March 8 to 14, 2026

• Wobbly energy, wobblier focus. I have an almost-3 month old. It's par for the course!

• Manually transcribing in-person Lark workshop outputs -- deciphering handwriting on post-its and printed templates, and then figuring out how to mash it all up so that I can start to make sense of the patterns. My preferred method for synth here is to feed the bits of text (tagged for their originating activity) into a virtual whiteboard and then start to cluster and pattern-find manually. I suspect there's parts of this that can be fed into an LLM, in particular going from the corpus of raw inputs to some semblance of patterning, but I equally suspect that a) the fragmented nature of half-baked post-it notes as a shadow of the actual discussion that was happening (vs., say, interview transcripts) requires quite a bit of offline context to make sense of, and b) actually doing this work is how the ideas get into my brain in a persistent, usable kind of way. I may try an LLM anyway in parallel just to see where it lands!

  • This all rolls into a big report that's due at the end of April for this program. After I've got my head around this workshop material, it's report planning time. Hoping to get this sucker done well in advance but we'll see.

• Worked with LV on an RFP response for a sprawling healthcare patient experience framework thing. She does a lot of these RFP responses, and I have done very few. The process was kind of impressive in how it asked for a ton of content and then made it rather difficult to supply it in the end (in our jams we repeatedly circled on the question of the character limit of an Excel sheet cell).

  • This kind of thing is always a good opportunity to step back and reflect -- on what I've been doing in the last 7 (!) years of independent practice, what I've done well and have to show for it, and what I want to be doing next.

• We had a spike of mild weather here in Toronto at the beginning of the week, and being out in the world and the yard has been glorious. Now it's cool again but, as a local radio host put it, we've broken the back of winter after so many weeks of deep snow

• On the weekend I made the best chicken I've ever made. Capturing for posterity: four good quality bone-in, skin-on thighs, salted on all sides and allowed to come to temperature (15 min on the counter before cooking). In parallel, heat the stainless steel pan on high until a flick of water from fingertips skitters like mercury rather than instantly vaporizing. Pour in a reasonable glug of oil, roll the pan like a ship in the sea to coat, return the pan to heat but drop down to medium heat. Put the chicken in skin-side down, and place something heavy on top (I got some of the Insta-bait protein weights for Christmas and I actually like them a lot!) to ensure lots of good skin/pan contact and minimize any tendency for the chicken to curl or pull away from the pan. Cook until the skin turns shatteringly crisp, golden, and pulls away from the pan with no issues, then flip and cook on the other side. At this point, use an instant read meat thermometer to start checking temp. Pull the chicken when the thickest part reads at least 165°F (for thighs you may want to cook it a little longer -- they can handle the heat).

  • While the chicken was great, I tried to make a butter / leek pan sauce and it broke, I think because I left the heat too high for too long. It still tasted great but wasn't as luscious as it could have been.

• Listening: does listening to music actually help with concentration and focus? I definitely want it to! Lots of Ben Lukas Boysen, jameszoo, Son Lux (tangentially: it's been a delight watching this tiny trio I saw in a bar in 2014 score Oscar winners and huge AAA games)

• Watching: Hacks. I've mixed feelings about shows about shows (something like Somebody, Somewhere feels like the exact opposite of that!) but the relationship between Ava and Deborah is a delight.