The story of Norm Coghlan and his camp stove toasters:

Prior to forming his own company, Norm Coghlan sold lanterns, camp stoves, lamps, mantles and parts primarily to the hardware market in the United States and Canada. In 1959, he bought a small service depot in downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and operated it as a private company. At that time, the newly born Coghlan’s Gas Appliances concentrated on the natural gas heating market that was opening up in Winnipeg. Norm Coghlan also added camping equipment such as tents, sleeping bags and air mattresses. There were many campers that would come in to bring their camp stoves and lanterns in for repair and they also bought and rented other camping equipment and accessories as well.

Norm was aware that customers wanted a way to make toast on their pump-up gasoline camp stove. Such an item was already being manufactured by a U.S. based company and they sold very readily in Coghlan’s retail store. After inquiring with the toaster manufacturer, Norm found out that the toaster was being discontinued. Norm bought the entire inventory, rented a storage facility and this began Coghlan’s distribution of camping accessories. The Camp Stove Toaster has been made in Winnipeg, Manitoba since the mid-1960s. Coghlan’s has assembled and packaged over 7 million 504D Toasters.

Seven million toasters! I know my family owns one, maybe two. What about you?

You likely know Coghlan’s from the many camping-related products, like egg carriers and salt/pepper shakers, it sells at places like Canadian Tire: they have very distinctive green and yellow packaging.

If you live in Prince Edward Island and you haven’t been closely following the developments at the newly-christened Phoenix Medical Practice of Dr. Robert Coull, you’re missing out: some of the most exciting developments in general physicianship are happening in the practice.

For example, can you tell me what other medical practice in Prince Edward Island:

• publishes clinic wait times online
• allows new patients to register online
• regularly updates a practice weblog with useful, practical information
• is led by a physician not shy about voicing strong opinions
• provides patients with online access to their own health records

I don’t know enough about doctoring to know whether all of the aspects of Dr. Coull’s practice are reasonable and practical – and I expect that part of the practice involves a feedback loop so that they can find out exactly that – but I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to see a medical practice willing to break the fourth wall.

It’s been just over two weeks since Netflix brought its movie streaming service (but not its more-well-known DVD home delivery service) to Canada; I signed up on the first day it was available, and [[Oliver]] and I have been using the service ever since, first on my iPod Touch and Oliver’s iMac, and, once our Wii application CD arrived from Netflix HQ, on our regular old television set.

Here are my impressions after a couple of weeks:

• It’s nice that I can stream movies from onto so many devices, and it’s nice that I can start watching a movie on, say, my iPod and pick up watching later on, where I left off, on the Wii.
• That said, like Neal Gillis, I wish there was better integration between the web and the other platforms, specifically a way of using the web’s excellent search features to allow me to explore and flag movies for later watching on other devices.
• Netflix’s much-vaunted “if you like this, you’ll probably like this” features seem to be much less useful when the pool of possibilities is the relatively small selection of movies that can be streamed vs. the much larger selection of movies that they have available in the US on DVD.
• The Wii application is dead simple to use, maybe too simple: it’s really heard to get a sense for the breadth of movies available because of the limitations of the “browse” feature, and it’s really annoying that the “search” feature displays search results for films that aren’t actually available.
• The “buffering” period – the time you have to wait after clicking “play” and before the movie starts – seems to vary between “a few seconds” and “a minute or two.” It’s not clear what factors play a role in this (my Internet? their Internet? the length of the movie to be streamed?).
• The selection of movies and TV episodes doesn’t knock my socks off. The movies tend to be just out of date enough to not be entirely satisfying; the TV episodes seem to seldom be the current season.
• Oliver seems to have found plenty to watch: Liberty’s Kids, Dinosaur Train, Cat in the Hat. But it hasn’t replaced TV for him, and he hasn’t always been satisfied with the selection.
• I really appreciated all four seasons of the British series Coupling and all five seasons of ballykissangel.
• Documentaries seem to be a strong suit: I’ve enjoyed more of them than anything else, and I’ve found things that I wouldn’t have ever found elsewhere.
• You can’t beat the price: $7.99/month is little enough that, no matter the limitations, I’m likely to keep the service around after the 30-day trial.

The Costa Atlantica is in port in Charlottetown today and, from the plethora of Italian being spoken on the streets of the city today, it’s obviously carrying a lot of Italians.

It’s easy to spot Italian cruise ship passengers: they are all impeccably dressed (I saw an Italian woman in front of City Hall today wearing a dress that seemed to be made entirely of bits of fur and leather), extremely curious (there was a gang in front of the fire hall making careful study of the antique fire engine parked there that then moved on to take particular notice of our parking meters), and considerably more expressive than the usual semi-catatonic schlubs that roll off the ships.

When a dour American cruise couple stops me on the street and asks me where they can get a good lobster, I feel like telling them to get the hell out of my province; when a enthusiastic Italian man, dressed all in black and wearing a cape, asks me where he should go shopping, I feel like inviting him over for supper.

The thing about tourism and tourism marketing is that, at its root, it’s social engineering: marketing dollars are spent to attract certain demographics that are deemed attractive. That’s why Tourism PEI sponsors Live with Regis and Kelly and not, say, Trucks. It’s why the Canadian Tourism Commission bought out an issue of advertising in The New Yorker rather than an issue of 2600.

This is completely understandable – we can’t market to everyone so we might as well market to those who are most likely to come, and most likely to be good tourists.

I wonder, though, if we might broaden our definition of what “good tourists” means beyond strictly economic measures: having a gaggle of upper-middle class Italians roaming the streets of town for a day certainly makes for a more interesting street life than a gaggle of similarly-provisioned Americans. Not that Americans are bad tourists, but, again, we have to make decisions, so why not include a joie de vivre factor in our calculations.

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: