Last week the Canadian Competition Bureau released the report Your Data, Your Control: How data portability can unlock competition and empower consumers. The surprisingly readable report centers around an experiment exploring data portability in the insurance sector, calculating that “introducing data portability could save Canadians “between $1.10 billion and $3.83 billion in both time and money on their annual costs.” I decided to read the report to understand how the Canadian federal government thinks about data portability in general, with an eye towards other digital spaces like social media, cloud, AI, and the types of stuff I am interested in.
For a couple of years we kept a very small apartment in Kyoto for monthly visits while we were taking care of my parents-in-law. The rent was cheaper than getting a hotel each time, and my parents stored stuff there which justified the expense. The apartment was on the very edge of southwest Kyoto in a neighbourhood called Rakusai Newtown, a housing project started in the 1970s for the families of men working in the factories of West Kyoto.
From Evgeny Morozov’s essay Socialism After AI:
The driving imperative would not be “growth” measured as ever more commodities, but the enlargement of what people are actually able to do and be, individually and collectively.
On that view, AI would be judged by whether it opens new spaces of competence, understanding, and cooperation, and for whom. A tool that lets teachers and students work in their own dialects, interrogate history from their vantage points, and share and refine local knowledge would score highly.
Lewis Gordon on Frantz Fanon
This is a beautiful interview with Lewis Gordon, scholar of the work of Franz Fanon. Gordon contends that many people mis-interpret Fanon, especially around his views of political violence. Gordon’s reframing of Fanon is succinct and captures a side I didn’t get before.
Here are couple of choice quotes, but the episode is short and I encourage you to listen tot he whole thing. Dr Gordon is a great speaker.
Early Xmas!🎄🎁 New kit! 📷 I mulled getting a Fujifilm X100VI when they came out but wanted something smaller. Been watching the iteration of GRs and when they announced the IV I signed up right away. Gonna carry this thing everywhere!
#photography
In the second segment of this Neverpo.st episode researcher Emily Owens discusses “BrainRot” as a rare method of decompression for today’s teenagers:
There are loads of things you could do to decompress. Sometimes it is use your phone, but oftentimes it’s go for a walk, like go for a swim, take your bicycle out, paint a painting, write a little story. And we’re, I think, systematically discouraged from doing those things because those things don’t make anybody any money.
Unboxing my new Starter Set of The One Ring. (Now some very personal blogging that will only interest a few of you) Last week I wrote about the fantasy hole I have been in. Contributing to this is the fact that we are also in a Table Top Role Playing Game hole as well.
I have been playing TTRPGs with the same group since 2013. We started together after a big Board Game Night where we organized two simultaneous sessions of The Red Box to introduce people to tabletop gaming.
Yeah, I have fallen down one in the past few months for sure.
Last year my brother introduced me to The Blade Itself (2006) by Joe Abercrombie, part of the (currently) 10 book series called The First Law. A year later and I have completed the first trilogy, the three standalone novels, and the short story collection. Keep in mind that I am not one to binge book series… in fact I like to spread them out a little since I prefer variety in my reading diet week-to-week.
It is possible to identify a natural scale. When an enterprise grows beyond a certain point on this scale, it first frustrates the end for which it was originally designed, and then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself. These scales must be identified and the parameters of human endeavours within which human life remains viable must be explored.
— Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)
I was watching this cool tour of coffee shops and roasteries in Vancouver that hits a lot of the famous places. The Youtuber does some of these tours when he visits locations so I prepared some reccos for him for the next time he is in Western Japan. Thought I should share them here for you
KYOTO WEEKENDERS COFFEE TOMINOKOJI maps.app.goo.gl/yX4yemvBa…
Ambiance is top. They aren’t open very often. Don’t bother bringing a laptop since there are no tables.
Deep Work is Cal Newport’s highest selling book. He published it in early 2016 and it made waves at the time since he strongly argues against social media. Cal is infamously not on social media (unless you count blogging and podcasting 😜) so it is a little ironic that the reason I finally decided to pick up this book was due to a post I saw on social media.
Although the book explores quite a few topics, to sum it up from my perspective, he introduces a term well known in software circles to a more general audience: context switching.
The latest Neverpo.st roundtable asks: “Is the internet driving you to the brink?”
Mike points out that a first Trump admin, followed by Covid, and then another Trump admin, has turned many people’s online brains into mush.
How do you keep up or stay informed, without driving yourself insane?
A dozen years ago I tackled this problem, taking an information fast and reading The Information Diet by Clay Johnson.
Things have gotten away from me over the past few years, but recently I have been leaning more into RSS and trying to read more blogs.
This past weekend we were blessed with gorgeous clear blue skies as we took the ferry from Tsawwassen across the Georgia Strait to Swartz Bay on Vancouver Island.
Swartz Bay? But, it says “Nanaimo” in the title? you observe. And yes, you are correct. Although there is a ferry from Tsawwassen direct to Nanaimo, we decided to land at the southern end of the island and spend the Friday afternoon driving up the east coast of the island, visiting all those tiny little towns that I have heard about but have never actually visited before.
The Vaisakhi parade in Surrey is said to be the biggest in the world, attracting over 500,000 people! (See these aerial photos from last year to get a sense of the crush).
This year’s parade also saw the appearance of two of the candidates in the upcoming election for our next prime minister: Jagmeet Singh and Pierre Poilievre.
I was down on the ground, in the mix, surrounded by the celebratory masses with my older daughter.
For the past couple of years in Japan I have been really enjoying the cherry blossoms. I made cherry blossoms the theme of the Micro.blog photo challenge last year.
Prior to that, in Kelowna, we didn’t really have the cherry blossoms… for years…
But now, here in Metro Vancouver, I have noticed how many sakura trees there are around the city! Cherry blossom viewing is a real event here, with a festival and everything!
Very nice to see this send-off of John Dougill, an influential member of the English-speaking community in Kyoto. I have a number of his books and he came to Iki for a few days while I was there. I had the privilege to tour him around the island and talk about travel writing. I learned some valuable lessons during that trip.
Here are a couple of his blog posts from Iki:
As user 87 on Bluesky, I have been around the AT Protocol ecosystem — the ATmosphere — for a while. My comrade Boris Mann (@bmann.ca) started https://atprotocol.dev to serve as a place to do tech talks with developers, just like we used to do for Fission before (and Causal Islands before that and TFTRocks before that… and… 😊). When Boris was thinking of starting the first community conference for atproto devs back in early December 2024, he asked if I was in… of course!
It had been years since I had been to Shinjuku, at least, around the JR Station. It was a lot dirtier than I remember, but more than 25 years had past. It was a whirlwind trip this time to Japan, all for an important meeting for a client that asked me to come and help out. Except for taking my client to Ginza by taxi for some shopping, I stayed put in Shinjuku.
Got a shoutout on one of my fav podcasts:
I hit up producer Hans Buetow on Bsky about this ep of Neverpost (section 2) where he tries to figure out how many cameras are in the world. Wild. And not a bad pronunciation of my last name!
As you know, I back Neverpost and rate them highly.
For other mentions on podcasts also see: Chad on Chapper’s and The time I was outed as the reincarnation of L.
There is no one way to raise bilingual kids. Every family is different, and the context where they learn language can change. Previously I wrote about bilingualism expectations (and plurilingualism) in the context of raising our kids.
If you think about bilingualism in terms of time, there are generally two categories: sequential bilingualism and simultaneous bilingualism. In the first case, one learns a first language and then later learns a second language.
We got the keys! 🔑
For the first time, we have a home of our own. 🏡
A few months ago we found a place and had our offer accepted. Earlier this week we finalized the documents. But now we have the keys to our very own townhouse. After many years of bouncing back and forth between Japan and Canada, and even moving within each country, the family are now settled down and committed to living in Surrey, BC for the foreseeable future.
It has been six months since we moved to Surrey from Osaka. In that time we have explored our neighbourhood, the kids have gotten used to school, and I have re-connected with friends and family, and made a ton of new connections.
We lived in Kelowna for 8 years, which is plenty of time to build up our community network, including things like Digital Okanagan, Okanagan Developers Group, Kelowna Japanese Language Society, and Okanagan Asian Heritage Month committee, among others.
Favourite photo of the year: The Nintendo World train in Osaka through cherry blossoms. Taken during April’s Micro.Blog photo challenge
What a year. 😫 Closed down a company. Pulled all roots out of Japan and moved to a new city in Canada. Began settling down. Kids in a new school. Started a consultancy. Engaged with local community. Reconnected with old friends and family. Deepened my intellectual development. Found new paths to explore.