We landed back in Charlottetown late of Friday afternoon after an arduous but uneventful trip from Munich (9 hour flight to Philadelphia, 5 hour layover, 2 hour flight to Halifax, overnight in Halifax, drive home to Charlottetown). We’re slowing getting ourselves back into our home time zone, although Oliver woke up at 4:00 a.m. this morning so he obviously didn’t get the memo.

Lots to tell about our adventures in the days to come; stay tuned. In the meantime, I rebuilt the router that connects this site to the world; I think everything’s working correctly, but if you can’t see this page, then something is wrong (oops, there’s a paradox there).

Caught a bus in a dark alley in Mestre — the land-side of Venice — and 4 hours later we were in Ljubljana with 4 inched of snow on the ground.

Overnight at the crazily modern City Hotel and then picked up a rental car from Sixt and drove over the snowy mountains to balmy Croatia. First destination was Slavonski Brod, in the east, where a chance email last week from a Rukavina with a son named Oliver was enough to pull us in. We had a wonderful afternoon (The Other Oliver had purchased two of all of his favourite sweets, one for each Oliver) and learned much about modern Croatia.

Today we are in search of my grandfather’s sister Manda; she has moved into a nursing home since my father and I were here in 2004 and we know from our Peruvian cousin roughly where this is. Later in the day we’re off to my grandfather’s hone town to find another aunt and perhaps to find the home where he was born. There are at least 2 Canadian expats there, so we may have some help.

Monday it’s up to Zagreb and Tuesday to Munich.

What greeted us at the end of the street here in Venice this moring, high tide time in Venice:

Our street itself was dry, and the worst of it for our walk to the train station was hoisting Oliver into my arms and walking through about 10 metres of ankle-deep water, otherwise we saw a lot of knee-deep water on side-streets as we walked, and ended up on the raised platforms that are put out for flood tides on busy streets for a few blocks.

Catherine left the house 60 minutes later and what was ankle-deep water for us was knee-deep water for her and she had to wait half an hour until the water subsided enough to make her way.

Venice is sinking.

Networking on borrowed time, and with no apostrophes, so here is the prose poetry version of our trip to Europe so far: sunny drive to Halifax, painless pre-clear of US customs, US Airways to Philadelphia on time and pleasant, 4 hour layover made less seeming so by the myriad distractions of PHL. US Airways to Munich on time and pleasant (I watched Cyrus, which I recommend… Catherine watched The Jones, Sorcerers Apprentice and Grownups, none of which she recommends) and we even got a bit of sleep.

Arrived Munich bright and early Saturday morning (very nice, spacious airport) and had coffee outside, despite frigid temperatures. Caught train downtown and found Oliver a Nintendo DS euro-charger (our second) at Karstadt. Caught the train to Ulm (sleek ICE train) and then from there the train to Basel (non-sleek milk run with 30 degree cabin but stunning views of Lake Constance that made up for it).

Arrived Basel in a snowstorm so caught a taxi to the wrong city instead of walking (it turns out that many surrounding communities have a “Basel Street”). Found right city with help of patient taxi driver (Saint Louis) and delighted in our location 50 feet from the Swiss-French border. Hungry and tired so walked across the street and had Mongolian grill, which was filling and exciting because the “grill” was on the table between us.

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday in Basel. Paper Museum was great and interactive and everything I ever dreamed it would be: made paper, set type, printed, sealed, quill-pen-wrote. Christmas Market an unexpected highlight: ate two suppers there just because it was cheap and fun and of wide variety (raclette, fondue, pizza, crepes, and lots and lots of mulled wine). Vitra Design Museum, across the Rhine in Germany but an easy 20 minute bus ride, was just absolutely amazing: picture an IKEA, but without all the cheap disposable stuff, and located in buildings designed by the great architects of the world (Gerhy, Hadid, Siza, Herzog & de Meuron). The Hadid fire station was, perhaps, the most interesting building I have ever been inside. (Hint if you visit: take the 2 hour architectural tour - very, very worthwhile).

We split up today: Catherine and Oliver to the Kunstmuseum Basel for the art, me to the public library to slave over work at 6 CHF an hour using their Internet terminals to solve technical issues back home (equal parts annoying and thrilling; technical issues were solved, so ultimately satisfying).

Flew easyJet from Basel to Venice after supper tonight (quick and painless; a nice trend this trip), took a 30-minute water bus ride to the stop nearest our rental apartment and were met by the owner at the dock. Chilly 5-minute walk to the apartment, a once-over of all the systems, and we were on our own. Catherine and Oliver put laundry in and went to sleep right away, but I could not contain myself so I took a walk through the streets and bridges from here to the train station just to get the feel (hint: mind blown).

Venice for three days, then on to Croatia via Ljubljana for the weekend.

We’re off at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning, [[Catherine]], [[Oliver]] and I, to fly to Munich by way of Halifax and Philadelphia. It’s a late fall vacation; maybe too late for crisp fall weather, but a vacation nonetheless.

Munich is the destination simply because that’s where U.S. Airways would fly us most cheaply in continental Europe closest to my current obsessions.

From Munich we immediately hop on a train for Basel (obsession) where we spend three days, then fly to Venice (another economic decision: 75 EUR for the three of us, taxes included) for three days (obsession, with likely some art on the side for others’ obsessions), then take the bus to Ljubljana (it’s surprisingly hard to cross from Italy to Slovenia and this was the handiest way) where we’ll overnight and then rent a car and head down into Croatia to look up some long-lost relatives (somehow navigating through the fact that we speak no Croatian and they no English) before coming back to Ljubljana, and taking the train back to Munich. The end of the trip is 2 days in Munich before we fly home on December 9.

It’s certainly not “slow travel,” and it’s the first time in a while that all three of us have traveled together.

I may pop in here on occasion; my new-fangled SIM card from Telestial claims to be able to automatically update this Travel Journal with our current location once a day and I’ll likely be unable to keep myself from tweeting from time to time.

Of all the projects I’ve had a hand in over the years, my absolute favourite is My Local Almanac, a “make your own Old Farmer’s Almanac” application that’s available for sale on Almanac.com.

My Local Almanac had its roots in conversations many years ago with my friend and colleague the late John Pierce, Group Publisher of the Almanac – John was the project’s cheerleader, and it was his enthusiasm for it, along with the patience of Almanac staff who walked me through the data itself, that got me through the many and varied complicated bits from concept to product.

The printed Old Farmer’s Almanac is a wonderful analog tool, but its one limitation is that, because its tabular material is produced for a single geographic location per edition (Boston, Atlanta, San Francisco and Halifax for the U.S. National, Southern, Western and Canadian editions respectively), to be able to find the sunrise, or the next high tide or other information for other locations requires using the look-up tables at the back of the book.

While this need to do a conversion isn’t necessarily a bad thing – some would say it’s part of the fun of using the Almanac, and it’s certainly educational – it doesn’t make the publication as useful as it might otherwise be.

Enter My Local Almanac: we take a location you enter – either a ZIP or postal code or a city and state or province – and create a 13 month customized set of tables fit specifically for that location that we deliver to you as a PDF file. Take a look at this sample, for Dublin, NH for this month (click the image for a larger version):

Comparing this to the information you’ll find for November 2010 for Boston – the location you’d have data for if you bought the national edition of the Almanac – you’ll find that while the sun rises at 7:17 a.m. on November 1 in Boston, it rises at 7:22 a.m. in Dublin.

To find that out in the printed Old Farmer’s Almanac you’d first look at what we call the “left-hand calendar pages” for November 2010 and find the day in question:

Then, noting the “Rise Key” value of D beside the time of 7:17, you’d turn to page 236 where you’d find the nearest town to Dublin, in this case Keene, NH, and find the conversion under column D, in this case +5 minutes:

You’d then take 7:17 and add that 5 minutes to get 7:22.

It works. But having a My Local Almanac means you can skip that calculation and have information for your location right in front of you.

Behind the scenes of this product there’s a whole lot going on.

First, we’re using Drupal and Ubercart to power the Almanac.com General Store; when you enter your location when purchasing the product we take that information and save it and then, when you complete the purchase, we have some hooks that trigger the generation of your customized PDF file.

The PDF-generating magic is done on a dedicated server that takes the location you entered, converts it into a latitude and longitude, and then produces the data for each column for each data of the current and following 12 months. As you might imagine, making this all work required learning a lot about astronomy and astrology, and that afforded me the opportunity to work with both the Almanac’s own astronomer and its astrologer, fascinating people in completely different but obviously overlapping disciplines. Some of the calculations are done in PHP, some in Perl.

Once all the data calculations have been made, we use the (excellent) PDF-creating PHP class from New Zealand to burn the PDF files; once we have all 13 PDF files created we merge in a custom title page, a guide to the data, and end up with a final PDF.

Miraculously, all of this only takes about 20 seconds, meaning that by the time a customer’s placed their order and received an acknowledgment email pointing them to their file for pick-up, it’s likely already there.

My Local Almanac is on sale now at Almanac.com for $2.95 (US). If you purchase a copy, you’ll not only make me happy, be supporting an Island company in the process, but you’ll know when the sun and Moon are going to rise and set, when the next high tide will be, and a variety of other data points, every day for the next 13 months.

The issue of shopping on Sundays has reared its head here on Prince Edward Island again, with the introduction of a private member’s bill by Hon. Olive Crane, An Act to Amend the Retail Business Holidays Act.

And again the same forces are speaking out: it’s a freedom thing, they say; we should be able to shop whenever we want. And the news is full of person-on-the-street interviews and suggestions that there’s overwhelming support for abolishing the law that prevents unfettered year-round 7-days-a-week shopping.

But there’s a reason we don’t choose to govern ourselves by instant online poll: government is where we look to nourish our better selves; the filter of representative government allows other factors than “everyone wants it” to be considered. It allows for the broad view, the long view, the systematic view that places instant desires for fulfillment secondary to the greater good of the community.

This is why we have mandatory free public schooling (“forcing kids to go to school”), mandatory speed limits (“forcing everyone to drive slowly”), liquor laws (“forcing everyone not to be drunk all the time”) and universal health care (“forcing me to to pay for my neighbour when he gets sick”).

I don’t think shopping is bad. But I think that it’s healthier for the community to have a single day every week when, as much as we’re able, we move away from shopping and concern ourselves with other pursuits. This isn’t about God or Jesus, it isn’t about “family,” or a “day of rest.” It’s simply about a mutually agreed upon day when commerce is removed from the equation.

This indeed does involve a limiting of our “freedoms” and prevents everyone from a full exercise of their “right” to shop all the time if they so choose. But that’s an inevitable by-product of a system that is based on living in community; our individual rights are placed secondary to the collective long-term good.

A 2008 Guardian op-ed piece on this topic, Sunday shopping: how we got where we are, by Dr. Pamela Courtenay-Hall, remains the most cogent argument I’ve read to date, and its stand out paragraph remains:

Further, to construe ‘individual liberty’ as being primarily about ‘consumer choice’ is to misconceive the fundamental role of individuals in a society. It is not to consume or to own stores. It is to build a good life in community with others.

And she concludes:

Make no mistake about it. There is a battle of giants going on in our time, becoming only more intense as Wal-Mart enters the field of grocery superstores in Canada. All of them are competing to become The One – our one and only source for food, clothing, toilet paper, drugs, small appliances, and on and on. Unless we engage in civic action to preserve local economies, we will become their helpless dependants, relying on their suppliers and their underpaid workers in countries overseas to feed us. To say no to Sunday shopping isn’t going to save our communities from the fallout of globalized capitalism. But it is to exercise the kind of community intelligence and local control that can.

That is the broad view, and I hope our Members of the Legislative Assembly have the courage to consider it and to vote against this bill.

All of the components needed to set my Prince Street School raffle tickets were in place today, so I was able to set all the type and lock everything in place. Here’s a comparison of my original sketch (at the top), a digital mock-up (in the middle; created in OmniGraffle on my Mac and printed on an HP ink jet printer) and the first draft of a ticket printed on my Adana Eight Five letterpress (at the bottom):

I gotta say that the internal Gill Sansness of the analog Gill Sans certainly shines through in the letterpress; it just seems right. And the numbering machine (it came set to 31 – I didn’t actually print 36 copies to get to this one) is everything I hoped it would be.

My favourite part of setting the type was the opportunity to use the ligature for ffl, which I was happy to see came as part of my M&H type.

Here’s what the type to produce the ticket looks like:

The only problem is that I mistakenly ordered two 12 inch lengths of perf bar forgetting that perf rule has to be hard steel so as to be able to make perforations. I need a smaller piece to fit into the mix, so [[Catherine]]’s going to have a go at it tomorrow morning with her special jewelry tools with hopes that I can pick things up Tuesday night. Stay tuned.

I’ve printed the tickets for the annual Prince Street Home and School Association’s Christmas raffle for the past 2 years using a simple “design in OmniGraffle, print at Staples” technique. This year I decided to try out my newly-delivered Gill Sans (from M&H Type) and do the 2010 tickets as a letterpress job.

I’ve got a numbering machine and some perf rule (to let me number and perforate the tickets) on the way from Don Black Linecasting; in the interim, I roughed things out on paper for a 5 inch by 2 inch ticket, and set the left-hand-side type in 18pt. and 12pt. Gill Sans:

The green Christmas trees are a rubber stamp I bought at Michaels yesterday for $1.50; as I’m only printing 300 tickets, it seemed reasonable to add a bit of colour to each by stamping them individually after printing (it may seem less reasonable once I’ve stamped all 300).

Tickets will be available in December at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market and the draw date is December 18, 2010. I hope to have all the tickets printed and ready by the time I take off for a two-week vacation at the end of this week.

I’ve really enjoyed the six-part television series Circus that’s been airing this fall on PBS (it came to an end this week, but you can watch the entire series online). It’s beautifully photographed, and contains a nice mix of circus action and personal stories. Worth a watch.