By gut feeling I’d agree on Chrétien, and there is some polling on this (which I think backs that up). This article compares favourability after first election for PMs going back quite a ways and Carney looks similar but slightly worse off than Trudeau or Harper.

https://angusreid.org/prime-minister-mark-carney-first-month...

Well then, I concede! To stick to my guns would require us to trade competing survey results from different pollsters. That's no fun, and unsatisfying, in any case.

That is reasonable, and why I conceded the point. Unfortunately, I cannot remember where the notion got into my head, and it's a bigger pain then it might seem trawling search results to find current articles with peak approval for both men.

Actually.. Wikipedia to the rescue!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_prime_m...

  Highest approval rating
  1. Mark Carney — 67% (June 2025)
  2. Jean Chrétien — 66% (September 1994)
  3. Justin Trudeau — 65% (September 2016)

I'm sorry spark advocacy doesn't qualify as a good source (that's wikipedias source).

Then I concede a second time. Please pretend I originally wrote just 'Carney is popular enough that the opposition can use what help they can get'

I'm not an expert on Canadian pollsters, and poll numbers are not a subject of debate for which I have much enthusiasm.

Working towards a handheld computer with a physical keyboard. Lots of examples out there (Hackberry Pi, Beepy, etc) but wanted to try my hand at it.

Along the way I found most of these use salvaged BlackBerry keyboards which are only going to become harder to find, so also on a bit of a side quest to build a thumb-sized keyboard from scratch. Got me into laying out and prototyping my first PCBs and learning about how these things are made - lots of fun so far!

Something cool I learned from tearing apart a BB keyboard: the satisfying “click” is just a tiny metal dome that pops and completes the circuit when pressed. Not news to anyone familiar with electronics manufacturing, but it was a cool thing to “discover.”

I think it's likely - from what I can tell only Sharp makes these displays. I've been looking for displays like these (no backlight, fast refresh) for a project and all I could find was the Adafruit breakout of that one.

And while it's not free, there's also Comic Code: https://tosche.net/fonts/comic-code

I took it around 5-6 years ago when I was moving to Vancouver from the east coast. It was a great way to see the country and meet some other travellers - such a strange travel option attracts some interesting folks!

The highlight though is the Jasper-Vancouver leg going through the Rockies - if you don’t have 3 days to burn that’s a good choice. Rocky Mountaineer line goes through there as well iirc.

The way I think about it is that as programmers we build the process for the kitchen. The software is designed around commodifying the repetitive work for non-programmer domain experts.

In my experience this was building a process for data scientists (math PhDs) to train and deploy ML models, and currently chemical engineers to build and deploy process simulations.

Data scientists and chemical engineers will have to excuse my comparing their work to flipping burgers :)