I had an eBay shipment to get out yesterday after work. Knowing that the Canada Post office would be closed, I headed for the Shoppers Drug Mart on Queen Street, as its post office outlet is open until 9:00 p.m. When I arrived at the counter there was a hand-written sign on the cash register instructing me to ask for more information at the cash desk, with no post office staff in sight. I asked a cashier for help and she went looking around and reported back 5 minutes later that the postal staff was “on dinner break and would be back in 30 minutes.”

Because the post office was closed, I wasn’t allow to buy things that the post office sells; this included packing tape, which was all I really needed to send off my pre-paid parcel. Fortunately I was able to buy a roll of packing tape “from Shoppers Drug Mart”, 10 feet away.

Frustrated, I ranted a little on Twitter as was then impressed that, unbidden, the official @ShopprsDrugMart (an handle cursed by Twitter’s field-length limitations) sent me a reply. I’m not sure whether any practical change will result from this, but it’s nice to know that Shoppers is at least paying attention.

Another thing I’ve leaned about wind energy: when the output of a wind farm is expressed as, say, “30 MW,” that means that the combined output of the turbines has a theoretical maximum of 30 megawatts. Which is to say that on a perfectly windy day with all the turbines operating at perfect efficiency a 30 MW wind farm would be generating 30 MW of electricity. Of course perfectly windy days are few and far between, so the output of a 30 MW wind farm is more often than not less than 30 MW.

Setting that aside, here’s how the economics of the publicly-owned Eastern Kings Wind Farm work: Maritime Electric has a contract to purchase all of the energy the wind farm produces at a fixed price indexed to the consumer price index. Currently they pay $78 per megawatt hour (a megawatt hour being 1 MW of energy for one hour). So on a hypothetical perfect day the return to the public purse (not accounting for paying down the capital costs of the wind farm) would be:

30 MW x $78 x 24 hours = $56,160

And in a hypothetical perfect year – all wind, all the time – the farm would return $20,498,400. In reality, because reality is less than perfect, the return is less than that – electricity sales were last reported at $8.2 million/year. Here’s the summary of the Eastern Kings Wind Farm from the last annual report of the PEI Energy Corporation:

An objective for this year was to improve turbine availability at the East Point Wind Plant, and thus increase electricity production from the facility. This was accomplished. Despite replacing all ten gearboxes, machine availability improved to 89.4% as compared to 81.0% in the previous year. This increase in availability resulted in a 10% rise in energy sales, from 78,738 Megawatt-hours in 2008-09 to 86,779 Megawatt-hours. The only other major disruptions were the repair of switch gear in a turbine and the replacement of all three blades on another turbine.

A 30 MW wind farm has 262,800 (30 MW x 24 hours x 365 days) theoretical megawatt hours of energy it can generate, meaning that in 2008-2009 the farm was operating at 33% of “perfection.”

My grandparents died at 34, 82, 83, and 84.

My great-grandparents died at 38, 46, 69, 72, 78, 82, 85 and 86.

My great-great-grandparents – the ones I know about – died at 30, 39, 61, 69, 77, 80, 82, 85, 90, and 97.

Any way you slice it, I’m likely more than halfway to death today (perhaps I should start counting down rather than up). Which is less a depressing realization than it is a call to action: so much to do. And, hey, I’ve already outlived four of them, which is presumably the whole point.

It’s pretty amazing to consider the lives of all of those ancestors, each of whom had the good graces to not die before they spawned a new generation. So today I tip my had to them.

Last night after I posted the video I shot of Tim Hortons falling to the wrecking ball I got an email from CBC’s Donna Allen asking if it would be okay to use a snippet on [[Compass]] tonight. I wrote back “sure,” and this morning I got a call from Compass reporter Brian Higgins to work out the details. I uploaded the raw QuickTime file from the iPod for Brian, but from the look of the clip that got included it seems maybe he fell back on “plan B” and just shot Vimeo playing on a PC. My favourite part of the entire exercise is that [[Oliver]]’s voice got included in the clip:

My friend Ian Scott dropped around this afternoon with a wonderful loan: a collection of letterpress cuts from Prince Edward Island. There’s everything from a Kirkwood Motel logo to a signatures of various people long-gone. I printed a few this evening to send to Ian as a thank-you, and the favourite of those that I pulled out is this one:

If only for documentary purposes, I’d like to make archival prints of all of the cuts – there must be a few hundred at least – so I’ve got a new letterpress project ahead of me.

iMovie for the iPod Touch (and iPad and iPhone, etc.) is a truly wonderful product. It doesn’t come pre-installed on these devices — it’s a cheap $4.99 purchase from the App Store — so it’s an app that a lot of iOS device owners may have yet to learn the joys of.

Suffice to say, it’s an elegant, simple app for doing basic video editing: you shoot video on your device (and the iPod Touch has an HD video camera in it that can shoot pretty good video) and then load it into iMovie on the device where you can combine or split clips, add titles and transitions, and upload to any or all of YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook or even CNN.

I shot, edited and uploaded this video of Tim Hortons and this one of the UPEI book scanner entirely on my 4th generation iPod Touch (the book scanner video I shot at UPEI, edited on the bus ride back, and uploaded to YouTube once I got back to the office).

Editing video on a laptop or desktop Mac is still pretty great (and you can do things with the Mac OS iMovie that you can’t do in the iOS version), but to avoid the rigamarole of transferring the video from the device to the desktop, to say nothing of the intuitiveness-bump that being able to touch the video provides, makes iMovie for iOS devices a must-have if you’re going to shoot video on your device.

(All of which makes me wonder: why are Brian Higgins and the other video-journalists carrying around heavy Sony cameras when they could shoot, edit and upload to Compass all from a device they could fit in their pocket?)

Thanks to Adam Ramsay, [[Oliver]] and I learned that Tim Hortons on St. Peters Road was falling to the wrecking ball tonight, so we rished right over with iPod Touch in hand and shot some video.  When I got home I bought iMovie for iOS from the App Store ($4.99) and edited together a clip and uploaded it to Vimeo.

The iPod Touch might have a dreadful still camera, but it certainly shoots beautiful video.

Remember that Subversion to Git Cheat Sheet I was setting up on my letterpress last month? Well I finally got around to fine-tuning the printing so it’s nice and even, and I’ve made up packs of various versions that you can buy now as Letterpress Git vs. Subversion Cheat Sheet Variety Packs. Obviously I specialize in the far reaches of the long-tail, in the “people who like analog aids to their digital lifestyle” market. Perhaps that’s you?