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.

Five years ago in Copenhagen I went cycling with my friend [[Olle]] for the first time and when I remarked at his (and everyone else’s) religious adherence to traffic safety issues – cyclists, pedestrians, motorists, all seemingly working in harmony – he said, to paraphrase, “everybody has to follow the rules or the system falls apart.”

Here in Charlottetown, the system has fallen apart. Especially as regards cyclists.

I’ve had my bicycle back on the road for just over a week now, and here are just a few of the things I’ve witnessed from other cyclists in the city:

• riding the wrong way up a one-way street,
• riding behind parked cars on the wrong side of the street,
• riding on the sidewalk (by far and away the most prevalent misdeed),
• blowing through stop signs and traffic lights.

I’m not going to even mention the lack of helmets (especially important given all of the above and the attendant certainly of eventual death), the almost total absence of hand signals, and cyclists riding at night without lights.

I’m not being a effete cycling purist here: irresponsible cycling in Charlottetown is all over the place, all the time; just sit on a park bench at any downtown intersection for 5 minutes and you’ll be almost certain to see one or more death-defying moves.

Now the libertarian in me says “cycle however you want – it’s your life,” but the problem with that is that the bad cycling behaviour of others has a direct impact on my life: it motorists and pedestrians lose respect for cyclists (and I can’t imagine how they haven’t at this point), then, like Olle says, the system falls apart. Motorists and pedestrians stop looking for cyclists in expected places because “expected” places could mean anywhere. Kids see cyclists riding up and down sidewalks and think it’s okay; parents, afraid to let their kids on the road (where they would learn to be responsible), let them ride on the sidewalk. And so on and so on.

Somebody is going to be seriously injured or killed soon if this keeps up.

I promised to report back after a few weeks of using Remember the Milk as my to-do-list manager. That I’m writing this post is a testament its continued role in my life, as the “report back” reminder popped up yesterday in myriad places (on my Mac, in my email, in the Remember the Milk iPad app).

The application seems to be filling a useful space between the heavily-structured project management work that we manage in Trac with our clients, and the “you have a meeting with Bob at 2:00 p.m. on Monday” I track in a Google Calendar-iCal combo. I’ve been using it to help me remember things that otherwise I was juggling in the periphery of my mind, things I’d jotted notes down about, and things I never had a system to remember at all.

In the Getting Things Done religion they talk about the need for a “trusted system” to route the things that would otherwise pile up in your mind, your email inbox, your voicemail, and so on. I’ve been doing a pretty good job of keeping my email inbox at zero with Remember the Milk: rather than letting things languish there untended, I’ll create a task so that there’s a record, and then delete or archive the email.

In short, Remember the Milk, at least so far, is hitting a nice sweet spot of “simple enough that I’ll use it” and “complete enough that it lets me track what I need to track” without venturing into the woods of project managementy overkill.

On June 23, 2011 Kwik Kopy in Charlottetown is having an open house, and they’ve invited me to come and demonstrate their 1890 Golding letterpress, a press that came from Dillon Printing by way of Island Offset and currently sits in the window at the corner of Queen and Euston Streets in downtown Charlottetown.

The press is in remarkably good shape for something that’s 121 years old: it could use some oil, some tune-ups to the roller-grippers, and maybe a new set of rollers. But it prints, and that’s the whole point.

This afternoon I went over for a sort of beta-test of the press in advance of the open house, taking with me the Kwik Kopy logo I received in the mail last week from The Augustine Company in Iowa (in the running to become my new favourite company). After a few false starts, I managed to print off a not-too-bad copy of the logo:

The press is a thing of beauty, and wonderful to operate: after a year with my Adana Eight Five, it feels like driving a BMW after a year of driving a pedal-cart.

On the day of the open house our hope is to be able to print off take-away items for visitors – something like a coaster or a heavy card – with this logo imprinted.  I’ll even give you a chance to spin the flywheel (as long as you agree not to hold me responsible if you lose control and it takes your arm).

So today ended up being a morning of Drupal tuning and PHP coding followed by lunch, and then a couple of hours of time travel back two centuries. Hard to say which I enjoy more…

I remember that my father used to have memo pads, from the federal government where he worked, that had Don’t Say It, Write It printed at the top; I presume these were part of some sort of federal efficiency drive at the time. For some reason the slogan has stuck with me.

[[Oliver]] is much better at communicating his thoughts and feelings in writing than he is verbally, and so I’m always encouraging him to channel his frustrations into writing when he can. This morning when he got up and went downstairs to use his computer he found that the Internet wasn’t working, something that, for him, would feel like having his oxygen supply cut off. Frustrating, in other words. So he sent me an email:

the internet is off not the computer it self.
and your not helping it because you were in the shower
and you not helping it.

I was, as you might intuit, in the shower during this calamity. The grammar and spelling aren’t all there, but it was a pretty clear statement of the problem. I’m proud of him.

Turned out that the iMac just needed to be rebooted for everything to start working again, and so the email he sent eventually arrived at the office a few hours later. Where I read it just now.

It’s not news that I’ve been flirting with the city of Berlin for several years now. I visited the city for the first time back in 2007, a trip tacked on to the end of my yearly trip to Copenhagen for reboot, to allow me to see the Plazes operation close-up. Among other things, that visit netted me some work with Plazes, and that work took me back to Berlin the following January for PlazeCamp.

Two years later I was back in the city with [[Oliver]] for our spring vacation and much father-and-son merriment, and this February I seized the opportunity to return yet again, this time for the Cognitive Cities conference (a conference organized in part by Igor, who I first met in the lobby of the CAB INN City hotel in Copenhagen during reboot, proving that life is indeed a Möbius strip).

Suffice to say the every visit to Berlin I uncover another layer of interestingness, meet another group of great people, find another great place for coffee, and generally fall for the place a little harder.

When I came back from Berlin this spring, my brother [[Johnny]] suggested, over coffee one morning, that Catherine and Oliver and I should just pick up and go to Berlin for the summer; little did he know that he idle suggestion proved the catalyst for exactly that.

Choosing to leave Prince Edward Island for the summer is, on many levels, completely absurd. It’s not hard to argue that the only time of the year that PEI is actually habitable by humans is from June through October, especially coming off the end of the winter-of-snow-ice-and-perpetual-illness.

We love summer on the Island. But you can’t spend the summer in two places at once, and so after 17 summers spent here, we’re going to take one summer off and beta test both living in Europe and living in a big city.

Catherine and I both have the benefit of being able to work anywhere (although Catherine’s artistic endeavours do make it harder to take all her gear – looms, sewing machines, easels, anvils – with her, so she has to be more improvisational). And Oliver, after years of intensive training-through-travel, is quite happy to pick up and leave home for his summer vacation. We’ve worked hard to forge this flexible life framework, and so this summer’s the time to take it out for a ride.

We land in Berlin on July 12 and are renting the same Kreuzberg apartment I stayed at in February through until August 18. I’m hot-desking at Betahaus to avoid the ergonomic hell of trying to work from the dining room table (and to afford the possibility of a work social life), have been in touch with the folks at Druckwerkstatt about using their letterpress for part of the summer, and Catherine is busy ferreting out all the radical craft laboratories in Berlin to try and carve out a space for herself (if you happen to run an anarchist weaving coop in Berlin, please get in touch!).

No summertime trip to Europe would be complete without a swoop up to Malmö, Sweden, so from August 19 to 26 we’re pickup up and relocating the operation, affording us an opportunity to spend some time with Olle and Luisa and Morgan and Jonas and, I hope, with Henriette and others on the Danish side. Morgan had made promise of crayfish, and Luisa of a craftmaking workshop in the countryside.

We’re back on the Island for the tail-end of summer; a week later Oliver starts school again, leaving us a week to cram in all the beach-going, seafood-eating activities we’d otherwise have several months for.

For all the years I’ve been involved with Prince Street School I’ve been hearing tales of these great, tears-streaming-down-cheeks assemblies that students put on throughout the year to do things like mark events and recognize volunteers.

Indeed I’d been receiving an invitation to come to the annual volunteer recognition assembly for the past few years, but I’d never made the time to do so (perhaps because I didn’t consider myself a real volunteer).

But this year I had a special task as the home and school association was recognizing teacher Philip Brown with the Teacher/Staff Appreciation Award. And so this afternoon at 1:00 p.m. I joined all of the real volunteers (like Shirley, who’s in the school every day helping kids learn how to read, or Dana who keeps hotdog day running, or Catherine, who’s always doing fun and interesting art projects with Oliver’s class) in the Prince Street gym for the assembly.

It turns out everything they say is true: the assembly was a panorama of heartfelt cuteness, with classes singing songs (including two versions of Thank you for being a Friend and a rendition of With a Little Help from My Friends that cleverly omitted the line “I get high with a little help from my friends”), slide shows of kids and volunteers, and various and sundry words of thanks to all the volunteers who work in the school throughout the year. Tears did indeed appear in the corners of my eyes.

And Philip Brown got recognized. Those of you who only know Philip from his role in municipal politics may not know how deeply involved he is in the life of Prince Street School; he truly does go above and beyond the call of duty, and it was good to be able to thank him for his efforts (no matter how you feel about Philip, you may welcome the opportunity to come to the Prince Street School Spring Fling next Friday from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m where you can take a try at plunging him into the dunk tank!).