For years I have been investing in (and on) p2p lending platforms such as LendingClub, Prosper and Dianrong, and I have been writing about it on this blog (e.g. see this post from 2012). Although people were skeptical at first a lot of my friends now invest part of their savings there, simply because returns are so much better than what you can get at banks or in other debt investments.

To give you an idea, at LendingClub I have made consistently over 8% net (=after write-offs) for years. I also invest in funds that do leveraged investments in platforms, where you make 3-4% per quarter (13-16% per year). These are fairly liquid investments, so your money is not tied up for years like in most of my other investments.

In China, where I am on the board of one of the leading marketplace lenders Dianrong.com, returns can be even higher. That’s mainly because there are no other sources of capital for most borrowers. Maybe I am biased, but I feel p2p lending is much more common in China than in N-America and Europe, especially because it’s so easy to lend money through mobile apps.

I think there are a couple of reasons why marketplace lending has taken off so fast globally and why it is better than traditional bank lending. Samir Desai, founder and CEO of Funding Circle, a UK based marketplace lender gave a talk at the Lendit conference in London this week in which he focused on this. I embed a video of his speech (via avc.com) and summarize his main points below.

Why are marketplace lenders better than traditional banks:

-P2P marketplace platforms don’t need to have money on their balance sheets to lend it to consumers. It’s direct p2p lending, so the platform has no inventory. In that way platforms are truly aligned with investors, for example they can’t invest in loans themselves, so there is no incentive not to put the best loans on the platform. Next to that it leads to platform being faster and cheaper.

– Platforms are completely transparant. On most platforms data about all originated loans is available in detail. Try that with traditional banks!

– Platforms only do loan origination and many platforms focus on a certain type of loans (e.g. student loans, or loans to specific categories of people). By doing this over and over and over again, they get better and better and better at it. That leads to even higher returns for investors.

– Platforms generally give the same investment opportunities to small and large lenders. It may be easier to lend as a big player because the platforms service you better, but if you are a savvy small investors you have access to the exact same loans at most platforms.

– Platforms have no systemic risk, because the maturity of the investments is the same as the maturity of the loans. This is very different from banks where short term deposits may be used for long term loans. In case of a bank run the whole bank may fall apart because of this mismatch, as was the case with Northern Rock in 2007-2008. On a p2p platform a bankrun is impossible because there is no maturity transformation.

Conclusion: P2P or marketplace lending is far superior to bank lending, is more secure, and has higher returns because of efficiency. We will therefore see a lot more growth in this kind of lending over the next couple of years. Being a shareholder in these platforms or putting money on these platforms as a lender will continue to give investors outsized returns.

I am a big believer that the near future will be full of self-driving cars. So Tesla’s announcement this week that it would roll out its first self-driving features in a software update to its cars was super exciting.

My business partner’s wife drives a Tesla Model S P85D (the one with the insane mode, going from 0-100 km/h in just 3.1 seconds) and her car received its autopilot update on Friday morning. Because of my Facebook posts about autonomous driving they dropped by my house today to show me the autopilot’s features. Of course I made some videos and I uploaded one here on Youtube.

Once you drive over 30 km/h you can turn on autopilot (by pushing the cruise control handle twice). At that moment the car keeps on driving the same speed (like in cruise control mode), but it also starts steering for you. On the highway that works very well and the car keeps its lane and adapts its speed to other cars in the same lane.

Also passing other cars is easy, you just turn on the your signal light, then the Tesla will check if there are no cars close to you and move over to the next lane.

It start getting tricky if you get to an area with construction though. At that moment the car gets confused, gives a warning and you have to immediately take over manual control. The current version of the Autopilot software is far from ready to drive through a construction area, and that’s kind of scary.

On secondary roads it’s even worse, because many streets don’t have outside lines or the middle lines are too faded. We had quite some problems using the autopilot features on two-lane roads and one time we even started to drive into the lane with oncoming traffic! Also the autopilot doesn’t recognize stop signs (they are everywhere in Canada) and traffic lights yet…

To be fair, the software is only in beta version and you should actually keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times. If you do that you can turn on autopilot on non-highways as well, but what’s the use of autopilot software if you still have to pay attention to the road?

My conclusion after a short test drive is that this is a major step forward in the direction of autonomous vehicles, but that this software is not ready for non-highway use yet. Maybe it’s useful in traffic jams downtown, but for now I would only use it on highways. For long distance drives it’s great though. Just put your destination in the GPS, start driving and once on the highway let the car take over the controls. Keep a thumb on the steering wheel and look up regularly (e.g. to see if there is construction ahead!), but you can then start doing other things as well.

I am a bit worried that we’ll see some accidents caused by Tesla drivers using autopilot software soon. Although Tesla makes clear that you are still responsible for your car, some people may not realize its current limitations and rely too much on the car not making mistakes. The autopilot will get constantly better because the cars send feedback about road conditions to Tesla, so if you’ll wait a few weeks it will likely be much safer already.

My current cars feel suddenly very old fashioned, my next car will likely be a Tesla.

This year’s Vancouver Marathon was not the best marathon I ever ran. A week before I could still hardly walk because of an injury, so I could not participate in the 10K Vancouver Sun Run. But I still decided to do the full 42.2 km marathon the weekend after that. The result was an even worse injury (but I finished, which is the only thing that counts), however, there was more.

I think our housekeeper washed my Vibram running shoes before the race, because while at the start I felt they were suddenly too small. During the race my big toe was very painful, but I continued anyway. I will spare you the details, but about 3 weeks later I lost my complete toenail because of this. I never realized how important even a toenail can be, I could not even swim for a few weeks because of that (too much pain).

But the strangest thing was that after the marathon my lower abdomen was hurting and it looked like I had suddenly grown a big tumor during the run. Kind of scary, so I went to see a doctor a few days later. He told me that it was a hernia, something that 10% of the people develop during their life, which was a bit of a relief. This marathon had been too much for my body it seems.

I did some research and managed to get an appointment with the best hernia doctor in Vancouver, Dr. Scudamore. He told me that it was an inguinal hernia. A surgery was not immediately necessary, but that not doing it could lead to potential complications such as strangulation (cutting off the blood supply to part of the body). Because the full recovery of such a surgery would be 6 weeks I decided to postpone the operation until after the summer (I wanted to go swimming and sailing in summer), and so last night I went in for my operation.

I have always been very healthy and never had an operation before. The only time I spent some time in a hospital was when Scott and Elaine were born in Shanghai. So I looked forward to it actually, I like to learn new things and this is the best way to observe how a surgery works.

While being tied to my bed in the operation room I asked the anesthesiologist a lot of questions and looked at all the monitors and other instruments surrounding me. I was put on an IV, which I had never experienced before. I was hungry and dehydrated (I had not eaten for 20 hours when I entered the hospital), but the IV makes you feel better soon. The view from the operation room was great, on the top floor of the building with windows all around and views over the city. Too bad I could not take a selfie!

Dr. Scudamore walked into the surgery room just before 7 pm (I already had a short chat with him 30 min before the operation in which I could ask him all kinds of questions) and informed the staff of the procedure. Then the anesthesiologist put a mask with 100% oxygen over my mouth and told me I would be asleep in 20-30 seconds. Breathing was kind of hard so I closed my eyes and took deep breaths. After 30 seconds I felt I was still not asleep and opened my eyes to tell the doctor that it did not seem to work. But I was surprised to see that I was suddenly in a different room and that the clock at the end of my bed showed it was an hour later! The surgery was over already and I had not noticed anything.

I felt fine and wanted to get up, but the post operation nurse told me to stay put. I was completely awake and asked her for something to read, but that was not possible. I had to lay down for at least another 45 minutes. That was very boring, because I felt great (thanks to the IV and all the medicine in my body) and I am not used to doing nothing for 45 minutes. There was a man in the bed next to me who had also had surgery and who seemed to be doing a lot worse. I could not see him because of curtains between the beds, but I understood that they had needed a lot more medicine to bring him to sleep and he was not in good shape when he had woken up right before me.

After a very boring 45 minutes in which I asked the nurse questions about the instruments, the surgery itself (the whole operation had lasted just 35 min), and post-operation procedures, and in which I was trying to come up with improvements for patients (why not put a simple muted TV screen above the bed to at least you can watch something without moving or hang some posters on the ceiling), I was finally allowed to get up. The nurse wanted to bring in a wheelchair but I said I wanted to try to walk myself. That went fairly well, but the nurse warned me that if I would fall she may not be able to catch me. After leaving the post-operation area I was told to go to the toilet (they don’t let you go until you prove you can do that!), which was kind of weird because the whole middle part of my body was completely numb.

Then another nurse came and put me in a wheelchair. I did not see the necessity for that but wanted to go home and just obeyed. She took me to Grace’ car and with some pain I managed to get in. I thought I would sleep most of the drive back home, but I was not tired and could even tell Grace how to drive (she prefers my directions over her navigation system).

At home I decided to walk around slowly instead of lie down because I felt fine. But all of a sudden my legs felt like jello and I fell backwards on the ground. I still don’t know what happened exactly, but it was a good lesson that I may feel okay but I was not yet okay just 2 hours after the surgery.

From then on I just sat down, had a lot of clear soup and then went to bed where I read some emails, wrote a couple of text messages and tried to read a book. By 11 pm I was supposed to take new painkillers, but I felt the pain was manageable so I did not take them yet.

The night was not easy because I could only lay in one position and woke up each time I moved. I was thinking about taking painkillers at 5 AM, but in the end decided to try to get through the night without them. The result was not much sleep, but I still felt quite rested. I also had a lot of time to think about the things I experienced in the hospital and what could be improved. Especially the information flow is quite limited, if you don’t ask you just don’t hear a lot of things. Also the waiting time at the hospital before the operation was unnecessary. Why let me arrive at 3:45 pm and not start the operation until 7 PM (I was told other operations took more time than planned)? Just give me a call in advance so I could have worked 2 hours longer. A simple app could have solved this. And maybe I am different from others, but I would have liked to see pictures or video of the operation, that would be a nice memory.

It’s now 9 AM, the kids are in school and I am sitting in the living room doing emails and WeChat messages. Pain is still manageable so I still haven’t touched my painkillers. I may do so later if I want to get some sleep, but if I can handle the pain without medicine I prefer that. Actually, the pain is a lot less than I thought. Several people told me it would hurt like crazy, but it’s actually not much worse than the pain during or after a full marathon. The main difference is that after a marathon you can lie down on your bed and feel much better, here the pain is very concentrated and doesn’t really stop.

Recovery will be quite slow, it will take about 3 weeks before I can do light activities again and it will take 6 weeks for a full recovery. Biggest problem is that I can’t drive for 2 weeks (time for self-driving cars!), but I believe I should be able to beat that time if I walk around a lot instead of hang on the couch. I am in pretty decent shape, so I assume that with healthy food and drinks my body should recover a lot more quickly than the average person would. We’ll see. At least it was an interesting experience that I actually enjoyed (I realize that might sound strange), I just wish there would be a bit less pain involved.

One of the things that I enjoy most is to talk about disruptive technological trends and how they will already impact our lives 5 years from now. I use this in my investment decisions, both for start-ups and for public companies.

One of the most interesting areas for me is how quickly autonomous car technology and robotics are developing. My vision on this has evolved quite a bit since I moved to Canada in 2013, especially my view on the time line in which changes will happen (within the next 4-5 years) and the effect of robotics (more positive than I originally thought).

Robotics and autonomous cars are actually the same thing, because an autonomous car is nothing more than a robot. I have predicted for years that robots will take over most of our daily tasks and that the majority of people will lose their jobs over the next 20 years. I now believe that this will go much faster, but I also believe that this does not need to lead to mass unrest if society prepares itself well for the coming changes. This post will focus on self-driving cars, I plan to write about the effect of mass unemployment later.

Autonomous cars are a good way to explain the effects of robotics to people, because most of us use cars and can understand the changes that self-driving cars will bring. Within 5 years the first completely autonomous vehicles will hit the road (in 2013 I thought it would be in 2023, now I think it will already be by 2019-2020). Many cars already have limited self-driving features and these show how far we have come over the past years.

Last month my wife bought a new car with some of these self-driving features and it’s quite interesting to try them out. Among others her car can parallel park itself or it can back into a parking spot. It is kind of scary the first time you use it, and I even braked because I thought her new car would hit the car next to us (message from the car: “please release the brake”), but once you have done it a few times you realize the car is a much better parker than most humans.

The car also has automatic brakes in case the car in front of you suddenly slows down. When I was testing her car I drove up to a stop sign where a car was waiting in front of me of me. I saw that the car would start driving because there were no other cars at the intersection, so I drove up to him quite fast. About 15 meters before the stop sign, and right at the moment the other car started driving, Grace’ car suddenly took over the controls and started braking hard while making a beeping sound. It was very strange when it happened, but it’s actually assuring that the car forces you to drive more carefully.

For me the big take away is how quickly you get used to these features. It makes driving easier and safer, and after using them a few times it feels totally normal. I think that once cars will become more autonomous we will immediately accept it and will let the car do all the driving.

It will change the way cars look and feel. I don’t believe that fully autonomous cars will need a steering wheel and pedals. Once you have given control to your car you won’t feel the need to drive yourself anymore. That’s the mistake the big car manufacturers seem to be making, most still believe that people will want cars where you can take over from the computer if needed. It reminds me of the first cars in the late 1800’s that looked like coaches, so you could still put a horse in front of the it! Google doesn’t have this bias and its autonomous vehicle prototypes are just sit-and-go, without any controls for passengers. They redesigned the concept of a car bottom-up and that may turn out to be a very smart move.

Given how much better electric cars have become over the past 3 years (Tesla cars are among the very best vehicles on the road right now) and how quickly battery technology and solar power are developing, my prediction is that the first autonomous cars will be completely electric. No more engines with moving components that need maintenance and can break down easily, but a simple but powerful battery powered car.

This will have huge implications for the car industry, because many companies are still focused on gas- or diesel-powered engines, instead of focusing all their energy on electric technology. But not just that, once autonomous vehicles become widely available, car sharing concepts will take off and the whole automotive market will collapse. Why do you need 2-3 cars per household if these cars sit in parking lots 95% of the time?

I believe that most people won’t own cars anymore but will subscribe to an Uber-like concept in which an autonomous vehicle will show up at your door whenever you need one. The number of cars will go down dramatically and if you are the operator of a parking garage you might as well start looking for a new career. Self-driving cars will park themselves outside of city centers to recharge their batteries, or more likely, immediately drive to the next person that needs a ride.

Costs will be much lower than current taxi services, because there are no human drivers involved anymore (the majority of the costs for a taxi are salaries), because cars will become much cheaper (mass-produced luxury taxis without complicated engines will probably be produced for $15-20,000, and because of their electric engines you can drive them for more kilometers than normal cars) and because they don’t need expensive gas anymore (with better solar power and batteries the variable costs of driving will go down to almost zero).

My prediction: transportation will become almost free. Hard to imagine right now what impact that will have, but for sure it will change the way we live. People might start to live further away from downtown for example. And supermarkets may disappear because ordering online will be faster and cheaper (immediate delivery, no delivery costs, and the supermarket doesn’t need expensive real estate).

Traffic jams will disappear, not necessarily because there will be less cars on the road, but mainly because autonomous cars drive more efficiently (no sudden brakes) and will communicate with each other so that traffic lights are not necessary anymore. Check out this YouTube video to understand what will happen in intersections when you only have self-driving cars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7_lwq3BfkY This assumes that there are no human driven cars anymore, which will not happen 5 years from now, but it will be the case in 15 years. Possibly older cars will be have to retrofitted with autonomous systems or they will not be allowed to drive during rush hour or on certain roads.

Another big advantage is that there won’t be many accidents anymore. Driving is one of the most dangerous activities, but that will change once autonomous vehicles take over. Insurance companies should take this into account, if you are a car insurer your business may go away over the next couple of years.

I am very positive about the changes that will happen in the automotive industry over the next years and the additional freedom and free time it will give many of us. It will completely disrupt some industries but it will also create a lot of new opportunities. I look forward to these changes and hope to drive (or better: be driven in) an autonomous car by 2020.

Over the past days I have been closely following the ad blocking discussion. For those who did not pay too much attention to it, the issue is that Apple released iOS9 and that this version allows ad blocking apps. That means that by installing one of these apps you won’t see ads anymore.

Great, right? Well, maybe yes, because it makes the user experience better, but also maybe no, because ads are the main revenue driver for most websites on the Internet. Within a day the top paid apps in the app store were ad blocking apps, so there clearly was a big need for it.

I don’t want to go into too much detail, but it means that many websites will need a different business model if they want to survive. The current model where you are often bombarded with ads that you do not want to see or that load much more slowly than the site itself is not working. It’s the ad industries fault, because they assumed consumers could not avoid the ads. With more relevant ads, that are less annoying, load faster and don’t block part of the site, I believe people would be less inclined to download ad blockers.

I never put any ads on this blog (and never will), nor did I ever accept any paid posts, because I blog for fun and make my money in other ways. Indirectly this blog has earned me a lot more than I could have ever made with ads, however. That’s my business model, but obviously that doesn’t work for sites with high overheads.

Some websites charge monthly fees, which is a model I don’t believe in. The only paid subscription that I have is the New York Times, because their content is unique and far superior to that of most other newspaper websites. But I don’t want to pay a monthly fee for 10 to 20 blogs and media sites, so earlier this year I deleted all the ones that charge for content from my RSS reader.

I believe in a model like Blendle, where people pay for content on a per article basis. However, the model should be seamless (no ‘pay now’ button), ubiquitous (it should work on any paid website, not just a few) and you should pay less if you don’t finish reading the article. Next to that an article should be cheap, I think the Blendle articles (at on average $0.20 per article) are still too expensive.

I have talked about this for about 8 years already, but so far I have not found the business model that I am looking for. Partly because big companies like Apple (iTunes for News?) and Microsoft (Skype with its pre-paid credit would be a perfect candidate) didn’t see the market or did not want to enter it, or in the case of Google because it would hurt their main business: advertising.

But the main reason the model does not exist yet is that there was no good machine-to-machine payment tool that can automatically send and receive money. Until now that is, because yesterday 21 Inc. released the data for its upcoming “21 bitcoin computer“. This Raspberry Pi with an added black box is the first tool that can make machines talk to each other and exchange value (=bitcoin) between them. Each 21 bitcoin computer contains the full blockchain and mines bitcoin as well when you use it.

The 21 bitcoin computer is 21 Inc.’s first product, but there will be many more products to come. Their vision is that everybody will in the future own one of their devices and will automatically mine small amounts of bitcoin every day. This money can then be spent automatically on products developed with the 21 bitcoin computer.

The first use case I see for this right now is automatically paying for web content. You read an article on say The Wall Street Journal and automatically a few cents are deducted from your bitcoin wallet. You don’t need to approve it (you probably don’t even realize that you are paying) and you can never spend more than you mine, unless you add bitcoin to your wallet yourself. In case you don’t like the content and stop reading after a few seconds or if you don’t scroll to the end of the article, you’ll get a partial or full refund – all done automatically.

This will solve a big part of the current ad blocking problem, because it gives content owners a new business model. 21 Inc. could be the ad blocker of the future: turn it on and you don’t see ads, turn it off and you’ll be served ads. Anybody can monetize their own content in the future and there is a huge opportunity here for a start-up.

Although lots of people dismiss 21 Inc.’s bitcoin computer (too expensive, ugly, just a Raspberry Pi, you can’t earn money with their chip, etc.), I think they are missing the bigger picture: we finally have an Internet protocol for payments! Automatic machine-to-machine payments will lead to new business models which will change the web as we know it. It’s hard to predict the future of the Internet, but I believe automatic payments are almost as disruptive as the first webbrowser was. Changing the online ads business model will just be a first step.

Today is our 10-year wedding anniversary (time flies, we were still so young during our wedding…) so I decided to take the day off and spend time with my wife. She wanted to do some shopping after bringing the kids to school, so we drove to the Metrotown mall in Burnaby, mainly because we had never been there.

We walked around inside the mall for a few minutes when we heard a loud scream behind us. My initial reaction was to ignore it, but the screaming continued. I turned around and saw an older Chinese woman laying on the ground outside the BMO bank. She seemed to be in shock and could only scream, but I noticed she was pointing in my direction.

I looked around and at that moment a big well dressed black guy with a panama hat walked by me. He carried a woman’s hand bag and walked a bit faster than normal.  I looked at him and then noticed he was the only one not paying attention to the screams. At that same moment he suddenly started running away from me, and I realized that he must have just robbed the woman and pushed her onto the ground.

I didn’t hesitate and immediately ran after him. He was quite fast but I am a decent runner so he did not manage to run far away from me. Within moments several other people followed me as well (Grace later told me about 20 people were running behind me and the thief). I shouted “stop the thief, stop the thief” and that scared the black guy, and he threw away the bag.

He probably hoped that I would stop running after him, but he was wrong. I knew that I would eventually catch up with him, these guys are generally fast at first but because I am a long distance runner I can run at a high speed much longer than they can. So I kept following him.

Problem was, the other people were not as fast as we were, so it was just me and him and some other people at least 20 meters behind us. He ran into Sears, which was virtually empty, so I screamed to the staff to stop the guy. But because he looked like a decent guy people did not immediately realize he was the criminal and let him pass.

He went around a corner, but when I rounded the corner he was suddenly gone. I first thought he may be hiding behind some racks, but then a shop assistant told me that a black guy just ran out the emergency exit. The emergency door had a sign saying that an alarm would go off if you opened it, but that was not the case so he managed to get away.

There was no point in going after him anymore, because I had no idea where he had run to, but at least the Chinese lady got her bag back. Grace was happy that I was not hurt, she had seen me running after the guy and saw from a distance that I was the only one close to him. She was quite worried that he would have a knife and stab me if I would have come too close, so seeing me safe made her quite relieved.

We were not in the mood for shopping anymore after that and left the building about 10 minutes later. By that time police cars had surrounded the mall, but I doubt that they were able to catch the guy. He was probably the only black guy in the mall, so he would have been an easy catch, but he was likely already off the premises before the police even got the call. It’s a pity, but it was a good reminder to be careful, even in shopping malls.

Lots of wildlife around our house these days: 2 weeks ago we saw 2 whales while sailing close to our home, last week a black bear visited our garden, on the weekend I had a close encounter with a deer, and tonight a family of 4 raccoons walked around our pool!

After dinner Elaine walked to the window to look at the sunset and suddenly started screaming: “Daddy, daddy, look, look, look!”. I had no idea what was going on but because she sounded shocked, I immediately ran towards her and saw a raccoon family walking on the deck next to our pool.

Two of them started eating some of the plants and 2 others jumped on the pool cover (I am glad we closed it!). We took a few pictures through the window, because I thought they would run away when they would hear or see us.

But when 3 of them had left the garden I opened the door to the garden and the last raccoon did not run at all, but turned around to look at me! I made some hissing sounds and pretended to throw something at the animal to scare it away, but instead it took a step towards me. That actually scared me a bit. The raccoon then slowly walked into the bushes and kept on observing me from there.

It’s not the first time I see a raccoon and it’s also not the first time that raccoons don’t run away when I encounter them. I once saw a huge one at dusk while running in the woods in Stanley Park, it just looked at me like I did not belong there (probably true!). I was more scared to see him than he was to see me running by.

I had assumed that if you see raccoons at home and try to scare them, they would at least have the natural reaction to flee. But that seems to be a wrong assumption. Maybe they are too used to human beings? Luckily raccoons are generally not dangerous to people, although they can attack pets or damage your garden. Let’s see what wild animals will visit us next week – I heard there are coyotes on the golf course behind our house!

 

Egmont, Sunshine Coast, BC

On Tuesday Scott and Elaine’s summer holiday will be over after more than 2 months of vacation. They are very excited to go back to school after such a long period of time. I think they had a great holiday in which they not only had some fun trips and summer camps but during which they also learned a lot.

Anchoring at Galbraith Beach (Bowen Island)

We didn’t have time for a long holiday this summer, mainly because I was too busy with work related activities, but we made a few short trips to the wineries in Kelowna, the Rocky Mountains (Banff & Lake Louise), Southern California (LA & San Diego, incl. Legoland and Sea World), and in British Columbia (a trip to the Sunshine Coast and several sailing trips).

Visiting a winery in Kelowna

When their holiday started in late June I made a list of things that I wanted to teach the kids during their summer break. For Elaine I put learning to swim and learning how to ride a bicycle on top of the list, for Scott it was sailing and learning a first computer language. Next to that they would practice piano every day, write their journals on a weekly basis and read books for an hour per day.

Rockwater Resorts, Sunshine Coast, BC

Looking back most of these goals were met. Elaine is now a great swimmer, she can do breaststroke, crawl and backstroke and she has no fear at all of water. Before June she mainly swam with one inflatable armband, but now she won’t need that anymore. She hang out in our pool on most days during the holiday, next year I’ll also let her swim in the sea with me.

Learning how to ride a bike with daddy

Biking took her a bit more time, but once she got the hang of it she immediately wanted to ride up and down hills! Just like with swimming she not only has no fear, but she also doesn’t see any danger. So she had a few crashes, but that’s the only way to learn.

Scott at his sailing camp

Scott took a sailing camp early in the holiday and there he learned to sail an Optimist on his own. He now knows the basic concepts of sailing, so when I took him out on my yacht a couple of times he enjoyed it a lot more. I even let him steer my boat sometimes, he loves it!

Captain Scott!

For Scott I had decided to teach him Python as his first computer language. Python is not that hard to learn (we only did the basics of course) and is a good basis for other languages. I realized soon that most of the key concepts are still quite hard for someone who just finished 1st grade (e.g. things like Boolean operators and expressions, variables, loop functions), but after several weeks of working with them he understands what they are and can work with them to write simple code. My plan is to do one lesson a week with him during the school year, and eventually to build a simple computer game with him.

Playing on the shores of Bow Lake

The kids also loved to play piano, they normally practiced without us telling them to do so. Elaine even played at some public pianos in Vancouver during the holiday, attracting a small crowd of onlookers. Because she memorizes all her songs she can play without sheet music, which is helpful when giving a mini concert in the open air.

Elaine learns how to play golf

The kids both wrote long journals about their holidays, describing the trips we took and the things we saw. Elaine wrote that her highlight was her visit to Legoland California in late July, she especially loved the rollercoasters (Scott not so much). Scott’s highlight was an overnight sailing trip that he took with me and my dad. We sailed in the Strait of Georgia where we saw 2 whales close to our boat (very impressive!) and then anchored for the night in a bay at Gambier Island. Nice to spend quality time withy my dad and son, and even nicer that Scott liked it so much as well.

Scott’s amazing reading results for August

Scott’s main activity this summer was reading. It’s unbelievable how much he reads. He has his own Kindle with an unlimited Amazon subscription and that was the best present ever for him. I just checked the statistics on his Kindle for August and it turns out he read 122 books this month, for a total of over 10,000 pages! I used to read a lot as a kid, but this beats everything. He is an extremely fast reader and already reads books for grade 4, so he will likely have an easy time in school this year.