october 2024 (extended)

a loose collection of unrelated thoughts

Nov 13, 2024

Hi!

Here’s a list of things that I did over September and October, chronologically:

Sept 4th: Went on my first float plane flight to test drive a RAV4 that I didn’t end up buying.
Sept 6-9th: Visited Maya in Vancouver and brought her and Brendan too many deli containers.
Sept 18th: My world was shaken on its axis when I got a low-taper fade.
Sept 20th: Left for Europe :)
Oct 6th: Came back from Europe :(
Oct 9th: Seven years after moving here, I received my BC Services Card.
Oct 12th: Ashley and I hosted Friendsgiving!
Oct 13th: Ran the 8k at Royal Victoria Marathon.

Oct 31st: Halloween!

a porch

While visiting Vancouver, I became enamoured with the idea of owning a house and spending time just sitting on the porch.

my car buying axioms

I’ve been trying to buy a car for a while, but no luck yet. Here are my axioms:

Driving feel supersedes almost every other aspect of a car.
Good deals don’t stay on the market for longer than 24 hours.
1. Bad deals stay on the market for a while.
Dealerships only offer prices at the current market rate or higher.
Private sellers can offer prices below, at or above the current market rate.
There is more potential for good deals in Vancouver than in Victoria.
There is no cost-efficient method to travel from Victoria to Vancouver given <24 hours notice.

europe trip

You’ll notice this newsletter is a bit loose because I spent most of my time creating a slideshow of me and Ashley’s trip to Europe → europe2024slides.

Disclaimer: You’ll need to ask me for the password to see it. Unless you can hack it. In which case - congratulations!

Here are some pictures:

I came away from this Europe trip with a couple of thoughts:

food vs development index

I’m realizing that the more developed a country is, the less appealing their native food is to me. For example:

British food vs Indian food
Croatian food vs Greek food
German food vs Mexican food

I’ve never been to Sweden or Thailand but I know which one I’m picking for food.

iphone

I’ve been falling out of love with my iPhone 12 and Apple Watch. The Europe trip really emphasized this. My phone’s battery doesn’t last a full day and my watch isn’t good at telling me the time.

This irritation is also a result of:

Updating to iOS 18 (I just wanted to italicize my iMessages!)
Heavy usage of my phone’s GPS and camera on the trip

It’s tough. On the one hand I like the idea of my phone becoming more inconvenient to use (less screen time, reduces dependence, etc), but it also means that I waste time trying to interact with it instead of actually doing things.

The Right Stuff

I finished The Right Stuff on the trip. If anyone wants an interesting, cowboyish recounting of America's first astronauts, this is the book for you. It's very Top Gun-esque.

The "right stuff" in this case refers to that ephemeral quality that all fighter pilots/astronauts must have, but can't describe. You just know it when you see it. You just gotta have the stuff.

israeli missile defense

With things escalating in the Middle East, I’ve been reading about Israeli missile defense systems. It’s a stark illustration of how technologically advanced Israel is, especially compared to Palestine and Lebanon. The Iron Dome (Daniel Gold) and Arrow (Dov Raviv) programs specifically.

Iron Dome is a system that intercepts rockets flying at speeds of around Mach 3 (about 2,500 miles per hour). It can target and destroy up to 90% of incoming missiles it detects.

Arrow is a system that intercepts longer-range ballistic missiles at speeds up to Mach 9 (about 6,700 miles per hour) in the upper atmosphere. That’s nine times the speed of sound.

Israel has been building these systems with American help since the 1990s. That’s three decades - roughly half the time the state has existed. These systems are so uniquely powerful that Germany is buying one for $3.5 billion.

Meanwhile, Gaza has no universities left.

fresh herbs, ranked

I've been getting into dill lately. It adds a great tang. My fresh herb ranking is:

Cilantro
Dill
Basil
Thyme
Mint

body annotator app

I require an app that allows you to annotate a 3D model of your body and export it. Doesn’t need to be a scan of you specifically, just a generic body will do.

Ideally, I can select a point or a specific muscle/tendon/bone on the body and say “sharp pain when I put pressure here” or something similar.

Then, I can keep track of where and when I’m experiencing various pains or sensations. Does this exist?

musing about consuming vs creating

I’ve talked about this concept of consumption vs creation before. But what if we got into the specifics. As in, how many bytes of data do we download from the internet versus upload?

What would my ratio be? I produce/upload:

this newsletter
reviews to letterboxd
photos and health data to strava
pictures (occasionally) to instagram
book reviews to my blog
videos to Youtube (sometimes)

I consume/download:

youtube videos + shorts
instagram reels + stories + posts
tv from Disney, Crave, Netflix, etc
email newsletters
stuff on facebook
stuff on twitter
websites in general

Obviously, I download A LOT more bytes than I’m uploading.

But everyone’s ratio would be different. Some people upload videos daily! If you’re a Twitch streamer, you’re uploading bytes of video for many continuous hours. Kai Cenat is streaming for literally all of November.

Is this the future of influencing? Just uploading more and more bytes of yourself to the internet?

misc

A meme for my developers out there!

I’ve been enjoying CBC’s About That show in Youtube. A rare piece of Canadian media that captures my attention.

And that’s all. Thanks to Ashley for helping edit this one.

See you next month!