This is completely unacceptable:

The average asking price for rent in Canada hit an all-time high of $2,202 per month in May.

That’s not one city. That’s the average for the entire country. How are people supposed to get by? There is an outcry but it’s just that and little is done to fight it. Are we supposed to riot and burn everything down?

Thanks to the good folks at Vintage Iron Cycles, I took possession of my first e-bike today! I’m looking forward to putting this Radster Trail through its paces.

Right now I have to wait because we’re getting more thunderstorms.

I’ve been looking to get an e-bike for like three years.

Last month I finally found exactly what I was looking for with the Radster Trail. I was supposed to go pick it up today.

But Mother Nature decided otherwise. Just as I was on my way to the shop, the biggest thunderstorm of the year started. Rain was pouring down like you wouldn’t believe.

The shop was closing at 7 PM. The rain also stopped EXACTLY at 7 PM.

Instead of talking about my wishes for WWDC ’24, I’d like to mention a favorite recent addition: Xcode Cloud.

After Apple purchased Buddybuild in 2018 and kept it running with subscriptions turned off, it took a while to know where they were going with this.

Now it’s hard to imagine development without Xcode Cloud. Along with TestFlight, it’s one of the best one-two punch development tools that we get by default. It can’t be overstated how easy this is now.

I’ve been reading every piece of the Family Tours in the Kingdom of the Sick series by Rebecca Saltzman. My wife having gone through health crises of her own, I recognize so much of the emotions and feelings Saltzman describes. It’s validating, in a way. It also helps that she writes in a tongue-in-cheek style. Her last piece didn’t disappoint.

Speaking of YouTube, I really hope for PeerTube to take off like Mastodon did. But for that to happen, PeerTube will have to figure out the monetization part. The problem is, there aren’t a zillion ways to do it. Usually it’s ads or subscriptions or both. Not really words that are compatible with decentralized, open-source software.

I just reactivated the Classic Editor in WordPress. Because life is too short for dealing with overcomplications like the Block Editor when all I want is to write. Just let me write. Can I write? My deepest desire is to have a big text field where I can write. Did I mention all I want is to write?

Note to self. I was getting bombarded with ads on YouTube, thinking that 1Blocker had stopped working so maybe YouTube had found a way around the blocker. But then I realized that the 1Blocker Scripts extension was only activated for m.youtube.com, not youtube.com. Once I activated the latter, ads went away, thank goodness.

It struck me today that I make roughly three times more money now than I did near the beginning of my career, but in that time home prices have gone up by a factor of about 15.

Buying a house was a thing we could do then. I don’t know how young people today are supposed to do the same.

Life’s too short to spend two hours a day in the train to commute to work.

It’s funny that hysteria is not fun but hysterical means funny.

I just released a little app for iOS that I made in the spirit of scratching my own itch. You might find it useful if you rewatch a lot of movies like I do and find yourself wondering “when did I last watch that?”

The Rewatchables

Version 1.0 is pretty basic but I’m thinking of adding things like stats and recommendations in the future.

Cereal box wisdom this morning:

Change your opinions, keep to your principles. — Victor Hugo

It reminded me of the common value seen at many tech companies to have “strong opinions loosely held”.

Considering how difficult of an ideal this is to uphold in a field where opinions are a dime a dozen and people are often inexperienced, I prefer Victor Hugo’s version. Because what’s important is not having opinions, but having principles that guide your practices.

My designer of a daughter has updated her web site and I think it looks great. Of course I’m totally biased and you shouldn’t take my word for it so go check it out right now!

40 goals for Crosby.

I can’t decide whether it speaks to his greatness that he’s still Pittsburgh’s best player at 36, or it shows how ordinary the rest of the team is.

Probably a bit of both.

I wish pedestrians didn’t make such a production out of it when I ring the bell on my bike. I just want to avoid surprising them, but most hurriedly turn around, grab their kids, and move waaaay out. Take it easy people, it’s not like my bike was 6 foot wide and I was going to plough right through you.

Ah, I bet things would be different if I lived in the Netherlands.

I disagree with Dan Moren and his piece about Apple TV. The problem with tvOS is that it’s often impossible to tell what the hell is currently focused or selected on any given screen. I use this thing every day and I still have to move focus around to figure out where it is.

That’s job number 1, Apple: highlight clearly what I’m interacting with. That’s it.

I always thought that ads were one of the worse things to plague modern life. But I’ve changed my mind. In the year 2024, no one can seemingly conduct business of any kind without requesting reviews.

Ad blocker? Checked.

Review request blocker?

My dad was at different times coach, recruiter, and referee for women’s hockey. He would have been excited to see the PWHL games. Sadly he passed away in November so he didn’t get that chance.

But in a satisfying twist, the PWHL Montreal team plays half their games blocks away from where he was born. That makes me happy.

Imagining how surgeons introduced themselves if they talked like software engineers…

“Are you backend or frontend?”

“I’m top-end.”

“Oh wow cool.”

The ArriveCAN app scandal is ridiculous. As someone who makes apps for a living, of course it doesn’t cost $60M+ to turn a paper form into an app with a database backend.

Of course. That is way, way, waaaayyyyy too much. No, the true cost is a lot less than that.

Tell you what, I’ll do it for $30M. Half price, what do you say?! Total deal!

Money has lost all meaning.

Christopher Nolan movies should come with not one but two sound level controls: voice and music.

I’ll let you guess which one should go up and which one should go down.

I’m not one to get anywhere close to Google Analytics, so for some time I’ve been trying out WP Statistics. I like that it runs and stores everything locally on my site. No sending data anywhere. And it presents the collected data very nicely. I’m far from an expert on web stuff, but this seems like a pretty good option.

I just read piece number 2 from Rebecca Saltzman on what she calls the Kingdom of the Sick. She writes with such a lovely hand, on a topic that is so devastating. Decoding the halls of medicine and finding your way through the maze is not easy. She describes it all beautifully.

Today’s quote of the day comes from Steve Joswiak:

The road to tech hell is paved by people who do things because they can, not because they should.

Yep.

It’s still only the first week but it’s pretty darn cool to be able to tune in and catch a women’s pro hockey game on TV several nights a week. It’s so normal!

The PWHL is up and running and it’s a treat to watch! I’m happy to finally see a pro league for women’s hockey. I’m especially glad to see the games being broadcast on TV and online so everyone can see how good it is.

My daughter played when she was little, and we watched Cassie Campbell lead Team Canada at the Olympics and went to see Hailey Wickenheiser play once, but women’s hockey never had the visibility it does now.

It’s going to help their game and their skill so much to play professionally, train every day, building rivalries, and competing against the best in the world. 👏🏻

I finally stopped my Quickbooks subscription. I wasn’t happy about the price continuing to rise, and it didn’t make sense any more considering the little amount of side-gig work that I bill.

A good thing to know is that Quickbooks remains read-only for a whole year after canceling.

So now I’ve switched everything over to Wave, which is free for the bits that I use.