A Saturday afternoon father-and-son letterpress experiment.

I’ve been involved with the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust, in one capacity or another, for more than a decade. Our non-profit group is working to preserve a stretch of coastal agricultural land stretching from French River to Sea View, Prince Edward Island free from development in perpetuity, leaving it without development pressures so that it can continue to be farmed as it has since the time of L.M. Montgomery and before.

The “crown jewel” of this stretch of coastline is a property variously known as “The Sims Farm” and “The Ash Property” depending on how hold you are; it’s a 135 acres that sits at the end of the Cape Road near New London Lighthouse. In this one undeveloped property you can experience almost everything that makes the Island’s north shore so special, from sandy beaches to towering cliffs, green fields, forests and rolling hills. It is a truly remarkable property. And, as such, it’s been our wish at the Land Trust that it be preserved as it is for future generations to enjoy.

This proved to be a harder, more time-consuming task than you might imagine: the property was owned by non-residents from the U.K. and between us and them were several layers of lawyers. Just making contact took several years, and getting to the point where the property might be sold took a few more. Several years ago the owners decided to test the property market and asked for expressions of interest from those who might purchase and possibly develop the property; without knowing what sort of response they might get, we made it clear that we wanted to work with them to preserve rather than develop the land if at all possible.

Working over the last two years, at long last we were able to come to an agreement to purchase the property from the owners at its appraised value; we arranged for a collateral mortgage to help us pay for the property, attached a non-development covenant to the deed to ensure its preservation, and today we’re happy to announce that the Land Trust has finally concluded the purchase and ensure that this breathtaking piece of the Island will be preserved.

Of course now the really hard work starts: raising the money to pay for the property, and its neighbours, which together we are calling “The L.M. Montgomery Seashore.” While it’s a Herculean task, we’re fortunate to have Hon. Marion Reid and Bill Andrew acting as our Campaign Co-Chairs, and a capable group of directors backing them up.

Here’s a video feature Hon. Marion Reid that the Land Trust prepared; watch it to get a taste of the coastline I’m talking about.

If by chance you happen to feel as passionately about this part of Prince Edward Island and its preservation as I do, and are able to contribute to this effort, please get in touch!

So I’ve been looking at my own transaction information with Maritime Electric, pulled using the code I posted yesterday and here are some of the things I’ve learned:

• Over the last 11 years we’ve paid $13,457.99 for electricity for our home in total.
• The most we’ve ever paid for a month’s worth of electricity is $202.68 in February, 2003. That was the winter of a very bad series of winter snow and ice storms that caused ice build-up on our roof; one way we tried to mitigate the damage was with heating cables on our roof, which we ran pretty-well full-time for a month.
• Later in the spring of 2003 we were in Spain from May 3 to 17, 2003; our bill for the month covering that period was only $21.13, the lowest bill we’ve ever had (which isn’t quite as “we used almost nothing” as it seems because we’d paid an “estimated bill” the month before of $148.34 which was presumably inflated by the expectations our February demand placed on the amount).
• We use more electricity in February (average of $114/month) than in any other month; in June our average usage ($68/month) is almost half of that.
• I consider myself a pretty “pay my bills on time” kind of guy most months, but I’ve managed to accumulate almost $100 in interest charges due to late payments over the last 11 years.
• We contributed just over $700 to the Green Power Program that started in 2001 (I cancelled our contribution back in August; I figure wind power has enough legs to stand on its own now).

My next logical step after discovering the treasure-trove of data available to customers in Maritime Electric’s customer portal was to create a simpler way of pulling that information out of their website and into a format that’s easier to analyze and visualize.

In an ideal world there would be a Maritime Electric API that would allow me to do something like:

wget http://data.maritimeelectric.com/transactions.xml

But there’s not. So some scripted login voodoo, followed by some screen-scraping voodoo, is required to pull the data off in a useful format.

And so that’s what I did. Over at GitHub you can grab the code and, assuming you’re on a suitably-equipped computer (a Mac works well for this with nothing additional to install), you can turn your complete Maritime Electric transaction history into a CSV file, suitable for import into a spreadsheet, in one easy step. Here’s a quick step-by-step:

1. Grab a ZIP file of the latest pei-energy code.
2. Unzip the resulting file, which will be named something like reinvented-pei-energy-2bec180.zip.
3. From the command line, move to the maritime-electric/transactions folder inside the code you just unzipped.
4. From the command line, issue the following command, substituting the email address and password you use to login to the Maritime Electric Customer Portal:

php maritime-electric-dump.php email password

The result will be a file, in your home directory, called maritime-electric-accounts.csv that lists the service addresses attached to your account, and one file, named [account-number].csv, for each service address containing the complete transaction history for that address.

You can then load those files into any old spreadsheet application to search, sort and visualize the data:

Sometimes the companies you do business with surprise you. Today it was Maritime Electric. I had a meeting there today, part of my search for open data of Prince Edward Island energy generation and usage (more on that later), and when I got back to my office I went looking for something on the company’s website and stumbled across their customer portal. I’d seen it before, but found nothing there to entertain or delight me.

Today, though, I noticed the “Transaction History” column on the main page for our accounts, and by chance I clicked on the green dollar sign – I’d likely seen it there on earlier visits, but didn’t realize it led anywhere:

What I was shown when I clicked there was a list of the transactions on that account. Given what I’ve found on other similar web-based customer information sites, I expected the transactions to go back only a few months or, at most, a few years (my Credit Union, excellent in other ways, only lets me see back one year). I noticed, however, an option to see All transactions at the top of the report:

And to my surprise what I was given when I selected that option was, indeed all the transactions on our house account since the day we turned on service in July of 2000. Everything. From there it was an easy cut-and-paste from my web browser into a spreadsheet, a sort by line item type, selection of the “Bill” type, and insert a chart to see 11 years worth of monthly electricity bills graphed:

If you’re a Maritime Electric customer – and if you live on Prince Edward Island outside of Summerside, you are, unless you’re completely off the grid – you have access to the same data for your own accounts.

We all complain so much about how little data the companies in our life provide us with access to (okay, well at least I do) that it’s nice to find an surprising example like this.

Our most expensive month ever? A bill for $202.68 from February 2003. The month leading up to that bill was a dreadful month for ice and snow in Charlottetown, to the point where we had heating wires installed on our roof that we ran almost full time (regardless, there was so much damage to the house that we had to leave for more than a month while repairs were done, thankfully covered by our insurance).

The other thing I learned from the data: we’ve contributed more than $700 to the “Green Power Program” that Maritime Electric launched with the PEI Energy Corporation to fund the development of wind power.

Update: I’ve written up some PHP code, that you can grab here, to pull this transaction data from Maritime Electric and turn it into CSV files ready for analysis.

I’m still not entirely certain who I’m going to vote for in tomorrow’s Federal General Election here in Canada, but the suddenly seemingly-realistic prospect of an NDP minority government got me thinking about my father’s mother Nettie.

My great-grandfather, her father, was the manager of a coop grocery store in Fort William; he was Ukrainian immigrant who came to Canada to escape the harsh conditions of his homeland. Nettie worked hard all her life, not only raising my father, but working as a waitress, small business owner and doing factory work.

As a pre-condition of work at her first job, at The Hoito restaurant, under the Finnish Labour Temple in Fort William, she was made to join the Finnish Communist Party. In retirement she worked tirelessly on behalf of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants in Brantford, Ontario, helping them deal with the bureaucracy by making phone calls and writing letters on their behalf.

All her life she was very much on the proletariat side of the capitalist equation, and any rabblerouserness in me can be traced, directly or through my father, back to her.

All of which is to say that, genetically and circumstantially, Nettie was a natural New Democrat, and, indeed, I never heard her express any preference for any other political party.

Nettie’s last paying job was as an NDP scrutineer on election day sometime in the 1970s. It was the only Canadian Pension Plan-eligible earnings she every made, which meant that her retirement income from the CPP was less than $1.00 a month, something the absurdity of which delighted her.

If by some miracle Jack Layton emerges from all this as Prime Minister, Nettie, in whatever after-life she chose for herself, will be pleasantly amazed and delighted.

You may recall that about a month ago I mentioned that Ian Scott had dropped around with an amazing collection of letterpress “cuts” to lend me. These are logos, maps, photos and other non-type items used in letterpress printing – basically what File | Insert Image does in a word processor these days, but a lot more work to create. They look like this:

This week an order of 200 chipboard coasters arrived, an order I’d placed a few weeks ago from a kind American I connected with on BriarPress.org. These are thick enough to be quite forgiving to the novice printer, and to accommodate any irregularities in the cuts, and proved an excellent medium for running some prints of Ian’s collection.

Here are the results of an afternoon’s worth of experimenting; what you don’t see are the experiments that didn’t work: some of the cuts had warped over the years, or were too caked with corrosion, others were too big or too small or just didn’t print well.

I love this on so many levels, perhaps most of all because these cuts haven’t been printed for so long, and so putting them on a press and bringing to life again is sort of like time travel. Or waking up the dead.

Life for CBC reporter Rosemary Barton, and everyone else covering the federal NDP campaign, has gotten a lot more interesting this week, as the campaign has had the elusive kavorka of “the big mo’ ” delivered upon it. At the beginning of this election covering the NDP must have seemed a lot like covered the Western School Board, and certainly there was no hint of momentum when things started. How things change:

Whether the so-called NDP surge is an illusion or reality doesn’t really matter any more: momentum is like a toggle switch, and once you got it, it feeds itself. As a significant stumbling block for the NDP in past elections has been the “I’m with them, but I’d be wasting my vote” argument, having momentum – the chance of something big – is like magic fairy dust for the campaign in a way that wouldn’t ever be possible for other federal parties.

Watching The National last night the NDP momentum was a study in this: “the rise of the NDP could take Canada into uncharted territory … so much for the uneventful campaign, what’s really happening out there … is it possible to blunt a last-minute surge” were the opening lines to the broadcast and the first five minutes were all-NDP-all-the-time. The Liberals didn’t get much mention until 6:30 minutes in, and the Conservative story, at 7:00, focused on Prime Minister Harper’s defense of Canada’s export of asbestos, which isn’t exactly a barn-burner of an issue outside of, say, Asbestos, Quebec.

All of which called to mind “The Big Mo’ ” from the (fictional) Vinick vs. Santos campaign on The West Wing and the episode “Message of the Week”:

My friend Alan, personable owner of Hearts and Flowers in Charlottetown, invited me to speak to his regular Wednesday morning “breakfast club” this week. The club, which meets for breakfast every morning at the Rodd Royalty hotel, is an interesting cross-section of Charlottetown businesspeople; it’s a testament to how small a place this is that around the table were the guy who sold me my life insurance, the guy I get my auto insurance from, and someone whose son I once hired.

They meet to socialize, talk about business, and generate “leads,” the later a concept that, thank goodness, I’ve a stable enough client base to be completely unfamiliar with.

I joked with them that I’d always suspected there was a secret cabal meeting in a hotel that actually ran the city; while I was exaggerating, I’d imagine that with the collected knowledge and resources of the people around that breakfast table you could get an awful lot done.

Alan asked me to come in and speak for 20 minutes about “what it is that I do,” a notion that threw me into a temporary existential crisis – what do I do? do I actually do anything? I managed to pull out a common thread joining together enough of the things that I do to turn into a 20 minute encapsulation, boiled down to its essence in this infographic:

Although the slides for my talk won’t make a lot of sense without the witty banter overlaid on top of them, here they are for posterity.

The breakfast clubbers asked some good questions, I enjoyed a cup of luke-warm hotel coffee, and by 9:00 a.m. I was on my way back to the office.

There’s a lot to love about Sushi Jeju, the Korean-Japanese-Indian restaurant you’ve never been to located next to the Best Western on Grafton Street in Charlottetown, including a fantastic new Indian Fried Rice dish on the menu that took my breath away.

But my favorite part of tonight’s meal was at the very end when the chef said, as we were on our way out the door, “we’ll see you again on… Wednesday.” Marketing through pre-ordination? Careful observation of my restaurant habits? Whatever you call it, like the fried rice, it’s a new sort of flavor for Charlottetown.

Highly recommended..