I had wanted to post this earlier, but then my country and the US entered into a trade war and I felt that posting anything that might promote the US would be in bad taste. I became emotionally paralyzed and did not write anything for a long time. But then something happened on September 10 which made me reconsider my position on a lot of things, and then I realized the importance of sharing happiness and joy in this world. This post is dated as of the date it was supposed to be posted; this paragraph to explain the delay was added after. So with no further ado, let me take you to Orlando Part 2: Universal Studios.

We decided to take an early spring vacation to Orlando, Florida at the end of March. Given the current political climate, you might be wondering if this was a wise choice. In my defense, we booked this vacation back in December of 2024, before Donald Trump started his tariff war against my country and announced his desire to annex Canada. We actually considered cancelling this trip, but realized we would be losing money and missing out on a unique opportunity to return to a place my wife and I had visited 29 years ago. We didn’t feel the political climate was going to improve at any point in the foreseeable future, and it’s hard enough for the three of us (my son, my wife, and myself) to get a week off from our jobs at the same time, so we decided to take one last trip to the United States before all hell really breaks loose.

As we move into the heating season here in southern Ontario, I have been thinking about a trend whenever evidence is presented for the promotion of a new “Green” technology, where heat is described as an undesirable “Waste” product. For example, it’s been long understood that the incandescent light bulb converts 5% of the energy it uses into light, and the other 95% is “wasted” as heat. The same is said about the internal combustion engine; that a lot of the energy is heat waste. It seems to me whoever came up with these conclusions is pretty ignorant of the reality of the world I live in. Perhaps these conclusions are of people who are fortunate enough to live in warmer climates closer to the tropic of Cancer than I do. I will now put a light on my own reality with some graphs.

So one of my favourite podcasts went into radio silence. I am of course talking about Hacker Public Radio, a free culture and technology oriented podcast, to which I have contributed a few episodes, in the spirit of listener generated content. I haven’t done a podcast in a while, spending more time in the real world, taking a break from tech and getting back to basics and messing around with my bicycles. I still tuned in once in a while, which is how I came to learn through other sources that I was no longer able to download any new episodes due to the fact that the Internet Archive was hacked. The Internet Archive is the server where episodes of hacker public radio were served from.

I broke a spoke on the rear wheel of my Trek FX-3 hybrid bike, so I decided to switch back to my 28 year old Raleigh Tarantula mountain bike I’ve owned since 1996 for my commute to work today.

Sally has the same model in the same colour in her size so we would have matching bikes. This is the bike I left locked up at Union Station when I worked downtown Toronto in 2012, and it would be faithfully waiting for me every morning I stepped off the train. It’s the bike I used to tow my son in a bicycle trailer when he was little. It’s also been on many camping adventures with us, including riding the famous Track and Tower at Algonquin Park. There’s a lot of history in this mountain bike, and that is the reason why I maintain it. That, and it’s a great steel frame mountain bike from the 90’s with classic powerful cantilever brakes that you just don’t see on bicycles anymore.