Finished reading: In Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canadian Book Publishing, Richard Stursberg gives a stark review of the collapse of Canada’s book industry. Tough to maintain a culture without a literature and ongoing national conversation. Fortunately he includes recommendations for how to fix it 📚
Colleague brought in a large box of delicious doughnuts and were having a Chinese Lunar New Year team lunch. I can do this!
Uh oh, I seem to be immune to caffeine this morning. This better be temporary 😴
Boilermaker by Royal Blood from Typhoons helped me finish off a too early Zwift ride 🎵
Etobicoke Olympium. 📍
🏊♂️ Spending the day at regionals with kid #2
Finished reading: The Dollar A Year Men by Allan Levine is an impressive reminder of what Canada was once able to accomplish by connecting government with industry. I like to believe that something like this is possible again, though it seems much harder now and required an existential war then 📚
🎵 Song of the week for my daughter: Weighty Ghost by Wintersleep from Welcome to the Night Sky. We listened to this one a lot when she was little.
Possibilities
In my recent, semi-regular review of my notifications settings, I was extra ruthless. As usual, notifications are off for the vast majority of apps. Just a handful are allowed into a twice daily summary and messages from family are immediate.
I used to rely on notifications for ambient awareness of what’s happening. Now I’m mostly only allowing action oriented notifications, like habit reminders in Streaks or moments in Waking Up. More importantly, given the limited number of notifications that appear, I now almost immediately do whatever the notification is about. This has made them much more relevant and is helping me build the habits that I claim to prioritize.
Turns out the best notification strategy isn’t about staying informed, it’s about staying intentional.
🏃♂️ Added another event to this year’s race calendar. My son is going to join me for this one, which will be fun. His runs have maxed out at about 7km to date, so he has some training to do. I need to convince him that he can’t just sprint the whole thing.
The Obedient Self: A Philosophical Critique of Self-Optimization — The Virginia Truth
The optimized self must remain unfinished, because only the unfinished self consumes, adjusts, updates, and corrects itself. Permanence would be inefficiency.
It is important to know when we’re actually improving something, rather than just changing it. I’m learning to be comfortable with leaving somethings alone. I really don’t need to check out that new notes app or blogging platform. These are just self generated distractions.
Asteroids that spin really fast – Triton Station
Every once in a while, a result comes along that make stop and remember that heavenly objects can be pretty darn cool. This is an asteroid about half a kilometer in diameter that is spinning once every 1.88 minutes. That’s 112 seconds. That’s crazy talk.
I should read more posts like this and less about politics.
I’ve listened to, watched, and read plenty about AI. Boss Class Season 3 from The Economist is actually relevant to my job and quite entertaining 🎙️
When Our Friends Come Over by Donovan Woods & Madi Diaz from Things Were Never Good If They’re Not Good Now is a great song on a great album 🎵
Finished reading: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . . by Steven Pinker is really interesting. I hadn’t appreciated how essential common knowledge (you know that I know that you know…) is to so much of what we do 📚
🎶 Song of the week for my daughter: Cloudbusting by Kate Bush. She knows Running Up That Hill from Stranger Things and this exposes her to more from a visionary artist.
A Blueprint to Restore Homeownership for Young Canadians
Young Canadians are increasingly seeing homeownership as out of reach. While 86% of non-homeowners under 30 and 75% of non-homeowners between 30 and 44 still aspire to own a home one day, only 51% and 47%, respectively, are very or somewhat confident they will achieve this goal. The combination of higher interest rates, stagnant wages, and a two-decade-long increase in price-to-income ratios has made it increasingly difficult for them to qualify for a mortgage. Their ambition has turned into uncertainty, and for many, that uncertainty is turning into defeat. The issue is not willingness to buy, but rather whether they can afford to enter the market at all.
Some good recommendations in this paper. I think that part of the solution also needs to be a cultural shift away from seeing home ownership as necessarily a desired outcome. That said, for those who do want to own, we have a lot of work to do to make this possible.
Komoot’s Apple Watch App Gets Offline Maps & Routing: Hand-on!
In arguably one of the biggest bits of news for outdoor-focused Apple Watch owners in years, Komoot just announced true offline mapping and routing for their Apple Watch app. Up until now, their app required some sort of connectivity, notably to the phone, in order to have offline maps/routing.
This looks quite promising. I’ve been using the WorkOutDoors app for offline maps, but Komoot looks much easier.
Relentless snow! ❄️
Finished reading: The Emergency by George Packer is a very good story about the collapse of empire, complexity of parenting, optimism of youth, and our terrible capacity to create “others” 📚