🚴 Glad to finally get out for my first outdoor ride of the season, though the 5am wake up was rough
Microposts
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 engineering problems and what I like to call “phone call problems.”
Phone call problems lead to increased costs, schedule delay, and significant uncertainty.
🔗 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 outsourcing your decisions to a data point is a fool’s errand. I worry that in our rush to optimize every aspect of our training and racing that we’re losing touch with the parts of this pursuit that can’t be measured and why most of us started running in the first place.
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 about the Arctic, pipelines, building Canada and middle power diplomacy. Unless we can actually build, buy, permit, deploy and defend at speed, sovereignty remains a slogan and security an aspiration. My original prescription was basically right. What I underestimated was how inadequately we are equipped to follow it.
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 about if I should go now. I also appreciate that I can tweak my tolerance for temperature, precipitation, and other weather features to match my preferences.
Another helpful feature is that you can add in upcoming events (like the half marathon shown in the screenshot) to start preparing mentally for whatever is coming up on race day.
I’m fond of apps like these: well designed, specific, and useful.
🏃♂️ 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 📚
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! 📚
Project Hail Mary is a very fun movie 🍿
🎵 Hooray, new music from both Wintersleep and The New Pornographers is out this week
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
🎵 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 🚴🎵