Small beginnings

Some of the materials which will come together to form a small voice over booth in our office. This is a somewhat portable solution but far more cost effective than what I’ve seen on Amazon or a full blown whisperroom.

The people at Kent Building supplies were quite kind, holding our hands throughout the whole wood buying process.


Complexity by design

I spent an agregiously short period of time yesterday trying to decide where to buy home insurance. The policy had just expired and a house fire spurred me into action.

Our current broker was recommended to us by my mother, apparently we had a relative working there, and she seemingly told everyone else I know to go there too. Unfortunately, my whole experience with this company has been sub-optimal. Poor service is the norm.

I inquired with other companies and the coverage and costs are all similar. Looking at the details of these policies, 50 + pages for our current one, requires more patience and time than I have. So relying on hopes and prayers, I gave up and decided to stick with the devil I know.

Since everywhere in the downtown is a 5 minute walk I thought I might drop in, as I also now need coverage for our office. Unfortunately, unknown to me, due to COVID they are appointment only. A call to the office reveals the account manager was on holiday and the operator sent me to someone already on the phone. And so I wait for a call back, so I can give them more money.

Insurance, like taxes, feels like it has been created with such complexity that only those with means or a great deal of time can afford to truly understand its workings.


Adaptation

These photos illustrate not just a messy desk but my preferred way of working. Screens off and paper, sharpie and pencils on. This is how I work and how I have worked for years. It’s immediate and easy – we have practiced our whole lives to transfer thought via pencil to paper.

Regularly I contemplate giving up working for myself and enjoying the regularity and structure of working for people presumably more skilled at business than I, at least skilled enough to afford hiring people like myself. I continue to resist and procrastinate; my wife continues to listen as she has heard the same words for years and years.

One of the challenges I might face is not ageism, though that’s a thing, or even finding work, a possibility, but the simple fact that so many I have talked to have abandoned creating low fidelity prototypes in favour of spending all their time using tools like Figma or my current tool, Sketch. I can’t imagine spending all my time creating high-res prototypes that would never be used. But these are just tools and tools can be learned by anyone. I can’t help but feel working time would be better spend communicating approaches and ideas vs. near pixel perfect output.


More survey nonsense

Nearly half of departing Health P.E.I. employees who took part in exit surveys as part of an effort to improve staff retention cited a “toxic workplace” as one of their main reasons for leaving the provincial health authority.

That information comes from an internal report on retention that consultant Garth Waite prepared for Health P.E.I.

CBC News obtained the report through a freedom of information request.

Health P.E.I. gave Waite the names of 55 employees who left jobs with the health authority between March 2020 and January 2021. Of those people, 31 completed exit surveys that became the basis of his report. 45% of departing Health P.E.I. staff surveyed say ‘toxic workplace’ main reason for leaving

Ignoring the fact that the CBC is resorting to sensationalist misleading headlines to gain ‘clicks’, I find it hard to believe that an organization full of smart educated people like Health PEI would rely upon a simple survey to try and gain insight to the deluge of people leaving the organization (we expect the knuckleheads at Ch’town city hall to use these methods, not health professionals). With peoples lives at stake one would expect Health PEI would try harder. Is it not common practice for organizations of this size to have an even an exit interview? It was a requirement for every organization I worked for for the past 25 years.

I assume the consultant hired to do this work was specifically instructed to use this method, because his background would illustrate he understands how to gain an in-depth understanding of how people come to understand, act and manage their day-to-day situations in particular settings. Something a survey would be hard to provide.


Wendell Clark, 90

My Uncle Wendell, and our last remaining elder on my side of the family, turned 90 today. We were fortunate to have a small celebration for him this Sunday past in Hunter River and published a short notice in the Guardian – a notice in the Guardian seems to be of particular importance to his generation.

I didn’t have a particularly hard youth, but summers working on his farm, throwing bales of hay in blazing heat high up in a loft, taught me the privilege of choosing a different less arduous path. A staunch Liberal since birth, his biggest thrill today was no doubt a call from Ottawa from his MLA.


Open water training

Camren had the opportunity to have some open water practice (about 6km) and coaching with Pierre Lafontaine yesterday, all in preparation for the upcoming Canada games. This was after he went to Stratford gym to practice the double-under for CrossFit, then a CrossFit class, and his 2nd COVID shot in the afternoon. I’m not sure where his intense drive towards certain activities comes from, but I do know we go through a dozen bananas, a dozen or more bagels, and a kg of peanut butter a week just to keep him moving.

Meanwhile, I stumbled along the starting route of the PEI marathon for my 6k, in what felt like incredibly strong sun. This segment is one of the most agreeable places to run I have experienced. Lovely flat surface, clean fresh air, and aside from the monster homes in the distance, incredible views.


Monday view

We took part of Monday off to enjoy this view on the north shore of the island. I have little patience to sit on a beach hours on end, but I enjoyed our little reprieve from screens and work.


Hello heat

When we first arrived in Taiwan many years ago I would plan my routes throughout Taipei with the ability to stop at the ubiquitous convenience stores that cover the whole Island. This was my attempt to beat the sweltering heat and torrential rain. During summer, a time to stay indoors, you would find whole families camped at one of the many malls to avoid the high cost of leaving monstrous AC units running day and night.

I sweat profusely at the first sign of exertion, so running in Taiwan was a constant battle with dehydration. Often I would fail, as I experienced during one marathon when my leg muscles failed to contract, but to cramp, and I started to pass out due to poor hydration. 3 litres of water on a 21k run wouldn’t be enough, and I experimented with all manner of electrolyte replacement products, none worked, but the disgusting Japanese drink powder Pocari Sweat came close, and is what I have been drinking as I have been running midday from downtown Charlottetown to CrossFit.

The weather we have been having lately is giving us a sense of deja vue, except that the interior temperature of our living room reached 31c yesterday, and many places are with out air conditioning. My new office in the basement has been a god send.

Today I lost more than 2kg in just over 1 hour of running. My clothes looked like I had been in a downpour.

I don’t recall as a kid growing up on the Island needing so much as a fan, but this intense heat, on an Island in the cold Atlantic, seems to be the new normal, and means further investments in AC units which will likely perpetuate the problems that got us here in the first place.


“No Worries”

On recommendation, last night, Sheryl and I went to the Brickhouse Kitchen & Bar for dinner. I had 2 mains, the starter selection seemed pithy to me and I wanted a chowder. Sheryl had salmon, and I had their seafood chowder and haddock. The pricing suffers from being geared towards visitors from New York, but we seem to be in the minority that feel the cost of food here seems high, especially considering how little they pay staff.

The seafood chowder was great and arrived hot. This is one thing I appreciate, food arriving so hot that you need to give it a minute to settle. It was also full of seafood and nary a filler ingredient like potato to be seen.

The haddock was well presented but lukewarm and quite salty. The fish was overcooked – which I find often the case with meat here in every single restaurant. Dry meat which requires a sauce is either a local preference or as a consequence of public heath laws.

The service was friendly with the hostess giving us that “awww look, it’s a couple of people as old as my grandparents out for dinner” smile as she showed us to our table. As we weren’t drinking service was quick, a little too quick at the end, but what was interesting to me was their use of language. Surely, language is a key part of the experience in any restaurant or service. Aren’t staff trained on what to say when patrons arrive, and when they interact with them? Even 7-11 cashier’s in Taiwan are famous for consistently saying, 「歡迎光臨」 and 「謝謝光臨」.

What tuned my ears into the language they were using was the constant use of the term “no worries” by two particular waitresses. Every reply was peppered with it. No thank you’s, you’re welcome, my pleasure or simple silence. Perhaps, that along with the softening of the “H” to become “Haaach” is part of the charm of dining in Charlottetown?

I’ll definitely be back for that chowder.


“Successful” podcasts and language

Spotify’s Research and Development department released a report detailing how the language you use can make your podcast more successful. Use “I, we, you” not “her, him, them”, don’t swear, use positive language and don’t talk slowly – and people will listen to your show more. They do note: … “It must be emphasized that the stylistic associations that were observed to distinguish high and low engagement podcasts in this particular dataset are correlations with no causality established, and therefore must be interpreted with caution”.

Through a combination of reading podcast advice blogs, previous research on correlating linguistic features with consumption metrics in other media like books and tweets, and intuition, we devised a set of interpretable, automatically measurable features of the titles, descriptions, and transcripts. These are features like the proportion of swear words or the reading grade level.

Much of the popular advice of language usage is validated by the data. Compared to low engagement episodes, high engagement podcast episodes tend to have longer and more relevant descriptions, use diverse vocabularies (as measured by word entropy and reading grade level), contain more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions, more conversations and personal narratives (as measured by the prevalence of first and second person pronouns compared to third), and fewer words associated with swearing.

On the other hand, some of the correlations are surprising. High engagement podcast episodes use language more like the average podcast creator, as measured by the cross entropy of the episode under a language model trained on the rest of the dataset, which contradicts the general advice to create a distinctive “voice.” They are also associated with faster speech rates (number of words per second) than low engagement episodes.

This report coincides with our first piece of negative feedback from a listener in some time: “These stories were read too slowly to keep my kids’ attention. I get trying to have a soothing voice for bedtime, but this was like Ben Stein calling roll in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

Some feedback should of course be ignored.

https://research.atspotify.com/podcast-language-and-engagement/


Quiet

When visiting a new city I love to get up early, grab a hot drink, and watch the city wake and get down to business. Charlottetown doesn’t have a downtown or central business district like other places, but there is still the opportunity to see quiet moments before people make their way for lunch and dinner.


Absence of thought

Peter has a wonderful post detailing his canoeing adventure on Andrews Pond, a lovely area to walk, run or in this case, canoe. There is much to do around Charlottetown for those of us who enjoy quick quiet escapes to nature, all are accessible and require nothing more than the ability and time to walk or ride.

I love it when urban areas thoughtfully juxtapose with nature but this is certainly not the case in this area. I can’t keep my eyes off the photo above, a screenshot from Peters article. Charlottetown’s rickety apartments look far worse than the brutalist concrete architecture that was so valued in construction throughout Asia. The use of concrete represented prosperity and strength, and the exterior appearance (and interior for that matter) was of less importance. Over time though, the concrete takes on the same patina as the surrounding area and can withstand the gradual encroachment of nature. I am constantly surprised, despite the obvious wealth flowing through this country, how little attention is paid to the places where people congregate and live. Perhaps that attention to detail is paid only to those who can afford a mansion in places like Stratford.