Last year was the first time in a long while that I didn’t acquire any computer gear. Well, I bought a mobile phone. That’s actually more of a computer. But otherwise the same old servers and the same old laptops have served us well here at Reinvented HQ.

In that spirit, here’s a list of the tiny bits of analog technology that I can absolutely not be without here in the office:

1. Standard-Duty Slide Lock Utility Knife (A) - I became an Olfa user when I apprenticed in the composing room, back in the day when the tools of the trade were a knife and a line gauge. I use my knife mostly for slicing open envelopes these days, and there’s nothing like it for that.
2. Gaebel 12” Printers Line Gauge - Another composing room holdover. These days I use the inches scale more than the agate lines or points; I also use it as a guide for keeping my place when going through bank statements and similar reports. It will last forever.
3. Swingline Commercial Desk Stapler - This will also last forever. Never jams and built like a tank. My world grinds to a halt when I run out of staples, so I always keep a spare box around.
4. Sharpie Fine Point Permanent Marker (Black) - For writing on CDs, on file folders, to address big envelopes, and for when I run out of pens and need something to write with (because you may lose pens, but you never lose a Sharpie).

Give me a MacBook and those four items, throw in a few Bic ballpoint pens, and you’ve outfitted my office. What are your own analog must-haves?

Sometime in 2050 a student will be tasked with writing about life in the old days in Charlottetown. To ensure that they have a complete picture of the minutiae of our daily lives, here’s how it goes every morning in our house:

• 6:50 a.m. - Clock radio goes off, thinking it’s 7:00 a.m. (it’s been running early for 2 years and we’re so used it we can’t change it now) to the voices of Karen and Mitch on Island Morning. Catherine gets up.
• 7:00 a.m. - Oliver gets up. Or at least complains about being too tired to get up.
• 7:02 a.m. - Catherine out of the shower, downstairs making breakfast and lunch for Oliver.
• 7:05 a.m. - Oliver goes downstairs for breakfast.
• 7:08 a.m. - I’m still in bed, waiting for Mitch to deliver the morning news headlines.
• 7:12 a.m. - News headlines done; into the shower.
• 7:35 a.m. - Ablutions complete, get dressed. Oliver on his way upstairs to get dressed (unless he’s running very late), and sometimes we’ll race to see who can get dressed first (“I have my underwear on, how about you?”)
• 7:47 a.m. - Downstairs for breakfast of yogurt and cereal, a six-year old habit that started with Dan’s Outward Bound trip (yes, it’s really better with yogurt).
• 7:50 a.m. - Watch first 15 minutes of last night’s Daily Show on the DVR. If Oliver isn’t dressed yet the “Oliver, are you dressed yet?” call and answer begins.
• 8:05 a.m. - “Oliver, it’s time to get your shoes on.”
• 8:09 a.m. - Out the door. Sometimes we straggle and it’s 8:10 or 8:11. 8:15 and we’re in the “late for school” region, which rarely happens.
• 8:12 a.m. - Meet the woman with the salmon-coloured hat walking her son to school in the opposite direction, usually at the corner of Prince and Kent. Sometimes we also wave hello to Gary MacDougall on his way into The Guardian.
• 8:15 a.m. - Meet the long-haired guy with sun glasses walking his son to school in the opposite direction. Or sometimes it’s the same son, but the cool-looking mother.
• 8:16 a.m. - Say hello to the retired postal worker out walking his dog.
• 8:16 a.m. - Say hello to the woman from Prince and Euston on her way back from dropping her son off at the school.
• 8:18 a.m. - Maurice is backing his Toyota Yaris out of his driveway; we wave hello. If we’re early we’ll have a chat with him about his house renovations (today we talked about his new fence and how he rounded the tops of hundreds of rails).
• 8:20 a.m. - Stop at the “Reduce Speed” sign just before the school (part of the multi-year “path to independence” project). I say “Have a good day at school” and Oliver says “Have a good day at work” and runs to be at school before the bell rings. Usually the bell rings as he’s running. Sometimes he turns around and says “Or have a good day at the gym. Or at your meetings.”

And our day has begun.

Back in the days when Highway #7 running from Peterborough to Ottawa was my corridor-of-choice, I recall a weekend where my friend Stephen Southall and I decided to stop at every restaurant between Peterborough and Tweed and have a Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwich. As you might expect, it was an exhausting but ultimately satisfying day.

More recently on the BLT front, BLT From Scratch Summertime Challenge! from Michael Ruhlman:

A collective challenge for all of you who really love to cook: Make a BLT from scratch. No, this does not mean raising a piglet for the bacon or growing your own wheat to grind into flour. Yes, extra credit for either, but I want this to be a challenge that everyone can accept, whether you live in a Manhattan walk-up or rural North Carolina, Alaska or suburban splendor: make a BLT from scratch, photograph it and send the photo to me. If you blog, blog about it (and please link back to this post to encourage others to accept the challenge).

From scratch means: You grow your tomato, you grow your lettuce, you cure your own bacon or pancetta, you bake your own bread (wild yeast preferred and gets higher marks but is not required), you make your own mayo. All other embellishments, creative interpretations of the BLT welcome.

A great idea.

Leonhard’s Café and Bakery on University Avenue has been slowing building out their “patio” and last week the tables got tiny chairs. As a parent of a formerly-tiny child, I applaud this: with the exception of McDonald’s, restaurants almost universally ignore the fact that children eat out too.

The Alibi Lounge, taking over the old Royal Tandoor space on University Avenue, was supposed to open last week. But it didn’t. But they explained the delay well:

There’s just over 12 hours left for you to place your online bids in the Prince Street School Silent Auction: online bidding closes tomorrow (Friday, June 5, 2009) at 12 Noon, and then in-person bidding starts at 5:30 p.m. at the Spring Fling at Prince Street School, closing at 7:30. So bid online, and if you really want something, come to the Spring Fling to make sure you’re not outbid.

Some new items have just gone online for bidding:

• 9-Hole Green Fees at Countryview Golf Club
• One night at the Quality Inn on the Hill
• Two 30-minute Piano Lessons with Natasha Hall

The network really came through in response to my request for translation help for a flier for the Prince Street School Spring Fling and I ended up with translations in French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Russian and Persian. You can download a PDF of the flier and we’d really appreciate if you’d print a few copies and stick them up around your office or school or neighbourhood.

And, of course, I encourage you to come out to the Spring Fling yourself: it’s this Friday, June 5, 2009 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Prince Street School, 60 Upper Prince Street in Charlottetown. And even if you can’t make it out in person, you can still bid online in our silent auction until Noon on Friday.

Here’s what the final version of the flier looks like:

Thank you to Philip Brown, PEI Association for Newcomers to Canada, Launa Gauthier, Clark MacLeod, Rob Lantz, Olga Erasova, Mike Brychuk, Svetlana Tenetko, Josephine Sahely, Liane Khoury, Anne Putnam and Mehrnoosh Aghdassi for translation help.

Today is both my 10th year of blogging and the 10th anniversary of Reinvented Inc..

Reinvented is the butterfly the emerged from the chrysalis of digital island, the company I founded in 1995 to take on the task of working with the Province of Prince Edward Island on their nascent website. On May 31, 1999 digital island became Reinvented as the digital island name was ceded to Digital Island Inc., a Honolulu-based company about to launch an IPO.

Interestingly, the domain name digitalisland.com is now controlled by SAVVIS, Inc., a Missouri-based IT company. Presumably SAVVIS acquired the domain when they acquired the assets of Cable & Wireless America in 2004, Cable & Wireless having purchased Digital Island in 2001. What a tangled web we weave.

On May 31, 1999 Reinvented HQ was in the spare bedroom of our house out on the Kingston Road, Reinvented was just me, and I spent most of my time concerned with the minutiae of Island life.

On May 31, 2009 Reinvented HQ is on the first floor of 84 Fitzroy Street in downtown Charlottetown, Reinvented has tripled in size (from “me” to “me plus brother Johnny and partner Catherine”), and I spend most of my time concerned with the minutiae of the cosmos.

Back in the middle of the winter I had grand plans for fireworks and brass bands to help us celebrate this milestone, but the day-to-day deadlines of current projects were enough to distract me from the goal. As a result I’m left to simply thank Catherine for many years of support (and putting up with late night kernel panics), Johnny for many years of hard work (and putting up with working for his scatter-brained brother), our longtime client Yankee Publishing for many years of challenging projects and, more importantly, for the friendships that came with that work, and my former colleagues in the Province of PEI for getting me started at a time when there was still a lot of doubt that this “information superhighway” thing would take off.

• 5,388 blog posts (1.47 per day on average)
• 996,016 words (273 words per day on average)
• First post: Digital Island gets Reinvented
• Most popular topics:
  • Charlottetown (613 posts)
  • Prince Edward Island (302 posts)
  • Design (245 posts)
  • Travel (236 posts)
  • CBC (140 posts)
• Most popular posts (Google Analytics, since January 2007):
  • Air Canada Seat Sale (82,578 pageviews)
  • Montecito Resort and Casino (27,805 pageviews)
  • T@B Trailer (23,358 pageviews)
  • Motorola Helps You Hack Your Motorola (21,882 pageviews)
  • Iced Cappuccino (19,703 pageviews)
• Number of times someone’s asked me to remove a post: 2
• Number of times I complied and removed the post: 2 (in both cases the post was causing the subject of an otherwise benign post difficulties when finding employment)
• 17,987 blog comments
• First comment: Johnny on Good Plumbers Redux (comments didn’t begin until September 2001)
• Top commenters:
  • 1,160 from Alan
  • 818 from Oliver
  • 526 from Ken
  • 515 from Steven Garrity
  • 434 from Wayne
• Most commented-on posts:
  • T@B Trailer (444 comments)
  • Tim Hortons Responds (319 comments)
  • What does sic mean? (296 comments)
  • Toby McGuire (285 comments)
  • WigWag Bar from the Tuck Shop (216 comments)

I was walking down the street yesterday when a man, obviously a tourist, asked me where to find Starbucks. When I told him we didn’t have a Starbucks he look aghast, as though he’d taken a right turn in Borden and ended up on the Moon.

It seems this is about to change. Speculation has been swirling that the old Tweel’s store at the corner of Kent and University, recently under heavy renovation and shrouded in construction cladding, is being renovated into the Island’s first Starbucks.

While there’s been no confirmation of this as the new location, the fact that Starbucks is currently advertising for a Store Manager for Prince Edward Island would seem to suggest that the rumours are at least partially true.