It’s not news that I’ve been flirting with the city of Berlin for several years now. I visited the city for the first time back in 2007, a trip tacked on to the end of my yearly trip to Copenhagen for reboot, to allow me to see the Plazes operation close-up. Among other things, that visit netted me some work with Plazes, and that work took me back to Berlin the following January for PlazeCamp.

Two years later I was back in the city with Oliver for our spring vacation and much father-and-son merriment, and this February I seized the opportunity to return yet again, this time for the Cognitive Cities conference (a conference organized in part by Igor, who I first met in the lobby of the CAB INN City hotel in Copenhagen during reboot, proving that life is indeed a Möbius strip).

Suffice to say the every visit to Berlin I uncover another layer of interestingness, meet another group of great people, find another great place for coffee, and generally fall for the place a little harder.

When I came back from Berlin this spring, my brother Johnny suggested, over coffee one morning, that Catherine and Oliver and I should just pick up and go to Berlin for the summer; little did he know that he idle suggestion proved the catalyst for exactly that.

Choosing to leave Prince Edward Island for the summer is, on many levels, completely absurd. It’s not hard to argue that the only time of the year that PEI is actually habitable by humans is from June through October, especially coming off the end of the winter-of-snow-ice-and-perpetual-illness.

We love summer on the Island. But you can’t spend the summer in two places at once, and so after 17 summers spent here, we’re going to take one summer off and beta test both living in Europe and living in a big city.

Catherine and I both have the benefit of being able to work anywhere (although Catherine’s artistic endeavours do make it harder to take all her gear – looms, sewing machines, easels, anvils – with her, so she has to be more improvisational). And Oliver, after years of intensive training-through-travel, is quite happy to pick up and leave home for his summer vacation. We’ve worked hard to forge this flexible life framework, and so this summer’s the time to take it out for a ride.

We land in Berlin on July 12 and are renting the same Kreuzberg apartment I stayed at in February through until August 18. I’m hot-desking at Betahaus to avoid the ergonomic hell of trying to work from the dining room table (and to afford the possibility of a work social life), have been in touch with the folks at Druckwerkstatt about using their letterpress for part of the summer, and Catherine is busy ferreting out all the radical craft laboratories in Berlin to try and carve out a space for herself (if you happen to run an anarchist weaving coop in Berlin, please get in touch!).

No summertime trip to Europe would be complete without a swoop up to Malmö, Sweden, so from August 19 to 26 we’re pickup up and relocating the operation, affording us an opportunity to spend some time with Olle and Luisa and Morgan and Jonas and, I hope, with Henriette and others on the Danish side. Morgan had made promise of crayfish, and Luisa of a craftmaking workshop in the countryside.

We’re back on the Island for the tail-end of summer; a week later Oliver starts school again, leaving us a week to cram in all the beach-going, seafood-eating activities we’d otherwise have several months for.

For all the years I’ve been involved with Prince Street School I’ve been hearing tales of these great, tears-streaming-down-cheeks assemblies that students put on throughout the year to do things like mark events and recognize volunteers.

Indeed I’d been receiving an invitation to come to the annual volunteer recognition assembly for the past few years, but I’d never made the time to do so (perhaps because I didn’t consider myself a real volunteer).

But this year I had a special task as the home and school association was recognizing teacher Philip Brown with the Teacher/Staff Appreciation Award. And so this afternoon at 1:00 p.m. I joined all of the real volunteers (like Shirley, who’s in the school every day helping kids learn how to read, or Dana who keeps hotdog day running, or Catherine, who’s always doing fun and interesting art projects with Oliver’s class) in the Prince Street gym for the assembly.

It turns out everything they say is true: the assembly was a panorama of heartfelt cuteness, with classes singing songs (including two versions of Thank you for being a Friend and a rendition of With a Little Help from My Friends that cleverly omitted the line “I get high with a little help from my friends”), slide shows of kids and volunteers, and various and sundry words of thanks to all the volunteers who work in the school throughout the year. Tears did indeed appear in the corners of my eyes.

And Philip Brown got recognized. Those of you who only know Philip from his role in municipal politics may not know how deeply involved he is in the life of Prince Street School; he truly does go above and beyond the call of duty, and it was good to be able to thank him for his efforts (no matter how you feel about Philip, you may welcome the opportunity to come to the Prince Street School Spring Fling next Friday from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m where you can take a try at plunging him into the dunk tank!).

The fire insurance maps of Charlottetown from the early years of the last century – the maps I mentioned here last week – are some of my favourite maps of the city: they’re not only beautiful, but they’re packed with all sorts of information about buildings here and gone. The Island Imagined project at Robertson Library has made high-resolution scans of a set of these maps first created in 1903 and evolved, through patch-and-paste, through 1917, and you can view them all at IslandImagined.ca.

Jumping off from some experimenting I did with the 1878 panoramic view of Charlottetown a few years ago, I did some experimenting over the weekend with using Zoomify and OpenLayers to create an alternative way of viewing the maps. What I really wanted to get to was a way of being able to bookmark maps at specific locations and zoom-levels, so I could reference locations.

Like Spring Park Tannery or the Egg Warehouse or the Electric Light Station or the Round House.

So I started by grabbing each of the 20 fire insurance maps from IslandImagined at a zoom-level of 7, which results in a nice, large image about 7,000 pixels wide, like this:

wget -O fedoraimages/firemap-01.jpg \
  "http://137.149.200.109:8080/fedora/get/imagined:208604/ilives:jp2Sdef/getRegion?level=7"

Here’s a Bash script to do this automatically if you want to do it yourself.

This resulted in 20 large images that I then ran through the free-to-download Zoomify tile-creator, which resulted in 20 directories filled with tiled images.

At this point I could simply drop the Zoomify Flash component into any of the directories and have a Flash-based map viewing solution, like this one for the main index map to the fire insurance maps. This is certainly more usable than the IslandImagined viewer, but it relies on Flash and it doesn’t make for bookmarkable maps.

From there it was a simple matter of crafting (crufting?) some PHP code to create an OpenLayers-based viewer for the same tiles, which has the added features of creating an index page linking to all 20 maps and the ability to bookmark any of the maps at any zoom-level and position.

You can take a look at the resulting map viewer or grab the the PHP code here in github; it’s by no-means feature-complete, but I enjoy the map browsing experience, and I really like the ability to bookmark.

As announced on the Phoenix Medical Practice blog and acknowledged in a Health PEI news release, Charlottetown doctor Robbie Coull is shutting his medical practice, letting go his 14 staff, and leaving his 4,500 patients without a family doctor.

Dr. Coull showed up on my radar last fall: I was intrigued by some of the novel aspects of his practice, like publishing patient wait times on his website, operating a paperless office, and, perhaps most novel of all, expressing social policy ideas in public. It was clear the Dr. Coull was not your regular everyday Island doctor, and when I received an email from him in reaction to my blog post about his practice, I took the opportunity to suggest that we get together for a chat about his approach to medicine, health and technology.

Which is how, about a month ago, I ended up spending a very interesting afternoon with Dr. Coull and some of his senior staff, learning about how they view the world.

Suffice to say that they view the world in a decidedly “not like everyone else” kind of way.

There’s no denying that Dr. Coull is a bull in a china shop: he has strongly-held set of views about the right way to practice family medicine, and it’s a model that doesn’t seem to have much in common with the kind of medical care we’re all used to receiving.

The first thing you see when you enter his office, for example, is a fridge full of fresh vegetables, free for the taking by visitors. The waiting room itself is unusual: most medical waiting rooms on PEI are designed, it seems, by the same design firm that designs underground prisons. Dr. Coull’s waiting room is actually rather pleasant. There are couches. Lots of natural light. It’s the kind of place you wouldn’t mind hanging out for a while.

Beyond the technology, the vegetables, and the sunlit waiting rooms, however, lies this simple, radical notion, laid out in the practice’s Guide to Patients:

Health Starts With You
We want to work with you to keep you healthy. We can help you stay healthy with education, health promotion, screening, and monitoring.

The general attitude that pervades the health system on PEI, especially the consumer-facing end of it, is “you should count yourself lucky that we’re taking time out of our busy, overworked schedules to spend any time with you at all.”

The notion that a family medical practice should actually want to work with you to keep you healthy shouldn’t be a radical notion – you’d think it was the whole point – but the siege mentality that’s gripped the medical system for as long has anyone can remember has meant that, somehow, this basic idea seems unusual.

There are many passionate, caring practitioners working to keep us all healthy on PEI, and I’ve benefited from their efforts time after time.

On a systems-design level, however, it’s clear that they’re working a framework that hasn’t been significantly re-examined in several generations: a fee-for-service system that incentivizes illness, a customer service model that strips us all of our dignity more often than not, and a human resources model that places too much emphasis on physicians and not enough on the team backing them up.

I’ve no real idea whether Dr. Coull’s ideas about family medicine are the right ones for Prince Edward Island, and even if they are the right ideas I’ve no idea whether it’s even possible to install a brand new operating system on such an intractable and complicated organism. I suspect that that approach Dr. Coull takes to his practice won’t work for every patient.

But I do know that the three hours I spent with Dr. Coull and his staff are the only three hours I’ve ever spent on Prince Edward Island with a group of people who had thought so long and hard about a new way of doing things, who were so passionate about not only talking about it but about listening to others, and who had built constant re-examination and improvement into the very core of how they worked.

Dr. Coull likely doesn’t have all the answers for Prince Edward Island, but I suspect we’d be better off listening to him than casting him out as an irritant.

When I left our house at 100 Prince Street this morning Catherine was set to launch herself off on another day of spring cleaning – she’s got the kevorka for the flotsam this week, and as we’re thinking of letting out our house for the summer she’s going at it with extra verve.

Thirty minutes later I found myself in Casa Mia listening to DB relate the story of the late Eunice Reid’s mad dash to clean up the same house at the end of World War II in anticipation of the arrival home, after 6 years overseas, of her husband Brigadier Bill Reid (punchline: he showed up earlier than expected, and found her in mid-cleaning).

After toying with Google Tasks as a way of managing my life (or at least the parts of my life not already managed by Trac), today I’m experimenting with Remember the Milk, with hopes of finding, in its single-minded focus on task management, a more fulfilling solution.

After getting the iPad and iPod apps set up, getting the email-to-tasks chain flowing, the next task is getting (the excellent) Alfred app up and running for easy task entry from anywhere.

Here’s how I did it.

Step One: Install rumember

This is a handy command line Remember the Milk utility. Install as follows, from the command line:

git clone https://github.com/tpope/rumember.git
cd rumember
sudo gem build rumember.gemspec
sudo gem install rumember-1.0.0.gem

Run ru from the command line the first time and a browser will open Remember the Milk requesting permission to access the application; one you grant this once you don’t need to do it again. Once you’ve done this, you can test the utility from the command line like:

ru Setup Alfred for Remember the Milk

Step Two: Setup for Alfred

Open the Alfred Preferences window and click on the Terminal section:

Click on the + at the bottom of the list to add a new command, and enter the following:

• Title: Remember the Milk
• Description: Add a Remember the Milk Task
• Keyword: r (this can be anything you like – rtm or task… anything)
• Command: ru {query}
• Optionally, grab this official icon and drag it into the icon field.

And click Save:

Make sure you check the Silent checkbox beside your new command to prevent a Terminal window from opening when you access the command:

Step Three: Use It!

…results in:

I’ve only been a Remember the Milk user for a few hours now, but I’ve already upgraded to the $25/year “pro” level – partly just because I admired the gentle on-ramp provided for this, where everything works fine and dandy at the “free” level, but just works better once you pay up. I’ll report back in a few weeks on how I make out with it…

I have a selfish interest in the success of school breakfast programs: I want all the kids in my son Oliver’s class to start the day well-fed, because well-fed students are better learners, and a classroom full of well-fed students is easier to teach.  When everyone wins, everyone wins, in other words.

Both Prince Street School, where Oliver is in grade 4, and St. Jean School, just down the street, have active well-used breakfast programs. The programs, which work to provide a free healthy breakfast to any student at the school, are an important part of the life of the school, and while they receive financial support from many corners, always need more resources than seem to be available.

To this end, an ad hoc committee of teachers, staff, parents and members of the community-at-large are organizing a fundraising concert for Sunday, May 15 from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. at Murphy Community Centre in support of the Prince Street and St. Jean breakfast programs.

There’s a great line-up of performers, all of whom are donating their time:

• St. Jean Choir
• The Chaisson Family
• John Connolly
• Prince Street Rock Band
• Joey Kitson
• Patrick Ledwell
• Bridgette Blanchard
• The Blueprints

It’s an all-ages, family-friend concert and admission is by donation (you decide how much you can afford). The folks at Trinity United Church will be providing scones, tea and coffee at no cost. It promised to be an excellent way to spent a late Sunday afternoon. Please join us, and please spread the word!

Last week I learned that we spent $13,457.99 on electricity for our house at 100 Prince Street over the 11 years since July 2000, or about $1200 per year.

Today I asked Coop Energy, where we buy the oil that heats our house and our hot water, for a similar summary. What I learned was that from January 2002 to May 2011 we’ve consumed 37,989 litres of oil for which we’ve paid $26,258.23, or about $2900 per year.

That means that our total energy cost for our home is about $4,100 per year.

Coop Energy doesn’t have an online customer system yet, but they tell me that one is currently in the works.

From Island Imagined, a Robertson Library map-scanning project, here’s a page from the 1903 Fire Insurance Map of Charlottetown. Our house, at 100 Prince Street, is in the bottom-left corner in the 53rd block.

There’s city-wide map that acts as an index to the individual map pages; my favourite part of that map is the legend: