Episode 60

Ep60: A special Canada Day for 2026

Please note, the podcast will take a break and return July 13, 2026

Welcome to my Canada Day special episode. Canada Day 2026 is special for me because twenty-five years ago on 1 July 2001, surrounded by many dear friends, I became a proud Canadian. That story comes towards the end of the episode.

First, I want to celebrate a fellow Canadian and a fellow Newfoundlander. I've known Joe Teo for more than a decade. A long time ago, my alma mater, Memorial University called me up and asked me whether I could meet with two young entrepreneurs, Joe Teo and Sahand Seifi, who had just started a company in St. John's called HeyOrca. Over the years I've watched Joe navigate life and entrepreneurship and I am incredibly proud to call him a friend. On the day I interviewed Joe, Joe had just received his Canadian citizenship and taken the oath.

This episode also contains the original audio created by my friend and then journalist Craig Welsh for CBC featuring my Canadian citizenship ceremony. Hearing my friends voices from twenty-five years ago is surreal and touching. I hope I have done you all proud.

I would like to thank the many Supermetrics colleagues who contributed to this episode: Dave, Bartosz, Kamal, Darius, Toli, Irina, Pavel, Anssi, Lee and Jaz. I'm sorry for those that I could not include.

The Canadian National Anthem, O Canada, is performed by Julie Nesrallah and Nathalie Paulin, accompanied by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Peter Oundjian.

Instrumental versions of O Canada are public domain recordings.

For more show notes and pictures: https://tales.dups.ca/p/ep60-a-special-canada-day-broadcast

About the Podcast

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Tales under the cat tree: Conversations on Imagination, Tech & Human Adventure
Hosted by tech leader and storyteller Duleepa Wijayawardhana, this podcast explores the intersections of technology, fiction, and human adventure. Words create the worlds we live in—join us for weekly conversations that spark your imagination.

About your host

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Duleepa Wijayawardhana

It started with late nights, glue sticks, and a university newspaper / radio.

That early obsession with how words reach people took me from student journalism to a career spanning the globe. I’ve gone from designing newspapers and having radio shows to building systems at BioWare (yes, the RPG legends), managing data at MySQL, and now leading tech at Supermetrics in Helsinki.

But at my core, I’m still that geek who believes writing is just code for the human mind.

While a computer chip executes code exactly, your imagination runs stories based on your own unique wiring. Tales under the cat tree is where we run those programs together. Whether we're exploring the fiction that inspires us or the tech that defines us, my goal is to spark your imagination and—most importantly—never make you go "meh."

Words create the worlds we live in. Let's explore them.