Thursday, December 31, 2015

Greetings for Christmas 2015, and New Years 2016


Just when I thought the dust had settled on this year's Christmas celebrations, yesterday the postman delivered the ModernVespa.com 2015 gift exchange present. I got to the door as the driver was climbing into his truck and we exchanged enthusiastic waves in a scene reminiscent of a Saturday Evening Post Norman Rockwell Christmas cover.

Saturday, December 26, 2015

With the help of the Empire, I strike back

I slid onto my perch and looked Kitchen Mac straight in the screen. I was focused. Reestablishing order and control over whatever was slowly going wrong among the wayward applications in my digital domain was mission critical. Keeping my collection of music and art out of harm's way was an objective I would reach.

Saturday, December 19, 2015

Music and images

I believe that art, in all its forms, is the essence of our humanity. I will go further, and argue that the arts drive our evolution more than any other aspect of our being.

Long before the Motorola flip phone became a consumer product, there was the Star Trek communicator. Jules Verne explored ocean depths long before Jacques Cousteau did. Man walked on the moon in July 1969, but Jules Verne wrote about it more than one hundred years earlier, and Tintin made it there in 1954. Leonardo da Vinci explored human winged flight five centuries before the Wright brothers broke the bonds of gravity at Kitty Hawk.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

The laws of nature vs the nature of laws

Sometimes humour, even dark humour, accomplishes more, in a single sound bite or hastily drawn cartoon, than reams of newsprint, gallons of ink, and endless 'breaking news' segments can manage.

Sunday, December 13, 2015

Rider profile: Mike Fritz

Name: Michael Fritz
Find me on Earth: Cornwall, Ontario
Find me Online: http://vstromamericas.com
Interview Date: Saturday, December 12, 2015
Interview Location: Cornwall, Ontario

Life on two wheels: When did you start riding, how old were you?

Mike: I was 5 years old when my father bought my brother and I a blue plastic battery operated bike. It was only meant for indoor use and surely I drove my folks batty driving it all the time. I was 8 or 9 when my friend bought his first dirt bike and I rode it as much as he did. I was hooked for life. At 16 got my first street bike and only went back to a dirt bike in 2014.

Life on two wheels: How many motorbikes have you owned?

Mike: 7 bikes.

Life on two wheels: What is your current bike, and is the current bike your favorite?

Thursday, December 10, 2015

Lunch with Peter and Mike

I had to be in Ottawa yesterday for a meeting at four o'clock. It made sense to seize the opportunity to drop in on Peter Sanderson.

Peter had some business to look after in the morning and suggested we get together for lunch. He was already meeting Mike Fritz to celebrate Mike's birthday and asked me to tag along.

That meant three bloggers getting together to celebrate a birthday, what could be finer?

Allow me to introduce Mike Fritz.

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Monday, December 7, 2015

Winter ride

I was seriously remiss.

I borrowed camping equipment for my July trek to the Adirondacks, and hadn't yet returned it to Marlene.

The weather gods are holding off the snow, at least for the time being. So today I made good.

Sunday, December 6, 2015

Comfort food: Heirloom spaghetti and meatballs


Do you know why humans achieved so much more, in the course of evolution, than any other animal on the planet?

The proximate cause, of course, is that we are the smartest.

Saturday, November 28, 2015

Life and death at the crossroads

Events continue to cascade in my life. It's been unremitting since May. The pace of change is something to behold.

Most recently I lost my Dad, on the twelfth of November. Out of the blue.

It's not a sad story, it truly isn't. Denis led a very happy full life. For the last six or seven years he was afflicted with progressive memory loss. He was in remarkably good spirits for the most part. That much hadn't changed. I believe his failing memory served to insulate him, to a degree, from his growing frailty and the ever-shrinking sphere of his existence. Then, in a matter of minutes or hours, a stroke took his life. He was eighty-six.

I've had this post on the subject of happiness simmering gently on the back burner for a little over a month. It's high time to publish it before something else happens, like the barbaric,

Monday, November 23, 2015

Remembering

On November 11th I went to the Last Post military cemetery in Pointe Claire.

I have written about this place once or twice before. Here time stands still. Twenty thousand servicewomen and servicemen have been laid to rest in the cemetery. My grandfather Georges Terroux, who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War I, is one of them.

It was a privilege to be here on Remembrance Day. The cemetery was well attended.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

Been fiddlin'

Today I managed to implement about ninety percent of the changes to this journal that have been rattling around in my brain for many, many, months.

I have to say that translating the thoughts in my head into reasonably well-behaved pixels on the screen has been as painful as I thought it would be.

Authoring any digital media, whether it's software programming, graphic content like photos, or the look and feel of a blog, is fairly obsessive work. Trial and error, error and trial, trial and error. That, and the occasional epiphany when, on the very cusp of total frustration, something finally works. There are far too many moving parts between what this blog looked like for the past five years, and where it is now. I won't bore you with the details.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Runnin' errands

I haven't posted much lately. We bloggers come, and we go.

Some of the going is voluntary, some is imposed.

I have come to the end of some roads. Other roads beckon.

If I was a commuter, now I run errands. Like a run to Costco last week, to buy new cordless phones.

Monday, September 28, 2015

2015 Blogger to Blogger Tour - Epilogue, and lessons learned

It's been a long time between posts. The main reason is that the past two months have been, by some measures, the best and busiest of our lives. There was the annual conference of the national organization I chair that was, for the first time ever, held in Montreal. As soon as that ended we celebrated the marriage of our eldest son. Sonja and Roland came to visit, then Susan and I went on an amazing trip that took us to Edmonton, Jasper Park, Vancouver, and Maui. Phew.

Along the way, I worked on this post, mostly during our flights. I hope you will find it was worth the long wait. 

I'm getting slightly more experienced with touring. That means I still have a lot to learn.

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Toying with Templates; Flirting with Failure

I've dropped hints about wanting to make changes to the way this ongoing story is presented.

The choices are unfortunately unlimited.

It's like shopping for a BMW vehicle with an unlimited budget. Sedan? SUV? Limousine? No problem. Suede headliner? 100,000 LED mood-lit interior? Built-in cigar humidor in the console? No problem. No kidding. I was chatting with Billy at Canbec BMW just the other day. Got millions to piss away to annoy your siblings and leave your heirs breathless and nervous? No better place to start than by ordering a custom seven series sedan with oodles and oodles of options and doo-dads.
The copyright in all text and photographs, except as noted, belongs to David Masse.