French or English school for our kids? A case study in choosing community

This week my household attended an open house event for the French public elementary school we are considering enrolling our child in to start Junior Kindergarten next fall. Ottawa has four separate school boards covering the same geographic area, that are each managed entirely separately: French secular, English secular, French

Simple Needs, Hard to Satisfy

My current immigration status is: saw a really pretty cloudy, still bright sky over a cornfield while riding my bike here in Ottawa, and cried. For a while in the last year we've been in Canada, I kept having a dream that we had to return to Lincoln

Migrating a Rails app from Webpacker to jsbundling-rails with Webpack

Recently at work I undertook a project to migrate a client's decade-old Rails app from using Webpacker to compile & bundle frontend assets, to using jsbundling-rails with Webpack. The app is big and fairly complex, and the project ended up taking much longer than I had originally anticipated.

Really Big Bike Trailers

First posted: January 14, 2024 Updated 2025-09-02: Added Wike, Burley Hopper, Specialty Cargo Add-ons section I can haul a lot of stuff on my cargo bikes (one front bucket style, one midtail; both electric), but I'm always interested in ways to haul even more when necessary. In particular,

Toothpaste Should Not Burn, Actually

Recently at work, our weekly company Talko Tuesday meeting once again became Talko Toothsday when the conversation turned to teeth and dental care. I don't entirely know why this topic even comes up so much in this particular workplace, and over time I've made a show

What Makes These Cities Feel Like Themselves

I just read a friend's post about the unique aspects that makes certain cities feel like uniquely that city, and I wanted to write down a few things that come to mind for me for cities I'm familiar with. Like Comfect/The Quad Urbanist says in

One Year in Canada

We've now been living in Ottawa for a full year. Annual events that were happening last May when we came to visit before moving have happened again, and ones that happened shortly after we first arrived to live here are happening again, too. Summer flew by somehow; I&

Hosting your Static Site on Cloudflare: Tips & Tricks

Over the last year or so I've been moving many of my static site projects (including this site) to the free tier of Cloudflare hosting, from their former homes at Netlify. Why Cloudflare I've been pretty happy with Cloudflare, and it's what I often

Ways to Reduce Consumerism

Over the last few years I've been thinking more and more about how consumerism affects my life, and, finding the effects are mostly not great, thinking about what I can do to resist it. By consumerism, I mean all the societal and cultural forces (from government policy to

Experiences Treating Cradle Cap in my Newborn

Fair warning, what follows is somewhat gross. Hopefully it is at least somewhat entertaining though, and will give you a little snapshot of the everyday trials of parenting a baby, and if you have a flaky-head baby of your own you're responsible for, maybe it will help you.

Frontend Assets in Ruby on Rails Through the Years

As a Ruby on Rails developer at a consulting agency who works with a wide variety of legacy apps, there have been many times where I need to change the JavaScript or CSS in use on the site and have to start by figuring out where those assets are currently

Migrating a a Rails Project from rails-ujs to Turbo

Recently I was helping update an app built in Ruby on Rails. It's an internal tool, so has been sitting for a while, running along happily on somewhat outdated tech. It was updated to Rails 7 already, and is already using jsbundling-rails for JavaScript, but a lot of