Well, I gotta say, this project to convert an inherited china cabinet into a growing space turned out as well as I’d hoped!
The final pair of 2024 Tour Alberta for Cancer socks. Another rainbow yarn but this time with a simple wavy motif and some cables I threw in for fun.
Strava Lost The Plot
Strava began rolling out a new beta feature where an LLM provides commentary on training activities, and in doing so provided a perfect example of how tech companies both cannot resist climbing aboard this latest bandwagon while having no idea how to make it useful beyond replacing their own jobs.
If you’re not aware, Strava is a social media platform disguised as a fitness tracking application. For years they’ve carved out a nice little niche for themselves in the space, first by offering some truly unique and value-added features like their heat map and route planner, which uses real user data to find routes where people cycle, run, and so forth, and second, by incorporating a number of social features to allow athletes to interact, whether it’s liking each other’s activities, commenting, organizing group events, and so forth. Notably, quite a few professional athletes use the platform, including legendary riders like Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar, which allows fans to follow their activities and so forth.
Strava opts for a freemium model, with a number of key features included in a paid tier, and as I’ve become more serious about cycling, I’ve found those paid features to be worth the price. As part of those packages, they include things like additional analytics, which provide various statistics about activities, a route planner with automated route suggestions based on their heatmap data, and leaderboards which, I have to admit, I kinda enjoy as they gamify community-defined segments for sprints, climbs, and so forth.
All of these features do one of two things: connect athletes to each other, or give athletes access to data, either about themselves or supplied by the community, that they can use to enhance their activities.
Unfortunately, recently it seems Strava has caught a nasty cold that is infecting companies the world over: AI. And in doing so I’m afraid Strava is demonstrating why tech companies ultimately fail to understand basic concepts like trust and empathy.
By the way, just a brief interlude: if you want to disable this mis-feature (for now), in the app you have to pick “Show More” on one of the AI generated callouts, select “Give Feedback”, and from there you can leave the beta. Given how difficult that option is to find, I’m comfortable calling this a dark pattern.
Alright, let’s get back to it, shall we?
Continue reading...I’ve posted about these a lot so apologies if you’ve seen them before. FO post number two for the Tour socks, this time some colourwork!
Finally some FO posts from my Tour Alberta for Cancer sock knitting projects. For this first pair I worked up an old familiar pattern in a lovely purple.
Review: Inverted World
Review of Inverted World by Christopher Priest (9781590177051)★★★★
Lately I’ve been struggling to find a book that could really pull me in, and certainly Inverted World did that! It’s a shame it had to end with such a fizzle because the journey was great!
The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the "optimum" into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death.
The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping...The set up is just so incredibly tantalizing. A moving city. A twisted reality. A gradual reveal as our protagonist, who was raised in ignorance, slowly learns the truth of his world. It really is gripping stuff and pulled me right in, which was a welcome change from my recent grinding re-read of The Sprawl series.
What follows is, I hope, a relatively spoiler free review of the book. However, if you really want no hints–and given the book is a bit of a mystery box, with the joy in opening it and revealing its contents–it might be best to read the book before proceeding further!
Though I will say: I don’t understand why the ending is praised. Be ready for a fairly dull, exposition-laden finish and a very sudden ending that at first made me wonder if there was something wrong with my copy of the book.
Continue reading...Second pair of Tour socks delivered, and thank goodness, they fit!
Another Tour raffle prize done! Well, assuming they end up fitting the winner, anyway…
Failing
As I continue the process of learning to drive, and now need to start hunting for a new job, some thoughts on failure.
I never learned to drive.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve thought off and on about this, about how I managed to skip such a typically formative step in life. Looking back I can’t claim I made a specific decision not to get my license. It really was a combination of avoidance, lack of need or desire, and circumstance that led me to never learn.
The lack of need was born of the fact that, living in a city, through a combination of cycling and public transit, it was easy enough to get around, and I had little desire to go further afield. My passions were in school, in front of the computer, or on the basketball court, and all those were close enough that driving wasn’t really necessary. And as I got older, I had a girlfriend and eventually wife who not only could drive, but loved it and was happy to do it.
As for circumstance, I grew up a latchkey kid. My mom, who I now realize was a bit insane, typically worked two or three jobs to ensure we had a roof over our head, food on the table, and to my astonishment in hindsight, a computer to keep her nerdy kids occupied. Simply getting time behind the wheel back then was not easy, and we certainly couldn’t afford to pay for lessons.
As for avoidance, looking back it’s now obvious that as early as my late teens I had some issues with anxiety. I think I was genuinely afraid to get behind the wheel, recognizing the risks and responsibilities that driving entails.
But let’s not forget the greatest anxiety of all: the fear of failure.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but that fear of failure often ruled my life well into my mid-twenties. I chose my education not only because it was something I was already interested in, but also because it was something I was already very good at. I chose my career for the same reason, and stayed there, doing the same basic things, for quite a while before I found the will to shift my career into something new. I even delayed proposing to my now wife because I was afraid I’d get it wrong.
But over time I gradually became more comfortable with the prospect of failure and, oddly enough, in part I think I have knitting to thank for it.
Continue reading...Man it was a whole journey to get to sock number one in this pair. I copied the motif from some photos, then improvised the slip stitch sole and striped gusset, all while re-learning Fair Isle knitting. Turns out, when you make something up as you go, you make a lot of mistakes and find as many design choices that don’t work as ones that do! But I took lots of notes so the second one should be much smoother sailing! I hope…
Man, 30 years later and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is still a banger. While I remembered the game having amazing level design, when you consider the context at the time, what they did in that game was really remarkable. And damn that soundtrack is great!
And it played great on the Miyoo A30 I picked up in a lark. For the price it’s a great little device to carry around!
One Year
Somehow, despite running a blog (sometimes quite intermittently) for the past twenty years, I never knew August 31st was World Blog Day. So it seemed as good a day as any to finally write a long-overdue post looking back on this break I’ve been on, and looking forward to what comes next.
Folks who know me, or who have been following my posts here or on social media, know that, after a lot of years of hard work, good planning, and truly monumental luck, last year I found myself in a position to take an extended break from my career. As a decision it was probably one of the most significant ones I’ve ever made, and it was far from an easy one, as I knew I’d be walking away from a lucrative career working with some of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. But after twenty years at the same company, and a lot of soul searching, I knew that it was time for a change, and rather than immediately jump into a new opportunity, I decided it was better to take some personal time to unwind, reflect, and eventually re-enter the work force with more purpose and intention.
Now, well over a year in, it feels like I made that decision only yesterday. Certainly, fairly early on I noticed just how quickly time can fly, but even then I don’t think I appreciated how short this break would feel fourteen months in. And while, yes, I went in with a lofty list of goals and only achieved a few, I can honestly say there’s little I would do differently.
At the beginning I genuinely assumed I’d eventually get so bored that going back to work would feel like a relief. Certainly, during past extended periods of time off (e.g. over Christmas), that was my experience.
And yet, rather than boredom, I discovered how freeing it is to spend time doing things both meaningful and yet outside any traditional definition of work, and how our western sense of self as being inherently tied to the work we do prevents us from seeing the many other ways that we can build and create and have a positive impact on others outside that narrow perspective.
Continue reading...