What I’m Up to Now
This is a /now page. The following is true as of July 2023.
I moved to Toronto from Vancouver in November of 2015, and started working for Acquia as a support engineer, and as of November 2019, a senior support engineer, and as of July 2021, a lead support engineer. (No, not the metal.) I work with the U.S. east coast team, which is located in Boston, MA, collaborating with them from downtown Toronto. I've been working at home since March 2020 thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. During the warmer months…well, I used to have an office to commute to by bike, but now I still bike around often enough.
After two years of trying to stay active but not participating in any running races, I'm back in the saddle. 2023 has been a slow year for running races.
Social media I keep updated:
- Twitter, the now-defunct social media site is where you could find my various witty remarks. Now you should go to Mastodon for that.
- Goodreads tells you what books I’m reading.
- Letterboxd lists the movies I just watched.
- Trakt.tv keeps a record of the TV shows I watch.
- Untappd keeps track of the beers I drink.
- Flickr hosts the occasional snapshots I think are worth posting
- Last.fm logs the music I listen to.
I spend my free time doing things that the GPS in my iPhone enables, like playing Ingress and visiting microconfluences. I play as many location-based games as I can. The current regulars are:
- Foursquare's Swarm
- Olixsoft's Fog of World
- Strava (that's a game, right?)
- Niantic's Ingress (I'm formerly a heavy user, now a light user)
My latest programming project was a self-hosted tool that turns your a Slack channel into a Twitter client. I would constantly look for ways to smash together public APIs, especially if there was a geographic component, but work and keeping on top of chores and errands means there's not a lot of time for coding.
As of September 2017, I have been a director for the Icelandic Canadian Club of Toronto, and since October of 2018 I've served as the secretary. I help out with the Instagram account, the ICCT Twitter account and the Facebook page, and provide what insight I can to the board. I also help out with Nordic Nights, a monthly movie night during the colder months.
As of November 2019, I have been a board member of the Garment District Neighbourhood Association and I maintain the online properties (Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, as well as manage our back-end tools). As of October 2022, I am the secretary of the GDNA.
I've been coping relatively well with the pandemic. I have a page of posts related to just that on my blog, sorted in forward-chronological order.
Some sub-sites I maintain:
- Raspberry Pi experiments
- Richard's Humble Arduino Mission Accomplishments
- Just a Gwai Lo: Questions
- The Microconfluence Project
I'm still not a photographer, and I still don't sail or play a musical instrument or know how to dance or do anything interesting like that. I make up for it by being funny.
I still think the scene in Spaceballs where they watch themselves in the movie ("We’re at now now!”) is hilarious.