2026-02-25 00:22:17
I’ve lived in Ottawa since I was a teenager. In all of the time I’ve lived here, there has been a tourist attraction: The Rideau Canal Skateway. Every winter, the National Capital Commission prepares and maintains one of the longest skating rinks in the world at just over 7 kilometres in length.
Despite the availability and proximity to this attraction, I can’t remember ever taking the time to skate on the canal. I played ice hockey as a teenager and switched to roller hockey as an adult. Winter is cold and it didn’t really appeal to me to spend any time in an outdoor rink—especially one with questionable ice conditions.
This year, my son wanted to take his girlfriend and her kids to learn how to skate on the canal, buying them all skates. He invited me along but I’ve long since lost my own ice skates so I just went on foot, walking along while the kids skated, helping them learn.
Wouldn’t you know it, I really enjoyed it. There was something magical about it, something quintessentially Canadian about it. Maybe it was all the Canadian hockey jerseys people were wearing, showing off their national pride during the Olympics. Maybe it was seeing this communal event with skaters at all levels enjoying themselves.
I stood there, feeling small underneath the Mackenzie King bridge, the walls of the canal stretching over my head, seeing Parliament Hill off in the distance. I found myself in a postcard moment.
The following weekend, I bought myself a new pair of skates and, having barely ice skated since I was a teenager, did okay. My feet were sore for the first ten minutes or so but then things shifted into place and I was able to get some good strides in. We ended up being out for at least a couple hours.
I still don’t love the cold but I could see it becoming a tradition of getting out to the canal every year at least once.
2026-02-18 08:12:05
Last summer, Richard Worth reached out to see if I’d be interested in attending a jQuery Reunion. I’ve only been to one other conference (Beyond Tellerand) in the last five years and a reunion seemed like the best opportunity to reconnect with people I hadn’t seen in a long time.
I was trepidatious going into it as I had no idea who would be in attendance. Did everybody I knew from way back when decide to say no? How many people were even going to be there?
Thankfully, my fears were unfounded and I had a blast. There was a group of folks that I remember from back in the day like Nathan, Karl, Kyle, Marc, Mike, and Paul, and I also got to meet some new people like fellow Canadians, Darcy and Ryan. Nathan brought his teenage son, who was very inquisitive and seemed to really enjoy talking tech with everybody.
We went to a vintage arcade the first night, played classic games and ate pizza. The next day, we did go-karting, sim racing, and enjoyed some BBQ for lunch. I sucked at go-karting but kicked ass at sim racing. Then we went back to the hotel for the “conference” part where folks did short talks on topics that interested them.
John Resig wasn’t able to attend in person but did call in to present on his passion of Japanese art.
Nathan and I remarked that we felt a little out of place with most of the people there having been or currently are heavily involved with jQuery including contributing core code or organizing conferences. I would’ve considered myself more a jQuery groupie, sitting on the edges of the community. Photos were shared of those early conferences, a couple of which I thought I had attended but not being able to find myself in those early photos had me doubting the accuracy of my memory. I’ve gone through my own photos and found a couple I had taken. Whew, I’m not going crazy.
The jQuery team officially launched jQuery 4.0 at the reunion, which was cool. It’s impressive to think that this library is still chugging along after 20 years and still powering so much of the web. PrototypeJS, Scriptaculous, and jQuery are probably the three libraries that really invigorated my joy of JavaScript and helped me learn about how powerful of a language it really was.
Our industry feels more grown up and I miss how fun it felt in those earlier days. I’m also delighted with how things have changed since then to make our reliance on these tools less necessary (or maybe just reliant on a different set of tools).
2026-01-07 09:08:44
I was in Japan with my mom and my son. The country had recently opened up again to tourism and I took the opportunity to take my son on a trip we were supposed to take pre-pandemic that was cancelled due to a typhoon. My mom tagging along this time was a bonus.
It is nice to be in a place that isn’t overrun with tourists. Which, like, I get it: I am a tourist. I am the very thing I’m complaining about. It’s like complaining about traffic while being traffic. Just learn how to zipper merge, would ya?!
Anyway… we’re in Japan. We did Shinjuku, and Shibuya, and Harajuku, and bought our KitKats. We took in some fancy restaurants and some fancy coffee shops but most of all—especially my son and I—we had ramen. Specifically, we’d go to Ichiran almost on the daily. We fine-tuned our orders for the right amount of spice and noodles and accoutrements.
One of these days, at one of its many locations, we’re in line at Ichiran and I recognize a forehead. Seems like a weird thing to recognize of all things but it’s true. Everybody at the time was still masking. Japan is very courteous and we followed suit by making sure we were masked up every time we left the hotel room, just like everybody else, and just like the person in line behind us with the forehead I recognized.
Did I actually recognize that forehead? Only one way to find out. I asked. “Are you Tom Scott, by any chance?” It was indeed. He was visiting Tokyo after having been in New Zealand recently. I told him I enjoyed his content and then politely returned to waiting awkwardly in front of him for my seat inside Ichiran.
I guess I did recognize that forehead.
2025-12-31 09:29:28
We’ve reached the perineum of the holidays and I’m enjoying some quiet time before the new year—a perfect time to reflect on the year just spent.
This year was a quiet year for air travel, perhaps even quieter than expected. I have been avoiding travel to the States, for the most part. That has meant not getting any status on United next year—the first year in probably 15 years or so I haven’t reached at least silver with them. I did travel to Europe enough on Air France, though, to get Silver status on Delta.
I made it to Italy, France, and Belgium, which were all lovely trips with more casual time, rather than trying to pack all the tourist spots in. I’ve really enjoyed getting to settle into a place, even for a week, find a local coffee shop, and then hit up the occasional museum. I was absolutely delighted with Bruges and would love to go back.
The new year is already looking full of travel. My mom is trying to finish off bucket lists and I’m planning to join her for a couple trips including my first time to Alaska. I’m hoping to make it back to Norway. I’d like to visit more of Asia. No specific plans for either of those yet.
I didn’t really get any projects done this year, but also didn’t give myself any.
I’ve been bringing my Leica more often instead of just relying on my phone for photos. I’ve been enjoying getting back into photography and hope to do more of it in the new year. I have my photo blog but keep forgetting about it. Whoops.
I thought about doing a new food blog and started in on some designs. I might kick that off in the new year but considering I’ve already got a photo and whisky blog that are languishing, I’m not rushing off to create yet another dead site. Instead, I’m using Instagram as a placeholder for the time being.
The idea behind That One Dish is exemplifying the best of a particular restaurant. Especially when having a fine dining experience, I could say these dishes were good and those dishes were okay but it was hard to really showcase a meal that had a dozen or more courses. I want to celebrate amazing food and picking out a particular dish felt easier to write about than detailing each course with mundane descriptions or ingredient lists.
I didn’t think I had made it to that many fine dining restaurants this past year and while it was definitely my slowest year since I started going to fine dining restaurants with any regularity, I still went to a dozen Michelin-starred restaurants. Highlights include Lido 84 in Italy, The Jane in Antwerp, and Epicure in Paris.
Ottawa is levelling up, even if we don’t have the Michelin guide here. I try to make it to Perch at least once a year and I should go more often. Antheia just opened up and it’s spectacular.
I haven’t set myself any specific bucket lists for the new year but already have more than a handful of restaurants booked.
I’ve considered trying to get to every Michelin starred restaurant in Ontario, which is about 16 restaurants. I’m still uncommitted to that but unsure why. I think it’s because I don’t love Toronto. I find the city large and spread out in a way that doesn’t make it easy to get to everything. Like, New York is big but public transit makes it pretty easy to get around. Going to a couple restaurants over the course of a week is one thing. Going to more than a dozen restaurants over weeks or months becomes a logistical task that isn’t as fun to organize.
Life really quieted down over the course of this year. My oldest son got a full-time job in the career he wanted. My youngest son moved out for school. I sold my house and am now living downtown in an apartment. I barely drive because I can walk or Uber/Lyft wherever I need to go. I no longer need to mow the lawn or shovel the driveway. My expenses have dropped and simplified and I’m using the extra room for a few revisions to the apartment.
I upgraded my gaming PC after I thought my old one was dying. The old PC was an Intel i7 with Nvidia 3070. The new PC is an AMD with Nvidia 5090. Then I got a dead pixel in my monitor a week later so I upgraded to an Asus ROG 32” 4K 240Hz monitor from an Acer Predator 27” 4K 144Hz monitor. I’m mostly just playing Call of Duty Warzone with friends and the upgrade feels real nice.
This year felt mostly good for me. I was able to steady myself and be there for others. The end of this year also saw the end of a regular schedule dictated by kids and as such, I find myself ebbing and flowing between productive and not. I started introducing a modicum of structure back in by giving my weeks a theme to focus on.
For example, I might say that this week will be focused on organizing a particular trip and all the research that goes into booking lodging, flights, and everything in between. Or perhaps it’s a week to focus on a particular project, working on writing, photography, or design.
I keep considering learning a language or instrument but have yet to do so. Maybe the upcoming year is when that might happen. With all the travel, I have some incentive to learn the language of wherever I’m going, even if it’s just basic understanding.
I was smart in not trying to predict what the 2025 theme would be. Change definitely happened but it didn’t turn out exactly like I expected. It didn’t turn out badly, just different. “Steady” is probably the best word for the past year.
The next year feels open, like anything or nothing could happen, and I’d be good either way. I’m looking forward to the year ahead…
2025-12-28 03:51:42
As a child of the 80s, I have distinct things that I associate with successful people. We’re talking the age of shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Dallas, and Dynasty. Sports like tennis, racquetball, golf, and sailing. People in their white short shorts, and polo shirts, with a headband.
Having a briefcase was yet one more sign of success. As a teenager, I had a briefcase. Brass buckles. Black leather. I doubt it was real leather but what did 17 year old me know. It made me feel like I could be successful.
I had a high school co-op program placement in the IT department of the local hospital. I brought my briefcase to work with me because that’s what you do when you’re a successful person going to work in an office. In that briefcase was my lunch and nothing else. I didn’t have anything else to put in it.
None of the adults there had briefcases and I quickly realized how silly it was. I imagine they got quite the chuckle when I showed up that first day but thankfully, they were very kind and never made fun of me.
Fun little story from my time there: I was in the server room with its towers and tape drives. There was even a little television in there. How cool is that? I changed the channel to something I wanted to watch. It was probably a game show like Price is Right and not one of those silly soap operas my mom liked to watch.
I was informed later that day that that TV is broadcast to all the sets in the hospital. Whoops. Good thing I didn’t change the channel to something… inappropriate.
My markers of what success looks like have definitely changed. I don’t play tennis or have a briefcase. I do have a home I care for and lots of friends and family. Okay, and a Porsche.
2025-11-25 05:28:22
It’s gotten to the point where I almost pathologically avoid television shows. Name a popular tv show from the last 20 years and there’s a good chance I haven’t seen it. Game of Thrones? Nope. Succession? Nope. Mr Robot? Nope. Breaking Bad? I saw the first two seasons and gave up. Strangers Things? Also gave up after two seasons.
It’s been difficult for me to articulate exactly why I don’t find television that captivating. After all, I grew up on television. Name a popular tv show from the 80s and there’s a good chance I’ve seen it. Punky Brewster? Yup. Three’s Company? Absolutely. Night Court, Cosby Show, Cheers, A Different World, Growing Pains? Yuuuuup.
Perhaps it’s the format? Shows back in those days were episodic: each episode mostly stood alone. There wasn’t any stakes in missing an episode or two, except perhaps not being able to participate in conversation around the water fountain.
These days, every episode feels high stakes. Everything is designed to keep you locked in from episode to episode and from season to season.
This is where I feel it’s gone wrong: it feels like a social media algorithm. It’s not about telling a good story and needing a certain amount of time to tell that story. It’s about how long they can capture and retain attention. Filler episodes. Backstories. Cliffhangers.
Prison Break, Heroes, and Lost might’ve been the three shows that I felt betrayed me the most. Each show descended into absolute absurdity pretty much after the first season, despite starting off with a great concept. It’s like they were surprised by their own popularity and now had to figure out a way to sustain it.
Other shows, like Scavengers Reign, get cancelled, despite fantastic writing because the concepts are perhaps too eclectic to garner a big enough audience. Kaos got cancelled, too, after one season which surprised me, given the cast.
I’m also bailing on shows early and often. I liked Poker Face, The Bear, and Severance but haven’t watched the last season of any of them—for no particular reason.
There’s a high level of inertia I need to get over to get into a show.
All is not lost. Ted Lasso pulled me in with the promise of a three season arc. They delivered. Russian Doll was fantastic. I’ve watched every episode of Silo and Shrinking and Fallout, so far.
Sometimes I think I’ll wait until a show reaches its end before I watch it but inevitably feel a lack of desire in committing to multiple seasons of a show that nobody is watching anymore.
And it’s at this point where I recognize my growing and perhaps needless skepticism as I age. The world isn’t out to get me, after all. Not all stories need to have a conclusion. Closure is overrated. My disdain for television seems silly and will likely continue in classic “old man yells at cloud” form—even while I continue to consume the format.
Anyway... I started watching Pluribus and already feeling like bailing after four episodes… what else is on?
