Beken Technologies

Back in 2022, there was a photo shoot and an article featured in Hagarty’s magazine.

It is here: https://www.hagerty.com/media/archived/mid-engine-missiles/

Just putting out some thoughts. Let’s be respectful and have an even keeled discussion.

There are some people who are quite convinced that the world will end, due to climate change, by the end of 2050. I have been in some heated discussion that if I don’t dump my gas car and buy a battery electric car within the next 5 years (not exaggerating), I am a person at fault for human extinction (that word extinction has been thrown at me multiple times). It is sometimes difficult to hold a respectful and intelligent fact finding discussion, as there are a few who have bought into the propaganda and sensationalized the issue of climate change to make their point. I hardly believe I am an expert at understanding climate change, and green house gases. But I have been told I am spreading propaganda, by an electric car supporter, when I said I was not convinced electric cars is the way to go at this time. Though I do see some advantages of having a current generation electric car over a gasoline powered car, I am not ready to replace my gasoline powered car with an electric car, even with government tax payer funded financial incentives. I don’t think I am spreading propaganda on the argument. I’m not the person trying to convince somebody else to make a serious social change.

Electric trucks and gasoline powered trucks came into existence at about the same time in history. Over time, the ICE engined vehicles became more popular because they solved more problems, at the time, than electric vehicles. Knowing full well that there are negative side effects to both forms of propulsion for a vehicle, industry, governments, and the scientific community would research solving these issues one at a time and that has worked well. Battery technology has improved. ICE technology has become cleaner and more efficient. There are other forms of energy still to be researched. I was hoping hydrogen fuel cell or combustion might work, but the research funding has been drained, as funds got poured into battery research.

Any consumer technology starts out as an industry invention to help solve some real professional grade industry (or military) problems. Over time, the price of that technology comes down, and the technology becomes reliable and robust enough so that the consumer can purchase it and rely on it. That is not happening in the electric car roll out. Some wealthy consumers have bought (government subsidized) electric cars and proven that in most instances, they are a viable (albeit more expensive) alternative to internal combustion engine (ICE) cars. If something goes wrong, there are lawsuits. Now automobile manufacturers are starting to roll out trucks. In British Columbia, Canada, they are beginning trials of battery electric transit buses. If the process for BEV cars were to be more convincing, the freighters that ship goods (or import cars) over oceans should be first to be battery electric. Then train locomotives, airplanes that fly over mountains and oceans to remote locations, transport trucks, then cars. Instead, the consumer is paying for this. Maybe, it should be military using BEV warships, tanks, vehicles. Consumer demand is being driven by propaganda based on incomplete science. Though sometimes, we do need to act based on incomplete science, the solution may introduce more problems than the issue being solved, and the solution does little or nothing to actually solve the problem. North American governments have bought into this propaganda in order to get elected. Why is it that it is the consumer and special interest groups that are driving this change if it is such an important issue? It is pretty tough to replace the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline. Artificially making gasoline expensive by taxing it, make me even less trusting of elected governments.

So right now, as of 2023, I’m not ready to get a battery electric car. Even if gasoline powered cars are banned and no longer for sale by 2030, I don’t think I will get a battery electric car. All those Youtube videos from Tesla (and other brand BEV) owners show me “how great it is to go all electric” have the total opposite effect on me. I still drive to too many places where there is no cell phone signal to tell me where the nearest charging station is. My need to periodically replace my battery in my rather expensive cell phone makes me leery of what might happen if my vehicle battery dies. Actually, I do know. Alternator on my car died while driving once. I was able to drive a bit further to a safe place to park the car. It was fairly inexpensive and easy to fix. As a consumer, if there really is a need to go away from internal combustion engines, invent me a propulsion system that is efficient, clean, reliable and easy to maintain. I think if proper research is done, an internal combustion engine can still be carbon neutral, clean and more efficient. I think if a battery electric vehicle needs to be fully viable, batteries need to be more energy dense, charging can be done with current infrastructure, and batteries be lighter in weight and possibly portable (even user swappable). Also research need to be done in battery heat management. The systems currently in place need to be more reliable and user serviceable. Of course, with time and money, these issues can be resolved. But it should not be done by the consumer.

Your thoughts?

— This was drafted in March 2021. I never occurred to me I didn’t post it. So here is a delayed post. I have since retired.

They have always said, when the work you do is something you enjoy, then it isn’t work at all. It’s great getting paid to do your hobby. I have been incredibly blessed to be doing something I enjoy and get gratification from when something goes well or I learn something interesting. The bonus is that for the most part, I got paid extremely well for what I did. The people that paid me also, got incredible value for money.

For those of you who have known me for a long time, you already know my career. As I near retirement age, I can’t help but think back how blessed I have been to have the career I have had. So for those of you who don’t know, here is my lifetime employment history.

Babysitter – Looked after the neighbour’s 3 kids. I was a 12 year old kid myself. So fastforward to today and I found all 3 have moved to different parts of the world. I met up with the mom recently. She is doing well and so are the kids…and grand children.

Paperboy – Delivered newspapers when they were still around. The Saturday additions were over 2 inches (5 cm) thick. I delivered over 100 newspapers on Saturdays. The money earned paid for my first set of serious camera equipment. I got to know most of the people in my neighbourhood, got chased and bitten by a dog, and learned there a few people out there who received your good and services and could not afford to pay you.

Grocery store stocker – worked for 3 hours after school for 2 days a week. It paid for gas money and maybe to take a friend out for ice cream or something. I learned that dropping a case of apple juice on your foot can be seriously painful.

Technical producer – Did some photography, library research, filming, sound sample recording, soundtrack recording and other technical aspects of a media production on BC Coastal Wildlife. It was my introduction to working in a full on recording studio. The project was sponsored by the government and put on by Greenpeace.

Chemistry/Physics department computer programmer – At a time when computer graphics was still in its infancy, I wrote a program to map out the wave formation based on formulas developed by the professor in charge. My introduction to fluid dynamics. It was interesting and made we think maybe I should have gone into physics instead of computer science.

Mainframe system computer operator – Back in a time where a mainframe computer system was housed in two floors of an office tower, and no more powerful than a current day (2021) mp3 music player, I had a job mounting and dismounting computer tapes, separating report printouts, and sending them to whomever ran them. My one and only job where I needed to belong to a union to work. It was really weird taking a break every 90 minutes. If I finished my work early, I just sat there, not allowed to do “somebody else’s job”.

Programmer -> Senior Systems Business Process Analyst – This is where my serious career began. I spent 20 years here. I learned about how long distance phone calls were route and the technology involved. We were at the forefront of it. We captured information on how those calls were routed and turned that information into a transaction that billed the customer. The hardest part was getting through all the bureaucracy how a telephone call was billed. I saw through how the technology changed, from mechanical clapper switches to electronic digital switching. In British Columbia, we were a hotbed for wireless phone call routing either by microwave, radios, or satellite signals. I got to take part is measuring all this stuff and applying all the rules that would turn it into a billable transaction and then billing it. Then came cellular phones and the internet. Which ushered in broadband. Nobody talks about ISDN anymore. We knew it was all coming. Just managing the changes in an affordable manner. As the phone companies started moving to Voice over IP, the traditional routing of phone calls was going to disappear.

Billing Process manager – I spent eight years at an engineering company. Billing was done by milestone billing. For any project, billing was done done at various phases. There was a deposit, and then when various phases completed, an invoice went out and payment we expected. Then there was final invoicing. It all had to tie to when revenue was recognized. Working here was extremely interesting. The product was state of the art. Lots of patent filings. The downfall was when the company needed to make money. So they cut costs by moving manufacturing to a country that had cheaper labor costs. The problem would be quality. In this country, if the part was not within tolerance, you throw it away. In the manufacturing country (we can all surmise which country that is), if the part did not meet quality standards, it would be used on something else where that level of quality was “good enough” and, not long later, we would find an inferior product on eBay that “is just as good as…”. Eventually this company was bought out.

SAI specialist (business analyst) – This job was kind of strange. I only lasted one year here. The company I worked for was a metals recycling company. They bought metal and shipped it overseas. It was never really explained what they wanted me to accomplish, but I learned a lot about how transportation of materials worked. The logistics of using rail, trucks, barges, ships to move material around, particularly from the oil patch of Fort McMurray, AB to the coast. We also purchased closed mills and factories and the company made money dismantling and recycling anything they could. It was a great business model, if not extremely physically dangerous. This job made me appreciate how hard people had to work to get to those 6 figure salaries. Those people certainly deserved it. In this job, I spent 3 weeks of the month out of town travelling. Going from destination to destination with no more than 1 day’s notice of where to go next. It was exhausting. So when metal prices took a sudden deep dive, I did not feel bad about being let go due to a massive downsizing. I don’t think I was there long enough to make any impact on the company, but I certainly learned a lot and became quite interested in transportation logistics. It was intriquing.

Business Systems Analyst – Reconciliation of cloud based sales transactions. This was the most technically challenging stop in my career. It took me almost 2 years of just learning before I was comfortable doing what I was doing. Yet most people I worked with seemed to view me as the expert in this. Anybody else that tried to do what I did, particularly when filling in for me if I took time off, they didn’t stay in the company very long. So if I leave, there is a long learning curve for whomever takes over. On the cloud, you split a transaction into pieces. Only the people who need certain pieces of a transaction got only the pieces they needed to do what they needed to do. Nobody had the entire transaction. My job is to make sure all the pieces are there…somewhere. So am I expendable? I hope so. I’m going to retire. The COVID pandemic has been totally draining as companies cut their costs in order to stay in business, and for the bigger businesses, maintain profitability. I’m totally drained from working on my days off, taking on emergency pager coverage, seeing teams of 8 or 9 people cut to 3 or 4 people and expected to maintain the level of work accomplishments as well as fill in for other teams that have been cut just as badly. All this while taking a pay cut and not being compensated for the extra overtime and employment expenses incurred because the company no longer provides office supplies or an office space.

It has been a fun career.

— This was drafted in March 2021. I never occurred to me I didn’t post it. So here is a delayed post. I have since retired.

Just thought I should place a bookmarker here.   My long time friend, Vicky has asked me about setting up a blog.  Perhaps it is a reminder that I have been neglectful of sharing my thoughts.  So I am working on putting together something.

Into 2018 and there is a lot to look forward to this year.  Having caved and signed up onto Facebook last year, I find myself back in touch with friends from….oh 30 years back.  It’s amazing how life takes a person away from old friends and then puts you back in touch and it carries on as if you never parted.  Oh, I missed them, and it is so pleasant to get back in touch and see where life has taken us all.   Most of us have gotten through fairly well. We’ve been blessed.

My own kid is graduating from university this year.   Society is our kids’ generation now.  They have now been charged with moving forward what we left behind and, hopefully, we gave them the tools to carry on.  To start the year, she bought her first car with her how money.

I need to hang on a few more years before I can retire.  The biggest fear is I don’t have enough saved up to last me until I leave this place.  But I have all these toys to occupy my time with and no time to play.   Life is so complicated.

However, we are talking 2018 here.  What do we have planned?  Well…for one, this will be the year where I will have been married to my wife longer than I have been single my my entire lifetime.  One of my bucket list items, and I don’t know how I decided this was something I wanted to do, is to visit all the Disneylands in the world.   We have visited Californa, Florida, Hong Kong.   Personally, I have been to Tokyo Disneyland, but my wife has not.   So maybe we will do that this year.  For some reason, I had this grand plan to visit Shanghai Disneyland also.  Since we just renewed our passports, getting a visa for China meant the visa would be good for 10 years.  But the big expensive renovation of our house last year put us in debt again and on my current salary (which is less than what it was 10 years ago), paying down the debt has been difficult.  We’ve been going backwards since my wife got sick.   Now that she’s much better, it has been near impossible to get back into a decent paying job for her.   So we will try and just do Tokyo this year.   How often do we want to go to China anyways?   Well, I have been to Guangzhou a few times, but that’s it as far as visiting China for me.   So I would like to just go and visit the culture.

In July, MINI USA has MINI Takes the States 2018.   It is a car rally.   Not a race, but a cross country drive.   In order to make it easier for more people, they are doing one that starts on the east coast and one from the west coast.  Both drives will meet up new Denver CO for big meet up.   In preparation for that, a number of people on Facebook are organizing a rally across Canada and then joining up with MINI Takes The States in Portland Oregon for the drive to Denver.   This will be fun for car fanatics.

There are other car events happening and I’m not sure how many of these I will attend this year.  The older I get, the more I feel guilty about doing things my wife doesn’t want to get involved in.   Her having a run in with cancer a few years back, we realize how short the time is we have together.   We sometimes argue, but the longer we are married, the harder it becomes to imagine spending our lives with anybody else.

Also, the MINI has become a high mileage car now, as it passed another milestone.

When I started driving, more than thirty years ago, it never occurred to me that we would have cars that lasted this long.

Thanks for reading.

It’s been awhile since this page was updated so here goes a quick and dirty rundown.

I spend some time running the sound mix for for at Willingdon Church  .  It’s not my day job.  But I’ve been granted some pretty good ears, I think, and I get to hob knob with the next generation of music makers and enthusiasts.  I am truly thankful for this opportunity.  I get to keep in touch with a generation of people younger than me, and hope my life experience/story offers up some insight as they grow up and take charge of their generation.

The now 12 year old MINI is still fun to drive.   Though it is starting to show it’s age in the engine sounding a bit rough and making me think I’m just a bit away from having a big breakdown.  I was wondering if it would make another trip to Las Vegas for AMVIV.  But few would try taking an unrestored 12 year old car for the 22 hour drive (one way).

My wife has finished her chemo therapy treatments.  She is now considered cancer free and is strong enough to go back to work now.   In my last post, I had complained that I was paid less than market rate for what I did.  Here is where I believe there is a God watching over us.  Certainly I was earning less than what I needed to support my family.   However, when my wife got sick, the benefits package of this job covered all the costs associated with her cancer treatment that was not covered by our medical system.  When the treatment was done, and my wife was not working, we had money put away (for retirement) that we could draw on to make up the difference for what I was being paid, and what we were spending for our living expenses.   She was strong enough to volunteer for a few hours during the week so she did that.   No work was available.  Then just before Christmas, the pipes in our house started to leak.  That meant we would spending a substantial sum to repair/renovate the house.  The place where my wife was volunteering offered her an auxiliary position that paid a few hours a week.  That would be enough to bring us out of drawing into our retirement savings.  Funny how things work out just in time.   This sort of thing has happened many times in the past quite a few years and we truly believe we are being blessed by God and continue to learn to trust in Him to provide for our needs.   Those of you reading this who don’t believe in this sort of thing, I would encourage you to consider a higher power that we can’t truly comprehend that would want us to think outside of space time and matter.

Last year, I caved and signed up for a Facebook account.   I did it because most of the car clubs I was a part of had abandoned website and forum maintenance and moved all their communications to Facebook.   The side effect of that was I got back in touch with friends from as far back as high school days, as well as relatives overseas.  Social networks is a huge time consumer so if you decide to get in on the bandwagon, be careful.   If you are on Facebook and would like to get (back) in touch, please feel free to drop me a hello.

Anyways, there’s lots more to share, but I should be doing something else right now.   So until next time…..hopefully not 2 years later.

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I never thought I would have this car for this long. It’s been so much fun for the past 10 years driving this thing. Two generations of MINIs later, the F56 version of the MINI is just as fun to drive. Albeit, MINI has seen fit to abandon the design features that made the car eccentric. I’ll keep this car as long as I can. Difficult to say if I will get another MINI or not.

It’s been fun.

Over the course of my life, I have come to be certain of one thing.  Everything has its time and then it changes.   As I go through life, I find I am constantly discovering new things and coming to an understanding about what life is about, what it means to love my wife, and what it means to be saved from my sin.   2014 has been eventful so far.   I have gone through unexpected changes in direction.

Those who know me know that I have been going through a bout of career instability the last few years, and I finally landed a position with exciting prospects.  I’ve noted at my age, once you are out of the IT field, very few people stay in and find other jobs in the information technology field.  Most have started career paths outside of anything to do with computing.   I work in a cloud computing type company as a business systems analyst and the learning curve is steep and complicated, yet the concepts appear simple.   If I had taken a position at the other companies I had applied for, I wouldn’t be as interested at what could be done.   I wished I got paid more though.  Maybe I should have asked for more when I started.

So 2014 rolls around and things start of change.   My manager, whom I had gotten to respect and like very much decided it was time for a change and he left the company as the company was going through some ownership change.  It appears I have pretty good experience and dealings with ownership changes.  My last 2 career stops went through ownership changes and for some reason, I got let go right after I took part in the successful developing and integration of various business processes.    Seems I find ways to work myself out of a job each time.   I hope that doesn’t happen here but if it does, it will be in God’s plan for my life journey.   My advice to IT people entering the field,  get into maintenance/support side and don’t get too wrapped up in the development side of IT projects.

Next 2014 event, my daughter graduated from high school.  I am so proud of her.  She got early acceptance into University into a program that we are told very few first year students get into.   She received a small scholarship and got invited into the chancellor’s council (whatever that is).  More importantly, she made a few good lifelong friendships in high school and has started making more friends in university.

Then life changed.  There was a sermon at church that spoke of taking time from your normal stress of work to rest, because God needed to prepare you with what’s coming up next.  It could be a sabbatical.    It could be an extended vacation and it occurred to me, it could be a year of unemployment.   The next week, my wife was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer.   The mammogram the previous year showed nothing.  This year, it showed a cancerous tumour.   The first operation showed the cancer had spread already.  They took out two lymph nodes and they both had cancer.  They had to operate again a few weeks later.   After the recovery, there was discussion and she has begun 18 months of chemo therapy.   Tying that back into my career situation, my current job has the benefit of covering all of the medical expenses incurred that is not covered by our standard medical system.

Then my father had what appeared to be stroke.  He sneezed and started seeing double.  Doctors determined it wasn’t a stroke, but my father still sees double.   At his age it’s time to stop driving anyways.   But he is noticeably slowing down in all things he does.

So how does this tie into life’s journey?   The goal of raising my child is that she will have the tools to be self sufficient so when it’s my time to go, she will be okay.  We are almost there.  Graduating from high school and working at her best potential,  I am confident we she will do well.   As for my wife, we just celebrated our 25 year of marriage this August.  I remember when we first got married, I had stated that marriage is a learning process.  We will learn how to love each other for the next 10, 20,25 years and never stop learning what that means until we die.  Then the surviving person or those who are left behind, like our children will say, yah..they loved each other.  I remember my vows…for better or worse, richer or poorer, sickness and in health ’til death do we part.    I do love her more now than 25 years ago.   After the chemo therapy, the prognosis is good.  She has a better than 75% chance of longterm survival.   My parents are old now.  Their generation is leaving us.  It won’t be much longer that I will become the senior surviving member of my family.   It’s been an exciting trip.   All of this is in God’s hands.  The trip might change direction tomorrow.   As a believer in Jesus Christ, I could die tomorrow.  It will be like going to sleep……and waking up and seeing those who went before me again .

Thanks for reading.

January is the time of year I renew my membership as a certified member of the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS).   This is society that I have belonged to since I was in university as a student member and have been a full member ever since.  However, after having a brush with being kicked out of the industry before I could reach retirment age and seeing the fragmentation of the computing industry as a whole, I am thinking very seriously that Professionalism, though noble in thought, has little or no effect in the expansion of the computing industry.    Or is it because the rules for computing are slow to respond to the ever increasing pace of society and is no longer relevant to the IT practicioner?   

35 years ago, the IT industry was just starting out.  Most of us didn’t even have cell phones.  The internet did not exist, but dial up modems through phone couplers were becoming available.  The mainframe computers back then are about half the power of a current generation smartphone.  Yet most of us who were in university or just starting out in computing saw the potential growth of the computing industry and felt it a good thing to lay down some rules on how the industry should grow.  Unchecked, the computing industry would be a disaster, we thought.   While the information technology industry grew and people thought of new things they could do with computers, both good and bad, people made a lot of money doing education seminars, trade shows.  CIPS was a big part of that.  Education and the ability to keep up with what was happening was reason enough to join such an organization.  A strange thing happened along the way.  Computing became a commodity.   Computers got smaller and more powerful.  Anybody could program a computer or at the very least run one.  So there was a need for Professionalism.   A code of ethics to adhere to, a need for continuing education, a desire to bring up the next generation of IT practioners.  So CIPS continued to have relevancy in my life.  I was an IT practitioner and a Professional at that.     

But Information Technology changed right in front of our eyes and we didn’t even see it.   The industry of computing, programming and systems analysis, grew to become process analysis, business analysis, computer engineering, and blew way past the bounds of computing that we had defined.  I asked a member of the leadership in CIPS, what about the game programmers, those who program for the movie industry, do digital mix downs of sound in the music industry are they not essentially programming computers also?  What about those who fix cars and program ECUs?  I would have to disagree when told that CIPS does not include people in those industries.   Myself, I have been involved in the telecom industry, the graphics print machine industry, the metals recycling, and computing more focussed on specific industries.  I have done computing for all those industries.   Whatever “computing” means.   CIPS can’t possibly cover all of those.  Yet there are a whole lot of certifications I could or maybe should be applying for if I want to stay relevant in my career path.    Having gone through a number of job changes in the last decade or so, and seeing those not in CIPS do much better in their career path than I feel mine has been, I am thinking CIPS is no longer relevant in my career path.  I have many colleagues who have gone through this thought process already and have left CIPS years ago.  So where do we go regarding being professional at what we do?   More on that in the future…..

On another topic, today, I am saddened to hear of a passing of a friend.  He goes by the avatar name of Dieselhead.   He is a fellow MINI driver.   Dan is a very private person outside of his own family so I have been honoured that he would choose to have me as a friend.  He would over and we would drive our MINIs to places just for the fun of it, go have fish n chips or just enjoy each other’s company.  The other vehicle Dan drove was a transit bus.  He was a bus driver by profession, but loved Basil, his MINI Cooper.  Perhaps we became good friends because we always passed each other while I was on my way home from work.   The timing had it that on my way home, I would drive along Marine Drive in Burnaby just as Dan would drive his bus along that route.  I would sometimes let him into traffic and sometimes he would wait at a stop sign and wave me through first.    Before Dan retired, we talked about getting his debts paid off and how he would enjoy his retirement to do the things he always wanted to do but didn’t have the time or money to do it.  Well, Dan did it.  A proud moment in his life when he paid down his credit card and also paid off his MINI.  Shortly after a tumour grew in his shoulder and it got very big.  It turned out to be cancer and very aggressive.  I suspect there were also other complications.   The chemo therapy Dan went through seemed to work. The tumour came down and the doctors sent Dan home.  Dan was going through some rehab and he was getting around a bit, driving his car again. 

Dan died rather suddenly just after new years.  He made it into 2014, I guess.  Somewhere up there in heaven, I can imagine him motoring around in something much more fun than a MINI.