:: August 12 2004 ::

20 years ago... When I was in Grade 6, my friends and I were obsessed with a new computer roleplaying game: Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. This game broke new ground and remains highly regarded as one of the major works in CRPG history. Unfortunately, I didn't own a Commodore 64 or Apple ][ at the time, and never got the opportunity to complete the game.

Twenty years later, thanks to the quality work of the XU4 group, I've finally been able to return to the lands of Britannia, and complete the quest of the Avatar. While the game may be very dated by today's standards, I still found it challenging, and deeply admire the brilliance of the design: a quest where there is no great evil to defeat, but rather the goal is perfection of the self... becoming the Avatar of Virtue.

You can get XU4 for Mac, Windows, or Linux at http://xu4.sourceforge.net/.

:: October 12 2003 ::

Damn I gotta update this more often.

I love doing web design, I'm fairly decent at it, and I've enjoyed freelancing the last several years. But the last two years, with the economic slump we're in, I've been finding it much harder to find work and get clients. It also doesn't help that I'm not an aggressive self-promoter or very good at selling. Working at home also let me get into a rut, and I was getting depressed about not having work, spending my time playing games rather than contacting potential clients, which of course didn't help the situation at all.

So I decided I needed to find something else; and after looking semi-seriously for a couple months, I found something that I'm well suited for. I'm now working as a Service Technician at a Macintosh store. I love Macs, know them inside & out, and I'm quite technically inclined.

While the pay is a fraction of what I made freelancing (when I had work coming in), I'm making more than I have in quite a while because it's steady work. It's providing some MUCH needed stability so I can take care of some debts that were building up due to not making enough from web design, and now I have breathing room to think about what direction I'd like to take next. The work is interesting and challenging, I enjoy dealing with the customers (an amazing number of cute girls own Macs!), my coworkers are all nice to work with, and the daily routine & getting out of the house I think has been good for me.

So I'm pursuing my Apple Certification (which will give me plenty of job security, there's few people in this city with it), and I've picked up the job skills fairly quickly. I've only destroyed one expensive Powerbook. It's definitely time-consuming (9 hour days), but it's also only a 10 minute walk from home (very simple!). Once my debts are clear I can start thinking about what to do next: this probably isn't a permanent career, but it's definitely something I can do for a year or two while I look for something else. Maybe web design again, or software development, but I think if I'm working on my own in future I'd need to do it outside the house. I could also do Mac-related consulting, network administration, etc. I'm also interested in writing, and doing something related to the issues that are important to me: sustainability, urban planning, population, environment, etc. Regardless, I'm very glad to have joined the 9-5 (or 6 in this case) world again for a while, with the stability it offers.

:: October 17, 2002 ::
Here's a whole lot of links related to the Vancouver Civic Elections.

For balance & fairness, here's the ruling NPA [Non-Partisan Alliance] party's site.

Despite their claim to be a non-partisan party, their decisions in council consistently show a favoring for wealthier residents of Vancouver, and have let issues in the east side linger while spending money on the west side.

Note that they kicked long-time NPA Mayor Philip Owen out of the party because of disagreements over his 4-pillar approach to solving the drug problems in the downtown eastside.

Jennifer Clarke is the NPA's mayoral candidate. Jennifer Clarke Quotes, Quotes from the media about Jennifer Clarke.

COPE [Coalition of Progressive Electors] is the left wing opposition party. In the previous session of city council, they've had two council members, to the NPA's 8 + mayor. The full list of COPE council candidates.

Fred Bass consistently argued for pro-cycling initiatives, and to my knowledge is the only city council member who regularly uses cycling & transit to get to work. He's a bit of an awkward speaker, but clearly passionate about environmental issues facing the city, transit, and seems fairly competent.

Tim Louis has been in city politics for several years, being on the Parks Board previous to city council, and has been a constant thorn in the side of the NPA. I'm glad people keep electing him. He is extremely articulate and argues his points in council very well.

The COPE mayoral candidate is Larry Campbell, former BC Chief Coroner, and police officer. He is strongly in favor of continuing Owen's four pillars approach. In an article in the Georgia Straight a couple years ago, he surprised many by coming out in favor of legalizing drugs so that addicts could be treated, rather than criminalized.

COPE's platform on various issues. COPE and NPA's voting history. Lists of the COPE candidates for Parks and School boards.

The Green Party is also running several candidates for City Council, Parks and Schools.

Hope all this provides food for thought. Remember, the election is Saturday, November 16. You can find out about how & where to vote.

Oh and, how many people voted last time? It was 94271 people out of 256361 registered voters. 36.77%. That's fewer than 100,000 people deciding the policies in a city of 545,000 people, 80% of whom are voting age.

:: August 23, 2002 ::
Someone recently got me thinking about astrology. I had this to say:

A long time ago, ancient people such as the Babylonians and later, the Greeks, believed that the Earth was at the center of the universe, and the Moon, Sun, planets and stars all spun around the Earth, mounted on vast, interconnected crystal spheres. The philosopher Plato and his followers such as Aristotle went into great detail calculating how many spheres there were and how they were connected. Astrologers believed that vibrations from the outermost sphere, which held the stars (and the zodiac) resonated inwards, affected by all the planetary spheres, eventually to affect the earth itself, and its inhabitants.

2000 years later, it was initially Copernicus and then Galileo who discovered, simply by looking at the night sky and plotting the movement of the Sun, Moon, and planets, that the Earth was not at the center, but rather it was the Sun, and the planets each orbited the Sun, with only the moon orbiting the Earth. Galileo of course was attacked by the Church for heresy, and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life for not recanting his theory that the Earth was not the center of the universe. It wasn't until this century that the Catholic Church admitted their mistake. Later, Isaac Newton described gravity as the force that draws the Moon towards the Earth, the planets to the Sun, and apples to the ground. No crystal spheres, no cosmic harmonics.

So aside from that, I have another opinion on astrology: it leads people to believe that they can put people in little boxes based on when they were born; like "Virgo" or "Sagittarius", which have an arbitrary set of qualities ("analytical and exacting", or "truth-seeking and easy-going") assigned to them. Then when people exhibit these qualities, they reinforce a simple stereotype, and we might miss any behaviors they have that don't actually fit the mold we want them to fit. So in fact this view of people, in my opinion, LIMITS our perceptions of other people.

I believe we should learn about other people simply through getting to know them; not by drawing on prejudices whether based on their skin color, their ancestry, or the time and date of their birth.

I think the universe is an amazing place; and early on I was awed by the night sky. I love astronomy. I don't think science is boring, or unromantic; rather, I think we should let the universe should reveal itself to us as it really is, and we don't need to make up mystical sounding explanations for things when the reality (such as relativity and quantum mechanics) is interesting enough on its own.