A methodical practice, first learned with greasy hands on steel frames, now applied to clean abstractions in cloud architecture.
My journey into professional bicycle mechanics began at Bike Pirates, a non-profit co-op in Toronto’s west end, where I learned the fundamentals. From there, I transitioned to Urbane Cyclist, a worker co-operative that profoundly shaped my approach to technical work. Urbane was more than just a shop; it was a hub for Toronto’s cycling scene, a community held together by shared values and, often, shared roti meals from Gandhi’s during staff meetings and parties.
This guide is my own synthesis. I have walked many paths—learning from yoga, meditation, Shin Buddhism, Aikido, Tai Chi, and shiatsu—yet I have never fully belonged to a single teacher, dojo, or sangha. While I am deeply grateful for the lessons from each tradition, I found myself without a central anchor.
So, I have chosen to become my own. This is not a rejection of those teachings, but an integration of them. Here, I distill the core of the core principles that resonate across disciplines into a practical framework for navigating the world with awareness, compassion, and purpose.
Each hand feels one part
Declares the whole elephant known
Truth requires many hands
There’s an ancient story about blind men encountering an elephant for the first time. One feels the trunk and declares the elephant is like a snake. Another touches the leg and insists it’s like a tree. A third grasps the tail and argues it’s like a rope. Each is certain they understand the whole animal based on their limited experience, and each is wrong in their certainty.
A measured approach for the Government of Canada’s digital future.
Digital rivers flow
Between open and closed banks
Sovereignty grows
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the Government of Canada faces decisions that will shape our technological capabilities for generations. The conversation has matured beyond simplistic choices between open source and proprietary solutions toward a more nuanced understanding of how both can serve the public interest in different contexts.
We don’t live long—two, maybe three years if the cars miss us and the
coyotes stay north. But we remember. We have to. Memory is our map,
passed from mother to kit, from dumpster to dumpster, through alleyways
slick with stale broth, under the Gardiner’s concrete sigh, past the
tents near Lamport and the benches of Grange Park: the legend of Skinny.
Open source, proprietary software, and the search for digital harmony
Code flows like water
Between open and closed banks
Balance is the way
The contemporary technological landscape presents a fundamental philosophical tension between competing models of software creation and distribution. This tension between open and closed, free and proprietary, communal and corporate represents one of the defining ideological struggles of the digital era. The conflict transcends mere technical or business considerations, touching upon deeper questions about power, freedom, and the nature of creation in the 21st century.
Canadian Expeditionary Force
Mule Skinner
Vimy Ridge
Reginald Mulkins Portrait
Diary Pages Preserved: 41 Pages
Time Period Covered: March - April 1917
Historic Battle: Vimy Ridge
The Boy Who Became a Soldier
In the twilight of his childhood, Reginald Mulkins made a choice that would forever alter the trajectory of his life. At sixteen, with the world embroiled in a conflict of unprecedented scale, he stood before the recruitment officer and added years to his age with a steady hand and a resolute heart. He was not alone in this deception—approximately 20,000 underage Canadians would follow the same path, driven by a complex tapestry of patriotism, economic necessity, and the irresistible call of adventure that war, in its cruel irony, often presents to the young.
Open Source, Closed Source, and the New Collaborators.
Twenty-five years after Eric S. Raymond’s influential “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” we find ourselves in a software landscape that defies the simple binaries of that earlier era. The revolution didn’t end with one model’s decisive victory over the other. Instead, we’ve witnessed something more nuanced and ultimately more interesting: an evolution toward a complex, symbiotic ecosystem where both open and closed source development find their place.
Reality is a thin veil, and for Flight Sergeant John Douglas Paget, that veil was shredded at 20,000 feet. In the claustrophobic metal belly of a Halifax bomber, with engines roaring like mechanical beasts and the black void of night stretching endlessly below, Paget confronted the existential absurdity of war. Was he the pilot of his destiny or merely a component in the vast machinery of conflict? The Royal Canadian Air Force had trained him to navigate through flak-filled skies, but nothing could prepare him for navigating the labyrinth of his own consciousness.
A map of the territory beyond the threshold of questioning.
There is a moment in every thoughtful life when the external search for answers turns inward, and one stands before a simple, profound, and terrifying question: What is actually true?
This is not a question about facts, but about the nature of reality, the self, and the path to a good life. It is the gateway. Our conversation has been a map of the territory just beyond this threshold, charting a course through the wreckage of inherited dogma toward a personal, sustainable philosophy. The journey can be summarized in three acts: the deconstruction of tradition, the synthesis of wisdom, and the final, direct inquiry into the nature of the self.
When life feels overwhelming and the mind is clouded by suffering, the Buddha’s Eightfold Path offers a practical framework for navigating challenges with wisdom and compassion. This is not a rigid set of rules, but a guide to cultivating a mind that can meet difficulty with clarity and resilience.
The path is divided into three essential categories:
Perception as a Matrix Multiplication of Urban Sensation.
Step out into the Beijing night. Or perhaps it’s Shanghai’s morning rush. Close your eyes. No, wait, keep them open. You need them for the data stream. Look at the city—not as a collection of things, but as a raw, unprocessed torrent of photons, pressure waves, molecular gradients, and mechanical vibrations. This is the blooming, buzzing confusion of pure urban sensation. It is the city’s raw data dump, a chaotic and overwhelming CSV file of existence.
