Category: 🧩 Miscellanea
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March 2025
Housing Over the course of February, we finished unpacking everything in the living areas of the house and have gotten settled in to the new place. We were able to host friends for the first time mid-month in February which was a great feeling. Late February in Calgary saw a very rapid thaw after a…
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Edward Tufte on Interface Design
No matter how beautiful your interface is, it would be better if there were less of it. Edward Tufte
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February 2025
Housing January was a whirlwind as we moved out of our old house, in to our new house, and started to get unpacked and organized in the new place. In reality, this meant I wasn’t able to make any progress on anything else during the month of January. Moving into February, there is still a…
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Jane Jacobs on Old Buildings
As for new ideas of any kind – no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be – there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error, and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.…
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You Don’t Need A Full-Size Pickup Truck, You Need a Cowboy Costume
Brett Berks article, You Don’t Need A Full-Size Pickup Truck, You Need a Cowboy Costume, provides a good look at truck culture and the disconnect between how trucks are marketed and how they are actually used by owners. On one hand there’s no accounting for taste, on the other hand I appreciate the statistic that…
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Bill Fletcher Jr. on Responses to COVID
Yes, people were angry about restrictions imposed as a result of the pandemic, I got that, but what was being proposed in opposition? What was being proposed in response to the very real problem of dealing with a virus? An almost humorous response from the US right came from the lieutenant governor of Texas who…
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January 2025
Housing In December we finalized the purchase of a new house, and sold our current house (in a brief 3 days). We celebrated Christmas but also spent a lot of time packing for the move. Moving into January, the focus is now the move itself which will happen mid-month and getting settled into the new…
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Can Architecture Trigger Neuroinflamation?
Studies have established that architecture can trigger a stress response, but stress is more than a mental response – it triggers a whole host of compensating mechanisms in our bodies including hormonal changes. Cleo Valentine is doing interesting research, taking the impact of architecture one step further, by examining whether persistent exposure to stress caused…
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Thoughts on Hiring
Thinking about hiring, the typical process for screening candidates using written applications is likely to become far less effective as it becomes a game of adversarial bots both creating applications for positions and evaluating them. In light of this I see one possibility being less emphasis on written applications going forward, resulting in more emphasis…
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Recapturing the Magic of the Early Blogging Days
Chuck Grimmett’s post on recapturing the magic of the early blogging days describes a lot of my intentions with the latest changes to my website. The one thing I would add from my philosophy is: ‘spend less time building, more time using and maintaining’