Richard Audette's personal brain dump: Opinions, Projects, Toronto
In 2004, I was living in Toronto near Bathurst and Eglinton, and commuting by TTC to my job at a company that built control systems for pipe organs near Woodbine & John, in Markham - about 20 km. As spring approached, I thought it might be fun to try commuting by bike. I wasn’t 100% committed to the idea, so I was looking for something affordable - I found a used Miyata Civicross for which I paid…
This post was first published in The Evolving Analyst , a collection of writing on business analysis compiled by Marcus Udokang and Emal Bariali. Marcus and I discuss The Joy of Shipping on his podcast, The Inquisitive Analyst, which you can watch on YouTube . Epigraph “At Microsoft, there was no peer pressure to do anything except work and ship on time. If you did, you got a Ship-it Award.…
Introduction When I built my blogging bot in 2023, I spent time thinking about how to make it interesting - the best results came from making my bot sum up forum threads. But there was no discussion, no personality. I then tried creating bot-bot discussions . I’d thought about having it participate in Twitter threads, but decided it was one thing to post what we now call slop, another to try…
Introduction I was looking to spend some time to get a feeling for the current state of AI/LLM software development tools, and decided to try building a simple game using the OpenCode agent connected to the Claude Sonnet 4.5 LLM. I set out to build a 2 player lunar lander type game in the Godot game engine . I had never used Godot before. The Build Using OpenCode is a bit different from asking…
Download I Brought The Ages Home by Charles T. Currelly epub I read Charles T. Currelly’s autobiography, I Brought The Ages Home, a number of years ago. I found it to be such an interesting book - he was a real life Canadian Indiana Jones, leading archaeological digs and acquiring artifacts. He describes the late 1800s/early 1900s in Canada as a time full of promise and opportunity. Charles…
Background Since reading about James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s work entering the public domain in Canada in 2015 , I’ve thought about creating public domain ebooks that I could share online. At the time, I picked up a copy of Octopussy , and scanned it. I ran it through the OCR software bundled with the scanner I was using, and the results were pretty mediocre. At that time, the OCR…
Headphone Rant I have been frustrated with earbuds since mobile phone manufactures dropped the 1/8" inch headphone jack - I think this trend started with the iPhone 7 in 2016. After playing around with headphones with proprietary connectors and adapters for almost a decade, I decided to buy wireless ear buds in April 2024. I chose the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds II. I haven’t been impressed -…
Introduction I was fortunate to be able to spend time with one of my great-grandmothers, who lived until I was in my early 20s. We great-grandkids knew her as GG. GG was born in Lerwick in 1907. In 1912, her parents moved the family to Scotland’s mainland. She had my grandmother in 1928, and they left Scotland for Canada in 1930. So in 2024, when my wife and I were planning a trip to…
Introduction I was looking for something to read in June, and decided to read Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence, the author’s account of his leading the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire in World War I. The book was made into a movie, Lawrence of Arabia . As the author died in 1935, the book is long out of copyright, and I downloaded a free copy from Standard Ebooks .
Paddling is something I’ve associated with canoes and cottage country outside of the city. Living in a small space in Toronto, it didn’t seem like an activity I could take up, even though Toronto is located on the shores of Lake Ontario. That changed when a friend picked up a deeply discounted inflatable paddle board at Winners (an off-price department store) and I got the chance to try it out. It…