Breath On Glass

As a somewhat younger man, I had a ‘Sliding Doors’ moment. I’d just completed my degree and thought I would go onto do my thesis on batteries at the gorgeous UBC (University of British Columbia). I then thought: “nah”. UBC would have been a bit too distracting, and it was probably time to make some revenue. I never went back. Did I save a lifetime to get where the world is now, or would I have contributed to getting here earlier? I’ll never know. In my work with startups Redgrid and IOEN, the intent is to create a new economy based on energy. But electricity is ephemeral; use it, or lose it. Batteries of all sizes will change that completely. In 2022 Redgrid had successfully completed a project in the NBI, or  Neighbourhood Battery Initiative . Here in Australia there will be major rollouts at both state and  federal levels in 2023 and beyond . Putting aside the major shift towards EVs (electric vehicles) with the big auto companies ramping up, there is also a need to ‘save th...

  A cedar chest. I still can't smell it. To be clear, I’m not talking about the Big Two senses, visual impairment, or being hard of hearing. This is about loss of taste and smell, a phrase that has worked its way into our vocabulary due to Covid. When this happened to me, it was so strange I thought, “this should be a Medium article”, but I put it off.. for three and a half years. Considering it is 2023, do the maths; this was a few months  before  the pandemic. And it gets stranger, as you will see. What It’s Like In July 2019 I had a mild cold, afterwards I started to notice that food tasted like.. nothing. Zero taste. I had heard this could happen (remember, this was the Before Times), so it was a bit of a novelty. A common question was: did it affect my appetite? I think the answer was ‘no’: I didn’t get any joy from eating, but I was still hungry. Maybe I ate a bit less because of this. It dawned on me a few days later than I also couldn’t smell anything, but again, ...