Remember how I was looking for a space to house and operate my newly-acquired letterpress? Well, I’m still looking. It turns out that Charlottetown, at least very-broadly-defined “downtown” Charlottetown, has very, very little surplus “light industrial” space.

So far I’ve had the kind offer to two spaces, for free, that, alas, didn’t pan out because of difficulty of access; everything else I’ve looked at has been either too expensive or too much space (I can’t spend $1000/month to feed what amounts to a equipment-intensive hobby, and I only need a couple of hundred square feet).

So, I’m calling on all of you in the local readership to plumb your networks for me to see if you can help drum something up.

(All of this makes me wonder how much creative pursuit is being held back because of real estate issues; I used to scoff at artists when they talked about the need for space: now I know just how real a challenge it is!)

There was a 3-hour interruption in Eastlink Internet service this evening that affected service here to Reinvented HQ. So this site was offline, as was our email and telephone. Things seem to be returning to normal now, but if you were trying to reach me by email to tell me that you’d fallen into a well and needed my help, you should probably send your message again.

Today was moving day for the Golding Jobber letterpress that’s coming into town from Campbell’s Printing in Tryon. The goal for today was to get the press – in all its giganticness – from Tryon into a Queen Street basement. In the end, we made it half way.

I started the day out at the Campbell’s working with Bill to peel of the removable parts of the press – the ink disc, engine, and various other bits and bobs – and get them into my car.

At 10:30 a.m. the mover arrived and from 10:30 to just after noon they tried, really really hard, to move the press. What was originally estimated at “700 or 800 pounds” ended up being, in their estimation, about 1500 pounds of letterpress, and top-heavy at that. These guys are piano movers, and they really struggled to wrangle the press in a way that didn’t wreck the press, or themselves. In the end it was beyond the tools they had available to them, and the press had only moved from the middle of the room to the door. They apologized for not being able to go any further, I paid them for their time and gas, and off they went.

Next up was Griffin’s Towing on the Bannockburn Road. Bill and Gertie’s son works for them, and they knew that Griffin’s had serious “big stuff moving” gear. A call was made. Tea and turkey sandwiches were had.

And then, while we were waiting, Bill and Gertie and I managed to lower the behemoth from foot-high position on wooden blocks where it had been left and onto metal rollers. I don’t want to gloat, but the three of us did a pretty good job, and lived to tell the tale.

Twenty minutes later a flatbed tow truck pulled up, negotiations about position and approach ensued, and within half an hour the letterpress had been winched out the door and onto the bed of the truck and secure in place.

With new-found knowledge of the Golding’s heaviness, and given that I didn’t have a crew of skilled burly movers at the ready to help negotiate into a Queen Street basement, I happily took Griffin’s offer of leaving the press in an disused corner of their shop in Clyde River until alternate arrangements could be made.

And so we set off, tow truck and letterpress leading the convoy, me behind (and thus the victim of any freak cable snap sending 1500 pounds of Massachusetts-crafted iron through my windshield).

The first six feet cost me $100, the next 30km cost me $60 (I like the was this is trending).

Lessons learned: I know absolutely nothing about how much things weigh; you need serious kit to move 1500 pounds of iron; Griffin’s Towing is quick, efficient and super friendly and if I ever need anything big or heavy moved, they are now my go-to guys; Bill and Gertie Campbell are among the most kind, good-humored, and patient people I’ve ever met.

If you had any advice on who to turn to for moving a really heavy something into a tricky basement location, please let me know.

Hard to believe it’s been a year since the last Wayzgoose at Gaspereau Press in Kentville, Nova Scotia, but it’s coming up again this weekend. Last year Erin Bateman and I went, making a Herculean trip over and back in one day; it was a great trip, and I’m thinking of going over again this year, a trip the possibilities of which are made more interesting by Thursday and Friday being days off school for Oliver. I’ve spent a total of 6 hours in “the valley” of Nova Scotia in my life: perhaps a time to experience a little more of it?

A couple of days ago I got an email from Stephan MacLeod, one of our Zap Your PRAM Fellows, inviting me to dinner with his boss, Evan Jones.

In general I’m not the kind of guy who people invite out to dinner. Unless you’re Catherine, or one of my brothers, you’ve probably never said “hey, I should invite Peter out to dinner.” So I have little experience in this realm. But I’m always game for adventure and, heck, Evan’s bio billed him as a “two-time Emmy award winner,” so he had to be at least somewhat interesting, didn’t he?

Yesterday morning I got an email from Evan’s assistant Natalie.

In general I’m not the kind of guy who interacts with a lot of people who have assistants. Unless you’re my doctor or my dentist, it’s likely that if we communicate we do so in a disintermediated fashion. If you’re important enough to have an assistant, then you’re likely too important to talk to me. So, two Emmys and an assistant: what was I getting myself into?

I arranged with Natalie to meet Evan at Sushi Jeju at 7:00 p.m. and so, after working a little later than usual, I hopped on my bicycle and rode over. Walking in the door I suddenly realized that, what with all the Natalie-mediated communication, I’d completely forgotten what’s-his-name’s name.

(In general I’m not the kind of guy who meets a lot of new people, so my new-person-name-remembering skills have atrophied).

Fortunately I was there first, and a quick check of my inbox revealed that what’s-his-name was Evan and 30 seconds later, as I rushed to clear the evidence of my forgetfulness from the table, Evan walked in the door.

As it turns out, Evan, in addition to having an assistant and being a two-time Emmy-award winner, grew up in Copetown, Ontario. Which is about 30 minutes from where I grew up in Carlisle. He was from West Flamborough, I was from East Flamborough. We were practically brothers.

And so we had an interesting 2-hour long conversation over Indian fried rice and Sapporo beer and I learned an awful lot about an awful lot.

All of which has me thinking that I should be more actively seeking out dining opportunities with Emmy-award-winner people who have assistants. If you happen to be one of these people, please have your assistant call me and we can set something up.

Eve Goldberg, who falls into my “favourite people who I haven’t seen face to face in 25 years” category of friends, sent me an email this morning.

I met Eve in high school in Toronto where we were both budding scientists at the Ontario Science Centre. We kept in touch for a few years off, then lost touch for an awfully long time, and then a few years back I heard from her again, perhaps as a result of her instrumental Watermelon Sorbet being used as the theme song for Richardson’s Roundup on CBC Radio One.

That Eve is a professional musician and I am, well, whatever I am, and that neither of us is curing cancer nor splitting the atom¹ is a testament that science is not for everyone. But I think we count ourselves lucky for our early dabbles in that world.

Anyway, Eve emailed today to tell me that she’s coming to Prince Edward Island to play three “house concert” dates on October 29, 30 and November 1 in Bedeque, Summerside and Charlottetown respectively (details).

I never knew Eve as a musician back in the day, so this side of her is all new to me – it’s sort of like learning she had a secret superpower all those years that I never knew about – and I’m quite looking forward to seeing her play.

1. In addition to her musical work it’s possible that Eve also has a sideline as a cancer-curing atom splitter.

If you’re a geonerd like me, finding a whole new level of geography somewhere is like discovering gold. When I used the parishes of Prince Edward Island as an example of the map layers available from the Province of Prince Edward Island I had no idea what I had accidentally discovered: I’d assumed these were some sort of religious slice-and-dice of the province.

Talking to G. last night, though, I came to learn that the “parish” level of geography here on the Island goes back to Samuel Holland, the surveyor who originally laid out the “lots” system for Prince Edward Island. At the same time as he surveyed the lots he also created parishes, collections of lots, and gave each a name. Here’s a map from the National Archives that illustrates this:

And here’s a list of all the parishes, with locator maps for each. Each parish has a story behind its name – North and East are self-evident, and Wikipedia has the story behind some of the names but it would be nice to see this agglomeration get the documentation it’s due.

G. says that parish boundaries never really came into fashion in bureaucratic use; does anyone have example of situations where they were used (or still are in use)?

The Province of Prince Edward Island has a large collection of “free” GIS data on its website (that’s “free” as in “you can use it if you agree to our crazy license terms” not free as in “go forth and live, fair data”).

To download any of the data files is a cumbersome process that requires agreeing to license terms and then entering your name, email address and occupation. All of which makes getting all of the data rather time-consuming.

Fortunately all the files are actually there, sitting unencumbered on a webserver waiting to be downloaded, so it’s relatively easy to scrape the free GIS data file lists (here and here), extrapolate the names of the data files, and then automatically download them.

That’s what this PHP code does for you: download it, configure, let it run and shortly you’ll have a few gigabytes of GIS data – everything from school board boundaries to walking trails to soils – sitting on your local machine ready for use (the script, by default, just grabs the ESRI Shapefiles).

Given the rather violent response to making public data, well, public, that the province has shown in past, I recommend you grab your data now, before this is made more difficult and cumbersome still.

I recommend the free Quantum GIS application for manipulating the files once you have them: it reads Shapefiles natively and is quite feature-rich. Here’s a map of the parishes of Prince Edward Island inside Qgis, for example:

I had a request from the Executive Director of the PEI Home and School Federation earlier this week for a map of schools on Prince Edward Island. The Federation is putting together an “info kit” for local home and schools and wanted a map to include as a resource.

I went looking for the information in a couple of places – the province’s GIS Data Catalog, the Eastern School District and Western School Board websites, for example – but found nothing. The closest I came was the School Finder on the Department of Education’s website.

As most of the data required to make a map appeared to be buried inside the HTML of the School Finder, I set out to scrape the data out of that page and into a format suitable for mapping. The primary challenges in doing so were related to the poorly-formed HTML of the page, which made automatically pulling out certain elements more challenging, and the poorly-formed and somewhat inaccurate civic address data – addresses like “3326 Trans Canada Highway Route No 1” that conform to the Civic Addressing Standards (the proper form would be “3326 Trans Canada Hwy - Rte 1”).

But with a mixture of manual and automatic data wrangling I ended up with a CSV file of civic addresses that I could then match against freely-available civic address data to get the latitude and longitude of each school.

The result of this process was a CSV file of school locations which I then ran through the excellent KMLCSV Converter application to make a KML file of schools suitable for mapping.

You can see the result overlaid on a Google Map or overlaid on a CloudMade-powered OpenStreetMap:

My next challenge – only because I think it’s information that should be freely available – is to find GIS data for the “school zone boundaries” that indicated which kids from which neighbourhoods go to which schools.  For the time being this information for the Western Board, is only available as a textual PDF file of School Attendance Zones, for the French Language School Board as a series of PDF files of “territory served” by school, and for the Eastern District has PDF maps by “family of schools” (Bluefield, Charlottetown Rural, Colonel Gray, Montague,
Morell, Souris).

As we’re inevitably going to have to take the Eastern District through a “rezoning” exercise – it’s been put off for far too long – it behooves we parents to equip ourselves with the planning tools now so that we can make meaningful contributions to the process.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner in Little Sands yesterday, packed into a very full house with a group of friends and family new and old. The house is 5 minutes walk from the beach and so after a supper of turkey and turnips and mashed potatoes and apple pie and pumpkin pie and untold other delights Oliver and Sergey and I took a walk down to the shore. We got there just as the sun was going down.