And the story does rather remind me of what is probably my 2nd favourite Monty Python skit on how to defend yourself from a man armed with a banana!

According to Statistics Canada’s recently published General Social Survey—2010: Overview of the Time Use of Canadians (PDF):

… the proportion of Canadians reporting using computers (excluding using a computer while doing paid work) for such things as email, on-line social networking, and searching for information increased nearly five-fold between 1998 and 2010, from 5% to 24%. In 2010, computer users spent an average of 1 hour and 23 minutes on the computer on the diary day. Computer use increased significantly across all age groups. In 2010, the age group with the highest proportion of computer users continued to be 15- to 24-year-olds (at 32%). This group spent, on average, 1 hour and 41 minutes a day using the computer.

You don’t have to reflect on this very long to realize how significant this change is, in how computers have penetrated our society.

One of the reasons you won’t find ABC/123 priority coding in the GTD system is that most people’s lives change too quickly for it to ever be an accurate reflection of what’s true in this moment. Not to say clarifying priorities shouldn’t be a priority, but I bet you can think of a time when you thought your day looked one way at 9:00 a.m., and an exciting or challenging or annoying interruption or surprise happened at 9:05 a.m. that blew all of that out of the water. How quickly could you shift and change to adapt to that—while bookmarking what you were working on to easily get back to it?

The rest of David Allen’s post is an interesting extension to this insight, using fire services as his example.

This is barely a kilometre from our house, and I often run down or up it. I’ve never biked up it because it’s so steep and I’m reluctant to take the lane; but the new facility is wide enough for upbound cyclists. For downbound cyclists, I understand the City will be painting sharrows in the centre of the downbound lane; in deed, I can cautiously bike down the hill faster than I can drive a car down it.

Here’s a set of drawings of what the City planned to do.

This article relates the September meeting of Toronto City Council’s Public Works and Infrastructure Committee, which considered Ironman’s application to close a long expressway section to mount a 5150 event in Toronto. Interestingly, a prominent environmentalist and usual opponent of the incumbent mayor, seems to have led the fight not to approve the closure.

The September meeting deferred further consideration to today, but the meeting minutes are unclear. It seems that the committee set out a ten-point framework for deciding whether a closure was to be granted, but did not clearly approve or disapprove Ironman’s application.

Here’s the original, favourable, staff report on the proposal, and here’s the course map.

UPDATE: Coverage in the local newspaper of triathlon.