Birthday Week Cruise

In Juneau for my birthday.  We left Sunday the 19th to Sunday the 26th.  I'll play catch up when back in British Columbia.  Cheers.

Surrey's 2026 Fusion Fest

Our neighbors just south of the Fraser River in the city of Surrey are expanding rapidly. Regional growth models show that Surrey is on track to eclipse the City of Vancouver in population within the next decade, potentially as early as the late 2020s, depending on immigration shifts. This demographic surge from a suburban bedroom community to the province’s most populous city is directly reflected in the scale of their civic events, especially the Surrey Fusion Festival at Holland Park.

When we first attended the inaugural weekend in 2008, the event was a relaxed, community-focused affair. It featured just twenty-five cultural pavilions and four modest stages. Notably, even as global conversations around borders grow fractious, the broad diversity on display here serves as a reminder that Canadian immigration remains a source of national pride, standing in sharp contrast to the rising populism seen in other countries.

By 2023, the festival hit its peak historical benchmark, drawing 110,000 visitors over two days. The sheer volume of people shifted the experience from a quiet park stroll to a high-density bottleneck, where navigating to a food stall required serious patience.

For the 2026 iteration, we took a quick ten minute ride on the SkyTrain last evening and stayed an hour and a half. (It runs today as well.)  We spent our time walking around all the pavilions, checking out what each culture was offering. Many were selling traditional food from their respective countries, or selling merchandise. The city framed the event under the theme "One World, One Game." It was fun to see the humanity and people from the globe who are now in Canada and making it a home, creating a space where every culture feels explicitly seen, welcomed, and woven into the neighborhood.

A Historic Trinity

​Jay and I have an IKEA cube next to the television that holds a three-act play of human ingenuity compressed into a single square foot, charting the very technological shifts our lives have seen during our years on earth. By placing the lava lamp precisely between the Slinky and the Google Home speaker, the trajectory of how we transitioned from the mechanical past to the digital present becomes clear.

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It represents three distinct eras of human focus, given equal custody of the shelf.

​First comes the steel. The Slinky is the embodiment of the early-to-mid 20th century: rigid, predictable, and dependent on the cold laws of kinetic physics and gravity. It is technology you can grasp in your hand, a heavy coiled spring that requires physical interaction to exist. It does one thing with mechanical honesty, a relic of an era when progress was measured in metallurgy and gears.

​Then comes the interim period: the liquid and the heat. The lava lamp represents the cultural transition of the 1960s and 1970s, where technology moved away from cold industrial machinery toward chemistry and interior design. Patented in the early 1960s, it became the definitive ambient icon of those two decades, using electricity not just to run an appliance but to alter the mood of a room. It uses thermal convection to create an organic, unpredictable dance, a slow precursor to the moving visuals of a modern screen, executed entirely through heat and wax. It is the moment home technology became atmospheric.

​Finally, the timeline hits the silicon. The Google Home speaker is the 21st-century finale: its work is weightless, invisible, and completely decoupled from the physical laws governing the other two. It doesn’t drop down stairs or expand with heat; it translates code in the dark, routing data across the cloud to manipulate the room without moving an inch.

That these three objects ended up occupying the same small surface is entirely a fluke of domestic drift rather than any conscious design. They simply landed on the shelf at different times for different reasons, yet seeing them lined up by chance makes a strange kind of sense. It turns out the future can arrive without completely displacing the tactile satisfaction of the machine or the slow warmth of the transition.

They Don't Make'em Like This Anymore

We hauled our old hide-a-bed couch down to the basement of our complex today. Tomorrow is the official strata "junk day," a quarterly event where residents can discard items too large for regular disposal. The timing is ideal; our new sofa won't arrive until after we return from my upcoming birthday cruise.

We distinctly remember bringing this couch home from the Sears Canada Outlet Store in Coquitlam, crammed into the back of my old Ford Ranger in 2006, so we knew it could leave in one piece. However, to lighten the load today, we stripped out the mattress and springs first. That was when we discovered a twenty-year-old manufacturing anomaly: the heavy metal frame was secured with two bolts and a screw on one side, but only a single bolt on the other. Someone skipped a step on the assembly line, yet it held together for two decades regardless.

I should have taken photos of the transit. Dismantled, the couch required multiple stages to move. We loaded the springs into the back of the Kona EV for the first trip, a journey involving twelve floors down on the elevator into the parkade, and then up one level to the designated junk collection zone. A second automotive run took care of the mattress and cushions. The main chassis, however, required pure physical transit. Jay and I pushed it 300 meters across the concrete floor of the parking garage. A utilitarian, fitting end for an old domestic friend.

Beeing Industrious or Not

Yesterday down at Westminster Pier Park, I spent some time watching the bees on the purple coneflowers. Against the backdrop of the Fraser River, these bright pink flowers were in their prime, acting as busy landing pads in the July heat. The bumblebees were out in full force; watching a single bee, heavy with pollen, crawl over the stiff, spiked center of a flower is a masterclass in quiet productivity.

Today, Jay and I headed uptown to Walmart, though the errand felt a bit redundant with our upcoming departure. We board the Celebrity Solstice this Sunday for a week-long cruise, so our minds are already focused on packing rather than picking up household items. However, the bags remain in the closet at the moment.  There might have been a certain satisfaction in getting the final chores out of the way before we head out to sea. Watching the local wildlife work so tirelessly is a reminder of how very different it must be to have no choice in completing one's schedule.

Reclaiming the Waterfront

A Walk Through the Westward Expansion

With Jay over at the Bonsor Recreation Gym in Burnaby this morning, I headed down to the river around 10:30, phone in hand, to see how the city is doing with clawing back our waterfront from its old, creosote-soaked industrial past. The new westward expansion is finally hooking up the old pier park with the River Market; standing right under those massive Bosa towers, it is a funny contrast, seeing all that looming glass sitting right next to a fresh public greenway.

I wandered through Phase 1, which has been open to everyone since May. The city has crammed all sorts of things into these little "outdoor rooms," including a shiny new fitness circuit, ping-pong tables, and some nice, tiered wooden decks. 

Past the art, a chain-link still fences off Phase 2 and lets one know they are not quite finished. Peeking through the wire, I watched the crew working on the new concrete seating plinth and performance stage, which is a multi-tiered setup meant for casual river-watching or live acts once they finally open the central plaza. The rest of it, the spray park, the stage, and the dog zone, is all taking shape behind the barricades. Even the big play tower by the Sixth Street overpass is still locked tight while they hook up the plumbing for the new washrooms. Still, watching them work under the warm morning sun, you can tell the whole boardwalk is finally coming together.

The Death of the Outlier

How AI Polish is Erasing the Real World

We are rushing into a digital whiteout where plausible has completely replaced true.  Most people treat AI like an objective oracle. It isn't. It is a statistical mirror reflecting the internet's average noise, and that slight distinction is quietly eating our history.

The Smooth Lie 

Real life is a messy business. A historic hotel doesn’t just evaporate; it gets demolished after a chaotic council vote to make way for a condo. But when a machine is missing the actual date, it doesn't admit the blank spot. It invents a story that sounds perfectly reasonable, like claiming the old facade of the Windsor Hotel, is still there, just encased in modern siding. Because the grammar is perfect and the tone is confident, we buy the fiction. Convenience wins; friction loses.  In reality, the historic structure was completely torn down before the creation of a new condo tower.  For the record:

The building that actually replaced the Windsor Hotel at the corner of Columbia and Begbie Street is called Interurban (located at 14 Begbie Street). The concrete-and-brick condo tower was completed and opened its doors in 2009.

Model Collapse and the Erasure of the Weird

In statistics, the rare, the local, and the lived memories are 'outliers'. As synthetic text floods the web, newer models are trained on the output of older models. It’s an autophagous loop. Without stubborn human memories to act as a handbrake, the algorithm systematically shaves off the outliers to keep the curve clean. The specific local history is discarded as statistical noise.

The Absolute Null 

When we lose our physical anchors—the paper archives, the books, the eyewitnesses—we enter a multi-universe of fictions. Ask five models about a street corner, get five beautifully written lies. If nothing challenges them, all five become true at once. When reality becomes a sliding scale of probability, it collapses into a giant zero.

If we don't actively protect the unpolished, stubborn, physical truths of our world, the machine will happily rewrite them until they conform to a very convenient, completely fabricated average.

The Purely Cash Contingency

Living on an active tectonic plate along the West Coast changes how one must look at emergency preparedness. Most regional advice focuses heavily on the standard accumulation of canned rations and emergency supplies, but a critical logistical blind spot exists for most households. Jay and I have completely relied on electronic transactions for the entirety of our daily lives for decades now. I carry a solitary, folded twenty dollar bill in my wallet as a symbolic relic, but the rest of our financial footprint is entirely digital. I really didn't remember who is on a few of our Canadian bank notes.  

Few people in modern society actually envision a total disruption to that seamless daily routine. It is a fragile baseline. If a significant seismic event interferes with the local electrical grid, the immediate consequence will be the total disappearance of ATMs and point-of-sale terminals. Cash becomes the only viable currency when the digital architecture fails.

I had set aside a dedicated, little cash stash for just such a circumstance a while back. That emergency fund sits securely inside a hidden, fireproof box in the apartment alongside our vital personal papers. However, I recently took a closer look and realized a major flaw in the makeup of the bills. What earthly good is a hundred dollar note going to be when one is trying to purchase basic necessities like broccoli and carrots from a local vendor? In a real crisis, merchant registers are going to run out of small bills within hours.

I visited our uptown bank branch this morning to systematically break down those large denominations into a beautifully distributed stack of highly usable smaller bills. The teller probably thought I was running a highly suspicious garage sale. Thanks to this bout of financial micro-management, I feel like a wonderfully dutiful, silver-haired Boy Scout. If the "Big One" finally hits the coast, I might be sitting in the dark, but at least I possess the exact change required to bribe my way onto a outbound ferry or buy a single, 4-liter jug of whole milk.