The fire insurance maps of Charlottetown from the early years of the last century – the maps I mentioned here last week – are some of my favourite maps of the city: they’re not only beautiful, but they’re packed with all sorts of information about buildings here and gone. The Island Imagined project at Robertson Library has made high-resolution scans of a set of these maps first created in 1903 and evolved, through patch-and-paste, through 1917, and you can view them all at IslandImagined.ca.

Jumping off from some experimenting I did with the 1878 panoramic view of Charlottetown a few years ago, I did some experimenting over the weekend with using Zoomify and OpenLayers to create an alternative way of viewing the maps. What I really wanted to get to was a way of being able to bookmark maps at specific locations and zoom-levels, so I could reference locations.

Like Spring Park Tannery or the Egg Warehouse or the Electric Light Station or the Round House.

So I started by grabbing each of the 20 fire insurance maps from IslandImagined at a zoom-level of 7, which results in a nice, large image about 7,000 pixels wide, like this:

wget -O fedoraimages/firemap-01.jpg \
  "http://137.149.200.109:8080/fedora/get/imagined:208604/ilives:jp2Sdef/getRegion?level=7"

Here’s a Bash script to do this automatically if you want to do it yourself.

This resulted in 20 large images that I then ran through the free-to-download Zoomify tile-creator, which resulted in 20 directories filled with tiled images.

At this point I could simply drop the Zoomify Flash component into any of the directories and have a Flash-based map viewing solution, like this one for the main index map to the fire insurance maps. This is certainly more usable than the IslandImagined viewer, but it relies on Flash and it doesn’t make for bookmarkable maps.

From there it was a simple matter of crafting (crufting?) some PHP code to create an OpenLayers-based viewer for the same tiles, which has the added features of creating an index page linking to all 20 maps and the ability to bookmark any of the maps at any zoom-level and position.

You can take a look at the resulting map viewer or grab the the PHP code here in github; it’s by no-means feature-complete, but I enjoy the map browsing experience, and I really like the ability to bookmark.

As announced on the Phoenix Medical Practice blog and acknowledged in a Health PEI news release, Charlottetown doctor Robbie Coull is shutting his medical practice, letting go his 14 staff, and leaving his 4,500 patients without a family doctor.

Dr. Coull showed up on my radar last fall: I was intrigued by some of the novel aspects of his practice, like publishing patient wait times on his website, operating a paperless office, and, perhaps most novel of all, expressing social policy ideas in public. It was clear the Dr. Coull was not your regular everyday Island doctor, and when I received an email from him in reaction to my blog post about his practice, I took the opportunity to suggest that we get together for a chat about his approach to medicine, health and technology.

Which is how, about a month ago, I ended up spending a very interesting afternoon with Dr. Coull and some of his senior staff, learning about how they view the world.

Suffice to say that they view the world in a decidedly “not like everyone else” kind of way.

There’s no denying that Dr. Coull is a bull in a china shop: he has strongly-held set of views about the right way to practice family medicine, and it’s a model that doesn’t seem to have much in common with the kind of medical care we’re all used to receiving.

The first thing you see when you enter his office, for example, is a fridge full of fresh vegetables, free for the taking by visitors. The waiting room itself is unusual: most medical waiting rooms on PEI are designed, it seems, by the same design firm that designs underground prisons. Dr. Coull’s waiting room is actually rather pleasant. There are couches. Lots of natural light. It’s the kind of place you wouldn’t mind hanging out for a while.

Beyond the technology, the vegetables, and the sunlit waiting rooms, however, lies this simple, radical notion, laid out in the practice’s Guide to Patients:

Health Starts With You
We want to work with you to keep you healthy. We can help you stay healthy with education, health promotion, screening, and monitoring.

The general attitude that pervades the health system on PEI, especially the consumer-facing end of it, is “you should count yourself lucky that we’re taking time out of our busy, overworked schedules to spend any time with you at all.”

The notion that a family medical practice should actually want to work with you to keep you healthy shouldn’t be a radical notion – you’d think it was the whole point – but the siege mentality that’s gripped the medical system for as long has anyone can remember has meant that, somehow, this basic idea seems unusual.

There are many passionate, caring practitioners working to keep us all healthy on PEI, and I’ve benefited from their efforts time after time.

On a systems-design level, however, it’s clear that they’re working a framework that hasn’t been significantly re-examined in several generations: a fee-for-service system that incentivizes illness, a customer service model that strips us all of our dignity more often than not, and a human resources model that places too much emphasis on physicians and not enough on the team backing them up.

I’ve no real idea whether Dr. Coull’s ideas about family medicine are the right ones for Prince Edward Island, and even if they are the right ideas I’ve no idea whether it’s even possible to install a brand new operating system on such an intractable and complicated organism. I suspect that that approach Dr. Coull takes to his practice won’t work for every patient.

But I do know that the three hours I spent with Dr. Coull and his staff are the only three hours I’ve ever spent on Prince Edward Island with a group of people who had thought so long and hard about a new way of doing things, who were so passionate about not only talking about it but about listening to others, and who had built constant re-examination and improvement into the very core of how they worked.

Dr. Coull likely doesn’t have all the answers for Prince Edward Island, but I suspect we’d be better off listening to him than casting him out as an irritant.

When I left our house at 100 Prince Street this morning Catherine was set to launch herself off on another day of spring cleaning – she’s got the kevorka for the flotsam this week, and as we’re thinking of letting out our house for the summer she’s going at it with extra verve.

Thirty minutes later I found myself in Casa Mia listening to DB relate the story of the late Eunice Reid’s mad dash to clean up the same house at the end of World War II in anticipation of the arrival home, after 6 years overseas, of her husband Brigadier Bill Reid (punchline: he showed up earlier than expected, and found her in mid-cleaning).

After toying with Google Tasks as a way of managing my life (or at least the parts of my life not already managed by Trac), today I’m experimenting with Remember the Milk, with hopes of finding, in its single-minded focus on task management, a more fulfilling solution.

After getting the iPad and iPod apps set up, getting the email-to-tasks chain flowing, the next task is getting (the excellent) Alfred app up and running for easy task entry from anywhere.

Here’s how I did it.

Step One: Install rumember

This is a handy command line Remember the Milk utility. Install as follows, from the command line:

git clone https://github.com/tpope/rumember.git
cd rumember
sudo gem build rumember.gemspec
sudo gem install rumember-1.0.0.gem

Run ru from the command line the first time and a browser will open Remember the Milk requesting permission to access the application; one you grant this once you don’t need to do it again. Once you’ve done this, you can test the utility from the command line like:

ru Setup Alfred for Remember the Milk

Step Two: Setup for Alfred

Open the Alfred Preferences window and click on the Terminal section:

Click on the + at the bottom of the list to add a new command, and enter the following:

• Title: Remember the Milk
• Description: Add a Remember the Milk Task
• Keyword: r (this can be anything you like – rtm or task… anything)
• Command: ru {query}
• Optionally, grab this official icon and drag it into the icon field.

And click Save:

Make sure you check the Silent checkbox beside your new command to prevent a Terminal window from opening when you access the command:

Step Three: Use It!

…results in:

I’ve only been a Remember the Milk user for a few hours now, but I’ve already upgraded to the $25/year “pro” level – partly just because I admired the gentle on-ramp provided for this, where everything works fine and dandy at the “free” level, but just works better once you pay up. I’ll report back in a few weeks on how I make out with it…

I have a selfish interest in the success of school breakfast programs: I want all the kids in my son Oliver’s class to start the day well-fed, because well-fed students are better learners, and a classroom full of well-fed students is easier to teach.  When everyone wins, everyone wins, in other words.

Both Prince Street School, where Oliver is in grade 4, and St. Jean School, just down the street, have active well-used breakfast programs. The programs, which work to provide a free healthy breakfast to any student at the school, are an important part of the life of the school, and while they receive financial support from many corners, always need more resources than seem to be available.

To this end, an ad hoc committee of teachers, staff, parents and members of the community-at-large are organizing a fundraising concert for Sunday, May 15 from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. at Murphy Community Centre in support of the Prince Street and St. Jean breakfast programs.

There’s a great line-up of performers, all of whom are donating their time:

• St. Jean Choir
• The Chaisson Family
• John Connolly
• Prince Street Rock Band
• Joey Kitson
• Patrick Ledwell
• Bridgette Blanchard
• The Blueprints

It’s an all-ages, family-friend concert and admission is by donation (you decide how much you can afford). The folks at Trinity United Church will be providing scones, tea and coffee at no cost. It promised to be an excellent way to spent a late Sunday afternoon. Please join us, and please spread the word!

Last week I learned that we spent $13,457.99 on electricity for our house at 100 Prince Street over the 11 years since July 2000, or about $1200 per year.

Today I asked Coop Energy, where we buy the oil that heats our house and our hot water, for a similar summary. What I learned was that from January 2002 to May 2011 we’ve consumed 37,989 litres of oil for which we’ve paid $26,258.23, or about $2900 per year.

That means that our total energy cost for our home is about $4,100 per year.

Coop Energy doesn’t have an online customer system yet, but they tell me that one is currently in the works.

From Island Imagined, a Robertson Library map-scanning project, here’s a page from the 1903 Fire Insurance Map of Charlottetown. Our house, at 100 Prince Street, is in the bottom-left corner in the 53rd block.

There’s city-wide map that acts as an index to the individual map pages; my favourite part of that map is the legend:

Back last September I had a new wrist brace cast by Barry MacKinnon at Island Orthotics. The first time I went to use it I found a fatal flaw that prevented it from working: the “squeegyness” of the newly-cast space-age material the brace was cast from preventing my wrist from easily gliding back and forth on my desk.

A quick call to Barry produced a quick solution: he told me to go and buy some baby power and dust the brace with it. I did this, and it immediately solved the problem (although it introduced a new “office smells like baby nursery” problem; I could live with that, though).

I recent months I’ve been noticing that my otherwise-amazing Apple Mighty Mouse wasn’t smoothly gliding about my desk as it used to, and I reasoned that the awesome power of baby powder might help here too, so I washed and thoroughly dried off the mousing area of my desk and then sprinkled a small amount – about 1/8th of a teaspoon – of baby power on the desk and swooshed it all about.

I’m happy to report that the mouse glides about as never before.

Oddly, I have no recollection of using baby powder on actual baby Oliver when he was young; perhaps we did and I wasn’t aware, or perhaps the maladies it cures were solved otherwise.

My meeting at Maritime Electric this week afforded me an opportunity to shoot a photograph of Prince Street from a new perspective. That’s our house, barely visible, on the left-hand side in the very centre of the photo.