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Category: Personal

  • #Octaver25 – Day 1The first music I remember hearing

    Hello and welcome to my first entry for #Octaver25, OK, so what the heck is an Octaver you might ask. Well it’s a portmanteau of the words Octave and October and was originally coined back in 2012 by yours truly for a musical festival that took place on an audio-based social network called Audioboo. During Octaver people were given a set of prompts about music, and they would create audio messages of themselves talking about music, and in some instances even playing small excerpts, those among us who were more talented, I don’t include myself in that group 🙂 would also play musical instruments and/or sing.

    In any case, Audioboo was purchased many many years ago and re-baptized Audioboom and they changed their approach to social audio and started charging more. Unfortunately the social network slowly caved in and we all went our separate ways and Octaver faded into the distance, like the end of a great song. During my years on Audioboo I met a wonderful group of people, many with whom I still keep in touch with today. In fact, two of those great folks ask me to participate in a revival of the hashtag some 13 years later, has it really been that long?

    Back then in the 2010’s I would put quite a bit of production time in these Octaver episodes, I’m not so sure I’ll be able to give it that much devotion this time around, but I did want to at least contribute and participate in some way. So here it goes, below is my first entry for this new month and the launch of my #Octaver25

  • Four years and counting

    According to the date calculator on timeanddate.com I’m due to retire in 3 years, 11months and 5 days, but hey who’s counting, I’m looking very much forward to retirement, there are so many things I want to do, projects I want to work on, things I want to learn. During the next few years I will be slowly preparing for retirement by purchasing those tools and items for many of my past-times and interests, this might include specialized measurement tools for my electronics hobby, woodworking tools, mechanics tools, etc… Perhaps a nice new synthesizer is in the mix as well, we’ll see. I both anticipate my retirement but I’m also a little leery of it as I worry that I’ll have enough to do, enough things to fill my time. Then again, there are many things I haven’t thought of, like perhaps some meetups I could go to, some social events or perhaps other outside activities. I’ve always loved the theater, so perhaps something like that is in order. Who knows really, I just hope that I’ll be healthy enough to enjoy my retirement years. This brings me to another point, physical fitness, which unfortunately I’m sorely lacking at the moment. You see I have a life partner that is an avid fitness guru. She loves to exercise and has the discipline to do it, alas it’s not my case at all. I’m not so much a couch potato, as a desk potato and spend untold hours on the computer doing a myriad of things. I really need to find a hobby/interest that gets me moving, gets me out of the house at least and doing something physical. I was thinking of getting back into photography and maybe doing urban photography or hiking in the forest to do some forest bathing, etc… That is a possibility, I just wish I had more discipline. In any case, I’ve got a little less than four years and in that time I have to get my ducks in a row as they say…

  • Canada first initiative

    Canada first initiative

    Now with the US administration having put into place the 25% tariffs as they had threatened and Canada doing a tit for tat and imposing tariffs on incoming US goods I felt it was time for me on a personal note to reduce the number of US-based online services and products I am using. I started with my domain name and email provider. I initiated a transfer to a Canadian-based domain and DNS host as well as email provider. This should all go down by the end of this coming week.
    I was also subscribed to the US-based Tidal music streaming service and severed my account with them and opened up one with a French-based company Qobuz, OK, not Canadian-based, but at least it’s not in the US. I also stopped donating, at least for the immediate future, to SOMA FM, one of my favourite online Internet radio stations out of San Francisco. Again, it’s nothing personal against the fine people working there or elsewhere, it’s just that I feel compelled to support my fellow Canadians in this very difficult moment.
    Only time will tell what will happen next…
  • Good-bye Spaced-Ex and Blue Orifice and a confession…

    Good-bye Spaced-Ex and Blue Orifice and a confession…

    UPDATE: 2026-05-31

    On this, the last day of May, I’m confessing that my boycott of SpaceX and Blue Origin didn’t really last that long. I suppose it’s because Musk, perhaps having understood his errors with the DOE (doubtful) and his supporting of Donald Trump after the whole Jeffrey Epstein scandal broke out, has simply vanished from the political spectrum and he’s seemingly back to talking about colonizing Mars. I certainly don’t condone any of his or Bezo’s other behaviour, but such is the pull of my interest in space exploration and rocket science and technology in general. Am I being hypocritical, perhaps a little bit. I certainly don’t talk too much about either company and praise them, I simply and quietly read and/or watch their on-going activities. I have also since started watching Scott Manley and Marcus House as I felt boycotting them wasn’t fair, they are simply space journalists in their own right. So yes, do I completely retract everything I’ve written below? No, not all of it, I still am sickened by these billionaire little boys, but I mustn’t forget the thousands of people who work at SpaceX and Blue Origin who put in hours and hours of hard work and scientific experimentation in pursuit of space exploration and so I feel I’m honouring them when watching and cheering on Starship and so forth.

    I’m so done with rich billionaire little boys and their big toys. Elon Musk’s rather disturbing gestures at President Trump’s inauguration really upset me as it did many people and I’ve decided to now do a personal boycott of SpaceX flights. I’m a big space nerd at heart, so not partaking in the excitement of launches and the advancements of amazing technology like Starship is going to be very very difficult. However, I just can’t bring myself to ignore Musk’s seemingly white supremacy behaviour and Jeff Bezos isn’t any better, Amazon recently closed all of their distribution centres here in Quebec because one of them was successful in forming a union. The employees were only trying to get fair wages and better working conditions and Amazon punished them for it, closed down everything and laid them off.

    For this reason I’ve decided I’m going to boycott SpaceX and Blue Origin launches. In fact I’m even going to Boycott Scott Manley and Marcus House as they mostly talks about SpaceX. It’s going to be tough as I’m such a space nerd, but I’ll continue to watch and listen to NASA but if they mention or talk about SpaceX, then I’ll switch off, perhaps in time I’ll just ween myself off NASA altogether, who knows. I’m not sure what I’ll use to fill the gap, perhaps Ham radio, my music, both listening and playing it, and then there is reading, as I have so many books waiting for me. In any case, I don’t know how successful I’ll be we’ll see. I’ll take it one day at a time and see what happens.

  • …and what if…

    Silhouette of a man sitting next to a window looking out at a city skyline.

    The company I work for ships most of its products to the United States, meaning if the 25% tariffs are put in full force on February 1st the repercussions could be disastrous. Am I worried? You bet! I could stand to lose my job or at the very least see my salary and/or my hours cuts drastically in a bid for the company to recoup their losses. The company itself won’t have to flip the bill for the tariffs themselves but the way I see it, if the US customers decide they don’t want to absorb the extra cost then they may force our company to cut their price or they may decide to go to one of competitors. If this happens I could see a possibility of the company doing massive layoffs, if not outright putting the key in the door. It may not happen but it is a possibility and so I’m left with the ‘what if…’ Well, if that were to happen as I see it I’m in a comfortable enough position 4 years from retirement to finish my working life in a lower-paying job, perhaps even a retail job part-time, maybe in a hardware store or some kind of electronics shop, who knows. Just something to carry me until my pension kicks in and I can start slowly trickling my retirement fund and enjoying life at my own slow pace. In fact, I’m really not too worried. Would it be tough finding work? Maybe, but I have many many marketable skills, I’m good with people, technology, I’m a quick study and a great troubleshooter and solution finder. I think I have many good qualities to offer a company. So, you see, given the right opportunity, I think I could shine for another 4 years at a company and maybe beyond if I found the right place. So for now I sit and wait and continue to work and not think about it too much.

  • Happy New Year 2025

    Wow, 2025! I don’t know about you but that number looks very sci-fi doesn’t it? It’s already seven days into 2025 and so far so good 🙂 In years past, in fact for most of my adolescent and adult life I’ve always taken January as a month of reflection to look at and plan my upcoming year, take hold of the year that passed and work towards resolutions, blah blah blah 🙂 Not this year, at least not in the same way. I’ve decided that this year will be a year of action. No more planning things to death but simply having a todo list and knocking things off of it. What exactly? Well for starters I had the installation of a new dishwasher, which was done two days ago. It didn’t go smoothly as our kitchen was built in place and isn’t standard at all. So at the moment, although the dishwasher is installed and works fine, it’s skewed forward so that it looks like it’s open all the time but in fact it’s closed. I will revisit it this coming weekend where I will cut away a portion of the top of the cabinet so that it will sit flush and at least look a little better. It’s kind of a moot point as one of the todos on my list is to redo the kitchen entirely. More on this in later posts.

    I’d like to wish everyone a Happy New Year 2025, may you all have Heatlh, Happiness and Peace as we embark on what might become a very divisive year with American politics very much in the forefront and our own Canadian politics in upheaval. We’ll have to hang tight and ride out all the storms and hopefully we’ll all be OK in the end.