In 2004, I was living in Toronto near Bathurst and Eglinton, and commuting by TTC to my job at a company that built control systems for pipe organs near Woodbine & John, in Markham - about 20 km. As spring approached, I thought it might be fun to try commuting by bike. I wasn’t 100% committed to the idea, so I was looking for something affordable - I found a used Miyata Civicross for which I paid $175. The Civicross is a hybrid entry level bike, made in Taiwan, sold in early 1990s.

This post was first published in The Evolving Analyst, a collection of writing on business analysis compiled by Marcus Udokang and Emal Bariali. Marcus and I discuss The Joy of Shipping on his podcast, The Inquisitive Analyst, which you can watch on YouTube.

Epigraph

“At Microsoft, there was no peer pressure to do anything except work and ship on time. If you did, you got a Ship-it Award. Easy. Black and White.” - Douglas Coupland, from his novel Microserfs

Introduction

When I built my blogging bot in 2023, I spent time thinking about how to make it interesting - the best results came from making my bot sum up forum threads. But there was no discussion, no personality. I then tried creating bot-bot discussions. I’d thought about having it participate in Twitter threads, but decided it was one thing to post what we now call slop, another to try to engage with slop.

Introduction

I was looking to spend some time to get a feeling for the current state of AI/LLM software development tools, and decided to try building a simple game using the OpenCode agent connected to the Claude Sonnet 4.5 LLM. I set out to build a 2 player lunar lander type game in the Godot game engine. I had never used Godot before.

The Build

Using OpenCode is a bit different from asking LLMs/ChatGPT to write code snippets. There is a plan mode and a build mode.

Download I Brought The Ages Home by Charles T. Currelly epub

I read Charles T. Currelly’s autobiography, I Brought The Ages Home, a number of years ago. I found it to be such an interesting book - he was a real life Canadian Indiana Jones, leading archaeological digs and acquiring artifacts. He describes the late 1800s/early 1900s in Canada as a time full of promise and opportunity.

Charles T. Currelly (January 11, 1876 – April 10, 1957) was the first director of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) from 1914 to 1946, and acquired much its initial collection. As he passed away over 50 years ago, his autobiography fell into the public domain (note: on December 30, 2022, the general term of copyright protection in Canada changed from 50 to 70 years after the death of the author, but this did not affect works that were already in the public domain). I created an ebook version, as it’s an interesting public domain work that I haven’t seen shared elsewhere and we all benefit from a work with some historical importance being freely available (see /create-epub-from-paperback/ for how it was created). A scanned copy of the book is available from archive.org.

Background

Since reading about James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s work entering the public domain in Canada in 2015, I’ve thought about creating public domain ebooks that I could share online. At the time, I picked up a copy of Octopussy, and scanned it. I ran it through the OCR software bundled with the scanner I was using, and the results were pretty mediocre. At that time, the OCR process was certainly faster than typing, but the output required a lot of manual review - I abandonned the project. In short order, the Canadian Gutenberg team created excellent James Bond ePubs, and I note now that other ones are available from Faded Page.