I agree with the others who have pointed out that you're already successful, don't break it!
That said, don't even consider HR as your first hire. Not even for a second. Their role is to police contracts and resolve issues. You won't have that until you have more people.
Get someone who wants to do the stuff you are tired of doing.
Took me awhile to understand what you mean. I calculated inflation in Canada to be $27 today from $17 in 1990 (which was about what I paid then). Of course I pay $10-13 per album now.
I have a Priv, you will like it. You don't sacrifice any Android features (or security updates), and the keyboard is there. I have had it since December and only typed on the touchscreen about 3 times. It is a bit big, but it is the same as any other phone manufacturer makes. I find it is fine in my front pants pocket and it also fits nicely in a shirt pocket.
I run a small company and I absolutely refuse to have an HR department. We're still small enough that this is fairly easy to work around.
My recent hires are all just people I met at events. I'm told by people outside the company that they're all very happy workers.
We do not do technical interviews. We talk casually about past work and what people want to achieve. After hiring we usually find out they have a different skillset and then we find the right tasks to match experience vs. career path.
Knowing this works for my team I would never want to go back to full-time employment at a place with HR ever again. HR has become an insular group of "specialists" who do not deliver value to organizations, and often ruin them IMO.
You might be interested in what is going on in Drupal 8 with regard to pre-caching and a newer (now in core I think) module called BigPipe. It does some of what you describe in PHP in a fairly generic way. AFAIK, you just enable this module and ensure caching is enabled. From that point on, slower assets load when ready so the rest of the site is already visible... like Facebook.
I would love this if airlines allowed personal wifi in-flight so I could offload my development builds which I currently have to run on my laptop. As it stands, you can either use the airline's onboard wifi or just not use wifi. :(
They have the parties at home in east van because it is impossible to get a permit and/or a suitable venue for most events. There are very few venues for hosting parties and virtually no practice areas for bands. I've been to a number of events that were held in death-trap condemned buildings. I've even been locked in one illegally because someone called an ambulance and they didn't want to "blow their cover" so nobody could enter or exit for 30min while my friend waited outside in a back alley. Much prefer other cities where I can just go to a normal bar and not deal with entrapment issues.
A major factor in this is that the transit services largely die off at 1am in Vancouver. So for any workers at stores or restaurants they simply can't afford to go home after a certain point. The late night bus service is not good enough, take for example the N19. It is full of all the bar kids at 1am. You don't want to take that bus unless you're drunk.
I think you're onto something with the Victorian "healthy living" bit. There is some hypocrisy as well: the way Vancouverites talk down about alcohol drinkers or tobacco smokers all the time but meanwhile promote the pot trade and never talk about the rampant heroin problem in that city.