1. Café So-Ban, in the food court of the Charlottetown Mall, seems to be under new management; the food is still good, though, and they seem to have expanded the menu.  Don’t let the “food court” location put you off: they make their food fresh to order, and Café So-Ban has absolutely nothing in common with big-city MSG-laden Asian food court glop.  I especially recommend their dumplings, their sushi, and their shrimp teriyaki.  They’re open from 11:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. daily.
2. There’s a kind of “to go” sandwich in the cooler at Leonhard’s Bakery and Café on University Avenue: focaccia with feta cheese. I had it for the first time today, and it’s very good; the focaccia is pleasantly un-cardboard-like.
3. I’m always surprised by how many people don’t know about Monsoon, the sushi place on University Avenue across from the Atlantic Technology Centre, despite the fact that they’ve been open for many years now. They’re open only for lunch, but you can eat in or take out a nice array of made-to-order sushi, with options running the gamut from vegetable-only things like carrot rolls to full-on BBQ eel rolls. They make a very nice miso soup too.  And Ruth, behind the counter, is the nicest person you’ll ever buy sushi from.

There is a man I know only from his slipper-selling-stand at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market. I don’t know his name, or what he does other than make very nice slippers, and so in my heard I think of him as Mr. Tumnus, only because he bears a passing resemblance to, well, Mr. Tumnus.

Yesterday afternoon [[Oliver]] and I dropped by the Confederation Centre Art Gallery to see the new shows and, while we browsing the Walter Tandy Murch exhibition, Mr. Tumnus suddenly appeared, as if by magic, and started to play  hauntingly beautiful music on the grand piano.

That this music was exactly the same kind of music you’d think Mr. Tumnus himself would play our local slipper-making Mr. Tumnus did nothing to dispell his unearthy reputation.

I surreptitiously grabbed a snippet of the piano playing on my phone; it doesn’t really do justice to the experience, but it will give you a taste.

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.