Meanwhile / Friday, November 6, 2026 / Temporary Coordinates
Friday night. Vancouver is getting absolutely rinsed. October was a full-on Futureproof wormhole, so this week I’ve been switching gears back to finding my next role in tech. And hey, the interviews are rolling in, including a possible year-long platform engineering contract downtown. I’m stoked. Apparently November has plans.
I’m writing this from a little Airbnb near the Fraser River, a temporary stop while I sort out the next chapter. My 8GB MacBook is here, the rain has opinions, and the 49ers toque is back in circulation.
And yes, it’s a 49ers toque. My brother and I grew up with a lot of respect for Joe Montana and Jerry Rice. We were Giants fans too, especially Kevin Mitchell and Will Clark. My mom’s from Palo Alto, half my family is American, and my grandpa was mayor of Menlo Park in 1979. He’s in the Federal Register, to boot.
My hat has municipal documentation. lol.
California’s in the wiring. But Vancouver is home. I was born and raised here, and for all the things this city makes unnecessarily difficult, I really, really don’t want to leave.
For a split second I considered Toronto. My big brother, Jimmy the Bag, is there with his family, and being near them sounded pretty wonderful. I even looked at flights. But the more I thought about it, the clearer it got: I want to stay in Vancouver. Especially now, with the interviews picking up and a whole scene of people here I want to keep making things with.
Load-out
I wrote two whole posts about October already: The Toaster Was a Decoy and An Orchestra in 8GB. The toaster has had enough press.
That was the stage.
This is the load-out.
By Thursday I had a logistical problem: one room ended before the next one began. My new host kindly let me drop the luggage early. The bags had an address. I had several hours to kill.
Who’s on first?
Turns out I had enough Scene+ points for a movie ticket. Finally, my debit card’s loyalty program became a cultural arts grant.
I went to see You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. Absolutely bonkers. Funny in the way something becomes funny when you can’t believe the person is still talking.
⚠️ SPOILER ALERT: I’m about to discuss a specific scene, including the punchline. If you want to see the film fresh, skip ahead to The other kind of orchestration.
Nathan is trying to pin down one tiny word: can.
Holmes says the Theranos machine can run any test. But does can mean it works right now, on that machine? Or that it could, theoretically, once somebody invents the chemistry to make it work?
That is an enormous amount of corporate mythology to balance on three letters.
So Nathan plays her Abbott and Costello’s Who’s on First? The players have names that also sound like questions: Who is on first, What is on second, I Don’t Know is on third. It’s a joke about two people using the same language while apparently occupying different universes.
Holmes laughs, but doesn’t seem to grasp what’s happening. Nathan asks who plays first. She says she doesn’t know.
I Don’t Know is on third.
I nearly died.
Except it’s also kind of terrifying. Does she not get it? Is she refusing to get it? Would understanding the joke mean acknowledging that words can be engineered to make someone believe something different from what you technically said?
People are arguing about it on Reddit, which is part of the fun. Maybe she’s confused. Maybe she’s performing confusion. Maybe Nathan’s performing his confusion. Nobody gets an answer key.
And that’s the little black hole in the scene. Not whether she’s smart enough to understand a baseball routine. Whether you can ever establish what somebody means when they keep moving the definition.
The film also made me think about every spectacular AI demo that has ever entered a room wearing a very expensive blazer. Can the model make music? Sure. Can it hold a loop together while a human sings and changes her mind halfway through a phrase? Different question.
The Theranos stakes were medical and profoundly serious. My stage rig is a musical experiment. I’m not confusing the two.
But I am increasingly allergic to the word can without a demonstration attached.
The other kind of orchestration
The fun part of the interviews is getting back into the things I know how to do. Not the shiny AI demo. The plumbing underneath it.
Identity, APIs, cloud systems, digital workplace infrastructure, automation, all the weird invisible machinery that keeps everybody’s workday from collapsing. I know this world. I’ve spent years inside it, usually figuring out why one piece of software has decided to stop speaking to another.
Somebody close to me sent a message this week reminding me that a single employer doesn’t get to decide what my skills are worth.
I needed to hear that. Especially from someone who knows me outside of a résumé.
It’s funny that music and engineering keep getting filed under separate chapters. In a band you learn to listen, keep time, notice a bad signal, and recover when something goes wrong. In IT you do all of that, except the drummer is sometimes Microsoft Entra.
I want to get back into tech. I also want to make strange little sound worlds and keep playing with other people. There is no actual conflict here.
Mostly I would like a stable contract and somewhere I can leave a microphone stand assembled overnight. Outrageous.
Accelerando / tiny film department
Next Thursday, November 12, BC + AI Film Club is back at 375 Water Street. The challenge is make art not war.
I’ve got a weekend, the music instrument I built for Futureproof, and a dangerously optimistic idea for a short film.
Grimes’ ACCELERANDO has been rattling around my head. I don’t want to remake it. I want to reply from my own little corner of the machine.
