Wow I’m married

I found it remarkably true what people say about this being the happiest day of your life. I'm filled with so much love and happiness towards Mer and the life we've built so far, and for the life we're going to continue to build together. I'm still replaying memories of that day in my head.


What I didn't find was that it went by in a flash. In some ways it went by at the speed of any other day. But this had moments that were excruciatingly slow (like waiting for our first look around 3pm) and other moments that you could blink and miss. The legal signing ceremony was one of those moments. I think we both just looked at that time as a formality when we were planning it out. But it was really magical. My mom, who has trouble speaking, gave some moving words before we signed. All of our immediate family was in the room with us, sharing in this moment before the festivities. The champagne at the end was a nice touch to deal with the nerves that had been building up throughout the morning.


I spent that morning with my brother Adam and one of my groomsmen, Cody, sampling a flight of ridiculously fancy coffee. It was a nice distraction from my nerves about messing up my vows. A great way to caffeinate after a very sleepless night.

Mer and I headed out on a mini moon right after. A perfect length of time in a tranquil spot filled with good food, highland cows, a neat train and the love of my life. It's an amazing place that everyone should visit, but I'll go ahead and gatekeep it for now.

Revisiting virtual subscriptions

At the start of the year, I posted this about everything that's coming out of my account every month as a subscription. I wanted to check back in on this now that it's been almost five months. 

Note: I'm using voice-to-text software to write this, specifically Wispr Flow, because I recently broke my finger and it's very difficult to type with the cast on.  

My recurring payments of of this writing

This is literally everything that comes out of my personal or joint account on a regular basis

  • Kagi
  • Fastmail
  • iCloud
  • Communauto
  • Carshare
  • Koodo (dumb phone)
  • Fizz (iPhone)
  • SpinCo (gym)
  • Various donations
  • The Globe and Mail
  • NYTimes
  • Posthaven
  • Bikeshare
  • Transit App
  • Google Drive
  • Renters insurance
  • Pet insurance
  • VPN
  • Ente
  • The Verge
  • Betches Media
  • NPR+
  • Gym close to my office
  • Gym close to my house
  • Deezer
  • Monarch
  • YouTube Lite (x2)
  • One video streaming service
  • Sportsnet
  • Nebula
  • All Trails
  • The Guardian

What's changed

Added
  • Gym close to my office
    • I thought having a gym close to my office would have been convenient. I have found out that I prefer going to the gym closer to my house. It's more convenient on the weekends and in the evenings. Usually, this office gym is pretty busy around the same time I would find it convenient to go. Unfortunately, I'm locked into a year commitment on this, but we'll be cancelling it at the end of the year. 
  • Gym close to my house
  • Deezer
    • This is a bit of a left field one and feels like it's very antithetical to my goals but I explain more in the conclusion 
  • Monarch
    • I actually had this one before. I just forgot to add it on the last list
  • YouTube Lite (x2) 
    • Buying two YouTube Lite subscriptions for my partner and me was cheaper than buying a YouTube Family subscription.
    • We both have been watching more YouTube over the past couple months and reached a breaking point with the ads, and we broke down on this.  
  • One video streaming service
    • Used to be Crave, now it's Netflix. This is mostly used by my fiancé, although whenever a new season of Love is Blind comes out, I do jump in on it. 
  • Sportsnet
    • It's baseball season, and the Raptors made a run in the playoffs, so we added this. Mostly used by myself. 
  • Nebula
    • Like Monarch, this was already something we were subscribed to. I forgot to add it to the list last time. 
  • All Trails
    • This one is for my sabbatical. We'll get rid of it after the first year. 
  • NY Times Games -> NY Times
    • Covered by work
  • The Guardian
    • Also covered by work

Removed

  • Apple One
    • We've gone down to just having iCloud.
  • Set App
  • TTC Monthly Pass
    • Switched to pay-as-you-go
  • Bear
    • I had originally intended to get rid of Posthaven instead of getting rid of Bear, but I found Bear to still be a little too limited, especially since I don't support creating blog posts via email, which is the main way I like to post my blog. 
  • Transit App

Planned Changes

Ente

This is a tough one because I really love Ente. I think it's such a great platform. It's really thoughtfully designed, the tools work really well, and I've emailed the CEO and gotten immediate feedback. The trouble is the cost. It's a very expensive product, and it does a lot more than I actually need it to. I don't want to be supporting a big tech company, and it's hard to justify when Google Drive has the ability to share and collaborate on documents, which is, on a day-to-day basis, a bigger thing that is needed for our household.

The Ente Locker is a cool feature, but we mostly get that through 1Password, which I get for free through work. I would pay for 1Password on its own just because of how much we use it. The tricky thing with a lot of this stuff is the collaboration between my partner and me. This would be a different thing if it was just myself. I would probably be using an open-source document service, and I really wouldn't need anything beyond what's on my computer or my iPad.

Since it's not just me, I need to find something that works well for both of us. In an ideal world, we would be seeing something like these smaller, privacy-minded, independent platforms like Kagi and Fastmail, Mailbox and Ente, all of them collaborating. They are aware of each other and that they share common user bases. What's missing is the ability to have one subscription and strong integrations between these so I could mix and match between services and offer my partner a simple solution to collaboration. That's what's missing here, and with a lot of these privacy-focused tools. 


Conclusion

This is very much a one step forward, five steps back kind of post. I was hoping that after four months I would have removed a lot of the subscriptions for my life, specifically the virtual ones, but I actually increased them.
  • Sportsnet will eventually be cancelled after the end of the Jays season, but that's still going to be most of the year. I just have to accept that I really enjoy baseball, and that's not going away any time soon.
  • YouTube: I have mixed feelings about adding it, but we do use it a lot, and I really don't like ads.
  • Deezer was a surprise to me, to see a music subscription streaming service being added to this list. It's hard to deny how convenient it is to be able to quickly listen to music and get a feel for an artist or a song, especially if I'm evaluating going to concerts during NXNE or Departure. There just really isn't an alternative to streaming here.
I've kept my Plex set up at home, so I still am able to stream music from that. That's been nice, and I go back and forth between the two, but Deezer I found to be fine. It kind of reminds me a bit of how Spotify used to be five or ten years ago, when they first came out: pretty simple interface, pretty easy to use, and they have a lot of good AI policies. I determined them to be the lesser of all the evils.

I gave Qobuz a try as well, but it was just not good. Really hard to use, always playing through the wrong speakers, really clunky app for playing music. Just wasn't worth it, but I did like that you could buy music through Qobuz and have it integrated into your library.
























First hike with gear

34KMs in the books. Still need to work on how to properly adjust my bag shoulders were really feeling it at the end. Had to pop into a Shoppers near the end to get some blister patches. I’m feeling good that after consistently practicing like this I can reach Montreal :) 

Last night after recovering from the hike I went through and reorganized my pack. Currently I’m at 19lbs without food or water. I have a few more bits of gear I need to add that are going to bump that number up. Even with food I should be able to stay under the 20% of my body weight rule of thumb. That said, there’s a few more adjustments I can make to get even smaller.

Landing on a sabbatical plan

Next month will be my five year anniversary at my my current company, Wealthsimple. We already get 20 days of PTO but at five years you become eligible for a sabbatical of an additional 20 days (so roughly a month in calendar days. They have to be taken all at once and can't be combined with another period of leave. 

This is a pretty cool opportunity. Normally to get this much time off you have to be in between jobs. If that time is not by choice, then it's a stressful time where you're looking for work. If it's time taken by choice, you're likely coming down from the stress of the last role or you're mind is thinking about what you need to do to prepare for the next role. This is not that. I'll return to the job I'm doing now and I'll be getting paid while on the leave -- nice!

The next time I'll have chance, either the next sabbatical or time in between jobs, I will likely have kids and won't be able to be such a free spirit.

Since the start of the year I've been toying with several different ideas

  • A worldwide tour of cool transit systems
  • A Euro-centric tour of cool transit systems
  • A big UK train trip
  • An Asian transit trip
  • A China transit trip
  • The east coast trail in Newfoundland

But I settled on one of my favourite activities, just leaving the house and going for a walk. But, like, a really long walk. I've nixed the transit ideas because it's actually something that doesn't require a ton of PTO (at least not an entire month) and doesn't require me to be in a specific physical shape. I'm in relatively good shape now and my legs work. Who's to say what happens between now and retirement.

My tentative route looks like this:

A combination of the Great Lakes Waterfront Trail and the Trans-Canada Trail. The exact route isn't shown, it's more of an approximation.

Yesterday I headed out on a long walk within Toronto, going from my house to the airport. Google Maps has the most direct route at 23.1 KM. My meandering route took me 26.3 KM (segment 3) over about 5 hours. It was a good test. My legs were getting quite tired about 15k in and the last 2k were quite the push. It was made harder by the super pedestrian-hostile environment that is the Toronto Airport. If I can get myself up to 35k/day then doing the whole trip in about 2 weeks should be no issue. Ideally I could pull off some 40k days. Granted, my test route required me to carry very little gear and was an ideal 20-24 degrees with no rain.

Managing owned music

My music owning experience in life has been a story of jumping from one monolith to another. It started with iTunes. Buy from the store or rip a CD, all in iTunes and then synced to device. Then it was Spotify and a variety of other streaming services.

Now you have every single analogue/anti-algorithm/minimalist yelling, buy an iPod! Own your own music. And to be clear, I am absolutely one of those people. But wow, it's a rough experience to switch. Once you have all of the music it should be easy, in theory. I have a few thousand songs on my hard drive.

The metadata and file organization are all very weird depending on where you got the music from and how you imported it. So you're going to spend quite a bit of time managing that. Getting the music is pretty annoying too.

The last bastion of one-stop-shop is iTunes. You can indeed buy music there. The cloud locker service -- iTunes match -- still exists for $30/yr. But the default Apple Music app has gotten bloated and it's very pushy to get you to subscribe to streaming. I haven't tried to install Apple Music on linux but there's no support by default which isn't a great sign.

Bandcamp is fantastic, but the library of options is really limited. Qobuz has an iTunes sized library but the interface is absolute garbage and doesn't let you stream the music you own from their site.

I think this would all be fine but we're missing a killer *just music listening* app. Rhythmbox for Linux feels promising but it's not very feature complete and the external device syncing has been rough in my experience.

This is a bit of ramble, but I guess I'm surprised at how difficult the process of "I give you money, I put music on my device" is. It feels like we're full circle back to the reason the iPod was invented in 2001.

Franc Moody @ Danforth Music Hall

I went to see Franc Moody at the Danforth Music Hall on Tuesday. I bought the tickets only knowing one song:

But I thought it was such a bop and I don't mind going to shows knowing little or nothing. 

The show was good, not great, the first half I was pretty surprised by how low energy it was for an electronic heavy band. It really picked up in the second half and drove it home at the end with a keytar and cowbell coming out. The band chemistry picked up at the point, with everyone starting to interact with each other. For most of the show it seemed like everyone was enjoying what they were doing on stage, but separately.

Two big shoutouts, the drummer raided a thrift shop in Toronto and managed to find an old and pretty sick Labbat's/Bluejays collab shirt. The bassist/synth absolutely carried the team though. You can find she's pretty consistent with this in videos of other shows bouncing around the stage.

Two things really hurt this show.

The venue choice was not it. The Danforth is hands-down the best venue in the city. But I don't think it's the best setup for electronic acts, especially if your set is kind of bland. History or Rebel would have been better choices. 

Second, the flow of music was not great. There was a lot of dead air between songs and the audience interaction was pretty meh. I don't need musicians to be excellent story tellers or comedians, but you can fill that air with music that flows from song to song or interesting interludes. Those interludes are great moments for the band to interact with each other or the audience.

On a personal note, I had some reflection on how I refer to the different ratings categories while at this show. "Spectacle" and "Stage Presence" are the two most important categories (to me) for what makes a concert a concert. But the naming is off. What I really want to convey is "What makes this concert worth seeing over staying at home and listening to the CD" and "Does this show feel like something bespoke that is unique to just this tour and/or just this performance", respectively.

So "Spectacle" is becoming "In person only factor", "Stage Presence" is becoming "One night only factor". I'll probably change it a dozen times before I find the best way to word those.


The Ratings
  • Venue: 1.5/5
  • Audience: 4/5
  • Band: 4/5
  • Vocals: 2/5
  • In person only: 1.5/5
  • One night only: 1.5/5
  • Song choice: 2/5

Overall: 2.35/5

My Email is My Blog (Updated)

Updated: My email is no longer my blog, but I've linked to a copy. Turns out I really like posting to my blog via an email.

For several years I've been using Fastmail for my email and calendar. I love it! But the entire time there's been a "sites" feature to host a static website that I've toyed with but never really used. 

What I've really wanted to use it for all of these years is to host my blog. There wasn't an out of the box way to do it so I settled on paying for Posthaven most of the time and more recently moved over to Bear.

Going back to my more recent post of wanting to move away from subscriptions, this one became a surprisingly difficult one to shake.

Fastmail could be so easy, a blog is just static content. But if I throw in a bunch of markdown files, it just winds up looking like this..

That's a problem right?

Well, if you look at it as a directory listing, it is. But really, that's just a database. A bit funky, but it's clean and simple and pretty easy for Javascript to parse. 

You can still go to https://experimental-blog.noahkoch.com/blog/ to see that same directory listing. But on this page you're reading it's a bit of a magic trick. The URL has secret info in it (query params, for my nerds out there) that's instructing the browser where to fetch the contents and metadata (post title, date) from.

It's a fun little trick and means I have a blog hosting platform via a service I was already paying for. Yet another subscription cut out!

That being said, I really recommend Bear Blog, it's one guy and he's building a great thing. If I wanted to go back to a hosted blog, that's where I'd go.

Matt Andersen @ Massey Hall

Matt Andersen must be 300 years old. That's the only way to explain how one man's voice can sound like it had several lifetimes of experience.

Massey Hall was both the best and worst place to host this country-blues singer when my Fiancée and I went to see him this past Friday. On one hand, there's few places in Toronto that have the acoustics to do his music justice. Backed up by an incredibly talented band, every one of his slower songs just made you feel like you were a little baby being swaddled in a blanket of passion. 

On the other hand... when songs like Free Man were played, you just wanted to rip out the seats so you could dance. 

Two things I appreciated out of this performance. Mariel Buckley, his very talented and funny opener, was invited back on to the at the end of the show to do a duet of Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Released. I really appreciate when artists do this. It makes the show feel like something more put together and cohesive rather than a way to stretch time. It's a surprisingly rare thing.

Second, he didn't leave the stage before the encore. It's something I'm noticing more artists and bands do. The encore has become a pointless tradition. There's no surprise to it anymore, let's stop pretending, let the music play.

You can give Matt Andersen a listen on a recording. But truly it is nothing compared to seeing him live. I don't say that lightly. I enjoyed Pink Martini at Massey Hall but I wouldn't say you couldn't get an idea of what they're like from their recorded music.

I don't know if it's because he needs a better recording setup or if he just can't be captured well on an MP3. 

The Rating

  • Venue: 3.5/5
  • Audience: 2/5
  • Band: 4.5/5
  • Vocals: 4.5/5
  • Spectacle: 1/5
  • Stage presence: 4/5
  • Song choice: 4/5
Overall: 3.35/5

1984 + Brave New World

Our phones are Soma

Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.

A nod to subscriptions today

'Look at him working away in the lunch hour,' said Parsons, nudging Winston. 'Keenness, eh? What's that you've got there, old boy? Something a bit too brainy for me, I expect. Smith, old boy, I'll tell you why I'm chasing you. It's that sub you forgot to give me.'

'Which sub is that?' said Winston, automatically feeling for money. About a quarter of one's salary had to be earmarked for voluntary subscriptions, which were so numerous that it was difficult to keep track of them.