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Got the mini-exhibits set up last week in a hurry, and began running the public tours today. So far those tours have included television, radio, and print media, a couple of “regular” researchers, a city councillor, and a single new member of the general public. A decent start, though. Later this week we have city staff, heritage committees, a Grade 5 class, and another day of “public.” By the end of it I’ll probably have some things memorized that I never expected to.

So what’s this table about, then? Turns out that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, stopped in Fort William one afternoon in 1914 and bought a piece of land on a whim. (It was an investment property — he was just that taken by the city’s potential. As far as I can tell he wasn’t in the habit of buying land in Canadian cities he’d never been to before.) The exhibit uses this property, and the famous name attached to it, to demonstrate the variety of resources that the Archives has for researching the history of land and buildings. People use these to find out who used to live in their houses. (Hint: not Sir Arthur.)

Incidentally, the place is now a bakery (and a pretty good one.)

We also have set up a display of maquettes of public art, a display of assorted visual materials (photos, maps, blueprints) and a couple of “strange but true” files (including one documenting the controversial move to accept Daylight Savings Time in painstaking detail.)

A full set of photographs can be found here, on my flickr account.

This afternoon I was able to harvest my first batch of high-potency compost from my indoor vermiculture bin. Exciting!

I didn’t really get into this for the end product — the intent was more to have a better way of disposing of vegetable scraps. Still, I’m sure the house plants will love it.

Pretty sure the wermz have multiplied, also. There’s got to be at least twice as many in there now as when I started. Makes me wonder whether there’s a maximum werm density, and if I’m anywhere close to it.

Things I have learned:

• to add food slowly and in small pieces
• to stir regularly, especially when there’s lots of food
• that “harvesting” the compost takes longer than I expected
• and that the cat should be kept far away from this process

And in a couple of months, I get to do it all again.

This season’s Discardia is March 20-26, and once again I am celebrating. Because I am that sort of a geek.

The point is, generally, to get rid of unnecessary things in one’s life; to clear out the clutter and the trash and emerge happier. My strategy is a little different. I do more.

The one thing that is the biggest problem for me is procrastination. I tend to pile up ideas, projects, and plans, and then leave them lying around in the corners of my mind to get worried about for months. So in fact it’s quite helpful to get that motivational kick in the head, in the form of an arbitrary calendar date, to actually start finishing things and checking the long-term items off the list.

Last March I moved to a new city and a new job. This time, it’s nothing so extreme. Fortunately.

Yes, I am one of those people who really does benefit from productivity tips. The ability to admit it is recent, and, I think, a major step in personal growth.

Walking to work yesterday morning, the sun was just a few degrees above the horizon, straight in front of me. It was cold and dry, and the sky was unflinchingly clear.

Everything came together in just the perfect condition for me to be able to see a steady stream of water vapour sublimating directly from the snowbanks.

Mornings like these make me wish I knew how to use a camera properly.

The past few days have been pretty unimpressive for me.

I’ve  been spending a lot of time doing things that bring me a lot of short-term happiness: reading and re-reading short fiction I’m already well familiar with, watching videos on YouTube, things like that. I know that it’s not the stuff that I need to be working on. But there’s this draw.

The problem is not because the other stuff looks so attractive to me. The problem is that the things that I’m meant to be doing are looking harder and harder.

And thus I find ways to avoid those things. It suddenly becomes very, very important to read everything that’s been posted on Boing Boing today. It would be horrible if I missed something neat, wouldn’t it?

The solution, I am trying to teach myself, is not to convince myself of how very important the things which actually are important are.[1] I know that full well. I am very good at feeling guilty and completely blithely ignoring those feelings.

The solution is to make those things that I need to do as exciting, interesting, easy, and fun, and as immediately satisfying as anything else. Bit of a challenge, yeah. I started writing this post at about 7 pm. And got distracted.

[1] Love the grammar, yeah?

Another lovely book review thanks to Mini Book Expo:

“The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: A murder and the undoing of a great Victorian detective,” by Kate Summerscale, published by Raincoast Books, 2008.

This is a fantastic piece of historical nonfiction that reads as grippingly as any murder mystery of the more fictional variety. Summerscale is an excellent researcher as well as an excellent writer, and I can’t think of a single weakness in the way this came together.

It’s 1860, and the body of a three-year-old child is found stuffed down an outdoor lavatory. His throat has been cut, and his chest stabbed, and he appears to have been suffocated as well. The killer must be someone known to the victim and his family — someone from the nearby village, or one of the help, or even one of the family. This horrible killing quickly becomes a national obsession. While the local police fumble evidence (accidentally or with help?) citizens from across the country write in to newspapers with their favourite theories, and the Metropolitan Police sends in their best detective to help.

The role of plainclothes detective is a new one, and one that’s not regarded fondly by the upper class British at this time. It’s shocking that someone could be authorized (and paid!) to spy upon citizens who have done nothing wrong. It’s even more shocking, of course, when one of these working-class, little-better-than-a-criminal-himself detectives enters a respectable home to interfere with its private workings and accuse a teenage girl of murdering her brother. Detective-Inspecter Jonathan Whicher is certain that the killer is Constance Kent, sixteen years old and half-sister to the victim. (After her mother died–and was rumoured to be insane in the years before–her father remarried the governess and had several more children.)

Unfortunately for Whicher, there just wasn’t enough evidence to convict Constance, and what with popular suspicion falling upon the boy’s governess, she went free and the crime went unsolved for years. Whicher’s career suffered, as did the reputation of the detectives in general.

Detective fiction did pretty well, on the other hand. Authors like Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens found lots of material for their stories in this new method of crime-solving. Summerscale traces nearly the entire history of the genre back to this and a few other famous cases in the mid-nineteenth-century.

And by the end of the volume some more light is shed on the murderer, the motive, and the way all of these lives played out after the tragedy.

As I mentioned, this book is excellently written, compelling, and thoroughly researched. One is given no reason to doubt Summerscale’s theories and conclusions. A good deal of context is given to put the murder itself in the proper time and place, and this never seems to bog down. No detail is irrelevant. The quotations from contemporary literature are perfect for shedding light on public opinion towards crime and detection.

While there are very few footnotes in the text itself, the voluminous research to support the work is indicated in an extensive Notes section. The reference material also includes a bibliography, an index, maps, and a list of characters (which I must admit I referred to frequently.) Incidentally, the binding and printing are of a pretty good quality, and I’m fond of the subtly hyper-sensational cover image.

All of which may pale beside the fact that this is a fun read. I got through much of it in airports (true of so many things I read, unfortunately) and it was more than sufficient to help me forget my surroundings. Goes quickly and is thoroughly enjoyable.

“You regard society as merely a machine, don’t you? What part of the machinery do you consider me, for instance?”
“You are one of the cranks.”

Kevin Kelly has written about the Rosetta Disk — a Long Now project that has microscopically etched text in over a thousand languages onto a nickel disk, encased in a glass sphere. The intent is that it will physically last as long as possible, and also increase the likelihood of readability well into the future. (The disk is analogue rather than digital, and the microscopic nature is implied by text decreasing in size on the opposite side.) Provided that at least one of the existing human languages is still known, the disk should enable future scholars to read the others, as it reproduces several standard texts translated into the variety of languages.

(It’s not explicitly stated, but what might be the probability of a civilization with no prior knowledge of any of the languages being able to decode it, to some extent at least?)

Saving one disk for all time is pretty unlikely. The goal is to produce a sufficient number of these, and have them stored in enough different locations that one or two can be expected to survive. Total cost (as quoted by Kelly) is $25 000. Seems like a lot, if you’re considering buying one for yourself.

But compared to the sort of money that large organizations deal with, it’s hardly anything. Get enough people together, and it would be easy to buy as a group. I’m sure that any number of university libraries, national libraries and archives, and similarly large institutions will be able to pick one or two up without blinking.

And if I can find 99 other people to put $250 in, then no problem!

I got in the mail today my package from Bleep Labs. There are a couple of major for-fun projects coming up in my personal time, and assembling the synthesizer will be one of them. Watch this space for more …

When I started working on the time capsule project, what I didn’t anticipate was what would be the most challenging part: putting up a sign above the exhibit.

Just something simple, reading “Time Capsule” rather than the existing, inaccurate signage. Not something I can do by hand, but it shouldn’t be that much trouble, right?

When you’re dealing with government, though, there are certain channels that one must go through. I needed to contact one person to design the sign, two to approve it, and another department entirely to put it up. It should have been finished today, more than 2 weeks since the process was started. I’ll go by the exhibit to check it out tomorrow.

Of all the things I’m not an expert in, right?