My attempt at working on Monday morning lasted about an hour. I ran two half hour meetings — very badly — before admitting defeat and going back to bed. On Tuesday I got up at my usual time, had breakfast and then fell asleep on the sofa for four hours. This illness has knocked me sideways. I can’t remember ever having taken a day off sick from work before, and now I find myself having taken two in a row.
I got back to my desk on Wednesday. Concentrating on topics was difficult as my brain had a fuzzy, foggy feel to it, and this persisted all the way through the rest of the week. So I picked my battles, using the time to catch up with administrative tasks as opposed to trying to tackle any big hairy problems.
My eldest son had been suffering with what I assume was the same illness, but he was a few days ahead of me. The doctors prescribed him antibiotics, so I gave them a call on Tuesday and explained my symptoms, explaining that if antibiotics were a necessary remedy, I didn’t want to delay getting on them. They prescribed me a course of amoxicillin without even seeing me in person. I’m not sure if it was necessary, but I was willing to take whatever help I could get. (It got me thinking — why is there no swab-like test that you can take at the doctors so that they can diagnose exactly what it is that you have and then treat you accordingly? Is this just too expensive and impractical? Maybe we need to move some research money from generative AI to trying to develop a tricorder.)
At the end of the weekend it feels as though I’ve got it under control. But the chesty cough, runny nose and lack of energy are still lingering, and feel as though they might hang around for some time yet.
This was a week in which I:
Continued work on the ‘definition of done’ for our document management project.
Reworked our real estate/facilities financial projections now that we have better assumptions to base our projected spend on.
Continued the on-boarding process for a new vendor, reviewing and amending the proposed contract.
Had a request to look at how deleted Teams, SharePoint sites and Groups can be restored.
Joined a workshop to start to look at how we can use AI to bring together informative data about our clients into a single pane of glass.
Joined the weekly standup meeting for developments on our internal chatbot.
Attended our weekly Learning Hour meeting about last year’s internal ITSM conference.
Had the weekly check-in with our sister company on their real estate/office improvement project.
Took one of our cars in for repair. We’ve had the engine light come on and it has repeatedly lost power. Unfortunately they couldn’t find anything wrong with it. The garage is amazing in that they charged us only £9 for a lightbulb that needed replacing.
Met with our personal financial advisor for our annual check-in.
Had a bizarre experience while lying around in a feverish stupor. I was sleeping and dreaming on the couch and in my dream, I found my way to a couch with some random big fluffy cat, fell asleep and started dreaming. I was having a dream within a dream. I realised I was dreaming and then ‘woke up’ only back as far as being asleep on a couch in my dream.
Smashed one of my toes against a leg of our bed in the middle of the night. We’ve been in the same room for ten years or so and I’ve never done it before. My toe has gone black and purple from the impact.
Watched the Everton vs Liverpool derby with my son, the last one to take place at Goodison Park before Everton move to a new home. What an incredible football match.
Media
Podcasts
Without a commute or time on my indoor bike trainer, I struggled to keep up with podcasts this week.
BBC4’s Tutankhamen in Colour was a fascinating look at the discovery of the pharaoh’s tomb, blended with technology that brought the black and white footage to life.
Discovered the Techmoan YouTube channel. From what I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of moaning, but there does seem to be a lot of brilliant videos digging into technology. Highlights that I’ve watched so far:
Finished watching Mo on Netflix. The last couple of episodes were incredibly moving. It feels like an antidote to all of the hateful rhetoric around immigration and asylum.
Watched The Substance (2024). We didn’t really know what we were letting ourselves in for. It’s … a lot. There’s potentially a great story in there, but the plot didn’t really make sense and it ended up as a gore-fest.
Audio
I’ve been digging the Sisters of Mercy’s Floodland album over the past couple of weeks. Another album where I’m wondering why it has taken so long for me to listen to the whole thing.
Web
A great resource that lists European alternatives to online services based elsewhere in the world (usually the USA). Being based in Europe is one thing, but it would be good to have the data cross-referenced with details on whether the people running each service are wrong-uns as well.
Books
Continued reading the second volume of The McCartney Legacy. It’s been just what I need right now.
Next week: A long weekend and getting back into the office.
A week dominated by illness. Early on Monday morning my wife collected our eldest son at the airport, back from his running trip to Boston University. He was quite ill with a horrible cough, sore throat and a high temperature, and ended up spending the whole week at home. A few days in, he didn’t seem to be making any improvement, so we decided to try and get him a doctor’s appointment. Not only was he seen that afternoon, but the doctor even gave us a follow-up call the next day to see how he was doing. Very impressive.
Lots of my colleagues have been off work with a similar illness. There are definitely some horrible bugs going around at the moment. On Friday afternoon, I started to get a little tickly cough which by Saturday morning turned into a full-blown illness. I’ve spent the entire weekend drinking lemon paracetamol drinks, alternating between being freezing cold and too hot. I’m going to work tomorrow, but I’ll be staying at home.
Continued to pick up more responsibilities from my boss. I’m now responsible for our governance committee and board reports, as well as attending an executive committee run by one of our front office teams.
Wrote and edited this quarter’s report to the board of directors.
Collaborated with our team on our annual submission to one of our regulators about our technology setup and dependencies.
Started to put together a portfolio roadmap for the work going on across our department.
Ran a short workshop in our work cafe/presentation space to assess how we want it to work in the future, and what potential changes we would need to make to get there.
Continued with the on-boarding process for a new vendor who will be providing us with a new contract staff member.
Met with the head of one of our IT functions to discuss aligning part of my team to his organisation.
Caught up with a colleague at our sister company on where they are with their office renovation project.
Held an overview presentation for our programme Steering Committee members on the technology we have installed to monitor the performance of our physical space. We have only been using it for a couple of months, but it has already revealed lots of insights.
Reviewed the proposal for implementing a data centre/network documentation and management tool.
Had our weekly call with our audio/visual consultancy.
Held my fortnightly team meeting. It feels like we are slowly getting into our stride as a group.
Caught up with writing and posting four weeks’ worth of wins.
Watched two Learning Hour sessions, catching up with the video of one that I missed on the topic of Infrastructure as Code, and another on the costs and benefits of space travel.
Had some discussions about the potential of ChatGPT Pro and its deep research feature, off the back of a Stratechery Update and the subsequent discussion on the Sharp Tech podcast.
Had my regular meeting with my friend and colleague, our Group Head of APIs.
Attended our company-wide Microsoft Copilot/Teams Premium working group. Last year I couldn’t make many of the sessions due to other work priorities. It feels good to have a little bit of bandwidth to attend again.
Fascinating discussion with Luke Jennings at Push Security on last week’s Risky Business podcast, all about ‘cross IDP impersonation’. (The link takes you directly to the start of the discussion on YouTube.) Users want to use OAuth buttons such as ‘sign in with Google’ to get into their corporate SaaS apps. There’s nothing to stop them from registering their corporate email address with an identity provider and verifying ownership of the email, allowing the button to work from that point onwards. The issue is that when their corporate account gets shut down, they would still have access to the SaaS app.
Sharp Tech’s discussion of ChatGPT Pro Deep Research was fascinating. If it’s as good as it is reported to be (for USD 200/mo for the Pro subscription), it may do the work of a junior analyst in terms of the quality of the report that it returns. The problems are that (a) it makes extensive use of searching the web and can’t go beyond this with novel insights or information that isn’t on the open Internet, and (b) if you need to be an experienced analyst who is able to think deeply and use novel insights of your own, what does the pipeline of analysts look like?
Articles
Baldur Bjarnason on ‘poisoning for propaganda’, how rising authoritarianism makes LLMs more dangerous. “The truth about modern AI is that there is that every major ‘AI’ company today is in bed with an authoritarian government. The ones that aren’t – such as the European ones – are distant runners up to the US or Chinese models.”
Google’s not part of the US government, but it wants to keep its government contracts, so it has ended its DEI hiring goals.
Watched Witches (2024), a very moving exploration of postpartum depression, linked to how women have been persecuted as witches over the centuries. Heavy-going, but brilliant.
Awesome Tapes From Africa had a Bandcamp sale on Friday. I picked up 11 digital albums for about £10.
Web
Went to look at an old mind map and found that toketaWare, maker of the iThoughts app, shut down last year. It’s a shame; iThoughts was one of the first apps I installed when I got my first iPad, and I’ve used it on and off since. I don’t use mind mapping that much, but I do have a bunch of old maps that I refer to occasionally. I’m going to need to find another home for them. Thesearticles have been quite helpful.
Finished reading Fascism by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. I’ve started to write up my thoughts about the book in a blog post, but being ill doesn’t lend itself to tackling this one very readily. Hopefully I’ll post about this in the next few days.
Picked up where I left off with volume two of The McCartney Legacy. I’ve just finished reading about the recording and mastering of Wings’ Venus and Mars. It’s not a perfect album, but I’ve always had lots of affection for it.
Next week: Working from home, at least for the start of the week, as I try to get over this bug.
Thinking of the (probably) billions of dollars that have been poured into the Amazon machine learning system, which is then brought to bear to regularly send me these incredible notifications.
Out on a short ramble on a beautifully sunny Sunday.
The first ‘normal’ week of the year, where I wasn’t having to prioritise some near-term objectives. Our offsite meeting was behind us, so it was time to get on with the work. I struggled to find my mojo this week. The big, important things got done but there are lots of lower-level things that didn’t get my attention.
This was a week in which I:
Was formally put into a standing deputy role for my boss. A mini promotion of sorts.
Held three more in-person interviews for the developer role within my team. We ended up with a good problem in that we liked more than one of the candidates. It was close, but ultimately our decision came down to team fit. It’ll be fun to have someone new join the team.
Took colleagues through a draft presentation on our company strategy at our department-wide team meeting.
Met with colleagues to get aligned on our mission for our document management project.
Had our regular project meeting for our plan to open a new office.
Reviewed the data and insights produced by our recently installed office environment monitoring system. Having quantitative data about our space — temperature, usage, CO2 levels, noise — is going to be invaluable in making decisions about how to improve the environment further over the next few years.
Checked in with our audio/visual consultants on the remaining work for this year. I have my fingers crossed that next week’s ISE conference will have the product announcements we are looking for.
Met with our vendor that supplies the mini PCs that run our meeting rooms to look at the next generation of this technology.
Met with our networking vendor to discuss our licence renewal and our plans for trialling additional products.
Met with our Microsoft Copilot pilot working group. (Why do Microsoft always name their products in such a way that referring to them becomes clunky and awkward?) We’ve continued to see a steady trickle of people who are interested in trying out the tools.
Attended the monthly Copilot Fireside Chat. What works so well for the Teams Fireside Chat seems to fall flat at the Copilot one. None of the attendees put their cameras on and the conversation at the session felt a little stilted.
Attended an internal webinar covering the political outlook for South Africa.
Took part in our first monthly Lean Coffee of the year. We have a completely open approach for agenda topics and it has served us well over the years. This week’s session left me wondering whether there should be a little bit of guidance for the topics. How have others managed this?
Had a good introductory meeting with a vendor that we work with extensively in South Africa but have not utilised in the UK.
Enjoyed a delicious free lunch at work to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
Discovered that someone has been spoofing my mobile number to make scam calls. For a couple of months I’ve been receiving calls from people who said that they were returning a missed call from my number. This week, a man with a Scottish accent called me and said that someone had been trying to scam him from my number. Other than changing my mobile number — which I don’t want to do as I’ve had it forever — I don’t know what I can do to prevent this. I called up my network provider but they were useless; it took 15 minutes for them to understand the issue, only to tell me that there was nothing they could do. I logged the problem with Action Fraud, but I don’t hold out any hope that they can do something either; the reporting tools on their website are geared towards people who have received the scam call, not the person whose number is being spoofed. I don’t know much about ‘calling line identity’, but I assume that it’s trivial to pretend to be someone else.
Met up with friends — ex-colleagues that I worked with 25 years ago — for a night in the pub. It’s always lovely to see them. It made me realise once again how lucky I was to have started my career in such a great department and team.
Dropped my eldest boy off at Heathrow Airport. He’d been invited to take part in the Boston University John Thomas Terrier Classic, an indoor track meet. A fantastic opportunity to try out being in a US university setting.
Caught up with some friends at The Perseverance pub in Wraysbury. We all had burgers, but didn’t eat the napkins.
Managed to get out on the Saturday morning cycling club ride again. The temperature was cold, but slightly higher than the week before which meant that there was no ice anywhere. Three of my cycling club friends have signed up to this year’s London Edinburgh London, a 1,530km ride to be tackled in one go, with a 128 hour time limit. A completely mad adventure. The closest I’ll ever come to it is watching this documentary, which had the effect of completely putting me off:
Enjoyed a sunny winter walk with my wife, following the footpaths across the fields at the back of our house. We live in such a beautiful place, but it has been years since I last wandered out there.
I’m not much of a computer game player, but Matthew Ball’s presentation on The State of Video Gaming in 2025, also surfaced via Stratechery, is a fascinating read.
Video
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story (2024) is a beautifully-made documentary about Reeve, his family and his friends. I was a teenager when he had his accident and remember reading all about it in the papers at the time, but I didn’t follow his life from that point. I had no idea how much pain the family went through, with his wife passing away shortly after him.
Started watching Mo on Netflix, a gentle comedy about a Palestinian asylum seeker and his family in Houston, Texas, who haven’t had their case resolved in over 20 years. We’ve already breezed through season one.
Bill Gates on Elon Musk: ‘“You want to promote the right wing but say Nigel Farage is not rightwing enough,” Gates told the Sunday Times. “I mean, this is insane shit.”’
Continued reading Fascism by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Somehow I don’t seem to be putting enough time aside for reading at the moment. It’s already February and I haven’t read much.
Next week: Welcoming my son home from his trip, and trying to knock the roadmap for the rest of the year into place.
The Center For Humane Technology announced that they have started a Substack. I’m so disappointed, and wrote to them a couple of weeks ago to say so but didn’t hear back. Substack is knowntoprofitfrom newsletters that spout hate on their platform. It seems so bizarre for this organisation in particular to move their newsletter to the platform in 2025.
The Monument, looking fabulous first thing in the morning
A very busy but fun week. Two of my colleagues flew in from Johannesburg to join our management team offsite meeting from Tuesday to Thursday. I’d put a lot of effort into planning these few days, and the week had finally arrived. Most of our management team have all been working together for seven or eight years and it feels like we’re a family, so it’s lovely when we can all be in the same place. Unfortunately, one of our local team members fell ill at the start of the week, so only joined one of our sessions remotely.
Going into London for a full five days was exhausting. By Friday night I was ready to drop.
This was a week in which I:
Interviewed two candidates for the vacancy in my team. One of the interviews was in person, which felt a little like a step back in time. But after having met two candidates online last year that seemed to be blatantly using generative AI to answer our questions, being in the same room has its benefits.
Had a couple of meetings on our document management project, clarifying the work done to date and agreeing on an approach for the next couple of weeks.
Spent day one of our offsite meeting with Hoopla!, working on our collaboration and storytelling skills using improvisation techniques. The workshop was pitched as ‘yoga for your soft skills’ and this felt right; by the end of the day we’d all had a good workout, sharing many laughs and insights along the way. The phrase “wise wise wise…” is now with us for good. Thoroughly recommended.
Had a fun night out at Electric Shuffle in London Bridge. It was just what we needed to unwind after an intense day of improv. The technology that runs the shuffleboard tables was very impressive, as was the range of games available to play.
Got through the agenda for our offsite, covering a team check-in, the latest reading of our corporate strategy and presentations and discussions led by each of the function heads.
Had a wonderful dinner to celebrate the success of last year’s major programmes with the extended team. The evening was perfect, with excellent food and a perfect ambience.
Got out on my bike for Saturday morning’s club ride, my first outdoor ride of the year. The weather has been bad, with clear skies being accompanied by freezing temperatures. I’m too scared to go out when there’s a risk of ice. I was signed up for Sunday’s postponed Westerley Winter Warmer, but pulled out when I saw the weather forecast of heavy rain from the halfway point and a ‘feels like’ temperature of -6°C.
Helped my son to dismantle his desk and replace it with a simple, inexpensive desk from Ikea. His friend has upgraded his gaming PC and has lent his old one to my son, but he didn’t have enough room to properly set it up.
Had a lovely dinner out with close friends on Friday night at Tabure in Berkhamsted.
Enjoyed a family lunch out in town on Sunday.
Media
Podcasts
The Strong Songs analysis of Annie Lennox’s Walking On Broken Glass is superb. I’ve heard this song so many times on the radio, but this highlights so many details that I’ve never heard before. It makes you realise that something that seems simple is anything but.
Picked up a copy of Rocky V: Music from and Inspired by the Motion Picture1 from eBay. This is not a great album, but this was one of the first three CDs that I ever bought2 and I wanted to hear it again. I recently noticed that my original copy has gone missing and I only had poor 128kbps mp3 rips of some of the tracks in my library. The highlight of the album is Joey B Ellis’s Go For It, which was effectively the theme tune for the film. 13-year old me loved this.
Video
Hearing Joey B Ellis again led me down a rabbit hole that culminated in watching Philly Boy: A Movie About MC Breeze (2002). It always feels strange to me to watch a historical documentary where the events being recounted are closer to when they made the film than they are to now. It’s not a great movie, and the quality of the YouTube upload is poor, but it was an intriguing bit of ephemera from the Philadelphia hip-hop scene. One of the talking heads was Funk Wizard Snow, the CEO/Editor of now defunct website phillyhiphop.com, who intrigued me as he had a copy of a FrontPage 2000 guidebook behind him. I couldn’t help looking up the archived pages from the website on the Wayback Machine.
Watched The Breakthrough on Netflix, a four-part Swedish drama of a double murder that went unsolved for 16 years. The acting is good, but with the series being so short it felt like we didn’t really get to know the characters. I found myself putting that aside and coming back to the realisation that they were reconstructing things that actually happened.
Books
Pressed pause on The McCartney Legacy Volume 2: 1974–80. I’m loving it, but it’s a big beast and I’m finding that there are too many other books that I feel that I need to get to right now…
…which includes Fascism by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey, a book that arose from their Origin Story podcast. I’m way behind on their main feed but noticed that their latest episode addressed Trump’s inauguration and Musk’s Nazi salute, and included an audiobook excerpt from this book. After having a debate with a friend this week on whether certain actions are fascist, this is the book I need.
Next week: Taking what we did on our offsite and getting on with the work.
The title of this album is weird, because the MC Hammer tracks were neither from the film, nor inspired by it — they are remixes of tracks that appeared on one of his earlier albums. But maybe that’s just being pedantic. ↩
Alongside George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice: Volume One and a CD single of Do The Bartman. Eclectic. ↩
🎶 Woke up this morning with this tune in my head. I love how an earworm always seems to reappear at just the right time.
A cold, frosty morning on my way to the train station
This week was a bit too much. Last week’s relatively slow start had lulled me into a false sense of security, so it felt as though reality hit me hard this week. There was so much going on both at work and at home. It felt as though I picked up more things than I put down.
This was a week in which I:
Wrestled with the trains. My usual morning train was cancelled until the final couple of days of the week due to a points failure somewhere on the line. The next one rolled into the station with a fraction of the carriages it normally has, so I had to run down the platform to catch it. We were standing, squeezed together from the start of the journey. After a quarter of a century of commuting I actually quite enjoy it — it’s where I write most of my weeknotes — but not when the service starts to fall apart.
Prepared for and ran our programme steering committee meeting. Preparing the pack was a useful exercise for me to get my head around where we are at after a flurry of activity at the end of last year. I spent a couple of hours at the weekend writing up the minutes as I know that there won’t be any time to do this next week and didn’t want it to be hanging over me.
Also finished off the preparation for next week’s management team offsite meeting over the weekend, confirming the final agenda and sending it out to my colleagues.
Met with the CEO and Office Manager for one of our regional offices for a review of the services provided by our department, and our plans for this year.
Bumped into another of our regional CEOs who was visiting our office ahead of an offsite meeting. We discussed the potential provision of a technology in his office and agreed a plan to gather some more information before making a decision.
Handed over background documentation for a document management project that we would like to make progress with this year.
Met with our audio/visual consultants following last week’s trial of demo equipment in one of our boardrooms. The Integrated Systems Europe conference is just around the corner, and we’re hoping for product announcements that will help us with our large shared meeting rooms. The solution that we tested may be more suited to another space that we’d like to improve.
Met with our real estate services consultancy firm to review their proposal to support us in 2025.
Caught up with our sister company on their revised draft schedule for their office renovation and maintenance.
Reviewed lots of CVs from recruiters for the vacancy in my team. I also hosted one of the recruiters when they came to visit our office. The CVs are getting closer to what we’re looking for and we have a couple of interviews lined up for next week.
Joined our architecture governance meeting and reviewed proposed changes to some of our technology infrastructure. The changes are deep in the weeds, but should result in a smoother experience for all of the staff working in our offices.
Had a career coaching session with my executive partner at a technology industry analyst firm. Thinking about what I would like to spend my time doing if there were no constraints was an interesting exercise. Very early in my career I fell into project management, but I’m a geek at heart and sometimes wish my role was more technical than it is.
Had my regular meeting with our account manager at the same technology industry analyst firm.
Discussed the needs of one of our departments that fields a large number of staff queries. What was initially pitched to me as a conversation about AI ended up with us deciding that a rule-based chatbot would be more suitable.
Met with the Product Owner of Planview AgilePlace for a demo of possible new features. We took the opportunity to give some extensive feedback on the tool. It’s been an excellent tool for us over the past few years and it’s so lovely to be able to give feedback directly to the person in charge. Another example of the magical Internet.
Spent many, many hours trying to find a suitable venue for dinner to celebrate our programme’s success and to thank our team. After a slow start to my search I soon realised that I had to cast a wide net. I spent time running around the City of London to look at venues that were in the running; this proved to be invaluable as I found rooms that looked great on the web were inaccessible or located next to the restaurant toilets. I now have both a venue as well as a newfound respect for our Marketing and Communications team who have to do this kind of work as part of their day job.
Enjoyed a wonderful Learning Hour meeting where our CTO talked to us about SpaceX, Starlink, and their status in Africa.
Hosted the latest WB-40Album Club. I’d struggled to make time to think about what to play, and picked Joe Jackson’s debut album Look Sharp! at the very last minute. I was very happy with my choice. There are so many great songs on there.
Had a frustrating experience at a stationery shop. My wife had ordered a few packs of coloured pencils to give as prizes to children in a school art contest. Her order was sent to the shop close to my office so that I could pick them up. When I got there and showed them the order on my phone, they asked for a physical copy of her ID, which I didn’t have. I asked whether I could just buy some more, but they said that the packs they have are put aside for my wife’s order. I asked whether I could call her and ask her to cancel her order, putting the packs of pencils back into stock. Apparently that wouldn’t work either, as the process takes a while. So, I walked out without the pencils.
Enjoyed this week’s in-person Album Club. I’d heard lots about Big Country over the years but had never knowingly heard any of their songs, so this was a great opportunity to listen intently. I’ve now tried it, and made up my mind that I didn’t like it.
The Standard Bank In-Market Insights podcast is excellent. The latest episode covers the relationship and geopolitics between China and Africa.
Articles
Local police forces are launching an initiative to tackle drivers who pass cyclists too closely. This article is from 2018, but the scheme is being rolled out in Hertfordshire soon. Lots of drivers don’t understand that when overtaking they need to use the whole of the other lane as if they were overtaking a car. A couple of months ago I was involved in an extremely narrow pass that just had a couple of centimetres between me and the car.
I had a conversation in the office last week about whether it’s better to read AI-generated summaries of books or to not read them at all. I don’t know what the answer is. This Bluesky post serendipitously turned up in my timeline.
Spent a baffled 45 minutes watching the first episode of season two of Severance. This recap of season one was exactly what we needed to remind ourselves of everything that happened. We’d forgotten nearly everything.
Started watching The Breakthrough, a drama about a double murder in Sweden that went unsolved for 16 years.
The first week of work for 2025 was a strange one. In many ways I hit the ground running, getting on with some important items that I need to complete early on this year. But it still felt very fragmented, with lots of little things pulling me in different directions.
I had a few conversations with colleagues that veered off in different directions, many of them fascinating. It brought into sharp relief one of my flaws in that I’m interested in ALL THE THINGS, and usually want the detail on each of the topics too. The structure of my week and my commitments don’t give me enough bandwidth to deeply indulge in the things I want to learn about.
Had a rainy, windy start to my first day back in the office. It broke my exercising streak as I chose to take the tube instead of walking to my office.
Tried to start the year by flushing all of the key priorities out of my head before getting mired in the detail of Teams messages and emails. On my first day I had a very useful impromptu catch-up with my boss which helped us to get aligned with each other at the start of the year.
Had lots of discussions about the ethics and use cases of large language models and generative AI, such as whether consuming potentially inaccurate AI-generated summaries of books is better or worse than not reading them at all.
Finished the annual appraisal process for my team. I haven’t managed a team of permanent staff in a while and I had forgotten how much I enjoy it.
Restarted the process of trying to recruit for a vacancy in my team. It was useful to re-review the role spec and tweak it a bit further. It’s out with quite a few recruitment companies and we’ve already started to get CVs back.
Had lunch with my contact at one of the recruitment firms, and had a call with another to get the process moving again.
Took part in tests of an advanced videoconferencing system in one of our large client meeting rooms. Getting the equipment set up on site was invaluable to see how it would perform in our space. The audio was incredible but the video experience started to struggle once we filled the room. One of our colleagues at our sister company in the building managed to bring along tons of ‘extras’ in the form of our cleaning, catering and maintenance staff so that we could fill the room with people.
Met with my counterpart at our sister company to catch up with what’s been happening with their major programme over the Christmas period.
Continued planning for our management team offsite in a couple of weeks’ time, firming up some of the agenda as well as a venue for dinner.
Gave feedback to our team for a couple of small tweaks to our office environment settings, which have already been implemented.
Helped a colleague to solve a problem with logging into their password manager.
Had a catch-up call with our consultant who is helping my eldest son to find a scholarship at a university in the US. The next few weeks seem critical to get solid offers nailed down.
Didn’t manage to get out on my bike, so did lots of indoor rides. The temperature has remained at or below freezing all week, making it too icy to attempt an outdoor cycle. The cycling club cancelled the Saturday morning ride, which is usual if the temperature isn’t high enough by the time we are due to set off.
Enjoyed a lovely Saturday afternoon lunch out in town with my wife. We’ve got into the habit of doing this regularly and I love it.
Went through my blog posts with the plan of creating a ‘highlights’ page, linking to posts that are important to me.
Discovered that a noisy pan on an induction hob is not a good thing. One layer of metal gave a cracking sound as it separated from another. We only discovered the problem when we found that the pan wasn’t heating up.
Nigel Farage, Elon Musk, Robert Jenrick, Tommy Robinson – when have you ever heard these people give a shit about women’s issues, let alone make a speech or put forward a policy dedicated to advancing them? Robinson very deliberately nearly collapsed a grooming trial, which would have put the victims through months and months of the horror of having to testify twice. People threaten to rape and kill women pretty much every second on Musk’s platform and nothing gets done about it – if I were him I’d be cleaning up my own streets. If he can’t manage it, maybe he should immediately call for himself to be imprisoned?
We finished watching season two of Shrinking on AppleTV+. The characters were fabulous and made me laugh out loud every episode. But who lives in a world where people just randomly pop into each other’s houses all the time? As fun as it looks to be a part of their gang, would anyone really like to live like that?
I’d never heard of the BBC TV programme Open Door before. It’s like an early precursor to YouTube, commissioned by David Attenborough.
Sky’s Dart Kings documentary offers a great slice of cultural history through three episodes, covering Eric Bristow, Jocky Wilson and Phil Taylor. I didn’t watch darts as a kid but everyone knew the names of the top players. I loved looking back at the old TV footage in this series; the venues, the crowd and the copious amounts of beer show a much simpler time.
Black Bird on AppleTV+ is an incredible drama, based on the real-life serial killer Larry Hall. We started watching it with no prior knowledge of the events or the subject matter and it blew us away. The main character, played by Taron Egerton, gets ever so slightly changed and impacted by events as the series progresses, and it’s only at the end that you see how much he has transformed from where the story began.
Audio
So excited to hear from Alicia Clara. Her music was one of my favourite things to listen to over the past year.
Finally finished my hobby project of cleaning up my digital music library and sorting out all of my Plex metadata. It took me days of work — I must have spent three or four hours just fixing the data for the 24-disc Mansun Closed For Business box set — but now it’s done. Albums have the correct covers, songs are where they should be, random old downloads were purged and everything now looks present and correct.
Next week: More people back at work, and two Album Club nights.
Random pondering: can people take quotes way out of context and use them on book covers? For example, if I wrote a review that said “Simply nothing worth reading in this book”, could the author publisher write ‘“WORTH READING” — Andrew Doran’ and slap it on the book?
After getting back from our Mexican holiday on Monday, I spent most of this week pottering around. I managed to get out on my bike on New Year’s Eve just ahead of a storm, and since then it’s been too cold and yucky to ride outside. So my routine has been to wake up a little later than usual, go on the indoor bike trainer, and then fill my afternoon with either jobs that need doing or hobbies that I want to make some progress with. Work will soon be in the foreground again, but I’m hoping that I will go back on Monday feeling properly rested.
New Year’s Eve was also my 48th birthday. After my bike ride, I went out with my family for a late lunch at Here, where they serve the best all-day vegetarian cooked breakfast in town. We spent a very quiet but lovely evening with friends who had invited us over for dinner. At midnight we watched the fireworks on TV. Every year they always look exactly the same to me.
My family know me well
One of my friends gifted me a second-hand vinyl copy of The Hits Album 6, a compilation that we both had on cassette tape when we were kids. There are some great tracks on there as well as one or two quite questionable songs towards the end. But mainly, it’s a great excuse to hear Donna Allen’s Serious, an underrated gem.
Reunited with a copy of Hits 6
I spent a lot of time cleaning up my digital music collection, including two or three hours alone which went into fixing up Mansun’s 25-disc Closed For Business box set. Getting the data corrected and organised in the Music app (which in my head will forever be iTunes) doesn’t necessarily mean that Plex will use it. Tracks seemed to jump between the discs, which all needed to be manually corrected. Taking the time to fix up the data is worth it, as it is helping me to rediscover my own music collection. I started the work before Christmas and have made it up to artists with the letter ‘U’, which felt good until I realised that I still have ‘Various Artists’ to go.
The episode also got me thinking again about how Internet platforms are largely unregulated, allowing people to spread fake news and make dangerous accusations without any checks. The planned ban of TikTok in the US makes sense; the platform is controlled by a state adversarial to the US that has itself restricted and banned many US social media platforms. What will the UK’s response be to a foreign platform whose owner uses it to incite division and hatred? Media regulation in the Internet age fascinates me. I made a note to myself to find a book that covers the complex topic of ‘free speech’ in the modern world; later that day I read Heather Burns’ post on her best reads and listens of 2024 where she recommends just the thing.
Articles
Alex Tabarrok says that India has too few tourists. I last visited in 2006 and still maintain that it is the most incredible place I’ve ever visited for a holiday.
Video
Despite our jet lag on the day we came back from our holiday, the finale of Gavin & Stacey kept us going. It’s amazing to think that we’ve known the characters for 17 years. It’s cheesy, but I love it.
Elliot Roberts’ video review of the Beatles ‘64 film and the Beatles’ US Albums box set is superb as usual.1 I adore his YouTube content, and am happy to support his work through Patreon.
Books
Despite trying to vary what I read, I couldn’t help but pick up the second volume of The McCartney Legacy by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair, which was published last month. It covers the years 1974 to 1980 and is another whopper at 768 pages, but I’m here for every detail.
Next week: Getting back to work.
At the time of writing, the video is only available to Patreon supporters with early access. It should be on YouTube soon, if it isn’t already. ↩
📚 Finished reading Exit Stage Left: The Curious Afterlife of Pop Stars by Nick Duerden. A large collection of vignettes about various pop stars, which I ultimately found to be a bit of a trivial and unsatisfying read. It’s the second book in a row where I’ve not been able to mentally keep track of how and why the anecdotes have been grouped into particular chapter headings, which implies it might be me instead of the authors. I did like Stuart Copeland’s reflection on playing new songs versus old ones at concerts:
View of the beach from The Fives Hotel, Playa del Carmen, Mexico
We’ve just come back from a wonderful holiday in Playa del Carmen, a short drive south of Cancún in Mexico. There were 14 of us — my two brothers and I, our families, plus our parents. Back in summer 2022 we went away on a big family trip to Turkey and had such a lovely time that we wanted to repeat it. After my lovely Nan passed away in January, my mum suggested that we plan another trip. We jumped at the idea.
The best thing about a big family holiday is how much time you all get to spend together. There’s no time pressure of having to fit in all of the conversations you want to have into a few snatched hours, as there usually is when you just get together for an afternoon. Of course, it helps if you like the members of your family. I feel very lucky to be part of such a great crew whose company I really enjoy. Spending quality time with my niece and nephews is a precious thing, and it was great to be able to get to know them better. When we get together, I always think of Tim Urban’s Wait But Why post on The Tail End:
I’ve been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I’ve probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time. 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood.
Being in their mid-60s, let’s continue to be super optimistic and say I’m one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the ten days a year thing holds, that’s 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years.
When you look at that reality, you realize that despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life.
[…]
It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
It’s a similar story with my two sisters. After living in a house with them for 10 and 13 years respectively, I now live across the country from both of them and spend maybe 15 days with each of them a year. Hopefully, that leaves us with about 15% of our total hangout time left.
My eldest son may be off to college in August this year. Given that he and his younger brother both have important exams in the summer, the only time we could plan our holiday for was the Christmas break. There were some nerves and reluctance about going away at this time of year as there is something special about being in the wind, rain, cold and snow, and enjoying everything Christmassy with the youngest children in our group. But there wasn’t any real alternative. For the first time that I can remember, I spent Christmas somewhere warm.
We woke up early to drive to Gatwick, dropping our car off and meeting everyone in the departure hall. Our flight was uneventful, but fun. I love a daytime flight going west, as it means that you just end up with a long day.
Vapour trail across the wing
Arriving at Cancun airport was a different story. As we came to the end of our long walk from the aircraft gate and descended into the immigration hall, we quickly realised that we had entered the gates of hell. The room was jam-packed and completely disorganised. People had little idea of where they needed to be, and no means of getting there even if they did. As we inched our way forward, people started shouting at each other for pushing in or somehow ending up in front of them in the pack. There was no queue, just one big scrum. We tried to make light of the situation, but any smiles were offset by the frayed tempers around us. A little panic set in when we realised that our airport transfer would only wait 45 minutes for us before leaving; I tried calling them but had no luck getting through.
This photo does not do justice to how disorganised the immigration hall was
Remarkably, by the time we got through immigration our bags had not yet turned up. After more waiting and a brief moment of panic that our suitcases weren’t with us, we finally left the airport and eventually found our transfer. Our driver didn’t have a clue where we were going, so I sat next to him in the front of the vehicle, holding up Waze on my iPhone to navigate us to the hotel. We were laughing as I relayed hazards reported by Waze to the driver and exclaimed “La Luna!” every time we found a pothole that hadn’t been logged.
Our home for the week was The Fives Beach Hotel and Residences, just north of the town of Playa del Carmen. It’s a strange mix of hotel and condominiums. Our rooms were superb, with separate kitchen and lounge areas, but they had no cutlery or other utensils for self-catering. The hotel is all-inclusive, so I doubt that guests would typically make use of any of the cooking facilities, but it was weird not to have a single implement in any of the drawers.
The rooms are spread out over a sprawling estate with plenty of amenities on site: a big variety of restaurants, a gym, multiple swimming pools, bars, a beach and small pier as well as wooden walkways through a lightly cultivated mangrove swamp. Monkeys, coatis and lizards roam around the complex, turning up unexpectedly as you pass.
Comedy footprints by reception. We have no idea what animal made these, or why its paws were so muddy.
A monkey on the wooden walkway. At one point my wife was busy pointing at a monkey in a tree, not realising that one was sitting about half a foot away from her. I’ve not seen her jump as high as when she spotted it.
One of the resident lizards
Coatis, making mincemeat of the lawn as they foraged for food
You can get around the site by chauffeured golf buggy, which you are introduced to when the staff first take you to your room. But it was much more efficient to get around by foot. The perimeter of the site is about 1.75km and makes for a perfectly usable running route. After a couple of mornings of sweating litres of water on the spin bikes in the humid gym, I couldn’t face doing it for a third time, so I tentatively tried running again. I was so pleased that my calf injury didn’t come back, so I switched to morning runs for the rest of my stay.
The main pool and beach area was lovely. You needed to get down there early to secure any sunbeds, as people got there early and left towels on them all day. I think that hotels like this one would benefit from having some proper rules in place, such as needing to have at least one member of your group present to keep hold of any sunbeds, and for each person to be able to ‘keep’ no more than four.
Early morning at the beach
View from the sunbeds, out to sea
Early on in our trip we saw an area of the beach turned into a wedding venue. It was beautiful, but strange that there were a bunch of strangers in swimwear milling around the smartly-dressed wedding attendees.
Wedding on the beach
The on-site restaurants were good, but getting a table was a pain. According to other guests that had visited the year before, the hotel had removed the ability for you to pre-book dinner at a certain time. You had to turn up at a restaurant, ask for a table and then wait around with a buzzer until one became available. If there were just two of us I think we would have been fine, but with such a large group we found ourselves eating quite late on a couple of evenings, with the youngest children falling asleep at the table. After some complaining and negotiating, we managed to secure a table for all 14 of us at the Thai restaurant on Christmas Day, which worked out brilliantly. My favourite restaurant was the Italian, which served some incredible butternut squash ravioli.
On the days where it was more difficult to secure a table, some of the group took advantage of the buffet restaurant or the pizzeria in the main plaza. These facilities made things a lot easier when we wanted a more relaxed, less formal evening.
A couple of days into the trip, my wife discovered a little frozen yoghurt shop that was slightly hidden away. It quickly became a daily staple for everyone, with many of us walking out of the shop with overflowing tubs that consisted of at least 50% toppings.
The hotel had a good programme of events for Christmas, which went a long way to keeping it special. Christmas Eve was so much fun. It started with a very good musical duo who were accompanied on stage by a snowy fireplace scene. (Is this as bizarre to people that live in the southern hemisphere as it is to me?) We then had an enactment of The Nutcracker followed by another band and plenty of drinking, dancing and having fun with the other guests around us. It was a blast.
Events at the hotel for Christmas 2024
There’s a cognitive dissonance of sitting in shorts and a light shirt in the early evening while the stage played a snowy scene complete with a roaring fireplace
The Nutcracker
The fun continued down on the beach the next day when The Grinch appeared, followed by Santa Claus who arrived — of course — by catamaran. Children and their parents queued up to go along the little pier to receive a gift from him.
The Grinch kicked things off before Santa Claus arrived by boat.
The hotel entertainment was pretty good quality throughout the week, with a programme of events each evening. I loved the enthusiastic mariachi band who played down by the beach, singing songs such as Guantanamera and La Bamba until the rain started.
I’ll never get used to the size of a guitarrón in a mariachi band
The weather was pretty good all week, reaching about 28°C most days. We had a little cloud, which stopped it from feeling too hot. There was one day of significant tropical rain, but given it was December, we couldn’t begrudge everything around us getting watered.
Looking out on a stormy evening
A couple of days into the trip we discovered the Lizzard Pool [sic], which made a gesture towards healthy living with regular water aerobics workouts and games of volleyball.
Volleyball in the Lizzard Pool
Aside from lounging around by the pool and the beach, we did a few activities. We took a taxi into the nearby town of Playa del Carmen for a look around. The main street in the town is amusingly called 5th Avenue, and is filled with lots of souvenir shops and quite sad-looking restaurants and tequila bars. I imagine that the venues come to life in the evening with the place taking on the persona of a typical resort town, with loud music and people drinking long into the night. It was a handy trip for us to pick up some flip-flops and cheap pairs of water shoes for our adventures later in the week.
Wandering around Playa del Carmen
One thing it did have was a fantastic ice cream shop called Aldo’s. The coffee ice cream was superb, and the boys both enjoyed a humongous ice cream sandwich.
Seriously good ice cream
A few of us had a very busy day out at Xplor, part of the Xcaret group of theme parks. We woke up early to catch the coach from our hotel, stopping to pick up additional passengers on the way. When you get in the park you are given a locker key and a helmet and then let loose on the various attractions. The zip lines were breathtaking — you finish one and then climb up to the start of the next one, covering fourteen different zip lines across two different routes, two of which end up in water at the finish.
As we waited on the steps to our second set of zip wires, we spotted a giant iguana in one of the treetops. We figured that it was a model that had been put there by the park to entertain people in the queue, but an unexpected giant yawn and shake of its head startled us into realising that it was real. We then noticed the iguanas all over the park, basking in the heat in the treetops as we slid overhead.
We then quickly made our way to the giant water slide, which you must tackle as groups of four. I’ve never been on a water slide with so many stages; it was epic. We spent the rest of the day navigating underground caves, swimming through some and using hand paddles to race and bump our way through others. The favourite activity turned out to be using the all-terrain vehicles to bump our way through two bumpy 5km tracks that included cave sections and massive water hazards. At one point my 17 year-old cried out that “It hurts so much but I love it!” Lunch took the form of an excellent buffet, better than the one at our hotel. The day out was expensive, but it didn’t feel that we had been ripped off. We were sad to leave, but satisfied with a brilliantly fun day out.
We were up early again the next day for an organised trip, this time with all 14 of us. Our first stop was the Mayan ruin of Tulum. Once you get past the souvenir and tat shops you find a well-preserved site in a beautiful setting, but surprisingly young at only 575–825 years old. (Berkhamsted Castle, located a short walk from our house, is approaching its 1,000th anniversary.) It was a super hot day and the site offered little shade, so by the time we had walked around we were happy to get back to somewhere where we could buy a drink.
The cove at the ruins of Tulum
Lizard at Tulum
Our next stop was a site where we could descend some steep steps to explore a cenote, a cave filled with groundwater that was formed by the erosion of the limestone bedrock. Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula has thousands of these, scattered all around. Cenote Caracol is located off of a long bumpy road in Tulum. Our trip included a swim in the cave, a walking tour through part of the cave network and a delicious lunch.
Steps into the cenote…
…and steps into the water
Swimming in Cenote Caracol
Walking through the caves, with strong Goonies vibes
The last stop of the day was Bahía de Akumal, a beach that is famous for being able to spot sea turtles as you swim your way around. I chose not to take part as I didn’t think the turtles needed to see me all that much. Everyone donned a life jacket and snorkel and were taken out as a group by a guide. While they were out at sea, a massive brawl broke out on the beach that resulted in soldiers from the National Guard turning up. As I sat chatting with my parents, we had no idea that this was going on a few yards down the beach from us. Our guide spotted it from where everyone was swimming and he first thought that the commotion was due to a shark or stingray being close to the shore. As everyone waded in at the end of their swim, one guy was sitting on the beach with a bag of ice held to his head. I have no idea what the commotion was all about.
Beach site for turtle spotting at Bahía de Akumal
One of the biggest highlights of our trip was an evening at La Casa De Rosa on-site at our hotel. This was a paid add-on to our stay where we gathered together in a little purpose-built kitchen and dining area to cook and eat a Mexican meal together. The evening started with introductions with our host, followed by a tasting journey through different tequilas and mezcals. Having had tequila before, and finding it difficult to believe that there could be a less appealing alcoholic drink, I politely declined to take part. But it was so funny to see the various faces that were pulled as people sipped from their shot glasses.
We were then each given a flashcard with a Spanish word on it which would become our names for the evening. Everyone had to learn everyone else’s name. The penalty for getting it wrong, or calling someone by their actual name, was either an additional shot of tequila, or a ‘shot’ of baked crickets. I kept my mouth shut.
Our table at La Casa De Rosa
The meal itself was delicious, and a real team effort. After we all made tortillas and gorditas that were then cooked on the comal, some people continued to make more while others prepared fish tamales, two of the children got busy making different types of salsa and others prepared a salad. There was mild panic in the eyes of our hosts when I told them I didn’t eat meat, which I tried to diffuse by saying that I would just eat the vegetarian things. But they insisted in rustling up a dish of roasted courgettes filled with corn, cheese and other delights. We ate so much — I haven’t been that full in a very long time. It was a lovely thing to do together.
Our last evening at the hotel was so much fun. They set up a silent disco in the plaza, with three DJs playing different music on different colour-coded stations. Most of our crew had never been to a silent disco before; their skepticism melted away as soon as they put their headsets on. We danced all night and everyone loved it.
Queuing for silent disco headsets
Cutting some shapes, tuned into the green channel
Travelling home overnight was always going to be tricky. My brother smooth talked his way into getting all of us access to the BA lounge. Once we had gotten through security we tried to locate it but couldn’t see it anywhere. A quick web search revealed that the BA lounge is located in the airport before you go through security. I find airports quite stressful places, so I found a seat in the terminal and donned my headphones to catch up with my podcast backlog.
Everyone seemed to snatch a small amount of poor-quality sleep on the way back. We then tried to keep ourselves awake all day in order to shorten our jet lag, but it will take a few days to recover.
We had a wonderful holiday. I feel so lucky to have been able to spend time together with my whole family in such a luxurious setting. We’ve made memories that will stick with us for a very long time, and I can’t wait for us to get together again.
Next week: Another week off before work begins again. And turning 48.
A week off work, largely spent pottering around at home. My wife and the boys were still going to school, so it didn’t feel quite right to spend the morning lounging around in bed while they dashed about as they got ready to leave the house.
Despite the early starts, it was lovely to not have anywhere that I needed to rush off to. On Monday I did a hard 100km ride out to Ampthill and back. It’s a loop that I had previously ridden a few times with my eldest son when he was enthusiastic about cycling. This time felt much harder as I was pushing myself, and I felt the effects of the ride for a few days afterwards.
The rest of the week was filled with domestic chores, catching up on the washing, and ironing all the things. I also managed to spend a whole morning at Deco Audio, thumbing my way through their entire collection of physical music and walking away with 19 new CDs for a fraction of what I would pay elsewhere.
I had dinner and drinks with a couple of close friends as one of them is working on a job nearby. I also had a lovely lunch and catch-up with Mat at Jester, over spicy avocado toast.
📚 Finished reading How To Lose A Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship by Ece Temelkuran. I found this important, readable, but hard-going. The book uses the experience of Turkey over the past few decades as a warning of what can happen to democracies. I found it difficult to remember where I was in the 7 steps, which may be more of a reflection of me reading it before bedtime each night than of the book itself.
The point that struck the biggest chord with me was how humans need a cause that they can get behind. The left isn’t offering this, so people gravitate to whatever narrative there is, typically one touted by right-wing populists.
🎶 I seem to rediscover this beautiful song about this time every year. The Smoke Fairies have reissued their Christmas album Wild Winter for its 10th anniversary, which was a good excuse for me to finally buy the CD version.
