The Reinvented Inc. logo in metal, produced by The Augustine Company. Original design by Tom Hughes (whose original EPS file simply got converted to a PDF and emailed to Iowa).

The City of Charlottetown has a serviceable website with one fatal flaw: a very annoying video of Mayor Clifford Lee that’s forever popping up right when you’re looking for the telephone number for Public Works to tell them about drowning puppies or felled trees:

This is the kind of thing that gives the Internet a bad name, and the kind of thing that’s only looked upon kindly by those of a public relations bent (one can imagine the “wow, that would be cool” reactions when idea was proposed; there should have been a chaperone in attendance to ward this off).

Fortunately, what the web giveth, the web can easily take away. Here’s how you can make the tiny talking mayor permanently disappear, at least from Firefox:

1. Location your Firefox “Profile” directory – find help here.
2. Inside the directory, you should have a directory called chrome.
3. Inside that chrome directory, either create or edit a file called userContent.css and inside that file put this CSS.
4. Restart Firefox.

From there on in, you should forever be free of the tiny video mayor (should you ever have the desire to revisit the video, non-tiny-style, go here for a full-screen experience).

For a while there it looked like we’d be traveling to Tokyo instead of Germany this fall. Europe won out, but Tokyo’s still high on my list, and by way of experimenting both with the city and with what’s available on the iDevices Tokyo-wise, I bought the Wallpaper City Guide to Tokyo.

Populated with Wallpaper magazine content, it’s a useful way to get a quick overview of the city; here’s the “contents” screen:

My favourite aspect of the application is that rather than trying to be a comprehensive guide to Tokyo, it’s a highly-curated stripped-down guide to Tokyo. In a world where Google can tell us 785,000 places to rent a car in Tokyo, the simplicity of “just go to Mazda Rent-a-Car” is very, very appealing:

We’re moving from an era where we were prisoners of scarcity of information to an era where we’re prisoners of choice; I’m convinced that there’s an unfulfilled demand for opinionated niche travel advice, the kind of advice that says “if you like Frank Gehry, go and visit these 6 places” instead of “here are the 2,600 things to do in Paris this weekend.”

The first sentence of Anne of Green Gables printed on cotton fabric with an Adana Eight Five letterpress, using blue soy-based ink.

I use a modified Linksys WRT-54G wireless router as the heart of the Reinvented network here at HQ. It’s not an industrial strength router, but we’re not sending people to the Moon here, and it’s been pumping along just fine for 7 years.

Until last night at 8:00 p.m. when, for some unknown reason, it closed its pipe down to a trickle, effectively replicating dial-up bandwidth. The effects on the infrastructure here, which expects broadband, were somewhat chaotic, and as a result the mail stopped flowing, this website went offline, and a cascade of other less significant side-effects resulted from there.

It took some time to trace the problem back to the router, and all it took after that was a quick unplug/replug and the data started to flow strong and free once again.

With the exception of 178 Nagios messages in my inbox waiting for review – one of the weak points of the operation here is that the monitoring server is monitoring itself, and can’t send email out if something like this happens – all is back to normal.

Just another Saturday morning…

Somewhere – likely on the excellent BriarPress.org – I read that one way of obtaining ink to use with your letterpress is to ask local print shops for their “so little ink in the bottom of the can that we’re going to through it out” cans of ink. And so I did: I asked the personable Shawn at Kwik Kopy – you remember, Shawn – and he generously had the excess ink cans hanging around the shop rounded up for me.

It’s a motley collection of grungy-looking ink, but once you scrape off the think skin of congealed old ink off the top, there’s enough ink to keep me printing for the rest of my life. And so now I can print in colour! There’s several versions of red, a magenta, a very nice blue, and some colours I haven’t quite been able to identify yet.

With the new old ink burning a hole in my pocket, I just had to print something this afternoon, so, with the type I borrowed from Holland College on its way back next week, I decided to do a two-colour variation on the business card. Here’s the result:

The blue is an especially dreamy ink: it seems to print almost anything with rich dark luscious blueness. Here’s just the “peter” printed on a piece of canvas that [[Erin]] left in the shop so I could try printing on fabric:

It’s time now to start printing things that aren’t vanity items or Anne of Green Gables-related. My first real-world project will be printing the raffle tickets for the Prince Street School Christmas Raffle; we need 300 of them, so I’ll have tired arms when that job’s done. Maybe I’ll print them in purple!

Remember Thinglink? It started off as a “everything in the world gets its own unique ID” project focused on handmade items and has recently reinvented itself as a “tag stuff in photos” project that takes the Flickr “Add Note” idea and makes it embeddable.

Thinglink is not without its annoyances: the “draw a rectangle around the thing you want to tag” tool doesn’t seem to start drawing where you click; there are situations where the description and URL input box gets cropped out of view; it seems odd to define regions on the photo and have the end product end up with dots to indicate what you’ve tagged (the “workers answer phones” tag in the photo above, for example, was a rectangle encompassing all of the people around the table); and you can’t centre the photos you embed or the tags end up hovering over the wrong places on the photo.

But I’ve wanted something like this for a long time – I was tired of writing “to see the notes in the photo go to Flickr” – and Thinglink certainly does the job.

And there are some cool things about Thinglink beyond the basics. I like the fact, for example, that I can edit tags in-place where I’ve embedded a tagged photo:

And I like the statistics that Thinglink provides on its website about hovers and clicks over embedded tagged images:

I’m a little nervous about using Thinglink for Serious Work because of its corner-turning past – what did happen to all those unique ID numbers that got assigned to all those things? – but it’s a useful enough tool, with a dead-simple-enough UI, that I might be unable to contain myself.

I’ve been accumulating examples of letterpress printing, and needed a place to hang them, so I strung a length of twine between two hooks in my office, and hung them all up with binder clips, inspired in part by a method that Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. using on the wall of Gaspereau Press at their Wayzgoose.

[[Oliver]]’s school has large population of new immigrant students, and not all of their parents speak English. At the Prince Street Home and School we began to become concerned last year that because of this the activities of the association were excluding large numbers of parents from active participation.

And so, with the help of the PEI Association for Newcomers to Canada and the support and cooperation of the school’s principal, we’ve been working to address this.

Our first effort, a small, tentative one, was to have the invitation to our annual Spring Fling translated into as many languages as possible back in 2009 and again in 2010. We also started talking about how we could improve written communication to parents.

And then, after many years of Home and School meetings where parents would be outnumbered by teachers and staff, suddenly last month we had 30 parents show up for our first meeting of the year, many of them non-English speakers. We stumbled our way through the meeting, but I think everyone was conscious that not everyone could understand everything that was being talked about.

For this week’s meeting we arranged to have translators for Chinese and Bhutanese parents at the meeting (as a bonus, our Bhutanese translator pitched in to also translate into Hindi!).

It was a new experience for all of us, and we weren’t sure how it would work. But it did. Things went a little more slowly than usual, as we’d have small bits of presentation in English, then wait for it to be translated. But we all made our way, and I think there was a good feeling on everyone’s part at the end of the meeting that we’d done better this time.

The highlight of the meeting, from a practical perspective, was when one of the Bhutanese parents was able to bring forward an issue about a change in school bus drop off points and have it addressed by the principal.

And that’s what home and school is all about at its heart: addressing concrete, practical issues with the day to day life of our children at school.

Every year I know that spring has arrived when Dave Coffin arrives on the Island from wherever life has taken him over the winter.

And I know that autumn is upon us when I run into Eugene Sauve at Casa Mia and we talk about where his travels will take him over the winter. Today was that day; fall us upon us.