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.

Outlasting the Department Store Chain

It takes a special kind of stubbornness to realize you are sitting on a piece of retail history. We purchased our current specimen back in May 2006 at a Sears Canada Outlet Store in Coquitlam. To put its longevity into perspective, the hide-a-bed couch actually outlasted the entire corporate empire that sold it to us; Sears folded up its Canadian tents and vanished entirely in 2017. 

Twenty years is an incredibly respectable run for such an oft-used piece of furniture, but it was undeniably showing its age. For years, Jay and I have been casually discussing the replacement with a standard couch. This eJournal is littered with periodic, failed couch-hunting missions peppered across 2023, 2024, and 2025.

Today, the streak of indecision finally ended, when we sort-of-accidently bought one! 

The entire acquisition happened by chance during a quick logistics run over to Surrey. We drove across the river to pick up a little Sony Voice Recorder I had ordered online from Best Buy yesterday. Because it was a Sunday, the electronics retail gates didn’t swing open until 11:00 am, which left us with about ten minutes of dead time to kill. Naturally, we wandered deeper into the mall to avoid standing awkwardly by the shuttered entrance and happened upon a showroom for The Brick, a local furniture retailer.

We spotted a lot of living room furniture through the windows and ambled inside. Jay and I walked around the acre of it and started comparing the loveseat-sized sofas. A gray leather one looked promising. In the past, I had sketched out a diagram with the exact dimensions of our present sofa on a napkin. Some of those specific details had stuck in my head, and we wanted to replicate the size exactly. Finding one that matched our requirements had proven difficult until today's fit the bill. We didn’t take the reduced-price floor demo model, but instead ordered a brand-new one in the same gray color for delivery.

Another Satisfying Meet Up in Richmond

Jay and I left the apartment at 3:10 pm for Ed and Shinji’s place on Dover Crescent.  Their place is located down along the Middle Arm of the Fraser River delta in Richmond, just across the water from YVR, the international airport. We parked just a few minutes before Tim and Jiwan arrived. It was great to finally have another one of our summer "duck parties" together.  This was the third of 2026.

We started in the living room with a lot of excellent appetizers. Afterward, we headed out for a walk along the dike. The weather was pleasant and it made for a nice stroll. The adolescent geese had gathered in a little side pond, a kind deliberately created when the city was working on the berm.

Jiwan set up his phone on a log, propping it with a piece of driftwood for this image.

Back inside, dinner was excellent. They barbecued shrimp and pork, served with potatoes and vegetables. Ed had also baked a lemon pound cake, though we didn't get a picture of it. Our conversation at the table eventually turned to the practical side of things, specifically the importance of making wills.  It seems as though some progress may be possible on that front.

The next dinner location is already settled, as whoever currently holds the ducks is responsible for hosting the next event. Now we just need to find a date that works for everyone, hopefully in a couple of weeks. We made it back home to New Westminster by 10:15 pm, ending a wonderful evening with great friends.

Small Brain for Rent

I stumbled into the world of "Wearable AI Note-Takers" this week, a genre of gadget I didn't suspect existed until I tripped over it. As a retired technical English instructor, I am fascinated by these new tools, and by guessing how they're being used in the wild jungles of education and business. Are students still synthesizing ideas themselves, or is the AI doing the heavy lifting? It marks a profound shift in cognition, and I find it amusing that a generation is being handed a digital brain before they have even finished constructing their own.

The hardware landscape feels like a cluttered minefield. The Fieldy 3 is a speculative gamble. The Omi is essentially an open-source science project; it is appealingly tinkerable, but far too unstable for serious use. Other options, like Anker’s Soundcore Work and iFLYTEK, lean heavily into corporate "meeting minutes." That feels clinical, turning conversation into a spreadsheet rather than a social exchange.

My inner gadget-lover is currently at war with my visceral loathing of the subscription economy. I crave something tactile and permanent, yet these innovations are all shackled to monthly fees that turn one’s personal history into a rental property. The Plaud NotePin S is the most tempting. It offers a satisfying physical button, but the prospect of paying a recurring "AI tax" to record my own life makes me want to toss the whole lot into the Fraser River.

Ultimately, my grand technological odyssey has yielded nothing but a well-documented sense of my own gullibility. I am still trapped in the limbo between desiring a shiny new plaything and the creeping realization that I am merely shopping for an expensive way to transcribe my own ramblings. I haven't reached "technological enlightenment," but I have mastered the art of over-researching a problem I didn't know I had, all while managing to buy absolutely nothing.

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NEXT DAY UPDATE: After the day of snooping, I've decided that I can forgo the dedicated AI services for voice. After all, my regular Gemini AI can handle audio processing in addition to pictures and video. But, I did get to order a shiny little device in the form of a Sony Voice Recorder. This involves and extra step but will work without a separate AI and its associated subscription fees.

Our Visit to the New Lab

Today, Jay and I went uptown to the new LifeLabs location on Sixth Street to get our baseline bloodwork done. This was our first time visiting the "new digs," which recently replaced their old spot over on Fifth Avenue.

I have to say, the new location is a significant improvement for overall access. The space is larger and the layout is much more functional. While the old clinic was definitely inconvenient to get to, it did have a view. However, this new spot certainly doesn't disappoint in that regard. I snapped a photo right from the lab chair, enjoying a surprisingly great peek out over the uptown high-rises and bustling 6th Street below.

One of the tricks to navigating the medical system here is knowing when to plan ahead. We had the foresight to book our appointments online in advance, which meant our wait time was a fraction of what it would have been if we had just walked in. The waiting area is always full of folks who didn't book ahead, resigned to a lengthened bout of sitting.

It got me thinking about how general medicine actually functions here in Canada, and specifically in British Columbia. To an outsider, the system might seem complex, but it operates on a very direct sequence. It all starts with the Family Doctor, or a walk-in clinic for anyone not lucky enough to have a dedicated GP. The doctor acts as the gatekeeper. They issue the requisition for the lab work, which in BC is primarily handled by private entities like LifeLabs that operate under the provincial health umbrella.

Once the requisition is issued, a patient simply gets their blood drawn, and the results are routed directly back to the doctor. Thanks to modern provincial portals, I can log in later today and see my own numbers the moment they are finalized. It is a hybrid system of publicly funded care delivered through a mix of private labs and independent physician practices. When it works smoothly, as it did today with our booked appointments at the new Sixth Street clinic, it is a remarkably efficient machine.

We Canadians certainly love to complain about our medical system, but one only has to look at places where healthcare is entirely privatized to appreciate what we have. In those models designed for moneymaking, the level of care received is entirely dependent on a person's wallet, leaving far too many folks with unequal treatment or abandoned by the wayside completely. Furthermore, there is a massive, hidden financial burden in those systems just to maintain the competing, redundant, and often poorly organized infrastructure required simply to keep the billing departments running. It might not be perfect here, but our single-payer baseline consistently delivers better overall outcomes than the wild west of the completely for-profit healthcare industry.

We've Lost the Freedom to Get Lost

I purchased a set of Chipolo LOOP Bluetooth trackers just last week. For the uninitiated, they function exactly like Apple's AirTags, but are specifically engineered to play nicely with Google phones. Our domestic strategy is straightforward: we will use them to keep tabs on our keys and wallets while we are anchored at home for the summer. Whenever we hit the road again, however, they will be swiftly repurposed to monitor our checked bags through the predictable chaos of airline transit.

Ah, ha. It's 10:49 am at home but Jay is at the Bonsor Community Centre in Burnaby so soon? To be absolutely clear, I wasn't actively stalking Jay during his workout. The excursion simply provided the perfect, low-stakes dry run for the new hardware.

That being said, looking at the screen and seeing his exact coordinates pinging back to me highlights a profound societal shift. We have willingly traded the quiet luxury of being unreachable for the perceived safety and convenience of constant digital contact. It is an extraordinary level of casual tracking, and frankly, staring at that little dot on the map is a concept that would have absolutely horrified our generation when we were kids.

We were a cohort that treated the front door as an absolute event horizon. The very second we left the driveway, we expertly vanished entirely off the parental radar. There were no digital footprints and certainly no GPS breadcrumbs. Today, simply hiding from one's parents must be a technological impossibility. The grid is absolute. To ever achieve our level of glorious, unmonitored freedom, a modern teenager would have to accomplish the equivalent of electronically gnawing off his or her own leg like a trapped beaver.

Jay outisde the Bonsor Compex in Metrotown, Burnaby, BC earlier this month.