I got an email from Google this morning announcing that video I’d uploaded over the years to Google Video, a service that in the pre-YouTube acquisition was Google’s competing video hosting service, would be removed after May 13th.

I hadn’t used Google Video for so long that I’d forgotten it even existed, and that I had some video there that I didn’t have stored elsewhere. But I did. So I logged in and downloaded them all, as my Google email suggested. Here’s a selection of what I found feature then-wee Oliver (note to parents: shoot video of your kids before they grow up; I wish I’d shot more):

At the beginning of every day’s proceedings in the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island is a period called Matters of Privilege and Recognition of Guests, an opportunity for members to speak to anything from congratulating their local curling rink for a win to recognizing visitors in the public gallery. To the uninitiated it is perhaps the weirdest part of the house proceedings, mostly because it actually doesn’t seem to have much to do with the important matters of the day. But it’s a tradition and I’ve come to view it as a part of the social fabric of Island politics.

On Tuesday morning I got an email from the Executive Director of the PEI Home and School Federation suggesting that I drop down to the Legislature that afternoon to watch Hon. Doug Currie deliver a statement on education governance. As the Statements by Ministers period doesn’t happen until after Question Period, we in the public gallery who arrived at the 2:00 p.m. opening got to see a lot of house business before Minister Currie’s statement, and I had the odd experience of being recognized three times during Matters of Privilege and Recognition of Guests. First came Hon. Robert Ghiz:

And then, a few minutes later, by Cynthia Dunsford, an old friend from her pre-political days:

And finally Hon. Doug Currie (who happens to have the longest title I’ve ever encountered: Minister, Education and Early Childhood Development and Justice and Public Safety):

I should hasten to add that I am neither a Liberal nor, indeed, anything but politically agnostic: almost everyone who sits in the public gallery gets recognized – there were only about a dozen of us on Tuesday, so it’s not a hard feat to accomplish.

That said, I to feel like achieving this hat trick has leveled me up to a new plateau on the path to Islanderhood, and I’m fully expecting to get an envelope slipped under my door with the passwords to the secret ceilidhs any day now.

In this well-produced video about the U.S. budget, U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan says “I asked the Congressional Budget Office to model the economy going forward, so they have these computer programs that simulate the U.S. economy; the computer program crashes in 2037 because it can’t conceive of any way in which the U.S. economy can continue because of this massive burden of debt.”

This may very well be true. But I’m wondering whether the simulator might be crashing, instead, because of the well-known 2038 problem, described in Wikipedia like this:

The year 2038 problem (also known as the Unix Millennium Bug, Y2K38, Y2.038K, or S2G by analogy to the Y2K problem) may cause some computer software to fail at some point near the year 2038. The problem affects all software and systems that both store system time as a signed 32-bit integer, and interpret this number as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on Thursday, 1 January 1970. The furthest time that can be represented this way is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038. Times beyond this moment will “wrap around” and be stored internally as a negative number, which these systems will interpret as a date in 1901 rather than 2038. This is caused by Integer overflow. The counter “runs out” of usable digits, “increments” the sign bit instead, and reports a maximally negative number (continuing to count up, towards zero). This will likely cause problems for users of these systems due to erroneous calculations.

I’ve no idea whether this is the case, but hearing “2037” and “crash” invoked in the video has got me wondering.

Earlier in the day I mentioned the abysmal state of schedule information for East Coast Music week here in Charlottetown. But way of helping mitigate this a little, I’ve taken the information for the two events, Discovery Stage and MIAFest, and have created a Google Calendar for them that you can grab and integrate into your digital lifestyle in a variety of ways:

• Discovery Stage
  • HTML
  • iCal
  • XML
• MIAFest
  • HTML
  • iCal
  • XML

You’d think that this sort of “open data for public events” would be an expected part of organizing any event these days, but even at the hippest of tech conferences it often seems to be left out, and what we’re left with is graphic artists’ impressions of usefulness.

These are obviously very unofficial calendars, subject to be completely wrong or out of date.

The nice thing about having the data in open formats is that the data is free to flow wherever it may; here’s the iCal file on my iPad, for example:

I can set alarms, send invites to friends, and generally arrange my musical week in an environment that I’m comfortable with.

It’s East Coast Music Awards week here in Charlottetown and starting this afternoon the city will be flooded with opportunities to see live music from all over the region. There is so much happening it’s hard to keep track of it all, and the challenge is doubly difficult when you have a child, as some venues are “all ages” and some, due to Prince Edward Island’s antediluvian liquor laws, are restricted to those aged 19 and over.

We’re blessed to have, in Murphy’s Community Centre, a significant ECMA venue right at our front door, and with a little work I’ve been able to make sense of what’s happening there, starting this afternoon. There are two separate streams of events happening there this week:

Discovery Stage

During the day the Murphy Centre is the “Discovery Stage,” a free all-ages (update: showed up tonight to find that it’s only all-ages during the day) event:

• Wednesday, April 13th - 5:00 PM to 2:00 AM
• Thursday, April 14th - 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM
• Friday, April 15th - 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM
• Saturday, April 16th - 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM
• Sunday, April 17th - 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM

The schedule of performers is available as a somewhat confusing PDF file or (in a format that’s possibly not being kept up to date any longer) from the ECMA website for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

MIAFest

During the evening the Murphy Centre is host to “MIAFest” – MIA stands for “Music Industry Associations” – with admission of $10.00 per night payable at the door. I believe that this is also an all-ages event – that’s what they told me when I asked at Music PEI earlier in the week, but I have my doubts given that I was also told this about the Discovery Stage – but there’s nothing in their publicity to indicate this, so buyer-beware:

• Thursday April 14 - 9:00 PM to 1:50 AM
• Friday April 15 - 9:00 PM to 1:50 AM
• Saturday April 16 - 9:00 PM to 1:30 AM

MIAFest also uses the Delta Hotel as a venue, and the events held there are free. The schedule of performers is available here on the Music PEI website, with the times, confusingly, missing AM/PM (everything starts in the evening).

One of the first issues I raised when I started to become involved with the Prince Street Home and School was the intersection at the corner of Prince and Euston Streets and its lack of pedestrian signals.

There are a lot of kids and parents passing through that intersection every morning and every afternoon to and from the school; anyone who has ever walked or driven through that intersection knows that it’s an accident always waiting to happen.

And so in January of 2009 the Home and School sent a letter to the City of Charlottetown asking that the intersection be rebuilt, with proper signals and other safety measures installed. It’s taken two years and a couple of additional email exchanges reinforcing our request, but I’m happy to report that Councillor Eddie Rice left the following on my doorstep this evening, just before I headed off to tonight’s Home and School meeting:

If all goes according to plan, by the end of the year the intersection should be rebuilt, and should be much safer for walkers and drivers alike.

Thanks to Councillor Rice for making this a priority and for communicating regularly with the Home and School with updates.

[[Oliver]] is a big Archie Comics fan: every week he and [[Catherine]] trek over to Lightning Bolt Comics and pickup a selection of whatever is new (and there’s a surprising variety of “new” in the Archie universe, even today).

Yesterday morning Oliver told me excitedly that he’d found Wikipedia entries for all of the Archie characters, and sensing a teachable moment, as well as a way of indulging my recent obsession, I resolved that Saturday’s father-and-son project would be to make an Archie character reference book.

Here’s how we did it.

First we visited each Archie characters’ Wikipedia page (here’s Archie’s) and grabbed the picture of the character (like this one for Archie) and dragged them to the desktop of my Mac.

Next, we loaded up OmniGraffle an excellent Mac application for creating things like book pages, set the page size (File | Page Setup) to “Index card 3x5 in.” and the page orientation to “Portrait.” We then laid out each page, dragging in the characters one by one and changing the text for their names.

We printed out each page on 3” by 5” index cards from Staples on the HP PSC 2355 inkjet printer in my office. Forty-five minutes later, we had a nice collection of characters ready for binding together into a book:

Next we stacked the cards together, in order of importance to the franchise (as selected by Oliver; Archie came first, and there was some discussion about whether Betty or Veronica should come next and it ultimately fell to me to pick Betty), spread some regular everyday white glue (Martha Stewart brand, only because it was the cheapest, purchased at Michaels) over the top edge and clamped the resulting stack to dry with binder clips:

We waited a few hours for the glue to dry and used the wait to go for lunch and to pop up to The Scrapbook Studio to buy some cover stock (they’re super-friendly there, and their prices for card stock are cheaper than Michaels).

Following the process outlined by Hamish MacDonald in his Perfect Binding episode of DIY Book we cut, scored and folded a piece of purple card stock around the stack of index cards, glued, and clamped again with binder clips to dry:

An hour later, we had a real book, ready for action:

I’m just amazed at how the previously mysterious world of bookbinding has peeled open to me over the past 24 hours.  If you’d asked me last week how books were held together I probably would have suggested that it was a combination of magic, spelt and unicorn mane-thread; to have learned that it’s really just glue (at least for perfect-bound books) was a huge revelation. So today I’ve been stealing away into the letterpress shop between conference calls and programming jobs to make tiny sample books. Here’s one I made using the powerful “shoots through up to 25 pages!” stapler that [[Johnny]] got me for my birthday, with a card-stock cover glued on.

Sushi Jeju, the remotest of Charlottetown’s new crop of Asian restaurants, has reopened after a winter break with a new, broader focus on Japanese, Korean and Indian food. Today was their first day open, and they were a little swamped, but handled it all with good humour. [[Oliver]] and I enjoyed a lunch special of miso soup, spicy noodles, and a bento box of chicken (beef for Oliver), rice, salad and tempura. All very tasty. They’ll be gradually rolling out the new menu over the days to come, and will soon be serving Indian tea. Open 11:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. seven days a week (closing at 9:00 p.m. on Sunday); located beside the Best Western on Grafton Street in Charlottetown.

Earlier in the week I put out a call on Twitter for pointers to book-binding intelligence on Prince Edward Island; I’ve been loaned a collection of letterpress cuts and want to experiment with printing them and making some sort of book from the result.

Almost immediately came a pointer to Hamish MacDonald, and expatriate Islander living in Scotland.

Wow.

Among (many) other things, Hamish is the producer of the DIY Book podcast which is about as wonderful a resource as you could ever hope to find if you’re someone in my position: a common-sense introduction to writing, printing and hand-producing your own books. Episode 17, for example, is a video episode titled “Perfect Binding (Or as Close as We Can Get)” and it’s a simple step-by-step walk through the process of making paperbacks.

MacDonald is a born presenter: calm, witty, and understanding of the position of a complete beginner to the process, filling in just the right about of detail and yet moving things along at a compelling clip.

I had no choice to but to rush out to Michaels last night and buy some white glue (Martha Stewart brand!) and some cover stock, and I glued up my first book this morning, a simple “blank book” with a bumpy blue cover and pink insides: