Apple’s M2 Pro MacBookis a wicked fast production machine. The Spy’s reader will recall he got one to replace his 2019 MacBook Pro, which has never been very rugged, reliable or power smart, and has now been relegated to recording his lectures and uploading them to Streams. The new machine never gets warm even when […]
…like an arrow (a) “but fruit flies like a banana”, is an excellent sentence to illustrate the difficulty that speakers of other languages have in learning English. Even most who grew up in English could not parse the parts of speech in the following: “Did you know that…that that that that that that followed was […]
This month, has some pretty important dates, and all in a row, starting with the fourteenth, fondly known by mathematicians as pi day. The Spy is unaware of a type of pie that would not be a favourite, unless someone makes it with kidney or liver. Moreover, pi philology has come a long way since […]
Last month, the Spy said of the botched Ecoline window installation: “Yes, if one can believe the scheduling department, the installers shall return(!) on January 4 (that’s 2023 BTW) to fix their errors and damage, install a long list of items missing from the first delivery, and make everything honkey-dory. But given the history of […]
To talk of many things but rather than ‘shoes and ships, and sealing-wax, Of cabbages and Kings, And why the sea is boiling hot, And whether pigs have wings,’ and also with apologies to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the Spy will instead speak of windows, wackiness, and the weather, Of controllers and cameras, Of furnaces and […]
The Spy was working in his woods a few months back, trying to rehabilitate a trail that had been washed out when his little creek became a raging torrent this time last year as the mother of all atmospheric rivers struck the area, causing Sumas Lake, which had been drained for farmland a century earlier, […]
Apologies to our impatient reader for the extreme lateness of this column. The Spy is attempting two full time jobs at once (his own and that of his boss, who has a concussion) plus handle the fiscal year end and budget for his church, and that of the Science faculty, all at once. Moreover, he […]
The Webb Bang No, that is not a spelling error, but a reference to the James Webb telescope, successor to the Hubble platform, and capable of producing images of long ago and far away. Initial results are disconcerting, as they seem to blow up long accepted models for the “early” universe, by revealing spiral galaxies […]
The Spy’s Reader who’s been lurking around here a while will be familiar with his many discourses on the mutual effects of society and technology upon each other (including the entire currently-being-revised textbook on that theme referenced below among his web sites). In order of technological sophistication, the three (kinds of) civilization to date are/were […]
Is There Enough energy available to power our planet? Russia’s war of aggression and nation destruction has the obvious consequences of squeezing Western Europe on energy supply, as much of the oil and gas for that region comes from there–a deal done with the devil with payment now coming due, as Russia is counting on […]
It’s often been said that half of Physics can be summed up in the sentence “You can’t push on a rope.” The other half is: T M A U H S W T Well, the Spy has said both often enough, at least. It’s a common belief, reinforced by a boatload of Speculative Fiction led […]
Technologically speaking it has been the worst of months, it has been the best of months, or perhaps neither. On the low tech side of things, the Acme engine (never terrific) on his 40+ year old BCS Mainline walk behind tractor that he lately uses only as a tiller, choked out its last while preparing […]
The Spy has it on good authority that on Monday next week after the markets close, Apple will announce the takeover of one-time rival IBM for a cash and stock package valued at $162B, just under a 25% premium over where the latter’s stock was trading this week. Given that Apple’s own market cap at […]
Last Month’s chat ended with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are no doubt laughing at the North Americans who must seem to them bent on destroying the very democracy we once touted as superior to their brutal and genocidal dictatorships. Surely they can now go to war, annex their neighbours (and eventually us) into a […]
A couple of recent purchases are worth a mention here. First up is Apple’s second generation TV+ Siri remote –product A2540 with the aluminum case, now sold with the Apple TV. 4K, but also available for standalone purchase. This is the replacement for earlier iterations of the Siri remote in the black case–a rather poorly […]
On the world stage, 2021 started with the failed violent coup attempt against the government in Washington, proceeded through an assortment of bad to worse COVID-19 news, the Afghanistan fiasco, deepening hostile divisions in the formerly more temperate and tolerant United States, worsening political situations in many parts of the world, the first potential breezes […]
It used to be that the three most important things to business success were location, location, and location. Today they are the content of your inventory, the content of your web site that permits access to ordering said inventory, and how content you make your customers (you don’t want your reputation slagged on social media […]
Some four decades ago when many of us knew some form of net-based document linkage was coming, just not who would instantiate it and what form it would take, the Spy coined the term “metalibrary” to refer to the collection of all a society’s knowledge, in whatever medium, together with the means of accessing them. […]
To the thieves who stole jewelry from my Bradner home on September 16–two questions: 1. How much did your fence give you for 52 priceless years of memories? Enough for a couple of fixes each of your favourite narcotic? 2. Why didn’t you also take the flowers in the living room? You could have made […]
Joyce Sutcliffe March 5 1947 – August 27, 2021 Joyce Arlene Sutcliffe (nee Madland) was born at home in Surrey, B.C. on March 5, 1947 to Philip and Grace (Halls) Madland and lived her early life near Whalley’s corner. Her parents were in fellowship at Westminster Gospel Chapel, where at a young age she accepted […]