Day 2 of Getting To Montreal The Hard Way kicks off with my new morning routine of taping up my feet has been great for blister protection My water filter kit still sits in its bag unused. I have a feeling this kit won’t stay with me past Kingston. I brought this based on thruhiking recommendations. It gets added to the list because thruhikers on the PCT, AT, etc. don’t have water taps available…
First leg kicked off with a walk from the CN Tower through Biidaasige Park with Mer. Took a pit stop to have a coffee with my friend Adam. Now I’m en route to Bowmanville to walk my second leg of the day to Newcastle. Yesterday I discovered this heat map feature on Strava which shows all of your recorded activities on a single map. So it very neatly shows the complete route I pre-walked going in.…
I wrote about my sabbatical plan here 4 months ago: https://nowuh.com/landing-on-a-sabbatical-plan Since then I've been busy preparing and getting married. This Saturday, 6 days away as of me typing this, I will set off on my walk to Montreal. I've gone through different gear (hello new backpack and boots) including things I bought for this trip that I now realize I won't use and learned a lot…
I found it remarkably true what people say about this being the happiest day of your life. I'm filled with so much love and happiness towards Mer and the life we've built so far, and for the life we're going to continue to build together. I'm still replaying memories of that day in my head. What I didn't find was that it went by in a flash. In some ways it went by at the speed of any other day.…
At the start of the year, I posted this about everything that's coming out of my account every month as a subscription. I wanted to check back in on this now that it's been almost five months. Note: I'm using voice-to-text software to write this, specifically Wispr Flow, because I recently broke my finger and it's very difficult to type with the cast on. My recurring payments of of this writing…
34KMs in the books. Still need to work on how to properly adjust my bag shoulders were really feeling it at the end. Had to pop into a Shoppers near the end to get some blister patches. I’m feeling good that after consistently practicing like this I can reach Montreal :) Last night after recovering from the hike I went through and reorganized my pack. Currently I’m at 19lbs without food or water.…
Next month will be my five year anniversary at my my current company, Wealthsimple. We already get 20 days of PTO but at five years you become eligible for a sabbatical of an additional 20 days (so roughly a month in calendar days. They have to be taken all at once and can't be combined with another period of leave. This is a pretty cool opportunity. Normally to get this much time off you have to…
My music owning experience in life has been a story of jumping from one monolith to another. It started with iTunes. Buy from the store or rip a CD, all in iTunes and then synced to device. Then it was Spotify and a variety of other streaming services. Now you have every single analogue/anti-algorithm/minimalist yelling, buy an iPod! Own your own music. And to be clear, I am absolutely one of…
I went to see Franc Moody at the Danforth Music Hall on Tuesday. I bought the tickets only knowing one song: But I thought it was such a bop and I don't mind going to shows knowing little or nothing. The show was good, not great, the first half I was pretty surprised by how low energy it was for an electronic heavy band. It really picked up in the second half and drove it home at the end with a…
Updated: My email is no longer my blog, but I've linked to a copy . Turns out I really like posting to my blog via an email. For several years I've been using Fastmail for my email and calendar. I love it! But the entire time there's been a "sites" feature to host a static website that I've toyed with but never really used. What I've really wanted to use it for all of these years is to host my…
Matt Andersen must be 300 years old. That's the only way to explain how one man's voice can sound like it had several lifetimes of experience. Massey Hall was both the best and worst place to host this country-blues singer when my Fiancée and I went to see him this past Friday. On one hand, there's few places in Toronto that have the acoustics to do his music justice. Backed up by an incredibly…
Our phones are Soma Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds. A nod to subscriptions today 'Look at him working away in the lunch hour,' said Parsons, nudging Winston. 'Keenness, eh? What's that you've got there, old boy? Something a bit too brainy for me, I expect. Smith, old boy, I'll…
The Verge’s Installer recently asked their readers to provide some details and feedback about their favourite devices and services from non Google/Amazon/Apple providers. I accidentally made a blog post in the email, attaching that below. ---- Hey! Heard your callout for people dropping services from the big guys. (Top list at the bottom) I’m emailing you from my Fastmail account that I started…
I've tried a lot of fitness classes over the years and I've only found a couple things that I've enjoyed. My current one is Spinning. Yoga and Boxing are also up there but with asterisks. Through trial and error I've figured out what makes me not want to do a fitness class: Difficult to access -- if it takes me more than 30 minutes to get there and it's not on the way to something else (like work)…
There's a tendency for me to want to try to find the new perfect thing to replace a whole host of things. I've now understood for a while that "nothing" is a very good replacement. Much much harder said than done. For instance, do I need a full fledged file management and syncing system? Or is just having a good photo backup service and using the very basic file storage in Fastmail good enough?…
2025 is almost over and I've once again decided to turn my attention to the constant quest to be more intentional. What this has really meant for me is to waste less time and do things I love doing and spend as much time with people in my life. In previous years, incredibly, I didn't actually spell this out. It was more of get dumbphone and my life will be perfect . I've had to grapple with what…
I recently picked up an iPad after not having one for a few years. I definitely don’t need it but I find them very fun. iPadOS 26 pushed me over the edge to get it and am currently rocking the current beta. The features they added with window tiling and just overall making it more computer-y is very welcome. I probably won’t replace my MacBook Air when the time comes because an iPad with a…
I can write absolutely anything here. And it’ll appear. Coming from the world of computers, this is the most wonderful idea. There is basically nothing I can do with just my brain and the keyboard attached to my iPad that will make this website crash and burn. Maybe my point won’t get across, maybe my English will be a bit garbled or covered in typos. But nonetheless, when I hit publish there is…
I read one of those Silicon Valley self-help/motivational books once that said something to the effect of you should try to create more than you consume. I’m pretty sure that’s the reason I still have an active blog. I wanted to have a low resistance way of making stuff where I could just throw things out into the ether. Every year it does feel like I have more things that make it possible for me…
Bounced over last weekend to ride the Line 2+4 LRT expansion. Rode the very nice TransitWay BRT for the first time as well. First pic is Line 1 oops.
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My first election as a Canadian citizen! I can finally vote :)
At some point in March 2020, shortly after it was clear that life as we knew it was on pause indefinitely, I wanted to stock up my fridge and bar with the essentials: gin & beer. To limit my exposure, I wanted to get enough so I wouldn’t need to go to the LCBO for at least another month. I grabbed the largest backpack I had and set out on foot. I came home with at least two bottles of gin and…
All of these are due for April 30th, 2021. Let’s start the year strong! 3 Month Emergency Fund In Cash Combined with my RRSPs, I have more than that goal. I want to build back up that savings account back up. * Read 3 non-fiction books I want to get better at technical writing. The advice I’ve heard over and over is you need to read and take note of how people write. Progress: 0/3 Release 10…
Start with Part 1 for the rundown on what’s going on here I just finished the first book in this challenge. This post is going to start with a sad story: my Kobo ate all of the highlights and notes I made in this book. Lesson learned that I should have started writing this blog post while I was reading. The Book Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?: Christian Identity in…
A few years ago, I made it a point to focus my reading list around books on Canada. I certainly knew more than the average American about the “True North”, which can no doubt be credited to me living there. But I didn’t really know Canada. I didn’t know a lot about the history, what it means to be Canadian (a feat I hope to achieve in the next few years). I was creating my own “Canadian History…
I’m about to embark on a road trip to knock a few more state capitols off of my list. I’ve done a lot of solo road trips; normally, I have my iPhone playing music, podcasts and my turn-by-turn directions. A pretty standard setup for a road trip these days. For the first time, I’m going to try to do without the turn-by-turn directions. I’ll have my iPad with the maps downloaded for all of the…
Fun little fact, do you know the difference between capital and capitol? Capital is the place, capitol is the building. Your senator works in the US Capitol in Washington DC, the capital of the US. For the past five years or so I’ve been trying to hit every single US state capitol building. As a rule, I only count it if I actually step foot on the grounds of the capitol. Preferably, I go inside…
Sometime in the beginning of 2017 I first became aware of the idea of living “Zero Waste”. First introduced to the idea when Lauren Singer was featured as the mystery guest on NPR’s Ask Me Another and she talked about her mason jar that represented her trash over however many months. Screw that. That was my sincere initial reaction. As months passed by I began to see every single piece of trash I…