As 2025 winds (or stumbles?) toward its end, my wishes for next year sound much like my wishes for any day of any year: - Cities, nations, provinces/states, etc. all elect more women to leadership. - The sensible people who exist between extremist polarities (in other words, 80% of humanity) […]

Just laughed out loud at how narrow-minded (colonial?) my spellchecker is. I was writing an email and used the phrase "Indigenous knowledges" and it flagged the use of knowledge in the plural as a typo.

Theory: Canadian student organizations utilize food insecurity as a red herring when talking about tuition. Yes, food insecurity is real, but it impacts a far smaller percentage of students than these groups imply with their use of it as a trope. Doing so tends to blur and distort getting help […]

Anyone remember Publons? It seems like a million years ago. It seems like one of the last time I saw anything attempting to change peer review at scale, but to be honest I'm not really watching that space closely right now.

Just had to use the command line to clear the print queue in Windows. In 2025.

Very ambivalent about seeing my institution engage in this research. Everyone is worried about some perceived threat from China, but the only country currently challenging Canadian sovereignty is the United States. Defense technology is the quintessence of the double-edged sword metaphor […]

Who thought it was a good idea to host a G7 meeting in an ecologically sensitive area? We can also only hope it rains a lot or someone will surely start a fire that will burn out of control.

Really value the candor in this analysis from Alex Usher of Santa Ono's move from Michigan to Florida. We rarely see this type of narrow criticism of leadership and it is so valuable to have when doing a search. I had one professional conversation with Ono during his time at UBC and I was […]

My service moment today was to discard two containers of milk--still unopened--in the staff fridge that expired ... last September. Or was it September 2023? I thought throwing them in the trash full was cruel to housekeeping, so opened and drained them. Will now have nightmares for weeks.

Every time I vote in Canada, I have a smile on my face. It's easy, it's accessible, it doesn't favour gaming or manipulation of voters. Also, the poll workers are nice and spoke both languages with me.

Record labels are trying to sink the Internet Archive. Please help out if so inclined by signing this petition. https://chng.it/M87BPgMMcy

I read this Walrus article about the rise of local long-form journalism right before seeing that the Globe & Mail had given space to Preston Manning to spread his deluded separatist sentiments. I want to invest my media dollars in outlets that actually do reporting, not just draw eyeballs with […]

Not sure why I am surprised that Google would wipe out the usefulness of millions of Chromecast devices and basically do nothing about it for days. Their record as a hardware vendor is full of failure.

Less email. Both fewer messages as well as more succinct messages. This might be the single most important change any organization could achieve.

Four or five times each week I still get the impulse to spout some opinion on social media. Twitter sits deep within my bones, apparently. Happily, I no longer have an outlet for that since 80% of the time it would either be annoying or simply repetitive, or, most often, both. I just don't want […]

We've now had corporate music apps for a couple of decades and they are all still laughably, pathetically terrible at understanding the metadata and structure of classical music and opera. One would think this is an afternoon's worth of work for a decent coder who took one music class in […]

Just had one of those moments where I realized, yet again, that X is one of the defining bands of my life.

After 30+ years of Windows, file searching on this OS is still the slowest, worst search process in the universe. Like, seriously, just index the hard drive.

This is a good article, but I have to wonder why it's being presented here as if this had just been discovered through research. I'm hardly young and I learned in school in the US that the eradication of bison was a calculated strategy to eliminate native peoples and force the remaining […]