2025-06-09 08:10:18
The life odometer slowly turned as I awoke to a cherry chip cupcake on my fifty-first birthday.
It was a warm, sunny, but smoky day as forest fires from central Canada filled the hazy sky.
I joined my handful of high school friends for lunch. I had a burger that was quite delicious and sizeable enough that I couldn’t finish it. The server brought out a dense but disappointing chocolate cake where she sung the first two bars to Happy Birthday and then walked away while my friends continued the singing.
I returned home to enjoy a cigar and a cocktail on the balcony, seeing the birthday wishes stream in from various social media platforms. [Thank you, everybody.]
For dinner, my girlfriend made a delicious gochujang miso marinated salmon served on a bed of basmati rice. The appetizer was figs, pistachios, basil, honey, and balsamic on a bed of fior di latte. Really tasty flavour combinations that I would absolutely have again.
The evening was intended to include a couple hours of gaming but my son had a school assignment due at midnight and he had fallen asleep. I ended up needing to wake him up and making sure he had everything he needed. Mission accomplished. One step closer to seeing this kid graduate.
At one minute to midnight, I hopped online to join my friends in one game of Call of Duty. We won. And I got the last kill. A fun way to close out my birthday.
2025-06-05 08:16:53
“The truth is, I’m… I’m not an exceptional person, you know? Nothing interesting really ever happens to me. I’m… I’m massively flawed, and I think I’m quite forgettable, if I’m being 100% honest.”
Randy Feltface ends his comedic storytelling in Randy Writes a Novel with this poignant bit at the end of his act.
“But must we leave a legacy? Must we make an impact? Do we have to leave a footprint? Is it okay to just settle? Seek safety? Nest, you know? Or must we constantly shake our lives up, or suffer the indiscriminate cruelty of having it shaken against our will?“
I grew up considering myself quite average. I still do, honestly. I was never the best hockey player but I wasn’t the worst. I wasn’t the best bowler but I wasn’t the worst. Even to this day, amongst my friends, I’m not the best Warzone player, but I’m not the worst. If I were in The Simpsons, I’d be in the Second Best Band. [n.b. from my favourite Simpsons episode.]
That’s not to downplay any of my successes over the years. Looking back on what has transpired in my life, it feels rather surreal and an un-average life.
“They say you die twice. Once when you stop breathing and the second, a bit later on, when somebody mentions your name for the last time.”
I don’t have any expectation to be remembered or honoured beyond my circle of friends and family. The time between my first and second deaths will be short, I imagine, and I have no problem with this. After all, once I die the first time, it won’t matter one way or the other to me how long the memory of me lives on.
I bring this up not in a woe-is-me or a sense of nihilism where nothing matters. I bring it up as for me, personally, I’m okay with settling. I’m okay with enough. My footprint has been made and is already disappearing into the sands of time as the waves of progress wash upon the shore.
For the billionaires of this world, however, it never seems to be enough. For many in the tech industry, there’s a culture of growth at all costs. When I was at Shopify, it was easy to fall into it. We’d have discussions about how to expand into various markets and then work to execute on those ideas. Move up-market, move down-market, move into foreign markets. It feels almost antithetical to even consider just refining a product without needing to hire more people to sell to more people. There is a fear that if you don’t continue growing, there will be somebody else who will and eventually you’ll die.
The idea of running a lifestyle business—one small enough to maintain a comfortable living—seems to have disappeared. Perhaps because those lifestyle businesses eventually got sold off to growth businesses.
Like a cancer, rapid growth eventually consumes a stable environment.
In much the same way that I have hoped that the enshittification of social media may lead to a resurgence of blogging, I hope that we see a wave of small, independent app creators, web or native.
While I don’t buy the hype of AI in its current form, if the expectation is that it’ll drive the speed at which we can develop, perhaps there is an opportunity for some to create their own little islands instead of heaping all creation into some mega-corporation just for the sake of growth.
2025-05-30 05:42:25
I don’t really identify with music. I mean in the sense that I don’t use music to attach to specific meanings or feelings. Lyrics are like instruments in that I couldn’t tell you what the words are or what they meant any better than I could tell you what the guitar or drums are saying. Everything comes together in rhythm and melody in a way that I enjoy.
Every now and then, though, a song will ingrain itself into my brain and become completely linked to a particular point in time due to repetition.
When I was a teenager, I collected comics. I bought the twelve issue series of Watchmen, which by the early 90s had already had multiple printings. While I read it, I’d listen to music on my Compact Disc player. I had maybe a dozen CDs at the time including Paula Abdul’s Spellbound featuring QSound technology, and Phantom of the Opera. Clearly, I am a man of impeccable taste in music.
The album I listened to on repeat, though, while reading these engrossing comic books was Soul II Soul’s debut album, Club Classics Vol. One. To this day, any time I hear Back to Life come on, I’m instantly transported to my teenage bedroom, the afternoon light coming through my window, as I sit on the floor, wondering what Dr. Manhattan would do.
After that, it wasn’t until March of 2009 that another song would create such an intertwining to an indelible moment. The song was Wake Up by Arcade Fire. While the song had been released in 2004, I first came across it when it was used in the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are—a book I had and enjoyed reading when I was a child and that I enjoyed reading to my kids, then 5 and 1½.
My wife (at the time) and I were in the process of adopting our third child. Unfortunately, it never came to pass. We had gone through failed adoptions a few times before and the reason this time was no different than those other times: the mother chose to keep the child—a perfectly reasonable, respectful, and honourable decision.
Perhaps because I had been more open about this attempt, the failure hit me hard. (Failure doesn’t feel like the right word here. Nobody failed. It’s nobody’s fault. Circumstances changed.)
Wake Up was played on repeat.
To this day, 16 years later, whenever I hear that song, I’m brought to tears.
Somethin’ filled up
My heart with nothin’
Someone told me not to cryNow that I’m older
My heart’s colder
And I can see that it’s a lie
That failed adoption precipitated events that led to my asking for a divorce three months later.
2025-05-28 07:52:30
I enjoy those who do weekly or monthly life updates. I don’t plan (right now) on doing a similar cadence. Partly because I usually don’t consider my life that exciting—which, honestly, I’m enjoying things being boring right now.
In my year-end recap, I mentioned my youngest was doing longer stretches splitting his time between homes. Little did I expect that less than two weeks after that update, he’d be at my place since and will likely continue until he’s off to college in the fall.
That has meant staying in Ottawa and keeping travel to a minimum. He and I went to Paris for March break where we stayed at an Airbnb in Le Marais. We spent too much money on clothes and food, including three Michelin-starred L’Ambroisie. We had a mostly decent experience there but not as good as I was expecting, given a lot of the online reviews I had read. We made up for it by going to Five Guys the next day.
It’s nice having more one-on-one time with him before he flies the coop.
He just went to his prom. I never went to my prom and my oldest missed out due to the pandemic so I’m glad my youngest got to have that experience. He won an award for Best Style. Unsurprising. He’s always been a stylish kid.
As for me, I’m happy to be in a place right now where I can support those around me.
I’m focused on downsizing in preparation for the empty nest. I’ve been selling or giving away things I don’t need anymore. My spending has dropped considerably, which has been nice.
I’ve started to spend more time reading. I felt like I was spending too much time on social media in general and TikTok in particular. I enjoy the inspiration that can come from TikTok—especially with cooking and cocktails—but needed to…diversify the inspiration.
I finally finished Think Little by Wendell Berry. I appreciate the message of preserving the environment but I found the writing style a bit underwhelming. Having finished that, I went back to reading Romance Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, which is a light book about a comedy writer working for a fictional version of SNL falling in love with a celebrity host. I’m enjoying it. I have a few other fiction titles lined up for when I’m done that including The Perfume Collector, Service Included, and Food Person.
I go in waves with music. I rarely listen to albums, instead preferring to listen to singles and then adding them to a big playlist. Again, TikTok comes in as my place of inspiration. Sometimes the algorithm will narrow in and give me just music recommendations and that’s where I’ll start adding different things. Dreamwalker by Dogpark has a Maroon 5 feel. Kilby Girl by The Backstreet Lovers. Indie Hills by Jonny K. Oh, and Dead Beat City by Kids That Fly. That’s a song to crank nice and loud while driving with the sunroof open.
For something more chill, Texas Sun by Khruangbin & Leon Bridges is so smooth. Love that guitar. Which lead me to Leon Bridges’ Smooth Sailin’.
I’ve added a couple songs from Galdive and St Paul & The Broken Bones to the list. And when I couldn’t get enough of Jungle, I feasted on Loaded Honey’s recent releases.
My playlists are on Apple Music and while Current Vibes is my main playlist, I’ve been slowly curating my other playlists, too.
I stopped buying whisky as I wasn’t drinking it nearly enough to get through everything I was buying. My urge to “collect them all”, even with a particular brand, was getting to be a bit much. For example, I love Octomore but they release four bottles every year. I hadn’t finished off the 9 series but then I bought the 10 and 11 and 12 and 13 and 14 series. Now I have 20 bottles of Octomore sitting on the shelf.
Instead, I’ve been buying vermouth and amaro and other interesting liqueurs. China China and Fernet Branca Menta were the recent additions. I fear I am no further ahead in these matters. Now I just have 20 bottles of liqueurs on top of the 20 bottles of whisky.
Last cocktail I made was The Getaway. Although I just used lemon juice instead of a lemon/lime split. I’d totally have it again.
Here’s to a good summer. With the warmer weather, I look forward to relaxing outside, having a drink, and catching up on my reading.
2025-05-25 02:48:16
I enjoyed Anh’s open tabs post and thought I’d do the same.
Tabs open: none.
Well, on the computer I’m writing this post, none. I try to keep things minimal. I have a couple other devices with maybe a dozen tabs open.
Tabs usually stay open when it’s for things I want to buy. They stay open until I buy them or until I decide I don’t want to buy them.
I also use Safari Tab Groups but tend to use them more like bookmarks where things go in there for months. They’re more oriented around projects. For example, I am redoing the laundry room and have a tab group for wallpaper options. What do you think?
When Safari first introduced tab syncing, it was fantastic. Now it’s unreliable and inconsistent. No idea why. Restarting the browser seems to update the synced tabs.
That’s it for now.
2025-05-13 23:24:44
The biggest problem I run into with my side projects is keeping dependencies up to date.
I’ll not maintain a site for months and then when I come back to do a small update, I’ll discover something along the way that has been deprecated. It results in more time being spent on updating the dependency than it does to do the actual update I want to perform.
This latest one, much like it has been for the past year or so, was an issue with my deployment setup. I used to use a third-party service and now use GitHub Actions to deploy to GitHub Pages. I had my deployment pinned to using Ubuntu 20.04, which GitHub no longer supports. I’ve switched it to use the latest Ubuntu, which hopefully doesn’t come back to bite me down the road.
Anyway, problem fixed… now to actually work on the site.
