Various Contrivances

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:08:07 -0400

Andrew MacDougall: Lessons from D-Day, 82 years later:

Looking at the past with rose-coloured glasses is usually a waste of time. We’re never going to be the country we were when it served up the “Greatest Generation.” But we do need a renewed sense of nationhood. We need to become a place that can once again pull together to do big things when called upon by the world. Different things, surely, but big just the same. What we shouldn’t be in a rush to do, especially in the face of Trumpian disorder, is to further weaken ourselves, whether by continuing our economic and military stagnation, or carving up the country via referendum.

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:20:45 -0400

🚴 Glad to get out for my first proper long ride of the season. The nasty headwind on the way up became a glorious tailwind coming back.

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:55:46 -0400

Finished reading: In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick is the harrowing story of survival that inspired Moby Dick. Hard to imagine such an ordeal 📚

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:07:32 -0400

Fun to listen to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco from start to finish for The Hemispheric Cavalcade Bingo Arcade June-boree! 🎵

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 18:16:51 -0400

Watched: Although I enjoyed For All Mankind Season 5, I agree with The NASA Vending Machine that the balance wasn’t quite right 🍿

Sun, 31 May 2026 20:26:44 -0400

🇨🇦 Gander is an interesting experiment: a “Canada first” social network, built on the AT Protocol. I’m trying out the beta and it works well. As usual, though, the challenge is getting enough people on the network to make it compelling.

Sun, 31 May 2026 09:18:13 -0400

🏃‍♂️ My kind of weather

Sat, 30 May 2026 21:50:45 -0400

Willibald Farm Distillery & Brewery. 📍

Delicious pizza from Willibald

Sat, 30 May 2026 17:48:58 -0400

Finished reading: Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson is an immersive story with great, imaginative details. Took a few chapters to get into and then was a page turner 📚

Sat, 30 May 2026 16:57:55 -0400

Wedges ‘N Woods Golf Academy. 📍

Mini golf on a lovely day ⛳️

Wed, 27 May 2026 10:43:44 -0400

🚴 Glad to finally get out for my first outdoor ride of the season, though the 5am wake up was rough

Fri, 15 May 2026 13:40:21 -0400

Friday before a long weekend and a wave of meetings have been getting cancelled throughout the day. Now there’s just one left at 3pm, taunting me.

Thu, 14 May 2026 17:37:11 -0400

The collaborative office puzzle is complete

Wed, 13 May 2026 13:07:31 -0400

🔗 Jonathan English makes a useful distinction in Engineering Problems and Phone Call Problems

There is a distinction that the infrastructure planning world doesn’t tend to make explicitly, but that explains an enormous amount of why large projects cost what they cost. It’s the distinction between engineering problems and what I like to call “phone call problems.”

Phone call problems lead to increased costs, schedule delay, and significant uncertainty.

Tue, 12 May 2026 07:11:41 -0400

🔗 The morning shakeout by Mario Fraioli

As a coach, I use various tools and data to track trends over time and initiate deeper discussions with my athletes about where we’re heading and why. But there’s a big difference between a tool and a crutch. Data should be used to inform your decisions but outsourcing your decisions to a data point is a fool’s errand. I worry that in our rush to optimize every aspect of our training and racing that we’re losing touch with the parts of this pursuit that can’t be measured and why most of us started running in the first place.

Switching my journal from Day One to Everlog 📝

Mon, 11 May 2026 17:37:19 -0400

Thanks to a post from David H in the Hemispheric Views chat, I’ve been considering a switch from Day One to Everlog for my journaling. I started using Day One back in 2012 and have around 10,000 entries, plus there isn’t anything particularly wrong with Day One. Given that I’m still tempted, there’s something worth exploring. So I want to think through this change before making it.

The basic function of Everlog is very similar to Day One or any other journaling app: you create dated entries in a journal. Everlog supports multiple journals, attachments, tags, templates, and locations. All things you would expect and that I find useful. The app is very well designed, responsive, and easy to use. I can quickly get to a blank entry and start typing, easily add photos, and tags, and search works well.

One very obvious difference is the price. Everlog is $19.99/year and Day One is $31.99 (though there are several different plans for Day One). Although not a big difference, it is enough to be part of the considerations.

Another difference, which has pros and cons, is that Everlog is from a single developer while Day One has an extensive team. Most of my favourite apps are from solo developers (Albums, Reeder, Overcast, Finalist, HealthFit) and I find they have an attention to detail and passion for development that is worth supporting. A risk, of course, is that the developer might choose to stop development, leaving my journal stranded in an abandoned app. Day One has, presumably, dozens of people (though many working on other platforms) and is less likely to abandon iOS.

There are a few things missing from Everlog that will be more or less important, based on what you want.

There is no web app. I do use the Day One web app for posting while at work. This is mostly just for convenience though, it isn’t an essential feature for me. In fact, I think it might be better if my personal journal was only accessible via my personal phone to better separate from work.
There is no Apple Watch app. Although I like the idea of making a quick entry in Day One from my watch, I have never actually used it. So, in practice, also not an essential feature.
You can’t post from email. I use this to integrate my micro.blog posts into Day One. However, I’m not convinced that I want to mix my blog in with my journal and have been considering disabling this anyway.
Day One integrates with Strava. I was curious about this when it was announced. Having used it for a while now, it hasn’t replaced separate entries that I still make in my main journal about how my training is going. So, also not essential.
Although Everlog does have support for locations, it isn’t as robust as in Day One. Day One keeps track of your location history, making it easier to start an entry from a location or changing the entry’s location based on the date and time. Day One also defaults to the location of a photo. Lastly, Day One has a nice map view of entries, relative to Everlog’s list-based, hierarchical approach.

A small thing that I’ve appreciated is Everlog’s much more appealing presentation of content from the built-in Journal Suggestions from iOS (screenshots below). Day One’s presentation is surprisingly plain.

Importing from Day One into Everlog was very easy. The text, images, and other metadata of close to 10,000 entries were all quickly and correctly transferred. However, I expect this is mostly a one-way transfer. Although Day One has some import functions, I expect it would be much more challenging to import back into Day One from Everlog.

So, what to do? I’m still quite interested in switching to Everlog. Honestly, I think this is mostly about favouring an indie developer focused on iOS over a large team focused on a journaling platform. I’m also not entirely keen on Day One’s (totally optional) push towards AI integration. My real concern is the lock-in of my journal in a specific app. This is true for both Everlog and Day One, though Everlog supports flexible exports (JSON, txt, PDF). If I do end up switching apps again, I suspect Everlog will be a better starting point. Eventually I anticipate that I’ll end up with an app-agnostic approach that uses plain text and this concern will be mitigated.

As usual, the decision rests on why I even journal in the first place. I have two reasons: one is as a record of what I’ve done, basically an annotated history that I can reference; two is a place I work through thoughts, ideas, and feelings. The first reason is where most of these features matter, especially the ability to search and the long-term viability of the app. The second reason is much more ephemeral and doesn’t require much structure. Everlog is quite capable of supporting both of these reasons. I’m going to make this switch, save a bit of money, and support an indie developer.

Using Claude to help finish book series 📚🤖

Mon, 11 May 2026 10:28:40 -0400

Although I don’t have much use for AI, and certainly have many concerns, I’m also quite curious about it. As an experiment, I pointed Claude at my list of blog entries on books I’ve read, asked it to identify any series from the list, and find the next book in that series. I sometimes lose track of which series I’ve started and wanted to see if I’d missed any.

Claude quickly and correctly identified all of the series I’d started. Other than a strange confidence that Alecto the Ninth had been released (I had to point it to the Wikipedia entry to get it to admit the mistake), it also correctly listed the next books in any unfinished series. Also, it helpfully noted that I’d read a few books in the Culture series, but had missed a couple of the most highly rated books. I’ve added these to my “Want to Read” list.

This isn’t using AI to code up my own blog engine. But, it is using AI to help me answer an actual question, based on my own information, that was important to me. And, although, it was quick and effective, the societal, political, environmental, and economic costs are all very valid concerns.

Sun, 10 May 2026 14:26:04 -0400

I started reading: Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson. I’ve read that if I can get through the first couple of hundred pages, this is a great series. I’m up for the challenge! 📚

Sun, 10 May 2026 13:08:38 -0400

Listening to The Call by Broken Social Scene from Remember The Humans. Great to have a new album from this collective 🎵

Sat, 09 May 2026 18:21:49 -0400

Finished reading: The Republic of Alberta by Tyler Dawson make a compelling case that the rest of Canada needs to be paying attention to Alberta separatism. I remember how traumatic this was with Quebec and am not keen to do this again 📚

Sat, 09 May 2026 17:42:10 -0400

I counted myself in 🇨🇦

Thu, 07 May 2026 20:20:53 -0400

🎵 Song of the week for my daughter — Right Back to It (feat. MJ Lenderman) by Waxahatchee from Tigers Blood. I think this is Waxahatchee’s best song.

Thu, 07 May 2026 14:28:08 -0400

Finished reading: Although I preferred the mystery of his previous book, Stiletto by Daniel O’Malley is still a fun read 📚

Wed, 06 May 2026 18:04:47 -0400

Gregory Jack: The New Republicans were real. They’re worse than I thought:

Now we know that there is no single, rational way to deal with this administration. The lesson for Canada is that diagnosis is not capacity. We can say sovereignty and “elbows up” as often as we like, and talk endlessly about the Arctic, pipelines, building Canada and middle power diplomacy. Unless we can actually build, buy, permit, deploy and defend at speed, sovereignty remains a slogan and security an aspiration. My original prescription was basically right. What I underestimated was how inadequately we are equipped to follow it.

Wed, 06 May 2026 11:32:54 -0400

RunnerCast is a great, single purpose app that tells me one thing: how is the weather for my run?

Prior to RunnerCast, I’d open up the Weather app on my phone and squint at various metrics. Now, I’m presented with a straightforward set of colours on a timeline and declarative sentence about if I should go now. I also appreciate that I can tweak my tolerance for temperature, precipitation, and other weather features to match my preferences.

Another helpful feature is that you can add in upcoming events (like the half marathon shown in the screenshot) to start preparing mentally for whatever is coming up on race day.

I’m fond of apps like these: well designed, specific, and useful.