🏊♂️🚴🏃♂️ Packing for the Guelph Lake triathlon. I’m excited to try a new course
Microposts
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 once again pull together to do big things when called upon by the world. Different things, surely, but big just the same. What we shouldn’t be in a rush to do, especially in the face of Trumpian disorder, is to further weaken ourselves, whether by continuing our economic and military stagnation, or carving up the country via referendum.
🚴 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 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 📚