ruk.ca - peter rukavina blogs

Tympan

Tue, 15 May 2012 14:23:46 -0300

The tympan — the top layer of oiled paper on top of which paper to be printed is laid on the letterpress — is a sort of archaeological record of the printing process. Here’s the tympan for the Richmond Street poster:

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Vertical Panorama

Tue, 15 May 2012 10:42:14 -0300

The Creative Studio app from Nokia for Windows Phone has an elegant panorama-taking function that I’ve been experimenting with. One of the problems with panoramas on the web is that they’re hard to display with any justice because they’re much wider than they are high. So why not, I figure, turn the camera 90 degees and shoot a vertical pano! Here’s the result:

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Get a Life

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:21:57 -0300

Can something be considered “sustainable” if only weirdos are involved? As a weirdo myself, this is a topic I spend a lot of time thinking about, and the Richmond Street Transformation project that my office overlooks has caused me to consider the issue again.

So far the project appears to be very much of the “Birkenstocks and apple cider” school — chalk painting, conceptual art, Katimavik demonstrations, talking circles, etc. — to the point, I think, the end effect might actually end up being anti-sustainable: for regular everyday people walking and driving by the message isn’t going to be “wow, we really should have more bicycle lanes in Charlottetown!” it’s going to be more “they closed the street for this!?”.

The transformation project has another week of action to convince me otherwise, but so far it hasn’t lived up to its promise.

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Switching Comments

Sun, 13 May 2012 17:04:57 -0300

Despite my difficulties learning how to spell it, I’m experimenting with using the third-party commenting platform Disqus to manage comments here.

Although commenting might appear to be a technically simple aspect of maintaining a blog — name, email, text, blamo — it’s the defense against the ever-widening torrent of blog spam that’s the complicated part. I’ve experimented with everything here — reCAPTCHA, Mollom, Akismet, Defensio — and although they do variously capable jobs at filtering out the spam, they also make the user experience of commenting suffer because of the delays involved in the spam-catching-and-filtering.

So I’m going to experiment with letting someone else have a go for a while.

Please let me know (in the comments, of course) whether this works better for you in the readership; if it looks like Disqus is a good replacement for Drupal’s built-in commenting, I’ll work at migrating the 20,000+ comments that have flowed in over the years into the Disqus archive.

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No Fax

Sun, 13 May 2012 12:27:37 -0300

I’ve had a MyFax.com account for as long as I can remember: I hardly every need to send faxes, but once or twice a year the need has arisen. But not for a long while now, and hardly at a volume that would warrant the monthly cost. So I’ve closed my account, and you can no longer send me faxes nor expect to receive them from me. The end of an era that started many years ago with WinFax Pro (note how the email address on that old Usenet post is caprukav@atlas.cs.upei.ca).

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A Day at Brackley Drive-in

Sun, 13 May 2012 12:17:30 -0300

Oliver and I spent the afternoon inside the projection room at Brackley Drive-in yesterday with Bob Boyle and his son Ben helping them prepare files for their new digital projection system.

Bob has made a huge investment in projection technology this year, shifting entirely from film to digital, and one of the content gaps that needed filling in were the various interstitial bits of film like “The Show Starts in 10 Minutes.” Bob put together animations, using Animoto for all of these; I simply helped him get them from the M4V format that Animoto allows you to save animation in through to the DCP format required by his digital projection system (I have some notes here if you’re doing this yourself). We finally got it all mostly working after about 3 hours of experimenting, most of which was spent waiting for video files to convert from one format to another. If you’re at the drive-in this season, watch for the result.

Here’s what the new projection system looks like (on the left) beside the old system (on the right; as a backup for now):

From the other side it looks more like a data centre rack:

The top unit in that rack is the driver for the new closed captioning system that Bob will roll out shortly, an innovation that would have been impossible in a pre-digital era. Those requiring captions are loaned an in-car caption display that looks like this:

The captions are displayed on that unit exactly as they would be if you turned on closed captioning on your television.

The captioning system isn’t the only drive toward accessibility that Bob’s taken this year: he’s finishing off construction of accessible washrooms along with a paved area of the lot close to the canteen that will allow easier navigation for wheelchairs.

The Brackley Drive-in is open weekends now; 7 days a week come summer. Check out what’s coming soon.

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Transformers

Fri, 11 May 2012 18:46:34 -0300

The Richmond Street transformation crew has been hard at work all day, and the street is beginning to take on a different character. While my jury is still out on the shape of the bicycle lane — I’m not sure a wavy-gravy bicycle lane is “sustainable” — it’s nice to see a gaggle of passionate people outside the office window painting and sweeping and drawing and plotting. Stay tuned for more.

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An Accidentally Cool Photo

Fri, 11 May 2012 15:56:50 -0300

I leaned out of the window of the Reinventorium and snapped this photo of a “living wall” set up beside The Guild on Richmond Street, not anticipating the nice reflection the building would offer in return:

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Pre-Transformed Richmond Street

Fri, 11 May 2012 09:23:03 -0300

Richmond Street between Queen and Pownal is getting transformed today into a “sustainable street.” From the Reinventorium we have a bird’s eye view. Here’s the pre-transformation scene at 9:00 a.m.:

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Five Years Ago Today

Fri, 11 May 2012 09:19:17 -0300

Ate lunch at the Town & Country Restaurant, since torn down:

Vestigial oil tank discovered on the playground of Prince Street School:

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Google Reader Readable Extension

Thu, 10 May 2012 10:47:34 -0300

Olle sent me to the useful How to setup Google Chrome a few days ago. Which, in turn, sent me to Google Reader Readable extension. The extension transforms the visual cacophony that is:

Into the calm simplicity that is:

Nothing to set up. No changes to Google Reader required. It’s the most useful of the myriad Google Chrome extensions I’ve come across.

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Plazes Infographics

Wed, 09 May 2012 09:25:38 -0300

As a pleasant and unexpected coup de grace, Nokia has transitioned Plazes.com into an infographic-rich summary of each user’s Plazes journey. It’s very nicely done. To get yours (and to download your Plazes history and/or transfer your history to Nokia Maps), just login to Plazes.com.

A nice additional touch is that the download package you receive if you choose to grab your Plazes history includes all the infographics for your own account.

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That Business of Strangers

Wed, 09 May 2012 09:18:32 -0300

Oliver and I have been making the rounds in downtown Charlottetown after supper this week stapling Richmond Street posters on electric poles.

On Monday night we ran out of staples and so popped in to Shoppers Drug Mart on Queen Street to buy some more. When we couldn’t find them on the shelf, I asked a clerk, who looked at the shelf with me and confirmed they didn’t have any. The pharmacist across the hall overheard our search, however, and volunteered some staples from his own stapler; no charge.

On Tuesday night we were walking up Queen Street toward Grafton. Oliver was expressing some interest in an after-supper snack when three young people stopped us on the sidewalk and asked us if we’d like hot chocolate and granola bars.

“Ah… why?”, I said.

“We’re just giving back to the community,” one of them replied.

And so we took a break and enjoyed hot chocolate and granola bars on a bench in the waning spring sunshine.

Both episodes were a technical violation of the age-old dictum to not talk to (let alone accept gifts from) strangers, and demanded an elaboration of the dictum to Oliver.

“It’s okay to accept gifts from strangers if you’re an adult. But you have to go with what your gut tells you.”

“What’s your gut?”, asked Oliver.

“Your feeling about whether the strangers are good people with an honest offer.”

“Okay,” said Oliver.

This is tricky parenting. I want Oliver to be “streetproofed” (and, to a large and possibly extreme extent, he already is), but I also want him to be open to the delightful happenstances that the world has to offer.

With staples and hot chocolate under our belt, and an extra 25 posters still-unposted, I’m eager to see what gifts the streets of Charlottetown will provide us with this evening.

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Best plant sale ever?

Mon, 07 May 2012 08:40:28 -0300

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Richmond Street Goes Green

Fri, 04 May 2012 20:26:22 -0300

Last year I had the pleasure, along with Jenni Zelin, Rob Lantz and Laura MacPherson, of judging applications to the City of Charlottetown’s Community Microgrants program. After a long process of deliberation, we awarded grants to “Tulips for your Thoughts” (a project to plant tulips along Upper Prince Street; tulips that are about to spring into bloom any minute now), an after-school theatre program at the Murphy Centre, and a project to transform the section of Richmond Street from Pownal to Queen into a “sustainable streetscape.”

The streetscape project was supposed to happen last fall, but the weather intervened, and now it’s scheduled to happen from May 11 to 19, 2012.

I’d been thinking about this project over the winter — newly resident as we are overlooking Richmond Street — and about a month ago I had a sudden vision of a poster to promote the project — a black RICHMOND ST on top with a green RICHMOND ST below — and so in the time-honoured tradition of unauthorized advertising, I’ve been crafting this together for the past couple of weeks. Here’s the result:

I dipped into the Holland College font of Akzidenz Grotesk for the large RICHMOND ST, and used M&H-cast Gill Sans in 18 pt. and 12 pt. for the date and location. Kwik Kopy in Charlottetown generously donated a Tim Hortons coffee cup of green ink. The paper is inexpensive white 110 lb. card stock from Staples.

Two recent arrivals to the print shop aided significantly in the printing of the posters, both ordered a few weeks ago from NA Graphics in Colorado.

First, a set of three Kort Adjustable Quad Guides. These aren’t cheap — about $10 each — but they are the Cadillac of gauge pins, and once I learned how to insert them into the tympan — there are handy instructions included that need to be followed carefully — I was left with a fantastic immovable paper-holding force:

It’s hard to overstate what an aid to printing this is: in my early makeready experiments last week, using some aging and partially smashed spring tongue gauge pins to hold the paper in place, I lost as many copies of the poster to the inside of the press (falling off the pins from the sticky force of the inked type pulling off). With the new pins in place I didn’t lose a single one.

The other item from NA Graphics was a 100-sheet package of tympan — oiled paper that’s sits as the top layer of the “packing” that sits under the paper to be printed. It has the benefit of being stiff (which is great for inserted the gauge pins), sturdy (so it doesn’t easily rip) and its oily coating means that you can print a guide print on it, then wipe of the excess ink and not end up with ink on the underside of what you’re printing:

Other than an unfortunate tongue-clash incident (the brass tongue of one of the gauge pins was aligned so as to crash into the “S” in “ST”), quickly solved by some adjustments, the printing went well. I discovered that if I wear disposable latex gloves while printing it’s a lot easier to grip the paper, both from the table to the press and off the press to the table. Once I was set up and in a rhythm I was cranking out 10-15 impressions a minute.

I printed the black ink first, then the green (I’d laid out the type to facilitate simply popping out the date and location and sliding the “RICHMOND ST” down into position for the green).

Watch for the posters on a telephone pole or shop window near you. And do come out to participate in the event starting a week from tonight on May 11, 2012.

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The End of the Plaze

Fri, 04 May 2012 10:48:49 -0300

I first read about Plazes, the pioneering geolocation site that consumed much of the late 2000s for me, from Joi Ito and I signed up for an account on September 26, 2004, eight years ago, and “plazed myself” from the old Reinvented office. I was user number 1185.

In the intervening years I visited 752 “plazes” in 172 cities in 15 countries and plazed myself another 10,954 times, which was slightly more than Plazes co-founder Stefan Kellner (9,948) and slighly less than Plazes co-founder Felix Petersen (11,822).

Although I signed up in the fall of 2004, Plazes didn’t really come into its own for me until the 2005 reboot conference in Copenhagen, where I had the seminal Plazes experience, meeting Ton Zylstra and Martin Röll (who remain good friends to this day).

After several years of being a Plazes power-user, in November of 2006 I got hired on to develop an explanatory screencast about Plazes, which I just dug out of the archives and uploaded to YouTube and the Internet Archive for posterity (note the references to the hot social networks of the day — MySpace, Friendster and TagWorld).

In June of 2007, after I liveblogged a visit to Plazes HQ, I formally joined the Plazes team as a User Advocate, working remotely from Charlottetown, where I blogged, hacked (including working with Til on a skunkworks Plazes.net project), developed and organized PlazeCamp in January of 2008:

On the tail end of the reboot conference in 2008 it was announced that Nokia had acquired Plazes. I stayed on as a Nokia contractor for a few months, but eventually it was clear that Plazes was going to become something different — perhaps integrated into Nokia’s Ovi Maps product — and not a standalone product with a need for someone like me, and so I stepped back into power-user-hood.

In the intervening 4 years we of the Plazes faithful have been assuming that we’d simply wake up one day and find that Nokia had taken Plazes offline. This morning the email came, albeit with some advance warning:

Logging in to Plazes one last time I joined members of the old team in one last plazing:

Good-bye Plazes; it was quite a ride.

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Water Tower, Then and Now

Thu, 03 May 2012 10:14:09 -0300

Across the road from La papeterie Saint-Armand is Lachine Canal National Historic Site which is filled with helpful signage about the industrial past of the area. Here’s a photo of one of the sign-boards with its subject, the water tower behind the former Congoleum plant — juxtaposed to the right. Saint-Armand’s shop is in the basement of the building just out of view in the modern photo on the left.

Parks Canada has a fascinating map of the historic North American north-east canal system; I learned, for example, that the Trent-Severn canal is a shortcut from Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay (something that, having lived 5 metres from the banks of the canal when I was in resident at Trent University, I should have known!).

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Gave hostages to fortune...

Thu, 03 May 2012 09:47:01 -0300

In a bid to learn more about the Confederation Centre of the Arts’ history, I sought out Frank MacKinnon’s book Honour the founders! Enjoy the arts! : Canada’s Confederation Memorial in Charlottetown at the public library. The book, which details the history of the Centre from conception to birth, is a fascinating primer on how to accomplish an impossible project. My favourite passage is this, relating the initial reaction of Premier Matheson to the idea:

The premier’s reaction was all that could be expected at the time: “It cannot be done but if it can we will not stand in your way. You are on your own. We trust it will not cost any money but we will provide the site. If it is a gift we will accept it.” “Will you maintain it?” I asked. “Of course,” was the easy answer when success was not expected. And the premier gave hostages to fortune when he agreed to keep politics out of the project and discourage the interference that so often has ruined local enterprise on the Island and elsewhere. On several occasions he warned that I alone would take the blame should anything go wrong.

For anyone seeking to carry out a project that seems so absurd as to be dismissed out of hand at the mere mention of it, MacKinnon’s book is a must-read, for he provides, in compelling detail, how he managed to assemble the political will required to build the Centre. We owe him a debt, both for the Centre itself, but also for his willingness to lift the curtain and show how it was done.

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How much does it cost to drive from Charlottetown to Montreal?

Wed, 02 May 2012 12:47:27 -0300

When we picked up our Kia Soul rental last Thursday it was full of gas. We drove from Charlottetown to Montreal, drove around Montreal a bit, and drove back. Total driven from door-to-door was 2,441 km and the Soul reported that it used 8.1 litres/100 km of gasoline when I return it; actual gasoline purchased:

Hartford, NB - 37 litres at $1.337 for $50.68
Deschambault, QC - 44 litres at $1.394 for $61.47
Brossard, QC - 11 litres at $1.359 for $16.24
Levis, Quebec - 35 litres at $1.394 for $49.51
Hartford, NB - 39 litres at $1.337 for $52.16
Charlottetown, PE - 38 litres at $1.281 for $49.38

So we used a total of 204 litres of gasoline which cost me $279.44. This comes out to a slightly higher 8.36 litres/100 km, or about 28 miles per gallon. Which is right around what the U.S. Department of Energy reports.

Our carbon footprint for this trip was either 0.38 tonnes or 0.40 tonnes or 0.46 tonnes depending on who’s doing the calculation. This is 60-70% of our emissions if we had flown (0.65 tonnes).

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Non à la marchandisation du savoir

Wed, 02 May 2012 12:16:08 -0300

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Crane Cast Iron and Valve Plant

Wed, 02 May 2012 12:03:05 -0300

When you see beautiful industrial builings like this (the former Crane cast iron pipe and valve plant on the Lachine Canal in Montreal), and realize that we’re capable of making substantial, striking, well-built commercial infrastructure, it makes the snap-together-from-a-catalog tissue-paper-and-aluminum buildings that APM et al are building all over Charlottetown even more depressing to regard.

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Radio Silence

Tue, 01 May 2012 23:47:44 -0300

It’s been quiet here for a week, mostly because of a last-minute trip that Oliver and I took up to Montreal. The trip had a variety of purposes beyond simple “father and son road trip” (which was a good purpose in its own right). Oliver had a new cousin to visit; Alain at Atelier Domino, a letterpress shop in the city, was selling off a collection of metal type; I needed paper from Saint-Armand and some accessories for the office from IKEA.

Because of the need to haul cargo, and a desire not to tax the aging VW Jetta, I rented a car for the weekend. As chance would have it we ended up with a Kia Soul, which was the perfect car for the job: not the most comfortable car in the world, but spacious and well-laid-out for holding lots of stuff (in addition to the type and the IKEA goods we made a stop at Adonis to fill up on exotic foods).

We rented an apartment from Airbnb — it was a block from Atelier Domino, close to my brother’s place, in a nice neighbourhood, and only cost us $84/night. We never met Carole, the owner, but she was quick with the email communication and the place worked out really well.

In additional to family visiting and shopping, otherwise we did the usual “father and son go to Montreal” things — visited some of the installations from the International Digital Arts Biennial, Vietnamese sandwiches in Chinatown, went to the movies (John Carter on the 3D Imax), went to the theatre (RH Thomson and Michelle Giroux in Same Time Next Year), make-your-own frozen yoghurt, fantastic Mexican food, and several very good coffees.

The driving was a killer (younger Pete would think nothing of driving almost anywhere in North America on a moment’s notice, but times have changed); we ended up doing just over 2400 km round-trip. We stayed in Riviere-du-Loup on the way up at Hotel Universel (clean, inexpensive, and seemingly teleported from 1974 design-wise) and in Edmundston on the way back at the Best Western (possibly the best roadside hotel I’ve ever stayed at — really).

I’ve spent the night unpacking the Soul, putting together IKEA accessories and getting the Charlottetown operation back in action; regular programming resumes tomorrow.

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Back when Brutalism was Brutal

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:00:18 -0300

Here’s an undated postcard from the PEI Museum and Heritage collection showing the Confederation Centre of the Arts:

The Centre is in the Brutalist style that was typical of institutional buildings in the 1960s, a style described as valuing “truth to materials”:

This “truth to materials” approach was anti-aesthetic, but, the Smithsons believed, more honest and true to Modernism’s basic principles. Reynar Banham dubbed the school ‘the New Brutalism’, a movement which aimed, in his words, to “make the whole conception of the building plain and comprehensible. No mystery, no romanticism, no obscurities about function and circulation.”

The buildings that were torn down to make way for the Centre were decidedly non-Brutalist; here’s another postcard from the PEI Museum and Archives collection taken from the same perspective, but in an earlier day:

Full of mystery, romanticism, and with much left to the imagination about function and circulation. Tearing down those beautiful buildings and replacing them with something tantamount to a nuclear fallout shelter took courage; it may have been misplaced, deranged courage, but it was courageous nonetheless.

Almost everything that has been done since — as the building has, as Stewart Brand would say, “learned” — has been backing away from that courage, trying to mute and soften the Brutalism. Here’s a photo I took from my office this morning, from a slightly different angle, but capturing the same area of the Centre:

The trees could be expected to grow up. But everything else — the planters, the replacement of the broad staircase, the public art, the lamp-posts, the garbage cans — has had the effect of obscuring architectural intent of the building. It hasn’t exactly added “mystery” or “romance,” but the eye is deflected, and the truth is no longer in the materials.

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I love it when a plan comes together...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:34:39 -0300

Back in 1999 Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article for The New Yorker, Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg, an article that factored prominently in his book The Tipping Point. In the article Gladwell profiled Chicagoan Lois Weisberg, a person seemingly at the centre of every crossroads in that city. Gladwell coined the term “connector” to describe Weisberg:

Why is it, for example, that these few, select people seem to know everyone and the rest of us don’t? And how important are the people who know everyone? This second question is critical, because once you begin even a cursory examination of the life of someone like Lois Weisberg you start to suspect that he or she may be far more important than we would ever have imagined — that the people who know everyone, in some oblique way, may actually run the world. I don’t mean that they are the sort who head up the Fed or General Motors or Microsoft, but that, in a very down-to-earth, day-to-day way, they make the world work. They spread ideas and information. They connect varied and isolated parts of society. Helen Doria says someone high up in the Chicago government told her that Lois is “the epicenter of the city administration,” which is the right way to put it. Lois is far from being the most important or the most powerful person in Chicago. But if you connect all the dots that constitute the vast apparatus of government and influence and interest groups in the city of Chicago you’ll end up coming back to Lois again and again. Lois is a connector.

I have never wanted to be an astronaut or a race-car driver or a politician or an artist, but the life of a connector, since I read Gladwell’s article more than a decade ago, has always seemed like something to aspire to.

Living here in Prince Edward Island is both bad and good for this aspiration: good because there are fewer social strata here than elsewhere and so it’s easier to connect across them; bad because, as a relative newcomer, I can never possibly hope to catch up with connectors who have been connecting all their lives. So I am an amateur cross-pollinator at best.

But, by applying Prince Edward Island-style learned behaviour to the broader connected world, sometimes it’s possible to make connections that resonate. And when they come together, it’s a great feeling.

Five or six years ago at the reboot conference — a conference that was instrumental in helping me confront the effects of connector-disabling shyness — I met Alex and Eric, two Swedes who shortly thereafter moved to Berlin and founded SoundCloud.

When I was in Berlin last February to the Cognitive Cities conference (organized, in part, by reboot alumnus Igor) I renewed my aquaintance with Eric and visited the SoundCloud office; when I went back to Berlin last summer I visited again, and ended up meeting David and Parker after being misdirected to the remote SoundCloud enclave office that houses the Community Team.

Fast-forward to this spring: my old friend and occasional Prince Edward Islander Cindy was going to Berlin with her son Cal. Cal, among other things, spent a year in Norway studying snowboarding and video production, and I knew he was interested in music and had a SoundCloud account so I reasoned he might be a good person to connect with SoundCloud, so I sent off an email to David and this morning, it seems, Cal dropped by.

I know this because of the following in Natalie’s Twitter stream:

(Full circle: Parker introduced me to Natalie at the SoundCloud party I made best efforts to attend last summer.)

I love it when a plan comes together.

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Go next door and borrow a cup of ink...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:36:53 -0300

The great corporate patron of my letterpress project continues to be Kwik Kopy in Charlottetown, just 4 blocks north up Queen Street. This week I’m plotting a poster for a May event, and I needed some green ink. Not much green ink, just a couple of tablespoons. A quick email to Rob at Kwik Kopy; an couple of hours later the reply: “there’s some green 348 in a Tim Hortons cup on my desk waiting for you to pick up.” Which I just did.

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