After 10 years, the owners of Formosa Tea House are packing up shop and moving to St. John’s, Newfoundland to start the next chapter of their lives.

The Formosa has been important to Charlottetown in so many ways: it was the bellwether of so much of what’s happened in the city’s restaurant scene in the last decade; it’s hard to remember that when they founded the tea house on University Avenue back in 2001 most everyone thought they were crazy – a tea house… in Charlottetown!?

But they persevered until customers found them, and then expanded into the bright yellow house on Prince Street where they found an even wider customer base. Along the way they created the kind of “third space” that was almost completely novel for Charlottetown: a peaceful, comfortable place with low prices and a welcoming attitude where you could just go and hang out for a while.

Rumour has it that the last day of operation in its current form will be this Tuesday, so if you’ve ever been a Formosa regular, you have two days to stop in an pay your respects.

As Chien and Fen move on, a new group of owners – monks from The Great Enlightenment Buddhist Academy in Little Sands – is gradually reshaping the place, and today was the day to start the repainting.

I’ll be operating the 1890 Golding letterpress at Kwik Kopy this afternoon from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. as part of the open house at their expanded facility at the corner of Queen and Euston in Charlottetown. Please come along and see the press in action, pick up a letterpress-printed something and see behind the scenes at Kwik Kopy.

Later the same day…

I did some letterpress printing today, taking the things I acquired last weekend at the Printing Arts Fair out for a ride.

A caution to those of you who might someday have cause to transport metal type in your carry-on luggage through airport security: when the security agents look at it on their X-ray machine, like Superman being protected from Kryptonite, it shows up as an impenetrable blob and makes them them “hmmmm….” and proceed to disassemble the carrier’s luggage, the packaging around said metal type, re-X-ray and so on. The TSA agents at Logan Airport who did this on Tuesday were extremely careful and pleasant about this, and although I was delayed 20 minutes, it was about as pleasant a 20 minutes as you can imagine spending at a TSA checkpoint.

When I came to pass through security at Trudeau Airport in Montreal on the next leg of my journey I removed the type from my luggage and placed it in the tray with my liquids and my laptop and the security people didn’t bat an eye or ask a question.

A few weeks ago I got an email from Bob Gray, bon vivant, man about town, and summertime restaurant reviewer for The Guardian newspaper: he wanted to write about the burgeoning Asian restaurant scene in Charlottetown, and wondered if I’d serve as a guide. Always willing to shed more light on this less-discovered slice of the city’s culinary landscape, and always eager to accept a free meal, I agreed.

Which is how I ended up across the table from Bob and his wife Earlene at Tai Chi Gardens at 11:30 a.m. this morning, on stop number one of a four-restaurant tour of the scene.

It’s odd, having lived on Prince Edward Island for almost 20 years, and have a good portion of my friends and acquaintances who are also friends with Bob and Earlene, that we’d never met. But we hadn’t. And so today’s adventure, for me, was a short course in them as much as it was a short course in Asian food for them.

After snacks and drinks at Tai Chi Gardens we headed over to Ta-Ke Sushi for sushi and tempura, then to Sushi Jeju for vegetable samosas, Indian fried rice, and teriyaki salmon. The plan had been to finish off with dessert and Korean tea at SeoulFood, but when we showed up at 3:00 p.m. there was a “closed until 3:30” sign, so our tour finished without a final flourish. But we were full and happy nonetheless.

Earlene and Bob were excellent dining companions, and I’m looking forward to reading what hits The Guardian from Bob’s pen the Saturday after next.

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.