed the deal. It was, indeed, an amazing place to see a film: very comfortable – Tempurpedic! – seats, stellar sound, the usual super-giant IMAX screen. The film was the kind of well-constructed dramatic monster movie you don’t see so much – Stand By Me meets Aliens. I enjoyed it.

After a burger at Fuddruckers (along with a musical fountain and a trapeze training centre, a part of the Jordan’s “get them in the door for reasons other than needing furniture” business model; the burger was excellent) I headed up to Peabody for an Apple Store religious pilgrimage, a dose of Barnes & Noble, and then to the AMC Loews Liberty Tree Mall 20 – they like their megaplex names good and long here in New England – to see Midnight in Paris, the new Woody Allen film. I really, really enjoyed it; I’m old enough to have missed Allen’s golden era, so I don’t have a soft spot in my heart for Manhattan and Annie Hall and the like; this leaves me free to treat each new film without that nostalgic anchor, and this is Allen’s best film of the last half-dozen I’ve seen (with the stipulation that I’m a sucker for time travel movies of any sort, for any film with Owen Wilson, and for Paris).

As if two movies in a weekend weren’t enough, I’m meeting a friend at the Wilton Town Hall Theatre tomorrow afternoon for the Danish film In A Better World.

Before then I’ll spend a good chunk of Sunday at The Museum of Printing here in North Andover: it’s their Printing Arts Fair, celebrating, in part, the 139th anniversary of the Kelsey press, which is the veritable American cousin of my Adana Eight Five.

A good weekend. Back to [[Yankee]] for Monday and Tuesday, then back to Charlottetown on the late-late flight on Tuesday night. I’ll have only been on Island soil for 12 hours before I’m set to hear out on the town with Bob Gray and his wife for an Asian restaurant crawl to feed his column in The Guardian. And then Thursday afternoon it’s a demonstration of the 1890 Golding letterpress at Kwik Kopy’s open house. So a good week all-round.

Another interesting look into Charlottetown’s near-history courtesy of Pex Mackay, who’s posted a 1988 video shot by Keith Wakelin. It’s an hour long, somewhat shaky, and with some repetition, but it’s worth watching all the way through for the shots of things that are no longer now as they once were: you’ll see the old Montage Dance space on Pownal (destroyed by fire just before the video was shot and still in ruins), the Irving station at the corner of Prince and Grafton, the waterfront full of oil tanks a derelict railway buildings before Confederation Landing Park and Peakes Quay, and Kent Street before the Royal Trust Tower.

Around 48:55 there’s a brief clip of the house on Longworth Avenue that’s been the centre of the SidingGate controversy this week.

We moved to Charlottetown in the winter of 1993, just 5 years after this video was shot, and it’s amazing both how much changed in those 5 short years, and how much has changed since.

Yesterday was a beautiful day here on Prince Edward Island: just the right amount of sun, warm but not too warm, and a gentle breeze in the air. We took the opportunity to go out to Argyle Shore Provincial Park with our new neighbours for a barbeque, and what with Catherine’s kite obsession, there were plenty of kits in our armoury, ready for flying. I took the opportunity to try an experiment: I popped my [[Nokia N95]] mobile phone in a clear-plastic kite holder and strapped it to the underbelly of our largest kite and set it to start shooting video.

The phone proved too heavy for the size of the kite and the amount of wind, but I like the result enough to edit it together into a small video. My favourite aspect of this little project is that patterns of movement emerge when, as I did in iMovie, the action is sped up 200%.

None of this holds a candle to the interesting work my friend Stefan Kellner is doing with tiny helicopters in Berlin. Indeed a Flickr search for kite photography reveals all manner of fascinating experiments like this, most far more successful than mine.

The traffic to this little weblog is scarily regular: on an average day Google Analytics reports between 1,300 and 1,500 visits and between 1,600 and 1,800 page views, day after day after day, with a little dip in traffic every Saturday. Things have been going on like this for the 4 years that Analytics has been in place keeping track of things.

Yesterday, however, things were different. We have a weekly conference call with our colleagues at [[Yankee]] every Friday, and yesterday afternoon just after the call got started I began to notice evidence that the server that powers both the Asterisk telephony server that was hosting the conference call and the Apache server that hosts this weblog was more heavily loaded than usual. Things weren’t exactly grinding to a halt, but the voice quality of the conference call was slightly degraded and the response time for the blog was a little slower than usual.

Balancing my need to be present for the conference call against possible technical doom, I began to plumb around for evidence that might suggest what was going on when a helpful email from TJ Lewis came in:

You probably already know but, your blog post about replacing the laptops with paper is #1 on hacker news right now.

This was followed, a few minutes later, by a tweet from Tom Purves:

Cool! PEI’s @ruk at the top of Hacker News | How to replace 30 laptops (and $10,000) with 150 sheets of paper.

Sure enough, over on the front page of Hacker News was an item, posted by Alexander O’Neill, linking to my post about Elections PEI, laptops and pieces of paper:

The post stayed in the number one ranking for a couple of hours, and incoming traffic from that post was responsible for my suddenly slightly-more-sluggish server.  Here’s a graphic showing network traffic hitting the webserver, which took a sudden leap around 3:00 p.m. yesterday and gradually died out over the following 8 hours:

Here’s a screen shot from Google Analytics showing the regular everyday level of visits to the weblog followed by a sudden jump yesterday:

And here’s the Google Analytics graph showing hour-by-hour visits for yesterday:

Over the last almost-24-hours Hacker News referred 12,278 visitors here, 98% of whom had never been here before. The Hacker News readership is an interesting niche of Internet users to look at in more detail. Browser usage for the those 12,000+ visits from Hacker News breaks down like this, vs. the general browser usage of visitors to the blog:

Take-away from this: hackers don’t really warm to Internet Explorer.

Geographically the Hacker News readership was of a very different pattern too: San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Toronto, Mountain View, London, Chicago, Los Angeles and Cambridge were the top cities for Hacker News referrals, whereas Charlottetown, Toronto, Halifax, Calgary, Ottawa, Edmonton, Montreal, Vancouver and New York are the top cities on a typical day.

At the peak of the Hacker News traffic influx my Apache server was serving about 50 requests per second; with the exception of a Apache restart that I initiated when I was probing around initially, and a short blip caused by a Drupal cache refresh I triggered to compress CSS files, Drupal and Apache did a bang-up job of keeping up with the traffic, and it’s nice to see that a pokey old server like the generic white box up in the server room could keep up, even if it did make for a slightly-choppy conference call.

Most interesting for me in all of this, technical details aside, is the 86 comments on Hacker News to read through: lots of interesting commentary there, some on-point and some on wild tangents.

I may be the only person interested in making this weblog more searchable – I don’t imagine there are “Narcissus, the Weblog and Modern Canadian Thought” master’s theses being written that demand an easier way to ferret out historical posts.

But if anything this weblog is about my life, and I’ve been doing it long enough – 12 years last month – that I’ve begun to forget what I’ve written before. This means I’ve built a helpful personal research tool, but also that I’m in danger of expressing indignation about things I’ve previous expressed indignation about (reindignating?).

For example, in January of this year I lamented a CADC proposal to extend the Queen Parkade to University Avenue, a plan that, at the time, I thought was completely new to me – I even called it a “secret” plan. It turns out that, three years earlier in 2008, I lamented the same proposal in an earlier “secret” incarnation. All I can offer in my defense is a feeling that my more recent lament was a better one.

That all said, I’m interested in search, and by way of exploring that interest (and enhancing my abilities to plumb the depths of my last decade), I’ve strapped Apache Solr and its companion Drupal module to the side of the weblog. This update transforms the searchability of the weblog considerably, adding “faceted” search (the ability to filter searches by date or topic), “did you mean” suggestions, and much more.

You can try it out here; the results look like this (searching for perry williams):

I’ve already profited from Solr’s awesome power, learning things about my life that I’d long forgotten – prostitutes in Thailand, the name of that great restaurant in France, the night Oliver had to spend in hospital when he was 18 months old. Should you be casting about for a thesis topic, I’m ready for you now.

There’s a provincial general election here in Prince Edward Island on October 3 this fall, and over the past month here at Reinvented we’ve been ramping up the technology side of the Elections PEI operation as planning and preparation for the election is now in full swing.

In each of the Island’s 27 electoral districts there are three advance polls dates – September 24, 26 and 30 if you want to mark your calendar now – and these are held in a single central location in each district. Because votes are cast and tallied on a poll-by-poll basis, with multiple polling divisions in each district, one of the challenges at these advance polls is to route electors arriving at the door to the proper table to vote for their particular polling division.

In New Brunswick, both for the advance polls and on election day, they use laptops loaded up with an address database for this task: poll workers enter a street number and name and an application running on the laptop returns the polling division. 

We used a similar system here in Prince Edward Island in the 2007 provincial generation election for the advance poll in Charlottetown – just a single laptop in a single advance poll – and it worked well, and after observing the New Brunswick election in September we started to develop a plan with Elections PEI to equip all 27 advance polls with laptops and look-up software.

It turns out to be surprisingly hard to source 30 laptops (one for every district, plus spares) for just a week. Purchasing inexpensive netbooks – in the neighbourhood of $300 each – would come to $9,000. And after election day you’d have $9,000 worth of obsolete laptops. Renting laptops was not that much less once you factor in minimum rental periods. And that’s only the hardware: the cost to develop the database application, to train poll workers to use the hardware and software and to make sure technical support was available would have at least doubled that.

Once the cost and complexity of this plan began to emerge, we collectively took a deep breath and realized that we were trying to solve with complicated technology a problem that could more easily, cheaply and effectively be solved with, well, paper. Witness:

That’s a single page of a simple 5-page index to District 12, a district with about 2,000 addresses and 3,100 electors. To find the right poll, the advance poll worker just asks the elector for their home address, scans down the alphabetical list of streets to find it, and then scans for the right number (we experimented with replacing address numbers with address ranges, but the complexity of poll geography meant that the result was more confusing than helpful).

Twenty-seven districts, a five or six page index for each district, and about an hour to create the report means that the entire “system” (if you can call it a “system”) cost less than $100, requires a few minutes of “training” and is guaranteed not to crash.

A good day at the office.

In the spring of 1994 I was working as a programmer and database-feeder at the PEI Crafts Council here in Charlottetown. I’d originally been hired to develop a standalone database of crafts supply sources (clay, wool, etc.); but when we realized that the database I was developing was going to be useful to people in the rest of Canada and the USA, and that the Internet – “the information superhighway” as we then called it – might be a way of making that happen, the project suddenly became a lot more interesting.

With some seed funding from CANARIE I build a tiny Linux server on an IBM PS/2, hooked it up to PEINet over a pair of 14.4 kbps modems over a leased copper circuit, installed the just-invented CERN httpd server, and thus brought to life the first webserver on Prince Edward Island, www.crafts-council.pe.ca.

The Internet was a very different kind of network back then, almost completely non-commercial, and full of the potential of noble purpose. None involved in making it had much of an idea what it might become, but there were a lot of lofty ideas.

In May of 1994 a gathering at Apple in Cupertino, organized by the late Steve Cisler, Apple Librarian, brought together many of the lofty-minded for a conference on “community networking” called “Ties that Bind.” From Steve’s first notice about the conference:

On Friday I will be posting an announcement for a community networking conference to be held May 4-6 in Cupertino, California. It will be of interest to librarians, community organizers, non-profiteers, government MIS workers, educators, and drifters on the InfoBahn. It is going to be cheap, fun, and intense.

When I read that announcement I decided that I had to go. Partly because it involved the stuff of my work – I was community networking using the Internet – and partly because, well, it was a chance to spend time on the Apple campus with a bunch of cool people. And it was to be “cheap, fun, and intense” – my kind of activity.

I still remember the meeting I had at ACOA with the Gerry O’Connell and late Sandy Griswold looking for $500 in funding to get me to California; they were intrigued, but my proposal was challenging to them on two fronts: $500 was way, way too little money to be asking for; and I was looking to go to California, not, say, Bathurst, New Brunswick. The optics were too challenging for ACOA to deal with, so I was referred to the provincial Department of Economic Development which funded my trip under the Cooperation Agreement on Rural Economic Development.

Which is how I ended up on a plane to San Jose in early May, 1994, seventeen years ago.

There’s not much record of the conference online – it was too early in the age of the web for breadcrumbs to be left, and so this box at Stanford from the Apple archives is likely the definitive resource. But it was cheap, fun and intense, as promised. And although I was shy and retiring and incapable of “networking” in any real sense, just being in the same room as people like Howard Rheingold was invigorating. I came back from California full of piss and vinegar, and everything else that I’ve done with the Internet since can really be said to have grown from that root. I think the Cooperation Agreement on Rural Economic Development got its money’s worth.

Apart from all that invigoration, one of my lasting memories from that trip was from the first morning of the conference. I asked at the front desk of the hotel where I was staying how long it would take to get to Apple’s campus on Infinite Loop. “About 15 minutes,” the front desk clerk told me.

What I didn’t realize was that, it being California and all, the default setting for “how long would it take to get” question was “by car.” I was on foot.

I figured this out when, after 15 minutes of vigorous walking through Cupertino, past strip mall after strip mall after strip mall, there was no evidence of Apple. In the end it took me about 45 minutes to walk to the conference, and I figured out how to travel by bus after that.

I thought of all this today when I came across this video, from the City of Cupertino’s council meeting last night where Apple’s Steve Jobs presented a plan for a new campus for the company, just up the highway from Infinite Loop. It’s a beautiful new building, and Jobs’s presentation is as skilled as any Apple keynote he’s ever given, albeit with a layer of “Brady Bunch goes to Hawaii” fish-out-of-waterness.

Remember my SoundCloud + Pachube + Energy mashup? Well I recorded an interview with Nora Young for the CBC Radio One program Spark this afternoon where we talked about it, and, in general, about mashups and APIs and ambient information displays.

Seemingly within seconds of the end of our interview, Dan Misener worked his audio magic routing machine and the raw interview’s audio appeared online. You can listen to our chat there, or in a SoundCloud-enhanced bootleg I created that has time-coded links to the things we talked about.