22 March 2026

The world is burning, but this website will continue to be updated for as long as I'm able.

This week, I added two new features to the Licence Plate Gallery:

• Unsolved Mysteries. Letter codes of unknown significance, plates that no longer exist, designs that make no sense, sequencing that no one fully understands...
• The Link Directory. Searching for surviving vestiges of the old hobbyist web.

I also added some updated infodumps on Mexico and validation sticker serials.

1 November 2025

P.S.

The Highways of Hamilton has been expanded with a comprehensive guide to former County & Regional Roads (179 of them altogether, although many were internal designations or renumberings), and a scattering of new pictures.

12 October 2025

New feature!

The Highways of Hamilton.

Enjoy.

24 August 2025

Microsoft Windows 95 was released 30 years ago today!

Windows 95 was irrefutably the high-water mark of software design. Microsoft engaged in actual usability research in the lead-up to release (the kind that never happens today!), testing the effectiveness of different UI paradigms before settling on something that was both powerful and intuitive.

Windows 95's 32-bit API was robust, and compatible web browsers were still being developed for it into the 2010s.

There was no IE integration, no product activation, no DRM, no unremovable components, no ribbons; nothing that "phones home" or connected online without consent! Menus and command buttons looked consistent (and looked like menus and command buttons, with clearly underlined keyboard shortcuts) no matter what application they were in! The UI was quick, snappy, respectful, and never, ever talked down to the user. Moreover, Windows 95 was an OS for personal computers, with the user in full and complete control.

Yet, I also remember Win95 as the beginning of the end for the PC as an open, OS-agnostic platform.

Prior to 1995, PC users had the option of at least four operating systems that were more or less binary compatible: Microsoft MS-DOS, IBM PC-DOS, Novell DR-DOS...or OS/2, which professed DOS and Windows compatibility of its own. Don't like Windows 3.1? Then don't use it; it was an application that ran on top of DOS just like every other program and was trivial to remove.

That all changed with Windows 95. You couldn't install it on top of a pre-existing DOS installation: You had to use its own integrated DOS, which froze IBM and Novell from the market and stifled competition.

To Microsoft's marketing team, it wasn't enough for Win95 to merely exist: It had to be turned into a coerced requirement by any means necessary. Microsoft shipped compilers that lacked the ability to make binaries for older versions of Windows. They entered licence agreements with PC vendors, requiring them to bundle Win95 and pay Microsoft royalties on every computer sold. They also wielded the "Designed for Windows 95" certification as a weapon, paying off companies to slap it on components and peripherals that should have been equally compatible with other platforms.

Windows 95 was buggy at release, and it was just as justifiable to "downgrade" a computer from 95 to DOS and Windows 3.1 as it was to do the opposite. But while "upgrading" to Win95 meant nothing more than buying the software and following the step-by-step directions, "downgrading" meant backing up all personal data (onto floppy disks!), reformatting, reinstalling the OS and all applications from scratch...and HOPING that compatible device drivers for the older Windows version were even available. It was a convoluted procedure for a process that should have been painless.

And that, sadly, has never changed.

25 February 2025

110 years ago today, my great-grandfather Clifford Turnbull immigrated to the United States from Canada.

To gain the right to live on the other side of the border, all Clifford had to do was show up at the bridge and fill out a form. The United States had open borders in 1915, and economically thrived as a country on account of the people immigrating there.

With one catch. See the field on the form, seven lines down? "Race." Racism loomed large in immigration, and was interpreted as being linked to a country of ancestry.

As long as open borders were seen as furthering the cause of white supremacy (and white northern European supremacy at that), Americans were for them. But as soon as immigrants started trickling in from "inferior" locales (then, in eastern and southern Europe)...they freaked out and started lobbing hurdles against the wall.

The 1924 Immigration Act imposed punitive visa requirements, banned immigration from Asia entirely, and created the U.S. Border Patrol out of whole cloth. The advocates of the act were also advocates of eugenics. The justification for this bullshit? "To preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity"...i.e., Christian whiteness.

As the tale of the MS St. Louis in 1939 demonstrated...closed borders kill.

Other than the internment camps, cages, and bogeymen du jour (replace "eastern and southern Europe" with "the Middle East" for a taste of life in the 21st century)...nothing has really changed.

Five years ago I immigrated to Canada from the United States, effectively reversing my great-grandfather. "All" I had to do was scrape together tens of thousands of dollars, go to grad school, rack up employment credentials, try to accrue enough "points" before being aged out of the system, and wait years on end bouncing from one status to another.

I would dream of living in a world as free to movement as the one that Clifford called home.