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Acquired is my favorite podcast and their most recent episode is my favorite ever It is a 10-year anniversary episode, which sounds a bit boring, but it's with Michael Lewis, and I don't remember a podcast ever bringing me so much happiness. Not only did I listen to it in one shot, which I never do (it's just under 3 hours), I listened to it on YouTube (normally Spotify). I have a rule that I never watch any form of TV during the day, but I made an exception for this. It is just unspeakably awesome. Here are two wonderful quotes with I am officially naming my Quotes of the Year. They are both from Ben (Gilbert): "Everybody has different beliefs about the truth. But I want, I want to make the story that most correctly approximates the average truth t hat exists from all these different truthy sources". "Language is a lossy compression of thought". -- This isn't a great quote per se, but also Ben: "The greatest performance art I have ever seen in ...

Last night, hugely against my better judgement, we went to our neighbourhood theatre, which seats maybe 200, charges around $20, and has a Christmas performance of 'It's A Wonderful Life': Despite a mountain of personal experience that suggests that it's almost impossible to enjoy live non-music performance, this was, in fact, hugely enjoyable. Interestingly, all of the actors (10 or so), who I am pretty sure have real jobs elsewhere, made lots of mistakes, and, each carried around a script the whole time and glanced at it constantly. They obviously must have rehearsed a ton, but, still had this crutch. Which in no way detracted from it. In a way, it made it more authentic. On the other hand, my soon to be daughter in law hated it.

It finally happened! I caught a straight-up typo / use of English language error in AI output. This is from Gemini, which I use about as often as ChatGPT - for my purposes, they are interchangeable. 'pcan' ?? This typo notwithstanding, I was and very often use Gemini/ChatGPT to understand AWS (Amazon's hosting service) better, and in this, it absolutely excels - from concepts to general information to direct guidance to step-by-step instructions. For me it is way beyond "how did we ever survive without this". To be clear, I have seen plenty of misleading or incomplete AI responses, much as one gets from expert humans, too. But this is the first time I have seen a "typo".

Tomorrow is El Gordo - the drawing of the annual "Spanish Christmas lottery". According to WP, it's the largest lottery in the world, in terms of total prize payout, at about $4 Billion C$. The prize money is divided amongst 20-odd million winners. The largest prize is around $6.5 million, and around 200 people will get that (it depends on the year). Thd smallest prize is around $280. By contrast, the California powerball lottery, which has the world's largest single prize, recently paid out $2 Billion to a single person . There are also millions of smaller winners, as with El Gordo, with the smallest prize around $4. A great example of US "winner take [almost] all" culture.

My Argentinian - Calgary friend is an engineer and he was telling me that he is working on a compressor station project. Here is a picture I found of one: They are for natural gas pipelines; I assume oil pipelines also have them, but they would be pumps, not compressors. They basically keep the gas moving through the system (at about 30 km/h) and are located about every 70km or so. There are around 1,500 of them across the USA. Besides compressing the gas to maintain pressure and flow within the parameters required of the network, they also monitor its quality and clean it to some extent. In a loosely similar way, the BC Hydros of the world have tons of "capacitor stations" all over the place: If you were to look at BC Hydro capital projects, you would see many of these - there must be dozens across BC alone. They aren't, metaphorically, pumps or compressors; instead, they provide so called "voltage support". This is required to react to the constantly fluctuati...

We went to Centennial Theatre (small North Vancouver venue with shows of highly quality) last night to see "Abra Cadabra", an Abba cover band from Vancouver: I don't particularly like Abba and I am not a huge music person to begin with. The band was nine people, all of whom looked like they went to our local high school, that is to say, normal looking and I assume have other jobs beside this group, though they do do tours from time to time. Anyway, it was so awesome. They just did a fantastic job. So much positive energy and enthusiasm. Just the right amount of Christmas faff thrown in. As always it's so awesome to see lowish expectations so thoroughly exceeded. 10/10 would recommend.

My spouse and I seem to be settling into an approximately weekly routine is going to a movie at Tinseltown. This is a theatre in a truly weird mall on the edge of Chinatown. We like it because it's close enough, easy parking, and we usually go to the food fair before. Despite the food at that, and basically all food fairs, being horrific. I don't know why I keep expecting this to change. I also don't know why all food fairs are incapable of producing food that isn't awful. Is there not a market for good food fairs? Anyway, here are the two most recent movies: I quite like Miles Teller (well, I liked Whiplash), and this movie wasn't awful, but it was kind of a boring love-triangle-in-heaven premise and I nodded off more than normal. 4/10. Yesterday's: This was a fairly typical James Brooks light comedy that was not awful but extremely forgettable. On the bright side, JLC was, as always, quite good, and the title character, on the right, I don't know the actre...

Maybe not a top-10, but I think this a really, really good movie, maybe George Clooney's best. I watched it for the 2nd (maybe 3rd) time over the weekend. The story is above average interesting and all the acting is perfect, IMO: We enjoyed it enough that we made a vague plan to watch all the George Clooney movies (apparently there are around 50). It's not so much that I like GC, it's more that usually like movies that he is in. Perfect Storm is probably a top-10 for me.

With all the consumer protection laws that we have, here is one we SHOULD have: What kind of b.s. is this - they can process the charge in 30 seconds but it takes 30 days to process a refund? Outrageous! ---- The circumstances of this refund are slightly interesting. There is a theatre in North Vancouver, Centennial, that is relatively cheap, relatively stress free (eg. you don't have to deal with downtown parking faff), and sometimes has really good shows. I check their calendar every few months. Thus I came to purchase four tickets to an Abba cover band Xmas concert thing. I am not a huge music person, and I don't hugely love Abba, but it sounded fun enough, so we were all set to go last night ... 2 hours prior, I got this email: Well, that's a first!  It's nice that there was no question about a refund, but don't make me wait a month, FFS!

There's a new Clooney/Sandler movie on NF: These are both actors I like well enough - "Michael Clayton" and "Reign Over Me" are two of my favorite movies. I can't quite recommend JK. It is a bit boring and never quite lives up to its potential. Clooney is very solid but the actress who plays his younger daughter got it all wrong, and, Sandler is uninteresting and at times annoying. But if you have nothing better to do, it's better than 95% of the slop* on NF. 4.5/10 would not recommend. *This is the Economist Word of the Year, as in "AI slop" = silly, pointless but technically impressive AI generated content, typically but not necessarily video.

I really love going to the UBC Endowment Lands because their network of trails is super flat, super extensive (about 70km), super pleasant, dog friendly ... in short everything I'd want, except it's an hour's drive from my house. I was vaguely aware that the mountain at the foot of which I live (Seymour) had trails, but I am sorry to say I had NO IDEA how extensive and generally awesome they are: This is the UEL, at the same zoom level: It seems fairly clear that the Seymour trails are overall longer, though they are both long enough that it doesn't matter, you could never walk them all in one go and it would take ages to get tired of either. They are also steep in some parts (easily avoided) and also some of them are more intended for mountain bikers (I'm not sure to what extent this is actually a rule, vs. a good idea vs. a suggestion). Anyway, the Seymour trails are my new favorite thing. They feel like they go on forever. I can't believe I have lived here 20...

Anyway, to wrap this up, we had an awesome, ultra-tranquil time in Mexico. We stayed 3 nights with friends in a somewhat below par (but OK) place about 15 minutes from the beach; 7 more in a top-floor condo on an enormous, nearly empty beach, with a very pleasant and also nearly deserted pool. I have said it before: I love MX more every time I go (I count this as my 8th trip but it could easily be 10th). We are already talking about doing exactly the same thing next November. All we really did was walk and read. No tourist activities. No driving, except for a supply run to the supermarket (which was bizarrelly, almost bereft of, of all things, salsa). Don't get me wrong, I love tourist activities. But I also love just lounging around. I got a ton of reading done. I'll be glad to get back to doggo, though.

We're airbone on WestJet and I am once again taking advantage of their awesome Wifi - it's a little slow, but, it's very stable and, this time, FREE! I couldn't get it to work on my Macbook, but, it works fine on my phone and I am hotspotting, as I often do. If you are an avid user of Wifi but you don't know what hotspotting is, do yourself a favour and check it out. I have never not had it work great. So, this flight is mostly full but I have an empty seat beside me. In the row immediately in front of us, there is an older Canadian looking couple that booked the aisle and window seat, no doubt hoping that nobody would take the middle. In the event, a miserable looking woman is stuck between them. Question: is this, a couple booking the "outside" seats, bad behaviour? I think so. Not 10/10 bad, and I mean I'm sure they paid extra, but still. I would not do that. But I honestly don't really care that much. I am just so happy to have quiet time on an...

I got this book for my birthday: Life's greatest pleasures must include an unexpectedly awesome book (or movie), and this one fits that bill. I have no particular interest in Jack the Ripper, but this book is hugely interesting and enjoyable. It's not actually about Jack the Ripper at all - the crimes are barely mentioned. It is really about what it was like to live in 1880's London. tl,dr: if you were poor - pretty awful! If you were a poor woman - even worse. I had a vague idea that at one point London was pretty awful, but I would have said that was much earlier than 1880 (well, it probably was also, but I would vaguely have thought that being poor in 1880 was somewhat tolerable). My grandmother was almost alive in 1880! I also would have said that JtR had dozens of victims. Actually, "The Five" are the only ones that they are fairly certain were JtR's; there are six others that might be, but nobody knows for sure, because he was never caught. He was called...