Archive

Hello!

In the midst of vacation, trying to channel Rach Smith’s “no inputs day”. It’s… hard! Changing context helps, of course, but those inputs are always just a tap away. That said, this week, in a moment where I just wanted some familiar things to read, I enjoyed this interview with a power duo in Welsh antiques (lol), on how they’ve made their life interests into their life’s work (and an integral part of their lives together).

Okay, back to no (little?) inputs—more soon! All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas

Thank you to everyone who wrote in about my break email last week. I’ll likely keep going, but relieve myself of the stress of titling these posts for the next few weeks (a surprisingly big part of the weirdness!), and just share a little vignette or a few links.

Links links links!

• https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/labor/ and https://everythingchanges.us/blog/work-work-balance/
• 

  
  

  On productivity metrics and management consultants – Surfing Complexity

  The management consulting firm McKinsey & Company recently posted a blog post titled Yes, you can measure software developer productivity. The post prompted a lot of responses, such as Kent Bec…

• 

  
  

  Never Look Down the Road Not Taken

  On financial regrets and why life never turns out the way you think it should.

• https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2023/09/06/memories-of-molly/ and https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2023/09/07/why-are-we-not-still-using-tables-for-layout/

All the best for the week ahead!

Hello!

Ah, September—what a pleasure! Though it’s been a while since the academic year shaped my life, I’m still keenly aware of it—the rhythm of thirds has a better feel than quarters, and the change from the beginning to the end of each set of four months is real, tangible, appreciable. This week is delivering a classic September heat spell, but with luck we’ll soon be snuggled in sweaters.

• I’m a fan of “vibes” posts (call them what you will, but they’re round-ups of what someone did / read / saw / thought / etc over the last week / month / arbitrary period of time). Two I read recently: Susan Jean Robertson and Tom MacWright.
• Props to Doug Keefe for doing what TBS doesn’t by making GC rate of pay data publicly available in an open data format (plus an API!). (And hat-tip to Chris Allison and Sean Boots for their prior art in this space.)
• This week, I picked up Jhumpa Lahiri’s Translating Myself and Others from Perfect Books. Essays on reading and writing are a favourite genre of mine, and I really enjoyed Lahiri’s In altre parole (In Other Words)—reading and writing takes a whole other feel when moving between languages.
• T and I also picked up Gardening Naturally, a delightful book by Laurie Perron and Sarah Quesnel-Langlois of Jungle Fleur—next year, we’re looking forward to slowly growing (haha) into gardening, and this book has a “just enough info and encouragement” approach that really resonates with us (similar to How to Sew Clothes, which we also love).

Posts the next few weeks will be brief, or… not at all!? This newsletter is now six years running (!!), a fact I largely missed last week. The fifth anniversary issue remains a good signpost to the archive, and the accompanying data analysis is a bunch of fun. (Solid Lucas sentence there.) While I don’t feel quite ready to shut it down entirely, issues this summer have been a bit slower to materialize—I’m reading and doing differently these days, in ways that don’t quite lend themselves to what I write here. Which is fine! But that, coupled with a very busy few weeks ahead, has me pondering a pause. We’ll see.

Folks! The evenings are cool and the mornings crisp! Fall is coming! This is not a drill!!

Very full days behind and ahead of us—with some exciting news to share in weeks ahead—so will just share some links, while hoping you’re getting chances to enjoy beautiful weather and quiet days.

• Noticed over the last few weeks two “lite” versions of news sites: CBC Lite and NPR’s text-only version. They’re lightweight designs with minimal data usage (only loading images when you choose to, for example), with few if any ads—as a result, they’re blazing fast to load and interact with. Everything a website should be.
• On what makes a healthy place to live and be.
• Lorin Hochstein’s writing often shifts my view of the world slightly but profoundly (so, too, with Marianne Bellotti). Two posts from Lorin that kept chipping away at that view: “Why LFI [Learning from Incidents] is a tough sell” and “Normal incidents”.
• When archivists smell vinegar, it’s time to act.

All the best for the week ahead!

Folks, I took that advice I shared in the last two issues—Mandy Brown’s energy makes time—and hoo boy does it ever work! Spent the afternoon in the woodshop today, thinking I’d do a project, but instead prototyping said project and practising a bunch of skills in the process.

It’s humbling to be such a beginner and surrounded by people with much more experience—the discomfort, which is very real, is good for me, I think. And, once I get past the “oh goodness I don’t belong here” each time, things feel pretty great.

Much attention this week has been on the fires—it’s frightening to realize, in writing that, that “the fires” can refer to any number of ongoing climate catastrophes. Sean wrote a post about the fires chock-full of links and references that I think are worth reading. I, too, +1 Lyn’s call for better.

Hello!

Bit of an off day energy-wise—trying to fit in too much, not doing a great job cutting myself slack when I can’t fit all that, and wallowing over all of it. I know I should heed advice I shared just last week, Mandy Brown’s “Energy makes time”—and yet, and yet, and yet.

Some recent brightspots included sunny afternoons in parks with T, quality time with family and friends visiting town (S and C yesterday, along with S and V!), morning bike rides, and plenty of summer ice cream. Quality go-tos, regardless of whatever else is going on.

I’ve also been enjoying Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I’m sure others have put this better, but it’s a good example of how Trek could become / is becoming an archetypal universe, where different performers can play Kirk, or Uhura, or Spock, or so on, each bringing new dimensions to a familiar character—and, perhaps, helping us re-nuance misunderstandings of characters we think we know through and through. The musical episode was also a delight, and I look forward to continued Trek oddness. (Also to Women at Warp’s review of said musical episode, once the writers / actors strike concludes.)

Ah, August—the good part of summer. Still hot, yes, but less consistently so. Cooler nights, the occasional balmy day, little treats to make the heat more bearable, comfortable and nice before we again give up the heat for so many months.

Several links from this week:

• “I don’t want students to be able to finish each other’s sentences. I want the ethics layer to be sufficiently thorny that a variety of design approaches would have to be considered.” (Sara Hendren, “shearing layers and finishing sentences”)
• “But more often than not, organizations are completely incapable of executing on any plan whatsoever and they hire the consultant as if that’s a magic cure that will fix whatever is keeping them from changing on their own. Consultants are really bad at doing that. They don’t have the authority to fix what’s broken for you.” (Marianne Bellotti, “The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All The Consultants”)
• Why transparency in municipal finances can help win support for funding from other levels of government. (Neil Saravanamuttoo and Catherine McKenney are on a good roll with Fix Your City.)
• “They had assumed, wrongly, that there wasn’t enough time in the day to do their art, because they assumed (because we’re conditioned to assume) that every thing we do costs time. But that math doesn’t take energy into account, doesn’t grok that doing things that energize you gives you time back. By doing their art, a whole lot of time suddenly returned. Their art didn’t need more time; their time needed their art.” (Mandy Brown, “Energy makes time”)
• Ethan Marcotte gathers a number of thoughtful posts on social media, relationships, and internet culture in the wake of Twitter’s continued demise.
• Jeremy Keith, a few years back, shares his experience crossing the Atlantic on an old-style ocean liner. Turning back the clock each day (almost) was one of the coolest bits for me!
• “This is the Phone Challenge: to use my phone as little as possible without sacrificing its real utility. … The point isn’t to limit my contact with the internet — I still get to use my laptop as much as I want. But my laptop use is more deliberate than the way I used to pull out my phone for no reason, and my laptop doesn’t go everywhere with me.” (Elizabeth Lopatto, “Let’s all play the Phone Challenge”)
• “We've let ourselves get away from building websites that can do normal web things. … In the end, it's usually because we've JavaScript'ed our way out of these things.” To the great bit about letting links be links, I’d add making links functional—that a link I bookmark or share should bring me back to the same information (more or less). (Heather Buchel, “Just normal web things.”)

Okey, time for some rest and fun this long weekend. C’s in town, we’re having a picnic with S and V later today, and tomorrow is gloriously unplanned. All the best for the week ahead!

Hello!

A happy Sunday to you :) Writing, again, at the end of a full but fulfilling weekend. This weekend featured hours in parks, enjoying the grass and the scenery and the quiet—yesterday, visiting some dear friends back in town for a visit with their baby; today, imagining the future and reading with T. Really enjoying this cool weather break—here’s to August, the better part of summer.

• Our devices, software, and mindsets quantify and incentivize growth, but don’t know what to do with rest.
• “Working, humanely” isn’t something that feels possible some days, and yet there are little pockets of goodness out there—even if only for a time.
• Sharing a post on learning from incidents, Mandy Brown applies its lessons to retrospectives in general.
• A helpful framework for thinking about financial investments: the “return on hassle spectrum”.
• Studies on the link between CO2 and cognition are all over the map, suggesting the need for more research—well-explained science interpretation, thank you!!
• I’ve been slowly enjoying the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds—episodic content, thank you!!—and don’t have a link to share about it, just to say, it’s good.

All the best for the week ahead!

Hello!

Writing after an unexpectedly full weekend, tired but thankfully not drained:

• Yesterday morning was an awesome hand tools course at Ottawa City Woodshop (great fun, dicing up a pine board with a long list of tools).
• This morning and afternoon was spent securing a very-nice-but-has-tricky-physics set of shelves to our how-in-the-world-did-they-build-this apartment wall.
• This evening with a host of friends, new and old alike, whiled away in Strathcona Park (itself an old friend), eating and catching up and blind contour drawing and the like.

Our get together was to celebrate a host of July birthdays, a lively and lovely way to enjoy a summer night. (A was unimpressed with the lateness of his dinner, but that cat’s stomach runs on a 22-hour clock or something).

Hi!

Exciting things afoot, but I’m low on energy and brainspace this afternoon. I don’t have anything in particular to say or share this week, but am pleased to report that moving (inside or outside), tending to little bits of earth (in my case, watering plants), and “Grandparent hobbies” continue to be great ways to fill you up. In case you didn’t follow that link, here’s how Anne Helen Petersen defines Grandparent hobbies:

No one told me that aging would include gradual and then overwhelming obsession with Grandparent hobbies. What is a Grandparent hobby? Broadly conceived: Woodworking. Needlework. Specialty baking. Unscheduled comfy chair napping. Puzzles. Scheduled walks. “Visiting.” Golfing poorly. Block printing. Bridge or canasta or Mahjong. Smoking in the backyard. Word games. “Tinkering.” Fiber Arts. Driving people to medical appointments. Birding. Listening to baseball on the radio. Reading large-print history books.

A Grandparent hobby doesn’t have to have done by your Grandparent. It just has to be something that you do without mind towards optimization.

Here’s to Grandparent hobbies. All the best for the week ahead!

Hello!

Coming off a lovely weekend full of T time, family time, friend time, and hobby time—very glad for all the people I get to share life with. It’s left me quite tired, though, so I’ll just share some links with light annotation. T and I are finishing The Terminal and an ice cream cake tonight, so there’s much to save my brain for!!

• Commentary, history, and links to more history on Ethernet, which just turned 50 years old.
• I didn’t know the Ontario Food Terminal is publicly owned, nor that it primarily serves the not major brands.
• On the use (or not) of secret intelligence in government, and what it says about political-bureaucratic incentives.
• I am shocked but not at all surprised to learn that Pimisi station—one of the Ottawa LRT stations likeliest to host large crowds—is not built for large crowds.
• To rebuild Notre Dame, they have to first reforge the medieval axes that dimension the timber. I find the expense and extravagance poured into restoring this church to be mindboggling, but if you’re going to go all out, I guess you really need to go all out.
• Morning routines, yes, but also being more chill about said routines. Rach Smith, thank you for this.

Thank you for being a wonderful part of my week, every week. If I haven’t replied to an email from you recently, I hope to soon! All the best for the week ahead!!

Hello!

We’re just wrapping up a really lovely visit from my family, which included a brunch today with our closest Ottawa family, S+V. Very glad for the chance to visit these past few days.

On that note—it’s halfway through the year, somehow! The weather has not done much for my desire to be outside (rainy or hot or smoky, pick two!), but we’re plugging along nonetheless. Since goalmaking is generally arbitrary, but public accountability can be helpful, sharing here some things I’d like to do with the six months ahead of us:

• Do more woodworking: make some frames, make something usable for around the house (a handy box or shelf thingamajig? a lil furniture? who knows!).
• Ship a [redacted] project about the federal government’s HR system.
• Sew one piece of (basic! functional!) clothing.
• Do a joint project of some sort with T—maybe combining woodworking and sewing, or something like that!?
• Go on some fun trips with T (these are already booked / in the process of being booked, so pretty sure these’ll happen!).
• Do one consciously “active” activity a week, and one “stretching” activity a week (stretching is definitely active, but I’m thinking “elevated heart rate” for the first).

Hello!

It’s been a very full week, and I don’t have much in the tank to write today. I hope you’re all doing well, and taking care, especially if you live somewhere (like Ottawa) where the air quality is so manifestly bad.

I was saying to T this morning, it’ll be interesting to see if/how people learn about air quality in future years—wearing a mask seems so negatively identified with COVID for some, I wonder how many will just continue defiantly not wearing one, even with wildfire smoke (which is so clearly bad!!). Sadly, it seems we’ll be reckoning with this more and more often.

All the best for the week ahead,

Hello!

Sunny, blue skies have emerged from an overcast morning (though I like the gloom, some days—it encourages a general feeling of quiet, a welcome break from noise and hubbub). My brain is full of project ideas, and I’m looking forward to the slow days of summer for a chance to make those projects a reality.

Links links links!

• For so many reasons, I am very happy to see the depth and breadth of coverage coming out of the Globe’s Secret Canada project, which last week launched a database of Canadian freedom of information requests. (The “behind the scenes” pieces in their blog are also excellent.) There have been many pieces published under the Secret Canada banner this year—a favourite from the last week discusses the connection between federal information requests, immigration policy, and the service approach of the federal immigration department. Brilliant stuff that I’m glad to see discussed publicly.
• Vass Bednar with two great issues of regs to riches this week: one on interoperability through the lens of strollers and another on the quiet power of legislating labeling requirements.
• L.M. Sacasas contrasting care to control, particularly in the raising (and surveillance) of children.
• Justin Ling with some interesting discussion on “retreating” in debate, as a method to advance discussion instead of wedging extremes. Not easy!
• But I think that’d appeal to Paul Wells, who’s been writing a lot about having better conversations (individually and nationally). This week, he wrote about one such conversation—or series thereof—that took place in Ottawa, a conference he describes as an “amiably chaotic event” reflecting on how Canada responded to the pandemic, not seeking to establish a position, but simply to allow its participants to confer. Ottawa Civic Tech used to offer a similar, though much lower key, type of “amiably chaotic” space to meet and get to know folks you might not otherwise—a type of space that definitely feels missing as various groups re-find their footing.
• On the predictable increase of unpredictable turbulence due to climate change.
• Finally, for yet more links, I never regret dipping into Austin Kleon’s weekly newsletter—the latest has a collection I really enjoyed this week.

Hello!

Writing, very (very) full with food, after a full day visiting family. We’ve had a busy few weeks, with lots of emotional ups and downs, but are glad to be able to spend time with loved ones.

• Looking outside or breathing this week felt a little different, a little more difficult—wildfire smoke flipped the pandemic logic of “outside air is safest” on its head, pushing us to seal windows and limit external circulation. CBC published a frightening chart of hectares burned over time by year—this year’s is a vertical line, with more hectares burned already in 2023 than we’ve burned in the entirety of any of the last seven fire seasons (which usually end in November). It does not bode well.
• One way we get through difficult times, like fires, is through community—an inherently social act. Apple this week shared its, er, vision of the future of computing, a tech that would undoubtedly facilitate content consumption, but in a pretty isolated way. I appreciated commentators who critiqued it on the latter count. To be clear, I also get the appeal!! But, I’ve been trying to go out and do more things with people—people I don’t know, even!—and appreciating more and more the brain rewiring that such time together can offer. So, uh, deep skepticism that this is what we really need, as our challenges become ever more about our ability to relate and get along.
• Finally, a moving message from Sameer in memory of a close friend of his who recently passed away. “Tell your friends you love them”—some of the best advice out there.

All the best for the week ahead. May it be filled with great love.

Hi!

A very happy Sunday to you. We’ve had a whirlwind few days, but in a way that feels as relaxing as it’s been full: a woodworking course yesterday morning (such fun!), checking out some Doors Open spots today (the greenhouse at Rideau Hall, excellent as always), visiting with friends in Strathcona park (another spot that’s consistently great, especially with friends).

As I look up at “Issue #300”, I realize happily that those activities exemplify some of the principles I shared 200 issues ago, when this newsletter switched from the double to single digits. Thank you, as ever, for being along for this ride.

Briefly, some links, as I’m itching to do more things off-screen, before a week with loads of staring at screens:

Hello!

I spent the morning as a biking kit man to T and T’s mom, who ran the Ottawa marathon today. CONGRATS BOTH!! It was so awesome to see their accomplishment, gruelling as it was at times, and to share it with S and V at some key points along the route. We’re all thoroughly zonked, so I’ll just leave some links and head off to rest.

• This entertaining annotation of some legal back and forth over an inquiry requesting access to Boris Johnston’s journals taught me that there’s a full-on, proper inquiry “to examine the UK’s response to and impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, and learn lessons for the future”. Talk of an inquiry is all the rage in Canada at the moment—and with good reason!—but not with how we responded to the pandemic as its object. As I’ve written about previously (“Learning in crisis”, August 2022; “Broken social scene—wait, I mean, contract”, July 2022), this is the kind of serious endeavour I desperately wish this country would take on.
• Huge congrats to all in Nova Scotia’s new Department of Cyber Security and Digital Solutions, including Nova Scotia Digital Service friends. Matt Jukes recently reflected on his ten years in digital government, to which Matt Edgar recently responded—movement in Nova Scotia is a bright spot in the Canadian landscape, one I’m glad to see.
• “Why do [US] prison emails cost so much?” Concise, impactful depiction of prison as an industry. Canada has its own issues here, too, lest you thought this was a distinctly American thing.
• “Make all cars electric” is not the panacea some think it is, as heavy batteries will probably make those cars much more dangerous for those sharing the road. Not to mention the immense difficulty—primarily in water volumes, but not exclusively—of putting out an electric vehicle that’s caught fire. So, public transit anyone?

All the best for the week ahead!

Hello!

I smelled manure from the Experimental Farm while out biking this morning, and it gave me a great smile—manure’s a smell that reminds me of home, growing up near where suburban Waterloo gives way to farmer’s markets and fields.

Three quick links for you, as I’m enjoying a long weekend away from screens and focused on making things with my hands—and I hope the same for you!

• An interactive news story to surface and contextualize how often your personal information has been breached online.
  • A good example of how digital security is much more than just “use a password manager” (but my goodness, please do—I happily use 1Password and am happy to chat about it).
  • AND of how there’s so much we can’t opt out of in the digital sphere, hence the need for genuine attention to and action on data brokers, among other actors, who enable this wild ecosystem.
• La Niña has wrapped, El Niño is coming—and it’s about to get that much hotter. We thought it was hot the last few years and Alberta is having a very intense fire season unseasonably early, and yet the El Niño heat doesn’t even start until next year!!
• A calculator to see the salary impacts of the EC tentative agreement announced this week.
  • As various waves of collective bargaining produce agreements, I’ve been frustrated with how salary changes are presented: %, %s simply summed, %s compounded, and so on—so much room to imply one position or another. When the tentative agreement for my group came out this week, I realized I could build a calculator to show the tangible impacts of the proposed agreement.
  • It’s a good demonstration case for Observable notebooks, which I’m increasingly using to explore JavaScript’s impressive in-browser computation and visualization capabilities (this is just a calculator, nothing really impressive under the hood, but more to come from another project soon).
  • One piece I’d love to add: a “tithe” calculator, to show what CAPE-represented employees could contribute of their salary to compensate the lost salaries of PSAC-represented employees who went on strike to get, essentially, this very deal, for themselves and the rest of the public service (but PSAC’s wasn’t even as good, in some dimensions, which tells you a lot about bargaining dynamics). That’d be something closer to real solidarity. That is, if CAPE were, y’know, something closer to a robust union.

Hello!

I was already a few minutes from home during a walk earlier today, when I realized I hadn’t taken an antihistamine. Miraculously, I emerged mostly un-irritated—a sign, perhaps, of my slowly adapting to this pollen-y season, or of its slowly fading in intensity. Either way, no complaints!

I’ve been grappling lately with “how best to fill my free time”—an urge to relax well, to not waste my free time, as it were. I don’t have a particular goal or vision in mind for how best to spend my life—work can’t be the whole thing, I’m convinced of that, but I don’t have an excellent answer to “So what about the rest of your time?”

Time with friends and family is usually excellent, but I’ve been struggling more often than not lately with a gnawing sense that I should be up to more. In one attempt to grow and challenge myself, I’ve been exploring new hobbies, fumbling through unfamiliar motions and wondering if it’s really worth it. This leaves me grappling with “not knowing”, a sure sign of growth, but no less comfortable for being so.

Whew! We made it through a dreary week of April showers, and are now truly treated with May flowers.

I’ve had Springsteen’s “Glory Days” going through my head (and, on the not so rare occasion, my vocal chords). Perhaps it’s from seeing videos of Michelle Obama’s appearance singing the song with Springsteen in Barcelona.

But I’ve also been yearning for the simple pleasures of my childhood—getting lost for hours in a world (whether outside, or in a book, movie, game, or so on), having a broad sense of possibility (rolling hills always seem to come to mind), always learning so much (encountering things for the first time, more on average than later in life, will do that!)—and perhaps “Glory Days” is also about that, even if the lyrics aren’t really.

I chalk it up to our emergence from dreary weather to spring- and summer-like days, with all the feelings that evokes.

Hello!

It’s been—finally—a mostly chill, restful weekend. Long overdue, and grateful for it. We read, ate ice cream, did some light shopping, caught up with family (including Oma!), and later today will catch up with friends. No travel, nor trips to the hospital, nor much distress. I even had a chance to write some data parsing code! (To get a breakdown of my Communauto trips from PDF invoices, so thrilling are my interests.)

Part of the chill-ness, external factors aside, has also come from not reading too much on screens—I’ve had plenty of screen time (coding, gaming, accounting), but tried to focus my reading time on paper. Good for the eyes, yes, but also a good way to escape the onslaught of the feeds. To that end, I’ve been reading City of Illusions (Ursula K. Le Guin) and Pastoral Song (James Rebanks), both fitting books for a quiet, rainy weekend.

Because of this, I haven’t got many links to share, but that’s okay. More time for all of us to tend to things offscreen, whether books or plants or life outdoors or something else. Still, though, I’ve two brief notes, on Ottawa things that aren’t just Ottawa things:

It’s an overcast Sunday and there’s a mariachi band playing outside, which, much to T and A’s chagrin, means I’m trumpet-mouthing along (I suppose we should all be glad I haven’t yet broken out my actual trumpet). It’s not been quite the relaxing weekend either of us were expecting (not because of the mariachi band, but because of various continued health adventures), but we’re hanging in nonetheless.

Ottawa’s been thrumming this week with the PSAC strike. For those who wonder why office workers ought to unionize and, yes, strike—though not all PSAC workers are office workers, they make up a significant portion—Anne Helen Petersen offers a compelling argument, grounded in many of her previous pieces on precarity, class, and honest living. A +1 to Sean’s thoughts on the strike.

Hi folks!

Hope you’re all doing well. Two interesting links, as I slowly get back into a groove:

• Land trusts as a growing player in housing (along with all the pieces in The Local’s Rent Series)
• Erin Kissane has started up a new one of those ol’ internet sites, with a characteristically thoughtful, thought-provoking opening post

I’ve got some nice time with friends planned for the days ahead, followed by some calm days at home with T and A. The past few days of summery weather have been nice, but also a reminder to revel in the joys of spring while they’re here—in refreshing rains, rapid regrowth, and the buds of new flowers. I’m grateful to everyone who’s reached out since my note last week, and look forward to sharing this spring weather with you soon.

Some issues are links, others are reflections—this one’s a snapshot, of the last month. It’s been a long one, full in ways good and bad. I share it with you both for my own record, and because I sometimes find it helpful to read about arcs like these, to put my own into context. Maybe you do, too.

Four weeks ago, around this time, T, S, V, and I were on our way to the airport. The next week would bring us to Porto and Brussels. There are many happy moments from that week, but a few come to mind:

• Seeing flowers blooming in March (a welcome change from the snow that awaited us at home)
• Looking for the best pastel de nata in Porto (for once I wasn’t the one keeping the spreadsheet!)
• Hearing a club remix of Because the Night blasting from a beer tent in suburban Brussels (and then joining the party for a few moments!)

Two weeks ago, T and I were in Washington, DC. Some happy moments from that week:

Folks, it’s been a day—a week—a month. In hard ways, yes, though also in good ways! But I am thoroughly tired. The kind of tired where you’re waiting for the tears to come, but they don’t, then they show up at the most unexpected of moments. We’re back in Ottawa now, after a long stretch mostly on the road, but there’ll be more travels, soon enough.

I’m not following much outside my world right now, with few thoughts to offer there, either. Next week, I hope to have the energy to catalogue a few cool things from the last month, but we’ll have to see. (Maybe there’ll even be… photos!?)

• Good thoughts on privacy tradeoffs in “Personal Apps” (e.g., journalling tools): “The best ones start with private spaces and then add features from there, instead of starting with a mountain of collaborative features and integrations and then tacking on a privacy policy after the fact. They tend to be subscription-based, which can help align their business with their customers. Many also tend to not be venture capital-backed: several developers I’ve talked to went out of their way to mention refusing to take VC money because taking that money means growing fast and growing fast means making compromises. It’s hard to make a good Personal App when it’s mostly being sold to IT managers.”
• Commit, then make it fit: ‘Earlier this year, I found myself in a funk with side projects, so I threw my arms up, went to the Makeville website, and booked a class without thinking twice. I knew that if I thought too hard about making the class work around my schedule, it wouldn’t happen, but if I booked it and worked around the class’s schedule, it might work out—and it has! … Rather than waiting for the right time to take a class or go somewhere and end up only thinking about it, I need to just book the class or trip and work the rest of my life around it. This makes me want to fill almost every evening or weekend with something. Then, my day-to-day is less “what do I want to do?”, but instead “what’s next?”—always learning, making, and experiencing.’
• adrienne maree brown with some incredibly helpful (topical) advice about where to put our attention: on joy, not suffering.

All the best for the week ahead.

Hello!

Another weekend spent checking out cool places and visiting with friends. (I’ll stop vaguebooking in a week or two, I promise.) I heard a mockingbird this morning, which was super exciting. More on that another time, though—it’s time soon to head back out!

In the meantime, three links I found interesting in the last bit:

• Mandy Brown, responding to the hype around AI, by unpacking the idea of “intelligence”. As ever, a concise, provocative piece, that returns you (or, me, at least) to consider some core values.
• Interesting account—and argument for the merit—of trying to archive “householders” from Members of Parliament, the newsletters MPs can send using parliamentary (public) funds.
• Inflation is causing ice cream producers to reduce the size of their containers, which triggers taxation, as they’re now considered “single serving”. Gotta love (“love”) unintended consequences.

Hi there!

It’s been a lovely week travelling with T and friends (hi S and V!), but I’m pretty wiped and don’t have much to say otherwise. (Other than, I was glad to miss the news this week, it seems to have been pretty wack??) I’ll spare you the trip highlights, but suffice to say, it’s nice to get away to a different (head)space now and again. And especially to do that with T and good friends.

I’ve also got some personal things going on that may shorten these over the next few months—we’ll see what emerges. I hope you’ve had a good week, with some happy moments at the least, and wish you all the best for the week ahead.

Lucas

Hi!

Writing after a fairly hectic week, wrapping some things at work before some time off.

Because of that hectic week, I haven’t had much time to speak to, or reflect on, a really generous honour from Thursday. If you’ll forgive the indulgence, I’m touched to say that, as part of Open Data Week, the Canadian Open Data Society jury voted—uh—me as the 2022 Canadian Open Data Leader of the Year. The jury statement captures their kind reasoning, and we recorded a video where I explained a bit about my main open data project last year. If you were reading along in late November, the project may sound familiar—I previously wrote about the POEC Explorer, a tool to make it easier to access the transcripts of the Public Order Emergency Commission.

I’m particularly touched by this, since it acknowledges a broader definition of open data than we sometimes use, and an activity that I think is really important: not necessarily opening data (these transcripts were already on the web), but making it more available and accessible than it otherwise might be (now, the transcripts are available as both HTML and CSV, facilitating both reading and analysing the transcripts—treating the words as data, while also respecting their form as testimony).

Hello!

It’s been a lovely day, hosting S and V for brunch (Dutch babies are the best!), followed by time in the sun and springlike weather. Yes, there’ll be more snow and ice—and slush, loads of slush—to come, but we’ll enjoy the upbeat moments when they come.

Speaking of snow, T and I made a snowwoman yesterday. When we went back today, there was no trace, though it didn’t seem like there was any destruction—more like she’d walked off, on some private adventure. Happy for her!

• Krista Tippett recently interviewed Nick Offerman, and what an interview it was. Debbie Millman’s interview with him is also excellent—he brings a joyful humility and self-ease, a personality that’s lovely to spend time with.
• That reminds me of when Debbie Millman and Roxane Gay were interviewed by Brené Brown about their relationship, the infectiousness of their joy and love for each other. Gay recently wrote about a trip she and Millman took to Antarctica, with characteristic understated hilarity. She has a paragraph contrasting her and Millman’s approaches to travel, and T is very much my Debbie Millman in this respect—for which I’m glad. (And I’d be remiss if I didn’t re-surface the most excellent of ongoing Antarctica blogs, brr.fyi, with its delightful focus on infrastructure.)
• I’m enjoying Observable notebooks for data visualization and interaction. A few weeks ago, I shared a post by Ben Schmidt on the possibilities for web visualization—fittingly, it’s through many of his public notebooks that I’ve learned about and explored Observable.
• Finally, thank you to Sameer for sharing his reflections on turning forty-one. Plenty to quietly chew on when pondering the year ahead. (Don’t miss out on the poem and many links Sameer shares—always worth spending time with his newsletter.)

Hello!

Having a lovely cosy morning, after a lovely cosy day, which leaves me in more of a reading mood than a writing one. And that’s great! Rest, rest, rest, needs to be the rule of the day more often than it is.

Just really briefly, then, some links (for your reading, if you’d like)!

• “Put your name on it” by Lynn Fisher
• “Why governors put this over here, with the rest of the fire” by Waldo Jaquith
• “Researchers working on First Nations claims say Ottawa has made accessing archival records more difficult” by Patrick White
• “My Lifelong Quest for Silence” by Ted Gioia

Hello!

I’ve spent much of the weekend working on an exciting data-y side project. Been having fun learning about graph theory (just enough learning, that is, to torque the numbers I need from a graph) and pondering organizational structures. Awesome as that is, it’s seriously thrown off my adherence to the “best rest is no screen” principle, so, here we are, me a bit drained and various things still to do today.

So, then, some links!

• Speaking of graphs, the Open Syllabus Galaxy is a fascinating interactive visualization of relationships between different assigned readings in syllabi. And it’s accompanied by a detailed write-up of its data structure and creation—not sure which I love more!
• That led me (through a few clicks) to a reflection from a few years ago by Ben Schmidt on the evolution of different tools in the “data programming” landscape, and the increasing prominence of JavaScript—which is only truer today. As someone wrestling with how best to publicly visualize a large-ish dataset, lots to chew on here.
• Anne Helen Petersen on how exploitation and precarity are so increasingly common.
• Mandy Brown, in a similar theme, on how relationships can—should!—outlast working together.
• Apparently the 15-minute city concept has become a conspiracy theory about freedom of movement and I just really worry about the ability to have substantive policy conversations these days.
• Finally, the intrepid Antarctic blogger at brr.fyi has hunkered down for winter, sharing the details on how the base prepares for a long wait.

Hello!

T and I were talking last night about hospital doctors (particularly residents) who work 24-hour shifts. (If you hadn’t heard about this, there’s a good interview with a resident from ten years ago—though it’s very much still a thing—and there continue to be calls to abolish the practice, to little avail.) You can imagine different reasons for this, including the “physician god complex”, despite the huge incongruity of physicians doing something they’d never recommend to their patients.

I got to wondering whether it’s a legacy practice, grounded in assumptions that no longer hold: of lower patient volumes, higher staff numbers, fewer and simpler procedures, and technology that speeds rather than slows (the speedy technology would be paper, to be clear). In that world, there was at least a chance of using the bunks commonly found in hospital break rooms—24 hours didn’t meant 24 hours of work, but 24 hours of presence. The assumptions have changed, the status quo unjustified—yet 24-hour shifts persist.

Similarly, it’s increasingly likely the Rideau Canal will not open this year. This is a shame: the Canal is an iconic part of Ottawa’s winter landscape, the sounds and sights of people skating a cheery break from midwinter doldrums. It’s also… somewhat inevitable? Average temperatures pursue a stubborn course “up and to the right”, which, while great for many graphs, is not great for ice.

Hello!

Yesterday was one of varying degrees of angst and worry—the kind that, though not entirely gone, dissipates gradually with solitude and sleep. So, feeling (somewhat) better today. T was quick to remind me of environmental influences: it’s been frigid the past few days, and overcast or snowing otherwise; the extra friction (layers, steeling yourself, and so on) to a good outdoor experience has been part of bringing me down. Perhaps I need to embrace being dormant (or read Austin Kleon’s other posts on seasons).

Of course, another way to cope is by distracting yourself with interesting links—of which this week yielded plenty:

• Was a major budgeting error in Virginia the result of Excel? It’s entirely possible! Despite mindboggling investments into fancy ERP systems like SAP, so much decision-making and calculation happens with Excel, which is then manually re-entered into the ERP system. An early project at CDS dove into the idea that spreadsheets were the “human API” gluing together otherwise automated(ish) systems—Waldo lays out the many risks with such an approach.
• A thoughtful, practice-informed piece on access to born-digital archives like email. Found the privacy and ethics considerations—especially the cultural differences between, e.g., the US and the UK on the question—particularly interesting. Ryan has long shared the idea of analysing a department’s power structures not through its org chart, but through a network analysis of its email—if only government email was sufficiently preserved and accessible to enable something like that!
• Summary and reflection on an interview with Maryanne Wolf about reading—with helpful reminders about all the ways reading is not inevitable, of its myriad forms, and more.
• Some fun posts on the history and workings of the financial system, by Patrick McKenzie, with a few interesting tidbits on approaches in different countries: credit cards as a legacy system (with link to an account of the first major general purpose American credit card); the infrastructure behind ATMs.
• Julia Evans, following her post on floating point problems, listing some common problems with integers.

Hello!

T and I spent the day in Montreal with family—a last minute decision, but a nice change of scenery (even if much of the scenery was obscured by blowing snow). It’s been a lovely weekend, spent happily with people I love very much. (Montreal friends, I’ll be sure to come for longer next time, and give you a heads-up!)

To the links!

• Anne Helen Petersen paints a compelling portrait of the “layoff brain”, a generational psyche borne of constant precarity. I’ve been thinking about this essay all week. (Including, for reasons the section on “Consultant Layoff Brain” and the excerpt about McKinsey. What a broken world.)
• A story of a week spent with Ursula K. Le Guin—on meeting our heroes (gods?), writing, and facing it all with good humour. May we all have something of Le Guin’s clever grace. (via Mita Williams)
• Vass Bednar’s most recent newsletter does some characteristically clever policy thinking with Canada’s anti-spam and (federal) privacy law, imagining versions of control over technology well beyond our current paltry offering. What I perhaps appreciated most, the imagining aside, was Bednar’s pointing out the potential already inherent in the legislation, missed due to lack of enforcement efforts.
• Tom Critchlow points out a web publishing gap: it’s relatively easy to get a webpage online; it’s relatively hard to get a small database online, particularly one that people can contribute to collaboratively. (via Simon Willison)
• The South Pole is a constant process of snow management, to the point where decades-old buildings, though still fully functional, are buried under many feet of snow.

Good afternoon! (That’s me, trying to wake myself up as a small food coma combines with a dreary weather day.)

I’ve got some exciting spreadsheets to make today (cost benefit analyses! travel planning!), so will dive right into the links:

• I ate up this essay on the historical significance of the secretary role, a position of privilege and power once accorded great importance. Some of the observations on recordkeeping and filing are relevant well beyond the “secretary to important person” context: “we use computers, everyone can file their own things, look at the cost savings!” entirely misses the huge productivity costs of self-filing, which is very rarely done well.
• Speaking of recordkeeping and archiving, two Canadian historians (rightly) call out Canada’s absurd process to access historical government records (where little is made open by default, instead requiring an access request and manual review of every file before release), comparing it to the UK’s, which regularly announces new tranches of 20-year-old files automatically opened to the public. We accept such mediocrity.
• An excellent explanation of administrative burdens meant to expand access, by Jordan Kyle. It’s a great explanation of administrative burden generally, where people have to do a bunch to access some benefit or service they’re eligible for, adding a huge (often hidden) cost for (often vulnerable) people to access (often necessary) services.
• Ben Werdmuller gathers a host of research on how ineffective layoffs are—how they give the appearance of doing something economically smart, while devastating workers and hurting the company or organization itself in the long-run.
• Dan Sinker’s experience of not feeling up to trying for the last few years really rings true. Here’s to a year of trying?

All the best for the week ahead!

Hello! Good afternoon—or, well, it feels like afternoon here, as the sun stretches closer to the horizon and the shadows lengthen.

There are two modes we can go by. (There are always more, but let’s pretend there are just two. “Assume a can opener”, and so on.)

1. We can wake up with an alarm, to a schedule of hours and minutes and recorded time. In this mode, I aim to wake up by around 7 at the latest, though without a reason to get out of bed struggle to do so.
2. Or we can wake up with our body’s intuition, usually informed by light and hunger and so on. When on vacation, particularly longer ones, this tends to be more my speed.

The first mode might make you feel like you’re “behind” when you sleep in, that you lost time—you’ve overshot the schedule, time has slipped away, and now there’s simply less of it (because you can’t intrude on the sleep necessary to wake up at your planned hour tomorrow, of course).

Hello!

Been a bit of a week. Returned to Ottawa after a few (pretty full, heavy) weeks away, only for all the stress to dump on me and trigger a sick reaction (life happened, in other words, h/t Tantek Çelik for the link). My body telling me to rest more, even if I didn’t realize it at first—though I’m glad T did. It’s fitting that I read Mandy Brown’s latest, “Reentry”, right after asking for a bit more time to rest, for which I’m grateful to my new team for so graciously accommodating. So here we are, resting—reading, writing, and whatever else comes up (tending to the body’s needs, inseparable from those of the mind, as Winston Hearn’s recent year-end reflection reminded me).

And now for a flood of links:

• Susan Jean Robertson on being thoughtful about reading and favourite makes from 2022. (T and I got ourselves a sewing machine for Christmas, so the latter is particularly neat to see.)
• Ellen Pasternack captures so succinctly the problem I’ve long lived with statistics (and quant methods generally): the enormous gap between intro classes and diving any deeper into the concepts and techniques. Also offers some interesting ideas for how academic units can better support their researchers.
• Two Canadian writers dove into federal government contracting this week, Paul Wells and Justin Ling, following a Radio-Canada report similar in its findings to a Globe and Mail report on McKinsey. It’s all worth reading, if you care about questions like state capacity or whatever we call it—the ability for government to function. McKinsey is in the spotlight here, due to the timing of a trend in contracts with the firm and the firm’s being often in the headlines, but pick any of the Big Four and you’ll find a similar story (though with perhaps a different arc): Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC. Having written about this a few times last year (“Playing for team public”, “Assurance”), I care deeply—and am glad to see journalists and others digging into this.
• Appreciated Wesley Wark’s surfacing of an easily forgotten principle of the federal access to information system: it was never supposed to be the only way that records became public. I’d add a reference to s.2(3) of the act, which reads: “This Act is also intended to complement and not replace existing procedures for access to government information and is not intended to limit in any way access to the type of government information that is normally available to the general public.” The principle was written into the legislation from the start!
• Much of my reading—and linking—these days is to either personal sites or Substack newsletters (as with four of the links above). Patrick McKenzie (patio11) dove into the paid newsletter economy.
• Rach Smith wrote about an amazing regular day—and what made it possible, and why that’s not always possible.

Hello!

It’s been a pretty full day here (Italian families hang out on New Year’s Day, so I’m chock full of lentils and whatnot), after a full few weeks.

2022 was quite a year. The pandemic kept raging, despite an apparent collective effort to ignore it. I grew a fair bit, in ways I’m only just coming to recognize, and look forward to exploring more. Some notable personal changes, for my own (but public) record:

• T and I moved in together (!!)
• T and I adopted Arthur
• I started regular therapy sessions (which have been great! but the great-ness definitely depends on who you’re working with—I used a matching service that helped quite a bit)
• I started planning to get out a bit more (starting with some small concert trips in 2023)
• We went on some nice hikes, particularly during the fall colour season, finally getting to know the trails around us after a few years in the city
• My family maintained our weekly catch-up calls, with T (and Arthur, more often than not!) now a regular fixture
• I said goodbye-for-now to CDS, after contributing to some cool things this year, including amending a law and making an Order in Council
• I actually shipped a civic tech project, versus just creating an undocumented code or data repository (though I made plenty of those, too)
• Folks around me went through the challenges of aging—I did my best to help when I could, or to be a supportive and listening ear when that was the most I could do

Hi there!

Bit of a different situation today: writing this post from my phone, on the road. It’s been quite a week, but things are feeling more or less righted today.

In years past, I’ve used this near-end-of-year issue to discuss some favourite reads. Honestly, it’s been a slow year for reading: again, most of my reading happened through my book club (schedules and accountability!). Briefly, though, some notable books:

• We started the year reading Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel (who, if you didn’t know, is divorced), which is an excellent read for the times—particularly then, when Omicron was first making its ravages known, locking us down. Little did we realize it’d be the last, for many of us.
• The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich, another timely read, for its depiction of the tumultuous year that was 2020. Set in an independent, Indigenous bookstore in Minneapolis, it includes events from 2019 through 2020, including the murder of George Floyd and the pandemic. Shoutout also to the excellent “Totally Biased List of Tookie’s Favorite Books” that accompanies the book, as any book set in a bookstore should have.
• Finally, a nod to Pachinko (with thanks to T for the recommendation), a feat of worldbuilding (or, that term applied to a real setting, to things that’ve happened) that makes accessible a whole history of which I had very little knowledge.

Hullo!

Today began gloriously sunny, lighting up the decimetres of snow we got the last few days. It’s more subdued now—low-level clouds moved in, darkening and softening the views. Still, feels properly Christmas-y and so on, which is cute.

It’s been a pretty busy end to the year. This week saw the end of a long-running project, a continuation of the legislative change work from earlier this year. It felt great to pass the baton from the strategic policy side of things—getting a framework in place—to the delivery side of things, though of course there’s been plenty of mixing along the way.

Now, though, things feel at peace. Changes are afoot with me and work—Friday was my last day at CDS for a while, as I embark on a new adventure, on which more another time. I spent a fair amount of the week reflecting on, writing about, and discussing the past and future of CDS, and of the broader digital government project (federally, in Canada, globally, whatever you’d like). As ever, I was struck by the great privilege of getting to do this work—to contribute to public service, to try to help others, if mostly in a quiet, behind-the-scenes way. My fourth anniversary post (also linked above) includes links to many of my thoughts on the subject. No doubt there’ll be more like that, as I get my thoughts in order.

Hello!

Say a government has a policy objective. Implementing it requires sophisticated underlying infrastructure. This infrastructure is large, complex. Likely there’s a legacy system in play, one that, though at times stretched at the seams, continues to work—more or less, often with much thanks to staff heroics.

Senior actors in this government—politicians and public servants alike—know they need to get this right. They’re terrified of the alternative, of the impacts of failure, any failure, on people’s lives. At the same time, they’re not fully confident in their own ability—that is, the ability of the government and its public servants—to get it done.

Likely this is for a few reasons: the public service has (been?) shrunk, and lacks the capacity (if not the ability) to get this done; similar initiatives, in their own experience or elsewhere, have gone off the rails; there are a lot of stakeholders, internal and external alike, and they’re worried their own organizational structures and procedures will get in the way of satisfying those stakeholders. And, also, because they’re decision-makers with a lot riding on their decisions—and, let’s face it, they’re human—they want some kind of assurance that things will be okay.

Hello!

It was a good week. Changes afoot, on which more another time—for now, reading and rest.

As an opening note, I really appreciated Sara Hendren’s framing of “critique and repair”, as two modes or posts from which we might engage the world and seek change (via a post by Hendren on “solutions journalism”):

Critique is alive and well (thank goodness!). What are its modes of action? Critique unmasks hidden or suppressed realities. It reveals ugly truths. It subverts or even negates mainstream or inherited or lazy narratives.

…

Repair language suggests new futures. It invites possibility. Perhaps it translates ideas from the past that might be reinvigorated or more accessibly understood, or perhaps it enchants by asking: what if? What if this new different thing could come to life?

…

But understanding each mode as a post—as a vantage with a view of the horizon that is necessarily partial, with particular assets and with unavoidable drawbacks—is one way to sidestep the often corrosive debates about “civility” that tend to explode in urgent times. Instead of policing the tone of others, wanting either less or more anger, less or more imagination and kindness, we might instead ask: What is my post?

Hello!

I spent much of the weekend working on a civic tech project, so I haven’t got much juice left to write in-depth here.

The project is a web version of testimony presented at the Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC), variously known as the “Emergencies Act Inquiry”, “Convoy Inquiry”—you know the one. I’ve written in past weeks about the interesting documents the POEC is surfacing, but didn’t realize until late this week that there are verbatim transcripts posted as PDFs after each day of testimony. (See, for example, the transcript from the last day of testimony, with the prime minister as witness.)

They’re great! They’re thorough, well-structured, and machine-readable. (The first and second attribute is great for anyone; the second and third attributes made this project possible.) Court reporters (stenographers, in other parlance) are really good at what they do. Transcripts are very helpful: not everyone can or wants to listen or watch a long video of a hearing; you can’t easily search a video; and so on.

For the Extremely Online™, this last week has been a continued horror show. It’s renewed and revitalized my impulse to have whatever I write (post, photo, etc) on the web under my roof, to homestead my digital presence.

To that end, I finally took some time to follow an idea I’d noted in August, to make my own site more IndieWeb, by setting up an IndieKit server. (Words!) That’s now running happily, enabling me to post notes to my site, which then get syndicated out to Mastodon. (Back then, I’d planned to send them to Twitter—alas, the time has come to leave.)

My first syndicated post was a test (successfully syndicated to Mastodon), to which I exuberantly replied shortly thereafter (it was posted originally on Mastodon, then copied back—still figuring out how I’ll handle that). It’s very nerdy, very fun, and deeply satisfying—who knows if I’ll actually post more short notes, but the plumbing’s all in place now, if I want to.

• You should really just subscribe to Mandy Brown’s website, A Working Library, as I’ll link most every post I read there. “Out of time” explores the idea of restlessness and technology, how tech “consumes rest”—and Mandy reminds us of radical definitions of rest, which oughtn’t feel so radical.
• Combining many of my interests (disaster / emergency management, insurance, policy, bureaucracy, to name a few), a profile of the Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements program caught my eye. One point that struck me: the idea that “governments just don’t know how to say ‘no’”, to requests for assistance beyond the program’s parameters, or to building in known danger zones (like floodplains). To whom are governments comfortable saying “no”, and in what contexts? In the domestic disaster context, the answer seems clear, but I contrast it to the countless, often invisible or unpublicized “no”s that governments make, direct (decision) and indirect (indecision) alike, often suffered by the most vulnerable.
• It was a pleasure to watch Sean Boots and Amanda Clarke present their recent research into the scale of government contracting (specifically IT spending, in this context) at a recent meeting of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (OGGO). A scholar-practitioner combo for the ages!
• Interesting to consider the various mechanisms and incentive structures through which government can help to secure open source software. Of course, there’s an argument to be made that making software open source in the first place is a (potentially, at least) positive contribution to security, because it enables otherwise impractical scrutiny. (Amanda made a similar point toward the end of the OGGO session, pointing out how, if ArriveCAN’s code were open source, weekend hackathons could be spent scrutinizing work, instead of recreating it.)
• Enjoyed Rach Smith’s description of her “lifestyle-centric career”.
• Anil Dash with the how-to for two key kitchen staples: roasted garlic and pickled onions.

I’ve been lacking the motivation to go outside the last few weeks—little surprise, as the seasons change and our bodies only gradually adapt. And as I write that, it starts snowing! Alas. Promising myself to get out, a little and often if that’s what it takes, will get me through it.

The last week or so has been full of lovely family time. It also had a fair bit of screen time (though less than if I’d been working, I suppose), eyes glued to the rapid decline of Twitter, mind thinking about the possibilities of Mastodon and elsewhere. I promised myself I’d take a break this weekend, but between working on a side project and playing Flight Simulator, thus far that hasn’t worked out.

Promises, eh? Perhaps the only promise to self we can truly, fairly make is to give ourselves grace for the times we inevitably fall short of our hopes or expectations.

• As a bunch of people learn about (intuitively or explicitly) the limits and possibilities of the ActivityPub protocol (which Darius Kazemi helpfully explains how to learn) that underpins Mastodon, Bookwyrm, and other fediverse services, it’s neat to read Robin Sloan’s reflections on specifying a protocol—especially the call to imagine.
• Brexit has caused a host of pressures for the UK civil service. An interesting one is a commitment to (immediately? eventually?) replace EU laws having effect in the UK. This is, it turns out, very hard to do: the laws cover 1973 to 2016 (or 2019), and “nobody ever thought the whole thing would need to disentangled, and so nobody thought to keep any track of it”.
• Kudos to folks writing at the Globe for digging into bureaucracy. Two notable pieces from this week: Shannon Proudfoot on the federal government’s recent struggles with service delivery; Tom Cardoso on the apparent (though questioned) barriers to the proactive release of completed access to information requests. (On the latter, a reply by Tim Sayle points out that Library and Archives does, sometimes, proactively release packages for its records; though there’s a whole other rabbit hole to go down about why we need to access historical records through an access to information request.)

I’m pretty tired, so I won’t dive into the big thing of the week—constitutional unconstitutionalism is what I’ve been calling it, and yes, sure, in a formal legal sense this is probably permissible, and yes, sure, there’s good political theory in favour of (at least some degree of) parliamentary supremacy (though there’s also good stuff in favour of judicial review! there are no absolutes!), and yes, of course, it’d be great if kids could be in school, but this is a chilling attack on labour, which makes pretty much everything possible, so it’s right to be up in arms, and it’s well past time for workers to get their due. Each of those breathless sentence segments warrants at least a paragraph of its own, but that’ll (have to) do for today.

• This piece on socially acceptable anxiety came at a great time. As a friend at work put it, “it must suck to think so much, about everything”, and, whew, were they ever right. Sometimes, alas, we can’t simply think our way out of things—that does suck, but it’s an important start to recognize it, and flow accordingly.
• Craig Mod walks a lot. This week, he reiterated his key tips for a good walk.
• brr is a delightful blog, chronicling the author’s experience leading up to and during their (currently ongoing) placement as an IT tech in ANTARCTICA. It’s great fun—very cool, you might say. I liked: “Hut Point!” for an example of the small rules and incredible amount of cooperation and planning that enable a year-round village at the end of the world; “Onboarding Timeline” for an overview of the many (MANY) overlapping approval and clearance processes; and, well, all the posts—there’s so much to learn, and I’m looking forward to more!
• Some fine folks have filed a class-action lawsuit over GitHub Copilot, the automagic code completion (writing!) tool that’s taken developers by storm. As the accompanying background investigation discusses, this has potentially enormous implications for questions of “fair use” and open source code—an area with relatively little case law to date. Matthew Butterick, co-leading the case, noted his initial legal misgivings about Copilot earlier this year.
• Oh wait, ha! You thought I was really just going to do a breathless mini-rant about shutting down labour, without at least one related link? As some scholars at Active History remind us, it’s thanks to a labour strike that we have—checks notes—widespread maternity leave (which has since evolved into parental leave). One way or another, this week has been the start of something big.

Ooooookay—all the best for the week ahead! Particularly to those on the picket lines.

Lucas

Hello!

Had one of those “sitting an exam you haven’t studied for” dreams last night, except it was very much a history student version of it: I dreamt that it was the end of term and I hadn’t started on any of my papers. Glad to not be in that situation, though it had the hilariously opposite effect of prompting me to look into grad school again—maybe I’ll be one day ready again to dive back into the world of exams and essays.

Went out for an amazing foggy, then sunny, bike ride this morning. Felt so good during and after. This body—mind connection stuff, it’s real. Must do more, of course. Perpetual note to self, there. Sigh.

Okay, one section on social media and the crisis du jour (Twitter, Elon Musk, Mastodon), then a quick bit on some interesting documents from the inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act, then a few links.

What a lovely weekend it’s been. Plenty of time outside, alone and with friends, biking and walking and eating and enjoying the scenery. But it’s also tired me out!

I’ve been thinking through a big decision, which tends to take up brainspace. It’s interesting to see where my mind and attention wander when under “thinking stress” like this.

For example, I spent time reading documents from the inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act. We have, for example:

• the readout of a conversation between a bunch of federal deputy ministers and various police chiefs
• the notes of an OPP incident commander from the bridge blockade in Windsor (apparently the “INCIDENT COMMANDER’s notes” template is in… COMIC SANS!?)
• a WhatsApp group chat for city staff debriefing updates from the National Capital Region Command Centre (NCRCC) (apparently WhatsApp continues to play a role in city hall drama!)
• oh hey, more WhatsApp chats between the city manager and the general manager of emergency and protective services (there’s a very relatable “I hate WebEx” on page 22)

Hello there!

It’s been a few weeks of glorious fall colours. T and I have been making a point of getting out, to bask in some of this precious season while it lasts. (Seasons are so funny—the quintessential part of fall lasts for perhaps a third of the season, followed by at least a month of dreariness. Sigh.)

Inside the house, most of the plants are struggling, after having previously thrived. We think it’s something in the soil—either that, or some airborne infection or invisible pests. (It could be our plant care technique, too, but it’s been a suspiciously coordinated decline.) It’s overwhelming to deal with all of them, hard to accept the loss (or significant trimming) of some beloved green friends. But there’s also, I suppose, some embrace of life’s cycle in doing so, an acceptance of earth passing to earth that comes with this season. So it goes.

Onto the links!

I often put off shopping (and the research it often requires) until I can do so in one burst, which I did recently. I recently had something like four or five deliveries coming over two or three few days (each from a different carrier!).

Living in an apartment downtown, deliveries can be stressful! There’s missing them, the intercom not working, packages left at your door (or maybe not!), and so on. They’re stressful for drivers, too: nowhere to park, or parking illegally while dashing in and out of unfamiliar buildings, only to have to navigate busy streets while on a tight schedule. Hence I normally avoid deliveries, but today’s economics are such that I can only get some items online, or it’s far more practical or affordable to get them delivered versus heading out to a store in the suburbs.

I try to send deliveries to the post office (which anyone can do, for free, with Canada Post’s neato FlexDelivery service), because we have this incredible public logistics network, but many private companies, for private reasons that make sense in their contexts, opt to use other carriers that don’t have access to the public network (or won’t use it, again for private reasons), and so we have all these public pick-up and drop-off points that are probably underused, and instead loads of packages just left on doorsteps and so on, with all the stress that can bring. So that sucks.

This process has reminded me of—I saw it somewhere, Twitter probably—a hypothetical: “Would you choose slower delivery, if it gave your delivery drivers real benefits and better working conditions?” And, if slow would actually result in those things, yes! So much yes! But will it actually?