[[Oliver]] is a big Archie Comics fan: every week he and [[Catherine]] trek over to Lightning Bolt Comics and pickup a selection of whatever is new (and there’s a surprising variety of “new” in the Archie universe, even today).

Yesterday morning Oliver told me excitedly that he’d found Wikipedia entries for all of the Archie characters, and sensing a teachable moment, as well as a way of indulging my recent obsession, I resolved that Saturday’s father-and-son project would be to make an Archie character reference book.

Here’s how we did it.

First we visited each Archie characters’ Wikipedia page (here’s Archie’s) and grabbed the picture of the character (like this one for Archie) and dragged them to the desktop of my Mac.

Next, we loaded up OmniGraffle an excellent Mac application for creating things like book pages, set the page size (File | Page Setup) to “Index card 3x5 in.” and the page orientation to “Portrait.” We then laid out each page, dragging in the characters one by one and changing the text for their names.

We printed out each page on 3” by 5” index cards from Staples on the HP PSC 2355 inkjet printer in my office. Forty-five minutes later, we had a nice collection of characters ready for binding together into a book:

Next we stacked the cards together, in order of importance to the franchise (as selected by Oliver; Archie came first, and there was some discussion about whether Betty or Veronica should come next and it ultimately fell to me to pick Betty), spread some regular everyday white glue (Martha Stewart brand, only because it was the cheapest, purchased at Michaels) over the top edge and clamped the resulting stack to dry with binder clips:

We waited a few hours for the glue to dry and used the wait to go for lunch and to pop up to The Scrapbook Studio to buy some cover stock (they’re super-friendly there, and their prices for card stock are cheaper than Michaels).

Following the process outlined by Hamish MacDonald in his Perfect Binding episode of DIY Book we cut, scored and folded a piece of purple card stock around the stack of index cards, glued, and clamped again with binder clips to dry:

An hour later, we had a real book, ready for action:

I’m just amazed at how the previously mysterious world of bookbinding has peeled open to me over the past 24 hours.  If you’d asked me last week how books were held together I probably would have suggested that it was a combination of magic, spelt and unicorn mane-thread; to have learned that it’s really just glue (at least for perfect-bound books) was a huge revelation. So today I’ve been stealing away into the letterpress shop between conference calls and programming jobs to make tiny sample books. Here’s one I made using the powerful “shoots through up to 25 pages!” stapler that [[Johnny]] got me for my birthday, with a card-stock cover glued on.

Sushi Jeju, the remotest of Charlottetown’s new crop of Asian restaurants, has reopened after a winter break with a new, broader focus on Japanese, Korean and Indian food. Today was their first day open, and they were a little swamped, but handled it all with good humour. [[Oliver]] and I enjoyed a lunch special of miso soup, spicy noodles, and a bento box of chicken (beef for Oliver), rice, salad and tempura. All very tasty. They’ll be gradually rolling out the new menu over the days to come, and will soon be serving Indian tea. Open 11:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. seven days a week (closing at 9:00 p.m. on Sunday); located beside the Best Western on Grafton Street in Charlottetown.

Earlier in the week I put out a call on Twitter for pointers to book-binding intelligence on Prince Edward Island; I’ve been loaned a collection of letterpress cuts and want to experiment with printing them and making some sort of book from the result.

Almost immediately came a pointer to Hamish MacDonald, and expatriate Islander living in Scotland.

Wow.

Among (many) other things, Hamish is the producer of the DIY Book podcast which is about as wonderful a resource as you could ever hope to find if you’re someone in my position: a common-sense introduction to writing, printing and hand-producing your own books. Episode 17, for example, is a video episode titled “Perfect Binding (Or as Close as We Can Get)” and it’s a simple step-by-step walk through the process of making paperbacks.

MacDonald is a born presenter: calm, witty, and understanding of the position of a complete beginner to the process, filling in just the right about of detail and yet moving things along at a compelling clip.

I had no choice to but to rush out to Michaels last night and buy some white glue (Martha Stewart brand!) and some cover stock, and I glued up my first book this morning, a simple “blank book” with a bumpy blue cover and pink insides:

I had an eBay shipment to get out yesterday after work. Knowing that the Canada Post office would be closed, I headed for the Shoppers Drug Mart on Queen Street, as its post office outlet is open until 9:00 p.m. When I arrived at the counter there was a hand-written sign on the cash register instructing me to ask for more information at the cash desk, with no post office staff in sight. I asked a cashier for help and she went looking around and reported back 5 minutes later that the postal staff was “on dinner break and would be back in 30 minutes.”

Because the post office was closed, I wasn’t allow to buy things that the post office sells; this included packing tape, which was all I really needed to send off my pre-paid parcel. Fortunately I was able to buy a roll of packing tape “from Shoppers Drug Mart”, 10 feet away.

Frustrated, I ranted a little on Twitter as was then impressed that, unbidden, the official @ShopprsDrugMart (an handle cursed by Twitter’s field-length limitations) sent me a reply. I’m not sure whether any practical change will result from this, but it’s nice to know that Shoppers is at least paying attention.

Another thing I’ve leaned about wind energy: when the output of a wind farm is expressed as, say, “30 MW,” that means that the combined output of the turbines has a theoretical maximum of 30 megawatts. Which is to say that on a perfectly windy day with all the turbines operating at perfect efficiency a 30 MW wind farm would be generating 30 MW of electricity. Of course perfectly windy days are few and far between, so the output of a 30 MW wind farm is more often than not less than 30 MW.

Setting that aside, here’s how the economics of the publicly-owned Eastern Kings Wind Farm work: Maritime Electric has a contract to purchase all of the energy the wind farm produces at a fixed price indexed to the consumer price index. Currently they pay $78 per megawatt hour (a megawatt hour being 1 MW of energy for one hour). So on a hypothetical perfect day the return to the public purse (not accounting for paying down the capital costs of the wind farm) would be:

30 MW x $78 x 24 hours = $56,160

And in a hypothetical perfect year – all wind, all the time – the farm would return $20,498,400. In reality, because reality is less than perfect, the return is less than that – electricity sales were last reported at $8.2 million/year. Here’s the summary of the Eastern Kings Wind Farm from the last annual report of the PEI Energy Corporation:

An objective for this year was to improve turbine availability at the East Point Wind Plant, and thus increase electricity production from the facility. This was accomplished. Despite replacing all ten gearboxes, machine availability improved to 89.4% as compared to 81.0% in the previous year. This increase in availability resulted in a 10% rise in energy sales, from 78,738 Megawatt-hours in 2008-09 to 86,779 Megawatt-hours. The only other major disruptions were the repair of switch gear in a turbine and the replacement of all three blades on another turbine.

A 30 MW wind farm has 262,800 (30 MW x 24 hours x 365 days) theoretical megawatt hours of energy it can generate, meaning that in 2008-2009 the farm was operating at 33% of “perfection.”

My grandparents died at 34, 82, 83, and 84.

My great-grandparents died at 38, 46, 69, 72, 78, 82, 85 and 86.

My great-great-grandparents – the ones I know about – died at 30, 39, 61, 69, 77, 80, 82, 85, 90, and 97.

Any way you slice it, I’m likely more than halfway to death today (perhaps I should start counting down rather than up). Which is less a depressing realization than it is a call to action: so much to do. And, hey, I’ve already outlived four of them, which is presumably the whole point.

It’s pretty amazing to consider the lives of all of those ancestors, each of whom had the good graces to not die before they spawned a new generation. So today I tip my had to them.

Last night after I posted the video I shot of Tim Hortons falling to the wrecking ball I got an email from CBC’s Donna Allen asking if it would be okay to use a snippet on [[Compass]] tonight. I wrote back “sure,” and this morning I got a call from Compass reporter Brian Higgins to work out the details. I uploaded the raw QuickTime file from the iPod for Brian, but from the look of the clip that got included it seems maybe he fell back on “plan B” and just shot Vimeo playing on a PC. My favourite part of the entire exercise is that [[Oliver]]’s voice got included in the clip:

My friend Ian Scott dropped around this afternoon with a wonderful loan: a collection of letterpress cuts from Prince Edward Island. There’s everything from a Kirkwood Motel logo to a signatures of various people long-gone. I printed a few this evening to send to Ian as a thank-you, and the favourite of those that I pulled out is this one:

If only for documentary purposes, I’d like to make archival prints of all of the cuts – there must be a few hundred at least – so I’ve got a new letterpress project ahead of me.