Category: Life

Alcohol, Canada, and the CCSA Report: The Devil’s in the Details

Brain Farts / Life / OpinionLeave a comment

Alcohol is back in the news in Canada and the new report from The Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA) is making waves. The CCSA report updates their guidelines on safe alcohol consumption, and this is the first update in 11 years. The TL:DR on this one is that it significantly lowers the amount of alcohol advised to drink.  How much lower? The new report states that no amount of alcohol is truly safe, suggesting a maximum of two drinks a week for both men and women. This guidance is far more conservative then the original guidance, which …

AI-written Post on Pool Noodles

Brain Farts / LifeLeave a comment

Just for fun, I decided to use a GPT-3 powered AI writer to create a blog post about pool noodles. You are about to read that post. The only thing I fed to it was the following: “Pool noodles are great summertime fun. They come in a variety of colours and sizes. Some are solid, and others are hollow.” As you may already know, I could have generated a hundred different outputs and picked the best, but I went with the first thing that came out. This is the result. Enjoy! Pool noodles come in a variety of colours and …

No Man Is An Island

LifeLeave a comment

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. — Poem by John Donne, published 1624

Heroes Like You

Brain Farts / LifeLeave a comment

It seems so cliche to say it, but these are difficult times and 2020 has been one difficult time after another. Rather than provide a laundry list, I’ll let you fill those blanks in for yourself. Even as you try to ‘fight the good fight‘, it starts to seem hopeless and you may even find yourself questioning whether there’s any point in trying. It’s good to step back and consider that there always needs to be an island of sanity in the raging sea of madness. Sometimes, it just seems so hopeless and you become convinced that the bad guys …

Money Has Officially Jumped The Shark

COVID-19 / Life / OpinionLeave a comment

One of the hard truths of our world is that money is really just a collective fantasy that only works because we’re all in on the game. There’s an expression, “suspension of disbelief,” that is usually reserved for written works of fiction, movies, or television shows, where the person enjoying the fiction is willing to temporarily accept the fictional premise as real for the same of entertainment. If you pause in the middle of a show (let’s use Game of Thrones” for fun) and you decide to note every place where this or that can’t possibly be real or make …

What’s Your Contribution?

COVID-19 / Life / OpinionLeave a comment

As this pandemic drags on, it raises questions about the value of what each of us does for a living, when compared to the amount of money that we make for those jobs. There isn’t a day that goes by right now, or somebody doesn’t talk about the heroes who are working in the medical field, or the heroes who are working on the front lines, or the heroes working in the grocery stores and providing us with essential goods and services, but the question that needs to be asked whenever we discuss all these people, is how we assign …

My Open Source Journey

Cooking With Linux / Life / Linux/Open SourceLeave a comment

Way back, in my late teens, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, I had created myself a geek’s paradise in my basement. I had a chemistry lab, with equipment sourced through my high school, a microscope, a telescope, and an electronics lab built with equipment from Radio Shack. I was also starting to experiment with various computers and, in time, would have at least three different Commodore computers, a TRS-80, until eventually moving to a state of the art 286 IBM PC clone. Later, I’d expand the memory on that PC’s main board to a staggering 1 MB of RAM. …

The Death of Capitalism

Life / OpinionLeave a comment

I’ve been listening to a fascinating discussion regarding the death of capitalism on CBC’s “Ideas” program. I’m only about half way through it, but the subject matter is important and somewhat unsettling. Here’s a quote from where I’ve paused in my podcast app. “Democracy was always a problem in a capitalist society. There’s an enormous inherent tension between the two. Democracy is inherently egalitarian because every citizen has one vote. And the rich also have one vote but the rich are only five percent. Whereas in the market, every dollar has a vote. And the capitalist economy in particular functions …

Some Thoughts on Capitalism, Universal Basic Income, and Automation

Brain Farts / LifeLeave a comment

The concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI) is not new, but surprisingly few have heard of it or truly understand the reason for it and why, now more than ever, it is vitally important. In simplest terms, UBI is a regular cash payment made to every person. You don’t need to work for it and you can do anything you want with it. Some see it as money for nothing, a lazy person’s way of getting a handout from the rest of society. Proponents, many of whom don’t actually ‘need’ UBI, see it as a necessary means to keep the …

The Book of Secret Knowledge

Life / Linux/Open Source / Useful StuffLeave a comment

Every once in a while, you run across something so terribly useful, that you just need to share it with others, even if it does have the word “secret” in the title. This is one of those times. Should I call this a document, or a resource? Hey, maybe it’s just a glorified collection of bookmarks, but dang, is it ever useful! Given that I think it’s pretty awesome, I’m going to pretend that maybe you’ll feel the same way. And so, I give you “The Book of Secret Knowledge“, a “collection of inspiring lists, manuals, cheatsheets, blogs, hacks, one-liners, …

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