Reserving Some Time at Ruins

With Wednesday's departure fast approaching, Jay hopped onto Viator this morning and locked down our day tour into El Salvador's Mayan past. 

Our last glimpse of the country was back in 2011 on an ambitious, self-navigated bus haul through Central America. Tikal in Guatemala was the undisputed heavyweight champion of that trek, with its towering limestone temples practically daring you to climb them. This go-around is a bit different. We are trading grand royal propaganda for Joya de Cerén, the UNESCO-listed village famously flash-frozen under volcanic ash while everyday life was still in mid-stride, along with stops at San Andrés and Tazumal.

   

We are far more accustomed to rambling multi-week itineraries, but a seven-night outpost in San Salvador for Jay's birthday week leaves plenty of room for ambition. The beauty of a country this compact is the complete lack of wasted motion. When you can pivot from cloud-draped volcanoes to high-altitude coffee fincas and Pacific surf within a couple of hours, a single week suddenly feels like plenty of runway.

A Free Plastic Chassis Will Come With My Toner Refill

It would cost more to buy an original Brother OEM drum and a fresh high-yield toner cartridge than to simply purchase a brand-new monochrome laser multifunction printer. My apparent decision to participate in modern electronic wastefulness was not self-imposed. It was forced upon me by the bizarre arithmetic of printer manufacturers. The bargain-basement, third-party drum and toner replacements I have been using over nine years were finally catching up with me, turning out increasingly fuzzy, degraded prints that looked more like faint charcoal rubbings than sharp text.

We do not print in massive volumes these days. Even so, I cannot imagine living without a reliable Wi-fi printer in the apartment. Having that immediate utility on the home network is essential. Furthermore, while I never scan multi-page documents in bulk, retaining the flatbed capability to quickly photocopy an official form or digitize a passport spread into a clean PDF remains a genuine necessity. Giving up the scanner glass altogether was out of the question.

I was mildly surprised to find that desktop laser printers have shed virtually none of their bulk over the past decade. Mechanical physics is an unforgiving taskmaster. Unlike silicon chips that shrink with every manufacturing cycle, a laser engine is a miniature thermodynamic paper factory. It requires a physical tray capable of holding standard letter sheets, a C-shaped mechanical paper path with pickup rollers, a full-width electrostatic drum, and a ceramic fuser unit operating at 200°C that demands physical clearance and thermal shielding so the plastic housing does not warp. Once engineers figured out how to tuck a 250-sheet cassette beneath the print engine and top it with a flatbed scanner glass, geometric optimization hit a solid brick wall.

The replacement heading our way is the Brother HL-L2465DW. In order to get a fresh OEM drum and toner cartridge, I essentially had to purchase a free upgrade to the entire plastic box surrounding them. An Amazon driver will be dropping it off tomorrow during Sunday delivery. It will be plugged into the smart outlet and put straight to work.

Go Big or Go Home!

We headed out this morning for the sold-out 11:00 AM screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, armed with tickets secured three weeks in advance. The drive out to Langley was remarkably smooth, taking an easy half hour each way.

The entire motivation for making the trek was the rare technological indulgence of 70mm film projection. Langley hosts one of only nine venues in all of Canada capable of running physical 70mm celluloid. And it's one of a mere 41 in the whole world that is screening it.  For the inner statistics geek, the mechanical scale alone is impressive: at 5-perf standard projection speed, film whips through the gate at roughly 112.5 feet per minute. Over a nearly three-hour running time, that translates to approximately 18,000 to 20,000 feet of heavy ribbon, an astonishing three linear miles of physical polyester rattling past the lamp.

The immense scale and uncompressed audio certainly dominated the room, though being accustomed to our 55-inch OLED panel at home spoils conventional projection. Throughout the darker scenes, one could not help wishing for absolute, self-lit black levels rather than the typical hazy grey inherent to massive xenon bulbs. Cranked to that cinematic volume, our home Onkyo setup would undoubtedly incite an immediate strata revolt on Carnarvon Street.

As for the film itself, Nolan delivered his signature revisionist brand of mythmaking. Homer's ancient epic was stripped of whimsical divine intervention, turning the gods into psychological fractures and transforming Odysseus from a favored hero into a shell-shocked veteran rationalizing two decades of disastrous avoidance. Penelope’s court became a tense, claustrophobic political thriller rather than a portrait of passive virtue.

A few peculiar artistic liberties stood out. Polyphemus was gifted a horizontal ocular slit, an anatomical trait belonging strictly to grazing prey animals, making the legendary brute resemble an oversized, irritated goat scanning the Mediterranean coast. On the other hand, staging the final bow-stringing contest as an agonizing physical struggle of aging, failing muscle, rather than an effortless demigod triumph, added genuine dramatic weight.

While modern digital contrast has fundamentally altered our visual expectations, experiencing three miles of roaring celluloid in a packed cinema remains an exceptional mechanical spectacle. I am very glad we made the trip to see it in true 70mm.

A Parade's Not a Parade without Elephants!

When Jay expresses a lifelong fondness for parades, it helps to understand his benchmark. He was raised on the gold standard of pageantry. The Kandy Esala Perahera is a centuries-old, ten-day sensory marathon that tends to ruin ordinary civic street parades for anyone who has ever witnessed it.

The History and Sacred Weight 

The tradition traces back to the 4th century CE, when the Sacred Tooth Relic of the Buddha was smuggled into Sri Lanka hidden within the hair of Princess Hemamala. In ancient Ceylon, physical custody of the Tooth Relic conferred the divine right to govern the realm.

Originally an exclusive royal rite interwoven with ancient agricultural rituals to invoke the monsoon rains, the modern festival took form during the mid-18th century under King Kirthi Sri Rajasinghe. He decreed that the sacred casket leave the palace sanctuary to be paraded alongside the pageants of Kandy’s four guardian deities (Natha, Vishnu, Kataragama, and Pattini), bringing the blessings directly to the public.

The Ten-Night Lunar Progression 

The festival follows the lunar calendar, building in scale each evening to culminate under the Esala / Nikini Full Moon (Poya):

• Kap Situveema: The quiet prologue during which sanctified saplings are planted at each devale to inaugurate and consecrate the proceedings.

• Kumbal Perahera (Nights 1 to 5): The opening processions. The streets fill with temple dignitaries in traditional regalia, whip-crackers clearing the route, fire-dancers spinning blazing coconut husks, and Kandyan drummers setting the rhythm with the Geta Beraya.

• Randoli Perahera (Nights 6 to 10): Named after the golden palanquins of the royal queens, the pageant expands substantially in scale. Dozens of caparisoned tuskers parade in elaborate vestments illuminated with intricate lights, accompanied by legions of acrobats and traditional Ves dancers.

• The Grand Randoli: The peak procession coinciding with the full moon. The chief Maligawa Tusker elephant strides down white linen carpets laid along the street, carrying the golden Karanduwa (the sacred casket enclosing the relic) upon its back.

• Diya Kepeema (The Water-Cutting Ceremony): At dawn following the final night, chief priests travel to the Mahaweli River at Getambe to strike and part the water with a consecrated sword. This ancient fertility ritual petitions for ample rainfall and prosperous harvests before the concluding daytime procession.

When your childhood reference point for a street parade involves fire twirlers, massed drum corps, and illuminated tuskers under a full moon, a standard holiday float never quite measures up.

      

Because Sri Lanka is on the other side of the world from British Columbia, the evening there was just getting started when we were getting up.  The YouTube video stays online.  So, if you have an extra five hours, you won't miss a thing!

Tuesday Night's Duck Swap Dinner

The Duck Group convened in the West End last night for a rare weekday summit. Full-time leisure affords certain scheduling liberties, meaning Tuesday is the new Saturday. Our journey from New Westminster involved some minor SkyTrain friction heading into Vancouver, but the delay barely impacted our 4:00 PM arrival at Tim and Jiwan's residence.

Conversation flowed easily with a little wine, though we collectively realized our discussion topics have decisively shifted to reflect a senior status. The gathering also functioned as a logistical crossroad. Tim recently returned from a motorcycle camping trip in the British Columbia wilderness, and the calendar ahead is suddenly crowded with departures. Jay and I are preparing for an upcoming birthday expedition, while Ed and Shinji are embarking on a cruise alongside Ed's mother as she celebrates her ninetieth birthday. Due to these conflicting itineraries, our next dinner is officially deferred until mid-October. As we have now gained control of the ducks, the responsibility for hosting that subsequent dinner falls to us in New Westminster.

We ate a bit early to allow for a stroll down to Sunset Beach. There is a distinct joy in having a proper beach right in the middle of a city's downtown. It is remarkable that residents have access to such excellent public facilities within a short walk from their front doors. A lingering tinge of wildfire smoke in the atmosphere provided the requisite particulate matter for a rather spectacular sunset over the water.

It was a thoroughly fun evening, and we are already looking forward to gathering the Duck Group here. We headed home at a reasonable hour, surprised only by the completely packed SkyTrain. Whatever the general public was doing near 10:00 PM on a Tuesday, TransLink clearly no longer needs to beg for customers.

The Highly Exaggerated Decay of 2026

I grabbed a bus uptown yesterday as it seemed simpler than either walking up the hill or driving and parking. My goal was a 10:30 appointment for a free hearing test at Connect Hearing! on Belmont Street, right near the new park area. One must appreciate the efficiency of a quick transit ride when the alternative involves an unnecessary physical struggle with gravity.

The results from the clinic are exactly what one expects at this stage of the journey. I have a slight hearing loss in my left ear. This diagnosis comes merely a week after seeing the eye doctor to complain about visual floaters. It appears my biological hardware is slowly failing its routine warranty checks.

I am clearly starting to fall apart in 2026. The sheer friction of maintaining a human frame is exhausting. It is a good thing I have an extensive archive of photographs, as I may soon need them to remember what the world actually looks and sounds like.

An Unsolicited Technology Grant to Certain Unnamed Parties

Deep inside one of my spare tech drawers sits an arsenal of basics for home automation: glowing colour bulbs, voice assistants, and smart plugs that obey a spoken whisper or the tap of an app. To me, it is everyday convenience. To our circle of close friends, it is alien magic best left quarantined in cardboard.

I have contemplated distributing this surplus out of sheer benevolence. Leaving lamps and appliances without dedicated IP addresses while capable routers sit idle is a domestic travesty. Civilized adults should not be trudging across rooms to flick manual plastic toggles, like cavemen before the wheel's invention, when they could dim the lights without leaving their chairs.

Yet my digital collaborator, Ajith, warns that gifting connected gadgets to the happily analogue is not charity; it is a binding contract for unpaid IT support. The moment a household network hiccups, our relaxed social dinners will instantly devolve into troubleshooting radio channels over appetizers and resetting bulbs between courses.  The process would add unnecessary friction, he says.

To the uninitiated, the ultimate luxury remains a dumb wall switch that has performed with complete reliability since 1978 without requiring a single password or Wi-Fi handshake.

Still, my generous heart aches for those stumbling around in manual darkness. The surplus silicon awaits. If anyone in our circle wishes to be dragged into the modern era, your resident administrator is open for business. Just remember that emergency troubleshooting after nine in the evening will be billed at the rate of one very good glass of wine per question.

Lit from a Fraser River Barge

New Westminster’s modest footprint, barely fifteen square kilometers tucked along the Fraser, remains its greatest civic asset. While sprawling municipalities across Metro Vancouver scatter their populations across endless subdivisions, our compact geography enforces a genuine, walkable sense of community. Everyone navigates the same hills, shares the same river breeze, and marks the same seasonal milestones.

Last night brought the annual Hyack Fireworks, the long-standing Fraser River ritual that effectively folds up the season. Organized for decades by the Hyack Festival Association, the display serves as our official signal that the bulk of the summer has slipped past. It brings a brief, inevitable twinge of autumn reality, but the gathering remains an essential local routine.

The riverfront drew crowds from the late afternoon onward. For the first time, the newly completed public plaza adjacent to the Pier West high-rise towers was open and fully operational, providing fresh boardwalk space to settle in while a DJ spun tunes into the evening air.

Jay and I headed out at 8:45 PM, taking the direct walk down Sixth Street for straightforward water access before the scheduled 9:30 PM launch. The show ran for a sharp, tightly paced twenty minutes over the river. The sequencing was crisp, the concussions carried genuine weight, and the overall visual density sat comfortably above the standard baseline of previous years. A solid, well-timed punctuation mark on the season.

The Deliberate Art of Voluntary Obsolescence

Taking stock and looking around at what might need replacing is just one of the items on the agenda for August. It makes for an idle window to scope out gadgets. Naturally, this meant checking in on my hobbyist 3D printer, the 2020 Flashforge Adventurer 3. It sits quietly out of the way, perpetually plugged in and ready for the mere two or three assignments I give it each year. I decided to see where my white-and-black, acrylic Easy-Bake® Oven actually fits into the modern technological landscape.

As it turns out, the answer is "in a museum."

A brief dip into the 2026 marketplace revealed that additive manufacturing has been completely conquered by high-speed consumer robotics. The shiny new benchmark is the Bambu Lab P2S, a thousand-dollar enclosed gantry that handles four-colour filament swaps, runs on artificial intelligence to spot errors, and connects directly to your smartphone so you can watch plastic melt in real time. It also prints at five times the speed of my Flashforge. While my aging machine plods along at a stately, glacial pace, the new rigs whip across the build plate in a complete blur.

Take a classic demo example like a tiny plastic desk frog. If I hypothetically wanted to print one with royal blue eyes instead of monochrome green, the modern software makes it look effortless. You just click a digital paintbrush to colour the eyeballs blue while leaving the skin green. The hardware then executes this marvel by cutting the green filament, retracting the line, feeding the blue spool, and purging a mountain of sacrificial plastic down a rear waste chute on every single layer. It is a four-hour mechanical ballet to deposit eighty milligrams of eye colour. Meanwhile, any sensible adult with a $3.99 CAD jar of Testors® enamel and a wooden toothpick can achieve the exact same artistic triumph in six seconds, utterly humiliating a thousand dollars worth of automated Shenzhen robotics.

The real joy of the exercise wasn't buying anything. It was the pure, academic pleasure of finding out how far the hardware has advanced while my Adventurer 3 lived out its quiet existence. Spending money on hyper-niche, techno-curiosity hobbies that spend 98% of their operational lives parked on standby is a classic Dennis ailment.

The hardware upgrade to a multi-colour appliance is probably inevitable eventually, but the beauty of voluntary obsolescence is that the timeline can be deferred indefinitely. For now, the Adventurer 3 remains in active semi-retirement. In fact, the trusty old box is humming away on a print job right this second, while the credit card stays firmly in my wallet. The thousand-dollar printer upgrade can wait for some other year, while any hypothetical desk frog can get its blue eyes courtesy of a tiny brush and a steady hand.

Giving Up the Ghost, Literally!

Back in 2022, sitting comfortably under the tropical winter sun in Sri Lanka, I had what felt like an airtight engineering epiphany. Looking ahead to the summer's punishing vertical climbs of New Westminster, I convinced myself that proper micro-mobility demanded dual hub motors and maximum peak wattage. I clicked "preorder" on the Apollo Ghost without a second thought.

What arrived was not a nimble urban runabout; it was a 30-kilogram (65-pound) slab of forged alloy that handled less like personal transit and more like an uncooperative anvil. I put fewer than 50 kilometers on the clock before the sheer misery of wrestling that unbalanced battering ram across door thresholds and into elevators permanently cured my enthusiasm.

For the subsequent four years, the Ghost was placed in covered balcony exile. It sat there, occasionally plugged into the mains, soaking up the weather, slowly losing tire pressure, and occupying prime patio real estate that was meant for morning coffee and river watching. Even with the financial ledger balanced, watching an expensive piece of hardware slowly forfeit its battery capacity to calendar aging was a constant visual rebuke. It was easily the undisputed heavyweight champion of my personal regret purchases.

Today, I finally executed the eviction. Loading that awkward, front-heavy mass into the back of Kimchi, our Hyundai Kona, required dropping half the split rear seat and engaging in some serious lumbar gymnastics, but I got it done. I hauled it across the Fraser to a dedicated repair shop in Surrey.

The shop will patch the flat, bench-test the 52-volt battery, and pass it along cheaply to someone who actually needs the transport, whether that is a newcomer establishing a daily commute or a teenager whose family budget cannot stretch to a vehicle.

The flat tire is now a workshop project, the balcony is officially liberated, and four years of domestic buyer's remorse have been hopefully converted into an honest piece of community mobility.

Here’s Looking at You, Kid

At breakfast on Tuesday, my left eye decided to launch an unannounced visual effects show.

It started with a solid, dark thread drifting and twisting directly across my field of view. Not the usual, transparent microscopic squiggles you squint at against a white wall, but an assertive black yarn. After about ten minutes, it took a lazy swan dive toward the lower-left corner and vanished, immediately replaced by what looked like a shakerful of coarse black pepper strewn across the day's blue sky.

Naturally, my immediate conclusion was that the ocular sky was falling.

By that afternoon, however, the pepper storm had somewhat diminished.  Yesterday, I marched uptown for a 9:30 AM rendezvous with the eye doctor and the eye specialist, who seemed to take immense professional delight in explaining that my eyeball is simply undergoing vitreous syneresis, the preposterously grandiloquent term for the structural collapse and liquefaction of internal eye gel.  It leaves what professionals call, floaters, although that term immediately reminded me of swimming pool noodles.

Apparently, after nearly 67 years of solid service, the jelly inside the eyeball decides it has had quite enough of holding things together. It shrinks, turns to liquid, and pulls away from the retinal wallpaper like cheap contact paper in a humid bathroom. The dark thread was the initial peeling; the pepper storm was just the microscopic debris of a routine biological eviction.

The specialist checked every square millimeter of the perimeter, declared the retina completely intact, and scheduled a one-month victory lap to make sure the detachment stays orderly.

When you are thirty, lectures about aging collagen and vitreous 'body' fall on aggressively deaf ears. You assume your various parts will remain in their original factory-sealed condition indefinitely. One morning your optical gel does a swan dive without warning. Then, fast-forward twenty-four hours to an examination chair where your pupils are chemically blown wide open, and you have to admit that blissful ignorance is strictly a young person's luxury.

I returned home yesterday, caught a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror looking like a startled barn owl, and accepted that while reading a screen remains a blurry gamble, the wallpaper is still glued on, the sky is right where I left it, and the owl in the reflection, was just plain old me.

Jay's Birthday Pivot: Rediscovering El Salvador

We have officially pivoted to an alternate destination to explore during Jay's birthday week. Mexico City was our initial target, especially because it remains an unexplored metropolis on our travel ledger. Unfortunately, the awkward flight timings and steep fares quickly dampened our enthusiasm for that option. Jay stepped in with his dependable flight-sleuthing discipline and found clean, affordable routing to El Salvador via Houston, TX. A sensible schedule with an included checked bag always beats an overpriced, midnight ticket.

Returning to El Salvador offers a front-row seat to one of the most dramatic social turnarounds in modern Latin American history. Back in 2011, we took a grand bus tour across Central America, but our stay in San Salvador was unusually brief because holiday bus timetables over Easter forced us along. At that time, the country held the grim distinction of murder capital of the world, registering homicide rates above 70 per 100,000 residents. Today, following a massive and controversial security offensive, the homicide rate has plummeted below 2 per 100,000, making the country statistically safer than the United States national average. History rarely moves this fast without a total change of scenery.

Our stop in San Salvador was short on a bus trip around Central America in 2011.

Frankly, Jay and I were surprised to see just how quickly the country transformed into a global travel hotspot. Tourism has rapidly become a vital pillar of the national economy, welcoming over three million international visitors each year and injecting billions in foreign exchange. The chaotic, barricaded street markets from our 2011 visit have given way to brightly illuminated plazas, manicured pedestrian corridors, and a modern national library open around the clock. International travelers who once bypassed the region completely are now filling boutique hotels and coastal venues. Clear streets and reliable infrastructure serve as the ultimate marketing campaign.

With our September dates locked down, we are now actively combing Expedia for the ideal hotel base. We are scheduled to depart exactly two weeks from today. We decided to stay directly in the capital city rather than basing ourselves in the mountains or along the coast. Staging from accessible urban districts like San Benito or Colonia Escalón makes day trips to volcanic calderas and Pacific beaches remarkably straightforward, while keeping level sidewalks and dependable elevators close at hand. We look forward to rediscovering the country, experiencing its modern transformation, and enjoying a memorable birthday expedition. A great travel adventure only requires an active volcano, a fresh plate of hot pupusas, and an elevator that actually works.

Digital Archaeology and the Unbroken Thread

There is something slightly surreal about opening the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and staring at a digital sweep of my own website captured on Thursday, December 11, 2003.

Back then, the homepage felt compelled to offer a polite, earnest public service announcement explaining what a "weblog" actually was. That was in case a wayward visitor thought they had stumbled into an obscure departmental bulletin. It proudly offered an AvantGo badge for PDA users synchronizing via desktop cradles, and cheerfully displayed both my home landline and mobile numbers to anyone on the World Wide Web with an internet connection.

At the time, Blogger had only just been acquired from Pyra Labs by a young, ambitious outfit called Google. In internet years, two decades is several geologic epochs. Yet despite Google's legendary habit of sending beloved products to the corporate graveyard, Blogger is still quietly running the machinery in the background.

The surrounding scaffolding, headers, and fonts have evolved over the last twenty-three years, but the core text remains untouched. More than two decades later, the words typed on a winter morning in 2003 sit exactly where they were put, still chronicling the road east over the Rockies.

The Missing User Manual for Ear Wax Warfare

Public education spends years drilling the Pythagorean theorem and the life cycle of a frog into our skulls, yet completely omits any practical manual for basic human maintenance. One arrives at adulthood fully versed in long division, but utterly ignorant about how to manage the biological systems on either side of one's head. The medical establishment solemnly warns against ever sticking anything smaller than an elbow into an ear, while consumer packaging actively markets cotton swabs that function precisely like miniature cannon ramrods. The inevitable result is an entire generation packing their auditory canals into acoustic soundproofing.

With a formal hearing test booked for next week, I decided to bypass the clinical embarrassment of having an audiologist inspect two solid plugs of cerumen instead of an actual eardrum. If one is going to have expensive diagnostic hardware measure frequency response, the runway ought to be clear of unnecessary debris. Jay recently had a clinic extract some stubborn buildup after a test of his own and wisely concluded that preventative home intervention beats an awkward clinical excavation every single time.

My domestic protocol began with straight 3% hydrogen peroxide, which immediately produced a delightful, effervescing cauldron of tiny bubbles that sounded like a miniature deep fryer working right next to my brain. Once the chemical storm finally quieted down, I recruited Jay to administer three drops of olive oil into each side. Lying stationary for ten minutes while kitchen salad dressing slowly soaked into my skull felt slightly absurd, but good engineering demands lubrication. Tomorrow brings the gentle warm water bulb syringe to flush the system clear, leaving the canals pristine, silent, and ready to face the decibel telemetry. The hearing test is entirely on the provincial tab, but I still prefer to fail the high frequencies honestly on my own biological merits. I'd rather not flunk out due to an easily-removable sound barrier.