Polyclinic

Polyclinic: A clinic, hospital, or health care facility that treats various types of diseases and injuries. (from the American Heritage Dictionary).

Distance of the Charlottetown Polyclinic to our house: 214 m.

Places in the Charlottetown Polyclinic that we’ve visited in the past 8 years: the doctor who helped me with my first bout of carpal tunnel syndrome, Catherine’s OB/GYN during her pregnancy with Oliver, the surgeon who performed my colonoscopy, the surgeon who repaired the cartilage in Catherine’s knee, the clinic where we got our immunizations before our trip to Thailand, the place where we both got new pairs of glasses, Catherine’s physiotherapist, Lawton’s drug store.

And now, our new accounting firm.

I suppose you can consider income tax an injury.

ePrintIt comes to Charlottetown

It seems we have a secret new addition to our downtown Charlottetown business community: ePrintIt.

Catherine went to Action Press this afternoon to get a colour copy made.  Their colour copier was busy, so they sent her across to the Dominion Building (aka “the old Post Office” / aka “where all those DVA people work”) and the Commissionaire there led her down a hall to ePrintIt’s Charlottetown office.

They made her copies, but seemed confused as to how much to charge her.  She said “I have three dollars.”  That seemed to make them happy, and they took her $3 and that was that.

Looking at their website, their quite technically sophisticated, and can accept documents for printing over the web.

Check the tape

Catherine Hennessey gets the Order of CanadaCatherine Hennessey doesn’t have a VCR.

Or rather she does have one, but it was built in 1972, weighs about 75 pounds, and doesn’t fit into her aesthetic.  I think she stores it in the barn at Cranberry Wharf.

Tonight the Discovery Channel is showing a documentary on the Hillsborough River, and Catherine wants a tape of it.  We have a VCR, and so she asked me to record it. 

She dropped off a theoretically blank tape in our vestibule this afternoon, and then left a phone message later on: “you might want to check that tape I left, I think there might be something on it.” 

It turns out that the “something” was “only” the tape of her induction into the Order of Canada last July.

We’re on the way to Shopper’s Drug Mart to buy a new blank tape.

N O R M

A few years back, my Dad’s technicians spelled out his name, ‘Norm,’ using their boat while he was off somewhere.  It wasn’t until he “played” the GPS path of their survey that he saw the result being drawn out before him.

I thought of that today when I received tip to check out this GPS Drawing website from Maggie, the Internet Editor at The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

Rubylith

I am of the fortunate age to have learned a trade that is now, for all intents and purposes, obselete: manual paste-up.

When I worked at the Peterborough Examiner, I was a member of a team of 8 or 9 people who, every day, took typeset stories that spewed out of CompuGraphic typesetter on 4 inch wide rolls of photographic paper, trimmed them, applied hot wax to the back, and pasted the stories in the right place on a layout sheet the same size as the final paper.  This process is well illustrated on the Cal State Fullerton website

The resulting sheet was then mounted on a platform and a full-size picture taken of it with a large wall-mounted camera.  The negative was then sent down a special chute to the pressroom where a 3D plate was made on a platemaker, and the plate went on the press and a paper was produced.

In the modern post-paste-up world, when you want to colour a box of text green, you just click on “green” on your computer, select the paint tool, and woosh, it’s green.  Takes what, maybe 1 or 2 seconds tops.

Back at the Examiner, if we needed to colour a part of the newspaper a different colour, we needed to use something called rubylith.

Basically what we would do is to take a sheet of ruby — which is just a sticky red film and use an Olfa knife to cut out a piece the size of the different coloured splotch in the paper.  We’d then tape this ruby onto a clear plastic sheet the size of a newspaper page, and used some alignment holes punched in both the plastic sheet and the newspaper page in question, enure that the two were aligned.

Next we’d shoot two negatives, one of the actual page and one of the plastic sheet with the rubylith, and sent both negatives to the press room, where two plates would get made, one for colour and one for black.

Once you got good at it, you could do all this in, say, 10 minutes. 

A lot of work to make a red line under the Sears logo, or to make the Farm Boy grocery store have a green border.

I assume that there are still places in the world where my manual paste-up skills would be of use.  But not many.  Newspapers are created on Macintosh computers now, and I’d be willing to bet that if you showed up at the Guardian looking to borrow some rubylith they might have to look hard for it.

Message to Oliver

Oliver, I am including this message here only so that if the archive of this website survives until 2052 in some form or another, you make sure to make plans to be in Thailand for the cracking open of the time capsule buried at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok the day we visited.  Harold Stephens, our man in Bangkok, has a copy of one of his books buried in the capsule.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled era.

Oh, by the way, Oliver: I love you. 

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