I asked my friend David, an architect, to give me a ballpark figure for how tall a “story” is in a building. Because measurements in the media are often given in “stories” — like “the giant wave was over 10 stories tall” — I wanted to have an ability to make approximate calculations. Here’s what David told me:

A building like the new Government of Canada building would be 4 to 5 metres a story. A house would be more like 3m.

My original reason for asking was to add some real-worldness to this post about wind turbines. The wind seems to get really interesting at the 80m level here in Charlottetown — using David’s figures, that’s about the height of a 17 story office building. In other words, very tall.

Too tall for my back yard.

Congratulations to the City of Charlottetown on the release of its new heritage database. This project, brought to life on the wings of our friend [[Catherine Hennessey]]’s passions, aims to be a complete database of properties and buildings for the city. There are records there for our house; nothing yet for the office at [[84 Fitzroy Street]].

I put together a little demonstration project called [[Roll Your Own Plazes Launcher for OS X]] that takes the [[PlazesPHP]] class that [[Olle]] and I have been working on and uses it to create a simple [[Plazes]] launcher.

I think it would be quite helpful for the hospital to send home a note with every newborn… something like this:

Please note: at some random time over the next five years, probably in the winter, your child will wake up in the middle of the night unable to breath properly. They will likely be barking like a seal or a dog. They will probably be quite distressed, and you will probably think they are about to die, and will become quite distressed yourself. Welcome to croup.

And, indeed, this is exactly what happened in our family yesterday.

Things started off normally: [[Oliver]] went to bet about 8:00 p.m., and [[Catherine]] followed shortly thereafter — exhausted from a day at the Jack Frost Festival for Freezing Parents. I got to bed about midnight. And at 1:03 a.m. I awoke to the aforementioned seal barking sound, and found Catherine in Oliver’s room, with a very distressed little boy, pointing at his throat and quite concerned that it didn’t seem to work anymore. He was shivering. And wheezing. And trying to cough by unable.

I was absolutely sure he was going to stop being able to breath completely Any Second Now.

So Catherine and I got dressed faster than we ever have before, and we all piled into the car for a mad dash to the Emergency Room at the [[Queen Elizabeth Hospital]] — a 10 minute drive during the day, but we did it in about 4 minutes what with the lack of traffic and the panic-induced creative driving techniques I employed.

Whereas almost all previous visits the the Emergency Room had placed us 374th on the triage list, leaving us to stew in the waiting room safe in the knowledge that gunshot victims et al were getting treated ahead of is, last night we were whisked into the special “pediatric resuscitation” room, and before I knew what was happening Oliver had a mask on, and a dedicated team of experts swarming all round, looking calm and collected, and like this happens all the time (apparently, it does).

Oliver, it seems, was having his first experience with “the croup.” And he was having a barn-burner of an experience thereof.

It took about an hour before any sort of normality returned (i.e. all three of us stopped shaking): they gave Oliver various powerful “stop the croup symptoms” drugs through the magical face mask, and within about 15 minutes of arriving the worst was over. I think I saw his pulse max out in the 190s at the worst of it. After about 30 minutes he was breathing somewhat normally. When they took the mask off, he complained to the nurse that he had a runny nose — the first words he’d spoken since we’d left home.

At 3:00 a.m., after another check by the doctor and some helpful advice about what to expect over the next several days (like “it might happen again tomorrow, but probably not, but be sure to drop back in if it gets this worse again”), we were off home again. Oliver went right to sleep. I listened to the Voice of Russia for an hour before I was de-paniced enough to get any sleep.

This morning Oliver seems quite fine — to be expected, as the doctor told us that “the croupy ones are always okay during the day.” So, other than being unable to revisit the Jack Frost Fun this afternoon, things are mostly back to normal. We’re biding our time, of course, until tonight around bed time, and hoping that the evil croup monster stays in his cage. I don’t think we could take another night like that so soon.

Everyone at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital was amazing: thank you!

Isn’t parenthood wonderful.

Postscript: a Google BlogSearch for ‘croup’ leads to lots of similar tales. Nice to know we’re not alone.

Several of my recent procrastinations came crashing together tonight. Earlier in the week I did some experiments scraping of Charlottetown City Council minutes. Back in November, I documented a method for grabbing PEI civic address data into a local database. And my Interactive Charlottetown Transit Map and RealCharlottetown.com projects have taken me into the world of “Google Maps mashups.”

So what happens when you take all those projects and jumble them together? The Charlottetown City Council Minutes: Addresses Mentioned map. It looks like this:

Here’s how I made it:

• Because of my earlier RSS experiments, I already had a MySQL table containing the web addresses of Charlottetown City Council meeting minute PDF files — basically a list of the links you’ll find here. So I began by writing a little script to grab each of the PDF files and store it locally.
• Next, I used pdftotext (part of Xpdf) to convert each of the PDF files to a plain old ASCII text file.
• I extracted the names of all of the streets in Charlottetown from my database of PEI civic addresses, and then ran through each meeting minutes file using a PHP script looking for occurrences of a number followed by the first word in each of the 496 streets in the city — like “84 Fitroy” or “100 Prince”.
• For every match found, I looked up the civic address in my database, and if I found a latitude and longitude, assumed it was a valid civic address, and I inserted an entry in a new MySQL table recording the location, the address, and the minutes file PDF I found it in.
• Using the RealCharlottetown.com Google Maps-making code as a starting point, I created a “mash up” script in PHP that plots each of the 265 addresses I found on a map.

The process is, of course, imperfect. My address matching could be better. My process for grabbing the “excerpt” of the minutes could use some work. Sometimes the minutes don’t record a street number, so I don’t pick up a match. And of course the minutes don’t necessarily record every mention of an address at council meetings. But it’s still a pretty neat way of visualizing council business geographically.

Take note that the page might take a slightly long time to load, especially in Safari. Firefox might complain “a script on this page is taking too long” (you can just click “Continue). And I haven’t tested this, as yet, in any version of Internet Explorer.

I’ll cobble together an open source release of the source code for all this ASAP. Comments welcome.

After abandoning del.icio.us back in December, and replacing it with my own locally-hosted system based on Scuttle, I’m jumping back into the del.icio.us fold. Why? I realized that although my locally-hosted solution was faster, it completely lacked the social part of “social bookmarking.” And that, as a result, I was missing out. I also missed the subtle niceties of the del.icio.us UI.

So I hacked together a little script, using class.delicious.php, to grab my recent bookmarks and punt them over into del.icio.us. And I’ve sent an email to the few others who joined the Scuttle party with me and poured their own bookmarks into my local system. And in a few days, bookmarks.ruk.ca will be no more.

So if you want to play the home game, point yourself over to del.icio.us/reinvented from now on.

And if this is all confusing to you, and you’ve made it this far, What is del.icio.us? is a concise introduction to this world.

Every year at the New Year’s Day Levees here in [[Charlottetown]] (see reports for 2004, 2005 and 2006), our day ends with the Premier’s Levee at the Confederation Centre of the Arts.

And every year Provincial Photographer Brian Simpson is at the end of the receiving line, taking pictures of each visitors shaking hands with the Premier.

The miraculous part of this endeavour is that no effort is made to attach the person being photographed to a name or address, yet somehow the photographs make their way by mail, over the course of the year, to the homes of those pictured. I suspect that there is an entire secret department of government devoted to photographic analysis and address matching.

In 2004, I got mine a month later. In 2005 it took a little later: I didn’t receive mine until Nov. 27, 2005. Here, for comparison’s sake, is our 2004 photo:

And here’s our photo for 2005:

Besides the Premier’s moved from a striped tie to one with a diamond pattern, notice that my degree of sartorial splendour shot through the roof; indeed this is one of the rare photos of me, outside of a wedding environment, wearing jacket and tie. I also seem to be a lot happier in 2005, and I seem to have much better Premier interaction. I also seem to be very, very tall, something I’m not usually conscious of. Oh, and I think I was 10 pounds heavier in 2005 too.

Eagle-eyed readers will note that Catherine is looking resplendent in the background of the 2005 photo.

As I suggested here, and based on the same approach I took with building permits, I’ve prepared an RSS Feed for Charlottetown City Council Minutes.

The index of council minutes on the City’s website is slightly less useful, scraping-wise, than the building permits page because the file naming scheme for council minutes is all over the map. As a result, I’m using the “last-modified” HTTP header as the item date for the minutes.

I’ve added a page in the Rukapedia that documents the creation of the Charlottetown Building Permits RSS feed that I wrote about yesterday. You can also grab the code itself if you’re interested in rolling your own.

I expect it would be trivial to modify the code to RSSify other regular reports from the City, like:

• Bylaws
• Budgets
• Council Meeting Minutes
• Council Meetings Audio (could become a podcast with some savvy RealAudio to MP3 hacking)
• Photos of the Mayor
• City Events
• Tenders

Of course it would be even easier if the City simply published RSS data themselves, and I would certainly encourage them to do so.

I’ve hacked together an RSS Feed for Charlottetown Building Permits. The feed doesn’t index building permits themselves; it’s simply an index of the weekly PDF building permit summaries published here by the City of Charlottetown.

In theory, whenever that page gets updated with a new weekly summary, the RSS feed should get updated with a new item, pointing to the new summary. It appears that the weekly summaries are released every Monday, but I’m not completely certain about that.

Please don’t build the RSS feed into anything important, as its contents may change, and the feed itself might disappear; this is only an experiment. I’ll release the “feed creating” code when I’ve got a little more time.