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.

The Slow Evolution of This Winter's Itinerary

Jay and I have spent just a single day in Ecuador. This is where these two pictures were taken. We visited the port city of Manta at the end of November 2022 on our cruise to Buenos Aires. We'd come through the Panama Canal and were heading down the west coast of South America towards our destination. However, Ecuador holds a profound treasure found on bucket lists for many serious world adventurers. Our buckets may be far from running low, but our time holding them grows shorter. We made a strategic Expedia purchase this afternoon.  The three-flight Avianca tickets form the first step in our return to Vancouver at the end of the upcoming winter away.  

   

One does not need to engineer an entire winter away in a single sitting. The genuine luxury of a long absence is leaving generous stretches of the calendar entirely blank, allowing one to turn ideas over, test routing variations, and let the itinerary take shape over time. Today, that process received a decisive push forward when we brought an AI into the room to poke holes in our assumptions and run the numbers on our return leg from Rio de Janeiro.

Our initial musings centered on using Guayaquil as a convenient stepping stone into the Galápagos. That notion did not survive scrutiny; treating a rough mainland port as a holiday base means spending far too much energy managing urban security perimeters. Shifting our gaze directly to the archipelago made far more sense. San Cristóbal may have charm, but Santa Cruz has the restaurants, the day-boat fleet, and Seymour Airport on Baltra with a tarmac built to handle full-sized commercial jets.

The flight logistics resolved themselves with almost suspicious precision. Brazil allows a strict ninety-day residency, and our newly booked Avianca flight departs Galeão at 1:45 in the morning on March 1st. That allows us to clear passport control before midnight on February 28th, stepping out of the country on the final valid day of our visa window. We bounce through Bogotá and Quito before touching down on Baltra just after noon.

It took only a short, focused conversation to turn a vague ending into a masterclass in routing. We resolved our exit vector and secured our arrival on Baltra. One more crucial corner piece of the winter puzzle has dropped firmly into place. The exact date and path home, perhaps wandering back through Colombia, remain open for a future commitment. Those reservations can wait.

New West Street Pride 2026

 

Sixteen years of official municipal recognition have turned what began in 2010 as a modest gathering at Tipperary Park into a complete takeover of historic Columbia Street. For those of us observing New Westminster’s urban evolution since 1998, the stationary street festival format, closing vehicle traffic between 4th and 8th Street, proves structurally superior to a conventional rolling parade. Rather than spectators standing pinned to a curb while organizations roll past on flatbeds, the dynamic is brilliantly inverted. Community groups and vendors anchor themselves in fixed booths along the heritage storefronts, leaving the actual marching to the attendees who circulate through the asphalt corridor at their own pace.

 

We headed out for our first walk between 16:00 and 17:00, strolling down toward the Anvil Centre. The crowd was as big and lively as ever, showing just how firmly this festival has planted itself into the local summer routine. To top it off, the weather turned out to be pure perfection. Right as the event got going, the skies cleared up and it became noticeably warmer and sunnier, almost as if someone had managed to schedule the sunshine right into the afternoon plans. The street was packed with an interesting mix of booths and displays. Local artisans and craft makers set up alongside civic outreach tables, union locals, and neighbourhood non-profits, while nearby restaurants ran busy front-door patios. Open liquor sales were permitted for anyone wanting a cold drink on the go, yet the entire strip kept an easygoing, family-friendly atmosphere with kids, dogs, and strollers sharing the street. It made for a very pleasant walk before the evening crowd really picked up.

To save a few steps for the evening run, we took the SkyTrain directly down to the far end of Columbia Street for the 18:00 drag showcase outside the Anvil Centre. Dandy's Drag Block Party anchored the slot, delivering a tight lineup featuring one drag queen and two drag kings. It was just plain fun to stand among the large crowd, watch everyone have a good time together, and enjoy having all that energy right down the hill from home. We walked back up to our building as things were wrapping up. Soon the barricades will come down and the street will return to traffic only.

Broadcasting to the Algorithmic Graveyard

Back in 2008, I was practically an unpaid evangelist for Facebook. My early eJournal entries were full of enthusiastic encouragement, urging sceptical friends and far-flung acquaintances to sign up for this brilliant new digital commons. It seemed like an efficient way to keep in touch across continents. Nearly two decades later, that open town square has devolved into an algorithmic landfill. I gave up on it once, maybe twice, before settling into my current, highly defensive posture. Today, I maintain a rolling one-week buffer of posts and a contact list slashed down to a mere thirty-five people.

With a circle trimmed that small, it remains a genuine mystery whether anyone on the list actually sees what I post. Most people stay on the platform purely out of nostalgia; they worry that leaving means forfeiting twenty years of birthday photos and family snapshots. Handing one's personal history over to a corporate landlord is not an archive, however. It is simply a sentimental trap designed to serve advertisements between slot-machine pop-ups of the past.

I only maintain my minimal presence because the alternative is complete silence from contacts who find typing a standard website address far too strenuous. My eJournal contains thousands of high-resolution images, full travel archives, and daily entries dating back decades, yet modern internet users prefer to wait for scraps inside a walled garden. Posting there is no longer a conversation. It is merely operating a reluctant relay station for those who refuse to venture outside the gates.

To survive the experience, I treat the site as a strict one-way broadcast tower. I upload the daily signal, ignore the corporate notifications, and refuse to scroll through two-month-old updates from people not seen in person since the previous millennium. It may be absolute rubbish compared to the open web, but at least the transmission goes out, even if the ghosts on the other end only stare in silence.

My Flickr Account and a Few Stats

Click a screenshot to load my albums page on the Flickr site.

 

A Final Curtain for New West's Antique Alley!

Throughout the 1990s and well into the 2010s, New Westminster's Front Street was a bustling retail ecosystem known as Antique Alley. Its gritty industrial aesthetic made it a prime backdrop for major productions. The street famously doubled as New York City in Rumble in the Bronx and a quarantined Tokyo in Godzilla. It also hosted filming for projects like The X-Files and Twilight. During this peak period, the area served as a massive physical prop closet for the entire 'Hollywood North' film industry.

Stores operated as massive supply depots for set decorators and locals alike. You could walk in and rent or buy an absurdly wide array of physical inventory. They stocked everything from lavish fur coats and Persian rugs to mid century modern furniture. You might even stumble across a 200 pound bronze ship's propeller or a horrifying 1930s hair curler known as the octopus. It was a thriving local economy built entirely on bizarre physical artifacts.

I took a walk down Front Street today. That historic bazaar is now entirely defunct. I was quite surprised to see how completely the antique shops have evaporated from the landscape. There is only one antique store left along the street. Frankly, it was rather junky and looked like a hollow shell of discarded inventory. The modern film industry has clearly traded physical curation for green screens and digital convenience. A scattering of overpriced garage sale leftovers is now all that remains.

Aligning Our Ducks and Smoothing Natalia's Feathers

We recently officially checked in for our transatlantic passage to Brazil, which means the countdown is actually ticking. We depart in roughly two and a half months to spend a few nights knocking around southern England before boarding our MSC ship in Southampton. After that, we have the remainder of November to float our way across the ocean to Rio de Janeiro.

With the reality of our arrival setting in, we decided it was time to message our Airbnb host, Natalia. We locked in this winter basecamp months ago. Since we are checking in on the first of December for a complete three months, sending a friendly "hello" seemed like a polite necessity. Naturally, it was also a highly calculated maneuver.

As anyone who has ever survived a cruise knows, MSC will inevitably want to eject us from the ship at the crack of dawn. Meanwhile, the universal laws of Airbnb dictate that we cannot breach the apartment's perimeter until 2:00 PM at the earliest. Rather than face the grim prospect of dragging our luggage through the streets for six hours like wandering refugees, we figured a little preemptive charm was in order. We're hoping this early contact softens the ground for a morning bag drop. We shall see if the diplomatic approach pays off.

Natalia answered within minutes of the query to indicate that an early arrival wouldn't be a problem at all. A host with a response time faster than a cruise ship eviction is always a very good sign!