#haymanSplaining

What counts as "visiting a country", anyway?

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:02:24 -0400

Here’s something we argue about. What constitutes ‘visiting’ a country? Do you have to leave the airport? Stay overnight? Or what. I think we’d all agree that just flying over a country doesn’t count, you at least have to LAND. But what if you’re only in the airport?

I am firmly on the side of “Landing at the airport counts, because you are on the ground in that country.”

Others apparently disagree. (But why? Wouldn’t you want to increase your own country count as high as possible?)

So in a fruitless attempt to settle this argument, we’ve had these two framed posters hanging in our house for years. One for me, one for Cathy. “The 100 Most Interesting Cities in the World”, each says.

They’re scratch-off things, organized roughly by continent. Once you’ve visited a city, you scratch off the gold krogt and it reveals a colour image of that city underneath, with — oddly — a drawing of a taxi from that city.

Here’s a before-and-after example. One of us has been to Prague, one (me) hasn’t.

international disputes

But that wasn’t the main problem. We’d get into arguments, because one of us (guess who) had a more liberal definition of ‘visiting’ a city or country, and would attach notes to some of the squares. Like for instance

what if you don’t leave the airport?

I had a connecting flight through Beijing once. I was in the airport — and, thus, China — for 4 hours.

I visited Taipei for an entire 45 minutes (and then got right back on the same plane, back to Vancouver. Crazy mileage run. It got me Air Canada Super Elite status for 5 years. It was worth it.)

These should count, shouldn’t they?

How about that time I had a connecting flight through Hong Kong? Even if you want to argue that merely connecting in an airport doesn’t count, well, I had a shower in the arrivals lounge after a long flight from Vancouver and surely if you take off all your clothes in a country, that should count.

what does the Travellers Century Club say?

There’s an international organization, the Travellers Century Club, that attempts to keep track of people that have visited 100 or more countries.

They have some weird rules of what constitutes a country. They count 330 countries. The United Nations has 193 member states. Where do the other 137 come from?

According to their rules,

Any geographic area with a sovereign government or separately administered as a colony, protectorate, trusteeship territory, territory or mandate shall be considered as a separate country or territory

(There’s more, but that’s the first one.)

By these rules, the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island counts as a country, since it’s a distinct geographic area with its own provincial government, but Vancouver Island does NOT, even though it’s larger, because it doesn’t have its own government. And Newfoundland and Labrador doesn’t count either, because (I assume) the Labrador part is connected to the rest of mainland Canada.

It’s a pretty convoluted rule (one of many) but I guess people wanted to somehow count visiting Hawaii and Alaska as different from visiting the United States.

And of course this makes your number bigger.

Here’s their full list of 330 countries and territories.

Note that North America, by their strange rules, includes

Alaska
Canada
Mexico
Prince Edward Island
St. Pierre & Miquelon
United States (Contiguous)

OK, whatever.

You can download it as an Excel spreadsheet if you want to keep track yourself, and it will not surprise you that Cathy and I have done this, and at the moment, I am leading by a score of 63 to 57.

(you are no doubt curious what the delta is. Most places we’ve both been to; Cathy’s been to St. Pierre & Miquelon, Haiti, Saint-Barthélemy, Saint-Martin (the French part), Czechia and Hungary and I haven’t; conversely, I have been to … well you know what, I won’t bore you with the details other than to reiterate that I took off all my clothing in Hong Kong once so THAT COUNTS.)

Anyway. We’re getting rid of the posters

Now, it turns out we’re getting rid of these posters, because we had them framed and I think the guy sprayed some sort of lacquer or something on the poster and the scratch-off krogt is almost impossible to scratch off without knifing right through the poster itself.

wait, krogt?

yes.

krogt, n. (Chemical symbol kr)
The metallic silver coating found on fast-food game cards.

source: https://web.mit.edu/games/lib/sniglet.txt

so what are you replacing the posters with?

We found this nice corkboard map that you can stick pins in.

We came up with a colour scheme. Purple for places we’ve both been, blue if it was just me, red for Cathy, black, white, orange, green for places our kids have claimed, gold for future trips. It’s not exhaustive, but it looks kind of nice.

Surely that settles it, right?

ok NOW what’s the problem

Child had friends over, and helpfully messages me later. The following conversation took place over a period of several days.

child: Here’s a fun task for you: can you find the spelling mistake on the cork board map at Capilano

several hours of staring later

me: “Sacremento”
child: 😱 I guess there are multiple . It was a country name we had spotted

another hour later

me: “Cendral African Republic”
child: OK maybe there are a lot

one day later me: ‘Guatemeala’!
child: That’s the one!
me: Phew, I can stop looking, for now.

I better get down there and check it out.

I’ll keep you posted.

Remembering Vern Kennedy - Argonotes trumpeter, singer, composer, all-around good guy

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:06:33 -0400

I got the sad news yesterday that Vern Kennedy, trumpeter, composer, singer, backbone of the Argonotes trumpet section, and all around wonderful guy, passed away this week.

This hurts. I have been wanting to organize an Argonotes reunion ever since the band folded (nine years ago today, as it turns out) and I wanted to play with Vern one more time.

Vern was in Argonotes for 20 years and was just the most wonderful, dependable guy. Every bandleader knows this type - one of a handful of people in your band who just makes everything better, and when you know he’s coming to the gig, you know it’ll be OK.

Up for anything.

And he was up for anything. One year, the Argos called me in a panic, a couple of days before a playoff game that happened to be on November 11, Remembrance Day. They had neglected to book a trumpet player for the ceremonial playing of The Last Post before the game. Did I know anybody?

Well, one phone call later, Vern was happy to do it. I think he was happy to do everything. Here he is on the field at Skydome during the ceremony.

Go Argos Go

And not only that, Vern was one of the quartet of singers on the 1968 Dal Richards album CFL Songs, and every time the Argos score, they play Go Argos Go from that album, and the crowd sings along, and you can sure hear Vern’s voice.

Vern was a popular singer in the 1960s, and did a lot of studio recordings (see above, the Dal Richards album) and even appeared every Saturday night on the CBC, on the popular “Juliette” show, as a member of the Four Romeos quartet. I found this photo in the 2017 Vancouver Sun obituary for Juliette Cavazzi.

the four romeos

That’s Vern at the front left. Dashing lad, eh.

And one day, Vern was a member of a quartet that went to a recording studio in 1968 with Vancouver bandleader Dal Richards, and they produced an album with one song for every CFL team. Go Argos Go, by Toronto songwriter Johnny Burt, was a delightful original song on that album, but it included songs for all the other teams as well.

You can learn more about the album and listen to all the songs here.

It just delights me that even today, almost 60 years later, you still hear those songs. The Argos play Go Argos Go after every touchdown. The BC Lions play Roar, You Lions Roar. The Ticats sometimes play the Ticat Marching Song, and the Elks play the Eskimo Fight Song (excuse me, it needs a new title) - and in each of those, I can hear Vern’s voice, clear as a bell.

Here’s “Go Argos Go”, for instance. (I’ve trimmed it down to just the chorus but you can listen to the full thing too.)

Your browser does not support the audio element.

That just sounds to me like Vern.

When the Argos play this after a score, and the crowd sings, it really brings a smile to my face.

Now, I have always been curious about this album, and got to meet its creator, the late Dal Richards, years ago when my wife surprised me with a trip to Vancouver, but that’s another story - go click that link.

a 2006 podcast interview with Vern about Go Argos Go

But, well before that encounter with Dal, I was stunned to learn that one of the trumpet players in Argonotes had been one of the singers! Back in the day, the Argos had a podcast, and I contributed one episode where I interviewed Vern to see what he remembered.

The podcast itself has long since disappeared - it was a one-season wonder, I think - but I saved the episode Vern and I did. And if you’d like to listen, here it is: Skip ahead to about 1:30 if you want to hear me talking to Vern.

Your browser does not support the audio element.

In that interview, Vern recalls being in the studio with three other singers - Laurie Bower, Patty Van Evera and Kathy Collier, and this was just another studio job, so they thought, but this turned out to be something big and enduring.

Laurie Bower, a name many Canadians will remember from the Laurie Bower Singers (of which Vern was a founding member), passed away in 2016. Patty Van Evera left us in 2024. Dal Richards passed in 2015. I regret that I cannot find out much about Kathryn Collier.

There can’t be too many folks left from that album.

vern’s other music

The more I learn about Vern, the more I realize what an amazing musical career he had. He played trumpet not just with Argonotes, but with the Markham Concert Band, the Encore Band, the Pickering Community Band, and more, all of whom are mourning his loss this week.

Plus, he wasn’t just a member—he composed music for a lot of these bands. I’m sure you’ll be hearing some of his tunes from each band this summer.

I was very happy to come and hear Vern play with the Markham band a few times - and here is a mini-Argonotes reunion from a 2024 Markham concert.

the double blue blues

He even wrote an original song for Argonotes once, called the Double Blue Blues. I remember the day he brought it for us to try. We gave it a shot, but it turns out he’d included a tenor sax solo at one point, and we didn’t happen to have any of those on hand at that moment, so there was 4 bars of silence in the middle of the song.

I apologized for our ineptness, Vern laughed about that, and I’m sorry we didn’t give it another shot.

how lucky I was to have Vern in my band

Look, I hardly know anything about running a band. For the most part in Argonotes, we were making it up as we went along, doing the best we could to cheer for the Argos and make it fun for the fans.

But there was something about having Vern in the band that thrilled me. Here’s an amazing guy, a great trumpet player, with a fascinating musical background, that everybody loves—and he’s in MY band? Can that be right?

How lucky we all were.

Your voice will live on at the Argos games, we’ll make sure of that.

Thank you, Vern. Rest in peace, my friend.

The story of OpenSesame, and the one Steve Jobs photo I really hope to find.

Thu, 28 May 2026 16:03:49 -0400

Back in the day at NeXT, everybody was encouraged to work on little side projects. Even us field engineer folks would hack up different things in Objective-C with Interface Builder to try to impress each other. One that I whipped up, called Open Sesame, eventually shipped in NeXTSTEP.

Here’s the icon.

And I hope some day I can find a photo of Steve Jobs with Open Sesame’s icon on the screen. I think he would have used it occasionally.

Amazingly, although the app is long gone, the Open Sesame icon is still shipping from Apple today.

And the junior engineer who helped me ship this app turned out to be somewhat famous.

wait, Open Sesame, what was it?

OK, let me back up a bit. Here’s the situation I was trying to simplify. (You have my permission to skip this part.)

NeXT computers ran the NeXTSTEP operating system, on Motorola 68030 and 68040 chips, on NeXT’s own NeXTCube and NeXTStation computers.

Eventually, NeXTSTEP was ported to run on Intel processors too, and NeXT quit making its own computers, so the Intel version on computers from Canon and Dell and everybody else was the way forward. For the latter part of my NeXT time, I was using a Toshiba Tecra laptop. My NeXT cube lurked in the corner of the office.

Some apps were modified to run on the Intel machines, but not all of them were.

Lotus Improv, for instance, was a pioneering spreadsheet that ran only on the earlier Motorola version of NeXTSTEP.

If you only had an NeXT/Intel machine, and you wanted to run Improv, you weren’t totally stuck. NeXTSTEP had a way that you could launch an app on one machine, but tell it to use the screen and display on another. So if you also had a NeXT Cube or NeXTStation nearby…

It was mildly tricky to set up, but worked great. You had to use a Terminal app on the Intel machine, and from there, log in to the NeXT machine via ssh (wait, back then it was probably rsh), and concoct a command line like this

someNextCube$ /LocalApps/Improv.app -NXHost myMotorolaMachine

That’d run Improv on the NeXT machine, but use the screen and display on the NeXT/Intel machine. And, poof, the Improv icon would show up on your NeXT/Intel machine and you could spreadsheet away. Open spreadsheets stored locally on your NeXT/Intel machine, and the computation would run on the NeXT Cube, and it would be just as if you really had the app on your local NeXT/Intel machine.

All of us field engineer types could figure this out - we lived in the Terminal, and had no problem setting up rsh and a .rhosts file and we could make this work.

Of course there were lots of people who either couldn’t figure it out or wished they didn’t have to do this—isn’t there some way I could just double click on Improv on my Intel machine and (handwaving) the right thing would happen? like maybe could it auto-launch on the NeXT cube over in the corner and do all this rsh and -NXHost stuff for me?

There were also some sysadmin-type apps that you had to run as the root user, not as your logged in user, and that was a minor pain. Log out, log in as root, run the stupid app, log out again, log in as yourself—or, you could use Terminal and sudo and launch the app as root during your normal session, and why can’t we make that automatic too?

my big idea

What if you could select an app and then click something that made it run as root, or on another machine with this NXHost business, and have it just work in your local session ?

That was Open Sesame.

I figured out a way that you could select an app on your local machine, and (unnecessary tech detail: using the Services system) let Open Sesame know that you wanted to launch it on a remote machine (or locally as root), and it would just work with a click or two. No messing around in the terminal. Open Sesame would figure out and execute the necessary rsh or sudo commands for you. Poof, the app just launched the way you want.

I showed this around to a few of my colleagues, and somehow it caught the attention of an actual software engineer at NeXT in California, and he said “this is cool, maybe we can ship this as part of /NextDeveloper/Demos in the next release.”

wait, who was the guy? is that an interesting part of the story?

i’ll get to that in a bit.

Among other things, he fixed up the icon.

Anyway. Starting in NeXTSTEP 3.3 and continuing in OpenStep 4.0, everybody could find my app in the /NextDeveloper/Demos folder. My original version had a really crude 2-bit-grayscale drawing of Aladdin’s magic lamp as its icon, but my colleague created a much better one than the one I’d tried to draw.

That’s a screenshot of NeXTSTEP 3.3. Mindbogglingly, you can run NeXTSTEP 3.3 in your browser today courtesy of InfiniteMac.org.

did steve jobs ever use this app?

Well, I hope so. Steve used NeXTSTEP on Intel for quite a while, even after coming back to Apple while Mac OS X was still maturing. And there might have been the odd old NeXT app he wanted to use on his NeXTSTEP/Intel machine.

I’ve seen a few photos of SJ using NeXTSTEP on Intel, and I always check out what’s on the screen, very curious to see if the Open Sesame icon is there.

F’rinstance, here’s one photo, from an article in Fortune Magazine. He’s clearly using NeXTSTEP on Intel, but alas, no evidence of the Open Sesame icon.

So far, no luck, but I’m still looking.

the Open Sesame icon is still around

Open Sesame is long gone, of course. Once Apple acquired NeXT in 1997 and started to build Mac OS X, it wasn’t needed any more and this -NXHost business, despite being kinda cool, wasn’t a feature going forward.

Weirdly though, this icon is still shipping from Apple, even today, for something totally unrelated. There’s a package from Apple called Additional Tools for Xcode which includes some things that today’s developers find useful.

and if you download these modern tools, the icon for one of them in the Utilities set might look a little familiar.

Yup, there it is, 30 years later, the Open Sesame icon is still around, only this time attached to a utility called Clipboard Viewer.

are you going to tell us who the other guy was?

let me fast forward a bit first.

So … at the Apple WorldWide Developer Conference in 2009, I was helping the legendary Apple automation guru Sal Soghoian with a session on scripting and automation in Mac OS X.

Presenting with Sal was always a hoot. He’s a creative and funny guy and it often seemed like the two of us were doing some sort of comedy routine, not just showing off the latest in automation.

Photo of Sal Soghoian by Ihnatko at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, Link

so sal was the other guy?

No. Hang on. Almost there.

Apple had recently introduced a tool called Automator, and one of the things you could do with Automator was to create your own Services that manipulated files.

I wanted to explain that Services used to be really hard to write, but with Automator, they were now easy.

So … I fired up a 15-year-old version of NeXTSTEP 3.3 inside an emulator on Mac OS 10.5 Leopard and showed off how Open Sesame let me open and edit file as root - even files I wasn’t normally allowed to edit. (And then I showed how to do this with Automator, which was sort of the point of the demo.)

People seemed to like it when I mentioned that I had written Open Sesame, long ago, and that some other guy had helped me, and then I brought up the old Info panel for Open Sesame which showed its authors…

at last, the other guy

… and then I said, “I guess they listed us alphabetically. I wonder what happened to that other guy?”

That got a good laugh.

what happened to the other guy?

The other guy, who at the time was a junior engineer at NeXT and helped me get the app out and drew the icon, was Scott Forstall, who famously went on to become senior vice president of iOS Software Apple and ultimately left the business in 2013 and who’s now doing nicely as a Broadway producer.

Photo of Scott Forstall by Matt Yohe - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

epilogue. one day in 2014 in rural Texas

I was travelling to visit a customer in Texas and driving my rental car on some extremely rural highway late at night, listening to some tech podcasts, including one of my favourites: The Talk Show with John Gruber.

On episode 70 of the old version from 5by5, which I’m having trouble finding a link to but I’ll update this if I do, Gruber was talking to Dan Benjamin about all sorts of random things, and I was sort of half listening, but I jolted upright and almost drove off the road when I heard John say this:

"Steve Jobs in Exile" is here. And here's the gushing followup post.

Thu, 28 May 2026 13:21:13 -0400

A few months ago I blogged about the upcoming book, Steve Jobs in Exile.

This week, the Computer History Museum hosted author Geoffrey Cain and a panel discussion to kick off the book.

I had mentioned I was excited about this book—as I had worked for NeXT from 1991 to 1996 and was there for the merger with Apple, and remained at Apple for another three decades.

I also wrote

The book probably doesn’t contain the I was steve@next.com story, though. If it does, expect a gushing followup post here!

HERE IS THE GUSHING FOLLOWUP POST

Imagine my excitement to open the book

and flip to the index

and see that I was just five people away from Ernest Hemingway.

Yep, author Geoffrey Cain managed to include my I was steve@next.com story in the book!

I know you’re going to buy your own copy, and you really should; it’s an excellent read, documenting some rarely told stories of what happened to and transformed Steve Jobs after leaving Apple in 1985 and returning in 1996.

The book has tons of great stories and behind the scenes info; I certainly recognized a lot of the names, but many of the tales were new to me.

But of course my favourite was this part on page 180.

Steve's relationship with his own technology revealed itself in unexpected ways. When a new Canadian engineer named Steve Hayman noticed that nobody at NeXT had claimed the email alias steve@next.com— despite seven or eight Steves working there —he figured he could take it. Late one Friday night, two weeks into the job, he filled out the form to redirect steve@next.com to his own address, shayman@next.com.

The system approved it automatically. Then the avalanche began. Emails from reporters, CEOs, financiers-all thinking they were writing to Steve Jobs-flooded Steve Hayman’s inbox. “Of course I didn’t read any of it,” he later wrote on his blog. But panic set in immediately. In a desperate attempt to undo his mistake before anyone noticed, Steve Hayman filled out the form again, this time redirecting steve@next.com to sjobs@next.com. Then he sent Steve a confessional email: “I did something dumb…This was a bad idea, I’m sorry.”

But Steve didn’t rip into him. “Great idea, thank you”, he responded.

(The full story is here, and author Geoffrey Cain did let me know he was including it, which is OK by me!)

It’s been a pretty good couple of months. I’m 2 for 2 in getting mentioned in books about Apple.

Steve Jobs tells our customer what he thinks of their industry

Wed, 13 May 2026 13:56:52 -0400

It’s 1996. Steve Jobs was still at NeXT with the merger with Apple still a few months away.

I was a Systems Engineer for NeXT, working alongside a Sales Executive, and our little team covered customers in a part of the East Region.

We brought a customer out to Redwood City for a meeting. They asked Steve what he thought of their industry. And he sure told them.

NeXT's headquarters in Redwood City, California.

By Coolcaesar - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

we’re selling WebObjects to big companies

NeXT was mostly selling WebObjects in those days, which was a tool that you’d run on a server to help you build web apps five to ten times faster, as we all liked to say.

Seriously, WebObjects was a great product, that cost $50,000 per server at one point, and I remember being in the room post-Apple-merger when Steve announced that the price was dropping to $699 (and eventually to $0.) Our NeXT sales guys, whose recent careers had been built on selling one or two copies of the $50,000 version a month, were not exactly enthusiastic about this change.

(We Systems Engineers, on the other hand, thought this was a great chance to get WebObjects in front of more people.)

customer visits to HQ are usually great

So anyways, we used to bring customers out to the NeXT headquarters in Redwood City for a day of meetings with sales, support, and engineering leaders, and at the end, Steve would drop by for a little informal Q&A.

(I’m going to refer to him as SJ which is what a lot of us called him, because it might otherwise be confusing on this blog to be talking about Steve from NeXT.)

He was not quite the business legend at that point—NeXT had great technology that was not exactly selling like hotcakes—but he was still pretty famous, and someone that most customers enjoyed meeting, even briefly.

We invited the senior IT folks from a major retail chain (that has since merged a couple of times with other companies, and it’s not important who it was) out for one of these day-long meetings. My partner and I had been working closely with them for over a year on a project to modernize their point-of-sale checkout system to do dynamic personalized coupons, or something.

It’s been a while. I forget exactly what technical things we talked about. But I definitely remember the end of the meeting.

SJ arrives at the meeting. We brace ourselves.

End of the day, engineering meetings finished, everything’s gone well, sales team cautiously optimistic, Steve Jobs comes in. Pretty casual. Just wanted to say “hi”, and what questions do you have for me?

My partner and I glance at each other from the back of the room. We’ve been working on this customer for a long time. This part of the meeting has not been scripted carefully. Cross your fingers.

“why isn’t NeXT successful in retail?”, the customer asks

“Sure, I have a question”, says one of the retail company’s IT leaders.

“We’ve noticed that NeXT has been pretty successful in some vertical markets, like finance, and health care, and telecommunications for instance” (note: this is true) “but you haven’t been very successful with retail. Why is that?”

Um, did we remember to tell SJ that this was a customer from the retail industry? What’s he going to say?

“Well”, SJ begins … “I think it’s because people in retail are too stupid to see the value of our technology.”

omg WHAT?

As my partner and I start to think about how we are going to apologize to the customer at dinner later, SJ continues.

SJ analyzes the retail landscape

“Who’s your CIO?”, he asks.

Well, they respond, it’s some guy who (fortunately) wasn’t at the meeting.

“How much money does he make?”, SJ continues.

Um, I dunno, maybe $150K? the customer guesses.

“There’s the problem!” SJ announces. “All the smart CIOs are on Wall Street, and they’re all making a million bucks a year, and THEY are the ones who are adopting our technology.”

meeting over

SJ excuses himself and departs.

Well that could have gone better, we thought. Just as we start to think up what kind of grovelling could possibly save this customer relationship, one of the customers says:

“You know what, he was exactly right. Retail is a stubborn business, resistant to change. We want to be the exception."

And everything was fine. SJ had hit the nail on the head, even if the sales team in the back didn’t realize it.

the Alto misguided high-speed rail project between Toronto and Montreal

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:56:39 -0400

Look. I like high speed trains. I’ve been on the TGV in France and the Shinkansen in Japan. A high speed train in Canada would be a dream come true.

About to board a TGV high speed train in France

Our Shinkansken train in Kyoto

I even like the existing VIA trains, while wishing they were faster and more reliable. I’ve ridden VIA and Amtrak across North America and GO here in Toronto.

I like trains. You probably knew that. (You can like them as they are and also and wish they were faster.)

But … the federal government is proposing to spend a boatload of money on Alto, a new high speed line between Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Québec, and it’s the wrong project, going to the wrong places.

Yes, let’s spend some billions, but let’s fix up what we already have.

How about we get back to the way it used to be?

Here’s an excerpt of a VIA Rail schedule from 1976.

Turbo train #81 leaves downtown Montreal at 08:00 and arrives at Toronto’s Union Station at 12:15. Seven trains a day each way. 4hr 15 for the Turbo. (I recall it used to be faster, Via bragged about 3h59 service on some express trains.)

Not only that, four trains a day each way from Toronto to London via Kitchener, and ten more from Toronto to London via Brantford.

I took the Kitchener to London train every couple of weeks for a few years.

Kitchener to London took an hour and twelve minutes. Four times a day.

And Via had lots of other routes - here’s the 1976 system map; many of these links have vanished over the past years with one cutback after another..

What’s it like today?

Today there is exactly one train from Kitchener to London, and it takes an hour and 55 minutes (and a few more trains on the other route from Toronto to London via Brantford.) It limps along between Kitchener and London at about 30 mph on track that has been neglected and deteriorated.

There are six trains from Toronto to Montreal, all of which take five hours or more.

Everything is

considerably slower
less frequent
less reliable

than it was fifty years ago.

Freight trains continue to have the right of way over much of the routes that Via travels, causing passenger trains to stop and wait.

what is Alto proposing

The Alto project envisages spending up to 90 billion dollars on an all-new route, with speeds of 300 km/h or more, and a vague promise of a 3 hour journey between Toronto and Montreal.

But … They’re being very vague on the route and won’t even commit to having the Toronto end be the existing Union Station.

The route would bypass the existing rail corridor (along Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence) between Toronto and Montreal in favour of a new route through Peterborough.

Here’s the area they’re studying, with two possible vague routes under consideration.

This corridor would be exclusive to Alto and have no contention with freight service.

what’s wrong with that?

OK, just for the moment ignore all the expected complaining by anyone whose land might be impacted by this new route, which happens any time anybody tries to build anything.

It’s a huge expenditure and a huge project, and it bypasses a lot of population along the existing Via corridor. No Alto service to Oshawa, Belleville, Kingston, Brockville, Cornwall and more.

Alto won’t commit to where the Toronto station is. They say it’d be hard to run the new high speed track all the way downtown. Maybe it would end in Scarborough. Air Canada is somehow wrapped up in this process - maybe they want it to end at Pearson Airport.

Whatever they choose, it will take freaking forever to build and I’m confident it won’t be done in my lifetime.

And it’s spending tens of billions of dollars to build a service that is only slightly better than what we had with conventional rail service in the 1970s.

why don’t we do this instead?

Spend a few billion dollars to upgrade the existing VIA Rail right of way. Figure out a way to give the passenger service priority over freight on that corridor. Get back to the speed and service level we had in the 1970s.

Bring the trains right to DOWNTOWN Toronto. Maybe they can’t run at full speed for the last few miles, so what.

Improve service beyond Toronto to Kitchener, London and beyond, too. Can we just start by fixing the deteriorating track that’s already there and let VIA deliver reliable, timely service like they used to do?

High Frequency Rail.

Not High Speed Rail.

All that could be ready in a few years, not a few decades.

And I might even get to ride it before I die.

Our once-a-decade visit to the safety deposit box at the bank

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:24:04 -0400

We were discussing wills and other important documents and honestly could not remember if there was a copy of our will in the safety deposit box we’ve had at the bank for quite a while.

So, off to the bank we went today. (Minor victory: we knew where the key was.)

Ushered into the back for the safety deposit box opening ceremony, and our box was presented to us, and we opened it as dramatically as possible to discover that it contained: nothing.

Rats, I was hoping that I’d forgotten about the gold bars or Bitcoin or whatever might have been in there in my dreams.

my grandmother’s way

I could not help but think of my grandmother, who was apparently much better organized than we are.

After she passed away, my mother and my uncle went to the bank to examine her safety deposit box, unsure of what they’d find. Whatever was in there had probably been in there since 1940 or earlier.

My mom laughed as she recalled gasping when they opened my grandmother’s safety deposit box, because what did they find in there? A GUN. A small pistol. Fancy pearl handled revolver or something.

I admire my grandmother because she was apparently pre-planning a bank robbery and staging the weapons inside the bank.

Up a Lathe-y River ...

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:03:41 -0400

that was then

Shop class. Grade 8. I made this bowl.

I’m still kind of weirded out that they let 12 year olds play with a lathe back in the day, but my bowl turned out pretty nicely. Thank you, shop teacher at Ryerson Public School! That was the first and until recently last time I ever touched a lathe, but I’ve always wanted to try it again.

this is now

Lee Valley Tools, Turn a Pen Seminar. I made this pen.

For 50 years I’ve been impressed by this idea that you could magically convert square things, like this hunka wood (a pen blank) -

into round things, like the pen shown above. It’s the magic of the lathe! Square things become Round things!

Our local Lee Valley Tools occasionally runs seminars as a way of persuading you to buy more tools from Lee Valley, so I signed up for their Pen Turning Seminar last weekend. For $50, you got a hunk of wood, and a bag of parts,

and, fortunately, a competent instructor (Thomas) to lead you through making a pen.

You get to toss around words like gouge and mandrel and collet and Morse Taper in a kind of semi-intelligent way while you’re turning your square thing into a round thing.

I really enjoyed that. And of course on the way out of the store, you cannot help but look at the lathes for sale, and you start doing the mental calculations of how much money you could save on pens if you had your own lathe.

Daughter-in-law helpfully noted …

I stopped by your house today and Cathy literally said “this is going to be the most expensive pen he’ll ever have…because after this class he’s going to want a lathe”

Yeah, I think she’s right.

Thomas started off by asking the class if anybody had used a lathe before. “I made a bowl in grade 8”, I said, and he laughed and mentioned that 50% of his students usually started that way and then never did anything for decades after.

He was a great instructor but he hurled so many tips and tricks at us before we even mounted the blank on the lathe that I think I want to take the class again and take better notes. and then I’ll have TWO pens and the not-buying-pens cost savings will REALLY start to build up.

have I bought a lathe yet

No. Not yet. But I did buy this book -

which is full of gorgeous pens and practical projects, such as making corn-cob pipes out of actual corn cobs.

I never thought that corn-cob pipes would be something I admired.

do you know somebody who’s really good at this?

As a matter of fact, yes! My former Apple colleague Bret Siegel makes gorgeous pens out of ACTUAL DRUMSTICKS used in ACTUAL CONCERTS which he then re-sells. What a great idea. Are you a friend of the band Widespread Panic who also needs a pen? (Who isn’t, really.)

Check out Bret’s pens for sale for more.

Bret shared this video with me of part of the process of turning a Widespread Panic drumstick into a pen -

pretty cool. Isn’t it crazy that you can convince a lathe that it’s actually a drill press, and that the drill bit doesn’t even bother turning.

And I have a lot of Argonotes drum sticks in the garage, hmmm, I wonder what people would pay for those?

so what’s next?

Well, you’d need

A lathe;
Some gouges;
A strategy for dealing with sharpening the gouges. In watching Youtube videos, they seem to skip over this part. Thomas said “What you don’t see is that they’re probably stopping every two minutes to re-sharpen on the grinder.";
A grinder. Or, I dunno, can you subscribe to sharp tools and have Amazon send you new sharp ones every week? Which reminds me, one of my kids noticed I had some Amazon-brand rechargeable AA batteries and actually asked me “So … Do you send them back to Amazon to be recharged?";
Probably a good idea to sign up for another Lee Valley course on sharpening;
A drill press because why not, you have to drill a straight hole through the pen “blank” to get started;
Space in the garage to set everything up.

That last step is going to be the hardest.

Kids, come quick! There's a GOAT in the backyard!

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:17:02 -0400

There’s a goat in the backyard!

Ever since my kids were born, I have attempted, each April 1, to persuade them that there’s a goat in the backyard.

Strangely, this never works, and somehow it works even less every year.

But I keep trying.

You know, the kids today, what with the emojis, you’d think just sending this to the family chat would do it -

‼️🏡🐐

Daughter-in-law, unfamiliar with tradition:

Is this a guessing game?

Son, much more familiar:

I am unfortunately very experienced at this guessing game... If you really wanted to cut deep you could say there's a GOAT in the backyard and photoshop a picture of Ohtani in there

I can beat that! Kids, there are THREE GOATs in the backyard!

three GOATs in the backyard

how’d that go over?

This went about as well as previous attempts to prove there was a goat in the backyard; I feel obliged to document some of those here for posterity. Also to remind me next year to try it a different way.

2025

AI image creation, sadly, begins to destroy actual creativity

2023

The only thing that kept this Augmented Reality video from being believable was the way the goat seemed to be on both sides of the fence. Other than that, surely this would have worked …

Your browser does not support the video tag.

2014

(Cathy’s handiwork. At previous house. She got me.)

2013

I was away, but fortunately the security camera caught something fifteen seconds in….

Your browser doesn't support video

Cathy, knowing I was in California, helpfully chimed in:

2012

I can’t believe this didn’t work. Come on, it’s literally true.

Much Much Earlier, Maybe 2002

Actual aforementioned son, actual goats, and my actual Dad, and I hope he would have approved.

Co-authoring books - twice! - with David Pogue

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:14:19 -0400

David Pogue is a famous author of science and technology books, a contributor to CBS Sunday Morning and a one time Broadway pit band leader.

I am none of those things.

Well, I have led non-Broadway pit bands a couple of times, and I have read a lot of science and technology books, and Cathy and I always watch CBS Sunday Morning because we are now in that coveted Old People Who Drug Companies Make Commercials For demographic.

Imagine my delight, then, that not once but TWICE I have co-authored books with David Pogue. Although my name is not exactly on their covers, it’s in them.

The World According to Twitter

In 2009, as Twitter was capturing the world’s consciousness and attracting clever, intelligent people in a way that it totally DOESN’T do now, Pogue wrote The World According to Twitter

in which he posted some questions on Twitter to his 500,000 followers, collected the best responses, and published a book in which he actually listed everybody as a co-author.

Somehow, a few of mine made the cut!

He –very kindly– wrote:

As you'll soon see, this book's coauthors are some of the wittiest, sharpest, most interesting people on the internet.

gosh.

These were actual tweets posed by @Pogue and answered by @shayman and no, I’m not linking to the originals on Twitter, I’m avoiding it. But back in 2009, I loved Twitter. I remain very sad about what’s happened to it since, (find me now on mastodon ) but back in the day …

What’s your brilliant idea to improve air travel?

Your frequent flyer card can be used to lock the seat in front of you in the full upright position.

Who's had a brush with greatness?
Met Bobby Orr at age 11. He handed me an apple core and said "Here, kid, would you throw this away for me?" I should've had it bronzed.

Make up a headline from the year 2012.
Twitter's Multibillion-Dollar Server Upgrade Complete; Messages Can Now Be 142 Characters

Pretty much everything else in the book is funnier than this but hey, it was 2009, we were doing our best. And here’s proof I’m a co-author.

Apple: The First 50 Years

Apple turns 50 on Wednesday this week. David Pogue has written what is probably THE definitive history of the company, and if not, it’s certainly full of plenty of anecdotes that I’ve never heard before. I spent 33 years working at Apple (and NeXT) so of course I had to buy this one, and it will fit in nicely with the 4,000 other books about Apple I already have.

It’s a great book, I am very much enjoying it. And it’s a New York Times bestseller!

So here’s my tenuous contribution to Apple: The First 50 Years.

Last October, Pogue asked for volunteers who might know a thing or two to proofread certain chapters, even though the book was basically done at that point.

There’s a chapter about NeXT, so of course I volunteered, and he emailed me a preview of chapter 26.

I sent back a few notes – tremendously big deals such as the fact that he’d spelled the famous oceanographer as Jacques Yves-Cousteau when of course it’s Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and a couple of actual factual corrections to the NeXT timeline.

He graciously thanked me – and dozens of other fact-checkers – and we’re all acknowledged in the book itself. I’m honoured to be listed on page 568 as a Beta Reader in this, the definitive book about Apple.

Is that as cool as having my name on every iPhone in the world?

Almost!

one final tenuous connection to David Pogue - MacHack/AdHoc 2004

MacHack (later renamed AdHoc) was a legendary Mac conference in Michigan where the keynote speeches started at midnight and continued for hours, and the brilliant attendees would stay up all night trying to out-do each other with clever MacHacks.

In 2004, a speaker from Apple in California had to pull out at the last minute when he got ill, and I was asked on a couple of days notice to fill in, and was an ideal replacement because of the following reasons:

a) I lived near enough to Dearborn, Michigan to drive there.

I asked the organizers how long these keynotes were supposed to go. I mean, starting at midnight? Really? And they told me “Well, if you go past about six AM, you’ll probably start to lose people.”

So I did my best and was the keynote speaker for the 2nd night of the conference, showing off some Applescript tricks, making the CD/DVD trays on multiple PowerMacs pop in and out in sync, getting the computers to sing the list of software updates (softwareupdate --list | say -v Cellos) , and more late-night silliness.

My Day 2 Keynote went over pretty well. (I think I wrapped up at about 2 AM, with apologies for giving such a short talk.)

David Pogue was the Day 1 keynote, and I regret I didn’t have a chance to say hello.

The reviews were pretty good for both of us. Here’s a note from Adam Engst of TidBits:

Keynote. MacHack keynotes are legendary events that start at midnight and continue for hours, with well known speakers such as Ted Nelson, John Warnock, Steve Wozniak, Andy Ihnatko, and numerous others. This year’s lead-off keynote at ADHOC was ably given by David Pogue, who initially seemed a little shocked by the extreme level of interactivity traditionally shown by the audience. But David rolled with it, and quickly drew everyone in with his witty song parodies and jokes. His Panther tips were a challenge to members of the audience, which tried (successfully on a number of occasions) to tell David things he didn’t know. The second night’s keynote (also at midnight) was delivered by Apple’s Steve Hayman, substituting for an ill Jordan Hubbard. Steve drew on his experience with Apple’s large education installations (the places that have thousands of iBooks in school systems) and years of working with Unix to give a talk that was both hilarious and useful, in that he showed how simple it was to use development tools like AppleScript Studio to marry a graphical interface and a command line utility. +2 points.

Ted Nelson, John Warnock, Steve Wozniak, Andy Ihnatko, David Pogue, and me.

I’m a lucky guy.

Thoughts I Had While Undergoing a Couples Massage With My Wife

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:13:36 -0400

rationale

Cathy doesn’t like going to the movies. I like going to the movies. So for years, we compromised, by not going to the movies.

But a few years ago, she bravely got out of her comfort zone and gave me a delightful Christmas gift whereupon she agreed to go to the movies with me, occasionally, with veto power over which movie it was, etc.

Last Christmas it was my turn, and I agreed to get way out of MY comfort zone by going to a Couples Massage. I have never had a massage. I don’t particularly want other people—other than Cathy, of course—touching me.

(I’m not one of those people who likes hugging colleagues at work either, a problem which I solved by retiring.)

today’s the day

Today was the day. We’re off on a little mini vacation in the Niagara area, and Cathy booked us a Couples Massage, and, knowing me and how much I was likely to enjoy any of this, she booked a short one.

thoughts of steve during the procedure

This must be what having an autopsy is like.
You know what this reminds me of? A stranger repeatedly jabbing me in the back with his elbow. It’s a lot like that.
Check, there’s his shoe. There’s his other shoe. How did he get over to the other side while still jabbing me in the back with his elbow.
At least there’s a TV you can watch at the dentist.
Are we done yet? Because my favourite part of anything is when it’s over.
let’s see, where would I rank this in comparison to other 2026 procedures: eye surgery, a colonoscopy, a dental visit and a gastrosocopy? Top 5. Probably.
Remembering that time we went to the Mission:Space ride at EPCOT and I had to sit down with my head between my knees for an hour afterwards.
Or that time I was in a middle seat on a red-eye flight during severe turbulence and there was a kid kicking the seat behind me the whole way.
At the dentist, you can estimate how far through the procedure you are by watching them progress around your jaw. Ok I’m 1/4 done. 1/2. 3/4. Lower left is all that remains. Two more teeth. I can do this. … I had no time frame in this event today.
I have to concede that the guy is a professional and probably did a good job by the standards of people who enjoy this.
i hope she doesn’t mind if I write a blog post about this.

in conclusion

Cathy enjoyed it. And she says she’s glad I made it through, with her. And I am too (the part where it’s over.)

Happy wife, happy life.

Resetting toner levels on a Brother MFC-L8850CDW colour laser printer

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:36:26 -0400

THE SYMPTOM

THE HISTORY

I’m a big fan of Brother laser printers. I have a monochrome MFC-8840D that’s been pretty much trouble-free for probably 25 years, and a colour MFC-L8850CDW that’s been equally great, but only for maybe 15 years. Printed Christmas cards, travel agent invoices, documentation, and a mountain of band music over the years, all without complaint.

We’ve been having one issue with the MFC-L8850CDW though.

Like many lasers, it has four separate cartridges for Black, Cyan, Yellow and Magenta toner, and for quite a while, the printer has been complaining that the Magenta cartridge is empty even though Cyan and Yellow are maybe 90% full. I’d bought and installed them all at the same time a while ago, genuine legit Brother cartridges, but somehow the printer thinks the Magenta one is empty.

Tried everything. Disassembled printer, cleaned colourful toner everywhere, wiped everything down, and briefly considered buying another $120 magenta cartridge. (Expensive, sure, but they last a long time.)

Then, somehow, as a last gasp, I actually searched the Internet to see if anyone had experienced the same problem.

As unfortunately usual these days, a lot of the answers were 95% AI-generated slop, but I did find this site with the exact solution for my specific printer. Thank you, EasyInk Support! If I ever need a cartridge and I happen to be in New Zealand, you’ve got my business.

THE PROBLEM

Certain Brother lasers apparently lose track of how full the cartridges are. When you replace a cartridge, a counter is supposed to be reset, but sometimes, because who knows why, the printer fails to reset the count for one of the cartridges. Even after installing a new Magenta cartridge my printer thought it was out of Magenta.

I guess the reset didn’t happen, and for a while, our printer has claimed to be out of Magenta. (Fortunately, it still prints everything else.)

THE SOLUTION

All you have to do is press an INVISIBLE BUTTON for five seconds, and a secret Toner Reset menu appears. You can then choose your Magenta cartridge on the list, and the printer will now believe that it’s full of beautiful Magenta.

The front panel of this printer has a colour touch screen display, and also an array of buttons that are illuminated only when needed. You can’t see those buttons at all if they’re not lit up, but we need to touch one of them, which is a small challenge if we can’t see where it is.

I made a recording of the process just so you can see what I mean by an invisible button.

These are the steps.

Figure out where the “*” button is. It’s behind a backlit numeric dial panel that normally only lights up if you’re sending a Fax, so touch the Fax button on the main screen, and take note of exactly where the “*” is, because it won’t be illuminated when you need to press it in a moment.
Open the front cover of the printer. The touch screen display says Close the front cover. Don’t. Leave that error panel on the screen.
Press and hold the magic “*” button for five seconds.
The touch screen now shows this Reset menu -

Those represent different cartridges. K is black, C is cyan, M is Magenta, Y is yellow. STD means a standard capacity cartridge, and HC is High Capacity.

In my case I scrolled down to M.TNR-HC and tapped that button, and it asked for confirmation and - BOOM.

My printer now believes its Magenta cartridge is full again. Success! We can print in colour!

I hope this helps either me in the future, or someone else if you stumbled across this page.

reset codes for other Brother printers

Not all Brother printers work this way - I came across a site listing slightly different reset codes for other models (sadly, not including mine.)

Perhaps this list will help.

Giving kids the "Where Do Emoji Come From?" talk

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:42:59 -0400

It was a thrill to give a presentation today at the Bay Area Science and Engineering Fair, on “Where Emoji Come From”, with great thanks to Apple for conveniently shipping the trombone emoji 🪊 in 26.4 beta 4 this week, which let me change the thrilling conclusion from Coming Soon, the Trombone Emoji to OMG It’s Finally Here, Are You As Excited As I Am?

At least two of the students in the crowd admitted to being trombone players, so I’m sure they’ll win the grand prize just for that.

Bay Area? What Bay Area?

Um, in this context “Bay Area” is referring to this Hamilton end of Lake Ontario and I know nobody else calls it that.

i have learned one thing in my career

One slight hitch. I built the presentation on my Mac Mini but grabbed my laptop on the way out the door and (whoops) it didn’t have macOS 26.4 beta 4 on it so some slides showed the Unicode “missing character” glyph instead. A little frantic last minute copy/paste from iPhone to the rescue.

“Steve, did you seriously consider doing a software update on your MacBook 10 minutes before your talk started, just so you could get the trombone emoji 🪊?”

look, I’m not saying I’ve learned many lessons in my career but I did resist THAT urge.

deleting slides

I always hit the point in a presentation where I’m finished Creating Slides and shift gears to Deleting Slides. The presentation immediately starts improving.

That was about 1 AM last night.

The students are surely happy that I deleted a lot of my Thrilling History of Text Encoding slides and that I did not spend much time on why there is a gap in EBCDIC between “R” and “S”, even though that’s really kind of fascinating. to some of us. ask your grandparents about EBCDIC.

(It’s because, on a punch card, which also ask your grandparents what THOSE were, if ‘S’ had been one more than ‘R’, it would have resulted in a punch card with too many adjacent holes and for a popular letter like S, it was thought that would weaken the card. So, the EBCDIC standard means that S is two more than R, not one more. Srsly look at the ‘S’ here - there should be three adjacent vertical punches if it was going to follow immediately after R, but it doesn’t.)

By Nikevich (talk) 18:41, 10 March 2011 (UTC) - The same image, with lesser contrast at the top, Public Domain, Link

morse code “today”, he says

I did use Rush’s opening strain of “YYZ” as an example of How Morse Code Is Still In Use Today even though that song is, uh, from 1981 and oh my god that was 45 years ago? what is happening to the concept of time?

Y’know, this. The rhythm is spelling out “YYZ” in Morse Code.
𝄆 •-•• •-•• ••– 𝄇.

Emoji and Inclusion

It’s great to show off that the Emoji standard includes both Gender and Fitzpatrick Skin Tone modifiers, and that most emoji that represent a person can be modified on the fly. Here are some variants of the Weightlifter emoji, for instance, with gender and skin tone modifiers applied.

Unicode and Emoji also support the idea of merging two emoji through a Zero-Width Joiner. Check this out. If you have the ADULT emoji followed immediately by a ZWJ and then the MICROSCOPE emoji …

… what you actually get is a SCIENTIST. (Also modifiable for gender and skin tone, if you like.)

Human emoji are rendered in an unrealistic yellow, on purpose, and you can customize them to your liking. (There are even Grouping modifiers to tailor a “Family” emoji, for instance, to different combinations of moms and dads and kids.

I applaud the Emoji Subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium for these serious efforts to make emoji inclusive for us all.

possible trendy emoji

I can also report that any mention of 6 and 7 still causes the usual reaction amongst the youth of today.

(that was my example of “don’t suggest a 6-7 emoji to the committee, they aren’t interested in fads.")

And I still very much enjoy this unofficial list of Rejected Emoji including my favourite -

Today at last, the Trombone emoji!

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 15:27:56 -0400

Welcome U+1FA8A !

Today, Apple released iOS 26.4 beta 4, which includes a Trombone emoji.

wait… today? just where do emoji come from?

Glad you asked. There’s actually a committee - the Emoji Subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium - that meets every year to review proposals and vote on which ones should be included.

Every year a new version of the Unicode standard is released, usually with a handful of new, approved emoji. In 2025, version 17 of the Unicode standard was released, which includes a trombone emoji.

unicode ??

What the Unicode standard tries to do is to assign a code point to every conceivable character in every written language in the world. Software makers—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Samsung, anybody that might have to store and display text on the screen or in print—all agree that they’re going to stick to the definitions in the Unicode standard.

Everybody agrees as a result that the Unicode glyph known by its hexadecimal number as U+0041 represents the capital letter A, and that U+015C represents LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH CIRCUMFLEX (Ŝ), and that U+304A represents HIRAGANA LETTER O お, and more, so that most written language can be encoded in a standard way.

(It used to be a huge mess before Unicode 1.0 came out in 1989 Nobody could agree on how to represent accented characters or currency symbols other than ‘$’. Text written on one computer couldn’t always be read on a different system - but I’ll skip most of that history lesson.)

Unicode doesn’t just encode written text. The standard also includes code points for punctuation, mathematical symbols, musical notation, and even ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. U+13145 is EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH G006A which represents a falcon on top of a wickerwork basket: 𓅅

The current version, Unicode 17.0, defines a whopping 159,801 characters this way—which is 4,803 more that were standardized in Unicode 16.0 only a year earlier.

Those must be some fun committee meetings, but the result is pretty amazing - a standardized way to represent almost anything that’s ever been written down.

but what about emoji

Well, there’s an Emoji Subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium, that votes on which emoji will be included in each release. There are currently 3,790 emoji in the Unicode 17.0 standard.

Emoji 17.0 includes 163 new emoji - not just the trombone, but also DISTORTED FACE, FIGHT CLOUD, HAIRY CREATURE, ORCA, LANDSLIDE and TREASURE CHEST. It also includes a ton of variations of men/women/people wrestling, ballet dancers and people with bunny ears. (why so many? Unicode thoughtfully includes multiple skin tone variations for any emoji that represents a human.)

Wikipedia has a comprehensive Emoji chart of all of them. and Emojipedia has a good list of all the new ones in 17.0

I’m just interested in the trombone one, though.

a little emoji history

The history’s interesting. Japanese cell phones, starting in the 1990s, let you send little picture images in text messages. Like many things in our culture, the young people loved this, and the young people outside Japan wanted it too.

Here’s the set of emoji designed by Shigetaka Kurita and used by NTT Docomo in 1998.

You can see that the first Japanese emoji were pretty crude. 12x12 graphics. You probably had to be a young person to have good enough eyes to decode what they were.

Aș people outside of Japan started clamouring that they wanted Emoji too, the Unicode consortium took note, and in 2010, Unicode accepted a proposal to include 625 new emoji, including many of the same ones in that Japanese set.

Here for instance are three of the original 1998 emoji, at 12x12, and what they look like today on an iPhone, part of Apple’s Apple Color Emoji font.

But how do you add new ones?

The Emoji subcommittee welcomes proposals for new emoji, and votes on them annually. As you might expect, the number of emoji keeps growing.

(At one point, the Unicode standard included emoji for only six different national flags, not including Canada, and you can imagine the amount of worldwide whining and complaining there was about that. Now, they’ve found a way to include all the flags, fortunately.)

There’s a whole guideline for submitting Unicode Emoji Proposals that you have to follow.

Only a few are accepted.

And in 2019, a group of high schoolers from Maryland pitched an idea for a trombone emoji.

Here’s their proposal.

They did a pretty nice job! Click the link above to see the full thing, but here’s page 1:

As required by the rules, you have to submit a sample graphic, and justify why none of the existing emoji are sufficient.

This proposal requests the addition of the “Trombone” Emoji to the Unicode library. A trombone is a brass instrument played by moving a slide in and out to make different pitches. They are popular in pop culture and places that enjoy jazz music. The trombone emoji could also be used to represent a mistake symbolizing the “wop wop wop woooop” sounds when a person fails at a task.

Welcome U+1FA8A !

The Emoji Subcommittee were persuaded, and voted to adopt this emoji as U+1FA8A in Unicode 17.0 in September of 2025. It takes a while for the software world to catch up. Apple and Google don’t just automatically use the graphic in the proposal - they create their own. Apple’s emoji, which finally appeared in iOS 26.4 beta 4 in March of 2026, are all contained in the Apple Color Emoji font.

Here’s Apple’s trombone - as a graphic, not an emoji.

And if your system is up to date, you should see an emoji here - this is the actual glyph: 🪊

If that doesn’t look like a trombone, be patient. Your system will catch up soon.

wait, who draws the picture?

Each vendor agrees that U+1FA8A is a trombone, but they each get to draw it differently.

This can lead to humorous results - there was a time when the hamburger emoji on some platforms (cough google cough) was displayed with the cheese under the meat. That’s not how you build a hamburger! And the beer emoji showed the foam floating in air….

That’s not right either! Google’s CEO actually apologized and eventually it was straightened out.

one other proposal

Also, somewhat famously, in 2018 Ford spent some serious money to propose a pickup truck emoji which included sample artwork that looked suspiciously like a Ford truck.

Perhaps they forgot, though, that nobody has to draw the emoji exactly the way you proposed it, or in Ford’s shade of blue, and today, a pickup truck emoji (at least on the Mac) looks like this.

Adventures in hacking, 20 years ago this week.

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 16:54:29 -0400

The University of Wisconsin in Madison was always one of my favourite places to visit - I’d show up to do a demonstration of some cutting-edge-at-the-time thing like AppleScript or Automator or Apple Remote Desktop or Dashcode or Writing Apps with Objective-C, and there’s always be a fun, smart, creative and clever audience on hand. Students, network admin, faculty, always a great group.

(Of course I really hoped somebody would introduce me to Mike Leckrone, the former director of the UW Marching Band, whose book Quicksteps to Arranging taught me what little I know about band arranging, but we could never quite make that work.)

Anyway. There had recently been a somewhat dubious try-to-hack-this-Mac contest that some Europeans had put on, and Dave, an extremely highly respected Mac admin at UW who I kind of knew, was miffed about how it had been handled and the woefully misleading way it had been reported, and decided to set up his own contest.

CNET reported on the coverage of the first dubious contest.

Mac OS X hacked in under 30 minutes? Think again A highly questionable article on ZDNet claims that "Mac OS X was hacked in under 30 minutes," in a Swedish contest. The article fails to mention, however, that the Mac OS X system that was "hacked" had an LDAP server setup which was linked to the Mac's naming and authentication services, to let people add their own account on the machine. So the contest allowed the user to create their own account and local SSH access -- a precarious set-up to say the least.

Keen to run a challenge properly, Dave sets up a Mac Mini, running Mac OS 10.4.5 along with the latest security updates, and sets up a simple one-page web site on that machine.

Dave’s Challenge

Here’s the web page, from March 6, 2006. “The challenge is as follows: simply alter the web page on this machine”, it said.

Dave reported later that after 38 hours, the site was hit over 500,000 times and received more than 4,000 login attempts.

and? what did I notice?

Well …. I noticed one other thing on that page, a minor typo - “reqiurements.”

I figured he’d want to know, and I sent him a quick email, and Dave responded right away.

Just two minutes after my note - note the times, but Dave was in Central time and I’m in Eastern - he’d fixed the typo.

the altered web page.

Typo fixed!
Now the site looked like this (highlight mine) -

I WIN

Well, the challenge was Simply alter the web page on this machine - and it was altered, because of my email. Mac OS Hacked In 2 Minutes! the stories would surely read.

In fairness, nobody did hack the machine via any technical measure and the Mac proudly withstood the hundreds of thousands of attempts. I’m very happy about that. Mac security is pretty strong, even right out of the box.

But sometimes social engineering is stronger.

it’s kind of weird that you still have these emails and screen shots

That is kind of weird, isn’t it? A few days ago I was reminiscing about this 20-year-old stunt, but I couldn’t find any of the emails on my current Mac. I kind of wanted to tell the story, though, and tracked Dave down to see if he remembered it the way I did (and if he’d mind if I told you all about this.)

Dave’s doing great as it turns out, and he does remember this whole thing - and here’s the amazing part.

Somehow, Dave kept a copy of MY KEYNOTE SLIDES that I’d used the next time I presented at Wisconsin where I bragged about this a little. Dave sent me back a copy of my OWN SLIDES from 20 years ago which included before and after screen shots of the web site and the emails we’d exchanged.

I could hardly believe it when he sent these back to me yesterday! and here I thought I was a packrat.

Thank you Dave, for having kept this, and for all your hard work as a noted member of the wonderful Mac admin community. I wish you well in your new adventures.

…although your latest email to me said, “No one ever hacked that mini, by the way!”

I respectfully disagree.

21st Century Chicken and Egg Problem

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:08:13 -0400

I bought a new AirTag at the store a couple of weeks ago.

I brought it home. I haven’t opened the box and paired it to my phone, though.

Now I can’t find it.

Perhaps AirTags should have AirTags attached.

How the Olympics gets Canada's flag and anthem wrong

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:57:50 -0400

The National Flag of Canada Act defines the Maple Leaf as our national flag, and the government clearly and unambiguously defines what the flag should look like - its colour and dimensions.

Like this.

Similarly, the National Anthem Act defines the music and lyrics of O Canada. This is how it goes - this sheet music image is part of the National Anthem Act:

(The eagle eyed will notice a notation error in bar 10. I’ve already complained about THAT. But not now.)

Why does the International Olympic Committee get them both wrong? Shouldn’t we say something?

How the Olympics get these wrong

Let’s start with the anthem.

Here’s a brief excerpt as O Canada plays at the medal ceremony after the great Mikaël Kingsbury won gold in Men’s Dual Moguls.

You can hear the Canadians in the crowd singing along enthusiastically. Listen to the last bar. Notice how the fans finish singing before the orchestra finishes playing?

The final three notes in the orchestral arrangement are all twice as long as they should be.

how it’s supposed to go

Here’s how it SHOULD go. The National Anthem act defines the music, the way it is in the first staff. Most people sing the last two notes up an octave, as shown in the second staff. That’s cool. More heroic. Frankly I think we should change the National Anthem act to fix that, but that’s not my point.

The third staff shown here is how you hear it at the Olympics.

The last three notes are twice as long as they should be! People singing along will be out of sync at the end!

the fix should be easy

You don’t need a new arrangement. You don’t even need to get the orchestra back in the studio. Just digitally shorten the last few seconds of the recording. It would take a competent audio engineer only a minute to fix. I’m definitely not a “Competent audio engineer” but here’s a little experiment I did.

The Olympic Ending

The Corrected Ending

There, that was easy. Problem solved! Everybody can sing along!

where did the Olympic version come from?

In 2011, English musician Philip Sheppard took on a herculean task of arranging, conducting and recording 205 different national anthems with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios.

The International Olympic Committee used these versions at London 2012 and plans to use them for the next 25 years. (It’s what we heard in Milan.)

I’m in awe of how much work this must have been. I can barely scratch out a band arrangement of “Happy Birthday” in under a week. He had to do 205 different anthems, which surely required a tremendous amount of research. In this video he mentions the challenges - the anthem of Uruguay is six minutes long, the anthem of Uganda is only 9 bars long, and he had to come up with versions of them all that would fit within the time frame of an Olympic medal ceremony.

Great Job!

But …. The lengthening of O Canada doesn’t make any musical sense, and I’m not sure why it happened.

Can’t we fix this?

We don’t get a whole lot of chances to sing O Canada at the Olympics, and it’s a shame if the orchestra and the crowd aren’t quite in sync.

If the Olympic committee has its way, we’re stuck with this incorrect version of O Canada for another five or six Olympic Games.

OK What about the flag?

Flags have well defined aspect ratios - the proportion of width to width.

Canada’s is 1:2. Twice as wide as it is high. (And the middle is a square, and the red bars are each exactly half the width of the square.)

Wikipedia has an absurdly detailed construction sheet defining its shape right down to the radius of the curves. People take this seriously.

By MapGrid - Own work. Very careful measurements taken from an image of the official 1964 drawing of the Canadian flag, Public Domain

OK? Ours is 1:2 - one high, two wide.

Not everybody’s is.

Wikipedia, of course, has a very detailed table of all the flags of the world, and their aspect ratios, which you can study here.

Canada is 1:2. We’re joined in that shape by our friends from 52 other countries.

Lots of countries are 2:3 or 3:5. (The United Kingdom allows both 1:2 and 3:5). The United States is 10:19, of all things. And there are more unusual ones - Qatar is 11:32, Iceland is 9:16, El Salvador is 189:335 Mexico is 4:7, Norway is 16:27 …

It seems, though, like the Olympic organizers want all flags to be exactly the same proportion, which means a lot of them are just WRONG.

Here’s Canada’s flag being hoisted after our women’s team pursuit speed skaters won gold. (alongside the Netherlands and Japan) You can tell at a glance it’s wrong. The middle part isn’t a square. It’s too tall.

Canada’s Flag, the right way, and the wrong way.

It just looks wrong if you don’t draw it at the proper 1:2 proportion.

See? I squished that 2nd one to be 2:3 instead of 1:2. It’s wrong.

what I suspect is happening

Perhaps the Olympic people want all flags to be exactly the same size so that they can all fit on a standardized flagpole.

I don’t think that’s a good enough reason. Fly the proper flag. It’s the Olympics. It has a multi billion dollar budget. And it’s the right thing to do, for every country.

Korea speaks out

While I was collecting my thoughts on this, this news article came out -

Korea’s flag was displayed incorrectly after the medal ceremony at the womens 3000 metre relay. The Taegeuk symbol in the centre of the flag is incorrectly rotated counterclockwise.

(And, what do you know, the Canadian flag on the right is wrong, too.)

I’m not a Korean flag expert, but it does indeed look to me like the symbol in the centre is rotated maybe 20 degrees too far counterclockwise.

Here’s an article with more detail on exactly what’s wrong. That article included this illustration. You can see that the flag on the left is a little off.

The Korean Olympic Committee complained to the IOC.

"We provide the organizing committee with the official government-approved Taegeukgi design file and the national anthem audio for every Olympic Games," the KSOC said in a statement.
The IOC and the organizing committee apologized for the error and promised to take immediate corrective action, it said.

Korea spoke up. Why don’t we?

We should complain too, about both the flag and anthem.

I’m going to write to the Hon. Adam van Koeverden, Canada’s Minister of State for Sport, who is an Olympic gold medallist himself, and see what he’s going to do about this.

You bet I’ll keep you posted.

Adding "Steve Jobs In Exile" to my collection of Jobs/Apple books

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:41:09 -0400

I’m excited to see this post from author Geoffrey Cain announcing his new book, Steve Jobs in Exile.

Instantly pre-ordered.

Jobs left Apple in 1985, founded NeXT, hired me, bought Pixar, and came back to Apple in 1996 at its historic low point, when Apple was near-death, and orchestrated the turnaround we’ve all heard about.

I’ve bought most of the Steve Jobs books, and seen the movies, but they all seem to treat the NeXT years as an afterthought rather than a transformational time. Sure, the NeXT hardware didn’t sell well but the software set the stage for everything Apple makes today. And of course, the people were great.

The book probably doesn’t contain the I was steve@next.com story, though. If it does, expect a gushing followup post here!

Anthem Anxiety Again

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 16:05:32 -0400

O Canada at the Olympics

Here at the National Anthem Key Signature Research Bureau, we maintain our commitment to observing minute errors in O Canada.

You might recall that we have previously discovered Bugs in the National Anthem, including in the National Anthem Act, which have at least been partially fixed.

Today though, as the 2026 Winter Olympics get underway, we have a new irritant.

For Paris 2024. the IOC re-recorded all the national anthems, with brand new arrangements. That was a pretty huge project and I admire the effort.

It’s my understanding that they’re using these Paris 2024 recordings in Milan/Cortina 2026.

BUT

Here’s a video of the official Olympic version of O Canada. That’s the whole anthem.

But.

I want you to listen to just the last bit, right here. Listen for the last two bars. Does that sound right to you?

the last bit

OCanadaEnding.mp3

THE LAST THREE NOTES ARE AT LEAST TWICE AS LONG AS THEY SHOULD BE. Grrrr.

Doesn’t somebody from Canada have to approve this? Why are we letting them drag out the ending like this? We want to sing along!

I will give them credit for performing it in E♭ though, the National Time Signature

Hopedale Bowl - more than just Oakville's best car wash

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:16:52 -0400

So, our friends who own a bowling alley…

Cathy and I would frequently drop this tidbit in conversation. I thought it made us seem pretty cool. Come on, we have friends that own a bowling alley! This must be what it’s like knowing a celebrity.

oh you’re from Canada? so are we.

In 2016 we did a cruise on the Disney Magic and somewhere in the middle of the North Atlantic, another traveller introduced us to Ron and Linda. “Maybe you know them - you’re all from Canada”, someone probably said, trying to be helpful in that naive way that Americans assume everybody in Canada knows everybody else.

Ron and Linda and Captain Mickey on board the Magic

So we had the sort of conversation you might have had once where you gradually zoom in on exactly where someone lives.

You’re from Canada? So are we. Ontario? Sure, us too. From Toronto? Us too. Oakville? No kidding, we live in Oakville. Wait, you live where in Oakville? Did our kids go to school together? How do we not know you already? Wait, you own Hopedale Bowl?

And that began a great friendship.

We went to their daughter’s wedding, celebrated on a Disney ship. They came to our son’s wedding, and the stag-and-doe party was at Hopedale Bowl.

And we’ve enjoyed many more Disney adventures with them. I hope that continues!

It was all pre-ordained, somehow.

The bowling alley

16 Lanes of 5 Pin, the sign proudly proclaimed. Of course I always wondered if you couldn’t simplify that to 5 lanes of 16 pins, or one lane of 80 pins.

What a neat place to socialize. Not just for bowling, but as a gathering spot with, of course, a fully licensed snack bar.

Cathy, and two of our sons, even wound up working part time there. Sometimes I’d just go down for lunch and to watch other people bowl, all having the times of their lives. Individuals, families, tournaments, the Special Olympics – everyone was welcome.

I didn’t really bowl. But I really enjoyed watching it all. Wow, was it crowded with excitement when the Special Olympics tournaments were on.

how it works

I have to tell you, one of the highlights of my life was when Ron took us backstage where I finally got to see all the fascinating mechanical apparatus that makes a 5-pin bowling lane work. Ron had to work pretty hard to keep this all running! They had purchased a bowling alley that was already 40 years old.

There’s a lot to this, as it turns out.

The snack bar

I got an amazing behind-the-scenes look at everything involved in running a small restaurant, too.

The parties

People bowled, of course, but Hopedale Bowl is also the sort of community centre that’s the perfect spot for a kid’s birthday party - or in our case, a party to celebrate Tyler and Diana’s upcoming wedding, which Ron and Linda were delighted to host.

I can’t quite remember what the setup for this was, but you can see the groom here (on the left) clearly enjoying the outdoor component of the party.

The proprietors

Ron and Linda are, of course, well-loved and dazzling stewards of the 5-pin bowling community and after hosting dozens of tournaments over the years, we were delighted to be invited to a ceremony where they were both inducted into the Central Ontario 5-pin Bowler’s Association Hall of Fame - see, I told you we knew some celebrities!

wait, you said something about a car wash?

Y’know, when you’re as well-loved by the community as Hopedale Bowl is, anything is possible. Every year there’s something called Community Votes where people vote on their favourite Oakville establishments.

Hopedale Bowl routinely wins in the obvious categories - Best Bowling Alley, Best Kids Experience, Best Fries, Best Family Outing – and they certainly deserve those awards

Somehow – don’t ask me, I know NOTHING – it is apparently possible to nominate anybody for anything, and Hopedale Bowl was also nominated in 2023 in the category of Best Car Wash.

And it turns out, if you persuade enough of your friends to vote, good things will happen!

Behold, it’s official, Oakville’s Best Car Wash of 2023 …

Can I just say that I very much appreciate Ron and Linda’s sense of humour about this particular event.

the Third Place

Sociologists have coined the term The Third Place - social surroundings that aren’t your home (the first place) or your work (the second.)

They’ve recognized how valuable these are - the answer to loneliness, and political polarization, for instance.

Look at this characterization from the book The Great Good Place. A third place is -

Open and inviting;
Comfortable and informal;
Convenient;
Unpretentious;
There are regulars (and often there’s a host who greets people as they arrive);
Conversation is the main activity;
Laughter is frequent.

That’s Hopedale Bowl.

I hope you have a place like that.

what now?

Ron and Linda have just sold Hopedale Bowl, after 18 years, and I am sure its new proprietors will carry on this tradition of excellence, of family service, of being a warm and welcoming spot whether you’re a bowler or not.

I wish you both the best in retirement. Some of us retire and then never hear from our employers again, but Ron, I suspect the new owners will need your advice on maintaining that equipment!

and I hope we’ll all enjoy many more shipboard rounds of Quirkle!

update

Here’s a great story from Oakville News about Hopedale Bowl and its legacy.

Getting Hired at NeXT

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 11:53:21 -0400

I found this sheet of paper the other day.

In September of 1991 I travelled from my then-home of Bloomington, Indiana out to visit NeXT at their headquarters in Redwood City, California, for two days of job interviews for an SE position in Toronto. Here’s the agenda.

Back in 1990, proud new owner of a NeXT Cube at Indiana University, which was probably the first privately-purchased NeXT Cube in the entire state, I’d started to wonder about moving back home some day, getting ready to wrap up my big adventure of living in an Exotic Foreign Country.

And I had no idea how the computer business worked. But NeXT seemed pretty interesting. I loved my NeXT Cube and was starting to get good at, or at least fascinated with, NeXT software development with Objective-C.

Did NeXT even have a Canadian office? Did they have technical people out in the field or was everybody in California? I had no idea.

So I asked the local Indiana NeXT sales guy, Pat Wootan, if there might be an opportunity, and he put me in touch with Phil Hume, who was NeXT Canada’s sales manager in Toronto.

Over the 1990 Christmas break I met Phil and we had lunch at some place near YYZ. I’m sure I asked him nothing but dumb questions, but Phil encouraged me to apply for a Systems Engineer role in Toronto because the current SE was leaving.

It took months before this interview took place, and then … You know, I’m having trouble remembering the timeline. I guess they offered me the job pretty quickly because I started in October of 1991 but it sure took a long time for the initial interview. Pryce Harrison was NeXT’s manager for Canada - manager for a total of about four people - and showed me around, and at the end of the day I had dinner with Pierre Durand, who was the SE in Vancouver.

I remember all the other people I interviewed with too, including Avie Tevanian famously became VP of Software at Apple after the merger. Ali Ozer is still at Apple. The other names trigger fond memories too.

I don’t remember a whole lot about the Q&A though. My resume at the time - still stapled to this sheet of paper 35 years later - said that my career goal was A challenging software engineering position. Or a hockey organist.

so that’s how the best part of my career began.

Thank you to everybody on this sheet!

I don’t envy people applying for jobs (or interviewing candidates) these days. The process seemed much simpler then.

It could be that the main reason I got the job was that I mentioned to these folks that I’d spent $11,000 on buying my own NeXT Cube, just a month before the cheaper/faster/better $2,500 NeXTStation was released.

At least one person said “Um …. hang on, nobody told you to hold off for a bit? Nobody gave you a hint that something cheaper was coming? Geez, I’m sorry, can we make it up to you by offering you a job?”

Are you describing the coffee or me?

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 12:27:53 -0400

“round, balanced and comforting” … “a lot of interesting characteristics”

We bought this 2025 Coffee Advent Calendar from TheRoastersPack.com, which gave us 25 individual packs of coffee beans, each of which had been roasted by a different Canadian coffee roastery from coast to coast.

Fun! Every day in December we ground up and brewed and debated a different coffee, helped in our journey by the guidebook that came with it.

The booklet included thorough descriptions of each coffee. Tasting notes that reminded me of the somewhat overly pretentious ways that people talk about wine. Notes of this. Hints of that. Suggestions of imaginary flavours that surely had nothing whatsoever to do with the drink itself.

After a while, though, we started to notice that the descriptions started to seem … oddly familiar. It quickly became a running gag. What did the booklet say about the coffee that you can also say about me?

So may I present to you a few notes from the guidebook…

Phrases that Describe Not Just Coffee But Also Steve

Carmen Caturra - Rosso Coffee Roasters, Calgary.
Balanced Acidity meets a gentle body.

Candy Floss - Escape Coffee, Montreal.
Vibrant, a juicy backbone that holds its own. Playful, but also structured.

Gaitania - Alternate Route, Edmonton
The body is smooth and rounded, with a lingering, nutty finish.

Gikingo - Café Pista, Montreal
Full of comforting sweetness and layered complexity.

Diever Galindez Pink Bourbon - Drumroaster, BC
Enough distinct character to place any coffee nerd, with enough boy and sweetness to enjoy with pretty much anybody.

Juan Jose Torres - Za & Klo, Montreal
Round, balanced and comforting

Lagoinha - Epoch Chemistry, Moncton
Gentle acidity brings harmony between comfort and liveliness.

DOM Chiapas - Modus, Vancouver
A lot of interesting characteristics

Keanu - Sorellina, Edmonton
A beloved Canadian icon known for his humble attitude, generous soul and dreamy good looks.

OK that last one might have been referring to someone else, but it still syncs up.

I Checked My Notebook!

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 11:20:43 -0400

This was always one of my favourite commercials. An air passenger starts to panic after realizing he’s checked his notebook and it’s rattling around in the cargo hold. I think about this guy every time I’m flying.

This commercial won a well-deserved 1995 Clio Award.

It’s also an interesting look at not only Toronto Pearson Airport Terminal 3, but also what the laptop computer business looked like in 1995. Check out the massive size of his notebook when he picks it up at baggage claim at the end. That thing looks like a tank.

1995 Steve, still working for NeXT, pre-Apple, with his own clunky Toshiba Tecra notebook, would find it hard to believe what 2026 Steve’s MacBook Pro looks like.

Al Gore Introduces Me to a Billionaire

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 14:33:54 -0400

Somehow this was the top request in my recent survey about “what should I blog next?”

So … One time in about 2006 or so in Niagara Falls, Al Gore introduced me to a billionaire - Jim Pattison.

I suppose I should include a few more details.

The People

Al Gore

You might remember the 45th Vice President of the United States who also wrote a book, An Inconvenient Truth, later turned into an Academy-Award-nominated documentary.

After running for President, he became a popular after-dinner speaker talking about climate change, and often introducing himself as “I used to be the next president of the United States.”

He also spent 21 years on Apple’s board of directors.

Jim Pattison

Very successful Canadian businessman from Vancouver. His Jim Pattison Group started out with car dealerships, branching out into media, entertainment, and more, and even Ripley’s Believe it or Not, which operates the aquarium in Toronto and also a corny museum in Niagara Falls.

Pattison Group is particularly big in billboard advertising. You can see their billboards all across Canada.

Me

What do I have to do with any of this? Well, Apple’s field engineers would occasionally get a message saying that “a member of the Board of Directors” was going to be giving a talk in our area, and would like to have someone from Apple on hand to help out with the tech setup.

We all knew it was Al Gore, and one time we got the note that he’d be speaking in Niagara Falls, and I enthusiastically volunteered to help out at what turned out to be an annual sales meeting of the Jim Pattison Group. They’d lined up Al Gore as the after dinner speaker.

so I head to Niagara Falls

I had chatted ahead of time with Al’s assistant. What do I need to bring? He’s going to be using Keynote to present from his MacBook, of course. Do you have all the cables you need for the projector? Do you HAVE a projector? What about the Internet? Have you got an extension cord?

She was very nice and replied basically, “not to worry, Al travels with everything, just bring yourself and enjoy the dinner.”

Oooooh. I get dinner too? That’s cool.

Naturally I took three or four of every possible Mac and cable and adaptor and a projector, just in case. I didn’t want to be the guy who didn’t have backup.

None of this turned out to be needed.

I did learn that he lived dangerously and didn’t actually travel with a backup copy of the presentation and that one time, he’d had to re-download it from somewhere at the last minute which, given early 2000s internet speeds, pushed his speech from “before dinner” to “after dinner.” I suggested to his assistant that since he also travelled with an iPod, which could act as an external disk to your Mac, that perhaps he could just keep a backup copy of the Keynote slides on there. She seemed to think this was a good idea.

We checked out the setup, everything was fine.

presentation tips from Al Gore

Al did one clever thing that impressed me. His first slide was black - and we’d get the projector all set up ahead of time, and leave it showing the black slide, projecting nothingness on the screen all throughout dinner, so that the moment he started to talk and pressed his Keynote remote, boom - there’s the main title slide, all ready to go, no futzing around.

That is some pro presenter stuff right there.

the dinner

The event turned out to be a gathering of the Pattison Group’s top sales people for their annual awards banquet, and Al Gore was the invited post-dinner speaker.

Before dinner, they’d lined up a professional photographer, and each of the sales people had a chance for a quick one-on-one chat with Al, and the photographer would snap a quality portrait.

I had brought my own pocket camera along - this event was so long ago that whatever phone it was you had, it sure didn’t have a good camera - and I asked the assistant if she could possibly take a quick shot of me and Al.

“Oh, let’s not do that, just get in line with everybody else! We’ll get the photographer to take a good photo and we’ll send it to you.”

um, ok.

get in line

so I joined the end of the line of Sales Achievers, who were all inching towards the front, where Jim Pattison would introduce them to Al Gore. Jim would probably say something like “Al, this is Dave, he’s our top billboard salesman in all of Alberta” and they’d all smile and the photographer would snap the ceremonial photo.

I’m last.

I get up to the front, and I remember the look of confusion on Jim Pattison’s face. “Who the hell is this guy?”, he was no doubt thinking, looking around for security.

I introduce myself quickly. “Mr. Gore, Mr. Pattison, hello, I’m Steve, I’m the local Apple engineer and I just wanted to say hi and make sure everything’s OK with your setup.”

Al IMMEDIATELY takes over.

“Steve, it’s great to see you, thanks for coming," Al Gore, the former future president of the United States, says to me. And he turns to billionaire Jim Pattison and says “Jim, this is Steve. You might not know this but I’m on Apple’s board of directors and one of the perks of that is that when I travel, I’m lucky to have Apple people like Steve on hand to help out."

The photographer then snaps this picture, which they kindly printed off and mailed to me in a nice frame a week later.

Still one of my favourites.

Thank you Al Gore, and thank you Jim Pattison for this really cool opportunity.

surprise appearance of a famous politician and my dad.

This time in London, there was a huge crowd and no real opportunity for me to say hello again, so I just watched from the back.

Where I happened to bump in to Elizabeth May, noted Canadian politician, and leader of Canada’s Green Party.

She had recently run in a by-election in London, and my Dad had been very impressed with her and actually hosted a gathering at our local church at which she spoke.

I said to her, “My father thinks very highly of you.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful. Who’s your father?” Elizabeth May says to me.

“Bob Hayman.”

“Bob’s your father?”, she asks very excitedly. “He’s wonderful! Tell him I said hello!”

and that to this day is the only Canadian political leader who’s ever given me a hug.

Wondering what to write about ...

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 13:09:41 -0400

I asked my friends on Mastodon what mindless story I should write about next. Here are the results -

Post by [@shayman@cosocial.ca](https://micro.blog/shayman@cosocial.ca)

View on Mastodon

And if that link doesn’t work…

Not gonna lie, I was hoping the story of Steve and the Christmas Cops would rank a little higher.

Hmm.

Well I’ll just have to write about all four.

update

I’ll update this list as the writing mood strikes me.

Al Gore Introduces Me to a Billionaire