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Finished reading: Breaking Free of Neoliberalism: Canada’s Challenge by Alex Himelfarb is a fascinating exploration of neoliberalism: what it is, how it has gone wrong, and some alternatives. I can see some glimmers of hope with discussions of universal basic income and a return to government …

Finished reading: Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks is a great story about revenge, regret, and forgiveness with a dazzling sci-fi background 📚

Jen Gerson: Can we put separatist madness to bed, now?

Albertans sent a strong message to Edmonton, Ottawa, and the entire world last night; they’re ready to put this incredibly embarrassing chapter in our shared political history to an end.

I’m glad this was such a strong result. This was …

Recovering from today’s shenanigans starts with some Collingwood whisky 🥃

The Spartan Super 10k in Blue Mountain was fun and difficult. I’m a bit beaten up now, but grateful I can do these sorts of things

I’m excited to see Bruce Cockburn tonight at Massey Hall 🎶

Poor management of my library holds resulted in three books arriving simultaneously. I’ll do what I can 📚

Finished reading: The Wall by Marlen Haushofer is hard to describe. Very little happens and, yet, it is a compelling story. I’m glad to have read it 📚

I really like the new blog audit feature on Micro.blog. After twenty years of posts, it found many broken links, missing images, and other detritus. Even better, it fixed almost all of it!

A quality of life improvement I’d like to see in the next iOS update is that Safari Reading List remembers that I want to see unread only by default. I have to change this every time!

🇨🇦 Raised the new flag

Watched: Neil Peart: No One’s Disciple is a great tribute. Fun to see the four drummers enjoying themselves so much with Geddy and Alex 🍿

First time I’ve used a winch to winterize a dock. Seems to have worked. Guess we’ll find out in the Spring

We had a great thanksgiving weekend with family. Our first of many family gatherings at the new cottage

🔗 When the Watch Makes the Call - Steve Magness

We’re all entering an era where we get to decide what level of automation we want for just about anything. Do we want the free flowing unmediated experience of just running and feeling it all. Do we want feedback, agency, or even at the extreme, the …

Finished my quarterly review. I appreciate the opportunity to reflect on how things went, recognize the achievements, learn from the challenges, and prepare for the next few months. Always time well spent.

🎵 Song of the week for my daughter — Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right by Bob Dylan from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. We had to get to Dylan eventually. Hard to pick one song

Watched: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 is a lot of fun. Maybe one too many novelty episodes, but I did like each of them individually 📺

Next up in the reading queue. Sure to be thought provoking 🇨🇦📚

Finished reading: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett is great. An interesting mystery in a compelling fantasy world 📚

🎵 Song of the week for my daughter — Deer Creek Canyon by Sera Cahoone from Deer Creek Canyon. A good song about nostalgia for where you’re from.

Finished reading: Two Wheels Good by Jody Rosen is a fun read. Looking forward to my ride to work tomorrow 📚

The new place has nice sunsets

George is content

Finished reading: Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith is fascinating. Cephalopods are such strange creatures and a useful contrast to us when thinking about consciousness 📚

🎵 Song of the week for my daughter — Salesmen, Cheats and Liars by Lowest of the Low from Shakespeare My Butt…. Great Canadian indie rock

🎧 A reliable signal of Fall: a new season of Quirks and Quarks

Build Canada has a useful resource for the upcoming municipal elections in Toronto

Got some wood guitar picks from Tree Picks. Sound good and feel nice

A large coffee kind of day

I like the new Recaps feature in Everlog. It uses on-device AI models to create monthly and annual summaries of journal entries. Works well and the mechanics are carefully explained to provide comfort about privacy implications

🎶🚴 Cheap Beer by FIDLAR got me through a tough interval on the bike this morning

🏃‍♂️ Action shot from my coach at this morning’s track workout

🎵 Match Head Girl by Iceage is some good pick-me-up punk rock. The whole album keeps up the energy

🏊‍♂️ A short test swim in the new lake. I’m looking forward to exploring the shoreline

Finished reading: I enjoyed Jack the Bodiless by Julian May. A fun premise and interesting mystery📚

🏃‍♂️ 400km of trails in the Haliburton Forest to explore

Nice to see Apple starting to put more effort into generating health insights, like readiness. I have much of this already via other products, but they’re scattered about and don’t integrate well together.

🎵 Song of the week for my daughter — The Night Starts Here by Stars from In Our Bedroom After the War. The two singers work well together

Notes on the week of August 31 2026: 

Some highlights from last week, as recorded on the following Tuesday.

Queen‘s Engineering

Casa Domenico

2026 Blue Mountain Spartan race

Transcript

Dropped kid #2 off at Queen’s University to start engineering. Very excited for him! Now my wife and I need to sort out a new rhythm in a house without our kids

Unplug America is a great site from @todmaffin.com that lists Canadian alternatives to US tech products 🇨🇦

My daughter passed along some impressive footage from yesterday’s storm

🏃‍♂️ New running shoes day!

Aftermath of last night’s big storm

🎧 I’m glad to have supported Designed in California’s Kickstarter. The podcast has been great so far, though I have to be careful not to binge all of the episodes at once. I have particular nostalgia for the OS X transition in the current series.

Although the whole “Lake America” thing is nonsense and frustrating, I agree with Michael Geist that we want the large internet companies to follow government direction:

While critics may respond that Google was under no legal obligation to make any change since the executive order …

Augure had added an AI memory feature to help with migration and interoperability

🔗 Get along great - Paul Wells

The President says he doesn’t want Canadian anything. Fine. Let’s keep our honour, and not let him have any.

Sounds good to me 🇨🇦

🇨🇦 Early thoughts on digital sovereignty: Digital sovereignty is a pressing issue for Canadians, driven by concerns over foreign control, service accessibility, and the desire to support domestic technology providers.

Finished reading: I like the idea of Origin Uncertain by Anatoly Liberman. The book really demonstrates well the fluidity and creativity of the English language. The chapters do get daunting though. Lots of details that are hard to keep track of and a bit of a slog 📚

🔗 Resistance is never futile by Jen Gerson

Resistance in the face of bad faith and coercion is a moral end in and of itself.

🇨🇦 Of the many reasons to resist America’s bullying, this one is particularly important

🏃‍♂️ Approaching the time of day when, having run into work this morning, I debate if I should just take the train back. The return run seemed like a much better idea this morning

Finished reading: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky was a fun read. Tchaikovsky is great at creating interesting aliens and having humans struggle to understand them 📚

🏡 Our Haliburton cottage: After years of renting, we’re thrilled to have bought a property in Haliburton, fulfilling our long-term retirement plan.

🏃‍♂️ I’m both inspired and dumbfounded by someone running an ultramarathon everyday for 250 days

🎵 Song of the week for my daughter — Lovers In A Dangerous Time by Bruce Cockburn from Stealing Fire (Deluxe Edition). “Got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight” is a great line

We really enjoyed having so many friends and family join us for our fifth, and final, year renting the Torch Lake cottage. Such a special place!

As our vacation gets near the end, I’ll miss this view

🎵 Song of the week for my daughter — Feather, Fur & Fin by Danny Michel from Feather, Fur & Fin. A conservation biologist’s theme song with a fun horn section

🏃‍♂️ At 335m, my watch tells me this is the largest elevation gain of the year

Finished reading: Aubrey McKee by Alex Pugsley is a delight. Great writing and quirky characters, along with nostalgia for my own childhood. Recommended via Paul Wells 📚

Thanks to my sister for bringing these whiskeys from the Elora Distilling Company. I’m starting with the Royal Amber

Vacation continues to go well

🔗 Don’t Become a Productivity Tourist - by JA Westenberg

Because the only metric by which you can actually judge a productivity system is this: did it allow you to produce something or not?

A good reminder for those of us that spend too much time adjusting our systems

🏊‍♂️ The lake was like glass for this afternoon’s swim

My daughter captured me in full cottage vacation mode: a beer in one hand and book in the other

🎶 After hearing my son and nephew rehearsing Is What It Is by Chance Peña, I’ve been a bit obsessed with it. They were practicing for an upcoming campfire concert at their summer camp, where there was recently a tragedy. Watching the campers comfort each other through the tragedy seemed resonant …

Finished reading: The Justice of Kings by Richard Swan is a compelling story about justice and the law. A great start to the series 📚

Finished reading: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis is a fun and zany time-travel mystery. Although I enjoyed the story, it does get a bit frenetic 📚

🏃‍♂️ Misty morning run

Another good day at the cottage

Pizza on the BBQ

Lined that up surprisingly well, if accidentally

🏊‍♂️ Swimming in a Haliburton lake is so much nicer than a Toronto pool

Finished reading: Surprising no one, Alias Grace A Novel by Margaret Atwood is very well written📚

Getting dinner ready with my sous chef

🎵 Song of the week for my daughter — Midnight Rider by The Allman Brothers Band from Idlewild South (Deluxe Edition). An easy-going song about freedom and resilience

After experimenting with many different apps and approaches, I’m back to integrating everything into Reeder. I like the clean, consistent aesthetic, easy gestures for actions, and ease of integrating diverse sources.

🏃‍♂️ I’m glad to have finished this run before the big thunderstorm rolled through

Turned into a nice day

Finished reading: Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway is a fun noir detective mystery📚

Finished reading: The Casino Shift by Brian Goldman is a rather sobering look at the poor state of emergency medicine in Canada. Seems like a disaster waiting to happen through neglect, partly motivated by ERs’ amazing ability to adapt and get by with less, until they can’t anymore 📚

Finished reading: The Will of the Many by James Islington was a fun read: think Roman senators in Hunger Games at Hogwarts 📚

George is delighted to be back in a lake

Much better weather today 😁

🏃‍♂️ At least running in the rain keeps the heat down

Arrived to our cottage vacation in a torrential thunderstorm! That’s okay though. Still better than being at work and the storm won’t last

🎧 A fun Mindscape interview with Luis Bettencourt on scaling laws in cities. Bettencourt inspired some of my research on pollinator networks. So, this was also nostalgic

🎵 Song of the week for my daughter — Angeles by Elliott Smith from Either/Or. Although Waltz, No. 2 (XO) is a slightly better song, I think Angeles is a better first listen song.

🎧 As a small gesture of support for independent podcasts, I’ve switched from Apple Podcasts to Overcast (again). Overcast is certainly a better app and I’m happy to support it with another year of subscription revenue

🎉 The Hemispheric Views June-boree was tremendous fun! I’m delighted to have achieved third place and received a fantastic trophy.

Finished reading: The Notebook by Roland Allen is a comprehensive look at how physical notebooks have affected culture over centuries that was more interesting than I’d expected.

I’ve been using physical notebooks, with varying levels of enthusiasm, for decades. These days, I mostly use …

🔗 The false promise of sovereignty economics - The Hub

The insight generalizes into a first principle that sovereignty economics gets backwards: countries do not become rich chiefly by owning things. They become rich when their people are productive. A Canadian nurse, farmer, or machinist working …

🚴 Fun ride with the Morning Glory crew

🚴 Looks like a good morning for a ride

The iOS 27 Beta has been very stable on my iPhone 17. Everything is much snappier and, as widely reported, Siri AI actually works well. Finally.

So much better and a good reminder to not take air quality for granted. I don’t have fond memories of the regular smog days we had when I was a kid.

I like the new calendar view of my books in micro.blog. My vacation in August is certainly distinct

🔗 Why has Venus obsessed so many astronomers? | Aeon Essays

I think what’s missing is the obsession, the sense of wonder that made those expeditions feel like cultural events rather than technical exercises. The instruments around me in the gallery made this contrast sharp. The telescopes and …

🚴 Air quality still isn’t great. So, back to Watopia in the basement

Getting apocalyptic out here

Finished reading: Storm of Locusts by Rebecca Roanhorse is a fun sequel to Trail of Lightning 📚

Watched: I enjoyed Star City as a sort of cold-war thriller to the For All Mankind series 📺

The addition of a watch app in the Finalist beta really elevates the app for me. Having access to essential calendar and task data from my wrist, while leaving the phone tucked away, is very helpful. Of course, I can get that via the default Apple apps. I prefer Finalist’s approach

Finished reading: Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts has an intriguing premise – a voice emanating from a black hole – that didn’t quite pay off for me. The theology of the ending seemed too contrived 📚

🏃‍♂️ Found a nice trail while visiting Orillia

Spotted at a friend’s house

🏃‍♂️ Soggy run this morning

I endorse The Line’s proposal to convert our half of the Gordie Howe Bridge into an open air festival 🇨🇦

Finished reading: Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson is a good ending to a great trilogy 📚

🇨🇦 Happy Canada Day!

George is keen on his pride bone 🏳️‍🌈

Woodbine Beach Park. 📍

Father’s Day Ribfest

🏊‍♂️🚴🏃‍♂️ The Guelph Lake Olympic Triathlon was great fun, though challenging. Big thanks to my daughter for her expert race crewing.

🏊‍♂️🚴🏃‍♂️ Packing for the Guelph Lake triathlon. I’m excited to try a new course

Finished reading: Hostages to Fortune by Peter C Newman really helped me better appreciate the role that the Loyalists had in shaping Canada. Much more extensive than I recall from my history lessons in school 📚

RBC Amphitheatre. 📍

🎶 Bleachers know how to put on a great show

Just Be Normal About S**t by JA Westenberg

Be normal, and opt out of the deranged belief that the only way to take something seriously is to take it to the most extreme possible conclusion.

Seems to me like a great approach.

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 …

🚴 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.

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 📚

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

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

🇨🇦 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.

🏃‍♂️ My kind of weather

Willibald Farm Distillery & Brewery. 📍

Delicious pizza from Willibald

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 📚

Wedges ‘N Woods Golf Academy. 📍

Mini golf on a lovely day ⛳️

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

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.

The collaborative office puzzle is complete

🔗 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 …

🔗 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 …

Switching my journal from Day One to Everlog 📝: Considering a switch from Day One to Everlog for journaling, the decision hinges on cost, developer support, and the app’s ability to meet personal journaling needs.

Using Claude to help finish book series 📚🤖: I asked Claude to find all the books I’d missed from series that I’d started

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! 📚

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

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 📚

I counted myself in 🇨🇦

🎵 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.

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

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 …

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 …

🏃‍♂️ Proud to run alongside my son this morning for his first half marathon. We shaved about ten minutes off his two-hour goal!

Finished reading: The Governors General by John Fraser is a good companion to The Prime Ministers book. The Governor General as an important and misunderstood part of Canada’s government that deserves more attention. This book is a fun and personal start 📚

Finished reading: The Faith of Beasts by James S. A. Corey keeps delivering on the promise of the first book in the series. I’m a fan of the “clever humans fight overwhelmingly dominant aliens” genre. Remains to be seen if the humans actually win 📚

Nine Inch Noize is a great mix of nostalgia and novelty 🎵

Finished reading: Despite a gloomy subject, The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker was a delight to read 📚

Having to reset all of my devices allowed for a helpful reset of my systems: After a passcode issue led to resetting multiple Apple devices, a simpler, more intentional setup was established by selectively reinstalling essential apps and minimizing distractions.

Office tension continues to rise as we enter the second month of a broken dishwasher

Finished reading: A Crown of Swords by Robert Jordan continues this epic series. Hard to believe I’m only half way through the fourteen book series! 📚

🧘 300 hours of meditation: why do I keep going: Consistent daily practice of mindfulness has helped me improve focus and equanimity, although transferring these benefits to daily life presents challenges that require ongoing effort.

Project Hail Mary is a very fun movie 🍿

🎵 Hooray, new music from both Wintersleep and The New Pornographers is out this week

Heart rate distribution in HealthFit ❤️ : HealthFit’s new heart rate distribution graphs effectively help track workout intensity and recovery across different activities.

Year of the word

Something is happening. The dam has burst on almost two decades of tightly-managed, coordinated and targeted political messaging. In its place we’re seeing a communications approach that’s more free-flowing, discursive, open and adaptable.

Such a welcome change. I hope it lasts.

Finished reading: Arctic Passages by Kieran Mulvaney nicely integrates the past, present, and future of the Arctic into a compelling story about climate change, geopolitics, history, and exploration 📚

🎵 Song of the week for my daughter — Wheat Kings by The Tragically Hip from Fully Completely. A Canadian classic!

Finished reading: Count Zero by William Gibson is great. Not sure why I waited almost thirty years after reading Neuromancer to read this one. I certainly won’t wait as long to read the third book of the trilogy 📚

Finished reading: The Prime Ministers by J.D.M. Stewart was exactly what I wanted: a concise and clear summary of each Candian Prime Minister. That was a gap in my knowledge that is now closed 📚

🏃‍♂️ Winter was back for today’s run

Tracking surprise in financial forecasts 😱: Aiming to improve forecasting accuracy, I’m proposing a new metric to track the portion of monthly changes in project cost estimates that can be attributed to previously identified risks.

🎵 Song of the week for my daughter — How Soon Is Now? by The Smiths. A classic alternative song that still sounds great to me.

Go by The Chemical Brothers showed up just in time to get me through today’s tough ride 🚴🎵

How To Stop Jumping Ship

So I propose (years late, many bucks short) we just toss it all in the bin and go back to the beginning. Blogs, newsletters, IRC, mailing groups, and, sure why not, Usenet, go nuts. (The jury is still out on forums, but I suspect they are actually a stunted malformed …

Finished reading: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is very well done. Really fleshes out the Achilles myth and brings Greek heros and gods to life 📚

George had a busy day

Default app updates for 2026 Q1: I’m updating some app defaults to explore indie alternatives, enhance content discovery, and reduce reliance on Apple services.

🔗 Why the Online Harms Act is the Wrong Way to Regulate AI Chatbots - Michael Geist

Applying the Online Harms Act to AI chatbot conversations now risks reopening the very issues policymakers previously sought to avoid. In fact, it is difficult to see the difference between something posted to an AI …

Vereda Central. 📍

☕️ Tried a new (to me) coffee shop nearby: Vereda Central. Good coffee!

Great advice from Greg Morris in Noticing, Not Performing

Noticing your life doesn’t require depth. It requires attention.

Once I stopped trying to use my journal as a memoir and just captured daily thoughts, feelings, and happenings, my journal became useful and enjoyable.

🔗 Boredom Is the Price We Pay for Meaning - The Atlantic

But boredom needn’t be destructive. The discomfort of boredom, even the anguish of it, can spur us into flights of imagination, resourcefulness, and invention. It can prod us to seek more absorbing circumstances: a career more aligned with …

A Trickle, Not a River: Recent developments in RSS, including new apps like Current and Inkwell, have sparked interest in “river of news” approaches. I’m trying to keep to a trickle of well-curated sources, but am keen to experiment with Inkwell.

🎵 Song of the week for my daughter — Don’t Swallow the Cap by The National from Trouble Will Find Me. Likely my favourite song from them.

Losing Everything (feat. Anaïs Mitchell) by Donovan Woods from Squander Your Gifts is a highlight of a great new EP 🎵

I’m looking forward to this season of For All Mankind 🚀

iOS-only backups with BeeStation and Parachute: Transitioning to iOS-only usage led to the adoption of the Synology BeeStation and Parachute app for efficient, independent file and photo backups.

Thanks to my colleague for this nice card

🎵 Song of the week for my daughter: With or Without You by U2 from The Joshua Tree. Kind of ridiculous to pick a single U2 song, but I chose this one.

Finished reading: I really enjoyed The Bees by Laline Paull. Such an imaginative story about a bee hive 📚

🏃‍♂️ Winter was back for today’s run

🚴 Worldwide by Snõõper got me through some tough intervals on today’s ride 🎵

The office dishwasher broke and my colleagues have reverted to university dorm habits. Eventually someone will have to wash these

🏊‍♂️ 10 weeks since my last swim. This might be tough.

Although I am feeling better after a couple of weeks of being slightly off, this seems a bit too enthusiastic for me

⛑️ Recertified my first aid today. Although I’ve never handled more than a small cut over a few decades with first aid, I feel better knowing I’m at least partly ready if something goes wrong. A good reminder of how fragile we are and how just a small amount of training can make a big difference

Finished reading: Mavericks by Peter C. Newman is a fun collection of vignettes of infamous Canadians throughout history 📚

🎵 Song of the week for my daughter: Possession by Sarah McLachlan from Fumbling Towards Ecstasy

Fresh supplies

A nice video from Becca Farsace about leaving home without your phone.

The portable tape player was especially nostalgic. Reminded me of my bright yellow Sony Walkman. I used to make mix tapes by recording songs from the radio. Took great patience and precision. Hovering over the pause button, …

🚴‍♂️ Getting back into a routine with today’s ride

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 …

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

Notifications as action prompts: An effective notification strategy focuses on intentionality rather than mere awareness, prioritizing action-oriented reminders that align with personal goals.

🏃‍♂️ 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 …

🔗 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 …

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 …

🔗 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 …

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” 📚

🎶 Having claimed recently that my kids have good musical tastes, I was chagrined when my daughter mixed up Peter Gabriel and Pearl Jam. Parenting fail!

As my penance, I’m now sending her a weekly song to make sure that her musical foundation is sound. These won’t necessarily be the best, …

There’s a lot to like in Mark Carney’s speech at Davos. I certainly didn’t expect Thucydides and Havel to get cited.

Carney was clear about the problem. For example:

More recently, great powers began using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial …

Finished reading: The Second Mountain by David Brooks raises many important questions. According to Brooks, the first mountain is about personal achievement: career progression, wealth, and achievement. The second, more fullfilling mountain is about community, marriage, and religion. Although …

My right leg was signalling a potential injury. So, I converted this morning’s bike ride into a sleep in. Then had an extra coffee and listened to an episode of the Focused Podcast on Getting Intentional. Now I feel like a superhero, ready to take on the day!

Pizza night!

🎶 A mention in a Pitchfork review reminded me that Spiritchaser by Dead Can Dance is great. I hadn’t listened to it in at least twenty years.

Watched: The first few episodes of Alien: Earth Season 1 are good. Then the season gets bogged down. Several cool ideas though and definitely the creepiest sheep in TV. I’ll check out season two. The Incomparable has a good discussion of the season. 🍿

George’s predecessors would be flabbergasted that he’s allowed on Grandma’s couch

Why am I bookmarking everything that I read online?: I’ve decided to stop archiving all my online reading and focusing on capturing meaningful content.

🎶 What the kids are listening to: Hearing my kids’ music, now that they can drive, reveals they have good taste

Harmonizing my heart rate zones ❤️‍🔥 : Using a portfolio of fitness apps can lead to inconsistencies in heart rate zones, so one solution is to standardize them based on a preferred app’s method for more precise workout intensity tracking.

🏃‍♂️ Snowshoes would have helped with parts of today’s run. My Arc’teryx kept my feet warm, but extra effort for a relatively slow pace

Willibald Farm Distillery & Brewery. 📍

Delicious lunch at Willibald Farms. I recommend the When Pigs Fly stout and BLT.

🏊‍♂️🚴🏃‍♂️ Filling in the 2026 race calendar by adding in the Guelph Lake Olympic-distance triathlon

Annual polar bear swim: 

In what is now an annual tradition, my son and I went for a polar bear swim in Lake Ontario. We usually go on January 1st, but yesterday was -20°C which seemed almost dangerous. “Only” -10°C today so much more reasonable 🥶.

I’m often asked why I would do such a strange thing. Part …

My first day back at work and the internet went down. Maybe I should take the hint?

Year in books for 2025: 

2025 was another great year for reading, even if only to get away from mindless scrolling on my phone.

My favourite non-fiction book was Waves in an Impossible Sea by Matt Strassler and fiction was Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Those are narrow favourites though. I could have happily picked other …

📚 Thanks to my family for a great set of books for Christmas this year.

Finished reading: Breaking Point by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson provides a very clear description of Canada’s challenges. Thankfully it also provides good ideas on how to fix them. Pairs well with Andrew Coyne’s recent book, though they disagree on electoral reform. Although daunting, I’m …

🔗 The Telemetry - by Angus Hervey - Fix The News

This gap, between the world as it is and how we’re told to see it, comes down to a choice about what we do with our attention. Mission control doesn’t ignore danger. It’s acknowledged, monitored, taken seriously. But knowing which emergencies require …

Finished reading: The Random Universe by Andrew H. Jaffe is an interesting exploration of probability and models in physics and cosmology. I also appreciated the historical context that showed how the models developed 📚

🏃‍♂️ Burning off some Christmas cheer on today’s run

Finished reading: As a Canadian public servant, I’m not the target market for Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson. Nonetheless, I found the sections on managing teams and navigating conflict useful 📚

12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 12: Home

❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 11: Feast

🎄Merry Christmas!

❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 10: Travel

🎶 II by Voices from the Lake is good for getting focused

🎶 Great version of A Dawning at 9:34

❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 9: Baking

❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 8: Grinch

Finished reading: Seemed inevitable that The Last Town by Blake Crouch would become a mostly straightforward action plot with lots of shooting. Still entertaining, though not nearly as good as the first book in the series. 📚

Backup solutions for an iOS-only household?: After simplifying to only iOS devices, I’m looking for a reliable backup solution.

❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 7: Solstice

Finished reading: Sword & Citadel by Gene Wolfe continues a great series. I can’t understand how I lasted this long without reading these books. So many elements that are what I look for in a book: sci-fi, fantasy, and an unreliable narrator 📚

❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 6: Sparkle

❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 5: Beard

❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 4: Evergreen

Came home to a mess of needles, ornaments, and water. Our Christmas tree fell over! George looked very nervous, as if I would blame him for it. The tree is back up and tied to the wall with some rope. Hopefully that fixes it

❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 3: Firelight

❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 2: Cozy

❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 1: Frost

Building a Commonplace Book System that actually works for me: Establishing a personal reading and note-taking system to improve the retrieval of insights by consolidating information into one searchable archive rather than relying on multiple fragmented tools.

🖖 Star Trek: Khan was better than I expected with a nice character arc for Khan. The Vulcan Hello podcast has a nice review too

🏃‍♂️ I might regret this

🐶 George is a good pillow

Why RSS matters

And yet, despite being everywhere, RSS is somehow invisible. It’s the plumbing of the web: essential, reliable, and routinely underestimated. Most people who consume news this way don’t know they’re using RSS, and a surprising number of people who work in media …

🏃‍♂️ Ice and snow on today’s run made for a good ankle workout

Finished reading: I enjoyed Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. An imaginative mix of ecology, evolution, and sociology📚

🎶 David Byrne’s Tiny Desk Concert is great fun

🍕 Cooking pizza while it snows

Finished reading: Medieval Horizons by Ian Mortimer makes a good case that the Middle Ages were a dynamic period that made many contributions to our modern world 📚

🐶 Bacon please

🏃‍♂️ Although the novelty will wear off quickly, fun to have a proper winter run

Been a while since I did a Spartan race. I’ve got some training to do

💰 We’re integrating the Q3 forecast for an infrastructure project. A clear sign of inadequate forecasting is missing seasonality. We expect 10–20% reduction through December, given holidays. So, when we get a forecast showing flat or increasing costs in the month, a closer look is …

Finished reading: Wayward by Blake Crouch does what a second book in a trilogy needs to do. I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve read the third book to see if it pays off. 📚

Uh oh

🏃‍♂️ I’ve been using the new Workout Buddy on my recent runs, including letting it select my music. Every kilometre, I receive updates on my pace and heart rate, along with contextual information like recent elevation gains or total distance. While I can easily see most of this on my watch, the …

Finished reading: Frustrating that 1984 by George Orwell is still so relevant 📚

🏃‍♂️ Just as I’m thinking through my next training plan, Göran Winblad offers wise advice about increasing running mileage.

Deep Books in a Trenchcoat is another fun book club episode on The Incomparable. Added a few more books to my want to read list.

🍁 This year’s winners for best fall colours on the street

Watched: Although the first few seasons were good fun, Season 5 of Only Murders in the Building is mostly silly 🍿

There’s a new interesting Day One Labs feature: Daily Chat. This is an LLM that you chat with throughout the day. Usually it starts with a question about your intentions for the day and then asks follow ups that expand on your responses. Then at the end of the day, Day One converts the chat …

🏃‍♂️ First snowy run of the season. I’d only just started wearing long pants last weekend!

Finished reading: Greener Than Thou by Mark Leiren-Young is a scathing, and funny, look at the Canadian Green Party. I’ve voted for them in some previous elections, but doubt that will happen again📚

Strange times. For the first time since 1997, we do not have a Mac in the house. Yesterday, I pulled our 2019 iMac out of storage in the basement for some routine maintenance. After waiting 10 minutes for it to boot up and another 10 minutes just to open a few apps (watching those Dock icons bounce …

Watched: A House of Dynamite is terrifying 😳🍿

Finished reading: Although less cozy than previous books in the series, The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older was still entertaining 📚

🏃 The running tights season has begun

MacSparky's "Apple Productivity Suite Field Guide": The newly released Apple Productivity Suite Field Guide offers a comprehensive tutorial on Apple’s built-in apps, enhancing user understanding and effectiveness, especially for those new to them.

George enjoyed greeting each trick or treater 🎃

🔗 How Canada got immigration right for so long – and then got it very, very wrong

Canada conducted a decade-long experiment. The experiment’s principal investigator was the Trudeau government, assisted and enabled by the provinces, the business community and much of the higher education sector. …

Watched: Diminishing returns on the Invasion series. I really enjoyed the unsettling creepiness, persistent mystery, and international scope of the first half of season 1. The rest is just okay🍿

I’m intrigued by the Oura Ring and the idea of more passive activity and recovery tracking.

Realistically though, would I actually be able to stop wearing an Apple Watch? I use the watch to reduce my temptation to use my iPhone, since that’s a strong source of distraction. If I had a …

George is taking it easy today

Finished reading: The Book of the New Sun: Volume 1 by Gene Wolfe is a great mix of fantasy and sci-fi. I enjoyed it and will carry on with the rest of the series 📚

I used to work on a fun project to simulate elections in Toronto called PsephoAnalytics. But, we got busy with other things and haven’t posted since June of 2020. Realizing we’re not going to resurrect the project, we let the domain name expire and I’ve archived the content to a …

Last night my phone noticed the next day was a holiday and sent a notification asking if I wanted to change my alarm. I did! So tapped the notification to open sleep schedule settings, made a quick change, and slept in this morning. This is the kind of “AI” I want: proactive, specific, and useful.

Finished reading: After hearing a recommendation for the Fifth Business by Robertson Davies on The Paul Wells Show, I decided to reread it after about thirty years since the last time. Such a great story. I’m glad I revisited it 📚

A great benefit of my “only one coffee a day” rule is how effective the second coffee is on the occasional days that I violate the rule

🔗 Dispatch from the Front Lines: Major Avoidance Office

If we properly re-characterized our military procurement system as the federal money-distribution, political-delaying, and accountability-avoidance system, we’d all be raving about what a success we have on our hands here. Because it’s great …

🎶 Amazing, Rush is going back on tour!

🎵 Worldwide by Snõõper will wake you up

🔗 The Imperfectionist: Five short thoughts

Advice for big, daunting projects: do something right away. When a major project lands in your lap, perhaps with a deadline weeks or months away, make it your business to take some kind of concrete action on it as soon as you can, even if you won’t get to …

Apple’s ICEblock capitulation is business as usual

So let me repeat the maxim we should all be living by: do not expect a moral stand from a corporation.

This can be both true and disappointing, as Dan Moren is clear to write.

🎵Delightfully strange music from Patrick Watson on Uh Oh

Finished reading: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is a dystopian view of where we’re headed with data-driven algorithms. I enjoyed the story, despite the scary implications 📚

An interesting series of articles in Quanta Magazine on climate science: How We Came To Know Earth. Such an important field of research and remarkable how much has been learned, though still lots of uncertainty.

Finished reading: Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky is a really good first contact with aliens story 📚

Finished reading: Pines by Blake Crouch is an exciting start to the series. I appreciated the Twin Peaks vibes 📚

Spotted on today’s run: a dog library for sticks

Amazing that Quirks and Quarks has been going for 50 years! I’ve been listening for close to 40 years, starting with a small transistor radio when I was a kid and then was my first podcast subscription (before that was even a real thing).

Finished reading: The 51st State Votes by Justin Ling is a good overview of what happened in Canada’s recent, strange election campaign 📚

🏃‍♂️ Well, there’s a week that hasn’t gone to plan. Try again next week!

Finished reading: The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman is great fun: humour, adventure, and imagination, as a thief tries to rescue a queen 📚

🏃‍♂️ I’ve done this route dozens of times, but always counter clockwise. This was the first time clockwise and it is interesting how different the route seems when going in the opposite direction.

Finished reading: I’ll confess that I skipped through parts of Foreign Bodies by Simon Schama. I appreciated the message of the book that vaccination has always been controversial and only diligent science with careful public health communication have been persuasive. I just found the details of …

🎵 Bite Down by Ribbon Skirt is solid indie rock

Finished reading: City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer is an imaginative, richly detailed, and difficult book to read. I appreciated the world building and overall strangeness, but the lack of plot and central characters made for a challenging read 📚

🚴 After very little riding over the past two months, nice to be back on the bike again. Starting up a new season of training

🔗 Analog Office - Lumpers vs Splitters: How Many Paper Notebooks Do You Use at One Time?

Do you go with One Notebook to Rule Them All? Everything goes in there? Or do you have lots of different notebooks, each dedicated to very specific purposes?

Although I’m currently a lumper, I’ve been thinking …

The Strava integration with DayOne is pretty good. I usually manually add content on my activities into DayOne and this certainly helps simplify that.

The integration pulls in your title, notes, and any media, along with a map of the activity. I like that it also integrates with the iOS Journaling …

🇨🇦 This is going to be a good read. These Sutherland Quarterly books have all been interesting.

We’ve reached the end of a glorious vacation. Always great to take some time off to recuperate and reflect. Back to the office tomorrow

🏃‍♂️ I’d planned for a longer run, but allergies kept me up too long last night

Finished reading: I really enjoyed Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. A clever and poignant story. Not sure why it took me so long to get around to reading it 📚

Finished reading: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe is a fascinating and disturbing book about The Troubles in Ireland with interesting questions about political violence and accountability 📚

Finished reading: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz is a delight 📚

A subtle enjoyment of being at a cottage is exposure to the weather. At home and the office it is too easy to not be affected. Whereas here we feel the heat, the wind, and the rain.

George has become a cottage dog

Finished reading: Superbloom by Nicholas Carr is a fascinating, alarming, and important book about how communication technology and social media are shaping society, mostly for the worse 📚

🏃‍♂️ Clouds on today’s run, instead of smoke. Much better

Finished reading: Canada by Richard Ford is remarkable. A good cottage read 📚

Time to get up!

Impressive repurposing of a dead tree here at the cottage we’re renting

🎧 A poignant memorial to a father in this episode of Strong Songs

Finished reading: I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne is quite the tour through rock and roll debauchery. Hard to understand how he got anything done. Great excuse to revisit the music though 📚

Finished reading: A Theory of Everyone by Michael Muthukrishna is a compelling and fascinating book about us, our culture, and our future. Any book like this has a unifying principle and I found this one’s focus on Energy Return on Investment intriguing. 📚

🏊‍♂️ The lake is the only cool place around here and I’m grateful for it

Finished reading: I really liked the premise of The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: how would people adjust to being brought from the past into the present? Well written too. The last third was a bit too much standard time travel plot though, which detracted from the cool premise 📚

First week of vacation was a great success

🏃‍♂️ A sobering war memorial on today’s run. Likely a large proportion of the young men in the area are inscribed on it

George has settled into cottage life

Finished reading: Although it took two library loan periods, I enjoyed Lord of Chaos by Robert Jordan 📚

Finished reading: The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older continues a fun series: solving mysteries on a gas giant planet. 📚

Finished reading: Tapper’s Day Off by Dan Moren is a fun short story. I’m glad to read more in this universe 📚

Finished reading: Despite having watched and really enjoyed Slow Horses on Apple TV, reading the first book by Mick Herron was still great fun. 📚

🏊‍♂️ Nice to be back in a lake

Finished reading: An Immense World by Ed Yong is a remarkable book. A fascinating exploration of the senses and what we can learn by trying to understand the perceptions of other animals📚

🏃‍♂️ Hazy out there from the forest fires on today’s run

Vacation starts now!

After three weeks with a Readiness to Train score around two, I’m glad to be back in the green. Time to get active again!

Finished reading: A Field Guide to Lies by Daniel J. Levitin is a clear and thorough summary of all the ways we need to be on guard for misinformation. Targeted to beginners though, so not a lot of new information for us veterans of the internet 📚

Finished reading: The Longbow, the Schooner, and the Violin by Marq de Villiers is an interesting exploration of wood via those three objects. A bit clunky in sections, though pretty good overall 📚

🇨🇦🥃 Enjoying the Bearface Triple Oak whisky

Finished reading: The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison continues the great Cemeteries of Amalo series. I’m impressed with how casually and simply such a rich and complex world is created in this series 📚

New notebook day!

George is recovering well from recent, minor surgery by sleeping at my feet

🔗 Matt Gurney: How Hollywood screwed with our civic expectations

Why do we assume the same government that is, for instance, struggling to fill potholes in my city, or hire enough nurses in my province, or fix a federal payroll system, is going to be more competent when presented with something …

Finished reading: Blindsight by Peter Watts is an interesting mix of sci-fi, horror, and philosophy. I enjoyed it. Vampires in space!📚

🎧 I enjoyed Season 7 of Strong Songs and am happy to be a Patreon supporter

Glad it’s Friday

🎶 Some good, new albums that fit well together:

🇨🇦 Gloves Off is a thought provoking series (so far) on how Canada could respond to recent geopolitical developments

I was pleased by Glenn Jenkins’ invitation to return to his Program on Investment Appraisal and Risk Analysis at Queen’s University and describe an approach to project appraisal and economic assessment. This is my third year participating and I’m consistently impressed by the quality of …

🔗 Optimization Culture is Making Us Fragile

For all that we know about human performance, it is still wildly mysterious. A blackbox algorithm cannot predict how you’ll perform. If you think you must have full readiness to perform at your best, then you will leave so many of your best days on the …

Finished reading: Outlive by Peter Attia is a comprehensive approach to health. Although we need to be careful about influencer nonsense when it comes to health advice, Attia’s work is carefully considered and researched. My main takeaways are the importance of strength training, monitoring my …

Tall Trees Muskoka. 📍

Reflecting on yesterday’s stomach troubles, I have to consider the deep fried butter tart I had the night before the race. A delicious concoction of a butter tart, wrapped in a cinnamon coated churro, topped with vanilla ice cream. Not traditional triathlon nutrition, but I’ve …

🏊‍♂️🚴🏃‍♂️ I do these things because they’re hard. This was was the hardest yet: ridiculous humidity and some bad nausea on the bike made this one a struggle. 45 minutes slower than my last two attempts and every minute was earned. But, this is likely the one I’ll remember most.

Finished reading: Livesuit is a fun short story in the Captive’s War series by James S. A. Corey. Based on this and the first book in the series, a promising start 📚

Prioritizing rest and recovery this week has certainly helped my readiness to train. Great to be back in the green

Family Place Restaurant. 📍

Race fuel

🏊‍♂️🚴🏃‍♂️ I’m always worried that I’m forgetting something. Pictures like these help, plus a packing list in Apple Notes

George let’s me know when I’ve spent enough time with my phone. Leans right up against me and is not shy about using his paw to push the phone away.

Lawful Access on Steroids: Why Bill C-2’s Big Brother Tactics Combine Expansive Warrantless Disclosure with Unprecedented Secrecy - Michael Geist

But beyond the stunning breadth of the information demand power, there should be serious concern with how the government has crafted a system that is …

I was letting myself get distracted by petty arguments on the web again. So, switched my timeline back to “Show posts but no replies”. Although not unique to micro.blog, I appreciate features like this that allow me to expand and contract my timeline.

I’m tapering this week for Sunday’s race. I’ll confess that the reduced training volume is quite nice. So much more free time too

📷 Although I missed a few days, the June 2025 Photo Challenge was fun. For the next one, I’m going to restrict myself to new photos taken during the month. I used more archived photos this time than I’d originally planned.

📍

📷 Day 30: Solitude

🎵 Although Secret World Live is my reference album for live Peter Gabriel, In The Big Room is quite good with interesting changes to some classic songs

🔗 Midsommar - Paul Wells

It’s 167 days since Carney told Jon Stewart he was an “outsider” who’d “just started thinking” about running for a leadership role in Canadian politics. He thought fast, and announced his candidacy three days later. Now he’s been prime minister for longer than Charles …

🔗 Which came first colour vision or colour signals? When Did Nature Burst Into Vivid Color? | Quanta Magazine

Finished reading: I picked up World War Z by Max Brooks on a whim from the library. Lots of fun and much better than the movie. I enjoyed the unique structure and storytelling 📚

🎵 I got distracted by the upcoming Rival Consoles album and missed that they already released an album this year: MindsEye. MindsEye Is more dramatic and foreboding. Both are good!

Once again, my library loan timed out on a Robert Jordan book before I finished. The immersion in a long story is part of the appeal. I just have to write down what chapter I was on and wait a few months to check it out again 📚

📷 Day 27: Collective

📷 Day 26: Bridge

I was honoured by Tamer El-Diraby’s invitation to talk with his civil engineering graduate students about Project Delivery Systems and Finance.

Other than introducing the basic concepts and approaches, I also wanted to convince the engineers that the choice of delivery model will affect the …

📷 Day 25: Decay

📷 Day 24: Bloom

Budweiser Stage. 📍

🎶 Fantastic Mumford and Sons concert! They really know how to put on a show.

📷 Day 23: Fracture

🎵 Songs of a Lost World by The Cure was a favourite album of 2024. The new Mixes Of A Lost World is a musical exploration of that album through multiple remixes.

1990’s Mixed Up was also a great remix album from The Cure. Robert Smith has a knack for these collaborations.

📍

📷 Day 20: Gather

National Mall and Memorial Parks. 📍

📷 Day 19: Equal

📷 Day 18: Texture

📷 Day 17: Warmth

📷 Day 15: Tie

Woodbine Beach Park. 📍

Ribfest for Father’s Day

📷 Day 14: Twilight

🚴 Fun ride today with a great group and fantastic weather

📷 Day 13: Pathway

“The Problem Factory”- Preemptive risk aversion in infrastructure planning and the role of professional services is an interesting analysis of why infrastructure projects are so expensive in the “anglosphere”.

This kind of risk – very high stakes and very low visibility of probabilities …

📷 Day 12: Hidden

📷 Day 11: Brick

These days, I’m mostly interested in the new WatchOS features, rather than anything else. The addition of Apple Notes on the watch is significant for me. One less reason to carry my phone around.

📷 Day 10: Rail

📷 Day 9: Wood

📷 Day 8: Travel

📷 Day 7: Switch

📷 Day 6: Contrast

📷 Day 5: Reflection

📷 Day 4: Nostalgia

Finished reading: Revenger by Alastair Reynolds is easy entertainment with pirates in space📚

📷 Day 3: Shadow

📷 Day 2: Curve

I agree with this: The Wheel of Time: Amazon has cancelled the wrong mega-budget fantasy show. WoT was pretty good. Having now also cancelled The Periphery, Outer Range, and Night Sky, I’m very reluctant to start watching any new show on Prime.

📷 Day 1: Tree

🏃‍♂️🚴🏃‍♂️ Milton Duathlon 2025 : Some notes on a triathlon that turned into a duathlon

🏊‍♂️🚴🏃‍♂️ First race of the season tomorrow!

I actually enjoy this part — the setup. Laying out all the gear, checking the list, thinking through the transitions. There’s a quiet focus to it. A bit of nervous energy, sure, but also a sense of calm from knowing I’ve put in the work.

Getting …

🎵 Great to hear a new Rival Consoles album: Landscape from Memory

🎧 I’ve made a few updates to my default apps. I’m now using Overcast for podcasts (again) and Albums for music.

Both replace Apple’s default apps, which prioritize new content over easy access to media I’ve already selected—presumably what I actually want to listen to.

The recent rewrite of …

Finished reading: Moonbound by Robin Sloan is a fun and imaginative sci-fi retelling of the King Arthur story (and much more) 📚

Another fun analysis in The Logistics of Road War in the Wasteland, this time of Mad Max style warfare

This week, we’re doing another ‘silly’ topic, but this being me, it is a silly logistics topic, because – as the saying goes – amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. So we’re going …

📍

🏃‍♂️ Nice break after several days of rain for today’s long run

🎵 Who Will Look After The Dogs? by PUP is good punk rock

Based on the first two episodes, I like the new Murderbot show. I think it has the right amount of quirkiness to capture the tone of the books

Finished reading: The Crisis of Canadian Democracy by Andrew Coyne has plenty of evidence to make you mad about the state of Canadian democracy, along with many ideas about how to fix it. The trick is to get a political party to do something about the problems 📚

Finished reading: The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison continues a great series. Such great attention to language and precise world building makes these books a joy to read📚

🚴 Fun long ride today

Wow, Andor S2E8

Signs of spring

Finished reading: Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is a fun exploration of what makes things spread (ideas, behaviours, viruses). You know what you’re in for with Gladwell and this is a good follow up to The Tipping Point (25 years later!) 📚

Looking forward to the new season of Foundation!

A new feature in HealthFit shows that I’ve been pushing the training too hard. A better balance would be 80% in low aerobic. Although I feel okay, I’ll fit in more recovery runs and rides

🏃‍♂️ Recovery run

🚴 Cruising through Watopia this morning

🇨🇦 Great piece by Paul Wells: Solomon’s vote

The Liberals won. Mark Carney returns as prime minister. He’ll get to name another cabinet, meet Parliament for the first time, govern if he can. But the result forecloses cheap gloating in ways I find satisfying. Canada is a country that wishes …

Monarch Park. 📍

🏃‍♂️ Track Tuesday: 3x 1 mile + 3x 800m

Riverdale Collegiate Institute. 📍

🏊‍♂️ Mixed intervals

🇨🇦 Voted! Only took a few minutes

🏃‍♂️ Much better weather today than yesterday for a run

🍕 Pizza night

Finished reading: A Conjuring of Light by V.E. Schwab is fun and a worthy book in a great series 📚

🚴 Despite the high winds, cold temperatures, and occasional rain, I was glad to get outside for today’s ride

🚴 Planning for the first outdoor bike ride of the season tomorrow. So, wandering the house trying to find all the gear. Note to self for next year: put it all together in a box for storage

George is enjoying this spring weather

🏃‍♂️ I don’t have a bike at the in-law’s. So out for another run

🏃‍♂️ Pool is closed today, so swapped in a long run

Finished reading: Orbital by Samantha Harvey is enthralling. Nothing much happens and yet so much about humanity, science, and our place in the universe is explored 📚

Finished reading: At the Trough: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Corporate Welfare Bums by Laurent Carbonneau is a timely read, given Canada’s challenges 📚

🔗 The leader in your mirror by Paul Wells

We put too much burden on our leaders, and it makes them act silly. They shouldn’t be the perfect weapon of our vengeance, or the model of every virtue we admire but never quite get around to practicing. They don’t need to know everything. They can’t …

Riverdale Collegiate Institute. 📍

🏊‍♂️ Night swim

Finished reading: The Dog Sitter Detective Takes the Lead by Antony Johnston is a delightful murder mystery. Quite the cleanse after reading The Mercy of Gods 📚

Lights On by Annaka Harris is a fascinating “audio documentary” exploring the idea that consciousness is a fundamental building block of the universe, rather than emerging from complexity. Like Harris herself, I find the idea almost too wild and I’m not yet convinced. That said, …

Just posted on Six Colors: What to watch if you’re churning through Apple TV+

https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/04/what-to-watch-if-youre-churning-through-apple-tv/

A good list from Jason Snell. And, agreed that Bad Monkey was …

Finished reading: The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey is a really promising (though often bleak) start to a new sci-fi series about humans (presumably) overcoming an alien invasion 📚

I’m late to this, but glad to see Milo Beckman is back with the video series on Math Without Numbers

Currently reading: Taking a break from a seven-book streak of non-fiction to read The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey 📚

🚴 After watching the dog slip and slide on the ice in the backyard, decided to swap today’s scheduled run for a Zwift ride

Finished reading: The Future of Us by Jay Ingram is a broad overview of how science and technology is affecting all parts of our lives from food, to transportation, and to health. I’ve read deeper books on the individual topics. This one provides the overview 📚

📖 The latest Sutherland Quarterly book has arrived: At the Trough: The Rise and Rise of Canada’s Corporate Welfare Bums by Laurent Carbonneau. Likely going to be a provocative and frustrating look at government policy

🎶 The Rush 50 release is delightfully epic and much more than a greatest hits collection. Fun to hear their really early stuff again and to revisit later songs that didn’t get enough attention.

🏃‍♂️ Tried a new route on today’s run

That Severance Season 2 finale is 🔥

🇨🇦 Boosting our productivity and protecting our sovereignty: My list of things that Canada should start trying to boost our productivity and protect our sovereignty. No doubt there are better things, but let’s start talking about what to do!

Finished reading: Matthew Scace tells the harrowing tale of a major forest fire in Jasper on Fire 📚

📚 Finished reading: The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger is a fascinating book about how sophisticated and under appreciated plants are: they can detect relatives, “see” their surroundings, manipulate their environment, and make complex decisions.

Near the end, Schlanger writes:

Now when I spot a …

🏃‍♂️ 👍 to shorts 👎 to wind and rain on today’s run

🔗 Collections: The Siege of Eregion, Part III: What Catapults?

What I always find so striking is that these ‘clever’ a-historical solutions both batter suspension of disbelief but are also a lot less actually clever than the historical solutions.

Bret Devereaux continues his fun series of …

Nice surprise to see The Wheel of Time Season 3 show up on my AppleTV today. A great show and I hadn’t been following along with development of the new season.

You never had control; all you had was anxiety.

The Imperfectionist: Toxic preconditions

Good nerdy fun

A fun song from DARKSIDE that gives a good sense of the variety on the album

Lunch salads for the week prepared

🚴 My first workout with the Zwift Ride was good. The bike is comfortable, quiet, and smooth. Plus, I liked not having to move furniture around before starting while still only half awake.

Quite the week

🚴 After some deliberation, I ordered the Zwift Ride. With a straightforward setup, I’m ready for tomorrow’s long ride in Watopia!

We’re back. This time for provincial championships. So many amazing swimmers!

Days like today, I wouldn’t mind being like George for a few minutes: unaware and content

Finished reading: Waves in an Impossible Sea by Matt Strassler is a fascinating, comprehensive, and clear book about field theory in physics. I’ve read a few books on this topic and this is the best one. If you’re curious about particle physics and want to avoid math, you’ll like this one 📚

🖖 Finished the final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks. Lots of fun, though you need to be at least a moderate Trekkie to get most of the jokes

I already boosted this, but I want to add more emphasis. I think every Canadian citizen of the Fediverse ought to sign this petition to get the Government of Canada off Xitter: https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-5359

Could anyone who has any Canadian followers please …

🏊‍♂️ Rare treat of having a lane to myself on today’s swim

🇨🇦 Regardless of if any of the proposals are adopted (though I think several should be carefully considered), I’m glad to see Build Canada is offering bold ideas. We need more of this, especially these days

At the pool for high school city championships. Lots of excitement!

❄️ Running out of room for the snow

📝 A new season for my notes: I reflect on my evolving note-taking methods, combining digital tools and a return to writing in a physical notebook for a more engaging experience.

🇨🇦 The Sutherland Quarterly: I recommend the Sutherland Quarterly for informative quarterly books on important Canadian topics.

🏃‍♂️ Sidewalks were mostly clear on today’s recovery run

Micro.blog for iOS

Added new screen to manage your muted users, keywords, and blocks.

A nice addition to make it easier to quiet down the timeline, especially these days. Good to see this synchronizes across to Greg Morris’ micro.social app too.

🔗 Matt Gurney: I hereby propose the Ice Bucket Challenge for National Survival

The premiers can and must break the stifling complacency that is such a hallmark of modern Canadian politics and use the power of social media, and simple shame, to get the ball rolling. To do something. And then do …

Bad day for a broken shovel ❄️

🚴 Updating my indoor bike setup: After over 7,600 km of indoor cycling on a complicated setup, I’m considering purchasing the Zwift Ride for a more convenient and dedicated virtual cycling experience.

Finished reading: Shit My Dad Says by Justin Halpern is a lot of fun 📚

George had a busy day

🏃‍♂️ Winter wonderland on today’s run. Slippery and uneven conditions helped keep the easy pace on target while adding in extra ankle and calf work.

🎵 We Didn’t Know We Were Ready by Ólafur Arnalds is a lovely song

🎵 Afterlife - Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory is setting the right mood for me today

I found a great place to deposit my $200 bribe. I’d like the money to go somewhere helpful and to counter some of the nasty rhetoric and actions around LGBTQ issues 🏳️‍🌈

Finished reading: If you like creepy, weird books (and I do), you’ll enjoy Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer. But, you have to read the great Area X trilogy first 📚

🔗 The Cult of the Bully

It may seem priggish to say it, given the current “vibe shift,” but we really can’t give up on personal integrity just yet. The day we celebrate our children for their selfishness and cruelty will be the point of no return.

I can’t believe that I’m about to type this sentence: Now that America is threatening Canada with economic ruin and potential annexation as the 51st state, I think it is very important for Canadians to stay well informed. To that end, I recommend two great sources: Paul Wells and The …

A fun episode of The Incomparable on my favourite fiction book of 2024

🔗 What Aging Can Teach Us About Sustainable Success

With that in mind, here are a few lessons I’ve learned as an aging athlete who can still run pretty fast, but is having a lot of doing it.

1. Stop short. Almost always.

There’s an old adage in running that you should have one more rep in the …

Required viewing

🔗 Are We All Just Liars?

Eleven miles later, I stopped my watch — satisfied, yet aware that my run was a castle constructed out of lies. I never intended to stop early, but I told myself that I would. I think I believed myself in the moment. As a moral philosopher, this gives me pause.

via The …

We had a great two-day family ski trip to Blue Mountain. After a few years off skis, great to be back.

🔗 The "near abroad" comes home // Paul Wells // paulwells.substack.com

I’ve believed for many years that Canada’s national bird was a chicken coming home to roost, except this one looks like an eagle.

🖖 Outline of a short story, starring a Star Trek fan:

1. New episode of Vulcan Hello podcast arrives
2. Realizes there’s a new movie: Section 31!?
3. Stops listening to avoid spoilers
4. Starts watching Section 31
5. 20 minutes in thinks: “uh oh, is this the only Star Trek movie I’m not going to finish?”
6. Goes …

Yoga with George

☕️ Consistently tasty coffee : 

I’ve been a happy AeroPress user for many years now. A few weeks ago, I was gifted the Flow Control Filter Cap. The cap acts as a pressure activated valve that prevents any drip through the filter, until you press on the plunger. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much of a difference …

Finished reading: Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave by Seán O’Hagan is a remarkable conversation about creativity, grief, and religion📚

🏊‍♂️ The Mystery of the Shrinking Pool: 

There’s an odd glitch with my Apple Watch: anytime I finish a swim interval, it claims there are still two meters left. Then after about five seconds, it realizes I’ve stopped, decides I’ve finished a lap after all, and moves to the next interval.

It isn’t the pool, I’ve tried several different …

Dispatch from the Front Line: “Canada” is a question of what we can get

The ability of a population to withstand neighbourly aggression — “economic force,” if you will — depends on two things. The first is internal social cohesion and identity. The second is what the …

🎧 Nice to have Strombo back on Apple Music radio. The show has been a regular companion for my long basement rides and was missed over the past few months

📚 Although I exceeded my goal of reading 45 books in 2024 by finishing 60 books. I’m going to keep my goal for 2025 at 45, anticipating that I’ll be reading more non-fiction this year which will slow me down – for the better.

If you’re interested in owning your own web content (and you should be), the new Micro.one is a fantastic option at a super affordable $1/month. I joined Micro.blog back in 2018 and am a very happy Premium user.

The people should own the town square

Nice to see this:

we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by …

🏊‍♂️🚴🏃‍♂️ Finding the return to fitness sweet spot with RTT: 

Thanks to a pre-Christmas flu and general busyness over the holidays, my triathlon training took a dive.

This past week, I’ve really tried to get back into it. As a result, my watch and phone have been pointing out that my training load has spiked and are suggesting caution.

At the same time, my …

🎧 Reducing “abundance blindness” by deleting my Apple Music library: 

I lamented recently what a mess my Apple Music library had become. I was tempted to delete the whole thing and start again, only to end up doing nothing. What’s the big deal? It’s just a collection of songs. I search through them, find something I like, and hit play.

Then Jason Burk said …

Finished reading: The Infernal Machine is another great book by Steven Johnson. I enjoy how he integrates seemingly small technological changes with broad historical trends. Always interesting to read 📚

🥶🏊‍♂️ Shortest and coldest swim of the year

George wishes everyone a happy new year! And, requests more liver treats

🎶 Top albums of 2024: 

According to my listening history, my top three albums of 2024 were:

I’m a bit surprised that Nonkeen snuck in there at #3. It is rather different from the other two.

📚 Year in books for 2024: 

2024 was another great year for books.

My favourite fiction book was Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Non-fiction was As Gods by Matthew Cobb. 

Finished reading: Translation State by Ann Leckie is another great book in the Imperial Radch series. I’ve enjoyed each one📚

Highlights of 2024: 

As 2024 comes to a close, a few personal highlights:

Welcoming George to our family

Our family trip to Portugal

A recuperative cottage rental in Haliburton

Finished reading: I enjoyed the satirical futility of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis 📚

🎄My family knows me well!

🐶 George meets snow

Finished reading: A Gathering of Shadows by V. E. Schwab is a fun second book of a great series. I’m looking forward to the next one📚

🔗 Cross-border Calvinball - Paul Wells

Careful what you wish for. Five minutes ago everyone was calling for a “Team Canada” approach to dealing with Donald Trump. Unfortunately our team would make the Bad News Bears look like Navy SEALs.

Good observations on Canada’s responses, so far, to Trump’s …

🔗 Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.2: A Deep Dive into Working with Siri and ChatGPT, Together

I’m aligned with Viticci here:

I think empowering LLMs to be “creative” with the goal of displacing artists is a mistake, and also a distraction – a glossy facade largely amounting to a party trick that …

George enjoys the fresh air, even at high speeds

After using the new Reeder for a couple of months I’m going to stick with it.

I like having all of my sources (RSS, Micro.blog, Mastodon, Bluesky, and podcasts) consolidated into one feed with easy gestures to tag as “read later” or open in a native app. The recent addition of …

🚴 I’ve been having fun on Zwift

The most productive thing I’ll do all week: Organized the giant box of cables by taking out anything we no longer need, had no idea what is was for, or already had at least three backups. The photo is of the discard pile

🎧 20 album covers that shaped my musical preferences: 

Last month, I posted a series of album covers for music that shaped my preferences. The gimmick was that there was no context or explanation, just an album cover. Now, I’d like to provide a few notes.

As part of the overall framing, these are influential albums for me. They aren’t all …

Finished reading: I really enjoyed The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin. The Earthsea series is very good 📚

🏃‍♂️ Simultaneously ridiculous, inspiring, and intriguing

🔗 The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor // Bret Devereaux

I want to focus on rigid science fiction armors because they offer an interesting lens to consider their design: how to armor a human body in a rigid substance is an exceedingly solved problem: quite a few cultures have tackled this particular …

Finished reading: Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman is a great companion to Four Thousand Weeks (my favourite non-fiction book of 2022). I followed the author’s suggestion and read a chapter a day to help the ideas percolate 📚

🏃‍♂️ New running shoe day!

Finished reading: Fire Exit: A Novel by Morgan Talty is a good book about the importance of knowing your family’s stories 📚

My son and I enjoyed listening to Ryan Holiday elaborate on the importance of stoicism for everyday life.

A fun Mindscape episode with Brandon Ogbunu on Fitness Seascapes and the Course of Evolution

🔗 My Experiment to Eliminate Read-It-Later Backlog Stress

Every so often, I audit every information source I’m subscribed to. I ask three simple questions I picked up from the late Jim Rohn:

1. Who am I allowing to speak into my life?
2. What effect is that having on me?
3. Is that ok?

There are a lot of …

🎧 Having switched back to Albums (again) for music, I’m discovering what a mess my Apple Music library has become. I’ve got duplicate tracks within albums, duplicate albums, incorrect metadata, and all sorts of nonsense. Really tempting to just delete my entire music library and start …

🪓 We had great fun at last night’s Axe Pancreatic Cancer event. We started the event ten years ago to raise awareness and funds, after my Mom’s short battle with the disease. So gratifying and amazing to see what the event has become, especially under the stewardship of Pancreatic Cancer Canada.

Finished reading: In The Antidote, Oliver Burkeman makes a lot of sense to me about how to live sensibly and genuinely 📚

🏃‍♂️ Thinking about my grandmother on today’s run. She was a bright spark and warm hug for 100 years 😢

Finished reading: For You by Patrick Rhone is full of wisdom in short chapters. I read one every couple of days to let the ideas percolate before rushing to the next chapter📚

Finished reading: Superintelligence: Is Canada Ready for AI? by The Logic is a nice overview of the state of AI in Canada 📚

🍁 Some good red trees on the street this year

🏃‍♂️ Lovely weather for a run

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

20/20

🏊‍♂️ 🚴 🏃‍♂️ Here we go again!

George the rufferree 👻

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

19/20

Finished reading: Fleeced by Andrew Spence will make you mad at the Canadian banks, though he also offers suggestions for fixing the sector📚

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

18/20

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

17/20

🔗 E-dayism - Paul Wells

We are being given a runaround. When a party wins an election, its victory excuses every mistake or excess for years before the election. We won, didn’t we? Any new criticism is interpreted as sour grapes or denial of the result: the purest illustration of one day dominating …

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

16/20

Finished reading: As a Gen X, I unironically enjoyed Chuck Klosterman’s entertaining and nostalgic analysis of The Nineties 📚

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

15/20

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

14/20

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

13/20

🎶 Emerging from a delightful revisiting of The Tragically Hip. It started with this episode of the Strombo show, moved through the No Dress Rehearsal series, and ended with the Long Time Running documentary, all accompanied by their many albums. Gord Downie’s courage really is inspiring.

There’s a …

Big changes coming to the local train station with upcoming residential development

Finished reading: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh is really good📚

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

12/20

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

11/20

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

10/20

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

9/20

🍁 Starting to feel like Fall on today’s run 🏃‍♂️

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

8/20

🎵 Fate & Alcohol by Japandroids will cheer you up

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

7/20

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

6/20

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

5/20

Really shouldn’t encourage this. George will get much bigger

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

4/20

Finished reading: The Armageddon Protocol by Dan Moren finishes a fun series 📚

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

3/20

Out for a stroll

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

2/20

🔗 Walport ahoy! - Paul Wells

Walport couldn’t help noticing that Canada is a sucking black hole for information-sharing, although I bet he never imagined his own report would gather dust for half a year for no reason anyone has ever explained nor ever will.

This is too important to not be taken …

🎵 Inspired by Camiel Schoonens, I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image.

1/20

🏃‍♂️ Preparing for this weekend’s gluttony with an easy (mostly) trail run

🏃‍♂️ I was very lucky to win a pair of Arc’teryx Norvans at the recent Truth & Reconciliation Trail Run. I picked them up today and look forward to trying them out. Big thanks to Arc’teryx for the support!

Finished reading: The Fires of Heaven by Robert Jordan. I’m simultaneously delighted and intimidated by how long these books are and how many of them are left to go 📚

I appreciate new customisation options in iOS 18 for the Control Centre, mostly so that I can remove many of the controls. That said, I took the opportunity to add a control to launch a daily meditation session. The associated shortcut switches to Do Not Disturb and launches directly into the …

The Unraveling of Space-Time series in Quanta Magazine is fascinating. Our universe is a strange place

🏃‍♂️ The 3rd Annual Truth & Reconciliation Trail Run in support of Anduhyaun Women’s Shelter was great, though difficult, fun. Lots of hills on this one

George had a busy day

🔗 How to Choose The Best Methods for your Health and Performance // David Lipman

So don’t go jumping onto the latest trend, especially not if it’s been around for less time than it takes for your eggs to go bad in the fridge. When any new method arrives, it is worth spending some time evaluating …

📖 Hooray!

Finished reading: The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik is a good end to a great series 📚

🏃‍♂️ Tried a new trail near the in-law’s house for today’s run

🏊‍♂️ I tried the new structured swim workout this morning in watchOS 11. I appreciated not needing to remember the details about intervals or mentally tracking my laps. Unfortunately I can’t “accidentally” misread the clock anymore for extra rest 😀

The Experiments in Having No Head series in Waking Up from Richard Lang are great. So, I’m glad to see new sessions added

I still really like my iPhone 13 mini. My only challenge is with battery life, since the mini size necessarily means a smaller battery. Now that I have a separate work phone, I’m experimenting with my personal phone automatically enabling low battery mode when switching to my work focus. Now I …

The YouTube algorithm pulled me into a stream of Apple Watch Ultra videos that I was too tired to resist. This one from Brian Talbot resonated the most with me. It isn’t about the specs and features; it’s about the freedom

🏃‍♂️ 8 minute zone 3 repeats on today’s run. Feels like summer out there

🏃‍♂️ Back on a track for this morning’s run. I’ve been away from speed work for too long.

Finished reading: I enjoyed the rich detail of The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison. I think you need to have liked The Goblin Emperor (which I did) to appreciate this one though📚

📺 Sunny (2024) - ★★★☆☆

The first half was okay and then kind of falls apart. Although not a surprise, the last scene was unnecessary

I really like the idea of the unified inbox in the new Reeder and for $1/month I’m very happy to try it out in practice

We said goodbye to Lucy today. She was a good dog, great companion, and will be missed 😢

George did not appreciate the short-lived experiment with a life jacket

Going to be tough to leave

Coming to the end of a great vacation

Finished reading: The Long War by Stephen Baxter is okay. Not nearly as interesting as the first book in the series and has a rather meandering plot 📚

Finished reading: I mostly enjoyed The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz. Great world building across thousands of years and interesting ideas. The middle third dragged a bit though 📚

🏃‍♂️ Coming across this World War 1 monument, seemingly in the middle of nowhere while running on a country road, was a good reminder of the sacrifices people have made for us

🎵 Although more cheerful than the last few albums, Wild God by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds is still steeped in spiritual yearning

Finished reading: A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers is delightful. The Monk and Robot series is fun. Sort of like a mirror universe Murderbot📚

Finished reading: The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker is richly detailed with interesting characters and intriguing plot. A nice sequel to The Golem and the Jinni 📚

🏃‍♂️ I find it easier to keep good form at faster paces. So, practicing staying tall at a more moderate pace

🏃‍♂️ Inspired by finishing The Lost Art of Running to pay attention to my form. For this run I focused on running tall and looking forward. Tough to maintain on the hills

Finished reading: The Lost Art of Running by Shane Benzie has lots of great anecdotes and tips. I know my running form could be better and this book has both inspired and empowered me to improve 📚

A new mug from my daughter, along with some high expectations

A top ten favourite feature of iOS 18: eliminating those pesky clipboard alerts

Calm after a storm ⛈️

Finished reading: Starter Villain by John Scalzi is a fun, easy vacation read 📚

🎵 no name is distilled Jack White

Finished reading: Provenance by Ann Leckie is an entertaining political thriller in space. Nice to learn more about the universe beyond the Radchaai 📚

🏃‍♂️ All runs here are hill training

🏊‍♂️ The dogs are vigilant lifeguards while I swim

Finished reading: A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith is an entertaining and informative exploration of what is actually required to colonize space. A good counterbalance to all the sci-fi I’ve been reading 📚

Lunch companions

Chose a run over leisure

Finished reading: The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal is a good entry in the Lady Astronaut series. I enjoy these alternate histories of space exploration books📚

🏊‍♂️ The easing in continues

🏃‍♂️ Easing back into a routine

Finished reading: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky is a surprisingly amusing story about the robot apocalypse 📚

🎧 Given the rewrite of Overcast, I’m switching back from Apple Podcasts to try it out (yes, right on time). Although the audio engine is better and there are some other, nice refinements, I think my favourite feature of Overcast is that it just shows me a clean list of the podcasts I’ve …

Finished reading: Adam Frank cleverly uses interest in UFOs to get at the science of extraterrestrial life in The Little Book of Aliens 📚

Finished reading: Slow Productivity by Cal Newport has some interesting concepts for how to manage pseudo productivity. Almost makes me want to have the type of job that would allow me to really apply the advice 📚

Finished reading: Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin is a short, fascinating, and entertaining book all about black holes 📚

📺 Thoughts on recent television shows: 

Some short notes on recent seasons of shows that I’ve watched:

• Outer Range Season 2: Still nicely strange, though not as good as Season 1
• Night Sky: A slow build with a sci-fi mystery. Sissy Spacek and JK Simmons are great. Clearly a second season was planned, but it ends okay for a one …

Finished reading: I enjoyed A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab. Moves briskly with an interesting plot, good characters, and intriguing magic system 📚

Finished reading: Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy is bleak, nihilistic, and compelling 📚

🔗 Matt Gurney: Anson Mount saved Star Trek

Because Anson Mount saved Star Trek. And I’m not afraid to say so. In fact, I’m here to shout it from the rooftops: thank you, Anson Mount. You were just what we needed.

I endorse this claim

As usual, against my better judgement, I’ve installed the public betas. I’m mostly interested in the new fitness features of watchOS 11. Although I already have something like Training Load in the HealthFit app, Apple’s take is intriguing. For me it is the simple things, like …

Finished reading: The Rise and Reign of the Mammals by Steve Brusatte is a comprehensive and detailed tour of all of the mammals, past and present, that stays engaging. Such tremendous diversity and curious lifestyles 📚

Dog couch

Finished reading: The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson is a good ending to The Wax and Wayne series. Although the Cosmere hints were intriguing, they also got a bit confusing. Presumably to be clarified in later books 📚

🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️ 2024 Muskoka Ironman 70.3: 

Well that was “fun”! The Muskoka Ironman 70.3 was very well organized with great volunteers and an excited crowd of spectators.

I was within a few minutes of last year which I’m very happy with, considering the interruptions to my training with a trip to Portugal and introduction …

🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️ Getting ready

Finished reading: The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson is a fun continuation of the series. Intriguing to see the world of Elendel open up to a wider perspective 📚

George discovered digging. So George had his first bath

Finished reading: Justin Trudeau on the Ropes by Paul Wells is a short, informative, entertaining, and timely look at Justin Trudeau’s tenure as Prime Minister 📚

Finished reading: As Gods by Matthew Cobb is a really good look at the science, politics, and ethics of genetic engineering 📚

🎧 I’ve been enjoying The Universe podcast: a fun conversation about astrophysics. Katie Mack is great at explanation and John Green is a good audience stand in

Finished reading: Hexarchate Stories by Yoon Ha Lee contains lots of fun stories. Only make sense though if you’ve read the series 📚

Training load and rest days on the Apple Watch are nice improvements. I’m curious to explore the Vitals App too

Finished reading: Witch King by Martha Wells is good. I enjoyed the clever interweaving of the two time periods and the vivid world building 📚

Maybe not enemies

🔗 “Worse than I’ve ever seen” - Paul Wells

I’m not here this week to tell a story of despair. I was impressed by what I saw of the Alberta government reponse to the opioid crisis, which reflects a level of ambition and concerted effort over time that I rarely see in government …

Welcoming George to our family

So far Lucy is mostly ignoring him

🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️ 2024 Milton Sprint Triathlon: 

My third year in a row for this one and, despite pouring rain for the entire race, it was still fun and well organized.

My times across the three have been within minutes of each other. Although this one was slowest of the three, given the conditions, I’m happy with the overall results and ended up …

🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️ Ready for tomorrow

🇵🇹 Lisbon trip: 

The second half of our Portugal trip was fun too. We stayed in São Vicente, to the east of the historical core. Lisbon is certainly bigger than Porto, so we used the transit system much more extensively and the Lisbon cards came in really handy with their access to transit and attraction discounts …

Finished reading: The Dog Sitter Detective by Antony Johnston is an entertaining and easy to read murder mystery 📚

Finished reading: The Narrow Road Between Desires by Patrick Rothfuss is a fun interlude of the Kingkiller Chronicle series 📚

Finished reading: Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie is a good continuation of a great series. Includes some interesting ideas about AI 📚

Finished reading: Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson has a good twist on the humans-colonizing-other-worlds narrative, along with his usual, highly technical descriptions 📚

🇵🇹 Porto trip: 

The Porto half of our Portugal trip was great fun. We stayed on the west side of Bonfim, relatively close to the historic district and walked (seemingly) all over Porto. The one exception was taking the 500 bus out to the ocean for the afternoon.

We also took a day trip out to the …

🏃‍♂️ Today’s run was a fun exploration of Porto

Gorgeous views in Porto. We’re having a great first day here

🔗 Variations on the Theme of Silence

Silences that close us off, refusing connection, shoring up the ego at others’ expense—those are dead silences. But the letting-go sort, the silences that hold space or keep vigil for someone else? They are alive.

🏃‍♂️ Nice to be mostly on trails for today’s run

🎧 Perfect albums: 

On Hemispheric Views 110, Jason asked:

Pick in your mind a perfect album. And I think it’s mostly open to interpretation, but I’m kind of thinking an album that you would say you could just start from beginning, let it run all the way through, without skipping songs, without moving …

Finished reading: The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter is entertaining. Takes a relatively simple premise about parallel worlds and really works through the implications 📚

🏃‍♂️ A misty run this morning

🚴‍♂️ Nice to get out of the basement for a proper ride outside. First one of the season!

The coffe and pastries halfway through were very helpful.

Finished reading: Jinx by Matt Gemmell is a fun read. I enjoy these characters and the settings Gemmell places them in 📚

📷 Day 22 of the April Photoblogging Challenge

Blue

📷 Day 21 of the April Photoblogging Challenge

Mountain

📷 Day 20 of the April Photoblogging Challenge

Ice

📷 Day 19 of the April Photoblogging Challenge

Birthday

📷 Day 18 of the April Photoblogging Challenge

Mood

📷 Day 17 of the April Photoblogging Challenge

Transcendence

📷 Day 14 of the April Photoblogging Challenge

Cactus

🏃‍♂️ Classic spring weather on today’s run: started with rain and then cleared up into a sunny day 🌧️🕶️

📷 Day 13 of the April Photoblogging Challenge: Page

📷 Day 10

Morning commute on the train

📷 Day 9

Crispy

Finished reading: Although it took two library loan periods, I made it through The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan. Having made it this far, I’m sure to get through all of the books now, even though there are many to go 📚

📷 Day 08

Prevention

📷 Day 07

Signs of spring in my backyard helps with well being

📷 Day 06

Windy

🍺 Collective Arts Hazy State Session IPA

📷 Day 05

Serene

Finished reading: If you want a very detailed resource on how to do CBAs, especially for public sector projects, Cost-benefit analysis of investment decisions by Glenn Jenkins, Chun-Yan Kuo, and Arnold Harberger is the book for you. That said, you really need to want details – you’ve …

📷 Day 04

Foliage

📷 Day 03

A well targeted card from my children

🏃‍♂️ New running shoe day

📷 Day 02

Flowers

📷 Day 1: Toy

Finished reading: I can’t decide if I liked Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. The first book of the series, Gideon the Ninth, was one of my favourite books of 2021. The second, Harrow the Ninth, was frustratingly confusing. Nona was similarly challenging: lots of names, hints of conversations, and …

🏃‍♂️ Dynamic run training in Training Today: 

I’ve been using Training Today for a while now to track my readiness to train (RTT). They’ve recently released a new feature that provides dynamic training for running based on RTT which takes into account your current recovery and health to make sure you don’t overtrain.

Generating the workouts is …

🏃‍♂️ Part of today’s trail run was mostly made of broken bricks

🏃‍♂️ Today’s run burned off the last of the March Break cervezas. Back on the program tomorrow

🎵 Right Back To It - Waxahatchee is a stand out song on a great album

Such nerdy fun

Finished reading: Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson continues this entertaining series. A nice break from the “heavier” fantasy books 📚

Finished reading: I enjoyed Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson. Some of his usual attention to detail without getting too dry and a nice emphasis on Chinese culture and history📚

Finished reading: Although difficult to describe, I enjoyed The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada. A strange, slightly creepy story about modern work life 📚

Finished reading: The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik is a great sequel to A Deadly Education 📚

Finished reading: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston is more fun than you might expect📚

Finished reading: My Murder by Katie Williams has an intriguing premise, good twists, and is well written. A great book📚

My plan for the week

Finished reading: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older is a fun, short murder mystery on a gas giant planet 📚

Finished reading: I enjoyed My Effin’ Life by Geddy Lee more than I expected. A great testament to hard working, talented friends. Also a great excuse to revisit Rush’s music. I’d missed their last few albums and it was a pleasant surprise to discover them📚

A toasted old fashioned kind of night

Trying to avoid Apple’s Journal app 📔: 

I have 9,698 entries in DayOne across 4,312 days. This is one of my favourite and most consistently used apps. And, yet, somehow I am tempted to switch to Apple’s Journal app. This post is to remind me why that is a bad idea.

So, here’s a list of DayOne features I use that Journal doesn’t have:

• I …

🏃‍♂️ Misty run today

🔗 How to Talk to Whales - The Atlantic

This would be a first-contact scenario involving two species that have lived side by side for ages. I wanted to imagine how it could unfold. I reached out to marine biologists, field scientists who specialize in whales, paleontologists, professors of …

🎵 TANGK - Idles

I’m enjoying their new sound

🔗 “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel | Strong Songs: A Podcast About Music

Strong Songs Season Six kicks off with a widely requested classic: Peter Gabriel’s 1986 yearner “In Your Eyes.” Because why hire one rhythm section when you can hire two for twice the price?

🎧 A …

Finished reading: Although I’m far from having a crisis, I’m well into midlife. So, Midlife by Kieran Setiya was a powerful book.

I could relate, when Setiya describes what he expects to feel after he finishes writing the book:

If experience is anything to go by, the hole will be filled soon …

🏃‍♂️ Back to cold, snow, and ice on today’s run

Investing in the MacSparky Productivity Field Guide ✅ : 

There is absolutely no shortage of productivity methods and content out there, especially in the “influencer” racket. I’m quite sure that there is no one true way to be productive. In fact, I think there’s some merit to switching up my approach on occasion, just to reinvigorate my interest.

To that …

🔗 The strange and turbulent global world of ant geopolitics

What is surprising is how poorly we still understand global ant societies: there is a science-fiction epic going on under our feet, an alien geopolitics being negotiated by the 20 quadrillion ants living on Earth today. It might seem like …

Finished reading: I enjoyed Making It So by Patrick Stewart. Although not as much Captain Picard as some Trekkies might want, I appreciated the broader view of his career 📚

Great video from Casey Neistat. I too, somehow, continue to get older and am trying to hold on to some goals.

🏃‍♂️ Mostly trails on today’s run

🏃‍♂️ Nice to see some sun on today’s run along the Leslie Spit

📚 These Wheel of Time books are long! I only got 1/3 of the way through The Shadow Rising before the library loan ended

🚴‍♂️ Great crew for a ride up both sides of Achterbahn

Finished reading: System Collapse by Martha Wells is another fun book in a great series📚

Finished reading: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury is rather strange. Some really lovely, poetic passages about the tranquility and beauty of Mars, coupled with buffoonish characters from Earth. I totally get this could be intentional, though it is jarring 📚

Finished reading: The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1] by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn is a remarkable book. I’ve never really comprehended the Stalin-era purges. Solzhenitsyn’s dark humour and extensive narrative details really helped make them feel horrifyingly real 📚

🏃‍♂️ Found some company on today’s run

🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️ Fitness in 2023: 

I kept busy in 2023 with triathlon training. As a reference point for next year, here’s a comparison of 2023 with 2022.

My running was surprisingly consistent. Although the totals are almost identical, I do think that my structured workouts were much better in 2023. Each run had a purpose and …

New books for the new year 📚

🥶 Shortest and coldest swim of the year

Year in books for 2023: 

I read some great books in 2023.

My favourite fiction book was The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. Non-fiction was Enemy of All Mankind by Steven Johnson.

Finished reading: Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaikovsky is a good end to a fun series. I enjoyed the world building and premise of the trilogy which doesn’t get too serious 📚

Finished reading: Against the Grain by James C. Scott is a really interesting exploration of the links between agriculture and state building. Definitely changed my mind about early state formation 📚

We had a fun family night out to see the Candlelight Tribute to Taylor Swift at Longboat Hall. Interesting to hear the music reinterpreted by these talented musicians

🎵 Will Butler + Sister Squares - Will Butler + Sister Squares

I’m enjoying this one

The new Apple Watch integration with Training Peaks is really nice. Like my Garmin friends, I can finally just roll out of bed and do what my watch tell me to without having to manually create workouts 🏊🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️

DayOne has integrated Journaling Suggestions already. A nice addition and now there’s no compelling reason to use the new Apple Journal app. I liked the promised simplicity of the new app, only to find it too simple. My journal is extended memory, so I rely on search, which isn’t in the …

Lucy tried the gecko food. Didn’t work well with her system, but she has no regrets

🏃‍♂️ Forgot to turn off the workout before getting back in the car. Got some impressive running paces! 😀

Nice addition to HealthFit: a visual summary of training load to see if you’re optimizing stress and recovery

🏊 🚴‍♂️ 🏃‍♂️ Alright, signed up for the Ironman 70.3 in Muskoka. I enjoyed the race last year and look forward to a repeat

Even more defaults: 

As a follow up to my Duel of the Defaults post, I’ve made a few changes. These are all based on further adopting app defaults to simplify things.

• 📰 RSS: I’ve swapped out Feedbin for iCloud as the backend for NetNewsWire. Although I really like the Feedbin service, my primary use of it …

🎄 Tree is up and decorated

🏃‍♂️ Light rain, wind, and NIN playlist made for a gloomy ambience on today’s run

I don’t understand Apple’s algorithms. There’s no way I listened to 100 Gecs Boiler Room Session 51 times. Once was fun, but it is 1 hour and 26 minutes long. I would remember listening to it that many times

🏃‍♂️ A bit gloomy on today’s off the bike run

Trying out a new home screen with my personal focus.

• Screen Time at the top left to keep me honest and Day One on the top right to make journaling easy.
• I’m testing out relying on Siri suggestions as a large widget which is working out well, so far.
• Just Notes in the dock with everything else …

🔗 How paltry the return by Jen Gerson

“Now more than ever, soft and hard power are important,” Joly noted, correctly, ignoring the fact that Canada increasingly has neither, and doesn’t seem to be doing much about that.

Making a good case that we don’t take ourselves seriously anymore

Finished reading: I’ll admit that I was hesitant to read Mistborn: Secret History by Brandon Sanderson. The original Mistborn trilogy came to a satisfying end for me and I knew that reading this book would open up to the whole Cosmere universe. I’ve simply decided that I don’t …

In a pleasant surprise, my cellular carrier just boosted by monthly 4GB to 20GB at no cost. I’m not accustomed to this kind of good customer service from a carrier

Finished reading: All Souls Lost by Dan Moren is fun. Has the same lightly humorous tone as the Bayern Agenda series with a supernatural, rather than sci-fi, plot 📚

Hmm, I beg to differ Apple Music

I’m not ready ❄️

Finished reading: The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin is a great follow up to A Wizard of Earthsea that adds depth to the world of Earthsea📚

🦎 We have a new houseguest

🏃‍♂️ Frosty out there on today’s trail run

🎵 Who Can See Forever Soundtrack (Live) - Iron & Wine is a good one

🏃‍♂️ Another Thursday, so another hill repeat run. Note to self, next time don’t start the repeats at the bottom of a big hill. The cool down run back up the hill wasn’t fun.

Finished reading: I really enjoyed Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Great characters and good story. Although I’m not steeped in gamer culture, you don’t need to be to follow along📚

Although it seems frivolous, my favourite new feature of WatchOS 10 is the Snoopy watch face. I have it set as my weeknight and weekend face, and enjoy its whimsy. A nice break from my serious work watch face, full of calendar events and reminders.

🏃‍♂️ Felt winter coming on today’s run with temperatures hovering around freezing

🎵 Dirt - Alice in Chains

Best opening of any grunge album

🔗 David Enoch argues that much of the public discourse on the Israel-Hamas conflict is depressingly simplistic

Perhaps moral philosophers can contribute to public discourse even now—for instance, in thinking about how decisions should be made given the tremendous uncertainty involved, or to insist …

🏃‍♂️ Hill repeats at a steady, moderate pace for today’s run. I tried to focus on my downhill form: staying loose and keeping ground contact time short

🎵 Find A Way Home by MxPx is a fun punk rock album

Finished reading: American Moonshot by Douglas Brinkley. I’ve read several books about the Apollo missions, all of them focused on the science and engineering. This book is a fascinating look at the politics and JFK’s indispensable leadership. 🚀📚

Non-default apps: 

As a follow up to my list of default apps, I have a few non-default apps that weren’t on the original list from Hemispheric Views.

• 🏃‍♂️Fitness: As I wrote about recently, I use HealthFit (mostly) instead of Apple Fitness
• 🧘 Meditation: Waking Up, instead of Mindfulness
• 📓 Journal: Doesn’t count yet, …

Duel of the Defaults: My List: 

Episode 097 of the Hemispheric Views podcast held a fun Duel of the Defaults! competition.

Here’s my list. I’ve really shifted to defaults over the past year. I’m conflicted about this: I really like a good indie app, yet find my needs don’t justify the complexity of using non-defaults.

• ✉️ Mail …

📺 The Night Manager (2016) - ★★★☆☆

A good show. I binge-watched it over the weekend while recovering from a nasty cold. Hiddleston and Laurie are both great

Finished reading: The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson is fun. A nice break from the epic storytelling of the previous series. The Sherlock Holmes meets Western lawman vibe fits in well with the allomancy 📚

Finished reading: Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky continues a great series. Interesting and diverse aliens, cosmic scale mysteries, and against all odds, plucky humans 📚

New running shoe day! After 1,109 kms, I’m replacing the orange ones with another pair of Saucony Kinvara. I definitely don’t recommend waiting so long, just got distracted 🏃‍♂️

Choosing a portfolio of fitness apps 🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️: 

There’s a bewildering array of fitness apps out there. Here’s an attempt to document what I’m currently using.

I have some criteria when considering a fitness app:

1. Available on the Apple Watch, ideally as a first class app, rather than just presenting data from the phone
2. Suitable for multisport. …

Finished reading: Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson is pretty good. Nowhere near as visionary as Anathem or Seveneves, though tighter than Fall; or Dodge in Hell📚

🍿 I enjoyed Fathom (2021), a documentary about attempts to communicate with whales. Pairs well with Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs

Day 30: Treasure

Day 29: Contrast

Day 28: Workout

In Search of Lost Time, by Tom Vanderbilt is delightful

Yet the more precisely time is measured, the less it starts to feel like time at all.

🚂 Importance of Transportation Funding: Framing the Issues: 

Discussions about transit often end up about funding. To help make these discussions productive, I was pleased to co-author a paper through the Transportation Association of Canada titled Importance of Transportation Funding: Framing the Issues.

Working on this with David Kriger, Nick Lovett, …

This didn’t last long. When using Apple Podcasts to listen to Apple Music radio, you don’t see album art and can’t easily add music to your library. Discovery is my main use case. So, though I like the idea of this integration, in practice it doesn’t suit my needs 🎵

Day 27: Embrace

Switching podcast apps, again 🎧 : 

As predicted, after a couple of months with the Apple Podcasts app, I’m back to Overcast.

I think that Apple’s Podcasts app is great for anyone new to podcasts, given it has a strong focus on discovering new shows. I’m looking for a podcast app that simply plays my carefully …

Day 26: Beverage

Day 25: Flare

Day 24: Belt

Finished reading: The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy by Tom Chivers is an entertaining and interesting book about AI risks and the Rationalists that worry about them 📚

🏃‍♂️ Starting to see the Fall colour changes on today’s run. Powered by PUP and Rage Against the Machine

Starting Fall with a pumpkin ale from Lake of Bays brewery

Day 23: A day in the life. Enjoying the nice Fall weather outside with a good book

Day 22: Road

🚴‍♂️ Likely the last ride of the season with this crew. Getting too dark! Unfortunately we had to end early, thanks to a flat tire.

Sunrises are a nice benefit of getting up early

Day 21: Fall

Day 20: Disruption

Day 19: Edge

GPS Watch? No Thanks. Top Runners Are Ditching the Data.

For many, GPS watches are a remarkably useful training tool. But there are other runners, including world-class runners like Jacobs, who have a hard time understanding the fuss. To them, a smorgasbord of data is more hindrance than help. And …

Day 18: Fabric

Day 17: Intense

Interesting guest column by Reg Whitaker in Wesley Wark’s National Security and Intelligence Newsletter

The leading physicists mobilized in the Manhattan Project were on the one hand applying intelligence in the sense of the same pure quest for knowledge that had driven the discoveries of …

🏃‍♂️ Today’s run was an endurance run with a progressive fast finish. I tried breathing through my nose for the first hour to keep things slow.

Powered by Billy Talent and Beastie Boys

📺 I enjoyed Foundation Season 2. A good part of that enjoyment requires letting go of the original books and embracing this reinterpretation

Finished reading: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler has so many fascinating ideas about consciousness, intelligence, and language embedded in a good story about a community of octopuses. I really enjoyed this one📚

Day 16: Oof!

Day 15: Red

Day 14: Statue

Day 13: Glowing

Day 12: Panic

Day 11: Retrospect

Day 10: Cycle

Finished reading: Earthseed by Octavia E. Butler is a powerful story that is surprisingly optimistic for a dystopia 📚

Day 9: Language

Day 8: Yonder

Day 7: Panorama

Almost BBQ’d a mouse! Spotted it just as I was turning on the burner.

Day 6: Well

Day 5: Forest

Day 4: Orange

Day 3: Precious

Day 2: Buildup

Not a great start to Season 2 of Invasion. The ease with which Mitsuki easily dispatches a half dozen invaders doesn’t suggest much jeapordy.

I really liked the initial mystery and slow build of the first half of Season 1. So, will stick with Season 2 for now 📺

Day 1: Abstract

Finished reading: The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison is a great story about an outsider being thrust into power and the decisions they need to make without compromising their ideals 📚

Photos of a dog at a cottage: 

Lucy enjoyed her time at the cottage

The only perk of returning home from a cottage vacation is that I got to watch the season finale of Strange New Worlds. Great show! 🖖

Last night of vacation

I’ve been making an effort to listen to the Moments in Waking Up when the randomly timed notifications come in. This one resonated with me today: “We too have problems that cannot be solved by more thinking”

Finished reading: I really enjoyed Hands of Time by Rebecca Struthers. Although notionally about mechanical watches, there’s also interesting ideas about time, building things by hand, and focusing on what really matters.

The book also resurrected an internal debate about the Apple Watch vs …

Finished reading: Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson finishes the remarkable trilogy. Robinson’s meticulous detail (though occasionally overwhelming) really brings Mars to life, along with compelling characters and ideas. Although I sympathize with the “reds”, I think the series ended appropriately …