FEATURED POSTS
What I learned from my visit to the Island.
People always warn me about moving to a remote place. “The healthcare isn’t good there.” I would argue that healthcare as a whole includes access to fresh and local foods, a slower pace of life, and access to clean air. The first thing I remarked to my partner when I stepped foot on the ground in Charlottetown was that I could smell the salt in the air. It smelled good…
Artists don't stop.
They wait, or they repress. But once born an artist, you’re always an artist. This is a personal story. Music has always been a trigger for me. “Trigger”, these days, has a negative connotation. But, in my case, music has always triggered a deep desire to create. Music is the ‘on switch’. Tonight, while listening to Fleche Love, the switch was tripped and I went down memory lane in my head…
Why I talk to Uber drivers.
I took an Uber to a local store today to buy myself a new microscope. An Eritrean man, we started talking about culture and immigration. “You speak Tigrinya, right?”. A huge smile appeared on his face. “You know that?!”, he said. Of course. I’ve known people from all over the world, including Eritrea. I remember what people tell me and I store that in my little ‘bank of stories’ inside my head…
The online world feels so fake.
One of the challenges of working in the marketing world is the feeling that you’re part of a group of people that make the online world less interesting. Everything feels so fake now that every social network, and every search result is gamed and engineered by...
Don’t wait for an invitation.
A scientist once asked me why I had created a Twitch account to stream the microscopic world. I told him that it didn't exist when I went out looking for it, so I decided to just create my own stream. He surprised me by saying that he'd never have created something...
Doing vs thinking
How do we balance thinking about doing things vs actually getting them done? I have experimented with all sorts of ways of doing things. From thinking about an idea for years, to just jumping into a massive project without a plan. Both, as you can imagine, are futile...
A year later: an overview
It's been a year since I incorporated my company, Yippee Ki Yay. So much has changed since then. I had first intended to offer marketing services, but then, I started landing contracts to do tech work. I spent the summer teaching myself some Javascript, and React. I...
The next innovation is in healthcare.
If there's one industry problem I've always wanted to tackle, it's the problem of booking appointments, and filling out your health profile with your provider, online. As it stands, almost every provider I've dealt with in Canada has their own system. If you're a...
“You never stick with stuff!”
I'm gonna address an elephant in the room here, which is that I have the reputation for never "sticking with stuff" when it comes to personal projects (there's a huge distinction between 'personal' and 'professional', so read on). I've started a million personal...
What I learned from my visit to the Island.
There has to be a word for what I’m feeling right now, a quasi-depressed state for having returned to the city after having spent over a week in the wilderness, near the ocean, on Prince Edward Island. Due to time constraints, we chose to fly there and back. Usually,...
Execution is more important than ideas
Here's what I've learned over time: your idea doesn't matter. There are plenty of people with good ideas. There are very few people who can actually properly execute those ideas. It's the execution that matters the most. There. That's it. That's the golden rule. Of...
An artist should act, and fail.
We have made three major cultural mistakes in Canada. We've elevated conceptual art in our schools, and in our museums (where the artist's concept of a piece is more important than the finished piece itself). We've created an unbalanced expectation that our youth...
My dream life, after 50.
I think about it a lot, what I want my life to be like after 50. I picked that age randomly, as a way to give myself enough time to get what I'm after. When I was younger, I imagined what life would be like, but I didn't always chase after it. Now, I live a life...
Bring me a battle.
I was recently interviewed on a Twitch stream, where I was asked, a few times, about how I perceive failure. It's something I hadn't really thought about, probably because I stopped worrying about failure many years ago. During the interview, I was trying to figure...
I miss the chaos.
It's 2021, and we're still in lockdown. About this time last year, I remember seeing photos coming out of China. People panicking due to some strange flu going around. Meanwhile, nobody here was paying much attention to it, yet. By March, we started locking things...