🚴 Worldwide by Snõõper got me through some tough intervals on today’s ride 🎵
Microposts
The office dishwasher broke and my colleagues have reverted to university dorm habits. Eventually someone will have to wash these
🏊♂️ 10 weeks since my last swim. This might be tough.
Although I am feeling better after a couple of weeks of being slightly off, this seems a bit too enthusiastic for me
⛑️ Recertified my first aid today. Although I’ve never handled more than a small cut over a few decades with first aid, I feel better knowing I’m at least partly ready if something goes wrong. A good reminder of how fragile we are and how just a small amount of training can make a big difference
Finished reading: Mavericks by Peter C. Newman is a fun collection of vignettes of infamous Canadians throughout history 📚
🎵 Song of the week for my daughter: Possession by Sarah McLachlan from Fumbling Towards Ecstasy
Fresh supplies
A nice video from Becca Farsace about leaving home without your phone.
The portable tape player was especially nostalgic. Reminded me of my bright yellow Sony Walkman. I used to make mix tapes by recording songs from the radio. Took great patience and precision. Hovering over the pause button, waiting for your favourite song, and hoping that the DJ wouldn’t talk over it.
My version of leaving without my phone is taking only my Apple Watch. Far fewer distractions, but I still have music, messages, maps, wallet, and notes. The main missing piece is photos, which was an emphasis in Becca’s video.
🚴♂️ Getting back into a routine with today’s ride
Finished reading: In Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canadian Book Publishing, Richard Stursberg gives a stark review of the collapse of Canada’s book industry. Tough to maintain a culture without a literature and ongoing national conversation. Fortunately he includes recommendations for how to fix it 📚
Colleague brought in a large box of delicious doughnuts and were having a Chinese Lunar New Year team lunch. I can do this!
Uh oh, I seem to be immune to caffeine this morning. This better be temporary 😴
Boilermaker by Royal Blood from Typhoons helped me finish off a too early Zwift ride 🎵
Etobicoke Olympium. 📍
🏊♂️ Spending the day at regionals with kid #2
Finished reading: The Dollar A Year Men by Allan Levine is an impressive reminder of what Canada was once able to accomplish by connecting government with industry. I like to believe that something like this is possible again, though it seems much harder now and required an existential war then 📚
🎵 Song of the week for my daughter: Weighty Ghost by Wintersleep from Welcome to the Night Sky. We listened to this one a lot when she was little.
Possibilities
🏃♂️ Added another event to this year’s race calendar. My son is going to join me for this one, which will be fun. His runs have maxed out at about 7km to date, so he has some training to do. I need to convince him that he can’t just sprint the whole thing.
🔗 The Obedient Self: A Philosophical Critique of Self-Optimization — The Virginia Truth
The optimized self must remain unfinished, because only the unfinished self consumes, adjusts, updates, and corrects itself. Permanence would be inefficiency.
It is important to know when we’re actually improving something, rather than just changing it. I’m learning to be comfortable with leaving somethings alone. I really don’t need to check out that new notes app or blogging platform. These are just self generated distractions.
🔗 Asteroids that spin really fast – Triton Station
Every once in a while, a result comes along that make stop and remember that heavenly objects can be pretty darn cool. This is an asteroid about half a kilometer in diameter that is spinning once every 1.88 minutes. That’s 112 seconds. That’s crazy talk.
I should read more posts like this and less about politics.
I’ve listened to, watched, and read plenty about AI. Boss Class Season 3 from The Economist is actually relevant to my job and quite entertaining 🎙️
When Our Friends Come Over by Donovan Woods & Madi Diaz from Things Were Never Good If They’re Not Good Now is a great song on a great album 🎵
Finished reading: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . . by Steven Pinker is really interesting. I hadn’t appreciated how essential common knowledge (you know that I know that you know…) is to so much of what we do 📚
🎶 Song of the week for my daughter: Cloudbusting by Kate Bush. She knows Running Up That Hill from Stranger Things and this exposes her to more from a visionary artist.
🔗 A Blueprint to Restore Homeownership for Young Canadians
Young Canadians are increasingly seeing homeownership as out of reach. While 86% of non-homeowners under 30 and 75% of non-homeowners between 30 and 44 still aspire to own a home one day, only 51% and 47%, respectively, are very or somewhat confident they will achieve this goal. The combination of higher interest rates, stagnant wages, and a two-decade-long increase in price-to-income ratios has made it increasingly difficult for them to qualify for a mortgage. Their ambition has turned into uncertainty, and for many, that uncertainty is turning into defeat. The issue is not willingness to buy, but rather whether they can afford to enter the market at all.
Some good recommendations in this paper. I think that part of the solution also needs to be a cultural shift away from seeing home ownership as necessarily a desired outcome. That said, for those who do want to own, we have a lot of work to do to make this possible.
🔗 Komoot’s Apple Watch App Gets Offline Maps & Routing: Hand-on!
In arguably one of the biggest bits of news for outdoor-focused Apple Watch owners in years, Komoot just announced true offline mapping and routing for their Apple Watch app. Up until now, their app required some sort of connectivity, notably to the phone, in order to have offline maps/routing.
This looks quite promising. I’ve been using the WorkOutDoors app for offline maps, but Komoot looks much easier.
Relentless snow! ❄️
Finished reading: The Emergency by George Packer is a very good story about the collapse of empire, complexity of parenting, optimism of youth, and our terrible capacity to create “others” 📚
🎶 Having claimed recently that my kids have good musical tastes, I was chagrined when my daughter mixed up Peter Gabriel and Pearl Jam. Parenting fail!
As my penance, I’m now sending her a weekly song to make sure that her musical foundation is sound. These won’t necessarily be the best, most popular, or my favourite songs (though sometimes they will be all three). Rather, they will be influential to my musical tastes and worth her consideration.
Given how this started, the first song is Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel. There are plenty of his songs to choose from. I think this one is a great place to start.