Thanks to the kindness of [[Compass]] producer Tracy Lightfoot, here are some “behind the scenes” photos of Bruce Rainnie on set during the broadcast. Some interesting things (at least to me):

• Bruce is wearing jeans. I’d always assumed he was nattily dressed from head to toe. This is going to affect how I watch the news.
• The Darryl Sittler Wikipedia entry is open in Internet Explorer on the laptop.
• Bruce can see Boomer. I’d always wondered.

Thanks again to Tracy for sending these along via Twitter.

As an experiment, I’ve opened up a Reinvented Press Shop at Etsy.com to sell some of the items I’ve printed on the letterpress.

For those of us who follow Compass closely one of the great mysteries of life is the laptop that sits aside anchor Bruce Rainnie. What’s on the laptop? Does he use it to update Facebook during the breaks? Could we IM with Bruce when he has a spare moment? Or perhaps it’s just a dummy laptop that serves no function?

Alas these questions remain unanswered. But the laptop did have a larger-than-usual starring role in the closing seconds of last night’s broadcast:

Postscript

Some helpful tweets from Compass producer Tracy Lightfoot:

• LOL - you should ask me these things! it is on, he looks at it, and it shows the show lineup in case autocue goes down.
• one view has the title of the stories and the order, the other has the text. he can toggle back and forth.

You’ll also find a few “behind the scenes” photos of Compass on the Compass Facebook page.

The Prince Edward Island Department of Education released the Primary Mathematics Assessment results yesterday. These are the results of testing of students who were in Grade 3 in 2009-2010 and were tested on their mathematics skills in October 2010.

There were 1,295 students tested, and the results were as follows:

• met expectations: 68%
• approached expectations: 12%
• experienced difficulty: 20%

Here are three news headlines that resulted from the news release announcing the results, Results from Primary Math Assessments available online:

• Numbers add up for Grade 3 students and math testing: Currie
• Education minister pleased with math results
• Young Islanders meeting standards in mathematics

There was a similar story in Nova Scotia in 2008, reporting on that province’s grade 3 math assessment; in that case the headline on the CBC was Nova Scotia Grade 3 students struggle with math.

In that story the lede was “One-third of the children tested last year did not meet expectations in the province’s first Early Elementary Mathematical Literacy Assessment.” Which turns out to be almost exactly the same number of students “not meeting expectations” in Prince Edward Island’s assessment.

So in Prince Edward Island the minister is “pleased,” the “numbers add up” and students are “meeting standards” whereas, with the same result, in Nova Scotia student are “struggling” with math.

My problem, as a parent of a student in this group, is that I have no idea of who’s right on this: should I be pleased with the results, or concerned? Are our children being well-schooled in math or not? Do the results mean that 32% of 9 and 10 year olds in the province can’t add, or do they mean that 68% could go on to become mathematicians?

And this reveals the problem with standardized testing, especially when the results are wrapped in fuzzy words like “met expectations” that are useful for public relations but of little utility to parents. I remain unconvinced that there’s any utility at all in testing students like this, especially given the resources and attention that the testing takes away from actual education, and that the results can be spun to mean anything you want them to mean.

It seemed unconscionable to outfit [[Oliver]] with “store bought” Valentine’s Day cards this year, what with our own print shop standing at the ready. So this is the year said goodbye to Spiderman, Dora the Explorer et al and went completely DIY.

We started with setting Be my Valentine – a sincere but not overly goopy sentiment, I thought – in 18 point Dorchester:

I then broke out the can of Flame Red ink generously sent my way by Kwik Kopy, a colour that seemed tailor-made for the task at hand:

After experimenting with various paper colours and weights, we settled on an unexpected choice, the same bright orange I’d used last year to print some early business cards. Somehow it just seemed right. I ran Oliver through to to line of the card on the press so that the message printed in the right place, and then he got to printing:

Twenty-five pulls of the press later, we had cards that looked like this:

A snip to the top corners using my newly-acquired corner cutter, and a punch of a heart through the middle using my newly-acquired heart punch (a tool that, I admit, might get very little use outside of the pre-Valentine’s Day week):

And this is what we ended up with:

It was with some distress that I realized that I was shopping in the Martha Stewart section of Michael’s this morning: I think, technically, I may be, if not a “scrapbooker,” at least a “crafter.” Not that I have much of a rock and roll reputation to preserve going into this. I believe this might also qualify me as one of those over-achieving parents who helps their child construct a fully-working model of the Space Shuttle for science fair; I’ll have to work on this.

Happy Saint Valentine’s Day!

After a December that was almost completely free from snow, January and February have seen a good amount of it. Catherine has been working feverishly to keep the icicles and ice dams at bay (in 2001 we had to leave the house for a month because of the water damage that resulted from a combination of ice, snow and rain), so our house is in better shape than a lot of others.

Shoppers Drug Mart on Queen Street. Early on a frigid February night. I’m buying a box of tissues and a case of fudge popsicles, both in aid of my burgeoning cold. The counter at the checkout is covered with piles of receipts being organized by the cashier. A clerk is on the other side of the counter chatting with her.

Cashier: I can help you here. I’m trying to get organized, but I never will. It’s a strange night; is it a Full Moon?

Clerk: I don’t know. Maybe it’s a Lunar Moon?

Me (showing off): Aren’t all Moons Lunar Moons?

Clerk: I don’t know about that.

Cashier: No, I don’t know anything about that.

Clerk: Anyway, did you see the sparkles on her hands?

Cashier: When those women come over from the jewelry store – I know!

I have failed at showing off.

(Shoppers Drug Mart, by the way, is a major retailer of The Old Farmer’s Almanac in Canada)

I’ve long looked for an easy way to drop OpenStreetMap maps into another site, and although there are myriad “under the hood” ways of doing this none of them ever had the “embed” ease-of-use of sticking a Google Map on a page. But with CloudMade maps, it’s easy to generate embed code that you can paste anywhere, and the maps draw from the same OpenStreetMap data, so anything you edit there will show up on CloudMade. Here’s Charlottetown, for example:

I love timelines.

I’ve maintained my own timeline in the Rukapedia for the last 5 years and it’s proved an invaluable tool for helping me keep track of my personal history – where I’ve lived, how old I was, who I was dating – and for giving me visual sense of my own march toward mortality (I use the excellent EasyTimeline extension to MediaWiki to manage it).

My favourite timeline of late is Memolane, a web application that slurps in a selection of time and location feeds from sites like Twitter and Flickr and displays them in a very pleasant right-and-left-scrolling visual timeline. I find it interesting to see these disparate items laid next to each other, and I find it especially interesting to scroll left and explore my recent personal history. Memolane is the binoculars to my life-long timeline’s telescope (although, as I’ve just discovered – there’s a “macro navigation” bar at the bottom of the page – Memolane has slurped in 10 years worth of my life, which is pretty telescopic).

Memolane is in a closed beta right now, but if you sign up on the front page you’ll eventually get an invite code.

Being a corporation with employees, [[Reinvented]] has to file payroll summaries – T4s – with Canada Revenue before the end of February every year.

If memory serves correctly, in the first 12 years of our corporate existence I met this deadline, um, never.

But this year, I’m happy to report, it’s only February 6 and the the T4s are calculated and filed.

It’s hard to believe, as to file these electronically requires joining up two asynchronous events: the receipt of a “Web Access Code” from Canada Revenue in the mail sometime around the end of December and the actual use of this code to sign in to the T4 Web Forms website. Although it probably seems to digital bureaucrats that this is a simple filing exercise, it remains one of the most challenging bureaucratic duties of my usually just-in-time office lifestyle.

While it would be hard to describe the web application for filing T4s as intuitive – it’s essentially an electronic wrapper around a still-confusing paper-based process – Canada Revenue has made tiny improvements every year, to the point where it’s now at least usable. Indeed I went through the entire process in about 30 minutes for 3 employees.

Now, all I have to do is meet the RRSP deadline of March 1 and the GST filing deadline of March 31 and I’ll have a hat trick of filing perfection.