Twenty-seven columns later it’s time for another retrospective look at the year we just left behind. When I wrote last year’s look-back it primarily focused on a single column I’d written in February of 2020, on an as yet then unnamed virus, which became the focal point of a web site run by Johns Hopkins University.
Unfortunately, a year later, that site, and many related ones, remains as important as ever as today the world grapples with a fifth wave of what came to be called COVID19.
Although none of my 2021 columns were completely focused on the pandemic, several were directly influenced by it. There were columns on the technology involved in broadcasting to the church parking lot during the period when our churches were closed or attendance was dramatically curtailed.
When BC rolled out its vaccine passport system we looked at some of the frustration users experienced in those first days. I suppose today I could have covered the ArriveCAN app which had significant hiccups a few weeks back. As in-person Mass attendance was once again permitted we covered the end of Mass live streaming and the calls from parishioners for it to be continued.
As usual, there was no shortage of scams to write about and there were columns on never-ending email come-ons, as well as one involving a reader who nearly fell prey to what I dubbed the Supremo Scam.
Time’s Person of the Year for 2021, Elon Musk, continued to interest readers, particularly through his SpaceX venture, Starlink, which began a widespread rollout of its satellite-based internet service in Canada that year. A column featuring a couple in rural Ontario who were now able to work from home because of Starlink drew particular interest from online readers.
Speaking of billionaires, our column on space tourism covered the dueling egos of Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic tourist spacecraft venture, alongside that of Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin business that saw William Shatner ride the New Shepard craft for a brief jaunt into space.
On a more down-to-earth front we looked at the proposed Rogers takeover of Shaw and how that might affect consumers. We also covered the efforts by Telus to get longtime customers off their copper landline connections and onto the company’s potentially more lucrative fibre-based service.
In a more positive light about one of Canada’s big telcos, I was able to write about how Telus-owned Mobile Klinik was able to recover all the data from my mobile after it was driven over by one or more trucks and all-but destroyed.
As in previous years there was no shortage of columns on technology projects with a personal connection. I covered my home aircraft tracking system that feeds data to several commercial flight-tracking companies, and my setup for capturing weather satellite images via radio frequencies. Both of these evolved out of the burgeoning field of software-defined radio, which I covered at the beginning of the year, while explaining that I stumbled into SDR quite by chance when someone gave me a thumb-sized device and basically said “here, see what you can do with this.”
On a more general level we covered subjects such as the competition for streaming media (Netflix, Prime, Disney+ etc.) dollars and whether or not cord-cutting is really leading to savings on telecom expenditures in Canadian households, Canadian airlines bringing the 737 MAX back into service, the fascinating Radio Garden web site, Facebook’s major service outage, and the 30th anniversary of what was in the beginning known as the WorldWideWeb (this column has been running for 25 of those years).
One of the more unexpected columns to emerge looked at internet sites that no longer exist. This one grew out of a decision to move my password management service to the Canadian platform 1Password. As I looked over the more than 200 accounts I had established over a decade or so, I decided it was time to cull those I wasn’t using any longer. I was surprised by the number of companies that had simply vanished, presumably taking with them any user information requested or required when their accounts were set up.
Rounding out the year, I covered a Twitter onslaught that followed a number of tweets I made about possible northern lights activity for the Vancouver area, I wrote about a local containerized food production facility, part of the nascent agri-tech sector, and wrapped up with my annual survey of cameras for sale in the Vancouver marketplace.
Thank you to the editorial and design staff at the BC Catholic for making a collection of several hundred words look like so much more every two weeks, and for having my columns live on at https://bccatholic.ca/authors/peter-vogel.
Now it’s time for the biennial battle with my internet and TV service provider, which, as for many of you I’m sure, is something I do not look forward to, and this time certain to result in a price increase going forward.
Follow me on Facebook (facebook.com/PeterVogelCA), on Twitter (@PeterVogel), or on Instagram (@plvogel).
pvogel@outlook.com
