If you spend any amount of time on the UPEI campus, you quickly realize that visual communications is not the institution’s strong suit: campus maps are out of date, building signage is subtle enough to be invisible, and there appear to be three visual identity programs in simultaneous use (The Crest, The Big U and Rust and Gold).

It seems there is a move to bring some clarity to this hodge-podge: a Task Force on Visual Identity has concluded its deliberations, and the result is an refreshed visual identity program for the institution.

While the project is laudable — I’m one of those people who think this stuff matters — I’m somewhat perplexed by the typographic emphasis of the new wordmark. I heard it referred to as “the University Island” today, and sure enough in the guidelines for the identity is the comment:

The type appears in a straightforward and easily readable presentation, and the colours have been chosen to bring attention to the words “University” and “Island.”

Perhaps there are more profound reasons for this emphasis, but it seems to me that what’s being emphasized is separateness — after all UPEI already is a sort of “academic island” floating aloof in the sea of the civilian community that surrounds it, and surely this isn’t something you’d want to typographically draw attention to.

If anything it sould be the word of that is emphasized, for it is the most important if you feel that the interplay between UPEI and the community should be strengthened: UPEI as an institution of the Island. And yet there it lies in italicized ignominy, almost hidden.

To say nothing of poor downgraded Prince Edward, once Duke of Kent and Strathearn, commander-in-chief of the forces in British North America, Governor of Gibraltar, and Knight of the Order of St. Patrick, now reduced to Pantone Gold 143 rendering half the size of the ISLAND to which he lends his name.

You know those things that they clip to your finger when you’re in the hospital that are connected to a cable that connects to a machine that beeps. Well they’re called pulse oximeters and they measure the amount of oxygen in your blood and your heart rate.

What’s really interesting is how they do this: one side has a pair of LEDs, each of a different wavelength, that shine light through your finger; on the other side is a detector that detects this light. Because oxygenated blood and deoxygenated blood absorb the light at different rates, the changes in the reception of the light can be used to calculate both oxygen saturation in the blood and heart rate. All without needing to stick anything inside you or draw any blood. Neato.

See also this post.

Now that I’m a personal telemetry nut, I went looking for a way to funnel a live stream of my heart rate into some sort of digital archive where I could add it to the data pool. The Nokia N79 Polar looked promising, but I don’t want to buy a new phone, and I don’t like the form factor.

Then today I read Impact of open source hardware on Laurent’s blog, which pointed me to Low-cost Heart Rate Monitor for XO-1, a project to hack together a heart rate monitor for the OLPC, one of which we happen to have at home.

Which got me thinking of Forskningsavdelningen (“Research Department”), Olle’s hackerspace in Malmö, and hardware hacking, something that, to be honest, never interested me very much mostly because I wasn’t interested in making tiny devices out of solder and masking tape that could make an LED light up or a buzzer beep.

But making real stuff — whether toasters or heart rate monitors or a better light switch — now that’s interesting.

Kind of hard to run on the treadmill with the XO in my hand, but maybe that’s where LilyPad Arduino comes in?

Much to ponder.

The last time we were all going to die (see flu/avian) I got a little obsessed. Enough to buy black-market Tamiflu to ward off the “what if I didn’t do enough” guilt when friends and family started to drop all around me. And then that passed and life resumed as normal.

I got mildly re-obsessed yesterday (see flu/swine) and spent much of the day toggling back and forth between CNN, CBC, CDC and Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s Twitter feed. And washing my hands. All the time.

And then this morning Dr. Gupta said “it appears the rate of deaths in mexico is starting to taper down” and I took my personal flu paranoia threat level down from 5 (Panic) to a more comfortable 2 (Que Sera, Sera) and although I’m still plotting the purchase of new and more pleasurable hand soaps, I haven’t felt a need to watch a live CDC press briefing all day.

And during this brief period of calm I’m reflecting on how annoying it is to have the full weight of the CNN news machine applied to a situation that might actually affect me. I mean it’s one thing for CNN to wrap advertising around far-away wars and explosions, another to have them hype my imminent death.

From Interim Recommendations for Facemask and Respirator Use in Certain Community Settings Where Swine Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Transmission Has Been Detected, a definition of “close contact”:

Three feet has often been used by infection control professionals to define close contact and is based on studies of respiratory infections; however, for practical purposes, this distance may range up to 6 feet. The World Health Organization uses “approximately 1 meter”; the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration uses “within 6 feet.” For consistency with these estimates, this document defines close contact as a distance of up to 6 feet.

The singer/songwriter Serena Matthews on the personal economics of the music business:

If I made enough money from CD sales I could just be a stay at home mom and maybe focus a little bit more on music as well, but I don’t see that happening. My voice is peculiar.. my guitar skills are mediocre, at best. And my songs are too consistently sad for the radio. This leaves me saying “Hmmmm..”

…

If you want to buy my CD’s, I’ll sign them for you and I’ll make a wish for your happiness. I wouldn’t even ask if I didn’t really need the money right now. Honestly, I do need the money.

You can listen to and download all of Matthews’ tracks online. But if you buy her CD she’ll handwrite the track names on it for you.

Back in 2006 at reboot8 Rasmus Fleischer, co-founder of Piratbyrån, presented a talk called The Grey Commons that bears re-reading this week. My favourite section is Beyond the consumer/producer-dichotomy:

The copyright industry today likes to present the problem as if internet were just a way for so-called “consumers” to get so-called “content”, and that we now just got to have “a reasonable distribution” of money between ISPs and content industry. But we must never fall in that trap, and we can avoid it by refusing to talk about “content” altogether. Instead, we talk about internet as communication.

Therefore, it is totally wrong to regard our role as to represent “consumer interests”. On the contrary, it’s all about escaping the forceful division of humanity into the two groups “producers” and “consumers” that copyrights produces in different ways.

When The Pirate Bay gets distilled into a pop-culture news story (MP3 from Q) and becomes a simple David vs. Goliath discussion of “the big guys” and their litigious reaction to file sharing, the discussion presupposes this consumer/producer dichotomy. It would be nice to see the popular discussion move on from this into some of the more subtle (and more interesting) arguments that are at the heart of the Piratbyrån conversation.

Last night saw the debut of Big Break: Prince Edward Island, a taxpayer-supported reality show airing on The Golf Channel. A channel that, by some demographic incident, is included in my cable package. So I watched.

From the initial hoopla you might think that the show actually had something to do with Prince Edward Island. After watching the first hour I can confirm that, short of some quick establishing shots of lobster boats and a lighthouse, it does not.

Big Break is a show about golf and the narcissistic young people who play it. While it was shot at the Mill River course in western PEI, you never actually get to meet any real Prince Edward Islanders, nor, indeed, see much of PEI off the golf course. You might as well be in Dearborn for the paucity of “Islandness” in the show.

I’ve got nothing against golf and the people who play it — although I’m not certain we should be trying to attract the “soulless people with time on their hands” demographic that the contestants seem to represent — but surely there must be more to a golf vacation on the Island that what we’re showing on the screen. If there isn’t, we could save ourselves a lot of annoyance and degradation if we just re-sold Dearborn tee-times and offered a shuttle service.

The Holman Building on Grafton Street in downtown Charlottetown, once a department store and soon to be transmogrified from office space into the Hotel Homburg, is having its regrettable modern skin peeled off to reveal the facade the building once presented. Our man on the street G. captured the first stabs: