A Few Cozy Mysteries

I lucked out and got to read two lovely cozy mysteries over this Christmas break:

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice For Murderers

A man dies in a lonely teashop, and the proprietor decides that she is going to solve this mystery. I loved this book, and it was the perfect read for my holiday. This joins the Thursday Murder Club for great mysteries involving older people solving mysteries.

You may have heard of the idea of love languages: Vera Wong’s love language is food and I found myself starving after almost every chapter.

Aunt Dimity’s Death

Not a murder mystery, but more fantastical mystery, I nevertheless was mostly charmed by this book. However, a misapprehension gained early in the book led me down a wild goose chase that never paid off; the book is for the better not paying my hunch off, but my wife went down the same road, which suggests this is either intentional or at least a flaw others have tripped on.

Still. This was a cute read, and could probably be comfortably consumed a weekend or less, if you don’t have children clambering across you.

Ten Years of Blogging

It turns out, that today is the ten year anniversary of this blog. I opened this blog with a description of my history with blogging, and started with a decision to make the blog open without topics. That lasted until 2016, when I split my technical blog off.

I’m super happy to have made it to ten years. To ten more years!

Some Favourite Posts:

I also wrote some work related blog posts that I really was happy with:

Year after year, my most popular blog post remains Some Notes on CMake Variables and Scopes. I totally get this -- CMake scopes and variables are bizarre.

This year, my number two most popular blog post has been Polybius: The Rise of The Roman Empire, which I find gently baffling.

I've managed to hit the front page of Hacker News, with Faster Ruby: thoughts from the outside.

Climate Change and Therapy

This article from the NYT really speaks to where I’m at; while I’m not in therapy for climate issues, the struggles are all real, the challenges all real.

Human well-being, the psychologist David W. Kidner wrote, has historically been linked to “participation in a healthy ecocultural context.” Living within a context that is obviously unhealthful, he wrote, is painful

This is amplified by living in a place that more than many others refuses to own up to the work and scale of transformation required.

A Letter to my MP

Living in Alberta can be enormously emotionally draining at times. My Premier is organizing a letter writing drive, driven by fear mongering, trying to delay action on greening the Alberta grid.

I decided to write my MP to counter said letter campaign, insofar as I can. My frustration was perhaps too palpable as I wrote, but sometimes frustration is all you have.

“Honorable Mr. McCauley

You’ll get a lot of form letters driven by TellTheFeds.ca

This isn’t a form letter: This a letter to say the opposite: I am disgusted by our province’s attitude regarding climate change. By spending time and energy attempting to slow walk regulation rather than taking action on climate, our government shows they lack ambition or interest.

Climate change affects us today. It will affect my children enormously.

So far, all the Alberta government provides is excuses, rather than engaging with the demands of Albertans to decarbonize our future; don’t take the barrage of form letters as meaning that inaction is acceptable

Inaction on climate is unacceptable.”

I CC’d Steven Guilbeault as well.