Wednesday, November 26, 2025 →
Been a while since I did a Spartan race. I’ve got some training to do
Microposts
💰 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 required.
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 regular updates are helpful, especially now that I’m wearing long sleeves and gloves.
The Workout Buddy’s voice is quite natural, encouraging without being annoying.
The music choices were all good, well-aligned with my tastes and suitable for running.
Overall, this is promising, except for the hallucinations. My watch kept announcing songs that it definitely wasn’t playing. These were good songs, mind you, just not what I was actually hearing. Furthermore, there was a perplexing inability to read the watch display. For example, it cheerfully congratulated me on having run for 50 minutes when the watch actually showed 73. Then, it got increasingly inaccurate, repeatedly congratulating me for a 50-minute run over the next 15 minutes.
There’s potential here, but it needs to be more accurate. I’ll continue letting it pick music, but I’ll keep a skeptical ear out for its announcements.
Wednesday, November 19, 2025 →
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
Wednesday, November 12, 2025 →
Watched: Although the first few seasons were good fun, Season 5 of Only Murders in the Building is mostly silly 🍿
Wednesday, November 12, 2025 →
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 into a fully narrative journal entry (as in, it doesn’t just paste in the chat).
After using the feature for a few days, I can see the appeal. The entries generated are far more detailed than I would typically write and are quite reasonable summaries of the chat. The responses from the LLM are also usually on target, eliciting more details, but also move on to new topics without getting too repetitive.
At first, I found I had to write a lot of “as you know” type responses, since the LLM didn’t know anything about me, my interests, or family. So, things like “as you know, I have a dog named George”, so that it knew George wasn’t one of my children. This seemed to improve over days, so presumably the previous entries are getting included in the processing. There’s also a short biography you can write to guide the LLM.
Despite being impressed with the feature overall, I don’t think I’ll use it. The main reason is that I prefer to create entries throughout the day, as they happen, rather than having one summary entry per day. Also, I can’t quite get over that the LLM is writing the entries as if they are from me. I know that I provided much of the content. But, I prefer that my journal be where I write things down, not something else on my behalf.
I’ve found the “Go Deeper Prompts” more compelling. These are LLM generated prompts that are based on what you’ve written so far that trigger further writing. I find these are helpful nudges and I’m still the one doing the actual writing.
I’m glad DayOne continues to experiment, even if I don’t end up using all of the features.
🏃♂️ 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 up and down), I decided there really wasn’t a point in keeping the computer. We have a good half dozen iPads and many iPhones that get daily use. So we have plenty of computing resources and no plans to abandon Apple products. That said, it is still strange to not have a “real computer” in the house (ignoring our work-issued Windows laptops).
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
I’ve been wanting to get back to my default apps. And with good timing, MacSparky has released the Apple Productivity Suite Field Guide.
The field guide is a thorough tutorial of using Apple’s Reminders, Notes, Calendar, and Freeform applications. Done in MacSparky’s easy going and comprehensive style, no feature is left unexplained.
I’m a pretty knowledgeable user of Reminders, Notes, and Calendar. So, I didn’t learn much. That said, I knew this going in and did get new momentum to actually use these three apps more effectively and consistently. So, for me it was worth it. Anyone new to these apps will certainly benefit.
As for Freeform, I had never really used it. I’m planning to upgrade a rather old iPad with an iPad Mini and Apple Pencil and think that Freeform will be much more useful with that setup. The field guide included some extra use cases for Freeform that sparked several ideas.
If you’re curious about Apple’s built-in apps, this field guide could be really useful. The apps have become rather powerful and integrated tools.
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. They were opposed by essentially nobody. The hypothesis was that Canada, already one of the developed world’s highest-immigration countries, could jump start its slow-growth economy through higher immigration, and lower standards. The experiment was not a success.
Important context for current debates about immigration in Canada
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 ring instead, wouldn’t I just go back to carrying my phone around? With the watch I can still get useful notifications, as well as listen to podcasts and music. A ring can’t do that (yet).
I think this is a false attraction. Until I can more honestly say that I can get by without the Apple Watch features, the ring would only be an additional gadget. I’d end up wearing both of them, most of the time. The only exception might be while sleeping or on a cottage vacation. Those don’t really seem like enough to justify the cost of a ring, plus subscription.
And, having now watched a video from The Quantified Scientist, I see that the heart rate tracking by the Oura Ring during exercise is quite poor. So, that really reduces the attractiveness of the ring.
I think that the watch is simultaneously versatile enough and subtle enough to optimize the trade off between features and distractions.
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 blog category.
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 at all of those things. That is what the politicians and the bureaucrats want it to be. They might not admit it, but that is exactly the way they have designed the system, and they are getting exactly what they pay for.
🎶 Amazing, Rush is going back on tour!