When I was 9, my dad went to an auction with his uncle1 and bought, seemingly on a whim 🦋, an antique piano. I would like to reflect on how this has changed the course of, if not the world, at least my life and many people around me.
We are making an attempt to make some simple substitutions in what we buy in an effort to buy more Canadian goods and services. It can be difficult to unAmericanize a household though; there are a lot of American services that are deeply entrenched in our culture. Here's an overview of what we're trying to change.
I previously wrote my Top 10 Movie and have followed it up with Top 10 Shows. Again, these are not the shows that I think are necessarily "the best" because there are TV shows that are made with more craft than the ones I have selected. These are the ones that are my favourites, though, for whatever reason. Like movies, I'm not putting these in any particular order.
My daughter asked me what my top 10 movies of all time are, and it got me primed to actually write something after a couple of years of writing almost nothing. I think this may lead to a few other top 10s over the next few months - video games, books, tv series, board games, vacations? The possibilities are endless. Movies are a good starter though so that's where we are at.
Preface This essay came about as the result of someone asking, "Scribblenauts: can someone explain what makes it so great? I heard you can basically work around every puzzle with a jetpack." I enjoy Scribblenauts and it got me to thinking about how and why different people enjoy different games.
The Problem with Gaming: There are fundamentally different reasons that people want to play games…
This article contains spoilers for both the book and the recent tv show.
On a recent vacation, I read the entirety of the unabridged version of The Stand by Stephen King, a reread of one of my favourite books. After returning home, I wanted to contrast with the new miniseries, The Stand, which I thought was good but not great.
I wrote some posts about Tildes Backlog Burner event for 2020 - here is the tag to read all the articles, past, present, and future - and it ran again this past february. I took part, and wrote a bit about some games I've tried out this past month.
About 20 years ago, I worked at The Library for a mid-sized University. I was working on a project that at the time was interesting and pushing some technical limitations - the unit I was with had a bunch of resources available as paper, and we were using the same source control for paper copies, PDFs, web copies, and were doing the changes between formats using XSLT, having stored the data as XML (I know there's better ways to do this now,…
This past weekend I attended my brother-in-law's wedding. It was postponed a number of times due to Covid-19, but it was a beautiful event for a wide variety of reasons. My wife's brother is a wonderful person, and his bride is a also a wonderful person; the families involved are full of delightful people. It is the first big family even we have attended since Christmas of 2021, and I'm very lucky to be able to say that I have terribly missed family events with my wife's whole family, so it was a special pleasure on a lot of levels.
I was recently thinking about the act of giving speeches. I have given some wedding speeches, including a best man speech for my brother's wedding, and have been told I give good ones. Here are some guidelines.