On Tuesday, a few hours after the Amazon Kindle went on sale in Canada, I placed my order. Forty-eight hours later it arrived at my house; if nothing else this is a testament to Amazon’s stunning logistics savvy.

Why a Kindle?

Well, I’ve discovered in the past month or two that I actually like reading digital books.

Blame Anne of Green Gables.

I downloaded the Project Gutenberg version of Anne a while back and loaded it up in Stanza, the ebook reader I have installed on my iPod Touch. And every night for a couple of weeks I read [[Oliver]] another chapter before he went to bed.

The iPod Touch screen is tiny, and I don’t like having to touch the screen to turn pages, but otherwise this worked much better than I thought it would. And when we tired of Anne – you can only read so much “maples are such sociable trees” before you need a break – we moved on to Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother a novel perhaps a little on the bleeding edge for Oliver, what with all the phracking and terrorism, but a novel that seemed to hold his interest nonetheless.

For Little Brother we experimented both with Stanza on the iPod Touch and with an ebook reader application for Oliver’s XO laptop. This proved to be a step up from the iPod, with a much easier to read screen that’s large enough to fit a book-page-like amount of text.  Unfortunately the poor battery life of the XO meant that we often found ourselves at bedtime with a dead laptop and had to revert to the iPod or, dare I say, an old-school printed book.

So, I like digital books, and Amazon is arguably the leader, with the Kindle and its integration with everything Amazon.com, in experimenting with this new way of delivering words, so I really didn’t consider anything else.  The $259 price tag was low enough that I didn’t have to think too hard before clicking “Buy.”

So I’ve now been a Kindle user for about 12 hours.  Here’s what I think so far:

• The screen is very readable.  Jeff Bezos talks about the design goal of wanting the Kindle to recede into the background so that the reading experience feels like, well, reading.  It works.
• I love that when you power off the Kindle it displays a random image of a well-known author on its screen (a screen that, because it uses “e-ink,” can retain images without using power).
• I’ve spent more on books, even at the discounted prices that Amazon sells Kindle books for, in the last 12 hours than I have in the last 2 months.  I suppose that’s part of the point for Amazon.
• The ability to subscribe to newspapers like the Globe and Mail was an attractive proposition; the reality is less so, as rather than anything remotely newspaper-like, the experience of reading a newspaper on a Kindle is more like reading a very, very long RSS feed.  There are no images, the type is all the same size, and stories that would be graphically related on a newspaper page just flow along after each other in a disjointed fashion.
• The “experimental” PDF file convert-and-read feature is similarly disappointing.  Like a web browser, the Kindle is at its heart a text flowing machine, and so its PDF converting engine essentially does a pdftotext on the PDF to create something the Kindle can handle.  This is fine in the original PDF was well-formatted and primarily made of text, but take something like the PEI Climate Change Strategy and you end up with confusing morass of text that’s not particularly readable.
• The ability of the Kindle to receive documents by email, convert them, and wirelessly sync them to the Kindle has been removed for Canadian Kindles; the same functionality minus the wireless sync is still in place – you just drag and drop documents onto the device via USB – but the absence of this capability makes things like Instapaper support less magic-seeming (kudos to Instapaper for the new features that support manual syncing, features that are only slightly less magical).
• I had no idea I would use the ability to “clip” text for later reference, but I’ve done it a half-dozen times now, and it turns out to be a very nice feature, especially the fact that the Kindle jumps an ASCII text version of your clippings on the device, complete with attribution.
• The text-to-speech feature works surprisingly well.  But I wish that I could use it to read aloud a single word or sentence: that would be a big help for [[Oliver]] when he gets stuck on a word.  Here’s what it sounds like when the Kindle is reading this blog post (I sent the post to Instapaper, synced the resulting .mobi file to the Kindle, and then recorded the Kindle reading it).
• The entire New Oxford American Dictionary is built-in to the Kindle, and you can use it both while reading to highlight and define words, but also as a searchable/browseable dictionary in its own right. That’s neat.
• There are two page-flipping “next page” buttons on the Kindle, one on each side.  They’re at the right height and are big enough that using them feels comfortable. It’s confusing that there’s only a “previous page” button on the left-hand side though.
• The joystick used for navigation feels stiff and is not at all pleasant to operate.  I get the “make it flush enough so that it’s almost like it isn’t there” design choice, but they made it too tiny to use comfortably.

That text-clipping feature?  Here are two examples where I found it useful:

The more you learned during the day, the more you need to sleep that night. (NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman - Highlight Loc. 489-90)

Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant said talk of abuse of detainees is hurting public support for the Afghan military mission. (The Globe and Mail - Highlight Loc. 81-82)

It will take a while longer to see whether the Kindle is a keeper: I’ve got a few books stacked up to read now, but I’m unsure as to how I’ll keep new books in my queue (I may have to start reading the Globe and Mail books section).  More to come once I’ve had a few weeks to really take it for a ride.

The Small Fancy describes itself like this:

We are 2 friends living on opposite Canadian coasts who keep in touch with a weekly comic, sketch, doodle, or whatever we fancy. Lori Joy Smith lives in Charlottetown. Mia Hansen lives in Vancouver.

When the world of “the App Store is evil” blogging gets you down, I highly recommend you visit. It may be one of the greatest things ever.

Every time I visit Province House I find something new. This time it was the skylights, which I’d never noticed before. They run all the way from the second floor up to the third floor and the roof:

Unless you’ve opted out of popular culture altogether, you’ve undoubtedly been exposed to the marketing efforts of Rosetta Stone, a computer-based language learning system.  Rosetta Stone isn’t cheap – it costs over $500 for all three levels of Chinese, for example – so unless you’ve got cash to burn, or are unusually in need of language learning, it’s likely not something you’re going to pick up for your home computer.

Fortunately you now have another option: the open-minded folks at the University of PEI have opened their fancy new Mac-based language lab to regular everyday Islanders for free when it’s not being used otherwise.

To start, just go to the circulation desk in the Robertson Library and ask them to set up a free Rosetta Stone account for you; they’ll ask you which language you want to study, and you’re free to select as many as you like (we choose Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Latin American Spanish).  They’ll give you a username and a password, and you’ll need these to sign in to Rosetta Stone.

Next, just find a time when the language lab is free; unfortunately there isn’t a place on the web for this information yet, so you have to contact the library to find out.  You can walk right into the language lab without a need to sign up or check in: it’s at the end of the hallway where the catalog terminals are located and through a metal door with a “language lab” sign on the door.

Once inside you just pick a free computer, sign into the computer itself with the computer’s own username and password that are on a sticky note on the screen, and then start the Rosetta Stone application (it’s the weirdly-shaped blue icon on the dock on the bottom of the screen) and sign in with the username and password you got at the circulation desk.

From there, just follow the instructions.

At the risk of disappearing into a Möbius strip, I took the PDF of the article Panorama for Sale: The Birds Eye Views of Prince Edward Island from the Fall/Winter 1988 issue of Island Magazine, converted it to a TIFF (using the built-in Mac OS X Preview application) and then stitched together the 5 individual page TIFFs into a single 1280x8250 pixel TIFF. Finally, using the same approach I used to create a viewer for the 1878 Panoramic Map itself, I created a OpenZoom-based viewer for the article.

The result is Panorama for Sale: The Birds Eye Views of Prince Edward Island, which is, it turns out, an rather more readable view of the article.

I got curious about whether it might be possible to use the 1878 Panoramic of Charlottetown to create a 3D model of the city.  So I set out to create a proof-of-concept using Google Sketchup.  Aided by two very helpful videos, Getting Set up for Photo Matching and Modeling by Photo Matching I took a snippet of the panoramic, the area around Province House, and used Sketchup’s “match photo” feature to load the snippet, place it in 3D space, and then build a model by tracing over it.  I’m by no means a skilled Sketchup user, but with some trial and error I was able to achieve some promising results:

One challenge, especially if you set out to use the entire 1878 panoramic image to model the city, is that it doesn’t map directly to actual 3D space: the image is warped for artistic effect. But for individual buildings it’s not a bad starting point, and it would be neat is someone more skilled in Sketchup could take a stab and doing this with more finesse.

There’s a wonderful 1878 panoramic view of Charlottetown on view at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery. Last week [[Oliver]] and I spent a long time staring at it, looking for familiar buildings and streets; it’s a very approachable map, and captures the essence of the city 131 years ago in ways that a traditional map cannot.  Here’s a detail from the map, showing the area around Province House (our house, which was built in 1827, is in the lower-right, near the corner of Prince and Richmond):

While it’s nice to see an original of the map on the wall, it’s not the best environment for really getting a good look at a map like this.  Fortunately there’s a project underway at the Robertson Library at the University of PEI called Island Imagined that’s setting out to scan and enhance 1500 Prince Edward Island maps, this one among them.  They were generous enough to move the 1878 panoramic to the front of the scanning queue for me, and sent along a high-resolution scan of the map (151 MB TIFF).

I’m using the map as a test-bed for experimenting with different ways of presenting high-resolution map images inside the browser.

Zoomify

Zoomify is a closed-source Flash-based system with a desktop client that takes the original image and slices it up into tiles at various resolutions that you can then feed to a Flash viewer in a web page. The upside of this approach is that it requires no applications at all on the server-side: you’re just serving up JPEG images into a Flash application; the downside is that it’s not a free solution, requiring the proprietary “zoomifier” application to create the tiled images.

• 1878 Panoramic of Charlottetown in a Zoomify viewer

OpenZoom

OpenZoom is a Flash-based “free & open source toolkit for delivering high-resolution images.”  You can point the OpenZoom viewer at the same Zoomify-tiled images used with the Zoomify-viewer, making at least the client-side of the equation open source.

• 1878 Panoramic of Charlottetown in an OpenZoom viewer

IIPImage

IIPImage is a (confusingly-named) open source client/server system for viewing high resolution images in the browser.  It’s more complicated to get going than Zoomify or OpenZoom because it involves server-side setup of the IIPImage server as a FastCGI module, and configuration of the client-side Javascript-based IIPImage viewer. You also need to take your original image and turn it into a “Tiled Pyramid TIFF” (this is quite easy to do using ImageMagick).

The upside of IIPImage, through, is that it’s open source from end to end: the tiling and serving and the browser client are all freely available.  I’ve run into some issues with Firefox on a Mac not missing tiles with IIPImage that I don’t experience in other browsers; I’ve yet to find a reason this is happening.

• 1878 Panoramic of Charlottetown in an IIPImage viewer

OpenLayers + Zoomify

The wonderful Old Maps Online project has hacked OpenLayers to support using Zoomify images as the tile source. This is a no-Flash-required solution that perhaps has the most potential has it’s open source on the client and server sides (with the exception of the initial “zoomification” step) and can leverage the considerable toolset that OpenLayers makes available for drawing, annotation and so on.

• 1878 Panoramic of Charlottetown in an OpenLayers viewer

Next Steps

The Island Imagined project is looking at using OpenLayers on the client-side and Djatoka on the server side, so I may continue on in that direction for comparison.

In the meantime, enjoy the view of Charlottetown in 1878.  Comments about what you find in your explorations are welcome.

When we moved into our house almost 10 years ago the bathing facilities were limited to a tiny closet-sized room with blue shag carpeting that contained a bathtub with a shower-head that came out of the side of the bath. 

Taking a morning shower was a complicated soggy adventure.

And so the first major renovation we made to the house was to punch out the wall between this closet-bath and the actual closet beside it and create an expansive new washroom complete with snazzy (and expansive) shower room.

The new shower is wonderful, but it has one flaw: every couple of months the shower drain gets clogged up, resulting in a week or two of quick-before-the-shower-overflows showers until we get around to clearing the drain.

Our traditional practice in this regard has been to employ Draino or Liquid Plumr: chemical drain cleaners that, while they create a toxic death cloud in the washroom for a while, and require pouring corrosive chemicals down the drain and into the watershed, do an awfully good job of clearing the drain and allowing for a return to languid showers.

Last month the drain clogged up on schedule and I headed over to True Value hardware in the mall to buy some drain cleaner. Given my new-found interest in ecology, I decided to actually read the labels on the drain cleaners, and in doing so got shocked into looking for an alternative: I just couldn’t conscience the idea of pouring that stuff down the drain. “What about the poor oysters?!” I said to myself.

So I returned home with bottle of Nature Clean Drain Cleaner, a product that said on the label it used “enzymes and highly active bacteria” instead of harsh chemicals to clear my drains.

The Nature Clean product worked. Eventually. While the chemical drain cleaners burn through the clogs in an hour or two, it took about 24 hours, two sessions, and some supplemental drain plunging to get the drain clear.  But in the end it was clear, and I was happy to have taken the additional effort.

But then I got to wondering: what exactly are “enzymes and highly active bacteria.”  And is it any less dangerous to pour them down the drain than it is to pour potassium hydroxide down the drain?

So I did some research.  I consulted with my science writer and biophysicist friend Oliver who taught me about what an enzyme is, and how you whip them up.  I consulted with the folks at Nature Clean who wrote back:

Our Nature Clean Drain Cleaner is based on naturally occurring microrganism - bacteria spore concentrate in high numbers. When applied or poured in your drains these bacteria will come in contact with starches, carbohydrates, cellulose, fats, grease and oils and become activated (feeding) thereby producing enzymes - which will gradually break down organic blockage. So it does take longer and it is a very good drain/septic maintainer and completely safe.

And finally I sent a note to the City of Charlottetown’s water and sewer department from which I received a thorough and very helpful reply about the relative merits of various drain cleaners.  What was most helpful, though, was their final suggestion:

The bigger question for me is why would you find it necessary to use such a product? Perhaps there is a problem in your plumbing system which is causing the flow to be obstructed. Is the plumbing that services the fixture visible? I wonder if there is a flat section or a section with reverse grade?

I’m embarrassed to say that it had never occurred to me to consider the issue from this perspective: I’d channeled all my efforts – and the time and energy of helpful others – into finding a better way to do the same old thing.  I never gave any consideration to whether the problem itself, and my approach to it, needed examination.

I thought of this last night when I sat in on the opening of the final session of the City of Charlottetown’s Integrated Community Sustainability Plan process.

Making an “ICSP” is a weird process: rather than something that flowed naturally from a local desire for a more sustainable approach to city governance, it’s part of a carrot-stick procedure required by the federal government for communities to be able to access money from the federal Gas Tax Fund.  Think of it as mandatory driver trainer for someone who’s gotten into a car accident.  Except the “accident” is “not acting in a sustainable manner.”

As is often the case with such exercises, an industry of ICSP consultants has emerged to help communities develop their plans, and last night’s exercise was conducted by consultants from the multi-national firm Stantec that the City of Charlottetown has contracted to lead the ICSP development process.

Last night’s session had all the elements from the modern consultancy toolkit: there were charts of the “pillars of sustainability,” references to “stakeholders,” videos of  a “green CEO” (from Stonyfield Yoghurt), sticky-notes all over the wall, and adhesive dots standing ready for what one participant referred to as “dot-mocracy.”  There was even a time set aside at the beginning for “quiet reflection.”

In other words, it had all the hallmarks of a charade, and none of the hallmarks of something that real people interested in real things might actually ever care about.  That the meeting was attended largely by politicians, public servants and advocacy groups only served to emphasize this.

The fundamental issue, though: the ICSP exercise was focused on finding a better way to clear the drain clog, rather than stepping back and considering why the drain was getting clogged in the first place.

If I’ve learned anything from steeping myself in the 1970s for the past two weeks it’s that sustainability is all about process, not product.

We know exactly what we need to do, technologically, to adjust our systems; the real challenge is the behaviour modification we need to go through to motivate ourselves to implement.  Installing solar panels and biomass-powered furnaces is easy; getting a community to the point where it thinks that’s an important thing to think about is really, really hard.

If Charlottetown is truly concerned about building a sustainable community, the plan should not involve closeting a narrow bunch of “stakeholders” in meeting rooms with “experts” to ferret out whether federal cash should be used to buy more buses, build artist kiosks, or improve storm-sewer quality: that’s simply trying to figure out how to run new programs on the same old operating system.

A truly sustainable community is one that considers how we plan as much as it considers what we’re planning to do.

And, apparently, that’s not an ingredient in the ICSP process: when I asked why all the sticky notes on the wall were about the what and not the how I was told that the “implementation plan” would include recommendations on that front: the consultants would write that up at the end of the process, and that it would be up to the City to figure out the rest.

So here’s what’s going to happen next: the consultants will write up their report and present it to the City and then pack up and go on to their next Gas Tax job.  The City will make a big show of how it’s gone all sustainable; there will be a press conference, and an article in the newspaper with the Mayor holding the new plan.  The Gas Tax money will flow and the money will be spent on things that the City was already planning to spend the money on before this whole process got started.

And while some eco-friendly infrastructure tweaks may results, the community will be no more “sustainable” than when the exercise started.

I don’t know what the path to a sustainable community looks like. 

I’m pretty sure it doesn’t involve consultants and sticky notes and stakeholders, though.

I suspect it involves a lot of hard work: city councillors fanning out to have real conversations with constituents, hundreds of small meetings in neighbourhoods to talk about actual problems and solutions, work in the schools to involve all ages in developing plans and ideas. It will takes strong, informed, passionate leaders to get out in front of the process and point the way.  It will take a long time and won’t involve a lot of money – qualities that take it outside the comfort zone of our traditional approach to planning – and a willingness to experiment with new ways of making plans, making decisions, and getting things done.

Sustainability isn’t a snap-on feature that you can add to a community, it’s an approach to living in community. 

Until we stop seeing a bunch of drains that need unclogging in every more inventive ways we’re never going to get there.

We need to step back and open our minds to the possibility that the solution might lie in rearranging the plumbing: re-framing the problems, not banging harder on the solutions.

Cross-posted to climatechange.thinkaboutit.eu.

Six months after the filming of Ten Days in September, the National Film Board came back to Prince Edward Island, in March of 1969, to film the follow-up The Prince Edward Island Development Plan, Part 2: Four Days in March.

Del Gallagher, who featured prominently in the first film, has now left his position at the Economic Improvement Corporation (EIC), the details of the Comprehensive Development Plan have been worked out, and the film opens with the reading of the Speech from the Throne by Lieutenant Governor Hon. Willibald Joseph MacDonald that announced that the Plan would be introduced during the session:

The centre of this film, however, is the debate over how the plan is to be implemented, and this focuses discussions at the Rural Development Council and an interview with a farmer-member of the National Farmers Union:

The film closes with an excerpt of a CBC Television interview with Hon. Alex Campbell, Premier, and Hon. Jean Marchand, minister in the Canadian government responsible for regional development:

It’s interesting to contrast the federal proposal to drop education from the Plan, that was hotly debated in the first film, became, in the final Plan, 60% of the spending.

You can order the film on DVD from the National Film Board or find it in the Media Centre in the Robertson Library at UPEI.

Digging deeper into Prince Edward Island’s Comprehensive Development Plan, I’ve come across The Prince Edward Island Development Plan: Ten Days in September, a 1969 National Film Board film.  The filmmakers set down on Prince Edward Island for 10 days in September of 1968 and filmed the players involved in the Development Plan, and what emerges is both a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the plan’s mechanics, and an uncommonly rich look into late-1960s society on the Island.

You can order a DVD of the film from the National Film Board; it’s also in the media center at the Robertson Library.  It’s a very well-made film, and required-viewing for anyone who wants to understand more about that era.

Here are some clips to whet your appetite; first, a look at the research process behind the plan:

Lincoln Dewar, from the PEI Federation of Agriculture, talks a Island agriculture:

Hon. Alex Campbell introduces Del Gallagher, the man hired to shepherd the Plan: