March 29 to April 4, 2026

• Got the first draft of the report done Monday night

  • It was a (business) day later than intended but I think better for the extra thought, and against deadlines and timelines that I had set. I think I got caught up on this one in a cycle of perfectionism absent decision-maker input - basically I should have just drafted a crappy (by my standard) version sooner and sent it off. I'm living in a weird zone with clients sometimes, where I can't make up my mind whether I'm a consultant (where even the first draft ought to be quite pristine before they see it) or a team member (where there's value in shitty first drafts).

• A big Thing to which I have been a very small contributor got summarily and surprisingly cancelled at the 11th hour after many months of successful runtime for what seem to most likely be political reasons

  • My feelings about this are moderated by the fact that my role was only meant to continue for another month or so, and indeed will continue in the fashion originally planned because of how the contracts and funding shake out. But mostly I feel quite sad, for the development team that has made something rather great and for the implementing teams who are frontline service workers for the most part who took a big swing on this despite otherwise very full plates and saw encouraging results
    • Indeed I feel confident that the cancellation of this Thing was less about a failure to succeed, and if anything become too complicated politically because of its success
      • One of my favourite concepts from the time I spent in the Systemic Design trenches with the Government of Alberta was the notion of something being "catastrophically successful"; typically we'd talk about something being so successful that it started to generate unexpected negative externalities or consequences unintended by the designers. But maybe this is a different kind of "catastrophic success", where a new thing is so good and nice that it attracts a kind of institutional prey class from up a trophic order who decide that its value needs to come to life in some different way and that the conditions in which it came to be are no longer acceptable.
        • This makes me think of the Dark Forest Theory again, which I wrote about last week, and also about Tall Poppy Syndrome -- both scenarios where burning too bright attracts unhelpful kinds of attention

• I watched Is This Thing On? which is Laura Dern and Will Arnett as Tess and Alex navigating a divorce and rediscovering creative and intellectual and professional passions after letting all that slide.

  • Overall it was fine?
    • I liked Arnett and Dern's performances a lot, and I enjoyed Ciarán Hinds small role (although I suspect I could watch him in anything quite happily).
    • There was a bit where Arnett's character is reflecting on his marriage and says something to the effect of "I thought I was unhappy with the marriage, but instead I was unhappy in the marriage" which is probably a good thing to check in on periodically as a person in a long-term relationship!
    • I was a bit disappointed in the ending. Over the course of the movie, Arnett and Dern wind up kinda-sorta back together after she accidentally sees him perform his stand-up set for the first time. They characterize it as having an "affair with an ex". I was thinking and kind of hoping that eventually they would realize that this was a fantasy compared to the real dysfunction of daily life that had led them to the split in the first place, but that they would come away from the experience wiser and better equipped to co-parent their kids respectfully. Instead, in the end, they wind up back together more permanently, which I guess is good sociologically (like, for the sake of their boys? I guess?) but is not very interestin storytelling and felt kind of saccharine to me.
    • I also would have liked to see more of Alex's creative process around his stand-up. In the movie, he just kind of gets up on stage for the first time and starts telling some jokes, and then throughout the rest it's shown that he has pages of notes in a folder, and there's some conflict with his kids finding and reading those notes, but in general I would have liked more insight into how he writes jokes that seem to land, or how he workshops them over time.

• At the end of May, we (I) will be giving up the office space that's been home to October Systems Inc. for the past two years, and so I've been iterating through a few different working arrangements lately with varying success.

  • (We are letting go of our office at the end of a two year lease, partly because the new price is almost double our admittedly-cheap original price, but mostly because the office space is unbearably hot from October to June. The hallway thermostat read 26°C last week — coincidentally the same temperature that the City of Toronto is thinking of adopting as a maximum allowable temperature for apartments.)
  • Ultimately, we're doing some work on the basement to return it to home office glory — levelling the floor, putting down vinyl flooring
  • In the meantime, though, this week I've tested out:
    • Cafe working: good, although I am a conscientious customer and don't want to overstay my welcome nor am I particularly keen to 'feed the metre' with more purchases. We've got a number of good cafes in the hood but the platonic ideal for me is Field Trip Cafe at ~Bloor and Dovercourt in Toronto's West End, with its bright windows and a decent amount of space to set up and work
    • Church working: I have a friend who's a Mennonite minister and somewhat out of the blue he asked if I was interested in co-working at his church on Wednesdays which is his main in-office day (other than the big weekend days of course).
      • I'm not religious, although I was raised going to church, but I like being in churches. They're generally calm and quiet, designed for contemplative activity and fellowship. Plus it's nice to see a pal.

• At the end of the week, heading into the Easter weekend, I got sick.

  • This winter, on balance, has been much better illness-wise. The first few years of daycare were brutal, with lots of respiratory and GI illness through the winters. But this year we've mostly dodged it.

• Despite looming illness, Friday was glorious — 18°C and periodically sunny.

  • We went to Riverdale Farm, which is a quaint little working farm embedded right in the middle of the city. There are cows, horses, chickens, goats, pigs, sheep, rabbits, and ducks, all nestled in amongst some lovely heritage homes and outbuildings on the edge of the Don Valley
  • We ate pastries and ice cream in the sun, and suffered our first ice cream/sidewalk calamity of the season.