Posted onAugust 31, 2023|Comments Off on It’s the end of year! Here’s some very good thoughts (especially at the end) and the usual ramblings on a new year (i.e. the August 2023 edition of my not-a-newsletter newsletter)
Hold up, you say! It’s not the end of the year! The year still has four more months!
Sure, fine, if you go by the Gregorian calendar. But if you go by the beginning of the (Canadian) school year, as I do, then the new year starts the day after Labour Day, which is the upcoming Monday. A new year is about to begin. The summer is winding down, and the cooler Fall temps are already sliding into our evenings here in Toronto. As someone who loves September and hates August, I am excited for all the new month and the new year brings.
What about the pandemic? While the pandemic is still dormant, COVID-19 the disease is seeing a resurgence. The Toronto Star has a story on the new COVID variance, BA.2.86 here as does the CBC. For American coverage, the New York Times has more on it here and here. Will this new variant mean we are heading back to lockdown days? I highly highly doubt it. But I would not be surprised to see people in hospitals and other areas at risk wear masks again. Let’s check back in a month.
Should I mention social media, crypto, politics or climate change? Perhaps the next newsletter. Those things will be here with us then, still.
Culturally, Beyonce, Barbie and Taylor Swift continue to reap the whirlwind, adding 11.5 billion dollars to the U.S. economy in the last quarter. Good news! Also good news for Swift fans in Canada: she is going to be coming for a six night stay in Toronto. It should be especially good for Toronto, which could use the windfall her tour brings to places.
Well, that’s it for the newsletter! Short, but sweet. No doubt as we head into the new year / Fall, new developments will pick up and there will be more material on my weird newsletter. Meanwhile enjoy the remaining summer days while you can. And enjoy the gentle Autumn days coming your way too. After June, September is my favorite month. I’ll be enjoy mine: I hope you’ll be enjoying yours too.
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Posted onAugust 28, 2023|Comments Off on The WFH wars and other work related ideas
Zoom — yes, that Zoom — was in the news lately due to their mandate forcing people to work in the office. Here’s just one of many pieces on it. Buried at the bottom of that piece was this:
Zoom (ZM) has had its own difficulties as demand wanes following a pandemic-fueled surge. In February, Zoom (ZM) cut approximately 15% of its staff, amounting to about 1,300 employees, after growing too quickly. Members of the executive leadership team also reduced their base salaries by 20% for the coming fiscal year and forfeited their fiscal year 2023 bonuses.
Relatedly, a union drive is underway at Grindr. So what does Grindr management do? Try to force employees back into the office too. See here for details.
Look, management can have many reasons for having people come back to the office. While those reasons are often portrayed as positive, they might not be. Want to shed employees because business is bad but don’t want to have to lay them off? Then force them to come into the office like Zoom. For some it will be impractical or undesirable and they will leave. Voila: workplace reduction achieved. Want to make it difficult for employees to organize a union? Make them come to work where you can monitor them closely. None of these things are about employees being more productive, etc….they are about using the office as a weapon to manage your business woes.
I suspect these WFH (work from home) battles will be ongoing for a few more years, until leases come up for renewal. I could be wrong, but once that happens, I suspect more and more companies will eliminate costly office real estate from their assets and working from home (or temp offices) will become the norm. That’s going to occur over the next few years though, not immediately.
Regardless of where you are working, here’s some tips on balancing work and life I recommend you read. And if you do have to go to the office, read this good piece on how leaving the office at five is not a moral failing,
To close off, here’s three pieces on badness at work:
Bad Tools: workplace monitoring tools are bad. If you have to deal with them, here’s something that can help.
I often wondered whatever happened to wines based on the Marechal Foch varietal in Ontario. In the 1980s it was quite common to find winemakers selling it. As wikipedia describes it:
Marechal Foch can withstand freezing temperatures, below 32° F (0° C), for extended periods of time. Several amateur growers told me that they thought Marechal Foch could grow in Alaska, which might be an exaggeration, but the point was made. The variety was planted extensively in France during the latter part of the 1800s right through the latter part of the twentieth century, until the French government mandated that hybrid, non-noble varieties be removed.
Yep, it was a pretty hardy grape capable of growing in a lot of different places, and if you were taking a chance with a vineyard in a cold place like Canada, going with that made sense. But then something changed. Here’s Tony Aspler: The Wine Guy with some history:
For all its success with Maréchal Foch, Inniskillin has none planted in its own vineyards. When Ziraldo, a nurseryman turned winery owner, first planted the 30 acres of what is now the Seeger Vineyard, he put in Riesling, Gamay and Chardonnay, defying the accepted wisdom that vinifera could not survive Niagara’s climate. Advice from a vineyardist who had recently returned from Russia (and how they) kept the plants alive: bury them for the winter…. According to Dave Gamble, who publishes BC Wine Trails, a magazine devoted to the wines of the region, “In the Okanagan there is no longer any real need for either variety with the milder climate regimen of the past ten years. Those who make it do so because there is a specific customer demand for it… In all cases Foch has been treated like a vinifera, especially in the vineyard. They are a pain to grow because of their vigour and erratic shoot growth and it takes some effort to maintain a proper open canopy during the growing season.” ….At Henry of Pelham in the Niagara Peninsula, winemaker Ron Giesbrecht has established a cult following for his Baco Noir. He likes working with it because it “makes a consistent and reliable red of good weight and concentration.” Giesbrecht harvests his Baco a week later than the industry norm, but even so it comes into the presses well before Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon.
in that quote are three things that led to the decline of Marechal Foch in my opinion: 1) winemakers learned to successfully grow more popular varietals like Riesling, Gamay and Chardonnay 2) Marechal Foch is a pain to grow 3) Baco Noir has won over wineries and is the preferred varietal to Marechal Foch.
Typically, it produces a deep, dark, robust purple-coloured red wine that has strong acidity and mild tannins.
While I am sure some customers appreciate that acidity and even mild tannins, it’s not for everyone.
That doesn’t mean it’s bad by any means. Indeed, I’ve had some of the 2020 Old Vines Foch by Malivoire Wine Company and it was superb. But I get now why winemakers in Ontario have all but replaced it with other varietals. Nowadays you can easily find Ontario Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir and Baco Noir and some really good Gamay: Marechal Foch…not so much.
If you want to taste what it’s all about, I recommend that wine from a Malivoire. It’s like drinking history. Delicious history.
If you have to buy a chef’s knife, then head on over to the Wirecutter and check out their list of the 4 Best Chef’s Knives of 2023. Here’s their recommendations:
Mac Mighty MTH-80 – The best chef’s knife
Tojiro DP F-808 – An affordable Japanese knife
Wüsthof Classic Ikon 8-Inch Cook’s Knife – A classic German knife
Victorinox Fibrox Pro 8-Inch Chef’s Knife – Sharp and affordable
If you have to buy only one and money is an issue, then go with the Victorinox. It’s not just the Wirecutter: I’ve seen a number of places that recommend it as the best budget knife, like The Food Network.
It’s easy if you have the money to stock up on kitchen knives. They all have different feels, different steel, and of course different blades. But if your options are limited, go with the Victorinox.
Posted onAugust 23, 2023|Comments Off on Beware the cost of self help apps
As someone who believes in self help, I have been caught off guard with the cost of self help apps. You can see a listing of some of them at this site, Product Hunt, where they have a list of the 15 best gratitude apps for positive thinking in 2023 and which they go on to describe:
We all need time out to focus on our wellbeing. Gratitude apps are designed to help users focus on their mental health, offering a wealth of features that can help track our thoughts and feelings.
While many of these act like self-care apps in that they offer a private space in which to reflect through journaling or mood check-in features, they can also act like a photobook of memories allowing media to be uploaded or even shared to our nearest and dearest.
Not to mention, some utilize community features so you can access global support, or even just talk to a mental health professional. I tested 11 gratitude apps that focus on all these areas to discover the very best.
While this is all very well, and while many of the apps are free to download and get started, once you get going they could cost you $20, $30, $50 or over $100 a year to continue to use. If you get value from them, it may be worth it. Just be aware of how much they could cost you over months or even years.
Posted onAugust 21, 2023|Comments Off on Some thoughts on using an accomplishment journal at work
Over at LifeHacker they recommend how to stay motivated at work by using an accomplishment journal. It might sound fancy, but a journal is simply a place for writing down what you accomplish in your work day. The accomplishments don’t have to be major ones: some days just getting a handle on your inbox or dealing with a difficult meeting can be an worth journaling.
Accomplishment journals are not new. Athletes have been using something similar for years. No one is better than athetes at setting goals, planning activities, and logging what they’ve been up to. So take your lead from them and start your own.
This doesn’t have to be solely for work. You can have journals for home improvement projects or personal improvement projects.
By the way, another benefit of an accomplishment journal? It can help you later when you have performance reviews and it can help you when you want to update your resume. Just go to the journal and you have all the material you need to proceed.
Good luck!
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You really want to head over to Yanko Design and check it out (they have lots more photos of it there). It would be a fantastic addition to any living room.
Comments Off on A beautiful and minimal coffee table
Posted onAugust 18, 2023|Comments Off on Hindenburg Research eviscerates the billionaires
Hindenburg Research has an interesting business model. It does research on businesses that are bloated (for lack of a better word), shorts their stock, then publishes their research. Result? Profit.
The first time I heard of them was after they shorted Gautam Adani. But I really noticed them when they took aim at Jack Dorsey’s payments firm Block, causing shares to plunge. Whee!
But my favorite was the job they did on Carl Icahn. As this piece noted:
The development represents a rare challenge for Icahn who is accustomed, as one of the pioneers of shareholder activism, to dressing down companies over their governance and transparency, but has not had to field such criticism himself.
Icahn has been doing a number on companies for ages. Indeed he recently shook the trees at Apple, no less. Now the tables are turned, and “shares of Carl Icahn’s firm tanked after it halved its company’s dividend and Icahn said he would return to the style of investing he is known for”. (More on that, here).
You love to see it. So far, Hindenburg has fueled a massive wealth wipeout for 3 of the world’s richest men, as this summarizes.
Here’s to more good research. Here’s to less bloated billionaires.
August 26, 2023: here’s the New York Times has more on how Hindenberg took Carl Icahn down a notch, here.
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Posted onAugust 14, 2023|Comments Off on Twitter is dead, and the rest of text-based social media ain’t great
Twitter is dead. Sure there is some good parts of it remaining in the new company X, as this argues. But I am not certain for how much longer. If Musk wants to use it as a vehicle to relive his start up days , I don’t have much hope for it.
I still go on X to see what some people are doing, people who seem to be posting exclusively there. I was hopeful to jump to Threads, but after a flurry of activity, engagement seems to be dropping off. I tried Bluesky, but it seems better for people who used to love to argue on Twitter. That was never my thing.
I’ve also tried Mastrodon and even some Discord servers, but the problem in all cases is I cannot reproduce the social network I built up over time on Twitter. That social network kept me coming back and wanting to read and wanting to add. I don’t have the desire to build that up again.
The closest I have to that type of social network is what I have on Instagram. But it’s highly visual and I long for the text based social communication I used to have on twitter.
I don’t know what can be done about it. Maybe nothing. Maybe it’s the dusk of social media as we knew it from the Web 2.0 days. That could be fine.
In the mean time, here’s some more interesting links on social media I’ve liked recently. None of them are positive, alas:
I get why you can say Einstein is special amongst scientists for the work he did and the influence he has. And if anyone was a genius, it was Einstein. But to say he is more of a genius than someone else is folly.
In such a debate I am reminded of John von Neumann and his genius. If you asked the smartest people in the 20th century who had the most brilliant mind, they would point to him. Yet von Neumann fretted that “in the future he would be forgotten while Gödel would be remembered with Pythagoras.” He may have been a peerless genius to his contemporaries, but he felt he was not in the same league as Gödel (never mind Einstein).
In short, other than a fun drinking game, it is pointless to try and say who is more of a genius. There is nothing quantifiable about it.
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Posted onAugust 9, 2023|Comments Off on The difficult of staying controversial as an artist
It’s hard to stay controversial as an artist. Ask Andres Serrano. This piece in the New York Times explains what I mean:
As Pope Francis met with dozens of international artists at the Sistine Chapel on Friday, he sought both to reaffirm the Roman Catholic Church’s commitment to artistic endeavors and to enlist the artists to act as catalysts for change in areas like social justice.
Yet as the group sat amid Renaissance frescoes by the likes of Michelangelo, Botticelli and Perugino — undisputedly one of the high points of papal art patronage — not all of those present had a traditional religious bent.
Among them were the American artist Andres Serrano, whose photograph “Piss Christ,” an image of a plastic crucifix submerged in a tank full of urine, was considered blasphemous when it debuted in 1987.
On Friday, Francis blessed Mr. Serrano and gave him a cheery thumbs up.
A thumbs up! Not too long ago he was reviled for that work. Now he’s hanging out with Pope Francis. It’s hard out there for an artist to stay controversial. After all, if you go through this piece and check out art history’s most controversial nudes, so many are anything but controversial now. Now they are classics. Serrano’s work will become that way too.
A good reminder to artists: being controversial is fine, but it’s hard to maintain. Best to focus on making your work good first: that is what will remain after the controversy dies off.
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Posted onAugust 8, 2023|Comments Off on Restaurants loved and lost: Country Style
Sadly, the last of the great Hungarian restaurants in the Annex closed at the end of July. Unlike so many restaurants that have closed recently, this wasn’t due to the pandemic. The owners had been running it for many many years and decided it was time to retire. Sad for us, but good for them.
Posted onAugust 8, 2023|Comments Off on Desks for people who live in small spaces and/or like Transformers
In these days of working from home in small spaces, we could use ideas for desks and workstations that can meet our needs. Here’s five such desks that fill the bill:
This first workstation is amazing. It’s a gym! It’s a desk. It’s storage. It’s a space saving work and workout setup designed to keep your mind and body healthy. I thought this was especially cool.
For those more inclined to use their desks to lie down than workout, this hybrid couch / desk could be just what you need.
Posted onAugust 6, 2023|Comments Off on On the benefits of diaries, journals and notebooks
We’ve all have or had diaries and journals at some point. Sometimes they’re just a few abandoned pages: other times they are volumes of notes and information. If you are like me, you are in the former group, even though I’d like to be in the latter (no doubt smaller) group.
One person I know who is the group I am not is Austin Kleon. He has written extensively about them, and he creates several of them throughout a year (the photo above is of his collection). If you read him, you see he has a number of reasons to write them: to help him pay attention to his life, to give him something to write about later, and more.
Now if you are someone special like Paul Klee, then maybe someone will put them all online for others to study them (see here). Or if you are living in historic times, like the composers of these thousands of desperate vivid diaries from occupied europe, then historians may gather them and hold them in a special place like the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. (That might happen to anything you write, especially if you kept one during the pandemic. Decades from now people will be curious to know what life was like during lockdowns.)
Regardless of what happens to your diaries, it is beneficial to record your life, as I argued here. The only beneficiary later may only be you, but that’s enough. If anyone else benefits from it, that’s a bonus.
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Posted onAugust 2, 2023|Comments Off on The wonderful historicalness of “You’ve Got Mail”, 25 years on
“You’ve Got Mail” is many things. A romantic comedy, of course. A tragedy, as this piece argues… possibly. Of the many things I could list about it, what I loved most about it when I watched it was it’s historicalness.
For starters, the gentrification of New York is one of the historical things that pops out in the film. If New York now is a place of wealth and insane living costs, and New York of the 70s and 80s was a place of poverty and decrepitude, then the New York of the 90s was undergoing a time of economic transition between those two times. You see that in the arrival of bougie things like Starbucks and big bad book store chains like Fox / Barnes and Noble. The city just seems on the rise in the film. It is poor no more. New money is leading the development of real estate that is forcing a transition in the city.
The film also shows the start of the next big thing coming to force a transition: online communication. You’ve Got Mail illustrates how people back then are already dealing with how computers are starting to affect how we live and communicate. It will take some time past the 90s for books and magazines and newspapers to be impacted as we all take to the Internet in the 21st century, but the seeds are already sprouting up as we watch Kathleen and Joe get to know each other via their Apple Macbooks and IBM Thinkpads and the end of the 20th century. (And naturally she owns the former and he the latter). And the beloved typewriters in the film are dodo-birds of a mechanical sort.
It’s funny to think the film was once criticized by the Washington Post for product placement. After all, this month an entire film, Barbie, is launched and co-produced by Mattel. It may have been jarring then, but it barely registered to me watching the products placed in this movie from 25 years ago. If anything, it seems quaint compared to todays films.
Culturally the film drips with historicalness, from the clothes they wear (Ryan’s layered sweaters, Hanks’s dark shirts and ties), to the technology they use (AOL!, that MacBook), to the actors themselves (Hanks being a love interest, Chappelle trying to be mainstream). It all seems so long ago. It was 25 years ago, so I guess it was.
There’s lots to enjoy in You’ve Got Mail. One thing for sure: it’s a time capsule, and it’s quite good just to enjoy it for that.
Posted onAugust 1, 2023|Comments Off on Barbenheimer! Beyonce! Taylor Swift earthquakes! And more, in my July 2023 edition of my not-a-newsletter newsletter and assorted ramblings.
Last month I wrote about what’s hot and what’s not. Well it seems like everything is hot this month. Hot and humid. So we are going to gloss over serious subjects like Ukraine and Inflation and get light instead. Let’s go!
Summer Manias: It has seemed like a summer of manias so far. Sure, there was still stories about inflation, the war in Ukraine, and more such serious things. But the focus seemed to be on big time media sensations: Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Barbenheimer.
Barbenheimer, you ask? Well for those reading this years from now, it was “an Internet phenomenon that began circulating on social media before the simultaneous theatrical release of two blockbuster films, Barbie and Oppenheimer, on July 21, 2023, in the United States and several other countries” (that’s from it’s wikipedia page, no less). The madness was fueled by positive reviews, lots of think pieces, tremendous marketing and then strong ticket sales. Honestly, it was all good fun (at least as much good fun as you could have watching a film about the birth of the atomic bomb and McCarthyism. :))
Swift wasn’t the only one holding big shows. Beyonce has also been wowing audiences with her Renaissance tour, which also seems tremendous. You can read more about it here. Beyonce, Swift, Barbenheimer: it all adds up to people exercising their rights to party and enjoy themselves after too many bleak pandemic summers. I can’t say I blame them. Heck I took in Oppenheimer myself and enjoyed it.
Pandemic: there is nothing light about the pandemic, but there is something positive. It may not seem positive, but it is good news that the total number of Americans dying each day is no longer historically abnormal. So while people are still getting sick from COVID-19, we are back to “normal” in terms of causes of deaths. At least for now. The COVID waste water signal for Ontario is showing a slight increase this month…let’s hope it’s just a blip. And let’s hope that governments continue to fund this monitoring, as this piece argues. We need it.
That said, any good news about that this disease is very good news indeed. There are worse things in the world than having too many tests warehoused because of the decline of this terrible disease.
Social Media: there was a big shakeup in social media this month when Meta announced Threads and it quickly rocketed up to 100 million users (including yours truly). It’s too early to know what this will mean, but if Elon Musk continues his idiotic ways and Jack Dorsey continue with his half assed ways, then Threads could become the dominant company in a place that Twitter once was. (One thing interesting is it seems to be vearing off in a different direction and avoiding politics and news. Could be a wise move. Read more, here.)
Nova Scotia: last month I was writing about people evacuating in N.S. due to fire. This month they had to evacuate due to flooding. Ye gads. I feel sorry for my family, friends and other Nova Scotians suffering through that extreme weather. You can read about it here, here, and here. Awful. Climate change and the terrible effects are starting to overwhelm us.
Donald Trump is still in the news, mainly due to (more and more and more) indictments. Remember, the best way to keep up with all his legal trouble is by signing up to the newsletter indictment.fyi by Dan Sinker. The Times also has a big section on the documents case against him. I still think he will get off, but the legal traps are multiplying rapidly.
To close out, here’s a story on how Adele warns fans about throwing objects at musicians. I’ve seen several musicians hit with phones, including Drake, Harry Styles, and more. It’s insane. Also insane are foot eating competitions. Do you think you have want it takes to win a hot dog competition? Are you sure? After you read this, you may reconsider it.
Thanks for reading, as always. I leave you with this, from Fanny Singer along with mom Alice Waters. They are talking about Fanny’s new cookbook that had come out at the beginning of the pandemic. Just wanted to include it here, as a reminder of how things were.
Comments Off on Barbenheimer! Beyonce! Taylor Swift earthquakes! And more, in my July 2023 edition of my not-a-newsletter newsletter and assorted ramblings.