🎵 Worldwide by Snõõper will wake you up
Microposts
🔗 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 📚
Finished reading: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe is a fascinating and disturbing book about The Troubles in Ireland with interesting questions about political violence and accountability 📚
Finished reading: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz is a delight 📚
A subtle enjoyment of being at a cottage is exposure to the weather. At home and the office it is too easy to not be affected. Whereas here we feel the heat, the wind, and the rain.
George has become a cottage dog
Finished reading: Superbloom by Nicholas Carr is a fascinating, alarming, and important book about how communication technology and social media are shaping society, mostly for the worse 📚
🏃♂️ Clouds on today’s run, instead of smoke. Much better
