Lifestream

Yet again, my annual Christmas tree snap

I joined Goodreads in 2012, at roughly the same time I joined Twitter, in what might be called a more innocent age of social networking. The idea of a social network for book readers appealed to me at the time.

Fast forward to 2025, and the world looks different. Twitter/X has turned into a hellscape run by a super villain, and Goodreads, though not quite a hellscape, is slow, dated and run by a company with dubious ethics.

I ended up deactivating my Twitter account - not that difficult given that I never really gained a following. As it turns out, my use of Goodreads as a social network never really took off either - I don't think my friend list ever exceeded 20 people. I used it much more as a log of my reading habits, a record of every book I ever read or wanted to read. That made it easier to think about finding a replacement.

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"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power"

There is something to be said about the connection between ChatGPT, John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment and Dan Dennett's response to it, but I'm not totally clear what that would be. I'm leaning towards Dan Dennet being wrong, though.

It's that time of the year in Montreal, when you have to alternate between wearing your winter coat and spring jacket several times in the same week.

If I have learned anything from the Trump tariffs imposed yesterday it's that we've obviously all been underestimating penguins. Sneaky little devils.

I saw my first cyber truck the other night, "in the flesh" so to speak, and I was unprepared for the level of revulsion I would feel.

I have downloaded an app called "Buy Beaver" and I can't believe it's come to this

I have spent most of my life in Montreal but there was a decent sized chunk in the middle, spanning high school and university, when I lived in Toronto.

I still visit Toronto not infrequently. I have a soft spot for it; at the very least, I don't harbour quite the same level visceral hatred a lot of people seem to lob at the city.

But I haven't lived there for over 20 years. Obviously, a lot has changed in that time. I'm not sure I could live there now. I mean, I guess I could but my life would look very different. The place is so huge, and the housing so expensive, that I'm not sure it would be a good trade.

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I never thought that the law applied equally to rich people and poor people. I never considered myself that naive. I had always understood that rich people could break the law in ways that poor people simply couldn't.

But I had always assumed that the way this worked in practice was that being rich just came with a heightened ability to cover your tracks. I had always assumed that, rich or poor, it was of supreme importance not to get caught, and that being rich simply bought you more options in that regard. Maybe you could bribe a police officer, or a judge, and make the charges go away. Maybe you could afford to hire someone to do the dirty work for you, or take the fall for you if it came to that.

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Annual Christmas tree snap

4 photos

This is the year for tech upgrades, I guess. New tiny computer, new customizable keyboard and new smaller external storage.

My blog is based around Eleventy, which means I write my entries in plain text, using Markdown and YAML front matter, a combo which I'm sure is familiar to most users of static site generators.

I also participate in the IndieWeb, which means I post many different kinds of content other than your standard blog posts - notes, likes, photos, etc.

I find it useful to divide my content in two main types: original content, where the focus is on my own published material, and derivative content, which only makes sense in the context of another, external URL.

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First real snow fall of the year. Boot weather is here!

I can't be the only one who often catches himself saying "When I graduate" when I mean to say "When I retire", right?

Madrid marked the end of our trip to Spain. Our plane home flew out of there and so we decided to spend the evening before exploring what we could of the city. We boarded a train from Seville and arrived at our hotel around 4pm that day.

I would argue Madrid is the Toronto of Spain from the point of view of visiting Canadians because, like Toronto, it's the largest city in the country as well as its economic hub and also the city that everyone loves to hate.

I've said this before but I'll say it again - everyone loves Barcelona. No one loves Madrid. Madrid, by all popular accounts, is mediocre at best.

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I'm 47 years old, and most of the people I work with are much younger than I am - often in their 20's and 30's. Cultural references that I think are universal sometimes turn out to be pretty specific to my age group in ways that surprise me.

Take something like Bugs Bunny. Most people, young and old, have of course heard of Bugs Bunny but it turns out that not a lot of young people grew up watching it. I have, and it is because of this cartoon that I happen to vaguely know some of the music to The Barber of Seville.

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The COVID-19 pandemic put a cramp in my travel habits, as it did with everyone. The last overseas trip that Evelyn and I went on was to Poland in 2016 for a wedding and the last one that we actually planned was to Greece in 2015 (and, my God, it's hard for me to accept that Greece 9 years ago). We've been to a handful of relatively local destinations in the interim (Vancouver, New York, PEI) but nothing particularly foreign.

And while I do remain part of an increasingly small minority of people who still thinks about the pandemic in the present tense, I also wanted to finally visit someplace a bit more exotic.

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11 albums

Evelyn and I took a 10 day trip to Spain in September 2024.

Barcelona: Noisy, gritty, vibrant. Surprisingly many vermouterias. Seville: Beautiful, charming, fun. Surprisingly few barbers.

There is a glut of vermouterias in Barcelona, many of them with their own house blends and...I kind of love it?

Yes, I know that the word "chai" literally just means "tea" in Hindi (and other languages) and that the term "chai tea" is therefore technically redundant. I don't care. I will still occasionally say "chai tea" and I don't feel like I'm committing some kind of linguistic sin by doing so.

The English translation of "chai" is, of course, "tea" and it refers to a very generic category of usually hot and often caffeinated beverages made from steeping various kinds of leaves. On the other hand, the word "chai" in English usually refers to a very specific kind of spiced tea, often taken with milk, that Westerners typically associate with the culinary tradition of South Asia. One would not normally use the word "chai" in English to refer to the bog standard Orange Pekoe that one might drink for a caffeine fix in the morning before work.

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I mean...not quite everyone is welcome, right? Man, solicitors get no respect!

About five years ago, in early 2019, I stumbled upon the IndieWeb, a movement and community dedicated to modernizing the personal website. I quickly became enamoured with its ideas and spent the next year revamping my website and blog to make it more compliant with their standards.

I've written about the IndieWeb before but if you're just tuning in, there are several dimensions to it:

I pretty much went whole hog here; my website and publishing workflow supports all of the above, and link previews to boot. Not particularly well, mind you, but that's a different conversation.

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