Year: 2016
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Best of 2016
2016 has been a tumultuous year, for both the entire world and for me personally. I have categorized some of the best hits and big changes below into three categories: Life, Posts and Media. Life Death and rebirth This year we had a cancer scare in my family which made me put community activity on…
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Japan travel roundup
On this trip to Japan, we resolved to visit some of the nearby regions to Kyoto on a couple of day trips. I took tons of photos on our travels, but there are a few highlights that I would like to touch on here.
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Quarterly review: FY16Q4
Each quarter I do a quick roundup of the book and film reviews that I do on Goodreads and Letterboxd. These reviews are too short and too off-the-cuff to be included with the more in depth reviews I do on this site. Below are the highlights of the quarter. Books ★★★☆☆ Fight Club ★★★☆☆ The…
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Mental Flexibility: My first Zen experience
In 1335, a few years after he abdicated the throne, the 95th emperor of Japan Hanazono (1297-1348) decided to become a Buddhist monk. He entered the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism and donated one of his palaces, turning it into a temple complex. Almost 700 years later, the Myoshin-ji (妙心寺) complex houses almost 50 sub-temples,…
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On stage at OnPoint: An argument from culture
Me providing (unpaid) plug of OGO Carshare on stage. Photo credit: Deon Nel Photography Urban Systems rounded out their series of workshops on housing, the economy, and climate with their fourth and final workshop on Transportation. The evening focused on thinking about how transportation could enable vibrancy in the community. I shared the panel with…
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3 years of real-world OGO carshare usage data
It is end of year data time! Here is our 2016 data for OGO Carshare. The average we spend on our vehicle is about $3000 per year, well below the average Canadian who spends $10,456. Keep in mind that this year also included a round-trip to Vancouver (to take my family to the airport) and…
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Buddha, the manga
Historical drama can sometimes be dangerous. Subtle twists of creative license to fit a narrative can give a false impression of the facts. Osamu Tezuka’s massive 8 volume series on the life of the Buddha is anything but subtle. You may know Osamu Tezuka as the creator of Astro Boy and Simba the White Lion.…
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Event: OnPoint – Do we need a new relationship with transportation and mobility in our region?
What are the possibilities for city beyond transportation? How do we think about transportation in terms of making a city more vibrant, rather than a deadening concrete grid where we travel isolated in our cars? On December 8th I will be on the panel for the Urban Systems On Point Series “Getting Unstuck – Do…
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The unexamined blog is not worth writing
Blogging is an activity I have been doing for more than a dozen years, under a few different guises: an anonymous personal blog, a pseudonymous group blog, and then another pseudonymous Tumblr which actually provides the basis of this blog. Almost 8 years later I am now at 500 posts on this blog. Early in…
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Interac and your privacy
If credit cards are merely thin plastic behaviour trackers leaking your private information into a sea of marketers, cash seems the only way to maintain your privacy. What about debit? That is the question @dchymko had in response to my post on how I use cash pretty much exclusively these days. Daryl asks: [tweet 771027128183693312…