Last March when [[Oliver]] and I came to Berlin we happened upon the Kreuzberg Museum, a delightful little museum of a Berlin neighbourhood. On the first floor of the museum is a working letterpress print shop, and it was there that I got my first taste of letterpress printing. It seemed only appropriate, thus, that after a year spent delving into printing, on this visit to Berlin I should return to the scene of the crime and do some actual printing there.

Forces coalesced to make this possible: my friend Igor generously sent himself out as an advance team last month and established that such an endeavour might be possible, and then he and I returned yesterday to seal the deal.  The printer was extremely accommodating, agreeing to let an unknown Canadian of no demonstrable skill loose in his print shop.

And so this morning my friend Luisa – also in town for Cognitive Cities – and I took the 10 minute walk from my apartment to the print shop, made our introductions, choose a typeface and a nice, solid old German platen press, and set out to do some printing. The printer was around to help if we needed it, but mostly let us fumble our way along; fortunately printing in German on a German letterpress isn’t a lot different than printing in English on a British letterpress.

My goal was to produce a set of German “flash cards” for Oliver – two cards printed with each word to allow him to play a memory game and, with luck, to learn the meaning of the words. It was a labour-intensive project, as it involved setting type and printing 20 individual words. Fortunately Luisa, a quick study, was a great help all the way through (she managed to print business cards for herself and her partner while she was at it), and four hours later we emerged with the memory game set and printed. It was the most fun I’ve had in a long time.

The type I choose was a very pleasant, heavy 20 pt. serif face; I printed on a a package of “karteikarten” I bought on Tuesday night around the corner at a Kreuzberg paper store for 1.95 EUR. Here’s the story in photos:

I’ve had a very pleasant day in Berlin, starting with a hearty breakfast purchased last night at a nearby health food store. Spent the morning in Mitte buying magazines and paper, had lunch with Igor and the Third Wave Crew at a Korean chicken place in Kreuzberg, dropped by the Kreuzberg Museum with Igor as translator to set up a letterpress session for tomorrow morning, headed out to see Martin Z. Schröder letterpress shop in the afternoon and finished up with some more paper shopping before heading home (the quality and number of Berlin’s stationery stores is mind-boggling; I could spend all day every day browsing through them). Here’s the day in three photos (hover over them for notes and links).

I’m putting this here simply so that future versions of myself – or other English-speaking travelers in Germany – can refer to it.

So you’ve got yourself a Vodafone CallYa pre-paid SIM card in Germany – easy and cheap to pick up at any Vodafone outlet in the country (when I went looking for one last March they were having a 5-for-1 sale, so I have five German mobile numbers working in rotation for a time). And you need to recharge your account now that you’ve extinguished its initial value. But how?

I tried many times, in vain, to recharge online at Vodafone.de – it seems like it’s actually not possible. In theory you can buy a CallNow scratch card from kiosks, but that’s not always convenient or lingually possible.

Fortunately there’s a solution: aufladen.de. From that site you can purchase online, in English, a 15 or 30 Euro “top up code” by credit card that gets delivered to you by email and can then be entered on the phone by calling Vodafone’s 22922 line.

I did this today, and it worked as expected, with the following caveats:

• I appeared to need a German address, at least when paying by credit card: I kept getting an error message about a missing postal code when I used my Canadian address. I ended up using the address of my temporary Berlin apartment and the transaction processed without further problems.
• It’s possible that when you dial 22922 you’ll get messaging only in German. To switch your Vodafone language to English. press 4 and then 2; all future calls will then be in English.
• The code took about 3 minutes to arrive by email; be patient.

I still haven’t quite figured out how to tell what CallYa plan I’m signed up for and what the rates are: all I know is that an afternoon of occasional data and SMS use comes out to about 1 EUR of charges, which seems reasonable to me.

I’m off to Berlin tomorrow for a week of respite, renewing ties with old friends, and, at the end of the week, the Cognitive Cities Conference, which is shaping up to be an interesting weekend of ideas about urbanism, design and technology.

For old time’s sake I’ve resurrected my old Plazes account – yes, Plazes is still there chugging away silently – and with that, and Twitter and Google Latitude you’ll have a hard time not knowing exactly where I am and what I’m doing at any given time.

I’m staying in an apartment cum furniture showroom from VitaminBerlin on Graefestraße 10 in Kreuzberg.  Off to Berlin via Toronto and Munich on Air Canada tomorrow afternoon; back via Munich and Montreal on February 28th (travel details here).

Take care of the Island for me while I’m gone (and Happy Islander Day!).

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.