I discovered this morning that, were I to travel back in time and be captured by the Russians and subjected to electrical shock torture, I would immediately give up all of Canada’s military secrets and we’d all be eating borsch for breakfast.

I know this because this was the day for my nerve conduction study, a process that involves, in part, running tiny electrical shocks into various parts of the hands and arms. After two or three shocks – and these are tiny, tiny shocks just up from “walked across a shag carpet” on the Tesla scale – I was quite prepared to surrender.

The referral for this study came from my family doctor back in March. He, or rather his learning-to-be-a-doctor surrogate who actually did my yearly physical, upon hearing my typing-related symptoms – occasional numbness or tingling in the hands, neck and face – decided that it would be a good idea to see if I’ve been doing myself permanent damage by typing professionally for 25 years.

Apparently I have not.

There were two sets of tests. First, various electrodes were stuck to various parts of my right hand and arm and then a short burst of electricity run through while the doctor administering the tests – a quiet, somewhat severe but generally efficient tattooed man – watched a computer monitor.

That test lasted for about 10 minutes, and when it was over I’d learned more about the Skinner Box than I did in an entire year of Psychology 101.

The second set of tests involved jabbing a probe into various muscles in my right hand and arm and then listening to audio feedback. This was only painful in a “brief jab” kind of way, and the test, thankfully, involved no bursts of electricity.

When it was all over the doctor pronounced my right hand in arm in perfect nervous system health, with no sign of “permanent damage” at all. He did, however, say that “further tests are needed” to discover the source of my symptoms, and his severe manner didn’t allow for any elaboration on what this might mean.

In other words, while happy that I have “no permanent damage,” I left with some fear of what the “further tests” are testing for. Is it “you might have bumped your elbow as a child” or “there might be a raccoon nesting in your frontal lobe.” Apparently I am soon to hear back from my family doctor on this front.

As an aside: one of the least appreciated aspects of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital is its fantastic collection of art, much (all?) of it on loan from the Confederation Centre of the Arts. There was, for example, a William Kurelek tapestry humbly hanging on the wall of the Special Services waiting room where I went for my tests this morning.

The next time you’re in the QEH, be sure to pay attention to the art: you may be surprised by what you find.

Is it just me, or is the Matthew Rainnie in this small promotional graphic from the front page of the CBC Prince Edward Island website:

just a cropped and mirror-imaged version of Matthew from this larger graphic from the Island Morning page:

I’ve got enough of a prosopagnosia issue without all this Photoshopping mirror-imaging voodoo.

The real question: which image reflect the real Matthew Rainnie’s spacial orientation?

[[Oliver]] turns ten years old today. As a special bonus, if you’re numerically inclined, this birthday brings him back to the binary number system he was born into (he was born on 10-01-00 and today is 10-01-10).

Today also marks the day that [[Catherine]] and I have been together as parents longer than we’ve been together as non-parents (who knows, someday we might even find the inspiration to get married; although after 19 years I’m not holding my breath).

You know how some kids spend their first months looking sort of lifeless and dough-like, as though their facial expressions need time to slowly boot up? That was not Oliver: he spent his first 48 hours essentially unconscious, and then, as though a switch was flipped, he just turned on, fierce personality and all:

Happy Birthday, Oliver.

Every year the Eastern School District has a bulk-ordering program that it offers to schools in the district that want to participate.

I’ve a particular interest in this program because one of my pet issues at the PEI Home and School Federation is looking into whether it’s possible for the Federation to assist with lowering the cost of school supplies to Island families through this same sort of bulk-purchasing.

The District’s program works like this: it sends out a list of possible supplies to schools, receives back requests, compiles the totals, and then puts out the supply purchase to tender. The tender isn’t awarded as a whole: for each supply, the lowest priced tenderer winds the bid, so any given supplier might, say, win the tender for glue sticks, but not for printer ink.

This year, for example, the district needed to buy 265 dozen 9g glue sticks (that’s 3,180 glue sticks!).

The successful bidder was Grand & Toy which came it at a price of $5.04/dozen, or 42 cents each, for this product, which they sell online for 75 cents each or, if you buy more than 12, at 68 cents each.

So the District’s price represents a 44% savings over what we parents would pay retail from the same source.

In our family’s case, the Grade 4 Supply List at Prince Street School called for 4 gluesticks: we bought a 4-pack of 8g gluesticks at Staples for $3.50, or 88 cents each; if we’d purchased these at the District price we would have paid $1.68.

So we would have saved $1.82, or more than 50%.

We paid a total of $23.33 for Oliver’s school supplies this year, and we were able to save a little because he had things left over from Grade 3.

But let’s assume that’s the figure every family pays. And let’s assume that every family could save 50% on supplies through bulk-buying.

There are about 20,000 students in schools across the province, so if they each paid $11.66/year instead of $23.33/year, the total savings to Island parents would be $233,200.

That’s only a rough number, of course; but I think it’s a rough number worth following up on. Which is what I’ll do tomorrow night at the first meeting of the school season of the Home and School Federation.

Back in June at our Pecha Kucha one of the audience, a nice man from New Brunswick who had driven over just for the event, mentioned the print shop at King’s Landing historic village north of Fredericton as a good place to drop in on for one such as me interested in letterpress.

My trip over to Fredericton this week afforded me an opportunity to do just that: on Tuesday morning I took the beautiful drive up the Saint John River from Fredericton north to Prince William, arriving around 11:00 a.m. to a slightly soggy and seemingly almost-deserted village. I paid my $16 admission, grabbed a map, and made a beeline for the Print Shop.

Inside I found an incredibly nice man, dressed in ye olde period costume who, on learning that I was a fellow printer, immediately dropped the act (there was nobody else around, after all) and invited me past the threshold and into the shop for a tour of all the wonders there to behold.

King’s Landing turns out to be the final resting place of much of the remaining letterpress gear in New Brunswick: when a print shop closes or burns down or decides to clean house, the gear gets shipped off to Prince William. The best of it makes its way into the living print shop; the remainder is waiting to be sorted out in the large basement that sits underneath.

The saddest part of the Print Shop story is that they suffered a flood several years back, and the basement was badly flooded, as disaster they’re still recovering from: many of the type cases in the basement are warped out of shape, and a lot of the wooden type is covered with mold and grime.

Otherwise, though, it’s a wonderful shop, with two large C&P presses, an 1870s-era Golding press, and a Kelsey Excelsior that’s very similar in structure to my own Adana Press, albeit much older.

The shop is very well set up with wooden furniture, leading, a wonderful paper cutter, and a proof press. They’ve also got a good collection of wood and metal type (although much of it sits in the basement waiting to be cleaned an organized).

The printer was a wonderful man, ready to talk the trade for as long as I wanted, and he was full of great stories. If you’re interested in letterpress, and are in the Fredericton area, I highly recommend a stop in (they’re open until Thanksgiving, and then again in the spring of 2011).

I’ve uploaded a whole bunch of print shop photos to Flickr.

I had two great meals yesterday. First was lunch, at the King’s Head Inn at the King’s Landing historic village north of Fredericton. I had the Ploughman’s Lunch – fish cakes, salad, cheddar cheese, pickles – and it was fantastic:

After my King’s Landing visit I made my way home toward Prince Edward Island via Moncton and, at the suggestion of my friends at Charlottetown’s Tai Chi Gardens, I stopped in at Zen Gardens, on Mountain Road, for a supper of the “dinner combo” – salad, rice noodles, vegetables, and spring roll – which was also very good:

I’m here in Fredericton, New Brunswick for a couple of days, observing the Provincial General Election on behalf of Elections PEI. It’s a good opportunity for me to observe an election in a larger jurisdiction up close, and also a good chance to meet my “election IT operations” counterparts from across the country (there are observers here from 8 provinces and a territory).

Yesterday, for example, we got a demonstration of the tabulating machines used to count special and advance votes, and last night at supper I learned about the ins-and-outs of British Columbia’s IT infrastructure. All is valuable information that we can incorporate into what we do for Elections PEI.

This morning our formal program starts with a working lunch at noon, so I had the morning to spend in Fredericton.

I’m staying at the Delta Fredericton – it’s a generally moribund institutional-feeling hotel with fantastic river views and extremely friendly staff – and saw last night that they rent bicycles. With some Twitter-based coffee research in-hand I headed down this morning ready for adventure.

The cycles they rent are of the new-school old-school “easy riding” variety; quite comfortable, in theory, but I forgot to ask them to adjust the seat so my ride felt a little like riding [[Oliver]]’s bicycle. They do include a helmet and a lock, and they add the $7/hour rental fee to your room bill.

At the recommendation of the personable front-desk clerk, I headed off down the River Trail toward downtown Fredericton: the scenery was fantastic and the trail well-groomed fine-crush gravel. The only glitch was when I got to the Westmorland Street Bridge, followed a the sign from the path that pointed me “downtown” and ended up having to dash across 4 lanes of traffic.

None the worse for wear, I weaved through downtown streets to find Jonnie Java Roasters. Got a great, lovingly-crafted espresso macchiato and a dense extremely-healthy-seeming muffin; all I wished for was a place to sit down, but alas it’s a stand-up bar only, with a “we appreciate it if you don’t read or use cell phones” policy that wasn’t exactly, um, welcoming.

Fortified, I took a brief loop through the shopping streets of the downtown. At Endeavours, an art supply store, I picked up a three-pack of Moleskin journals and a Pilot V-Pen to enhance my note-taking abilities this afternoon, stopped in at Reid’s Newsstand (an amazing selection of magazines), supplemented the income of several of Fredericton’s panhandler community, and then headed back, this time on city streets, to the Delta.

This afternoon we’re off to tour polls and to learn more about the vote count.

Things wrap up with a breakfast tomorrow morning, and I’m thinking of popping up to King’s Landing to see their reputed print shop before heading home Tuesday afternoon.

I was quite excited when I heard that the University of PEI was holding an open house today: I’m something of an open house junkie, and I love the combination of “backstage access,” education and fun that a good open house brings together.

And we’ve some good open houses here on PEI: CBC Prince Edward Island always puts on a good one, and who can forget the opportunity to see the amazing envelope-opening machines at the GST Centre’s open house many years ago when it first opened.

The Atlantic Veterinary College is well-known for it’s extremely well-organized open houses, and I welcomed the opportunity to learn about the rest of UPEI’s activities in the same manor.

And so, after our usual Saturday morning trip to the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market, [[Oliver]] and I headed across the street to UPEI, primed and ready for action.

With memories of an unfortunate goat incident still fresh in my mind from the last Vet College open house, I decided it was probably best to start elsewhere, so we headed over to the shiny new business school ready to see what delights were on offer.

Alas there were none: we found some sort of conference going on, but no evidence at all of open house-related activities.

Okay, so no business school. But science is cool. So we walked over to the chemistry building. Nothing. The Cass Science Hall. Nothing.

Things were not looking up, so I decided we’d better head to the Vet College.

And, true to form, they put on a great event: everything from a handshake and welcome by the Dean at the front door onwards was well-organized, entertaining and educational. We saw living animals and dead animals and a horse treadmill and a snake skeleton. Oliver got dressed up in surgical garb and won a pencil in the fish pond. We learned about parasites and bacteria. And there was even a magic show.

With our spirits renewed by our veterinary successes, we headed back out onto the campus, sure that there must be something to see.

First stop: the School of Nursing. We followed a friendly chap who was hanging up the signs around the corner and up the path: “just go down the stairs and you’ll find them,” he told us.

We went down the stairs. Nothing. Wandered through the halls. Nothing. Finally, at the end of the end of the building we found an open door: the open house!

While I wish I could report that we emerged newly educated about the nursing profession and its educational process, what we encountered was the opportunity to be shown a non-working medical dummy and a drawer full of supplies. The nursing student who took us on this tiny tour was friendly enough, and answered all our questions, but there was, literally, nothing at all to see.

The only other open house activity on the signs was at the Robertson Library; knowing all the amazing things that the library is up to, I was excited by the prospects of what might be in store there.

And while there was slightly more energy in evidence in the library – well-meaning librarians singing songs and offering cookies and juice – the lost opportunity to showcase all of the library’s amazing projects was tragic. Where was the tour of the language lab? The demonstrations of the book, map and newspaper scanning equipment? A hands-on workshop in the Collaboratory? All these doors, alas, were left un-opened.

And that was it.

An entire university full of fascinating people doing fascinating things, and, aside from the vets, all we were exposed to was a hospital bed and a rousing rendition of a nursery rhyme.

If the University of PEI is sincere in its mission to, as President Wade MacLauchlan suggested, “find the time to tell each other and the world about what we are doing and achieving,” then they have to do better than this.

Open houses, done well, take a lot of effort by a lot of people. They take resources and time and energy and imagination. But UPEI has a head start: the vet college’s yearly open house is a showcase for how to do open houses well, and the rest of the university community needs to follow that lead and start thinking about how to tell their own stories to the “university island” that surrounds them.

No, the philosophy department doesn’t have cute puppies and pig bladders on its side. But it does have interesting, creative people, skilled at story telling and making sense out of arcane and complex ideas. And that’s all you need to open your doors.

Next time out UPEI needs to either scale back and do what it does well at the AVC, or take this open house idea seriously and make a real effort to open the house.

With Municipal Elections coming up in Charlottetown, Cornwall, Stratford and Summerside this fall, we’ve spent some time renovating the Municipal Elections section of the Elections PEI website. What once was a rabbit’s warren of various pages hung on various URL schemes has been consolidated into a well-organized and comprehensive set of pages that offer access to all of the data on each municipality that Elections PEI maintains.

For example, on Municipalities page you’ll find a list of all 75 municipalities on the Island.

Click any municipality – say, Souris – and you’ll see contact information and a map of municipal boundaries and, for the four municipalities for which Elections PEI conducts elections – like Charlottetown – and you’ll see a list of wards and a ward boundaries map.

And so on: look at a ward, like Queens Square, and you see a list of polls and a poll boundaries map; look at a poll, like Hensley Street, and you’ll see a map of the poll along with information on where to vote and how to contact the returning officer.

All of this arrange in a friendly set of increasingly-more-specific URLs:

• http://www.electionspei.ca/municipalities
• http://www.electionspei.ca/municipalities/charlottetown
• http://www.electionspei.ca/municipalities/charlottetown/ward1
• http://www.electionspei.ca/municipalities/charlottetown/ward1/poll2

All of the maps referenced by these pages are available in KML form and the “master” maps of boundaries are available in ESRI Shapefile format.

The really neat thing (at least if you’re a programmer or developer) is that you can stick an “xml” in those URLs and get exactly the same information in XML format:

• http://www.electionspei.ca/xml/municipalities
• http://www.electionspei.ca/xml/municipalities/charlottetown
• http://www.electionspei.ca/xml/municipalities/charlottetown/ward1
• http://www.electionspei.ca/xml/municipalities/charlottetown/ward1/poll2

This means that citizens now have “programmatic access” to municipality information. Meaning that if you want to develop an iPhone application lists polling station locations, or a maps mashup that uses polling division boundaries, you’ll now have all the data you need.

This is a work-in-progress; watch electionspei.ca/api for documentation and information about changes and extensions.

On Saturday afternoon [[Oliver]] asked me for some help getting Google SketchUp installed on his computer. He needed to do some building design work, and he’d decided that SketchUp was the tool for the job.

We got the program installed, watched the New to Google SketchUp tutorial video together, and then I ran through a couple of other features with him, like how to import other people’s creations from the 3D Warehouse.

Then he was on his own.

When I came back a few hours later he’d constructed a hotel-spa-restaurant-radio station complex of considerable complexity. Such is both the simplicity of SketchUp and the power of Oliver’s iterative learning style.

This morning Oliver woke me up at 7:00 a.m. and asked how he could retrieve the files he’d saved on the weekend and I told him about File | Open Recent and went back to sleep.

When I rumbled downstairs an hour later for the walk up to school, Oliver was in quite a state, having decided that he would rather stay home all day continuing to refine his buildings – he told me later he was working on a model of his school – and it took all of our parental superpowers – “hey, isn’t it gym day today!” – to retrieve a mood sufficient to normal routine to proceed.

And there’s the conundrum.

Oliver’s now at school, which he generally enjoys, and is likely immersed in some sort of project carefully designed by his teachers to artificially stimulate his interest. This will likely succeed to some degree, as Oliver likes learning and is generally a pliable child.

But no matter what heights of educational greatness they manage to achieve at the school, they will, I’m sure, fail to reach the place that Oliver was at this morning at 8:00 a.m. when all he wanted to do was design a building.

We parents can rationalize ripping him away from this with high-minded broad strokes about how kids need to “learn to follow a routine” and that they “can’t always do what they want” (read “look, I gotta go to work and I can’t look after you all day”).

But it still seems like a failure and like a part of a larger plan to inculcate Oliver in a system that is designed to train him to dampen his passions and disconnect learning from curiousity.

How did we get here?