Current affairs

I love current affairs. Always have, always will. My mother was a radio and television journalist with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) so I grew up listening to the local, national, and international news. I remember the CBC logo affectionately known as “the gem” with great fondness.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation logo (1974-1986)

I supplemented that with extensive reading of the only national daily newspaper at the time, The Globe and Mail. In addition to 2 college degrees (political science and international studies), I continue to be an avid reader of publications and books that deal with current affairs. It is a point of pride for me to be exceptionally well-informed about the events that shape our world. It even made be a better student when I was in the MBA program. I could provide deep context to what we were being asked to discuss or present on.

This morning I read an article describing the very real threats to Western democracy as we know it. The worst threat of all comes not from forces outside of a country but from within. They are : 1) voter apathy and, 2) the willingness to set aside democratic institutions and ways of organising power that go back to the Magna Carta and that underpin the very declaration of American Independence from the British Crown.

Finance

Applied for a product management job with a major investment bank this afternoon. I have been interested in finance since I was a teenager. I used to read the business section of The Globe and Mail as well as the stock market pages as my Dad drove me to school. I was admitted to an undergraduate business program but ended up failing out due to my inability to ask questions in a way that allowed them to be answered as well as the unexpected separation and divorce of my parents, which blew up my world. In recent years, I had the opportunity to work for a company that developed regulatory reporting software for financial institutions as well as investment funds.

Polymathness

I learned some more about what it means to be a polymath as well as how they are becoming rarer in a world that pays lip service to generalists while valuing specialists.

Mental health

I also learned about bipolar disorder and the difference between Type 1 and Type 2, and how it relates to depression. I learned as well how depression affects attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It’s all one big bowl of spaghetti.

More Stuff

I took the plunge and bought a copy of iA Writer, a very minimalist—read distraction free—writing application that can be used to publish to Medium and WordPress or export to Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat PDF formats. This is a great overview of the complexity that iA Writer does away with. One of the neatest features is something called transclusion, something that happens all the time on modern dynamic websites but is relatively new in the field of word processors. (I use BBEdit, a very powerful text editor for other activites, such as editing HTML, CSS or Unix configuration files.)