Thursday, July 9, 2020
watchOS 7 has some interesting new features for enhancing and sharing watch faces. After an initial explosion of developing many special purpose watch faces, I’ve settled on two: one for work and another for home. Both watch faces use the Modular design with the date on the top left, time on the top right, and Messages on the bottom right. I like keeping the faces mostly the same for consistency and muscle memory.Friday, July 3, 2020
We’re very excited to move back homeWednesday, April 15, 2020
I’m neither an epidemiologist nor a medical doctor. So, no one wants to see my amateur disease modelling. That said, I’ve complained in the past about Ontario’s open data practices. So, I was very impressed with the usefulness of the data the Province is providing for COVID: a straightforward csv file that is regularly updated from a stable URL. Using the data is easy. Here’s an example of creating a table of daily counts and cumulative totals:Friday, April 10, 2020
Since I’m mostly stuck inside these days, I find I’m drinking more tea than usual. So, as a modification of my brew coffee shortcut, I’ve created a brew tea shortcut. This one is slightly more complicated, since I want to do different things depending on if the tea is caffeinated or not. We start by making this choice: Then, if we choose caffeine, we log this to the Health app:Saturday, April 4, 2020
I’ve been tracking my time at work for a while now, with the help of Toggl and Timery. Now that I’m working from home, work and home life are blending together, making it even more useful to track what I’m doing. Physical exercise is essential to my sanity. So, I wanted to integrate my Apple Watch workouts into my time tracking. I thought I’d be able to leverage integration with the Health app through Shortcuts to add in workout times.Thursday, January 16, 2020
Shorcuts in iOS is a great tool. Automating tasks significantly boosts productivity and some really impressive shortcuts have been created. That said, it is often the smaller automations that add up over time to make a big difference. My most used one is also the simplest in my Shortcuts Library. I use it every morning when I make my coffee. All the shortcut does is set a timer for 60 seconds (my chosen brew time for the Aeropress) and logs 90mg of caffeine into the Health app.Friday, January 10, 2020
I’m delivering a seminar on estimating capital costs for large transit projects soon. One of the main concepts that seems to confuse people is inflation (including the non-intuitive terms nominal and real costs). To guide this discussion, I’ve pulled data from Statistics Canada on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to make a few points. The first point is that, yes, things do cost more than they used to, since prices have consistently increased year over year (this is the whole point of monetary policy).Sunday, December 15, 2019
Podcasts are great. I really enjoy being able to pick and choose interesting conversations from such a broad swath of topics. Somewhere along the way though, I managed to subscribe to way more than I could ever listen to and the unlistened count was inducing anxiety (I know, a real first world problem). So, time to start all over again and only subscribe to a chosen few: Quirks & Quarks is the one I’ve been subscribed to the longest and is a reliable overview of interesting science stories.Tuesday, October 15, 2019
For several years now, I’ve been a very happy Things user for all of my task management. However, recent reflections on the nature of my work have led to some changes. My role now mostly entails tracking a portfolio of projects and making sure that my team has the right resources and clarity of purpose required to deliver them. This means that I’m much less involved in daily project management and have a much shorter task list than in the past.Saturday, October 12, 2019
Among the many good new features in iPadOS, “Desktop Safari” has proven to be surprisingly helpful for my analytical workflows. RStudio Cloud is a great service that provides a feature-complete version of RStudio in a web browser. In previous versions of Safari on iPad, RStudio Cloud was close to unusable, since the keyboard shortcuts didn’t work and they’re essential for using RStudio. In iPadOS, all of the shortcuts work as expected and RStudio Cloud is completely functional.Sunday, June 9, 2019
My goal for the home screen is to stay focused on action by making it easy to quickly capture my intentions and to minimize distractions. With previous setups I often found that I’d unlock the phone, be confronted by a screen full of apps with notification badges, and promptly forget what I had intended to do. So, I’ve reduced my home screen to just two apps. Drafts is on the right and is likely my most frequently used app.Saturday, June 8, 2019
Like many of us, my online presence had become scattered across many sites: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and a close-to-defunct personal blog. So much of my content has been locked into proprietary services, each of which seemed like a good idea to start with. Looking back at it now, I’m not happy with this and wanted to gather everything back into something that I could control. Micro.blog seems like a great home for this, as well described in this post from Manton Reece (micro.Wednesday, April 3, 2019
I’m very keen on backups. So many important things are digital now and, as a result, ephemeral. Fortunately you can duplicate digital assets, which makes backups helpful for preservation. I have Backblaze, iCloud Drive, and Time Machine backups. I should be safe. But, I wasn’t. Most of my backup strategy was aimed at recovering from catastrophic loss, like a broken hard drive or stolen computer. I wasn’t sufficiently prepared for more subtle, corrosive loss of files.Tuesday, February 12, 2019
My favourite spin studio has put on a fitness challenge for 2019. It has many components, one of which is improving your performance by 3% over six weeks. I’ve taken on the challenge and am now worried that I don’t know how reasonable this increase actually is. So, a perfect excuse to extract my metrics and perform some excessive analysis. We start by importing a CSV file of my stats, taken from Torq’s website.Tuesday, December 4, 2018
This is a “behind the scenes” elaboration of the geospatial analysis in our recent post on evaluating our predictions for the 2018 mayoral election in Toronto. This was my first, serious use of the new sf package for geospatial analysis. I found the package much easier to use than some of my previous workflows for this sort of analysis, especially given its integration with the tidyverse. We start by downloading the shapefile for voting locations from the City of Toronto’s Open Data portal and reading it with the read_sf function.Sunday, September 23, 2018
Sunday, September 2, 2018
In my Elections Ontario official results post, I had to use an ugly hack to match Electoral District names and numbers by extracting data from a drop down list on the Find My Electoral District website. Although it was mildly clever, like any hack, I shouldn’t have relied on this one for long, as proven by Elections Ontario shutting down the website. So, a more robust solution was required, which led to using one of Election Ontario’s shapefiles.Sunday, November 19, 2017
In preparing for some PsephoAnalytics work on the upcoming provincial election, I’ve been wrangling the Elections Ontario data. As provided, the data is really difficult to work with and we’ll walk through some steps to tidy these data for later analysis. Here’s what the source data looks like: Screenshot of raw Elections Ontario data A few problems with this: The data is scattered across a hundred different Excel files Candidates are in columns with their last name as the header Last names are not unique across all Electoral Districts, so can’t be used as a unique identifier Electoral District names are in a row, followed by a separate row for each poll within the district The party affiliation for each candidate isn’t included in the data So, we have a fair bit of work to do to get to something more useful.Sunday, November 5, 2017
The past few years, I’ve delivered an introduction to using R workshop that relied on manipulating Ministry of Finance demographic projections. Analyzing these data was a great case study for the typical data management process. The data was structured for presentation, rather than analysis. So, there were several header rows, notes at the base of the table, and the data was spread across many worksheets. Sometime recently, the ministry released an update that provides the data in a much better format: one sheet with rows for age and columns for years.Sunday, October 1, 2017
Sometimes it’s the small things, accumulated over many days, that make a difference. As a simple example, every day when I leave the office, I message my family to let them know I’m leaving and how I’m travelling. Relatively easy: just open the Messages app, find the most recent conversation with them, and type in my message. Using Workflow I can get this down to just a couple of taps on my watch.Thursday, August 31, 2017
This tweet about the charitable donations by Albertans showed up in my timeline and caused a ruckus. Albertans give the most to charity in Canada, 50% more than the national average, even in tough economic times. #CdnPoli pic.twitter.com/keKPzY8brO — Oil Sands Action (@OilsandsAction) August 31, 2017 Many people took issue with the fact that these values weren’t adjusted for income. Seems to me that whether this is a good idea or not depends on what kind of question you’re trying to answer.Wednesday, June 21, 2017
The TTC releasing their Subway Delay Data was great news. I’m always happy to see more data released to the public. In this case, it also helps us investigate one of the great, enduring mysteries: Is Friday the 13th actually an unlucky day? As always, we start by downloading and manipulating the data. I’ve added in two steps that aren’t strictly necessary. One is converting the Date, Time, and Day columns into a single Date column.Sunday, November 6, 2016
Thank you to all the participants, donors, and volunteers for making the third Axe Pancreatic Cancer event such a great success! Together we’re raising awareness and funding to support Pancreatic Cancer Canada.Monday, October 17, 2016
We’re hosting our third-annual Axe Pancreatic Cancer event. Help us kick off Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month by drinking beer and throwing axes!Thursday, June 3, 2010
I recently participated in a panel discussion at the University of Toronto on the career transition from academic research to public service. I really enjoyed the discussion and there were many great questions from the audience. Here’s just a brief summary of some of the main points I tried to make about the differences between academics and public service. The major difference I’ve experienced involves a trade-off between control and influence.Thursday, January 21, 2010
Our offices will be moving to this new space. I’m looking forward to actually working in a green building, in addition to developing green building policies. The Jarvis Street project will set the benchmark for how the province manages its own building retrofits. The eight-month-old Green Energy Act requires Ontario government and broader public-sector buildings to meet a minimum LEED Silver standard – Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. Jarvis Street will also be used to promote an internal culture of conservation, and to demonstrate the province’s commitment to technologically advanced workspaces that are accessible, flexible and that foster staff collaboration and creativity, Ms.Wednesday, October 7, 2009
I spend a fair bit of time with a locked-down Windows XP machine. Fortunately, I’m able to install Emacs which provides capabilities that I find quite helpful. I’ve had to reinstall Emacs a few times now. So, for my own benefit (and perhaps your’s) here are the steps I follow: Download EmacsW32 patched and install in my user directory under Apps Available from http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html Set the environment variable for HOME to my user directorySunday, June 21, 2009
The CaGBC maintains a list of all the registered LEED projects in Canada. This is a great resource, but rather awkward for analyses. I’ve copied these data into a DabbleDB application with some of the maps and tabulations that I frequently need to reference. Here for example is a map of the density of LEED projects in each province. While here is a rather detailed view of the kinds of projects across provinces.Wednesday, June 3, 2009
I was given an opportunity to propose a measure to clarify how and on what basis the federal government allocates funds to STI - a measure that would strengthen relations between the federal government and the STI community by eliminating misunderstandings and suspicions on this point. In short, my proposal was that Ottawa direct its Science, Technology and Innovation Council to do three things: To provide an up-to-date description of how these allocation decisions have been made in the past;Tuesday, May 26, 2009
judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/1… A good read on the mathematics of scaling in urban patterns. I had looked into using the Bettencourt paper (cited in this article) for making allocation decisions. The trick is moving from the general patterns observed in urban scaling to specific recommendations for where to invest in new infrastructure. This is particularly challenging in the absence of good, detailed data on the current infrastructure stock. We’ve made good progress on gathering some of this data, and it might be worth revisiting this scaling relationship.