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.
Microposts
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!
🎵 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 the majority of the work until later.
I’ve found this works really well. For me, this typically means writing a short, clear sentence about the objective of the project. Too often we launch into busy work before confirming what we’re actually trying to achieve.
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 📚
Saturday, September 20, 2025 →
Spotted on today’s run: a dog library for sticks
Thursday, September 18, 2025 →
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 the book too overwhelming: so many names, dates, and locations to keep track of, which I wasn’t up for 📚
🎵 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 📚
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 →
🚴 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 of splitting out a daily journal notebook from my usual Field Notes that currently holds everything. The page size of the Field Notes can be a constraining with longer entries.
(Hat tip: Robert Breen)
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 Suggestions.
The stats view is rather plain, but I appreciate that given the diversity of potential metrics, this is difficult to display in any other way, certainly for an experimental DayOne Labs feature.
🇨🇦 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 📚