michael's journal

Tonight for "movie night", my daughter and I watched a Japanese movie inspired by Beauty and the Beast.

This is an interesting story about two neighbors in a small apartment building in Los Angeles who investigate some crazy phenomenon after one of them witnesses some unnatural light the unexplained levitation of household objects.

This is a movie about some dudes who break into the world's most secure vault, which is apparently in Spain.

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I believe this is the third time I've been in the news in Japan.

I'm due to give a short speech at our office's Grand Opening.

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Missed my son's event at school today because I had to leave town.

I don't recall having seen any of the Tremors movies except for the first, and I'm surprised to learn that this is the seventh.

This is a near-future Sci-Fi movie about a drone pilot who causes the deaths of some marines in a conflict in Ukraine through hitting a military target that was immediately adjacent to their position.

I don't know why Microsoft does this, but they periodically notify me that they're going to deactivate my credit on Skype.

My daughter and I seem to do everything together these days.

One complaint I have with these Spider-Man movies is that the titles are so similar that you can't tell which is which.

This is a fun if chronologically distant sequel to the '80s movie Predator.

I note that Canada's first World Cup showing (and first victory over an american team) comes on the 30th anniversary of our last win of a Stanley Cup.

Today Mari and I went to an unassuming grocery store that I'm sure we've passed on many occasions without entering.

Well, it's Friday.

I was wondering when these guys would get around to Canada.

Today I added a quote to my collection and noticed that it was my 250th.

My brother passed along this rather incredible account of typeset in the Star Trek movies and TV shows.

When we were in Hakone last weekend, a young couple was hanging around our car right after we arrived.

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Once upon a time I watched "Mission Impossible II" and did not like it.

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This area was poisoned by whatever gas was coming out of th

El Nino and a hundred million Ford F-150's and here we are.

The other day I shared a link to the woes of the car manufacturing industry as they face unprecedented problems.

At a matsuri, people started a rhythmic dance of sorts with

I noticed this article title "the potential looming auto industry fiasco", and thought it got everything just about right.

We thought this flick looked interesting -- I had thought that Jackie Chan had retired.

Today was another ridiculously hot day, but I decided that rather than spend yet another weekend indoors, I'd hop on my bike and do a dry run for a longish ride I have planned.

I note that Canada has reformed its passport process.

Death, what a bummer.

I've recently flown to the Netherlands and to British Columbia and my brain and body seem to be in broad disagreement.

In a rather jarring change of pace, I found myself in a Kabuki theatre today.

My brother called to let me know that our father has set a date for his medically assisted death.

I know it's not the last time I'll travel by plane this year, but I am glad to be done with it for now.

I was slowly engrossed in this movie after a shaky start in which its clearly dated setting initially had me cringing.

This afternoon, I gave my father a final hug, a final kiss on the cheek, and told him I love him, and then I left.

We were back on the water this evening, but it wasn't my on

This part of BC is so beautiful, I can barely believe it.

At 05:30, we hit the water at high tide and headed to the s

While on a hike earlier in the week, I came across a tiny mouse so small that its entire torso and head were no larger than the last digit of my thumb.

This is where Buttle Lake and Upper Campbell Lake meet, in

I got in late and decided to burn off what remained of the evening with this movie on Netflix.

After a long day's errands, hiking, and fishing, I spotted this underappreciated classic on Netflix and watched it for what must have been the third or fourth time.

This is a fun movie about a shlep whose fiance isn't close with her parents.

This morning I took Oma/Opa's PC in for repair and got it booting again.

I decided to try my hand at fly fishing while I'm in Campbell River.

I'm in Campbell River, BC, for the next two weeks!

Tonight I watched this 1979 sci-fi movie with my brother and sister-in-law.

It seems that a good third or more of the trees in Vancouver's Stanley Park are dead.

I arrived in BC this afternoon.

This morning I spotted a young woman whose skirt had gotten caught in the rear gear assembly of her bicycle.

Social distancing had more impact on mortality than lock-downs.

In May of this year, Ted Chiang wrote a piece in the New Yorker comparing AI to McKinsey, a consulting firm famous for "extracting shareholder value" by tactically tearing apart functioning companies.

This is a movie about a knight whos act of knighthood is sabotaged by a violent act of terrorism that causes him to unwittingly kill the city's monarch.

This movie is honestly an excellent action film.

Between jaunts to other continents, I managed to watch this with my kids.

Ever since I rebuilt my websites on this AliExpress Celeron server I have apparently been under the false impression that I had blocked password access on SSHd.

I'm in the midst of a busy travel time.

I watched this again with my daughter and I really enjoyed it.

This fellow's criticisms are sadly accurate.

While flying between Dubai and Tokyo I realized we were fly

I cycled to Hook of Holland after work.

I landed in Amsterdam at 13:45 today, having left Tokyo at 18:00 on Saturday.

I'm having one of those 21st Century dislocation moments.

This is a sequel to the interesting Netflix movie "Extraction", which was a straight-up assassin story with enough intelligence and vulnerability to set it apart from the usual fare that I think most of us have been ignoring for decades.

It wasn't really a beach - this is Tokyo after all - but we had a BBQ event and this is most of us.

Once in a while Netflix will recommend an older movie you've never heard of.

This is about a teenager who is struggling with life following the death of her father -- an event that's weakened the family to the point of disintegration.

This is a movie about the cast of a series of blockbuster action movies.

Somehow a story line from the Douglas Adams "Hitch-hikers" books popped into my mind this morning.

For some reason my daughter and I decided to watch this second modern sequel to the '80s original "Ghostbusters".

This is irritatingly close to a good movie.

I probably shouldn't be writing a review of this.

What a mess!

The "photo of the day" feature has been reinstated.

This is an animated flick about a scrawny young dog who dreams of being a samurai.

I described my symptoms from Wednesday's hell day to a colleague and he told me that it sounded like COVID.

I went to the office despite being quite sick yesterday.

It seems that everyone's waking up to the fact that useful AI is here now, and is incredibly easy to build.

This morning we left our hotel and made our way back to Naha.

last day on the beach It was time for us to return to (comp

let's check this out Fatal swimming! Sounds like my kind of

Today we had a later start, hitting the road at around 10:00.

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Today, we headed north to the famous aquarium on the north

We arrived in Okinawa today for a four-day visit; our firs

From time to time, since I had COVID officially in August, I've had "flu like" days where I feel mildly feverish, exhausted, and headachy.

It's been strangely cool the past few days.

I'm delighted to add yet another mis-spelling of our last name to the pile.

This past week, I added a new feature to this website.

I learned this morning that The Boy ran all the way to his school at one point this week.

This is a sequel to 2019's surprisingly good Adam Sandler movie.

It's painful to watch Florida turn into a miserable fundamentalist state.

Why it suddenly matters how we roll out artificial intelli

Today I cycled from Kokubunji to Kichijoji on my way to work.

pen care booth at Itoya This is the room where you can br

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end of a rainy day in Tokyo The Girl and I had returned to

But it was a warm rain.

pets wait in boxes I don't know if this was a pet store o

After work today, I walked from Shibuya to Shinjuku, to catch my commuter train.

The spring colors around here are astonishing.

I got very lucky this morning.

It was a rainy day in the inner west side of Tokyo.

welcome sign of spring Things are sprouting, everywhere.

These lovely little flowers had come up all over a driveway in our neighborhood.

We were in Tonogayato garden (yes again!

Where's the food at?

I work on the 42nd floor of this building.

A bike courier waiting on his next destination.

I don't know what's more interesting, the content or the fellows discussing this development.

It was so damp today that I had to go to five street-side vending machines before I found one that worked.

I find it amazing that it works and we don't know why but

We paid ¥58,000 for electricity in February.

all praise be the pajero mini I like Japan's many functio

Maybe it was the staff in a restaurant or something like t

I think it was hunting small fish.

This is a stitched-together panorama.

I had to endure a two hour drivers lecture in Japanese, tod

It was a glorious scene on a gorgeous day.

Today I managed to renew my driver's license on my own.

Tomorrow, incredibly, the family will be heading in three different directions by 08:00.

I've just noticed that I have continuous recordings of edits to this website's page dating back to this time in 2008.

Nothing seems to be in focus, but I love it.

This has to be the clearest stream I've ever seen.

It's been a very short trip.

The sun was heading down behind the Northern Japanese Alps.

It's the end of the first week of March, and I just brought out the fan to cool myself through the afternoon.

Later this month, I'm turning 52.

I never used to get bags under my eyes. Now they never leav

I'll be sitting a two-hour driver's ed instruction video in Japanese.

I got a ring to reverse-mount an old manual focus lens on Emma's camera.

Seems enticing, somehow.

This is a story about a family that moves into a grand old house to discover that it's haunted by the sad ghost of a man with a middle-aged paunch and a combover.

This is the aquarium I set up for The Girl.

I went out for some "shutter therapy" after another long day.

Today we went to a place I'd visited last year to see about getting a new ring fashioned for Mari out of her engagement ring (which she hasn't worn since she noticed it was scratching baby #1) and her late grandmother's ring.

If history had played its cards better, my last name wouldn't be Werneburg, it would be Ƿerneburg.

I'm not even sure what color this is.

I found this on the back side of a house, perched above a narrow laneway full of passing cyclists.

Today I went for a three hour photography walk around Kokubunji.

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Looks promising!

Today I took The Girl into Tachikawa, the nearest large (sub)urban center to our home.

On the way home tonight, I stopped and shot this view down an out-doors hallway.

I have written nearly eight hundred movie reviews and the person who posted this may be one of the few who sees the concept the same way.

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I last saw this movie about twenty years ago.

The Girl is the proud fish mama of three sprightly little goldfish.

I wonder what he did to pull garbage duty.

For the past eight years I have been using an Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mk II.

I can hardly call a movie that cost a billion dollars a "lazy cash grab" but this thing had some fundamental story-telling problems and was a confusing mess to watch.

Ever since the New Year's, when I went fishing on six separate days, I've had what I thought was a minor infection on my finger from briefly hooking myself while out on the water.

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To date, the worst applications I have used were: SAP, the

Whoever laid these out, did so with love.

This is a film about a real Troll waking up and terrorizing Scandinavia.

I liked the way this young lady's skirt was catching the wi

And I thought Canada was lousy with signs. Collections co

I watch the Youtube videos of a former hedge fund manager who explains who things like financial scams and Elon Musk work.

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The Boy has a semi-portable basketball net that sits in our driveway.

There's a new Dungeons and Dragons movie coming out, and it looks pretty good.

I've written 1,077,939 words on this website.

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Some spaces in Kokubunji that were productive farms become

So fast she can't be photographed.

For movie night, we watched this sequel to the "Puss in Boots" spinoff of "Shrek 2", which came out way back in 2004.

Last year I made a comment on a Youtube video about the problems of hydrogen vehicles.

Not a pretty town, but I can dig it.

I had the strange experience today of discovering that the ball point had fallen out of my ballpoint pen.

We had some friends visiting from Toronto this weekend.

Today we went to a 120-year-old circus.

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I wonder why they need the brick when the have the fancy do

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Today I had to go to the clinic to get repeats on my migraine meds and the sleeping pills I some to need to get through the night.

This is my neighborhood garbage depot on "plastics" day.

This is a movie about a young woman who becomes trapped in a "Groundhog Day" daily time loop.

My brother made me a leather watch strap.

The Boy caught a Bonito! Collections containing this phot

The kids were playing hide-and-seek today, and it all went too far.

I spotted this car outfit with decals that I thought were m

I've now used feedback from ChatGPT to brush up the story I ludicrously submitted to a Toronto Star short-story contest twenty years ago*.

This movie's had quite a rave reception and I have to say that I'm not entirely sure why.

This is a charmless sequel to a very different and original murder mystery.

My son and I tried to recreate a walk from three years prio

The Boy and I went for quite a hike, today.

It looks like the steep declines in email over the past few years are no longer possible.

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Welcome to Kagoshima, a city on a drowned "graben"

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Happy Yuletide!

What can you say about movies you see on airplane equipment?

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You can take the boy out of the city but you can't take the

I watched this seminal flick from the '90s with The Boy, today.

...sailor's delight! Collections containing this photo.&n

My son wanted to a see a Denzel Washington movie so you know this was my first thought.

Somewhere out there is a chef named Melissa Werneburg.

Say, do you remember COVID-19?

This morning while taking the garbage to the pick-up site I saw and electric tuk-tuk called a "Fun vehicle".

Oh wait, that's the sun. We don't always see it a lot in To

I think I shot this with my Nokia 6.1. Collections contai

We went to a performance/art exhibit thing in Yokohama call

I've driven in Japan before but never Tokyo.

We've packed up the used heater that wasn't working properly and have bought a new one in its place.

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This little eatery had been built in a semi-open space conn

I took The Girl downtown today.

This morning a Reddit user with a female name and icon posted a photo of a new aquarium that had just been set up on Thursday.

Who doesn't love blasting the planet with asteroids!

Sadly, all of Emma's three street-festival goldfish fingerlings are gone.

I've been watching "Star Trek Deep Space Nine", lately.

We bought a new (used) heater and it only works on certain wall sockets and only if you let it heat very gradually.

This is a Sci-Fi thing about some genetically-modified humans living in a world that has censured them and placed them under rigid restrictions.

Thanks to being the parent of a teenager, I now get to learn how much the replacement of a school window costs.

This action-comedy is so much over-the-top fun that I watched it a second time with my kids within days of my first, solo viewing.

My daughter and I watched the original story about a young girl whose father disappears at sea.

I honestly have no idea what the fuss is all about with this movie.

The Girl and I took some time to re-organize the aquarium.

I had three emails from my daughter this morning.

We went more than two years in this house without an aquarium, ending a run of about fifteen years of continuous aquarium-keeping.

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This is a fun story about a kid who moves to a small town with her parents.

I thought I had a handle on how bad the Aral sea ecological catastrophe really was.

This is how badly the old derailleur failed on my bike. The

This is my humble photo of the lunar eclipse.

I left work early tonight (just past 17:00!

This is an animated story I watched with my ten-year-old daughter for "movie night".

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This is a movie in which Kevin Hart plays the diminutive comic relief and someone capable of maintaining a scowl plays the heavy.

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I hadn't realized that China's population figures were questioned.

I was reviewing some old photos and was reminded of an even older event in my life.

I recently uncovered these old pics from my time at NikkoCiti.

I've been a fairly regular user of the social media site Twitter for the past several years.

This is an infectiously chaotic story about a famous but fading movie star who is invited to the home of a Spanish billionaire for a $1 million project of unknown purpose.

I mean, for small businesses apparently yes.

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This is a film with a star-studded cast and an overly ambitious plot that more than fills out its 2+ plus run-time.

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I've noticed that the thumbnail images on this site have started to become inexplicably uneven in size.

I watched a Youtube video relating the recent performance

Every year I make a book of photos from the kids' past year.

This is a somehow unappealing prequel to "The Kingsman", a modestly original take on the spy genre.

I follow a Reddit thread on Gen-X.

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I spent the first twenty percent of this movie thinking that I was seeing a cartoon prelude to a live action movie.

The Germans seem to have really made a mess of their energy security.

It was one of those days.

It seems that the new King in the UK (my liege, since I'm Canadian) wanted to go to the next big climate conference.

I watched a run-down of several theories around who blew up the Nordstream natural gas pipelines.

Mari and I found a Thai restaurant in Tachikawa and went for dinner without the kids for the first time in so long I don't honestly remember.

This morning I was out the door at 07:15 determined to ride to Kichijoji, half of my 25km commute and something I used to do routinely.

The Boy was pushing his bike pretty hard and had the chain "fall" (he can't describe it better than that, I think it skipped).

This is, like other Guy Ritchie movies, about a gangster in a pinch.

This fellow says that the Russians are calling up 300,000 - 1,000,000 men but they might not be able to equip them with .

We met Yagu and went to The Boy's school for an open house today.

Today's a holiday in Japan but we're completing a cloud migration and I had to follow the team's progress for about five hours.

I wasn't really able to tackle my homework this past weekend but when I noticed a message from my instructor commending me on always doing my homework I redoubled my effort and got it done with around a minute to spare before our call.

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This is a sci-fi flick about a man surviving quite alone after some apocalyptic disaster.

Typhoon Manmadol, which is currently making landfall in Kyushu, may be the largest (geographically) in the history of Japan.

Now I'm not dumb but I can't understand how this story played like fantasy but we're expected to believe that it's real.

It's so, so nice to ride a bike where the chain isn't making noise and skipping all over the place.

Recently, Mari's old 650b*-based bike has been having some difficulty.

It's been a month since I got over the initial bout of COVID and I'm still having days where I feel just like I did: sore throat, headache, wheezing, stuffed up sinuses, can't sleep.

On the surface, this is a sci-fi movie about a woman in her fifties that is asked by an other-dimension version of her husband to join an epic struggle to save the multiverse.

It's scarcely been 18 months since I last migrated this website to a new server, but I've done it again; with a twist.

Air Canada still hasn't refunded the money from the ticket they cancelled.

I've heard of three more people getting COVID in the past few days.

It looks like I'm finally kicking the after-effects of my bout of COVID.

Today I took (most of) the systems case to the local community center to dump in an all-metal recycling box.

The Girl made her own game of Twister.

I've recovered my "lost" photos from 2006.

About 18 months ago I wrote a piece about building an old PC into a modern workstation.

On our recent trip to Canada, I tracked down a lot of old backups because I'd discovered at some point in 2021 that I'd deleted the original images from a visit to a bamboo forest in Kyoto.

I bought a new systems case that arrived last night.

When we landed at Narita we finally got to the baggage gate some two hours after touching down.

This is a spy thriller in which the government aims one of its off-the-books killers at another of their killers.

We're back in Japan.

I brought many of my old photo backups and some old hard drives.

I took our dear Maebh, the Kia Rondo, to the dealership to hand her over today.

This is a movie about a vampire hunter in Los Angeles.

I had another COVID PCR test today and yup, I'm still positive.

I started working remotely, today.

Collections containing this photo.a lifetime vehicles

Today I had a positive COVID PCR test.

Mari and I went for a walk tonight, from mum's place on Linwell out to the beach at Port Dalhousie, then back over the pedestrian bridge at Royal Henley Park (odd name, I thought).

This is an unassuming animated movie about a mer-boy/reptile who becomes interested in the humans in a nearby village - which is in sunny rural Italy.

We've chosen our movers.

The Girl and I went for a walk today, first to the water and then back; and then to a nearby shopping mall.

When we went to the storage unit to day I picked up my "old" home-built PC from 2018 or 2019, which contains a bunch of parts I want to take home (to Tokyo).

The three of us went out early this morning and found a bakery that was open in the neighborhood where we're staying.

Today we went to the storage unit in farthest-flung Scarborough.

We're in Toronto.

We've retrieved our luggage.

This is the latest Bond flick and it is not good.

We're at "Grandma's" after quite a trek.

Movie night comes to Netflix once again.

Celebrating 22/7 (or ~3.

Recently I've been rebuilding a study tool for kanji that I accidentally nuked several months ago.

It was pushing 30°C at ground level, but clearly it was cold enough for snow at ten kilometers or so.

Condensation trails, or "contrails" are one of the first things I can remember learning as a child of a glider pilot.

In this sequel to "Venom", a sloppy sci-fi/super-hero movie featuring a human and his alien "parasite".

The premise of this movie is that a wastrel winds up with guns surgically grafted to his hands.

On the weekend our family had a water-balloon fight on our street.

This is a sequel to the imaginative and fun, "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle".

So it turns out that if you were born in North America between 1966 and 1975, there is a hundred percent certainty that you were exposed to harmful amounts of lead as a child.

It's 5º in Tokyo right now with humidity of 43%.

This is a movie in which Kevin Hart plays the diminutive comic relief and someone capable of maintaining a scowl plays the heavy.

This is an unpleasant little Sci-Fi number that features a number of inmates at a facility who are serving lengthy sentences.

This is an off-beat movie about a former star chef who now lives in a shack in the hills with his truffle pig.

A few years ago, my daughter was playing with my shaver.

This movie is what they call "fan service", designed foremost to please people who are really into the material.

On the downside my Japanese reading this weekend is on Yoko Ono.

It's remarkable to me that we can't even find the DNA that could tell us what these are.

Apocalypse now!

This movie is a near miss.

I watched a Youtube video about the textiles industry.

I went hunting in my journal and found what I was looking for: record of when I started working on the database-driven photo manager I use.

Today we watched one of The Boy's basketball tournaments.

I have this growing conviction that electric cars are not the solution to our car problem.

I marked this auspicious day by buying books, but not Douglas Adams.

This is a Marvel super-hero movie with enough of a re-skin that it is more watchable than many.

Today there was a persistent rumbling that waxed and waned in volume.

This was a "movie night" movie and despite myself I found it growing on me.

I can barely keep up with these things. I mean, I don't th

My friend Kevin Atwood died five years ago.

I hope the author's right that all this suffering and dest

Emma is studying the prefectures of Japan, so I've decided to learn them as well.

This is an animated remake of the old Addams Family series, movies, and comic strips.

This is the tale of a young Texan who falls in with a bunch of vampires.

For Movie Night, The Boy and I watched this now thirty-year-old Hollywood flick about a mentally and emotionally disturbed individual who - get this - attempts to walk across Los Angeles.

It's happened for the first time in nearly three years - hit with shit yet again.

I bought some Japanese whisky that turned out to be a form of Scotch.

This is an interesting work of Science Fiction that starts with its main character falling off a sky hook and then follows him to every miserable corner of a future that's at once dystopian but also somewhat grounded and optimistic but not in a Star Trek way.

The household is now down to just two cameras.

This is a tense tale set in a near future Crapsack World where war has broken out between .

Today I did some work on my watches.

This is a family-friendly animated movie about a girl in Toronto's Chinatown community (the one on Spadina) who discovers that she is heir to a family secret - puberty-onset shape-shifting superpowers.

The average home in Toronto is now $1.

The power generation company has announced that due to damage sustained in the large earthquake last week, the power plants in the north-east part of Japan are at maximum capacity, with zero spare.

Mari arranged a fishing trip for The Boy and me, as it's a holiday.

There was a large quake tonight, easily the largest I've ever experienced.

This is a particularly good animated kids' movie.

For years, while earning barely enough to pay the bills in Toronto, I'd occasionally write about this or that "watch crush".

This is a movie about a guilty survivor of a horrific incident at a university in which a fellow female student is filmed while being raped to death.

I live halfway around the world but I thought I'd create this token of my well-wishes for the people of Ukraine.

This is a comic book movie based on real comic books that I have actually read*.

This is a Fantasy story about the seventh son of a seventh son - a supposed marker of great ability as a wizard.

I've realized that the house is so cold I've developed frost-bite on my little fingers.

I went to work today, downtown.

The Boy has been accepted to a STEM program at a high school in Toronto.

This is a movie set in a near/alternate future in which GMO's were necessitated by an ecological collapse - humanity was starving.

This is a frustrating Sci-Fi/thriller flick that doesn't realize it's promise.

On the weekend, I received an email from Google that they were cutting my legacy account on Google Workspace.

This is a somewhat weird and off-putting animated story about a species of cuddly mammals that have bodies shaped like donuts - replete with the center hole.

Every day I tackle a couple of items from my to-do list, sit down to work, race through lunch, site down to work again until 19:00 or 20:00, and then face the too-brief evening exhausted.

This is the third in the "How to Train Your Dragon" series of animated movies.

My son had to sit an English-language exam today, so I packed him up and we went to Kichijoji.

This is an animated story of a human girl who wakes up to discover she's become a troll.

I bought some Japanese whisky in the grocery/drug store and it's .

It's not cold in Tokyo, but the houses sure are.

This is a sequel to a sci-fi thriller in which massive comets have fallen to Earth, spawning alien killing machines as they go.

I find that any time there's any small shift or movement, I'm waiting to see if it's an Earthquake.

I've only been back to work for 2-3 days and already it's like I never took two weeks off.

Today some Christmas cards arrived in the mail.

For "movie night" we watched a film about a kid who likes to write scary movies.

Today my son and I watched the first of the Bond movies to feature Daniel Craig.

It will surprise no-one that we went fishing today.

I watched this Bond flick with my son as part of our ongoing series.

We traveled to Miyakonojo in the interior of Miyazaki, today, to visit with family.

Today Mari drove me and the two Akios down to Kushima, to meet her uncle and board his boat.

Not having had a response from the second literary agency I reached out to in early December, I've now written to a third about my novel manuscript.

We took to the water again today, and I tried to catch larger fish rather than loading up on smaller ones as we had last time.

Today we went to a shrine first thing, leaving at 08:00 to beat the rush.

Today we headed out for a bit of a trip around the coast, just Mari and I and the kids.

Today my son and I watched our fourth James Bond movie, for the fourth actor to take on the role.

Well, I can honestly say that 2021 was one of the hardest of my life.

The collapse of email as a communications medium proceeds at a furious pace.

I can't believe how exhausted I became this year.

This is a satire of the handling (or lack there-of) for a dire situation in which two American scientists discover a killer asteroid that's on a collision course with Earth.

This is the third Bond movie that my son and I watched together.

I went fishing with my father-in-law today.

This is the second Bond film that I watched with my son.

I watched this with my almost-thirteen-year-old this morning.

I showed the kids this '80s classic movie tonight.

I built a TV stand this morning.

Not having heard from the first literary agent I reached out to six weeks ago, I've sent a second query to a different agency.

This is a Chinese-produced movie on Netflix that my daughter and I watched for "Movie Night".

A good friend has produced a card game called Nihonjin Mitai.

Our TV comes from Hi-Sense, a Chinese manufacturer that's been around for a number of years.

Burned out after another brutal week at work, I sat in front of Netflix and took a chance on this movie about a beautiful young Russian woman who winds up working for the KGB in the waning days of the USSR.

Yesterday I was woken at 02:00 by a modest earthquake.

It's 2021.

I was woken at 02:00 by an earthquake.

I've been reading a book called "The Whispering Wars" to my daughter.

This movie is four hours long.

Sometimes, Hollywood will make a movie simply by assembling a leading cast and letting them do their usual shtick.

We watched this one for "movie night", and I realized that I'd somehow never seen this movie.

It's been quite some time since I watched this Sci-Fi/thriller.

Every year, I make photo books detailing the kids' lives.

My mum sent this tool, which shows how different cities will look once flooded by the expected rise in sea level over the coming decades.

I had an unusually good e-commerce experience with a company called Number Barn that lets you park phone numbers.

I bought an all-silver watch to offset my entirely dark-dial watch collection.

The space adventurism of billionaires gives me solace that humanity is never going to colonize space.

After receiving a generous watch gift from my brother I'm suddenly a watch collector.

This is the story of a vampire who is locked up in a coffin for centuries and then released in our time.

Following hot on the heals of "Army of the Dead" comes a prequel about the German safe-cracker.

I had dinner with a friend tonight for the first time in so long I don't remember.

There, I said it.

This is an awkward semi-comedy featuring a guy who loses control of his life to an app.

I've submitted a query letter to a literary agent in the UK regarding my latest novel manuscript.

I got my first query letter out the door with a synopsis and the first three chapters.

I'm trying to find some reliable numbers of my new Mac's power draw, because I seem to be getting far more use out of a battery charge then I was expected.

It was a beautiful day today, and the only one in the forecast for my week off that wasn�

This is by far the best of the Men in Black movies about human cops chasing a bunch of alies around Earth.

In this story, a girl finds a yeti cowering on the roof-top of her building.

I've bought a new laptop for the first time in well over a decade.

We had a great earthquake today, a 6.

This morning as with most Mondays I got an early start at work at around 07:00.

This was another "movie night" viewing on Netflix.

I got a reading of 99.

We tried to fix our TV today.

Lemme just grab a handful of bees real quick.

This is the telling of a team of US soldiers that went into the Taliban's stronghold in Afghanistan following the 9/11 terrorist strike.

Another semi-lockdown quarantine movie review with the kids.

We watched this with the kids.

This is the story of a detective who is sent to his former precinct in Los Angeles to complete some paperwork.

This is an action pic about an assassin who's been tasked with hitting a yakuza target.

We're going through a bit of a cool spell, so my wrist has become a bit thinner.

Once in a while my daughter and I try to watch something for "Movie Night" that turns out to be unwatchable.

My son and I watched this flick for a school assignment.

This is a story about a man and daughter who lose their wife/mother and the father can't shake that his wife was allowed to die due to some mix of medical and pharmacological incompetence and/or conspiracy.

By finding an hour or so per day I've managed to rewrite a novel from scratch in the course of six weeks or so.

This is an animated movie based on the excellent TV series "The Witcher".

This is a spy farce starring the penguins from the Madagascar movie which I want to say was fifteen years ago or more.

I've completed the plot for the first draft of my rewrite of a novel I first wrote from 1990 - 1994.

This is a whodunnit set in a mansion.

In this film, a girl in Miami finds a kinkajou (a rare monkey thing) while on a trip in Cuba.

This is an over-the-top cop-in-trouble movie in the vein of "Bad Boys II".

Last year I don't think Tokyo was hit or skirted by any typhoons.

I use scripts to support the content management system that I wrote to create and serve this website.

I bought a new fishing watch for 2200 yen.

A couple of weeks ago I was having trouble sleeping and decided to count all the times I'd flown.

Sometimes there are movies that seem to be grown up around the personas of the lead actors.

Someone planted a single grape vine in our yard.

Had my second vaccine shot yesterday.

I've had my second vaccination, in a small clinic in the neighborhood (Kokubunji).

I saw a bat on our street tonight.

I've taken my journal live again.

Just under two months ago, Mari and I switched to a low-carb diet.

We've been having problems with the sound-bar for our television dropping out all the time.

It's about a young fellow who is being raised by a single mother.

The rainy season has abruptly ended, and the temperature is north of 30°C every day.

This is a sci-fi action film about a pair of agents for a galaxy-spanning government military force of some kind.

I got my first vaccination shot today.

This is an animated flick that re-purposes twenty-something Hansel and Gretel as investigators for the society of magicians that maintains order by tracking down missing peoples of all types.

I've finally finished a story I started in 2003 about how multi-cellular life got started on Earth, and added it to my little collection of sci-fi.

I've restored some of my fiction to my website.

Today I discovered that something had gone wrong with the software I wrote to manage my book reviews.

Today I cycled up to a town called Ome in Tokyo's far north-west.

Having this kind of day.

This is a movie about a pissed-off semi-sentient car tire that discovers it has psionic abilities.

Today we set out at 08:30 for the pension office.

Well I made it all of six days with this new drug in my system before taking a cafergot for a migraine.

My Japanese is getting to the point where I can string together actual (spoken) paragraphs now.

Today I had two shots at a hospital of a drug supposed to prevent migraine for up to a month.

This is a movie about a trio of siblings that move into a rambling and decrepit home of a deceased relative after the separation of their parents.

I'd noticed recently that the little pot into which I'd transplanted my spider-plant seemed oddly full, like the soil was about to overflow the thing.

This is an Adam Sandler movie.

I made a watch from parts I ordered on Ebay, AliExpress, and Amazon.

This is a style-over-substance heist movie set in a fictional Las Vegas that's been over-run with zombies.

Set during the Spanish civil war, this is a zombie movie.

This is a very uneven telling of the assembly of a "B" team of agents to track down a missing nuclear bomb.

This is the tale of a novelist who writes spy thrillers.

I managed to nick myself twice with a new razor blade.

I have a feeling that this movie came together due to someone owing someone a favor because I don't think it was built on an idea per se - or at least not a solid one.

When I moved from Tokyo to Toronto I bought a phone number in Toronto in advance through a small Canadian company.

Over the past couple of mornings I've been going through some of my pics from the past few months.

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This is a strange version of Spider Man that has no origin story but is basically a kid in the by-now Iron Man's wake.

I slept with the window open last night for the first time this year.

This is an animated flick we watched on "movie night".

We had an early morning quake again today.

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I gave The Girl a Casio watch for her birthday.

In what is surely a sign of a stable economy, my seven year old SARB watch from Seiko is now selling for twice its original retail price - used.

I'm going to build a watch from parts that I ordered from Ebay in the US and Aliexpress in China.

And now it seems I have to mow the lawn every week.

Today I was contacted by a former employer about the possibility of training their firm on a renewed push on the work we were doing 2-3 years ago.

So I mowed the lawn in about ten minutes.

For the first time in 30+ years, I'll be mowing the lawn this weekend.

This is a movie about an elderly woman whose life is turned upside down when she's forcibly confined in a nursing home by a crooked self-employed agent who has the legal authority to make self-serving financial decisions.

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This is a story of a girl who's drawn into a ghost story.

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We had another earthquake on Sunday.

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Until just yesterday we were using our space heaters on a daily basis.

I'm celebrating with a nasal/chest cold, which The Girl brought home early in the week.

Hmm, I guess I've burned off two thirds of my life expectancy.

I went to see my neurologist again today.

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Today we went to a small city in southern Chiba prefecture called Tateyama.

Mari's bought me a birthday gift of fishing.

This is a sequel.

For last Tuesday, I had to write something about an interesting experience.

The camera market is imploding fast.

It's been a year in Japan as of today.

I hope this unverified article is right, because it means I qualify for Japanese Permanent Residency.

I've been using a password plugin in my browser called LastPass since who knows when.

My beloved old camera bag has become faded, worn, stained, and shapeless.

I've discovered that I've managed to delete some ~150 or so photos from a 2006 trip to Kyoto with Mari and mum.

It's been many years since I was happily surprised by this gritty Angles-and-Demons flick featuring a human who has learned many occult secrets and now spends his unhappy days fighting "Lu"cifer and his minions.

This movie has a promising cast and certainly appears visually stunning, but is let down by an unengaging story in which characters behave without clear motive and no one is really very sympathetic.

After we'd had our bentou, we dragged The Girl into see some open houses that were freshly built in a quiet corner of our neighborhood.

When my brother and I were small my mum would occasionally ask what kind of gift to get for our dad.

My boss is going back to Europe for failing to deliver on a major risk project.

On October 9 I bought a video card for The Boy's PC for ¥28,000.

This is a spy spoof in which Rowan Atkinson plays a dimwitted secret agent of mostly good nature.

Today's word in Japanese is 動物, or doubutsu, or animal.

I just learned the word for grey in Japanese; haiiro.

We've had several quakes in the near year I've been here.

This is a luke-warm reboot of a TV show from the '60s that lacks a good deal of the charm of the original.

I decided, around 15:30 to head west to the Tamagawa to see the river by bike.

Two weeks ago I was surprised to see plum blossoms in the neighborhood.

This is a Korean piece of Sci-Fi that I quite enjoyed.

Kokubunji isn't exactly a beautiful place but it's lively enough for a tiny city in the middle of 40 million people.

Today Mari and I went for a walk to do some errands.

"Take me out into the black, tell 'em I ain't coming back.

I've long since lost count of the many, many VM's and physical servers upon which I've had emuu.

It's 3° outside this morning, which means it's scantly warmer indoors.

This is an entertaining film that's basically "The Goonies" in Hawaii plus girls.

And we think *we* have it rough.

Some of the cheap Chinese lego-like bricks I ordered before X'mas arrived.

A few blocks from our place is a laneway that's been abandoned.

This new residence of ours is about thirty years old.

The main weakness of Heist movies is being too clever.

As much as I like the stars of this film, I couldn't sit through it to the end.

Late this summer, we went to a "recycle shop" that Mari had found online.

This is a spooky family flick about a boy who goes to stay with his uncle, who is something of a witch.

This is a gritty telling of true events in mid-Century France.

We went out to see the sunset.

I was thinking back across the year and realized that I may have gotten through the year without a day lost to a migraine.

This time last year I recorded a count of the emails I'd received through the year.

I really wanted to enjoy this movie about a scientist struggling to resolve a global climate crisis while a space mission is returning to the ruined planet.

Of late, Robert Rodriguez has been making kids movies.

This is a musical number about a genius inventor who is ripped off by his apprentice.

crowded tree Mari's done a stellar job of X'mas as with eve

We were treated to an amazing image of the moon, Saturn, and Jupiter all crowded into a single corner of a cloudless sky at dusk, tonight.

This is a Batman spin-off, or perhaps a spin-off of "Suicide Squad", which is a spin-off of Batman.

Today I bought three heaters.

The Girl has been playing with Lego a fair bit, but sadly we had to leave most of it in Canada so she's got way more windows than wall pieces and some of her creations have been a bit rickety.

I tried showing my kids this flick for "movie night".

This film was a recommendation from a friend, and I was completely blown away.

I had to go to a dentist today because of a persistent problem in my jaw.

Well I've got three of my migraine capsules left.

This is a spy story, set in the Cold War.

For "Movie Night" my daughter and I watched this one.

It looks like we have no option to get the photo books to people on time.

We went to Tachikawa today to get me onto a mobile phone service.

This is the '80s classic featuring a bunch of kids who decide to explore a house where they think some evil-doing is afoot.

Proving once again that there can't be a good movie without a sequel, this is the unnecessary follow-up to the endearing Netflix Christmas Special featuring Kurt Russell as Santa Claus.

I needed a new bank account, because the Japanese banking system is .

I didn't get as much done today as I wanted.

Today I joined the headhunter who placed me at my current gig in a fishing trip.

Today we set off right away for Fuchu, a city adjacent to Kokubunji.

One odd wrinkle has come up in our plans to switch to a low-cost phone provider.

This is a classic science fiction movie from twenty years ago, before financial crises, calamitous presidencies, and terrorist strikes at the heart of the global financial industry.

I've discovered that I've been completely exhausted.

This is a kids' movie from a Chinese studio that features an ancient tale from that same country of a goddess who winds up stranded on the moon / living in association with the moon.

I used some white corrective tape to patch up three mistakes in this year's photo books, which arrived last Sunday.

This is a fun Sci-Fi flick about a cop whose son is becoming a petty crook.

We headed off at 10:30 this morning hoping to reach a place where there's a ravine full of autumn colors, this finally being the season.

I caught the edge of the glass on my beater watch on a surface while taking The Girl out to the park today.

Today we watched a movie the kids only know from memes.

Today I hooked up a small Linux device between the new TV and our even newer Internet connection*.

We've been diligently watering the grass and watching for some sign of life but we were beginning to think it hadn't worked when Mari spotted tiny shoots all over the tiny yard.

This morning I carried on with the work on volume thirteen of the kids' photo books.

Today was a sunny day (queue the day-long migraine) so we decided by around nine in the morning to seed the yard in hopes of growing a lawn.

This morning I set off to find a kickstand.

Buying a TV has become insanely difficult.

This past week the landlord sent some gardeners, who aggressively cut back the cedars and made pollards out of the deciduous trees.

I had my second Japanese lesson tonight.

For the first time in four days, it was not raining incessantly.

This morning Mari and I went to Kunitachi, a city in our 'hood with a name that seems to be comprised of bits of the larger cities.

Today after a grueling day and the end of a grueling week*, I was told that Ken had left his umbrella at school and that I'd had to meet him.

We've finally bought a sofa and some bed frames.

This is a sci-fi/super-hero movie about a disgraced photographer and the alien symbiote that he meets while breaking into a lab owned by a billionaire.

Ken's writing a piece for school on the Bering land bridge.

Our place is (literally) crawling with what appear to flying ants.

A friend posted to slack: "Andreas Liris, the CIO of Ma

Mari's old Tokyobike now has a new set of tires and tubes, and a new front axle to replace the one I broke when attempting repairs in Toronto last year.

Mari's dad had a near total aquarium kill incident.

This is an imaginative new story about the young sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, who defies her older brothers by striking out to find their mother, who seems quite fixed on not being found, for reasons unknown.

In an exchange with a friend in Canada who's a lawyer and fo

Today we went out while Ken was at school.

Every time I sit in front of a Spike Lee movie, I'm hoping for "Do the Right Thing" or "Malcolm X", and not, say, "She's Gotta Have It" or "School Daze" (which was the first of his works I saw).

Mari spoke to the landlord about a nest of paper wasps that she'd spotted hanging from our bedroom balcony.

I spotted the "badge" from the baseball hat I bought as a memento when on a week-long science trip on the west coast in 1986.

We're discussing giving up beef.

My passport went missing for a week during the move, which was a problem because I'd have to register my new address with the government.

I've mentioned that I bought an old Dell PC for about 15,000 yen (maybe $CA180).

On Sunday, we went about introducing ourselves to the immediate neighbors.

We're sleeping in the tatami room until we have beds.

I imagine I'll be laughing at this post some day, but I'm pleased with the high speed of our Internet connection.

Today we had plans to rent a car and do a bunch of housewares shopping.

This morning presented some challenges.

Mari and I have been remarking to each other what a difference this place is already making.

Mari's parents are evacuating in advance of typhoon X.

Needless to say, as I cycled from home to home this morning, the weather was 32°.

As I write this, I'm looking at a pile of 33 boxes from our home in Toronto.

Yesterday we signed our lease and forked over a fortune in fees and rent and illegal key money.

We have to buy The Boy an iPad for his school.

We watched this for "movie night".

Mari had the movers come in to do an estimate today.

Tonight we went to a "recycle shop", which is the Japanese name for a store carrying used stuff.

Our real estate says we're almost certainly going to get the place in Kokubunji.

All of us went to the dentist this week.

Last night we picked up a car share vehicle* and went to a destination in Shibuya to pick up a used IKEA table and chair.

I woke around 04:00 this morning.

Mari's found a set of tables and chairs for the new house, at 1/4 the new price.

Mari told me last night that after thirty years, a law prohibiting the consumption of farmland for housing will expire.

Today it was 39.

After a thread on Reddit, someone sent me this query: Hello

We've been looking at what it means to have to pay two months' rent in deposit plus one month's rent to the (illegal!

Today was possibly the hottest day of the year.

This film is a .

This is the tale of a young man who learns how to set up a wind-driven pump to bring up ground-water and save his family's farm in a time of drought and conflict in rural Malawi.

I saw another gushing article today about "Toronto's booming tech sector" and how its job growth is now greater than that of Silicon Valley.

I found Suica card with a recent date on the street.

Mari and The Boy went to the school today for a tour.

Mari and Ken took off at 09:00 or so to do some banking and to buy some mobile phones.

For "Movie Night" my daughter and I watched this flick about a robot that's escaped the Evil Clutches of a boy genius who's been driven somewhat mad and then loses control of the AI he's created.

I was talking with my "dotted line" boss in Europe in our regular biweekly call on Monday.

We've now lost a couple of homes we'd wanted to rent.

There's a joke in (seemingly endless) circulation on the Internet about how the virus and associated changes have led to more efficiency at the office.

Maybe as a global society we shouldn't have elevated "value extraction" into a religion, so we'd a) have some sense of shared outcomes and b) could be prepared for this.

On Sunday my colleagues and I at work were alerted by email that there had been two cases of COVID-19 in our office building.

The Girl has taught me something about teaching photography, as she learns.

I sat (and passed) a test on the cloud platform technology we're using at work.

During the chat with my direct boss this past week about my "promotion" some interesting things emerged.

This is a story of a band of mercenaries and former soldiers who come together to rob a drug lord.

Today we waited out the (morning) rain and went to Shibuya.

I read this poem today.

This weekend we looked at six apartments.

The Girl was at home today with me as The Boy and Mari were off for his entrance interview and exam for a private school.

This weekend we're working through more prep for Ken's school exam.

I took The Boy out this morning on a pre-work walk.

One of the pleasures of moving out of Canada is dumping your Canadian banks.

Grandma's been getting weird texts from some unknown party about "E06" needing a credit card for bill payment.

Nearly four months after I landed on March 6, the family is here!

In preparation for the family's arrival, I've been shopping and cleaning.

A friend of mine lost his job in Toronto in early October, just a couple of weeks before I did.

Mari and the kids are out of our apartment on The Boyilworth.

I'm moving my mail hosting for werneburg.

Because I unloaded all of my old Minolta and Pentax gear, I only currently own two cameras.

Grandma was on a 1,000-person Zoom call today about social and environmental issues.

This past Sunday I finally took possession of my pulse oximeter.

One of the first things you forget about when moving to a new country (or even one where you've lived before) is the holiday schedule.

As part of the eternal hiring process for my current job, I had to enumerate all the places I'd lived in my life.

I splurged on some peanut butter last night.

I woke up to some really bad news this morning (a death).

It's 31°C and 68% humidity right now.

I share my son's interest in learning the language of the country in which we'll be living.

When I was heading to Canada nearly ten years ago, I realized that I'd need a Canadian phone number to support my job search.

The old 32spokes.

Looking at the situation, we've decided that we'd be walking away from too much value in light of the likely difficulty in selling the car for anything like its "normal market value" [sic].

We're hoping to get The Boy into a certain school in the city center, a part of the city where rents are a bit much.

Well, as rough as the job is, and as rough as it is to migrate back here rushed and unplanned, it looks like the numbers validate my impression of Canada's fortunes.

It's official, I'm not flying home to help pack, move, or bring the kids here.

I've found an interesting storage company in Scarborough.

I'm winding down my activities with "32 Spokes", the cycling safety advocacy group I belonged to for six and a half years.

Just in time, the R0 value in Japan is going up again.

Today I picked up my new screen-reading glasses an I'm shocked to learn how much better my monitor is than I knew.

Today I set off fairly early on a shopping mission.

This is a movie in which a man returns to the house of his parents following an eight month stay in an institution.

Mari found some temporary accommodation options for when they arrive in early July.

Near my place in Kawasaki, a river is driven below ground before continuing a short distance later.

These are monthly transit passes issued by the TTC in the late '90s.

After writing about the VPN thing the other day, it's occurred to me that we could keep our Toronto phone number simply by bringing the tiny VOIP device and the old handset with us to Tokyo.

I've re-connected with a number of former colleagues from my last run at the life insurance firm where I am today.

Several private schools in Japan are barring kids from other countries to enter their intake exams, or simply not having those intake exams.

One of the irritants about being mid-way between two countries is the way that national boundaries still play a part in some services like telephones and media.

I woke with a migraine coming on at 04:00, so I moved my bed down to the main floor in order to get some cooler air.

I've finally figured out where there are so many delivery motorcycles racing back and forth outside my building all night.

Tonight I went out for a bit of a walk to burn off some stress and to finally mail a letter that I've been trying to send for some time.

This strangely-named movie is one of the best thriller/action films I've ever seen.

I'm thinking of writing some laws of synthetic intelligence into my story.

This weekend I concluded a major edit of the middle third of my old novel project.

Tonight I was out taking some photos and I ran across a masked palm civet, and introduced species that humans brought with them for some reason during prehistoric times.

I've been reading about SARS2 mutations.

So far, I've given three tours of my part of Kawasaki by "zoom.

We're selling our stuff in advance of the big move to Tokyo.

I've made a new photo collection.

This was a surprisingly good action film about a mercenary who's sent into Bangladesh to extract a kidnapped child.

I can hear the sounds of someone playing a tune by gunning the engine of some kind of high-performance motorbike.

I hopped on my bike at 13:15 and got off again 32km later.

It's been five weeks since I last cut my hair, so after The Girl's cake singing, I had a shower and put the hair attachment on my beard trimmer.

I've been changing my mind about my local grocery store.

Today a number of deliveries happened.

It's funny that you could be pleased to do something as trivial as activating and charging a prepaid credit card with funds but given that I had to use Google Translate every step of the way it was something.

This is a science fiction movie about a future that feels a lot more realistic than Star Trek ever did.

When this charming millennium was still young there was in Canada a show on TV called "Corner Gas".

Yesterday I received a package of fifty disposable face masks.

I've filled five of the 100GB disks with media and other stuff from my Dropbox account.

In the interests of staying alive, I've been staying indoors every other day (at a minimum).

I'm giving up my account on "Dropbox", a cloud storage service that's been around for years but has been getting progressively more expensive and in some ways frustrating.

Well I just got paid today, got me a pocket full of change.

I woke up from a mid-day nap by happily announcing, "I'm awake!

When I spoke with Jon this morning he told me that he's been seeing people living in tents in green spaces about Toronto.

Ken sent me a text early on Sunday morning (their time).

Tonight I hit the road because I realized I'm gaining a lot of weight.

Out for a stress walk just now, I noticed the wacky name of the neighborhood on a pole.

Years ago when I lived in Sydney it was frequent that you'd see apartment listings featuring the term "harbor views".

The other day I posted a video by Bonnie Riatt.

This morning (my time) I joined the Masterson clan in an Easter video chat on "zoom.

There has been a noise complaint about my apartment.

It's now been two weeks since I had a face-to-face conversation with anyone.

Today I went for a bit of a walk.

At the end of the week I can report than both of the jobs I thought I'd saved have slipped through our fingers.

Today I ate leftover rice and lentils with the last of my prefab fish.

I've surprised myself by diffusing the situation at work with my staffer who was on Monday evening was talking about going to a lawyer.

In Ontario right now only one person may leave the house for shopping.

Last night I went out to get some things prior to the impending lock-down of Tokyo.

One of the websites where I "published" the dissertation for my master's degree reports that that svelte 40,000 words has now been read 700 times.

We had planned to sell our car this summer.

This is a movie about a tough who works as a door man in the early 1960s.

I played an online board game with one of my colleagues, today.

I spent eight hours working on my old 2000-2008 era novel project.

Air travel between Japan and Canada is no more.

Tonight I did the loop through the great big cemetery near my home*.

I use eye drops on a fairly regular basis for a couple reasons.

Almost every morning I get to see the kids.

One of the irritants about this little apartment has been the Internet connectivity.

Meanwhile in Toronto, the school board has (finally!

I reached out to a friend who just moved to Vancouver with her husband in the Autumn.

Well that's the end of a month I'm sure I'll never forget.

I reached out to a lawyer friend in the Toronto area today.

Today it snowed a lot.

I mentioned to Mari that I noticed when getting money at an ATM that the ATM had a currency button.

Today Tokyo is on a lock-down lite, as the governor dips our collective toe into the concept of a locked-down Tokyo but without all the pesky stuff about businesses closing.

My health insurance card arrived!

Tonight after a grueling day I attended a "virtual drinks party" with a bunch of colleagues on our shared text/videoconferencing app, which was nice.

This is a movie about the state of the "war on drugs", as told from the point of view of an officer from a local law enforcement agency who is drafted following a significant drug bust.

I've got food coming at me from all angles.

Grandma reports this experience shopping for groceries in St.

Once upon a time while visiting my dad's office (at which I would later hold some summer jobs) I saw a many-times photocopied sign titled "The Middle Manager's Prayer".

Mari had ordered a small desk and a ball chair so that I would have somewhere to sit while living in this little apartment.

I did some laundry this morning but it was far too windy to keep the stuff on the railing outside so I had to crowd myself in with drying racks all over the ~20 square meters of my apartment.

After a bit of a slow start, I went back to Kawasaki's city center and returned my keyboard.

No sign of the fever today, so I presume that my self-diagnosis of strep throat couldn't have been too far off the mark.

I woke soon after having eventually fallen asleep; maybe at 1:30 or so.

I worked from home today.

This is the story of what becomes of little Danny from The Shining.

Today I walked for about 4.

Early this morning I ran over to the dry cleaner's and picked up my suit.

If you're wondering, yes there's information on the developing outbreak in Japan.

I spent the first part of the day puzzling through the ongoing destruction of the global economy.

Today Mari and I started the day by reviewing our priorities and deciding that there was no rush in finding an apartment.

Aha, I've figured out how to use the neutered phone that came with this studio apartment as a WiFi hot-spot.

My day started with a trek to "mouth of the gully" to drop off my suit at a dry cleaners.

This is an unpleasant movie about a reclusive genius and tech billionaire who has been dabbling in artificial intelligence androids - to make women to keep under his thumb.

Bright and early this morning.

I wrote about all my running around in the city but I left out one exhausting piece.

I woke at three this morning, unable to shake the jetlag.

I need inserts for new shoes or I get plantar fasciatis tears.

Today we looked at a house in the city of Setagaya within Tokyo's long border with Kanagawa prefecture.

My day was pretty full.

In my absence, Mari suggested that the kids start tending to the aquarium fish on a daily basis.

I'm preparing for tomorrow's trip.

I woke up today to find that I have my job offer.

When I came back to Canada I used a service offered by a fellow in Manitoba to acquire a number in Toronto's then newish 647 area code.

One of the final purchases to get me back in corporate form was a set of shirts for the office.

When I was a baby, someone bought a chime ball for my distraction.

Today I gave away a good chunk of my old film and early digital camera gear.

We're leaving for Tokyo next week.

OK, I've sat through two of these with the kids.

This is a telling of Alan Turing's contributions to the British war effort in the Second World War.

As of this morning, the government of the province of Ontario has now paid us $250 in compensation for the strike days that saw our kids at home.

I cycled downtown to pick up a prescription, today.

We took the kids to the aquarium today because The Girl had an annual pass that was about to expire.

This is a gangster film from the United Kingdom, cleverly told as recounting of a movie plot being pitched by somebody knee-deep in the story himself.

Last night at bedtime I showed the boy how to shave, since he needed it.

Last night I reached out to a number of the headhunters that I'd spoken to during my time in Tokyo over the new year's, mentioning that I was still "working with" NN Life for this gig.

Just telling myself, "You so old, you still use df -lk /volume".

This is a live-action kids' movie about a fellow who is trying to hang on to his family's circus.

This morning we all headed out to get some greeting cards, because in the afternoon we were to pile into poor old salt-stained Méabh and toodled up to Oakville for a surprise birthday party for uncle Scott.

We're in St.

Today The Boy's best friend came over and we carried on the long-running Dungeons and Dragons campaign with the two boys and The Girl playing.

With tomorrow being a PA day, meaning the kids would be home, Mari and I headed out together for a Valentine's day lunch at a Lebanese restaurant in Leslieghville.

Today I took the kids outside so that they could take their bikes for spin up and down the street.

While I wait for things to happen in Tokyo, I've been applying for roles in Toronto and the region.

The Boy and I went downtown to pick up my spiffy new spousal visa at the Japanese consulate.

Tonight I got together with a small group from "32 Spokes", the cycling advocacy crowd in our part of town.

I've had a fairly strong bug this weekend.

The TDSB teachers are on strike today, so I wound up with four 11-12 year olds playing D&D at our place.

In preparation for my departure I did our taxes today, though I can't submit them yet.

I just noticed this in our councilor's latest email blast (from the 31st).

Today one of my preparations for my likely departure was taking my ancient leather jacket and two very old blazers to the Value Village.

Every now and then I re-order my website or some part of it.

Today I learned that my daughter has somehow not watched Star Wars at nearly eight years old.

In preparation for an expected move to Tokyo, I've just taken the "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" books that we used in the 80's down to the end of our driveway for someone to pick up.

I've closed the bank account for my consulting business.

Today I went downtown to meet an old colleague for a coffee.

I have to use the TTC tomorrow, and realized that I would have to sort out my payment card.

Today I met an old colleague downtown for lunch.

This is a downer of a story about a much of mutually antagonistic members of a drug cartel that's imploding over internal strife.

When I was young I always marveled at my father's ability to get things done by refusing to make someone else's problem his own.

Touched down in Toronto today.

The way this movie was advertised didn't appeal to me, somehow.

I went fishing with my father-in-law on the Philippine Sea today.

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Today we did archeology.

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Today we picked strawberries.

Today we went to a shrine to pray, as it's a new year.

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My multi-annual plan to reduce emails has continued.

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Two interesting articles on the Fermi paradox state: one, that civilization burns itself out via industrialization-fueled climate change; and two, that ignoring the discussion isn't helping us mature to the point that we can even contemplate moving into the stars.

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Today I traveled from Tokyo to Miyazaki, where I met Mari and the kids.

Today was another with two good things.

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Well, in for a dime, in for a dollar.

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Two good things today.

Today I met with an old classmate from Japanese courses way back when I was at NikkoCiti.

This is a choppy heist movie by a director who absolutely nails the stunts and visual wizardry and often struggles to capture natural human interaction.

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Today I decided I'd had enough of the cell-like "hotel room" in which I've been hold up at the surprisingly cheap cost of ¥5000 a night and went on a long walk.

Today I made the trek out to the south-eastern reaches of the Tokyo "ku", to visit an old friend: Satoi-san.

I had no meetings arranged today, but did some banking.

Today I met with a fellow Canadian in the lobby of a life insurance firm where I worked when Mari and I were first living together.

This afternoon I met with an old acquaintance - a headhunter I'd met with in the frantic days before I ultimately left Japan in late 2010.

Today I visited Tokyo sky tree, doing the tourist thing after a day of meetings yesterday.

For a second time in as many decades, the Spider-Man movies have now been rebooted; they've started all over again.

First thing I crossed the city center from Kameido to Shinjuku to go to a book store that I knew had English-language map books.

I flew to Tokyo today to find work here.

Ontario's cancelled another wind-turbine project.

An interesting article in The Verge about how greed drove a "recycling" company to falsify documents in order to conceal that monitors containing mercury were being sent to Hong Kong for dismantling.

You know how you're so good about sorting plastic bottles from non-recyclable trash?

OK, I had to watch this one twice.

For my math nerd friends out there.

Today I rode up to the Bermondsey neighborhood to meet a friend and fellow unemployee.

Today I had a meeting downtown with an entrepreneur who's built a thriving software business; within a couple of years of their start they now have four products in production with different clients.

In this fascinating video, we learn that solid-state, eco-friendly, stable, and inexpensive batteries are just around the corner--prototypes already exist!

This is a retelling of the classic Agatha Christie movie.

My eleven-year-old son and I watched this in the run-up to Christmas.

A friend in Australia passed on an article in which a corporate board member spilled the beans about the mis-allocation of millions of dollars towards management consultants who provided little value.

Today I received a letter from the CEO of Gitlab about the retraction of a planned service that had worried the user community.

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This is, at first glance, a murder investigation.

Today The Boy brought home math homework that was in our opinion way above the grade six level - to provide a formula that can explain the sequence 8, 13, 19, 26.

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What a load of shit.

This is an interesting story that feels like an adaptation from a stage production.

This is a story of a young man who goes out in search of his estranged father.

I just noticed that today is the twentieth anniversary of my web journal as a daily events record, not just movie reviews and the odd news.

This is where my cycling advocacy stuff is taking me these days.

On the weekend, I ate some wheat.

This past few years sure has produced a lot of prequels and spinoffs.

My summer went by in a blur of long start-up weeks.

Early in the summer, I heard Ken playing early in the mo

I wasn't sure the title of this one is actually a word, but it is!

Over the weekend I repatriated the last of my websites.

I read a story from Calgary in which a resident has been getting endless death-threats because he pointed out that the city's bus drivers are refusing transit tickets printed in French.

It seems that the people trying to solve the Fermi paradox are increasingly coming to the conclusion that we're utterly alone in the Universe.

I've just realized that it was thirty years ago this month that I returned to Ontario to start my university studies.

So it turns out that rats can play hide and seek.

This is a splashy fun flick set in a future where cities are now mobile affairs, roaming the countryside and taking what they need directly.

Tell us, Boris!

So I wrote a tweet to Mikhail Gorbachev to thank him for getting the USSR through the Chernobyl crisis.

I'm constantly amazed at what politics looks like in this brave new millennium.

This is the sequel to the only good zombie movie in recent years, "Zombieland", released a full decade earlier.

Time was, I was underemployed and adrift.

Well, I guess within another couple of years there won't be ice in the Arctic ocean year round.

Watching what's happening in the UK these days certainly gives me pause.

Remember folks, when we see a broken or missing ring-and-post on the street in Toronto, we tell 311.

Living in a city where people routinely are struck down in the streets by an out-of-control driving populace, it's nice to see some small signs of progress.

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We followed up on the tip from the camper at the lock and fished below the dam at Port Severn (which is a fish sanctuary in the spring).

Our last full day at the cottage saw autumn-like weather, definitely time for long sleeves.

Well the improved fishing was short-lived.

It rained all day, today.

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Today we went paddling on Wye Marsh near Midland.

This was us, yesterday.

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We headed out early this morning, and while I caught only a single pike it was a beautiful time to be out on the water.

We've arrived.

This is a near-future science fiction piece in which a car mechanic who loses his wife and the use of his limbs in an assault after his automated car crashes.

It's been a very busy week as I prepare to take the family to a rented cottage for the following week.

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Today a fellow named Paul who is not our neighbour but rather the neighbor of a friend in Fenelon Falls took us out on his boat.

This is a movie featuring a male lead who always plays mild-mannered sweat-hearts and a female lead who always plays abrasive people with poor judgment and/or socialization.

Somehow, the early PC game "Doom" spawned a genre of movies.

Where to start.

This weekend we had plans on Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon/evening, Sunday morning, and Sunday afternoon/evening.

What does it say that a hand-me-down electric kettle made our week, this week?

I related to a friend how I'd accidentally run over a small snake on my bike, and then nearly hit a dog and he said, "At least you didn't kill a child.

Cheers to Cloudflare for taking the amazing but I have to say rather obvious step of taking 8chan off the air.

Well, what could possibly go wrong with launching an aware military defence network that can control spy satellites?

My brother and his wife are in Ontario for a wedding, so we all got together in St.

Driving in an unfamiliar area, I was shocked to see a terribly-uneven railroad crossing immediately before us.

Today proved that there can be times when you text your spouse to ask them to say reboot a computer system inside the aquarium stand, and it's work-related.

The lore of credit ratings says that maintaining credit accounts for a long time is good, so I've always wondered what happens if you give up an old credit card.

When I reviewed the Disney direct-to-whatever movie "Descendants" two weeks ago, my hasty review contained a lie.

Today I read a story about Intel's apparently upcoming ouster from Apple's lineup - pretty shocking stuff; remember MBA graduates, Porter's five forces have been established for a long time.

My daughter loves shark attack stuff, so naturally we watched this when the chance came.

So France and other European countries are setting record temperatures; in these cases I'd like to tell my kids that we did the best we could for the world but we all know that that's a blatant lie.

I've decided to resume the novel project I set aside eleven+ years ago when my son was born.

Today I rode a rental bike from Toronto's bike sharing service and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Today I wrote to emails of thanks to the Toronto Mayor and the city Councillors that took the lead on the recent spate of directives to make the city's streets safer.

The Late Show had a faux 'Wheel of Fortune' style puzzle tonight, for which I just couldn't pick a single answer.

So it turns out that Manta Rays can leap right out of the water into the air.

Today I put a manual of policy and procedures on risk management for small non-profits for sale on my "professional" website.

The weather today perfectly reminded me of hunting for tadpoles and Oma's cooking, while staying with the old folks on vacation from Calgary 35 years ago.

This is an implausible tale of a crook who is freed from hospital by a nurse.

I am happy to report that the city's parking authority is in no way fooling around with the bike-sharing project - there are bike stations everywhere, now*.

This is a direct-to-whatever movie from Disney.

Even if you wanted to buy a place in Whitby or Brampton (or Milton!

I saw a (badly written) article about new apartment building

Arnold Schwarzenegger uncharacteristically plays a corrupt DEA agent in this movie of suspected revenge by one of his gang's victims.

I closed a credit card account of 18 years standing because of one bad call to a bank; I don't know why banks can't be bothered to solve problems for long-term clients but this just forced me to move more business to my credit union.

I've done some math and it seems that riding a bike for the past eight years has saved me $9,000 in TTC fares.

I watched this again after several years, and I think I've belatedly come to realize that this movie had quite an effect on me when I first saw it twenties years ago.

My son's above the 98th percentile for height; I was hoping he'd avoid a lifetime of backache and poor shoe selection but no.

When I called up the Canadian Red Cross to give them a new credit card number the fellow took down my name as Wernebung; I'm glad that's not how it's spelled.

Our son plays tennis, and his club has just asked him to join a new youth program that will see him get a lot of exposure this summer.

Today all four of us rode our bikes in the East York Canada Day parade.

This is a charming attempt at bringing the Asterix books from many a Boomer and Gen-X childhood to the flat screen.

We had our fishing trip today.

We've rented a cottage for the last week in August, and have also decided to go fishing this weekend.

Toronto's Infrastructure & Environment Committee has passed resolutions calling for the creation of bike lanes on Danforth Avenue.

This is the tale of a girl from a rough background who is simultaneously a ballerina and maybe also a prostitute or any way seems to be living with a gangster.

In a discussion on cyber security breaches, someone referenced an incident in Baltimore.

For the first time, I met a colleague I'd worked with remotely for four years - he suggested we meet as he was visiting Toronto.

I had to run some errands while at work today, then had a meeting over dinner.

Our fridge is eleven years old and won't stop running; no wonder we have an $80 hydro bill every month.

This is a good Adam Sandler movie.

I for one welcome the flooded Woodbine beach - this morning the water was like glass and it reflected gorgeously.

Today I tried to add my Visa card to PayPal; I was declined, so I called the bank but was given the run-around.

Today I joined hundreds of other cyclists in riding the length of Danforth Avenue from Withrow park in the west to the Oakridge Community Recreation Centre in the east.

The Boy was watching me struggle with my inbox, and asked who "Cron Daemon" is and why I didn't spend much time on his email.

Some kids' movies are good enough to grab the whole audience and keep them engrossed.

I saw a truck from one of those document-shredding services with two parking tickets on its windshield; I somehow suspect I know what'll happen to the tickets.

At work, we've made a real breakthrough with the performance of our software.

Today I noticed that the average CO2 emissions of the fleet of cars sold by Mercedes actually got worse by 12g/km between 2016 and 2018.

For the 19th time in my life, I've been crapped on by a bird.

It's amazing how quickly the car repair bills pile up when your warranty expires.

This is the far side of Woodbine beach: the water is receding, but the beach is still swamped.

It's pretty amazing to see what we can work out these days, such as a distant supernova leading to humanity's ancestors walking upright.

Woodbine beach was largely underwater this morning, so I made a panorama pic.

I'll posit that the first mosquito bite of the season is the only welcome one.

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I saw an Uber Eats driver do something kind - she got off her bike to help a blind man cross Bay street.

I bought some goop to remove a rubbery-looking streak from the side of our car only to find that the auto shop had removed it for me.

Joining the boss today at Collision conference here in Toronto - it's a conference for startups and their investors.

For the first time that I can recall, our cycling advocacy group took a break and just rode for fun, today.

This is a spy story set in the modern, post-Cold War era.

When I ran into my son on the street today, I realized that it was the first time I'd encountered him acting as independently as he has for the entire school year.

Like me, Doug Crosbie was a cyclist and a father.

Last night a colleague took a pic of me through some app that slapped a woman's 'do on me and made my features more feminine.

Thanks to high water levels and a few days of east winds, a great deal of Woodbine beach is under water again this year.

Sometimes they make a movie where they just land on a personality and a broad plot line and start rolling the cameras.

A friend sent me this satirical "ad" for the "Australien" government.

This is a sci-fi piece about a crew that hunts space whales!

Hat tip to Adrian for the link.

This is the story of a snow-plow driver from a mountainous area of Scandinavia.

I suddenly noticed the absence of Thomas the tank engine videos in our home.

Having recently kicked the caffeinated coffee has had an impact on the incessant migraines I've been suffering this year.

According to the short series of videos below, it' inevitable that even a 2° rise in global temperatures, it will give rise to fully 6° in changes.

Between Sonnet insurance and Toronto Honda it's taken 3 months to fix a bumper cover; I now have to actively manage both daily.

I can't recall having gotten so wet at such a low temperature as cycling into the wind of last night's rainstorm at 5°.

This year in Toronto it appears that April freezing rain showers bring May well not flowers more like almost-freezing rain showers.

I've been watching "Game of Thrones" but I've been struggling to endure the increasingly dilute signal-to-noise ratio as the writers have clearly decided to sprint this "saga" to the finish line.

I rode home in freezing rain last night�

I'm not sure why someone would stoop to stealing one of these, but it happened to me this week.

I just learned that Billy Gibbons had a band before ZZ Top.

It's Marky Mark vs Ip Man in a spy story that leans very heavily on violence in an un-named South-East Asian city (it was filmed in Bogota!

I don't know how it's taken so long this year but the weather has finally changed for the better some six months after the first snowfall.

This is the story of three retirees who decide to pursue a life of crime to pay the bills after they're screwed by the company for which they'd all given a life's labor.

Another successful Easter egg hunt this year, the bunny was credited with doing a good job with the eggs�

To catch an international assassin, the police employ an imprisoned IRA agent.

How nice it is to take a bike ride with a small child, unsteady perhaps but growing in confidence and excited to explore the world.

So, this Scranos is a mutable piece of malware with a great deal of capability and it's still just getting warm.

Every day I cross the center of Toronto's downtown via street only usable by transit, taxis and bikes - not a big idea globally but new to TO.

Certain Audi drivers are going to ruin it for everyone.

The boss called from the western edge of the city with some urgent news.

I must be the very last person on Earth to migrate a substantial PHP project from the antique mysql_ functions (which went out with MySQL 5.

I've just taken my website to a new domain.

I hope some day when I tell my kids "Why don't you get a j

I took an online survey of my character strengths.

As I was riding home tonight I saw one of the regular anglers on our stretch of the waterfront.

This is a movie in which a soldier, having been framed, agrees to travel to a space colony to rescue the daughter of the President of the US or some similar political body.

Two months ago, we were in a fender-bender.

Sometimes you see a movie whose premise appears to be to assemble certain actors and let them do their thing.

So it turns out the famous "Easter island" statues are only found near sources of fresh water.

Toronto has a long-standing tradition of making plans to do something about its crippled transit system, then scrapping those plans.

Happy birthday, dad, and thanks for everything!

Tonight was my last night of service on the board of directors of Cycle Toronto, an advocacy organization with a vision of a future city that's safe for cyclists.

Is it a bad sign that your taste in watches ranges from $50 to $900 and you can't afford any of them?

Some words from a muslim on the killing of muslims at prayer in Christchurch.

I'm a member of a group of cycling advocates in my home "ward" in Toronto, "Beaches-East York" (catchy, I know).

Still feeling vindicated in riding my bike to work in some chilly conditions.

Second day of cycling for the year, and I've managed to fall.

I saw this amusing sign near the office:

Back on my bike, and on day one I missed a major disruption to the subway.

We use snow shovels from "Yardworks" - in the interest of product failure analysis, here are some pics of one shovel that broke.

In September, I switched to SSL on all my websites; doing so killed all the traffic.

According to my records, I don't have good luck with movies titled "Life".

I usually celebrate this day by returning to my bicycle for my commute.

I think this pic says it all.

This is a movie about two girls who are taken from their families and the efforts to bring them back, both by the police and one of the fathers.

If the fine folks who produced the Simpsons and Futurama had nothing more to say on the nature and quality of televisions shows, they need only have said this.

This is a grim flick about a semi-retired contract killer who's attempting to live out his life in the woods outside a small town.

I ran into a coyote on the street tonight.

The Boy wanted to see this flick, so we did.

In 2017 I received 18,000+ emails (not including work).

The rate of major meteorite strikes on the Moon is increasing.

This is an interesting if challenging film about a lone young lady trying to find a solution to a major environmental catastrophe on a (very) dying planet Earth.

It's been too long since I posted about my latest watch crush.

It's been a full month since I posted something to my twenty year old journal.

The kids like super-hero movies, so we're watching a bunch.

This is an uneven movie that grew on me as it went on.

This is a movie about a kid who discovers a robot thing.

I'm still limping from having (probably) broken a bone in my foot.

Whoopsie, I seem to have forgotten to renew my Certified Internal Auditor designation.

People seemed to behave like 2018 was a bad year, but I think I had a good one.

As I was watching this, it began to dawn on me that it was mostly just alternating shots of two people speaking.

This is a Star Wars prequel that needless attempts to tell Han Solo's back-story.

I am testing these inexpensive devices for a startup. Col

I had a rare get-together with a friend tonight, a few days before his fiftieth birthday.

This is a charming Christmas story featuring a brother and sister who are spending X'mas eve alone (mum's working; dad's dead).

This is the story of a corporate employee who is sent to Mexico for purposes that aren't quite what it seems.

Today a turkey vulture landed in our back yard; I was able to get the kids to my window to see it take off.

This is a thoroughly unpleasant Bat Man movie with an absurd story line even by the standards of Bat Man.

November in Toronto, when you can say, "Thank god we carried the sofa down all those stairs before it started snowing".

This is a series of shorts set in the Wild West of the late 19th Century.

Quite by accident, I discovered a cool weather website that uses no graphics at all.

Our ten year old made a song with his iPad that's on par with much of the electronic music you hear today from adults.

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I think I can confirm after several days of throbbing and inflammation: I've cracked a bone in my toe or foot.

For kicks, I've turned my website into a cluster running out of New Jersey and Amsterdam across two hosting companies.

This is the story of two men who join LA's police force in the time when the city (and continent) are being overrun by the drug trade.

I've figured out how to cut my spend on hosting my websites from $15 to $6.

I found a representation of all seven point seven people on one page - I had a heck of a time finding myself.

I registered my first domain - etherlabs dot net - on this date in 1998.

For the past two days, I joined a client's executive team and board on a strategic retreat that started with "What do we do as a company?

My son can't play "Splatoon 2" on his Nintendo Switch because he can't find 8 paying members online.

This is the grand finale of the "Harry Potter" movies and I think it's only to be seen if you've seen part one.

The kids have been watching the "Harry Potter" movies without me because I watched them all once years ago and refused to do so again.

This is hands-down the best super-hero movie I've seen.

According to my inboxes, I sent or received 18,000 emails in 2017.

Some time ago, I noticed that the UNIX epoch had turned 1.

This is an animated story about an advanced "security" droid and the human girl it befriends.

I started a new commute today, some 13+ kilometers across the city center.

This is a story about an LA detective who works magic in the field but stumbles in dealing with his own affairs.

This confounding movie begins (more or less) with a couple's decision to shrink themselves to live in an eco-friendly fashion as miniature humans in a miniature domed habitat.

We went to "African Lion Safari" today, so naturally the car came back decorated with baboon urine.

Today I took some time out from my job search and non-profit commitments to change the gear shifters on my bike.

I've now put SSL encryption on all four of my websites.

I've made a new website for my professional profile, featuring some case studies.

Today I read an excellent post on getting things done, by a City of Toronto executive.

This morning our dear daughter re-introduced me to one of her friends: "This is my daddy, and my daddy's flabby belly.

The Girl threw an envelope into the office this morning.

I'm jobsearching, and came across this odd warning when foll

I had the best cupcake of my life today, from a place on Gerrard called the Hype Food Company.

This is a clever zombie movie set in Korea.

It's been five years since I wrapped up a year - and five hundred hours of study - toward the Certified Internal Auditor designation.

Both of my grandfathers were known to chase down the garbage truck and get something precious back that their wives had thrown away.

At long last, I've implemented the flattening tool on risktopics.

I wrote a folk song based on "The Midnight Special" about today's political events in the US.

This is an unrelentingly unpleasant movie in which an unspeaking slave finds freedom when his captors are attacked.

I had the pleasure of picking up a friend at YYZ's terminal 3 today, such a refreshing change from the spacious and beautiful terminal 1!

I can tell the kids are home: I had to wade through Japanese educational toys to get to the bathroom, where the sink was 2/3 full of soap foam.

This is a movie in which a bartender is dragged into the underworld of crime.

I was out on the water at 06:30 again this morning, fishing and watching the sailors, paddle-boarders, and kayakers.

This is an animated story about supermarket food products that become aware that they are food stuffs and other disposable products - and then fail to recover from that realization.

Last night, I caught my first trout from Canadian waters.

Two high school nerds attempt to throw a party.

While fishing, it happened again.

I've lost nearly 3kg since a highly stressful contract ended six weeks ago.

This is a story about a teenage girl who's struggling with her emotional load due in part to suffering terrible bullying, witnessing the illness of her mother, and living without her father.

This afternoon I noticed a lot of sirens, and the presence on a number of helicopters.

This is a drama about a raid on a "safe house" maintained by the CIA, and the unlikely pairing for the rest of the story between one of the agents and the Bad Guy he is tasked with protecting.

I got on my bike despite the heat, and put another 15km on my bike doing chores today.

This is a story of Armageddon; peaceful cities of citizens going through their lives in a near-future setting that seems to be getting on pretty well.

There was flooding in Toronto tonight, and twitter was alive with astonishment; I couldn't help but think of the typhoons.

This morning "grandma" and I drove from Saint Catharines to Long Point on Lake Erie hoping to see the provincial park; we failed.

After fishing with my father in law (and my late "fishing

This is a movie about a handful of characters weathering the end of the world.

It feels strangely good to be back; it must be the jetlag, which is monumental.

I left the kids with their mother in Japan, today - it's amazing to see how far they've come.

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It was my final weekend in Japan, and Mari's uncle took us out on the water one last time.

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The four of us went to see this hugely popular super-hero flick and I have to say I am close to the end of my tolerance for these things.

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Today we went back out on the sea with Hosoda-san for what became the Day of the Snapper.

Everyone loves this thing, it's current rating on imdb on 8.

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We spent the night in an interesting little hotel that's next to one of the main Japan Rail station in Matsuyama.

Today our six-year-old daughter asked "Daddy, who built the world?

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Tonight I ate pork uterus.

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I've installed something called Glary Utilities to mind my PC's stability and security.

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Today I went deep-sea fishing for the first time, and caught some unfamiliar but delicious species.

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Perhaps I had it coming when a swallow crapped on me this morning.

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Today, inevitably, we wound up at Disney Sea.

Today we took the kids to the Ghibli museum, jetlag or no.

Hello, Tokyo, it's been too long - 5 1/2 years!

This is an ambitious movie about a young lad who's sent out to kill a reindeer with a bow and arrow as part of his "becoming a man".

After a year-long contract that saw 50-55 hour weeks every week, it's time to set aside the labor at last, and take a vacation.

To de-stress, I've been playing the original 1991 version of Civilization.

I've had this site on the go for five years, now.

Wow, it turns out that black plastic is a lot worse for us than I knew.

I blew a tube tonight, it went off like a gunshot.

This is a retelling of an animated movie from several years ago, but the story lines deviate considerably.

For a second time in the past month, I've broken a spoke - these new bike wheels seem to have a problem.

Discretionary energy is a term used to describe optional effort that an employee might put into their job.

As you can probably tell from the title of this movie, it's a sequel and not a particularly good one.

A spoke broke on Friday; when I got it fixed, the mechanics told me the problem was "too much weight".

This is a telling of the eradication of the culture of the marginal islands in the Gulf along Louisiana.

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In preparation for our trip this summer, I've bought a lens for my four-thirds system, a Rokinon 12mm.

This is a re-telling of the King Kong story, but with Brie Larson along for some reason.

This is the tale of four high school kids that get swept up in an ancient video game that transports them to an in-game world of high stakes adventure.

I'm back on my three-season bike, and the new wheels make an enormous difference!

Finally, it's time to buy worms and go fishing!

This is a story about three couples who meet while hiking a famous path in a tropical paradise.

This is a buddy movie in which a tough bounty hunter and a skittish accountant are thrust together by circumstances.

Once in a while, Hollywood produces a movie where they take some stars and tell them, "Here's the plot outline, improvise.

A couple of years ago I wrote one of my mini-reviews about "Jupiter Ascending", a Mila Kunis movie that eh, didn't work.

I was just sitting at my desk at home when I heard a great wrenching sound - one of the old hardwoods along the property lines between our places and the next had snapped in twain halfway up, with the crown crashing down where there are usually several cars behind a small apartment building.

We watched this for "Movie night".

The recent flap about the Cambridge Analytica breach at Facebook has people talking about privacy issues pertaining to that website.

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And of course my beloved fishing watch. Casio Duro C

Despite the many times I've seen this film over the years, I realized with a start today that I've never written one of my capsule reviews for one of my favorite flicks.

Ken finished the winter session of his Saturday tennis classes today with a bang.

A few months ago I wrote a review of a watch - my every day wear, a Seiko SARB 033; it's now been read 7,000 times.

This is the story of an aging actor who decides on one final big splash.

Cycling to work today, my winter bike brown down: the cassette was spinning freely on the rear axle.

This is a surprisingly excellent story of a wildlife officer who becomes involved in the investigation into the murder of a friend's daughter.

This is a mockumentary/found-footage flick about a house (nest?

I discovered splat of bird crap on my shoe; my sixteenth crapping upon by our flying friends.

Today, while pursuing one of my hobbies, I discovered something called the planning fallacy.

This is a gangster flick, in which a mute bartender is dragged into the appalling underworld of a sci-fi Crapsack setting.

With the weather suddenly (and suspiciously) nice, I hopped on my bike for work today, grinding rust off the chain and unironing my shirt.

This is an action movie, a follow-up of sorts to another with a similar title and the same bluff lead.

This is a movie about gun-running during the Bush administration and the massive orgy of mis-allocation of resources across the global "war on terror".

After years of substandard home network performance, I've finally taken the plunge and built a proper network at home.

I should have realized that our anticipated ice fishing trip would be a bust when I encountered a skunk in our backyard at 4:20.

This is an animated story of a young boy who lives on a lighthouse with her father and little sister.

I'm working on a project in which the data set is so sensitive that backups to long-term media �

The other day, I realized that my regular use of Facebook as part of my advocating for safe cycling infrastructure in Toronto was having some negative effects.

And I'm done with Facebook.

This is a Horror movie dressed up as a robbery flick.

I notice I'm not writing much in this aging journal; maybe it's the three hours of sleep and the 11 hour workday?

This anime has the interesting premise of documenting mankind's return Earth some 20,000 years after Godzilla chased them off the planet.

If I ever cared about my appearance, it's not as I start pushing fifty; this is how to look silly on your bike, in the name of safety.

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This is a movie about a twentyish drop-out who meets a girl with some very strange dating requirements.

This Christmas, I replaced the bracelet on my Seiko SARB033 with a nice leather strap - I think it looks much better, and haven't taken the watch off since.

I've once again found myself hand-making a backup solution when a large organization has proved incapable of deploying a sensible solution.

The fates just didn't want me getting to the office, today: I woke with a head cold, in a power outage, as the snow sheeted down.

We were at dinner with friends at their lovely home in Hamilton, when we had to coax The Girl into eating some meat with her meal.

We're going to check out the frozen Niagara falls before everything melts again, tomorrow.

So it turns out there's a third of these movies, and tonight that's what we watched.

Five years ago, I bought an external USB 3 device - two weeks after I finally have a USB 3 capable system, the external drive has died.

I had one of those milestone days today, where months of work on various projects comes together all at once.

I think it's really amazing that they're able to use DNA and archaeology to work out the history of ancient peoples with fair confidence these days.

We've just received word that our application for an apartment suitable for our growing family has been denied.

So my hackintosh has proven unstable - so much so I broke down and bought a Windows 10 license.

Yesterday I said that all was peaceful in the last work week of the year; I forgot some of the things that have to happen for year's end revenue-recognition purposes.

The primary benefit of working during the Christmas break is the peace: time for documentation!

Working for a US firm, as I am once again, I'm at a loss to explain Boxing Day to Americans.

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Driving to grandma's house in St Kitts for X'mas we found fresh snow lining the grape vines and tree branches; beautiful.

It snowed overnight, returning the landscape to a wintry white just days before Christmas.

I've taken the plunge - I'll be installing the OSX license from my now-defunct Mini onto some generic PC gear.

My mac mini's up and died, and it looks like Apple wants $1,700 for another one - which ain't gunna happen.

We recently showed the kids the movie Home Alone and I stupidly mentioned a sequel.

"Uncle Jon" and The Boy and I went downtown to see this.

The board meetings that involve the annual operations and budget reviews are always long - but this one was only 2 1/2 hours.

Adrian in Japan sent an interesting link to the writings of a bitcoin skeptic.

From a Youtube video, today I learned that there are two typ

My mum works in the medical field and shared a slideshow about FOOSH injuries - fell on out-stretched hand.

Someone's made a mashup of the Talking Heads with US President Donald Trump - it's disturbingly good.

We watched this with the kids for "movie night".

My latest watch crush is thin, square, and digital - but not smart.

It seemed, when riding this morning, that I'd timed the switch to the beater perfectly: the city had coated the streets with salt.

I picked up the 25-year-old bike I'm using for the winter, today - I'd forgotten how light it is.

I was so run off my feet at my client site I didn't send a single personal or business email all day.

This is a (very rough) adaptation of Ursula K Leguin's novels that spanned decades of the world of Earthsea (as well as taking decades to write).

When you sit on a board of a non-profit, there shall be annual budget reviews, and they shall be long.

We skipped the expensive trees we've been getting in the Beaches, and got our best tree to date at a grocery store.

I had the unusual start to my day of getting to the office to find the network completely out; so I scooped up my laptop and headed home.

Cycle Toronto's staff and board had our Christmas/holidays/etc party tonight, out in the west end.

During the height of the craziness when I was doing my masters degree, my brother gave me a fountain pen.

According to an article that features my cycling advocacy non-profit, it turns out that black mountain bikes are the most stolen bikes in the city.

Wow, the global Bitcoin system is really a disaster for energy consumption.

I patched up everything I could on my beater bike, a 25 year old mountain bike with extended handlebars and seat post.

My colleagues and I spent nearly the entire day working through the next version of a client's product.

This is a delightful Christmas movie featuring an office Christmas party that gets a tad out of control.

It's Fibonacci day, 11/23 - derived from the sequence in the Fibonnaci series where you find each number by adding the two before.

As part of my ongoing attempts to get my migraines under control, I'm trying to recognize more good things as they happen.

I've been chatting with a colleague about Seiko's spring drive watches - apparently they use both mechanical and quartz components.

This is a perfectly-paced animated short about a rising flood that causes one aging gentlemen to progressively build new stories onto his home.

I'm taking an evening class, and I'm enjoying it quite a bit but it turns my Mondays into 9AM - 9PM affairs.

This is my second review of "Tron", some sixteen years after the last time and I presume thirty years after I first saw it.

I rode in against a biting 30kph wind this morning, fallen leaves flapping wetly and low clouds skudding.

The city salted the streets last week, a reminder that it's time to tune up my beater bike for the winter.

Still no change to the migraines, but I'm prepared to stand by the assertion that the green lights are helping me sleep.

I had one of those DISC personality profiles done through an affiliate of my night school teacher.

Simon Sinek gives some interesting insights into how unsafe environments (such as a workplace with infighting) has a deleterious effect on our health through changing the chemical balance of our bodies.

It's shocking to see the sexual harassment scandals multiply, some really disappointing stuff is coming to light.

This is a crass and awkward retelling of a classic sci-fi/fantasy story in which people find a lost world of dinosaurs and lizardfolk under the Earth's surface.

I've been on this green-light migraine therapy for only a couple of days but I'm now sure I'm sleeping better.

Tonight I am doing a Canadian first: participating in a University of Arizona study into whether green light can prevent migraines.

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I dropped by Cycle Solutions on Kingston Road to have my rear wheel looked at; they shocked me with the news it was finished.

I met a friend for lunch, today - a feat that meant cycling first down and then up the hill to St Clair.

It's November in Toronto, and the thick gloom has settled in nicely.

I counted 6 drivers operating their vehicle with a cellphone in hand as I glided past a line of 37 slow-moving cars.

Here's an interesting video on environmental risks in North America - I hadn't known about the solar flares, wow.

I'm joining a study into whether nightly exposure to green light can help ward off migraines.

My latest cold has knocked me out, looks like I won't be cycling for the rest of the week.

I met with some colleagues I hadn't seen in six months - they greeted me with, "You're really turning grey!

As I watch for phone-surfing drivers, I've never noticed someone with a passenger in the car use his phone while driving.

This is a movie telling of a book I have read to my son.

I've put reflective tape all over my bicycle; see how it glows in the dark.

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Cheers to the driver of Ontario BUDHADOG; I've seen him 5 days in the past 2 weeks, never once driving and texting.

Toronto took another step toward keeping its infamous Bloor cycle lanes, today.

Today I counted 5 cell-phone holders as I passed 49 cars - and one person eating with a spoon from a glass bowl.

I counted 6 drivers Friday, in a stretch of 36 cars, who were using their phones - that's more than had a passenger.

A year ago, I designed a lightweight, anonymous page-view counter for my website: 75,000 views later I'm sharing with the world.

I've had permission from ISACA to re-publish my article, which appeared in ISACA's Journal earlier this year (volume 5, 2017).

Sadly, yesterday was the day that I put away the shorts and rode in my Trailer Park style cool weather track pants.

As I rode past a line of slow-moving cars today, I counted 8 drivers using their phone (out of 46 cars).

It wasn't a great day, but there's lots for which to be thankful.

I was crapped on by a bird again, today - for the fifteenth time in my life.

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We attended the Thanksgiving "festival" at Balls Falls.

Mari and I left the kids with Grandma and had a rare dinner out, together.

This is the story of a girl who sets out to save her tiny Polynesian island, which is dying from creeping black plague that infects the food and eventually can be seen in the air.

It's Thanksgiving in Canada, and our little family certainly

By my rough estimate, I've traveled 1,650 km getting to work and back, since I started this summer.

Lots of good material arising from the debates online about some cycle lanes (who'd have guessed!

Recently, there was some debate on the meaning of 'jaywalking' - a term invented by the auto industry and friends.

Yes, it was only 8oC this morning, but the weather was perfect for cycling: calm wind & lotsa sun.

This is an Adam Sandler movie in which he and a (rather excellent support cast of) team fight to save the world from space invaders that have chosen the form of all our favorite '80s video games.

I spent the day on Toronto's harbor islands, at the annual retreat for the non-profit board on which I sit.

It's funny, that with products like Red Bull everywhere, it can be hard to find taurine in pill form for daily control of migraines.

When I tried to turn left from Woodbine to Cosburne this morning, a TTC driver used his bus to block me.

This is an animated kids movie featuring a super-villain as its central character.

The line is supposed to be "summer is ready when you are", but summer just left, and I always hear "sober is ready when you are".

For the first time in nearly a decade, I had dinner with Jon and Charlie, who I've known for 22 and 36 years, respectively.

For the second weekend running, I've made some grain-free granola.

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I've gotten questions from a variety of people about the Equifax breach, and what it means to them in terms of potential ID theft.

Today I did the ride with Cycle Toronto; 25km with a crowd of a couple of hundred people.

My mum sent along this amazing map of the surface winds on the planet; the visuals and interactivity set a new bar.

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ISACA's sent me some copies of the issue of their Journal that includes my article.

On Friday, I tried to attend a talk at 08:30 downtown; but the TTC had other ideas.

As an IT auditor at a software company, I discovered that security vulnerabilities in our bespoke product had not been getting released to clients on a timely basis.

It's the end of a week that began with me working past midnight and finished with me abandoning a TTC bus and walking home.

The Japanese are being a lot more patient with the North Koreans than I think I could be.

I've recently read a great sci-fi book titled "All Our Wrong Todays".

I've pulled the plug on my data science MOOC: the instruction was aimless, and the assignments uneven.

My 25km daily commute's been rough on my bike; after three years it was time to replace the drive train.

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I've noticed an increase in the numbers of beige, khaki, and orange cars on the roads recently: it can mean only one thing.

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Dropbox has decided to turn off public image sharing, even for their paying customers - reducing their value-add but not their price.

From the photos in this article it seems that it was casual Friday when NASA made the golden records sent with the Voyager spacecraft.

My fundraising for the 25km safe streets bicycle ride in Toronto is $75 along, so far - thank you donaters!

Having had our car struck twice, I have to say I've come to appreciate what Saturn was doing with their polymer cars.

I am doing a fundraising ride to promote safe streets in Toronto.

The Investment Industry Association of Canada has issued new guidance on evaluating cyber security readiness in third parties.

So there are leaves blowing in the streets, and I wore a hoodie while cycling to work; it's Autumn!

Our beloved car has been scratched, and I'm thinking of getting it painted - time to source someone to do the work.

Mmmm, Japanese "yakiniku" in Toronto.

Today I had the pleasure of riding up the length of the new cycle lane on Woodbine Avenue - a great ride!

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We headed out under calm, clear skies, and attempted to reproduce last week's fishing success despite the un-fishy weather.

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This is a Sci-Fi flick about colonists headed for a distant planet.

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pi approximation day was 7/22, I've only just thought of it today.

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I've figured out the small arrows on the streets of Toronto that point from the center of the street to the curbs.

I've been asked to submit another guest blog post for my professional work.

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If you thought that salmon you ate was a natural organism, I hope you don't live in Canada.

Nothing quite like a fever in the warmest weather of the summer.

I'm back on antibiotics again, for the fifth time this year.

On my first commute through the city today, I saw a mastiff in a bike trailer (designed for kids).

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I've caused the destruction of our canoe.

We went to the Petroglyphs Provincial Park near Stoney Lake, today.

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Following a large rainstorm on the weekend, the septic tank at the cottage we're renting seemed to have filled up.

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We're going on vacation and my fourth sinus infection of the year just keeps getting worse.

We leave for the rental cottage in 48 hours.

July went out with a bang - thunder, that is - under sunny skies without rain.

Just how much money does Trump owe these Russian gangsters?

We took Ki-kun to Tommy Thompson park for a picnic and some fishing - it was the first time he truly felt that he was in another land.

We took Mari's nephew to Niagara Falls, as one does with visitors to Toronto - but then we did something a bit unusual.

It's always seemed that Trump and the Russian criminal syndicate/rulership had some joint concern driving their actions.

Mari's nephew is staying with us for the next three weeks; now we have a 5 year old, a 9 year old, and a 15 year old.

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The excavation next door to us seems to be causing subsidence in our yard.

Today I encountered the worst kind of cyclist: he passed me in an intersection by ignoring a stop sign.

The job's already gotten busy enough that I'm already pining for the days this Spring when I wasn't working.

After three weeks of cycling 23km every day I've actually gained two kilos.

This is a superb animated movie featuring a certain fox that decides it's time to return to old ways of pilfering the odd chicken from the farms in the area.

I'm taking a "MOOC" on Coursera in data science.

Having witnessed Ottawa's mature network of cycle lanes, my resolve is doubled to do something about Toronto's unsafe streets.

I currently have a contract with a firm that "de-identifies" health information prior to it being shared with third parties such as marketers, drug manufacturers, and researchers.

It seems my drug benefits plan has expired - who knew my migraine drugs would cost $240!

Tonight I found myself drinking with four Ph D's and one professor - all substantially younger than me.

I am very impressed with Ottawa's cycling infrastructure; separated lanes in green spaces and protected lanes on the streets.

The seat fell off my bike as I was crossing a busy street, today.

Today I noticed something: we've passed through 1.

A pickup driver nearly ended my life on Friday.

This is an engrossing tale about two teens who keep waking up in each other's bodies; one boy, one girl.

This is a film about a semi-sentient animal named Okja; she's a genetically modified super-pig, larger and tastier than ever and stationed by an eccentrically-run company with a young girl in Korea.

I have this browser plugin that blocks third-party tracker systems from the websites I visit.

I had lunch with two colleagues who lost their jobs the same day I did.

Be it ever so green and quiet and perfect, my route to my new job isn't going to last.

Having lost my job in April, I was unexpectedly a part of the family's life again around the house and able to take the kids to school and so on.

This is the route I took on my first day at the new job: a lot of climbing over nearly 14km.

If you're going to watch a Transformers movie, let it be this one.

Goodbye, first half of 2017: you took a friend, you took my job, and you thwarted my fishing - here's to the second half.

She ain't exactly pretty; ain't exactly small: she's my latest watch crush.

two of four articles are spam?

If there was any upside to a two-hour conference call last night, it's that my home Internet seems to have stabilized at last.

We lit out at 10 to attend the "Bells on Danforth" ride once again - this time with Mari and both kids.

The bicycle turns 200 this year, in fact we're only a couple of weeks away from the bicentennial of its first public use.

Out for a spin today, I had the misfortune of being in a "sharrow" with a driver staring at his cell phone.

Sometimes people get emails that make it clear their personal network is known to various websites or agencies.

Ye gods, summer is finally here �

A data analytics company leaked personal information on 200 million voters.

Sometimes people get emails that make it clear their personal network is known to various websites or agencies.

I cycled 30km today, but there's a dedicated cyclist on the CT board who cycles 70km a day - I managed nearly half a "Chantelle".

This is a film about a boy who joins an unusual household full of bizarre children.

The Boy invited me to go fishing today at Tommy Thompson park - where at least the mink catch fish.

Poachers in Siberia are digging up mammoth tusks with pressurized water, making themselves rich but fouling the rivers.

I've discovered that another of my old tattoo ideas was used by someone out there.

The kids were tested for lice, but there were no lice.

The Investment Industry Association of Canada is producing a two-document guide on evaluating cyber risk in their third party (vendor) arrangements.

The school just sent a note telling us 24 children at the school have head lice.

The ISACA article has been accepted.

It was nearly the end of me today when a bunny darted out as I was riding, this evening after a non-profit board committee session.

As I was on a 13km ride, I encountered a snapping turtle on a wooded path - it had the trail to itself.

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This is a movie about a loser name Ruth whose home is robbed.

At 6:30 this morning, my friend Richard picked me up for a morning jaunt to Leslie Street Spit from Cherry Beach by canoe.

I spent six hours today fixing kids' bikes at Main Square �

The "fawaffle" truck was at The Kids' fun fair - a falafel sandwich not wrapped in pita but a waffle cone made of falafel.

It's funny how everyone's going around on egg-shells pretending that we don't know that Trump's just a crook.

I left the apartment before six this morning to do some fishing in Scarborough; it's amazing what the unemployed can do.

I allowed my son's D&D group to worm their way out of their death-by-riddle from our last session.

Mari says that it's been nice having me around the house these past two months - that she thinks we'll retire well together.

I took the morning off for some fishing, but the lake's still funny.

Our son was supposed to attend his first camp on the Toronto islands this summer - it's been cancelled due to flooding.

Where oh where has the four-quadrant Franklin Covey time management system been, all my life?

So, we've killed the great barrier reef; mission accomplished.

This was a busy, busy month - a blur of interviews, meetings, phone calls until I got sick and had to take some time to recover.

The family took a cycle trip down to Tommy Thompson park today and had a fine time.

A five year old cyclist died this week when he fell into traffic - this is why I joined a cyclists' advocacy group.

It looks like Toronto's immense housing bubble may finally have burst.

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The boy was heroically standing at the brink as the waves came crashing in.

Happy towel day, everybody - you'll need it with all this rain.

The health industry works with a standard called the "Safe Harbor" for de-identifying personal information.

It is with great embarrassment that I've finally caught my first fish of the year in late May.

How better to describe the Victoria Day weekend to Americans than by its nickname, "May 2-4"?

I don't know if this movie was strictly necessary, they covered Lego Batman in sufficient depth in the Lego Movie itself.

This is a good anime about a time in the distant future where humanity has been sidelined by its own housing and infrastructure, and now ekes out a marginal existence in the shadow of security systems that refuse to let them sufficiently travel or build to reclaim their world.

My wife and I won a three-legged-race - I think it was the first I'd ever run.

Tomorrow's the deadline for the next issue of ISACA's "Journal".

Lake Ontario was apparently at its highest ever yesterday, May 17 - I've put together a pic of what that looks like in Toronto.

Kevin's death is having an effect on my job search.

My musician friend Kevin Atwood has died, as humorous and sweet a fellow as you'll ever meet.

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While enjoying a relaxing fishing jaunt, I stupidly broke my fishing rod, for the first time in my life.

I've had a right-side, weather-related migraine for five days.

My habit of introducing people I feel should be working together has paid off in a job created, but for someone else.

Once again, I'd like to quote Kurt Russell: the fun is in the doing, not the talking.

The boy caught his first fish of the year, today - a tasty 45cm pike.

Mari says it's common wisdom in the FX trading world that one must keep a positive attitude to place productive trades.

I played D&D with my son, his two friends, and their father yesterday.

It's interesting that some things have changed so much and some so little, being unemployed for a month.

I had a little help catching the 502 at University and Queen yesterday on my way home.

I did a personality test of sorts, and learned I'm an odd duck.

Toronto's become a city of new software ventures in the past few years.

I loved this movie.

My wife's an economist by training and is now learning to become an FX trader �

A bird of prey suddenly arrived on our balcony, diving at a mourning dove.

"Good news and bad news," I told Mari, "the new season of Archer has started.

If you tweet updates to your website at a certain time of day, you can get a steady increase in traffic.

Last night I was nominated to be the Vice President of the board of Cycle Toronto.

Another benefit of unemployment �

I wonder if any good movie ever had the word "Sing" in the title.

Another benefit of having all this free time - I got to volunteer at the school for the visit of a scientist.

An unexpected benefit of being unemployed: I am meeting a lot of people.

I've written a guide on managing third party risk, that is, the risk that comes with sharing your data with third parties such as service organizations.

Last month, I passed the sum of 13 years spent living in Toronto.

4ºC and freezing rain under 30kph winds; the worst cycling!

Today is the five year anniversary of my long slog through the PMP exam.

My various meetings took me downtown twice and to the Danforth: some 45km of cycling in a day.

A friend made a comment about hiding Easter eggs, within earshot of my son; this led to something unexpected.

This is a strange and violent story about transplanting the memories of a dead spy/soldier into the brain of a death-row prisoner with a neurological condition that means he'll never have empathy and will never deviate from his life of violent disregard for society.

This movie centers on a small scientific team that's worked out how to prove the existence of the afterlife.

Trying to figure out what's happened to our kids, today, to make them so hyper and babbly.

The article I placed on LinkedIn about losing my job has now been read well over 1,000 times.

As so frequently happens, the weather gets nice and I get a migraine.

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Today we went to St.

The damage to my good suit is irreversible.

My previous post (which was cross posted to LinkedIn) regenerated over 700 reads in under two days.

Two women colleagues described me as "gracious" today; I don't think that word means what they think it means.

Last Tuesday, I lost my job during a restructuring at PortfolioAid, a compliance solutions firm.

I've gathered my thoughts on exiting an executive role at a software firm after six years.

Well, it had been almost 17 years, so I decided to show the kids this flick for "movie night".

Every other night since my ouster, I've not slept.

It's a good thing I didn't have a pesky job to contend with.

I was a mid-level executive at employer of the past six years.

I lost my job today in a restructuring that saw 4/10 members of the management team gone, among others.

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This is one of the sequels to the stellar Jurassic Park.

A colleague came by to inform another; "I care about this as much as you do - to the power of minus 100.

This is a movie about a person involved by an agency in fighting certain crimes in the past.

I attended my first NBA game tonight - we had a great time (watching the local team blow a game-long lead in the fourth quarter).

I think the metaphorical back of this head-cold I've got is broken �

My first term as a non-profit board member ends on March 31.

A former colleague on the SIRA board published this article to LinkedIn.

Here's a guide to creating your own successful minimalist watch brand.

I lost exact count around Christmas, but I've got cold ~12 since September building up.

It's -8°C on the third day of Spring �

Ink cartridges for our home printer are so expensive that it's the only thing people have to say about the otherwise decent printer.

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In the past couple of days, I've brought back my book reviews, added a watch review, and made changes to speed up the site.

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Beware the ides of March, your day shall be a bust if depending on the weather forecast �

The new year is ten weeks old, and I have unsubscribed from 22 email things.

I love it when people "buy into" a brand intended for a wildly different demographic - my father's new watch is a great example.

I've started reading Peter Block's "Flawless Consulting".

I like watches, and true to Pisces form, my interests tend to flit about like a butterly in a field of flowers.

It looks like Australia's original settlers lived without mass warfare; an interesting break with the usual pattern of human history.

I've come across a really good explanation of the Vancouver housing bubble, from SFU.

Never park your bike on Duncan St in Toronto unless you want it destroyed or stripped.

This is a story of a robotics specialist who's sent to the remote residence where his genius/billionaire boss is holed up working on who knows what.

Housing in this city is now in the lofty company of Vancouver, where you can't guess if a listing is a parody.

My ride to work started with a flat that I deemed a slow leak; I pumped it up and took off into 40kph winds at -9.

I did some speed testing and discovered that AWS and Google are slow at serving fonts.

Here's an interesting article outlining all the things Canada's got going for it, and all the nothing we're doing with the opportunity.

These are the 64 IP addresses that I current block on my websites.

New research suggests that we adopt a face that reflects our name - I wonder if I've got a Michael face and if so, what does it mean?

Someone decided, "Let's put Johnny Knoxville from Jackass in a movie with Jackie Chan.

In Canada, anyone on the treadmill of maintaining professional designations gets a couple of tax incentives.

Looks like we've lost the rest of the ice fishing season.

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We were watching a hockey game, when we saw a camera angle that we couldn't figure out.

We played d&d on the weekend, and it was a memorable session - turns out they heard "white tower" when I was saying "wight tower".

There's a variant of the film noir where the detective is accidental.

The city of Toronto's been doing a good job lately of keeping the cycle paths plowed in the dead of winter.

Things continue apace - now the doomsday clock's back where it was in the 50's!

I have a Casio MDV-106 that's been my beater watch since the spring of '14 or so.

Hard to imagine that things could get this wacky, this fast, in the US - I feel for my American friends.

On Monday I appeared in a court room for the first time, for the guilty plea of the driver who knocked me off my bike.

A certain credit card issuer decided they would issue me a new card, then didn`t, but froze my existing card.

Oh boy, new census data - and my home town of St Catharines has once again bucked the trend and not show growth.

The government of Canada has produced some guidance for small-medium enterprises which is a) quite good and b) surprisingly readable.

It looks like the wealthy are planning on pulling the plug on the US.

This is a Demons-and-Angels bit of Fantasy about an immortal "Witch Hunter" who, in the modern time, gets wrapped up in an effort by (un-Hunted?

So it turns out there are micro-fragments of plastic in the seafood we eat; we now have that stuff in our blood.

For once, I find myself doing some reading about the character and intent of a US President, with some interesting findings.

It looks like I lost three days outright to migraines in '17, and had to take strong migraine drugs some 84 other times during the year.

I foolishly chose to take the TTC to work today; two fares ($6+) to get to work late.

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To get anywhere in downtown Toronto, there is no substitute for a bike.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, daily prophylactics for migraine are more trouble than they're worth.

On my son's new globe, some things never change; Crimea is still Ukraine #earworm.

This movie is about some people trashing their office over the cource of a Christmas party.

By all accounts, Adam Sandler is a decent guy who treats people well and there's no denying that he's made his own path.

In addition to CEO fraud emails, now there's virtual kidnapping.

It's ten to five, and the sun's just going down; so good to have some sunlight in Toronto!

Mari realized that the shoes we ordered from the US back in October hadn't come; I called the shop, they'd had them for months.

They say you bungled the American empire, Mr Obama; I say good riddance, let the US be a country again.

Farewell, civilization as we've known it.

Today I attended an wealth management industry committee meeting in which we're looking at an industry-wide approach to managing third party risk.

The storm last night tore a piece off our building that came down and onto our car - I wonder if insurance will cover it.

Another year, another extract-transform-load project.

Friends have taken the smaller of our aquariums - I know it's in good hands with a smart young lad.

I've been keeping this journal for a full decade, now!

We'll be cutting our home phone spend from $28/month + tax to ~ $9/month by going VOIP.

For the past few months, I've been paying $5 - $10 a month for overshooting my cellular data allotment on my mobile phone.