The Collector

I've collected things since I was a small kid. I think a lot of people have collections and I've had quite a number over the years. I used to collect badges from police departments, POG, beer bottles from different breweries and stamps. 

Some of those collections I've gotten rid of over the years. The beer bottles were recycled; the POG were sold for $50. The stamp collection is still n a shelf in the corner. 

I also have a number of practical collections, things that I use like my guitars and kazoos, or my collection of tools. Even my music collection like my CDs and records are as much archival and research as they are just a collection. 

The music collection in particular has been wrought with disaster. As the digital age moved in through the '90s and early 2000s, I found myself not wanting to carry these collections around with me through life and many of them were sold or found the curb. It was mostly the practical stuff that stayed. My beat up CDs and tapes from my youth found landfills in this time. The records seem to stick around, at first it was really cheap to get them because I'd get them at garage sales. I do still have a small box full of CDs and an even smaller box of cassettes but mostly my record collection is actual records or online. 

The Navigator has made the wise and correct choice to leave Spotify for less fascist pastures. I on the other hand haven't been able to make that switch just yet. It is part of my master plan I spoke of to diversify and change my digital footprint over the coming year. And it occurs to me that I kind of want to go back to having tangible music and a few tangible things. 

I've got five or six albums from this year that I really like and for the most part my listening has been to those albums. I would totally be able to afford say a couple dozen albums a year over buying my music from Spotify and having access to all this stuff I don't need. I also think I would have a closer attachment and a closer relationship with that music. 

But at the same time I don't have a CD player in my car or a portable tape deck I can use in the garage. Everything's Bluetooth. So I'm going to have to find a balance and find a new way to consume music as part of that larger project. At the same time, one of my favourite albums this year, "Looking for People to Unfollow" by Ecca Vandal didn't even see a physical release until the last few weeks. It's been digital only since the spring. 

I've also had this thought in my head over the last few weeks about collecting all of the mainline Zelda games. I think it was seeing all of the switch Zelda games that I have together on one pile that sort of triggered the idea. I don't own basically all of the consoles that they would be played on, but it would be really cool to be able to hold on to each game and play them. I also think this is just a reaction to the recent debate, discussion and movement in the game industry where you don't own a game, you just rent it until the studio decides they're done with it.

I dunno. I don't particularly want to sort and store more stuff in life. I think we have plenty. But the way the world is going, it sure feels nice to have something tangible in hand sometimes. Maybe there's a balance point. 

Magic Expectations

Last Tuesday, I went to see the Queens of the Stone Age and the Foo Fighters live at Mosaic Stadium. I had to use all of my fingers and toes, and borrow a few from Rhonda to figure out it's been nearly 30 years since I last saw the Foo Fighters. We were scheduled to have them here in 2022, but the passing of Taylor Hawkins cancelled that tour. For QOTSA, it's only been 3 years as I saw them in Saskatoon. Interestingly, also the last time I consumed alcohol in any appreciable amount. 

Overall, it was a great show and pretty much exactly what you would expect of a stadium show like that. Plenty of hit songs, a tight band and great visuals. But at the same time, it kinda fell flat. I've listened to the Foo Fighters since their first album and many of these songs are as ingrained in my musical lexicon as anything by the Beatles or Queen. With my location being on the opposite side of the stadium from the stage, I was mostly watching the fun through the big screens. I could barely make out the band at all. 

I felt the same way after seeing Paul McCartney at the old Taylor Field. I was far too removed from the action to really feel connected. I think at the end of the day, I would have been happier with a 2 hour performance of the hits in a heated arena than a 3 hour performance full of filler on a cold prairie night in an open roof stadium. 

In some respects, I'd almost rather go to a small local show with a band playing something I've never heard before. Without an expectation being set, it's easier to impress me and expand my mind a bit. This happened this past weekend at Tiny Fest, a small local scene festival. I saw the duo Worlds Collide and had my mind completely blown by how original and beautiful their music was. 

Queens of the Stone Ago delivered a bit more. It was still a stadium performance and I was still a quarter mile away, but they brought a little more spice to the equation. For example, during "No One Knows" they started to sort of drag and slow around the bridge part. The bass started playing solo and things just started melting. Like I even commented how the song was melting. Then the visuals on the screens started glitching and showing tracers. I wasn't on mushrooms, but they did a great job of reproducing that experience. 

Maybe little surprise from a band that talented but also known for being loose handed and stoner rock. It was like watching the musical version of "The Legend of the Drunken Master". 

But you start to realize that all of this is about expectation. I didn't expect Worlds Collide so it was easy for them to impress. My familiarity with "No One Knows" set me up with an expectation of the song sounding one way, and the change made it magical. And maybe I expected the Foo Fighters to transcend what I've heard from them for 35 years and they just couldn't exceed those expectations. 

My ponderings on expectations were well and truly capped off yesterday when I watched an episode of Neil Degrasse Tyson's podcast "Star Talk" where he talked to Teller of Penn and Teller fame (apparently Ray Teller?) where they talked about how a lot of what magicians do is play with our expectations and when they can exceed or circumvent them, that's where the magic happens. Bending a spoon with your mind is amazing because we don't often go around bending spoons at all, let alone with our brains. It would actually be less interesting to make a car roll down the street with your mind. 

They did discuss how musicians use music to affect people's emotions just as magicians use illusion to have the same effect, but they didn't talk about how musicians can do the same thing by playing with people's expectations. I first noticed this watching Tool play live. Maynard will often sing the harmony part of a vocal and in your head you can hear the two part harmony even though there is no one signing the root part, nor is a recording being played. Your familiarity is so strong that the brain fills it in on it's own. 

Of course, this is nothing new. Victor Borge was using expectation and familiarity long before any of us were even born to produce delight and humour. 

I was pondering this weekend how I can use expectation to my own benefit in the music I make. It's easy for an established act like QOTSA or Tool to use familiarity to create a new experience for audiences. My audience is not that entrenched - to be sure. In some respects, I've been able to use covers to subvert expectation, but I don't have nearly the talent Borge did. 

But, this weekend exceeded my expectations through an act of kindness. Tiny, the organizer of Tiny Fest approached me on Saturday and asked if I'd be willing to bring the kazoo out of hiatus and play a couple of songs on Sunday. So for the first time in a couple of months, I strapped on the kazoo and guitar for a couple of songs. And the delight in the faces of the people there when, despite their expectations, a guy played the kazoo and sang some funny songs, told me that I've been using expectation to entertain for a while now. 

All that to say, manipulating expectation is something I imagine few people think of, but clearly can be used to affect how you feel or experience the world. 

Can you think of a time that someone else playing with your expectations led to a change in how you felt or saw something. What are some negative ways that this kind of power could be used? 

I'm Leaving

There is a concept in investment and insurance called "spreading risk". Most people know this more colloquially as "putting all your eggs in one basket." In short, the idea is that putting a great deal of your resources (or all of it!) in one place, no matter how attractive or safe it seems, puts you at great risk of losing everything if that one system fails. Insurance companies manage this risk by insuring a wide swath of risks in many geographic, economic and commercial areas. For investing, you invest in many different companies in many different industries so that if there is a failure in one, your loss is less. 

I have a particular concentration of risk in my digital world, namely my dependence on the Google ecosystem. I mentioned this dependency about a year and a half ago in a blog post musing on ways that Canadians can disconnect themselves from the proverbial American teat. My opinion on Google has changed a little bit since then, but not drastically. I've been a happy paying customer for decades with Google. Their storage of my data has been dependable and their services are world-class. In fact that last part is why leaving Google is such a challenge - there is no one else that does it quite that well. 

But as mentioned in the intro, it means the vast majority of my digital life is concentrated in my Google account. So if we were to lose access to Google, say from the fall of the American Empire or simply as a result of the current trade war with the US, I'd be out a lot. Like a LOT a lot. And that risk is being shared with the rest of Canada - our dependency on US data infrastructure puts us all at extremely high risk. And announcements from Prime Minister Carney today show that not only is this risk recognized, there is also some momentum to change that on a national level. 

So how do I go about this?

I've admittedly made only a few minor steps in the right direction since my post last March. I've gone to the effort to back-up my Google data locally and just in the last month I've switched browsers from Chrome and changed my data sharing settings to try and hedge off my personal information a bit. Because there's more risk than loss here. If we're in an antagonistic relationship with an America that seems to be increasingly fascist, then my data is also at risk of being misused. 

In fact, the challenge is much bigger than I'd initially thought. I've had this particular post on the backburner for about 6 weeks because I couldn't really wrap my head around how to proceed. Overall, I've decided that it took me about 25 years to get this intrenched in this system, so it's going to take a year or two to get myself out. 

Let's define the problem

I've started by listing out all of the Google services that I use and will need to be replaced. Trying to list these out off the top of my head was overwhelming but if you click the grid of 9 squares in the top right corner of any Google service page, it will give you a dropdown of Google services that you can use to trigger your memory of what you use. If you're trying to do the same exercise for Apple or Microsoft, I don't have that info yet. Those challenges are for future me! 

Here's what I've come up with. I'm listing both the Google service name and a more generic name for that service in an attempt to get my head around what replacement needs to look like. 

• Email - Gmail
• Calendar
• Cloud storage/Google Drive
• Search
• Maps
• YouTube/Entertainment/Infotainment
• Photos
• News/News aggregation
• Translate
• Documents/Sheets/Presentation - Office suite
• Smartphone/Android/App store
• Chat
• Password vault
• Google Authenticator/2 factor authentication assistants
• Blogger/Blog
• Google Wallet/Tickets/cards
• Contacts
• Texting/SMS
• Keyboard (on mobile)

Oof. A lot, I know. I expect there are a few others that I'll discover on the way too. Stuff like the SMS app and Keyboard that aren't necessarily services but ways that Google can watch what I'm doing. 

In addition to this, I'm also considering some other American-tech connections I have. 

• DNS hosting - with GoDaddy - I should have left this company long ago
• Microsoft - Operating system, some Office Suite stuff and games
• Apple - iPad and a few photos and things with them
• Grammarly - sees everything I write and sends it to the US
• Social media - Meta especially
• AI - I'm not quite a luddite, but I'm pretty cautious about AI. At the same time, it seems to be the way of the future. This one will need less of changing over as it will necessitate care with how I proceed with AI. 

And finally, I host my music website with a company called Webador. I thought they were Canadian when I signed up, but they're based in the Netherlands. That doesn't actually bother me much (the DUTCH), but the service hasn't been exemplary and as long as I'm rearranging my digital presence, I'm going to look at changing this as well. 

Where to begin?

As mentioned previously, this is a big problem that I won't be fixing overnight. Simply updating my emails and passwords to new services is going to take months. But at the same time, I've done the work of updating all of my passwords in the past. It's difficult but it's responsible online presence maintenance. 

The Beatles put it best, "I get by with a little help from my friends."

Just posting this article might be enough to illicit a few suggestions and ideas. Discussion will help illuminate some paths. I've also been following Canadian commentator and activist Tod Maffin. Tod posts videos about Canadian identity and history and comments on the current beef with the US. But more than just commenting, Tod and his wife, Jocelyn are doing something about it. They have a website called Mainstreet Canada a database of Canadian companies you can buy Christmas gifts from to support them. Or rude Canadian Snack Foods - so you can junk out like a real Canuck. 

Most valuable to my undertaking is Unplug America, a database of Canadian or non-American tech services to replace American tech. I both love and hate this site. Love it because it's such a volume of information in one place. Hate it because they've done their homework and this really highlights how hard this project is going to be. It's why this article has been sitting in my drafts for 6 weeks. 

Order of Operations

Now is the time I need to divide this up a bit. 

Quick wins - there are a few things here I can do right away. I've already replaced my browser and search with Duck Duck Go. I don't know if this is the perfect solution but a week in, it's going ok. I can also update my SMS app and keyboard apps on Android this week. My contacts lists might go with them. Contacts is hard because I use it across SMS, Phone, Email and a few other places. 

Half steps - I'm not sure that replacing Google Maps outright will be possible based on what I've seen, but I can install Open Street Map and use that instead of Google Maps occasionally. It will help wean me off at least until other services get better. My main concern is having good transit information and directions in strange places. Like Saskatoon. 

Buy some service - I already pay a couple of hundred dollars a year on DNS, web hosting and Google Cloud. I'm currently on the hunt for a Saskatchewan based hosting service that can take over all of these services and also include email. If I get the right service, I might also be able to move this blog, my contacts, calendar, document services and photo storage over. Lots to be done here and it's going to be one of the more challenging steps in the project. Moving this blog is likely to be a disaster, it's probably coming last. I self-link in this thing so much, I don't know how I'll fix it. 

I may need to subscribe to a new aggregation service, like Ground News, as an alternative to Google News. But again, need to find a non-American option. I think finding an alternative to Grammarly might fit here as well. 

Moving accounts - Once I have my emails and contacts squared away, I'll look into my passwords and security and will go from account to account moving everything over. Changing my email, updating my passwords, getting new security setups in place. This step will be incredibly labour intensive, but it's not one I'm too worried about. I've done a project like this a couple of time before, I can do it again. 

Problems without an answer - there are a few things I just don't know about yet. YouTube is kinda my jam. There are a myriad of other options, including Canadian ones, but they don't all have what I want. I will probably look to move my own content to a different site, but my consumption will take some work. 

I don't know what the alternative to my Google Wallet will be yet. And security Authentication apps all seem to be American so I don't know where that path will take me. 

Figure it out when I get there - Google Chat/Meet and Translate are services I use off the cuff a lot. There are obviously better choices, I just need to find them when I go to use those services. As mentioned previously, I'll approach my use of AI with this mentality too. 

Just quit it - Social media and my Meta-life aren't really as essential as they used to seem. I've even started accounts with other services like Bluesky and I just don't use them. I don't need them that bad. I do use Instagram a lot for my music promotion, so I'll need to contemplate that. And Facebook Marketplace is my jam for used crap. But I can find other ways too. 

My Apple account and probably fall in this category too. 

Longer term things - I'll almost certainly want to switchmy operating systems in time. I've flip-flopped to and from Linux distros for years and they do get better every time. But music/audio work has always been a challenge. 

On the subject of audio work, my current favourite is Reaper, a decidedly American product. But the company seems very cool and ethical. There are other options but I'm going to stick with this for the medium-term future. 

I'm also a bit worried about my mobile operating system. There are Linux options but I worry about app availability and stability. 

The unsolvable - As I move through this, I know there are a few things I simply won't be able to fix. My work ecosystem doesn't have a lot of wiggle room. I have to use an iPhone, my operating systems are set, our cloud service is Microsoft and that's just going to be the way it is. I just need to separate my personal from professional as much as possible. 

It's kinda exciting

As overwhelming as this whole project seems, there's something exciting about it all. I daresay, it's almost been fun.

I was an early adopter and user of the internet. Those early years were not only exciting because the internet was new but because there were so many cool options and you could Lego them together in whatever way you wanted to. In fact, Pilot's World started from that approach. I'm excited to try some new tools and rebuild my online presence in my own image a bit. Google is very useful, it's also very bland. And risky. 

How about YOU?

Have you contemplated or even taken some steps to remove yourself from the American tech system? What do you think of my plan? Will I make it? Am I being overly paranoid? Is this worth the effort I'll put in? Have I missed anything that I should be considering in this?

Live Long and Proper

Today is the 60th anniversary of the first broadcast of the television show Star Trek. Owing to my young age I never did watch Star Trek in those first few years. But I was a massive fan of the next generation when it came out in the late '80s.

You see despite the fact that I never watched the original Star Trek, mom sure did. And I remember distinctly when the Next Generation was coming out, how she encouraged me to watch it because she enjoyed the original show so much. In fact, we watched it together. 

I've been asked over the years whether I'm more a Star Trek fan or a Star Wars fan. And like enjoying Metallica or Megadeth. I'm not sure why I need to pick just one. I can enjoy both. 

But I do like them both for different reasons . 

For Star Trek I've always enjoyed the ships and the space battles. For Star Wars. I never liked the space battles. I was more into the Jedi stuff and the things that happened on the planets. I guess I like the space opera part of Star Wars. 

I never could fully articulate what I like most about the ships and the battles in Star Trek until the series Picard came out and I was watching some post analysis videos. It was often pointed out that the Enterprise is as much a character as Data, Riker or even Picard. I love the Enterprise and there are few ships that I would more like to have a model of hanging from my ceiling or sitting on my desk. 

And I always idolized Commander Riker. Was never as much into Picard. He's cool and a great Captain but Riker was a swashbuckler and very cool. I played trombone because he played it. Even my beard is based on the classic. William Riker beard. 

And of course, as I got older and more familiar with Star Trek, I did learn to love some of the stuff from the original series. In particular, the movies were were a ton of fun. I really loved Star Trek IV where they go back in time to steal a whale. And Star Trek 6 was a big favorite in late junior high - early high school. I even had a copy of the novel that I read to bits. 

Star Trek has always been held up as a mirror to what's happening in the modern world as well as an oracle into what the future could look like. Of course, if we let Trump keep doing his bullshit, we probably won't reach that future. No matter how many Starfleet academies he tries to build.

So happy birthday to Star Trek. Thanks for bringing so much entertainment to my life and for giving me just one more thing to be a complete utter nerd about. Thank you for bringing me the Borg to terrify me at night. And for bringing me Deanna Troy. For other things at night.

An update I guess

September is dawning, and I'm still navigating my nerve issue and hoping that things start returning to normal. I think there's some progress happening - in fact, I occasionally think "maybe this is going away" - only to be ripped back to reality by doing a little bit of work or sitting in a car. 

I finally got in to see my family doctor yesterday, and he's prescribed me some new medication and ordered some X-rays in addition to more new exercises. I'd complain about more exercise, but at this point, I'll do whatever is needed to return to some sense of normal. I've also finally got an appointment with a sports doctor next Tuesday, so hopefully I'll be able to get some advice that moves this shit show along.

Honestly, I do think things are improving. I've been able to sleep in my own bed the last couple of nights, which is huge, and the medication the doctor gave me yesterday is supposed to help with that even more. Plus more exercise to wear me out. 

I've been so bored and impatient with this whole process the last few weeks that the burst of activity over the past couple of days is actually a bit overwhelming. I had to wait 2.5 hours past my scheduled appointment to see the doctor yesterday and ended up putting off getting the X-ray until today; I was so worn out by it. It's going to be a bit of an uphill battle to get back to work. I've tried setting myself some goals on guitar, but I really can't play for more than 5 minutes before my arm lights on fire. 

But I am typing today's blog, which is good. Last week's was typed too, albeit much slower. And I don't know that I'd be able to type for a whole day at this point. But progress is progress, and I'll do what I can to recognize it. 

Being in chronic pain sucks, being uncertain sucks and being bored sucks. I'll be glad to put this whole ordeal behind me to be sure.