Every year at our Annual Meeting the PEI Home and School Federation considers resolutions; those that are successfully passed are sent on to the Department of Education and the school districts for a response.

This year, for the first time, the Eastern School District invited the Federation to come and meet with school trustees to go over each resolution and the District’s response.

Which is how last night I found myself spending two hours in the company of Eastern School District trustees and staff.

If you believe the media reports and the general public conception of Eastern School District trustees you’d think them a bunch of lunatics engaged in a highly dysfunctional enterprise. In real life, however, the situation is somewhat more nuanced.

There’s no doubt that there are some severe group-process and personality issues lurking (just) beneath the surface of the trustee group. But to concentrate on that – the public obsession for the last year – is to ignore that the trustees are, as individuals, each passionate about education, well-versed in its intricacies, and doing what they’re doing not out of some power-mad rush to glory (you don’t get rich or powerful being a school trustee), but simply because they think they can help improve the educational lot of the Eastern District. They might not always get along so well, but their aim is true.

Each of the Home and School Federation’s resolutions was given due consideration by the District, and we had a chance to discuss each with the trustees and with Superintendent Ricky Hood and Philip Connolly, Manager of Policy and Planning, in detail. The discussions were animated and useful and I think everyone involved felt that it was a positive exercise to have gone through.

I was especially happy to see the resolution I’d originally proposed, one that ended up with the (somewhat unwieldy) title Request for Clear Procedures That Encourage Parent Communication and Involvement in School Life, discussed at some length.

As I wrote back in September, despite not being a “joiner,” I’m a Home and School convert, and seeing this resolution going from being a notion I had on the front steps of Prince Street School one day while dropping Oliver off – “I wonder what we could do to make going into the school less intimidating for parents” – to something that was being considered by school trustees was immensely gratifying, and proved again how powerful we parents can be when we work together.

• Cluny ArtBar – A little out of the way, but worth the walk. Very nice room, excellent food, pleasant service. Their coffee is fantastic and the tiny Belgian chocolate mousse is a perfect dessert.
• Papetiers Saint Armand – Hand and machine-made papers crafted in the basement of an old linoleum factory on the south side of the Lachine Canal. Open to the public on the first Saturday of every month, which, happily, coincided with our visit. Founder David Carruthers gave us a cook’s tour of the factory,  a rabbit’s warren of machines and bundles of rags and paper in various states of undress. They’ve also got a sizable letterpress shop on-site. If you’re interested in paper or printing or just fascinated by machines and the people who nurture them, you should visit.
• Café Santropol – Went twice. Service is spotty (slow, absent-minded), but genuinely friendly. Food, centers on sandwiches, was hearty and tasty. Their house-made herbal iced tea is a nice drink, and the carrot cake is wonderful (and enough for two). Sit outside in the back patio if you can.
• Dyad Electric Bicycles – Brand new enough not to have a website. On Saint Laurent just south of Rachel, where the Vespa shop used to be. They sell and rent Chinese electric bicycles, mopeds and scooters of various sizes and styles. Very accommodating staff – they’ll let you try out anything for free for 15 minutes. After that it’s $15/hour to rent, helmet included, and you don’t need a driver’s license. The scooters are surprisingly powerful: top speed of 50 km/h, a charge (which takes 6 hours) will get you almost 50 km. And the motor is powerful enough to pull me up hills.
• Drawn & Quarterly Shop – Even if you’re not a graphic novel type, this is a great store full of interesting books, magazines, zines and music.
• Style LABO – Beautiful things from the recent past reconditioned and lovingly displayed. Old store signs, lobby cards, metal type, radios, ornaments, fans. The solid stuff they don’t make any more.
• BIXI Bicycles – An epic upgrade in Montreal’s transportation infrastructure: every few blocks – enough so that it’s everywhere – you’ll find bicycles ready for renting from a self-serve kiosk. Need to get across town in a hurry? Stick your credit card in and you’ve got a bike in 2 minutes and are on your way. I used the service half a dozen times to good end. The bikes are solid, well-designed and well-maintained. Montreal cyclists are insane (they don’t follow traffic rules at all), and you can’t rent a helmet, but there’s a healthy network of bicycle lanes, some segregated from traffic, so you can mitigate you chance of death or injury somewhat.
• Montreal Science Centre – A nice cross between the “science as a branch of the arts” approach of Paris’s Cité des Sciences and a more traditional Exploratorium-style science museum, Montreal’s Science Centre, on the waterfront in Old Montreal, kept Oliver and me busy for 3 hours and we could have easily spent the day. The idTV exhibit, where you’re led through the process of making a TV segment on a science topic, is well-crafted and kept us both interested for 30 minutes. The glass exhibition was a little dry, but had some interesting objects. The Sex: A Tell-all Exhibition – I only read now that it was “recommended for ages 12 and up” – was titillating to the point where were if staged on Prince Edward Island there would be rioting in the street and the comments system at The Guardian would melt down from the force of collected consternation (in other words, it was terrific in all the right ways). That said, most of it was lost on Oliver (although it did get him to utter “pussy” and “cock” for the first time in his life). Upstairs there’s a more traditional set of “what happens when you spin around”-style exhibits that are well-constructed and with enough variety that even if you’re a science centre veteran you’ll be involved.
• yeh! – One outlet on Saint Laurent and another soon to open on Saint Catherine. It’s salad bar meets frozen yogurt: self-serve yourself some yogurt (they have 8 flavours on tap), and then add toppings like fresh fruit, Oreo cookies, dates, or gummy bears. At the cash your creation gets weighed and you pay by the gram. Oliver really enjoyed this.
• The Bay – No, not uniquely Montreal. But a novelty if you live in Charlottetown nonetheless. I’d been fruitlessly looking for trousers with a 38 inch waist at hipster places like Simons, but to no avail (I’d inevitably be shown to the one style for the hipster large man: boring, pleated, and completely unlike the dayglo pants the thin set are allowed to buy). In the basement of The Bay there’s a huge selection of clothing for men in all manner of styles and sizes, including the 38-30 trousers I was looking for. I bought two pair.
• Bubble Tea in Le Fauborg Ste-Catherine – When I lived in Montreal in the early 1990s, Le Fauborg was shiny and new and a paradise of food, prepared and fresh. You could buy fresh bagels, fresh fruit and fresh flowers and then sit down for a glass of mint tea. Twenty years on it has, alas, fallen on hard times. The space has been carved up into offices and running shoe shops, and the selection of food places has dwindled. The anchor tenant, such as it is, is Dollarama. But on the 2nd floor down at the end is an older Taiwanese couple selling a variety of bubble tea and snacks. They speak neither English nor French, it seems, but they make great tea and have some cool imported gear to make it with.
• Café Myriade – Coffee that’s good enough to make you weep, prepared by top-flight people in a pleasant space. Starbucks and Second Cup have polluted Montreal to a frightening degree; it’s good that there are still places like this that craft coffee rather than dispense it.
• Public Transit – With transit routing built into Google Maps on my Nokia N95, I felt like I had transportation super-powers. It’s expensiveish – $2.75 a ride – but it’s clean, frequent, and goes everywhere. Put together with BIXI, there’s little reason to have a car in Montreal unless you need to move a bed.

I sat down in the Charlottetown studios of CBC Radio One this afternoon with Matt Rainnie to chat about our June 17 Pecha Kucha in New Glasgow and the piece aired this afternoon in the final half-hour of the program.

I’ve attached the audio of the interview to this post; if you want to watch the entire talk I gave at the 2006 Pecha Kucha in Copenhagen, it’s right here. You can also watch the Pecha Kucha talk on “Small” that Guy Dickinson – “the man on the balcony” – gave as part of the same session.

And remember, if you want to attend, just RSVP right here.

Remember Traffic Light Bird? Absent for most of last year, I’m happy to report that it’s back this spring:

We’re in the middle of the second year of online bidding for the Prince Street School Silent Auction and it seems like a good time to peel off a little more of the wrapping and talk about the technical side of the process so that others can do the same thing (I took a first stab at this last year with just the basics).

The Silent Auction is run through a slightly-modified Drupal website: the modifications that support the auction are not dramatic, and should be within the realm of anyone with some basic Drupal savvy.  Here’s what I did.

Install some Drupal Modules

• CCK
• Views
• FileField
• Formatted Number CCK
• ImageField
• ImageCache
• PathAuto
• String Overrides
• CAPTCHA
• reCAPTCHA

Set up some ImageCache Presets

I created two ImageCache presets:

1. display – scale to width 500 pixels
2. thumbnail – scale to height 150 pixels

I’ll use the display preset when I want to display the full-sized image and the thumbnail preset when I’m displaying a list of items with thumbnail images.

Create a Silent Auction Item Content Type

We need to keep track of a few additional items for each auction item in addition to the title and description that a standard Drupal node supports. So I installed the CCK module and created a new content type called Silent Auction Item.

I set up the content type with comments turned on, newest comments displayed first, allowed anonymous comments (but checked Anonymous posters must leave their contact information) and set comments to display Display below post or comments.

Next I added three new fields to the Silent Auction Item content type:

• Item Number – field_itemnumber – Integer
• Donated By – field_donatedby – Text
• Estimated Value – field_value – Formatted decimal
• Photo – field_photo – File

The result looks like this:

Finally, I set the Display Fields settings for the new content type so that:

• Item Number field is excluded – we use this for internal purposes only.
• Donated By and Estimated Value have their labels displayed in-line.
• Photo is displayed as thumbnail image linked to node for the Teaser and as display image for the Full Node.

Create a Silent Auction Categories Taxonomy

To allow auction items to be categorized, I created a new Silent Auction Categories taxonomy, and added some terms:

I set this new Taxonomy to apply to the Silent Auction Item content type I created earlier.

Add some Silent Auction Items

Next I was ready to add some actual content to the site, so I started adding Silent Auction items using the regular Drupal Create Content mechanism. For each item I entered the Item Number (assigned manually when the item was received at the school), the title of the item (“Goalie Stick”), a category (“Sports”), a description (if I was given one), who the item was donated by, and its estimated value. I then uploaded a file (taken by the school secretary and sent to me as a JPEG) and saved the new item.

The result was something like this:

Turn “Comments” into “Bids”

With the content pretty well taken care of, now I turned my attention to setting up a way for people to bid on the items. I decided that rather than building out a more complicated dedicated Drupal module for this, I’d simply harness the already-in-place Drupal comments system and turn it into a “bids” system.

First I made some entries in the String Overrides module’s settings, changing appearances of the “comments” terminology to “bids.” I made the following entries:

• Add new comment became Place a bid
• Comments became Bids
• New comments became New bids
• Post new comment became Place a bid

Setup reCAPTCHA

To reduce the possibility of “spam bids” – not that this was a huge concern, but why create extra work for ourselves – I set up the CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA modules (the latter required setting up a free account at recaptcha.net) so that a CAPTCHA would appear on the form with form_id of comment_form:

Hack the Comment Form

To customize the comment form itself, I created a module called customsite and in it I used the hook_form_alter to change the form:

function customsite_form_comment_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state) {
  unset($form['_author']);
  unset($form['homepage']);

  $form['name'] = array(
    '#type' => 'textfield',
    '#title' => t('Your full name'),
    '#maxlength' => 60,
    '#size' => 30,
    '#default_value' => '',
    '#required' => TRUE,
    );

  $form['comment_filter']['comment'] = array(
    '#type' => 'textfield',
    '#size' => '10',
    '#title' => t('Your bid for this item.'),
    '#default_value' => '$',
    '#required' => TRUE,
  );

    $form['comment_filter']['format'][$i]['#value'] = '';
}

This had the effect of making the comment form look like this:

Create some Views

With the display of items and the handling of bidding completed, my final step was to create a couple of Views to display items and bids.

I created a view with a Page display called auction items that drives this page of the auction website; it displays all of the auction items, sorted by item number, showing the category, donated by, estimated value, and number of bids (which is just the “comment count”).

I also modified the stock node_comments view a little to customize the Recent Bids block that I display in the left-hand sidebar of the site; it shows the 5 most recent bids, with the item name, bid amount and bidding time.

Add Polish

That’s essentially it: a CCK content type holds auction item information; comments become bids. With the addition of some stock Drupal polish – menus pointing to each taxonomy item page to allow browsing by category, for example – the only additional tweak was to create an additional block in the customsite module to show how much we’d raised so far (the total of the high bids for all items):

function customsite_totalraised() {
   
    $result = db_query("select nid,max(comment) as maxbid
                            from {comments} group by nid");
   
    $total = '';
    while ($onerow = db_fetch_object($result)) {
        $bid = str_replace("$","",$onerow->maxbid);
        $total = $total + $bid ;
      }
    $block .= "<p>So far we've raised <b>\$" .
                        number_format($total,2) .
                        "</b>. Thank you (and keep bidding!)</p>";

    return $block;
}

Questions or Suggestions?

This solution has worked well over two years, but there’s always room for improvements. If you’d like to try something like this for your own silent auction and run into any stumbling blocks, feel free to ask questions here.

I’ve just added an additional 40 items to the Prince Street School Silent Auction. Online bidding is open until this Thursday at Noon.

Longtime readers may recall that back in the spring of 2006 I was called in at the last minute to prepare a so-called Pecha Kucha talk at the reboot conference. The result was Making Public Data Public[er], the story of which is here.

The essential idea of a Pecha Kucha talk – they’re also call micropresentations or lightning talks – is that each speaker presents 20 slides for 20 seconds each, making for a focused 6-minute presentation about one thing.

As such these talks are unlike you’re more traditional “one speaker drones on and one about something” that we’re all used to (a format that, when it works well, can change your life, but when it doesn’t, which is more often than not, can make for a prison-like experience).

Even if a Pecha Kucha talk is boring, at least it’s over quickly!

This spring my friends Bruce and Rob got interested in the format, and we three decided to organize an evening here in Prince Edward Island. Coincident with this I got a note from my friend-of-the-blog Valerie who lives in Vermont but summers on the Island; she’s been using Pecha Kucha in her college teaching. So we recruited her into the fold.

So, on Thursday, June 17, 2010 at the Prince Edward Island Preserve Company in New Glasgow we’re organizing PEI’s first Pecha Kucha night. We’ve got the following speakers lined up:

• Katie Cousins, farmer
• Paul Lopes, designer
• Aaron Stavert, architect
• Valerie Bang-Jensen, professor of education
• Rob Paterson, consultant and writer
• Peter Rukavina, programmer
• Frances Gertsch, park manager

True to the format, each will spend 20 seconds talking about each of 20 slides on a topic of their choosing. We’ll have finger foods for snacking and a cash bar; it should be a great night, in a beautiful location.

There’s no admission to attend, and everyone is welcome, but we’d appreciate it if you would RSVP in advance at http://ruk.ca/rsvp as we need to limit attendance to 75 people.

To help us get the word out, please print and post this handy poster.

Apologies for the more gentile readers for this niche technical post, but I’m hoping to solve my technical brothers and sisters some frustrations with Trac, the excellent open source issue tracking system (we’ve been using it for more than 2 years to manage our work with Yankee Publishing, and it’s been truly transformational).

If you’re upgrading from Trac 0.11 to Trac 0.12 and you’re using Trac with Apache and mod_python you might find that after you upgrade you either get a “500 Internal Server Error” form Apache when you visit Trac or, if you have mod_python debugging on (or if you look in your Apache error log), an error message ImportError: No module named trac.

And yet you think that Trac actually is there: you can use trac-admin from the command line, and if you look where you think Trac should be (say, perhaps, in /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages), you find that it is indeed there.

What’s going on?

It seems that Trac 0.12, at least when I installed it, installs itself as a “zipped egg.” I realized this was true when, after I did:

easy_install Trac-0.12b1.zip

I ended up with a file (not a directory) in /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages. My earlier versions of Trac were directories, not files. This, and this helpful post that says, in part:

mod_python 3.x is still unable to import modules from .zipped .egg-files. Command-line python (even older version 2.4 which is included into RHEL5/CentOS5) imports modules from zipped eggs without any problem, but not mod_python for the same version because it overrides the standard importer in its own special way.

So, in other words, Trac is there, it’s just that mod_python can’t see it because it’s zipped. Once I knew this, the solution was easy:

easy_install --always-unzip Trac-0.12b1.zip

Installing this way ensures that the resulting egg isn’t zipped, and once I did this Trac 0.12 ran without issue.

I first met Reg Porter on Christmas Day many many years ago. We’d decided not to travel up to Ontario for the holidays, and Catherine Hennessey kindly took us in for Christmas Dinner. Sharing the table with us were David Weale, Darren Peters and Reg.

Needless to say it was an interesting meal.

I’d not laid eyes on Reg Porter again until last night when I was in the audience for the third installment of The College of Reg: The Architectural Heritage of PEI.

I’m not usually a big fan of the “bunch of heritagey people gather in the Carriage House at Beaconsfield to listen to someone talk about finials” kind of event. I’ve got nothing against heritage, nor against finials, I’m simply averse to so much listening. Especially when the subject matter is so earnest.

I’m happy to report that The College of Reg proved the exception to this.

Yes, there was a lot of listening to be done – Reg held forth, without interruption, for almost 90 minutes.

And finials reared their head a few times – I think there might have even been a suggestion that certain finials could “make your heart soar.”

The tone was indeed earnest (albeit with a certain amount of irreverence, especially in matters of church and cats).

Heading out the door when it was all done, I wouldn’t have said my life had been transformed, nor even, particularly, that I’d had a good time.

But then, this morning, walking through the city on my way from dropping Oliver off at school, I passed the Paton house at 241 Prince Street and realized that something was different about my eyes.

I’d walked by that property a thousand times over the years, and suddenly I was looking at it in a different way. I noticed the “window in the chimney” and that the entrances had been covered-over, the dark-light-dark pattern of the curve over the entrance that mirrored the pattern in a French cathedral, and the many varieties of stone near the peak of the roof.

Somehow Reg Porter, without me noticing, had inserted an interest in the buildings of my everyday life into my head. And my eyes, previously blinded to all this interesting detail, were now open.

I continued down Fitzroy Street (past the “place where a church tore down a lovely house”) to Queen, past the City Hall (with its tower in which to hang hoses so they wouldn’t rot) and realized that the city will never seem the same to me.

Perhaps The College of Reg is the greatest kind of education of all, education that you don’t notice happening until it’s too late. And for that I’m truly thankful.

The final session of the college for this spring is June 7 at 7:30 p.m. at Beaconsfield. Admission is $5.00 and you don’t need to register in advance; just show up at the door. Recommended.

At long last all the bits I needed to gather together to run a real job through my Adana Eight Five press were in place on this holiday Monday: I picked up a couple of “one pound or assorted card stock” packs at DeSerres on Barrington Street in Halifax, my ink and tympan paper arrived from NA Graphics in Colorado last week, and I picked up some low-odour Varsol this morning at Canadian Tire to clean everything up when finished.

As I’d been experimenting with a Pecha Kucha poster and had its type set up in the chase, I started off with that. After a lot of thrashing around with bed and platen adjustments, amount of ink, and the press packing, the best I could pull off was this:

Rather than continue my thrashing about with such a physically large job, I decided to back off and try something more modest. The most complete typeface I have (especially when it comes to numbers-and-punctuation) is a one labelled 14 pt. Temple, so, despite my aversion to script-style faces, I decided to use that. I left the black ink on the press, and used some tiny orange card stock from my new pack, and ended up with this:

I’m not completely happy with it: the left-hand side, especially the capital “P” and the lower-case letter “e”, are too dark and both letter e are over-inked and slightly filled in. I expect that with a more deliberate make-ready I could achieve better results.