Omega Point

A decade in the life of…

Jan­u­ary 1, 2000
The Y2K bug does not result in air­planes falling from the sky, stock mar­kets crash­ing, or nuclear mis­siles launch­ing on their own. Pun­dits decry the waste­ful spend­ing of bil­lions to ensure noth­ing sig­nif­i­cant hap­pened. IT depart­ments world­wide sput­ter in bewil­der­ment. “But! But!”

Octo­ber, 2000
I come out to a few select friends and fam­ily. My par­ents imme­di­ately fight over which one of them is most accept­ing of it. It later turns out the answer is “neither”.

Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001
The Amer­i­can Cen­tury comes to a close. The sub­se­quent decade sees West­ern civ­i­liza­tion dig its heels in, ineptly seek­ing secu­rity and short-term gains at all costs. I watch CNN for 6 months straight.

Octo­ber 23, 2001
Apple releases the iPod. I fail to see what the big deal is. Investors dis­agree sig­nif­i­cantly on this point.

Decem­ber 20, 2002
“Sec­ond Life? What’s that?” I ask as I click the link. “What a stu­pid name!”

Feb­ru­ary 1, 2003
I move to Van­cou­ver on an ill-advised whim. The next three years are…interesting. To this day, I still wake up think­ing cock­roaches are eat­ing dead skin off my face.

Jan­u­ary 14, 2006
Some dude cuts most of my face off and totally goes to town on my skull with power tools. For­tu­nately, he was a doc­tor. I can breathe through my nose now.

August, 2006
As a part-time con­tract LSL devel­oper, I am paid in US dol­lars. Cur­rency fluc­tu­a­tions force me to give up LSL devel­op­ment in favour of work­ing a min­i­mum wage retail job. I like it a lot better.

Novem­ber 18, 2006
I man­age to get pub­lished for the first time. It is not exactly my finest work.

Decem­ber 20, 2006
I’ve just been told about this new CMS that’s sup­posed to be pretty good. “Dru­pal? More like Poo–pal!” I exclaim to a cir­cle of blank, embar­rassed faces. Nice.

April 21, 2007
A lab test indi­cates I may have can­cer. Sub­se­quent tests indi­cate I have stress. I con­sider rem­e­dy­ing both by hav­ing alcoholism.

July 22, 2008
My Palm Treo dies. I buy an iPhone. Unfor­tu­nately, every­one I know can be divided into two camps: Peo­ple who already have iPhones and peo­ple who don’t care that I am now the coolest per­son ever.

August 15, 2008
I learn my knee pain is likely to be the result of osteoarthri­tis. At such an early age, the impli­ca­tion is that I will not be able to walk in 10 years.

Sep­tem­ber 1, 2008
I am told I do not have osteoarthri­tis after all. As such, I am likely to con­tinue walk­ing for some time. “Your knees look great,” the doc­tor says, peer­ing at the x-ray. “Say, how much exer­cise do you get?”

Jan­u­ary 1-Dec 31, 2009
I endure a great deal of bull­shit. My friends are kept appraised of the situation–to their dismay.

And that’s what I did dur­ing the aughts. How about you?

Sure, we can put a man on the moon, but we can’t put–oh, right.

Eugene Cer­nan walks on the moon, Dec 13, 1972

I’m skep­ti­cal of the use­ful­ness of manned space­flight, even as I believe in its long-term neces­sity. (Besides, should it be nec­es­sary for humans to leave Earth, we could get that going on fairly short order. The technology’s straight­for­ward, even if we don’t have inter­plan­e­tary ships today.)

I was born almost a decade after the last time a human stepped foot on the moon. The Apollo pro­gram was Cold War nose-thumbing and sabre-rattling at its most bla­tant. It was a cor­po­rate boon­dog­gle on a scale scarcely seen since. It was a dis­trac­tion from the hor­rors of Viet­nam and from the wan­ing pop­u­lar­ity of two Presidents.

Land­ing on the moon was also the most impres­sive thing humans have ever achieved.

Despite all its flaws, I’ve been a big sup­porter of the space pro­gram for my entire life. Build­ing bet­ter tele­scopes and probes is absolutely nec­es­sary for the same rea­sons the Large Hadron Col­lider is nec­es­sary: because if we don’t seek out knowl­edge about the uni­verse, if we don’t appre­ci­ate it, what the hell is the point?

36 years ago today, Eugene Cer­nan and Har­ri­son Schmitt stepped into their lunar mod­ule and returned home, the last humans to step foot on another world. That’s not appre­ci­at­ing it, guys.

Blogathon 2009: Brewery Creek & Tea Swamp

So when I’m not try­ing to rat­tle off 50 blog posts a day from Gas­town, I live at the bot­tom of two hills on an avenue I will describe for hipster-credibility pur­poses as “just off Main Street.” I’m cool now, right guys?

My house is sit­u­ated directly on top of Tea Swamp, an off­shoot of Brew­ery Creek. Con­se­quently, the ground is not what engi­neers gen­er­ally con­sider to be “solid”, as they say.

16th Avenue. That’s… different.

As pre­vi­ously men­tioned, my neigh­bour­hood is com­posed almost com­pletely of two-storey, base­ment­less, concrete-slab-foundationed Van­cou­ver Spe­cials sink­ing into the muck. There’s also one impressively-designed house that’s not going any­where. On the other hand, the roads and side­walks around it are shift­ing most enter­tain­ingly. (This doesn’t make cycling nearly as awe­some as it sounds, believe me.)

From False Creek: Then and Now

Today, aside from a good thou­sand houses list­ing to one side, the only other sign of the under­ground rivers that once dot­ted East Van­cou­ver are the now stag­nant Trout Lake, where tonight I hope some­one will be Blo­gath­on­ning the Illu­minares lantern fes­ti­val, the myr­iad orange man­hole cov­ers, iden­ti­fy­ing their con­tents as a cul­verted stream rather than storm sewer or waste­water, and the Tea Swamp Park com­mu­nity gar­den located at Main and 16th.

So really, that’s a lot.

There are ongo­ing plans to reha­bil­i­tate many of the cul­verted streams beneath Van­cou­ver, the most promi­nent exam­ple of which is located next to Super­store on Grand­view High­way. Impres­sively, it’s actu­ally home to beavers… who promptly cut down all the trees in the park­ing lot. But you know, that’s what happens.