Sometimes the companies you do business with surprise you. Today it was Maritime Electric. I had a meeting there today, part of my search for open data of Prince Edward Island energy generation and usage (more on that later), and when I got back to my office I went looking for something on the company’s website and stumbled across their customer portal. I’d seen it before, but found nothing there to entertain or delight me.

Today, though, I noticed the “Transaction History” column on the main page for our accounts, and by chance I clicked on the green dollar sign – I’d likely seen it there on earlier visits, but didn’t realize it led anywhere:

What I was shown when I clicked there was a list of the transactions on that account. Given what I’ve found on other similar web-based customer information sites, I expected the transactions to go back only a few months or, at most, a few years (my Credit Union, excellent in other ways, only lets me see back one year). I noticed, however, an option to see All transactions at the top of the report:

And to my surprise what I was given when I selected that option was, indeed all the transactions on our house account since the day we turned on service in July of 2000. Everything. From there it was an easy cut-and-paste from my web browser into a spreadsheet, a sort by line item type, selection of the “Bill” type, and insert a chart to see 11 years worth of monthly electricity bills graphed:

If you’re a Maritime Electric customer – and if you live on Prince Edward Island outside of Summerside, you are, unless you’re completely off the grid – you have access to the same data for your own accounts.

We all complain so much about how little data the companies in our life provide us with access to (okay, well at least I do) that it’s nice to find an surprising example like this.

Our most expensive month ever? A bill for $202.68 from February 2003. The month leading up to that bill was a dreadful month for ice and snow in Charlottetown, to the point where we had heating wires installed on our roof that we ran almost full time (regardless, there was so much damage to the house that we had to leave for more than a month while repairs were done, thankfully covered by our insurance).

The other thing I learned from the data: we’ve contributed more than $700 to the “Green Power Program” that Maritime Electric launched with the PEI Energy Corporation to fund the development of wind power.

Update: I’ve written up some PHP code, that you can grab here, to pull this transaction data from Maritime Electric and turn it into CSV files ready for analysis.

I’m still not entirely certain who I’m going to vote for in tomorrow’s Federal General Election here in Canada, but the suddenly seemingly-realistic prospect of an NDP minority government got me thinking about my father’s mother Nettie.

My great-grandfather, her father, was the manager of a coop grocery store in Fort William; he was Ukrainian immigrant who came to Canada to escape the harsh conditions of his homeland. Nettie worked hard all her life, not only raising my father, but working as a waitress, small business owner and doing factory work.

As a pre-condition of work at her first job, at The Hoito restaurant, under the Finnish Labour Temple in Fort William, she was made to join the Finnish Communist Party. In retirement she worked tirelessly on behalf of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants in Brantford, Ontario, helping them deal with the bureaucracy by making phone calls and writing letters on their behalf.

All her life she was very much on the proletariat side of the capitalist equation, and any rabblerouserness in me can be traced, directly or through my father, back to her.

All of which is to say that, genetically and circumstantially, Nettie was a natural New Democrat, and, indeed, I never heard her express any preference for any other political party.

Nettie’s last paying job was as an NDP scrutineer on election day sometime in the 1970s. It was the only Canadian Pension Plan-eligible earnings she every made, which meant that her retirement income from the CPP was less than $1.00 a month, something the absurdity of which delighted her.

If by some miracle Jack Layton emerges from all this as Prime Minister, Nettie, in whatever after-life she chose for herself, will be pleasantly amazed and delighted.

You may recall that about a month ago I mentioned that Ian Scott had dropped around with an amazing collection of letterpress “cuts” to lend me. These are logos, maps, photos and other non-type items used in letterpress printing – basically what File | Insert Image does in a word processor these days, but a lot more work to create. They look like this:

This week an order of 200 chipboard coasters arrived, an order I’d placed a few weeks ago from a kind American I connected with on BriarPress.org. These are thick enough to be quite forgiving to the novice printer, and to accommodate any irregularities in the cuts, and proved an excellent medium for running some prints of Ian’s collection.

Here are the results of an afternoon’s worth of experimenting; what you don’t see are the experiments that didn’t work: some of the cuts had warped over the years, or were too caked with corrosion, others were too big or too small or just didn’t print well.

I love this on so many levels, perhaps most of all because these cuts haven’t been printed for so long, and so putting them on a press and bringing to life again is sort of like time travel. Or waking up the dead.

Life for CBC reporter Rosemary Barton, and everyone else covering the federal NDP campaign, has gotten a lot more interesting this week, as the campaign has had the elusive kavorka of “the big mo’ ” delivered upon it. At the beginning of this election covering the NDP must have seemed a lot like covered the Western School Board, and certainly there was no hint of momentum when things started. How things change:

Whether the so-called NDP surge is an illusion or reality doesn’t really matter any more: momentum is like a toggle switch, and once you got it, it feeds itself. As a significant stumbling block for the NDP in past elections has been the “I’m with them, but I’d be wasting my vote” argument, having momentum – the chance of something big – is like magic fairy dust for the campaign in a way that wouldn’t ever be possible for other federal parties.

Watching The National last night the NDP momentum was a study in this: “the rise of the NDP could take Canada into uncharted territory … so much for the uneventful campaign, what’s really happening out there … is it possible to blunt a last-minute surge” were the opening lines to the broadcast and the first five minutes were all-NDP-all-the-time. The Liberals didn’t get much mention until 6:30 minutes in, and the Conservative story, at 7:00, focused on Prime Minister Harper’s defense of Canada’s export of asbestos, which isn’t exactly a barn-burner of an issue outside of, say, Asbestos, Quebec.

All of which called to mind “The Big Mo’ ” from the (fictional) Vinick vs. Santos campaign on The West Wing and the episode “Message of the Week”:

My friend Alan, personable owner of Hearts and Flowers in Charlottetown, invited me to speak to his regular Wednesday morning “breakfast club” this week. The club, which meets for breakfast every morning at the Rodd Royalty hotel, is an interesting cross-section of Charlottetown businesspeople; it’s a testament to how small a place this is that around the table were the guy who sold me my life insurance, the guy I get my auto insurance from, and someone whose son I once hired.

They meet to socialize, talk about business, and generate “leads,” the later a concept that, thank goodness, I’ve a stable enough client base to be completely unfamiliar with.

I joked with them that I’d always suspected there was a secret cabal meeting in a hotel that actually ran the city; while I was exaggerating, I’d imagine that with the collected knowledge and resources of the people around that breakfast table you could get an awful lot done.

Alan asked me to come in and speak for 20 minutes about “what it is that I do,” a notion that threw me into a temporary existential crisis – what do I do? do I actually do anything? I managed to pull out a common thread joining together enough of the things that I do to turn into a 20 minute encapsulation, boiled down to its essence in this infographic:

Although the slides for my talk won’t make a lot of sense without the witty banter overlaid on top of them, here they are for posterity.

The breakfast clubbers asked some good questions, I enjoyed a cup of luke-warm hotel coffee, and by 9:00 a.m. I was on my way back to the office.

There’s a lot to love about Sushi Jeju, the Korean-Japanese-Indian restaurant you’ve never been to located next to the Best Western on Grafton Street in Charlottetown, including a fantastic new Indian Fried Rice dish on the menu that took my breath away.

But my favorite part of tonight’s meal was at the very end when the chef said, as we were on our way out the door, “we’ll see you again on… Wednesday.” Marketing through pre-ordination? Careful observation of my restaurant habits? Whatever you call it, like the fried rice, it’s a new sort of flavor for Charlottetown.

Highly recommended..

On the CBC At Issue panel on The National last night most of the time was taken up with discussion of a “CROP poll,” to be reported in La Presse today, showing an “NDP surge.” Host Peter Mansbridge introduced the topic to the panel like this:

There’s one that we’re hearing rumblings about tonight – this is a poll – and while we don’t place a lot of faith in polls you can guarantee this is going to make big news tomorrow. A poll, a CROP poll, a very highly respected organization, that’s going to suggest that the NDP, at least at the time the poll was done, were in first place – yes, you’re hearing me right – first place in Quebec, ahead of the Bloc Quebecois.

And for the following seven minutes much of the discussion of the panel was about or in reaction to this poll.

If, in fact, this was an actual poll as we were led to believe by the CBC panel, this would indeed be a big deal; it wasn’t until I returned to the topic this morning through an article in the Toronto Star, NDP jumps ahead of Bloc in Quebec: Poll, that I read, way down in the last paragraph:

The survey of 1,000 Quebecers online took place between April 13 and 20. Due to its non-random character, there is no margin of error.

This is echoed in La Presse in its article Le NPD prend la tête au Québec:

Ce sondage mené en ligne ne comporte pas de marge d’erreur compte tenu du caractère non probabiliste de l’échantillon.

In its reporting today the CBC has changed the language from “poll” to “online survey.” For example, in Bloc changes tactics to deal with NDP surge they report:

An online survey done by CROP, which the company said cannot be assigned a margin of error because the methodology doesn’t allow for random sampling, shook up the race in Quebec overnight Thursday, showing a surge for the NDP.

Note that although the language has changed, and the description of the methodology is closer to the lede, the headline is still a reference to a “surge” that exists only because of the “online survey.”

None of the stories I’ve been able to find dive any deeper than that, and we’re left not knowing whether the “online survey” was simply a web poll, liable to “poll box stuffing” by anyone who happened to come across it, or if it involved any sort of more statistically valid methodology.

What really bothers me about this issue, however, is that I’ve been impressed with the lack of coverage on The National – my primary source of election news and opinions – of polls for this federal election. Whether through policy or circumstance the CBC has devoted little or no coverage to the game of polling, and has instead concentrated on, dare I say, the ideas of the campaign. For this trend to be broken by giving substance to something that, on the surface, seems so potentially inaccurate is unfortunate and misleading.

As a fan of timelines and data visualizing, I’ve been delighting in Memolane since they released their first beta. This week they added the ability to embed timelines, and the result is this:

(I used to have the embedded Memolane widget here, but I didn’t like how long it was taking to load, so I removed it; you can still see the real thing right here.)

Charlottetown residents awoke on December 11, 2007 to stories on the CBC – 10-storey hotel to be P.E.I.’s tallest building – and in The Guardian – Huge hotel in the works – about a new hotel coming to the heart of the city and that, in its meeting the night before, City Council had unanimously passed a resolution to allow the new hotel to be built 87 feet higher than planning regulations allowed:

That the application for a height variance from the required 39.4 feet to approximately 127 feet, and for off-lot parking and/or cash-in-lieu of parking, for the proposed hotel to be constructed at 172-180 Queen Street by Dyne Holdings Limited, subject to the Developer entering into a Development Agreement for this project, be approved (draft agreement attached and to be reviewed by the City Solicitor).

Note that the approval was for a hotel to be built at 172-180 Queen Street, a location, at the time, occupied by a vacant lot and by The Bookmark that looked much like this (photo from Google Maps):

A year later, in November of 2008, we learned what the hotel, still planned for that lot on Queen Street, was going to look like, from an article that appeared in The Guardian:

Two months later, on January 7, 2009, came a story in The Guardian that the hotel’s planned site might move:

The proposed move wouldn’t take the hotel far. It would remain inside the block which houses Confederation Court Mall but instead of fronting Queen Street, as the current proposal lists, it would look out onto Grafton Street.

The story placed the possibility of a move in the context of a law suit by the hotel’s developer, Homburg Invest, against a neighboring property owner:

Homburg Invest. Inc., which announced in late November intentions to spend $45 million on a three-phase development project in the capital, is currently embroiled in a $5-million lawsuit against property owners in Charlottetown. Homburg has launched the suit against 2950243 Canada Inc., 100946 P.E.I. Inc., Nemir Tweel Corp. Ltd. and Christopher Tweel. “The properties owned by 2950243, 100946 and/or Nemir Tweel (collectively ‘The Tweel Properties’), border upon, or are in close proximity to the plaintiff’s properties,” Homburg, the plaintiff, says in the lawsuit. One of those properties is the vacant lot next to the TD Dominion Bank on Queen Street. In order to use that property, Homburg would need to reach an agreement with the Tweels.

Sure enough, in a meeting of January 22, 2009, City Council unanimously approved another variance related to the hotel:

That the application for a height variance from the required 39.4 feet to approximately 127 feet, and for cash-in-lieu of parking, for the proposed hotel to be constructed at 123-125 Grafton Street (PID#s 342311 & 342329), subject to the Developer entering into a Development Agreement for this project, be approved.

The CBC report of this new development concentrated on the variance and the lawsuit, and the move around the corner to Grafton Street was mentioned only in the last paragraph:

Homburg’s dispute with Tweel has already led the company to reconfigure the hotel so its entrance is on Grafton Street. The original plan called for an entrance on a vacant lot owned by Tweel on Queen Street.

In the same article we learned what the newly-configured hotel was going to look like, with the clear suggestion of two design elements: a mosaic of anodized aluminum panels of differing shades on the upper portion and a completely-preserved facade of the former Holman’s location that was to be torn down to make way for the hotel:

When work on the site began in April of 2009, the preservation of the facade was confirmed in an article in The Guardian:

Cliff Campbell, of James C. Johnson Associates Inc., says the fact the Holman building is over 100 years old means there are a lot of steps that need to be taken first before any major demolition occurs. He said the building, which once housed 10 businesses and acted as one of four main entrances to The Shops of Confederation Court Mall, will start to make its way to the ground over the next few months and will be reconstructed into the first new hotel development in downtown Charlottetown in over 25 years. With the historic brick starting to peek through, crews will be working to reinstate this portion of the Holman Building and keep it as part of the new development. “By keeping this part of the existing building, the historic feel of downtown Charlottetown will remain as well as this portion of the originally built Holman Building,” says a company news release.

A month later the modern-day cladding on the Holman Building was peeled off to reveal the facade that was to be preserved:

That photo, from May 9, 2009, clearly shows two sections to the facade: on the left is sandstone with minimal red brick in-fill and on the right is an all-brick section extending one floor higher.

Construction continued on the new hotel over the balance of 2009 and through 2010 interrupted only by comments in November 2010 from lawyer and historian James Macnutt, covered by the CBC as Hotel dominates P.E.I.’s Province House: author, that the new hotel was looming too large over Queens Square:

“I’m deeply disappointed. I think the citizens of Charlottetown should be deeply disappointed that that building was allowed to go there,” said Macnutt. “It is inappropriate in the location: its scale, its mass, its overall appearance.”

Mr. Macnutt’s comments echoed parts of his submission earlier in the fall to hearings held under Motion 56: The Future of Province House and neither appeared to attract significant public outcry.

Over the winter of 2010-2011 the new building was closed in, and in early February we got the first taste of what the cladding on the upper part of the hotel was going to look like:

It seemed that the “mosaic” of alternating colours of anodized aluminum that had been shown in every rendering of the hotel to date was to give way to a single colour of beige aluminum siding. Here’s a close-up of what’s been going up on the outside of the building all spring long:

As of today, it appears as though this is, in fact, what’s going to cover the entire upper facade of the hotel:

I wondered if perhaps this could be some sort of “under-layer” that would, as construction proceeded, would be enhanced with additional design detail, but in recent publicity for the hotel, now named the Holman Grand, the rendering of the hotel has been substantially changed from what’s been used to date. In a PDF fact sheet, for example, is this new rendering:

Notice how the previously textured upper portion of the exterior has given way to a monotone. 

And note, additionally, that the sandstone from the lower part of the exterior, sandstone we were once told “crews will be working to reinstate … as part of the new development,” has given way to a completely red brick exterior, with sandstone highlights, so that there appears to be little remaining of the original facade, and also that the far-right of the lower exterior no longer extends into the fourth floor as it was once shown.

The result? We thought we were getting the hotel on the left and inside we’re getting the hotel on the right:

It’s not news that I’ve been opposed to much of what Homburg Invest has developed in Charlottetown in recent years, including this hotel; setting my aesthetic and urban planning opinions aside, though, it seems as though planning regulations in the city should work to ensure, at the very least, that developers build what they say they’re going to build, especially in cases like this where the very fabric of downtown Charlottetown is being remade.

If City Council approved variances to planning regulation based on one design for the hotel and we end up with a substantially changed design, something’s broken.

Remember the work I did a few weeks ago to serve up Prince Edward Island to New Brunswick energy interchange in an open format via Pachube?

It seemed like a good idea unlock data on regulated petroleum prices trapped inside Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission HTML in a similar fashion.

So I’ve created some PHP code to scrape the data out of the HTML and into XML, JSON or Pachube-friendly formats and a Pachube feed the uses this code. The result of all this means that you can programmatically pull current gasoline prices from Pachube and use the data to build new and interesting applications.