Weeknotes #297 — Quick leg

Not a euphemism
Not a euphemism

A tough, busy week. We’re now just a couple of weeks away from the final big project milestone of the year and things are ramping up. On Monday I felt as though I was being put through the wringer a little bit with a couple of difficult situations; things got significantly easier after that, but no less busy. We have everything and everyone in place to be successful, we now just need to get it over the line.

At long last, we finally got to the week of the budget announcement by the government here in the UK, almost four months after they won the general election. Their plans to borrow more, tax more and spend more on investment are things that need to be done given the state of the country. It has amazed me — but not surprised me — how little coverage there has been on Brexit as a root cause of some of the trouble we find ourselves in today. It has cost the economy £140bn so far.

I have my fingers crossed for Harris to win next week’s election in the US. The idea of Trump getting in for a second term is stomach-turning.

This was a week in which I:

  • Triaged a couple of issues that have come up late in our project, agreeing on how we will test and assess solutions.
  • Joined the project completion meeting with our construction vendor, reviewing the outcome of the mechanical and engineering work that they have done on one of our sites.
  • Briefly met with our furniture vendor who was visiting our site to discuss fabric finishes and our plans for new boardroom tables.
  • Took part in a risk assessment meeting for our plans to open a new office in a new location.
  • Reviewed the latest design presentation for a shared space in one of our offices. Gave feedback on a couple of concerns that we have with the plans.
  • Had an introductory meeting with a new joiner at our sister company.
  • Submitted a narrative and photos to our regional internal newsletter about the opening of a new office that we completed in October.
  • Started year-end appraisals for my team. I’ve not had ‘permanent’ staff reporting to me for a decade or so. I’m already looking forward to the conversations and objective setting.
  • Took my team through the overview presentation that I put together a while ago that describes our function: the services and capabilities we offer, the products we own, and the current initiatives that we’re working on. Gathered lots of feedback on how we can change and improve the document.
  • Had a follow-up conversation with a new recruitment vendor, giving an overview of our company and what I’m looking for in a candidate to fill my vacancy.
  • Had a genuine ‘water cooler moment’ with a colleague that has led to a meeting being set up between a technical expert in our team and one of our business units. It’s exciting to have the opportunity to leverage the skills of our team in a broader way.
  • Picked up a new iPad Mini which I plan to try out as a dedicated reading device. I love my old Kindle, but it would be better if I could also read articles and PDFs that I’ve saved to Readwise Reader. At the moment I end up saving maybe 20 or 30 articles for every one that I read. I’ll see how it goes.
  • Ran our monthly Lean Coffee session with the team. It felt a bit flatter than usual, so we decided to wrap things up a little early.
  • Took Friday off in order to drive up to Mansfield with my eldest son as he was taking part in a cross-country relay race on Saturday. We were booked into a Premier Inn with a Beefeater restaurant attached to it; I’d not been to either of these in years. The Beefeater was full for dinner, so we booked ourselves a table across the road at The Nuthall. I tried deep-fried corn ribs for the first time. When they arrived, they looked to me just like halloumi fries. My son laughed at me as I tried to eat them whole, not realising the ‘rib’ part. I’m not sure my digestive system was expecting to have to deal with a corn husk. The race itself was good, with my son running a superb time in his leg, and the team doing themselves proud despite the first leg runner being tripped up by someone who fell in front of him.
  • Rode the cycle club ride a day early, the second time in as many weeks that I’ve tackled it solo. Being in Mansfield on Saturday morning meant I would miss out, so I assumed which route we’d be riding and pedalled it on Friday.

Media

Podcasts

  • Nick Robinson’s interview with Matt Goodwin got me thinking about how cultural integration of immigrants is always presented as a one-way street, i.e. the immigrants need to change their ways to fit in with the country. Wouldn’t we all end up culturally richer if it was two-way?

Video

  • Started watching Rivals on — surprisingly — Disney+. We’re really enjoying it. It’s bubblegum, but the casting is inspired. I never thought I’d be watching a moving performance from Danny Dyer.

Web

Books

Next week: Symposium, and final checks before project go-live.

Weeknotes #296 — Tipping point

Autumn leaves in Virginia Water
Autumn leaves in Virginia Water

A typically busy week. On a couple of days I finished work and felt good about all of the things that I’d completed. This was short-lived as I then took a look at the still giant ‘to do’ pile.

Our clocks went back by an hour over the weekend. Half of our meetings are scheduled from London-based diaries and the other half from those in Johannesburg. As only one of us changes our clocks, I’m expecting the usual diary bumps for a few days.

This was a week in which I:

  • Wondered if other countries have as much train-related drama as we do. For two days, my regular train approached us at the station, on time … and then whistled straight past as it was half its usual size. No explanation given.
  • Finished writing the script for our presentation at our quarterly Technology town hall meeting, and delivered it in the session. It was a wonderfully collective effort on the part of many members of our management team, knitting together some important strategic narratives for our company along with the day-to-day work that the team has been doing. I delivered the speech again at our all-team meeting on Friday. I quite enjoy being ‘on stage’, particularly when it’s from the comfort of my desk in my home office.
  • Prepped for and ran our programme Steering Committee meeting. We’re a couple of weeks away from our second big milestone of the year, so attention is already turning to the things that will happen after that.
  • Joined a Finance meeting to hear about the future technical treatment of specific types of costs.
  • Completed my annual self-appraisal.
  • Had an introductory call with a new account manager at one of our technology and staffing vendors.
  • On recommendation, met another recruitment vendor who might be able to help with the vacancy in my team.
  • Had a call with an ex-colleague who has declared that they are ‘#OpenToWork’ on LinkedIn to see if they would be interested in putting themself forward for the role.
  • Raised a ticket with QNAP as the cloud backup process that runs on my NAS drive has suddenly started to report a problem. I’d deleted a whole bunch of music files that I’m never going to listen to and the Hybrid Backup Sync process now aborts every night with a 404 ‘file not found’ error.
  • Went with my youngest son to a small careers fair at his school. There was a diverse mix of companies on show, from the military to small local startups. It was lovely to spend some dedicated time discussing his future with him.
  • Joined my son’s parents’ evening sessions online from my office. I couldn’t leave work early enough to join my wife and son at home for the first appointment, so stayed at work and dialled in from there. For me, online parents’ evenings is one of the best things to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Took an after-work trip to a cinema in Leicester Square to see Tears for Fears Live (A Tipping Point Film) (2023). I’m always swapping recommendations for music films and documentaries with the friend who came with me, so it was good to sit and watch something together for once. The concert was beautiful and the band sounded great; Roland Orzabal’s voice continues to stun even as he moves through his 60s. I’ve not heard much of their new music and now feel like I do need to check it out.

  • Had some pre-cinema food at Gordon Ramsay’s Street Burger on Charing Cross Road. Grim and expensive. Would not recommend.
  • Went to pump up my bike tyres on Friday evening ahead of the club ride on Saturday morning. As I unscrewed the dust cap on the rear wheel, the valve shot out like a missile and the whole thing rapidly deflated. I had no idea that the valve was a detachable part. I’d been meaning to replace my bike tyres but didn’t have the energy to start after a long week at work. Approaching the job on Saturday afternoon, I found that I couldn’t get the rear wheel off. One bent multitool, a visit to a friend down the road and a trip to the bike shop later and I was finally in business. (Embarrassingly, I think I was turning the bolt the wrong way.) At some point I’m going to tackle changing the disc brake pads which the Internet tells me is simultaneously “easy” and “quite tricky”.
Various levels of faff and drama
Various levels of faff and drama
  • Took advantage of Sunday’s extra hour in bed by getting up early to go and ride the route I missed the day before. It was a glorious sunny autumn morning, the kind that fills your heart and makes you glad to be alive.
  • Had a lovely afternoon walking around Virginia Water with our friends, followed by a late lunch at The Wheatsheaf.
  • Didn’t expect to love the F1 Mexican Grand Prix as much as I did. Typically it’s a relatively boring race but this one was all action.

Media

Podcasts

  • I’m drowning in podcasts at the moment. I’m hoping that it’s just a ramped-up schedule of the imminent US election, UK budget and the fact that the F1 season has restarted again after a second break. If not, I’m going to have to start trimming my subscriptions.

Articles

Watched this as I waited for a flight a few weeks back and finished it as we took off. Turned me into a snotty, crying mess with no tissues, and no ability to get up and find any as we went skyward. Incredible film.bsky.app/profile/iand…

Andrew Doran (@andrewdoran.uk) 2024-10-21T16:36:59.713Z

Video

  • Watched One Day In October on Channel 4, about the attack on Kibbutz Be’eri in 2023. I knew the subject matter would be tough, but I wasn’t quite prepared to see people getting killed on screen. What happened there is beyond dreadful. What’s happening all over the region is also beyond dreadful. There doesn’t seem to be a beginning or a feasible end to the whole thing.

Audio

  • Spent a little time tidying up my home music library. Years ago I worked for a lovely man who used to pass classical music CDs on to me from his extensive collection, ones that he didn’t want anymore. Having these tracks in my library has caused me more problems than the joy they have brought, with the odd random movement being included in some of the auto-generated Plexamp ‘radio’ playlists. I’ve decided that if I ever, in my remaining years, get into a new piece of classical music, I can check out whether I own it already and then add it to my collection at that point.

Web

Books

Next week: A four-day week and a short trip.

📚 Finished reading Where The Light Gets In by Kimberly Williams-Paisley. The author is best known for playing Annie Banks in the 1991 version of Father of the Bride. This read as a very honest narrative of her mother’s diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia and her subsequent decline. It was a useful, insightful and easy read. The book ends with a section of useful references and brief guidance for anyone dealing with dementia, or the potential of it, in their lives.

This is an incredible discovery. Peanut butter infused with mince pie filling. I was skeptical, but it was an unexpected lunchtime delight.

Weeknotes #295 — Big bad DOMS

I spent the first half of the week walking around like an old man, tentatively tackling stairs and taking an age to move between sitting and standing positions. It’s been a while since I’ve had delayed onset muscle soreness from running and I wasn’t really expecting it after the half marathon. This was me:

I was grateful for an early morning meeting on Monday that meant I would be working from home; I’m not convinced that I could have tackled the walk to the train station as well as all of the stairs at the tube stations.

By Thursday the stiffness had passed except in the calf muscle that caused me the problems during the run. I get the feeling that there’s something else going on in there as it still feels very tight and sore when I move any faster than walking pace. I decided to skip running this weekend and give it a bit more time to sort itself out.

This was a week in which I:

  • Gave my presentation on An Introduction to Large Language Models and Generative AI to the board of directors of one of our African companies. It had been a few months since I last presented on the topic, but I found that I didn’t need to make many updates to my slides. It’s amazing how much content is still valid 18 months on from the first draft.
  • Met with our external legal team to review a vendor contract for some minor works that we need to finish off in one of our office spaces.
  • Collaborated with my colleagues to write a speech that we are due to give at a ‘town hall’-style meeting on Tuesday. We’ve seamlessly knitted our own narrative with key internal content from the past few weeks. I’m very pleased with the results. Most of the attendees will be in the room in Johannesburg, but I’m grateful to be stuck in my home office as it will allow me to read from the document instead of clutching paperwork in my hand.
  • Caught up with the project team for opening a new office for the first time in a while. Things will get busy again soon.
  • Had my first monthly meeting with our technology advisory consultancy.
  • Heard from two different vendors that a key person from each of their teams is leaving. Agreed an approach for how we will mitigate one of these changes for the next few weeks.
  • Made a couple of visits to our vacated office with a colleague to work out where our new meeting room artwork should go.
  • Visited a corporate furniture vendor to look at new meeting room furniture. I loved the analogy that buying a boardroom table is like a car; it comes with a basic chassis and you can upgrade various components that are factory-fitted before delivery.
  • Joined the first part of a follow-up workshop on sustainable careers.
  • Had a useful meeting with my team, primarily focused on our upcoming Microsoft Copilot trial.
  • Met an online friend for a chat about the vacancy in my team. It was lovely to meet them in ‘high fidelity’ after having just been talking in a Signal group for so long.
  • Attended the Thoughtworks Technology Radar preview. I asked a question in the Q&A about where the company had seen Generative AI deployed with a massive impact as I am increasingly skeptical about it having ‘breakout’ value, but didn’t get much of an answer.
  • Fixed a problem with my laptop. I had rebooted and then suddenly the desktop and Office applications on my external monitor were VERY LARGE. After tentatively exploring some simple causes for a few days I ended up going for the full driver uninstall and re-download from the Lenovo website. The fix didn’t even ask for a reboot.
  • Bumped into a friend and enjoyed a lovely morning commute with him. He has been a Chief Financial Officer for many different companies. I felt like an information vacuum as he answered the many questions that I bombarded him with about his current business.
  • Went to a special event at school with my wife and youngest son to learn about the subjects he might take for A-Levels in the Sixth Form. Just like the last time I went to this event, I was jealous of the learning adventure he has ahead of him. He’s quite sure about what he wants to do, but we made full use of the time by checking out some other subjects that were on his long list.
  • Had our main bathroom repainted. This now seems to need doing on a roughly annual basis as (a) some people in the house like to drain the whole tank of hot water and (b) possibly these same people are reluctant or forgetful in opening the window. As a consequence, the bathroom regularly resembles the aftermath of particularly packed, jaunty evening at the legendary Cavern Club. We probably need to get an extractor fan in there, but I’m not sure they make one powerful enough.
  • Enjoyed two Album Club evenings, both with albums I’d never heard before. Talk Talk are definitely on my ‘to explore’ list.
  • Found a couple of gems at our local Oxfam Books and Music store.

My latest haul from our local Oxfam Books and Music store My latest haul from our local Oxfam Books and Music store

Media

Podcasts

  • Fascinating episode of Quiet Riot where host Naomi Smith talks to Gareth Dennis about Britain’s railways. I loved the sentiment that successive governments have “lost a diamond whilst chasing the glitter” with their focus on FM (f’ing magic) as opposed to AM (actual machines). There’s lots that I learned here, including how intensively used Britain’s railways are, which makes maintaining and fixing them more expensive as it has to be done more intensively in a shorter timeframe. Electric vehicles are important, but the ‘embodied carbon’ in their manufacture and usage versus the train means that they can’t be the only vision of the future.
  • The regular Thursday episode of Quiet Riot left me open-mouthed with its description of the Single Justice Procedure, and how “anyone can end up with a criminal conviction after a magistrate looks at a case for 45 seconds, behind closed doors, with no scrutiny or reasoning.” Magistrates themselves have asked for reform.

Video

  • Finished watching Kaos on Netflix. Loved it. Can’t believe it’s been cancelled.

Web

Books

  • Finished my book. Crippled with indecisiveness about what to read next and the commitment involved after picking one, I started wondering how I could make better decisions. Over time, I’ve built up a backlog of around 1,400 unread books and have their information in a list I keep in Obsidian. It feels a bit like I can no longer see the wood for the (mainly electronic) trees. So, I used Claude.AI to help me to put together some Python code to take a title (and author, where available) and use the Google Books API to fetch additional data. After an hour or two I got everything working and now have descriptions, genres and other metadata about my books in a spreadsheet. I now need to work out how to get better ratings information as this seems to be very sparsely populated in the Google data. I’m hoping that once I finish a book and am deciding what to read next, I can use the metadata to narrow things down. For example, I should be able to filter the list by biographies or fiction and pick something from the smaller selection.

Next week: Starting the annual review cycle, joining a conference from my chair and heading to the cinema with a friend.

📚 Finished reading Wrestling Merchandise of the 1990s by Kevin Williams. Bought for me as a niche Christmas present. This short book consists of what I assume are photos from the author’s collection of professional wrestling-related things, along with an enthusiastic narrative. The text could have benefitted from a little proofreading.

📚 Finished reading Taming Silicon Valley: How to Protect Our Jobs, Safety, and Society in the Age of AI by Gary Marcus. Having occasionally read the author’s AI-focused newsletter, I picked this up to get myself up to speed ahead of a presentation on Generative AI that I was due to give to one of our company boards. It was put together in a hurry and the result itself is a quick read. I agree with pretty much everything in the book, but there wasn’t much new for someone that has been following the progress of Generative AI closely since the release of ChatGPT a couple of years ago.

📚 Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma

I recently finished reading Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer, a wonderful exploration of the question of ‘what do we do with great art by bad people?’

It’s a perennial topic. It comes up in conversation at our monthly Album Club all the time. Is there something about society — us — somehow weighing the quality of the work against the wrongdoing of the artist, reaching a verdict of whether the art can still be enjoyed?

The book explores different angles through a number of public figures: Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, J. K. Rowling, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wagner, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Vladimir Nabokov (wrote fiction about monsters, with no evidence that he actually was one), Carl Andre, Ana Mendieta (died after falling from her apartment window during an argument with her husband, the aforementioned Carl Andre), Doris Lessing, Joni Mitchell, Valerie Solanas, Sylvia Plath, Raymond Carver and Miles Davis.

As much as the book is about problematic characters, it is also about the audience and each person’s response to an artist’s work:

Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art. This occurs in every case.

For me, wrestling with the question of whether you can separate the art from the artist has mainly been in the context of listening to music. Artists I’ve enjoyed, artists I’ve loved; when I read about something that they have done, hearing the music will never be the same experience again. Ryan Adams is someone whose work I had been enjoying exploring over a long period of time. His album Cold Roses contains an incredible set of songs which I had been playing a lot back in 2018. Around that time, according to Wikipedia:

…The New York Times reported that seven women (including Phoebe Bridgers and ex-wife Mandy Moore) said Adams offered to assist them with their music careers, then pursued the women romantically. They also claimed that Adams retaliated when they spurned his advances, hindering their careers and harassing them in text messages and on social media.

BBC News has a broader summary:

Several women have accused alternative rock star Ryan Adams of emotional and verbal abuse and offering career opportunities as a pretext for sex.

A report in the New York Times, external outlines a pattern of manipulative behaviour, including accusations of psychological abuse from his ex-wife, Mandy Moore.

Another woman said Adams sent explicit texts and exposed himself during a Skype call when she was a teenager.

The star, who rose to fame in the early 2000s, has denied the allegations.

I don’t think I’ve played that record since. I can’t hear the music without immediately thinking about the artist, and then about the stories surrounding him. I get annoyed that I can’t enjoy the music that I loved, but then feel guilty as I know that the pleasure that I’m denied is petty relative to the experience of the people that he has hurt and damaged.

A similar thing happened a little while later with accusations against Mark Morriss, lead singer of The Bluetones. The band’s music had been very important to me since my university days. My weeknotes tell me that I’d bought a box set of their first album in October 2021, a few months before these accusations appeared. I read the accusations with a sinking heart. Given how the scales of society are tipped, my instinct is to believe the woman’s side of the story. Morriss eventually posted a response. Who knows what actually happened? Again, I haven’t played their records since.

Despite not reaching for these albums, I find myself playing mind gymnastics with what would be ok. If I have a vinyl record and I play their music in my own house, just to myself, is that better than listening to them on Spotify where the play counts get registered and they receive a teeny bit of financial reward for my listen? Does it matter if my plays are recorded on last.fm for the world to see? What about records that they recorded at the start of their career, before the alleged offences?

Dederer’s book introduces the concept of ’the stain’, where something that someone has done at a point in their life colours to everything before and after it.

The stain begins with an act, a moment in time, but then it travels from that moment, like a tea bag steeping in water, coloring the entire life. It works its way forward and backward in time. The principle of retroactivity means that if you’ve done something sufficiently asshole-like, it follows that you were an asshole all along.

I loved the exploration of ‘the stain’ through a text message from the author’s friend:

These shortcomings of the word “monster” were clarified to me one day when I was messaging with a historian and music critic friend about the Michael Jackson problem. He wrote (in a telegraphic message-language that seemed elegant to me): i am currently trying to do the aesthetico-moral calculus thing re. MJ’s music, like, is the Jackson 5 stuff okay? oh but then in a different sense that also involved child abuse or exploitation too—michael himself. how about the ‘don’t stop til you get enough’, ‘rock with you’ era—surely he wasn’t at it then? but does the stain work its way backwards through time? I expect in practice it’ll be hard to resist the pull of the music when you hear it out and about.

Whether the stain seeps backwards and forwards in time through an artist’s work depends on the individual that is experiencing or interacting with it. Many people will hear Michael Jackson on the radio and not give it a second thought. Conversely, I’ve also been at an event where people have shouted to have his music turned off when it turned up on a playlist.

Jackson’s case fascinates me. From what I can make out, the release of the documentary film Leaving Neverland in the first week of March 2019, in which Jackson was accused of sexual abuse of two young boys, resulted many radio stations around the world removing his songs from their playlists. From Wikipedia:

Leaving Neverland led to a media backlash against Jackson. Commentators suggested Jackson’s music could fall from favor, similarly to the work of convicted child sexual abuser Gary Glitter. […] All Cogeco-owned radio stations in Canada pulled Jackson’s music from their playlists […] NH Radio in the Netherlands and MediaWorks New Zealand, New Zealand Media and Entertainment and Radio New Zealand also pulled Jackson’s music […] A 1991 episode of The Simpsons guest-starring Jackson, “Stark Raving Dad”, was pulled from circulation; the co-writer, Al Jean, said he believed Jackson had used the episode to groom boys for sexual abuse. A London concert produced by Jackson’s collaborator Quincy Jones removed Jackson’s name and album titles from its advertisements; the organizers said the modified artwork reflected the show’s inclusion of Jones’s repertoire unrelated to his work with Jackson. “Weird Al” Yankovic dropped his parodies of Jackson’s music from his Strings Attached Tour.

Lawsuits between the Jackson estate and HBO, the distributor of the documentary, followed throughout 2019 and into 2020. Putting aside whether the allegations of the film are true or not, I find it interesting that the popularity of Jackson’s work increased at the time of the film’s release. Wikipedia again:

Despite the negative publicity, Jackson’s honors were not rescinded, as had happened following sexual assault allegations made against Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, and there were no mass calls to stop playing his music, as had happened following allegations against Gary Glitter and R. Kelly. Jackson’s combined music sales, including his work with the Jackson 5, increased by 10%. Streams of his music and videos increased by 6%, rising from 18.7 million between February 24 and 26 to 19.7 million between March 3 and 5. His videos were viewed 22.1 million times, an increase of roughly 1.2 million from the week prior, and three of his albums re-entered the UK iTunes chart.

Is there something about the collective perception of the quality of the work that repels the stain? Can we ‘separate the art from the artist’ if the art is good enough to warrant it?

Dederer discusses how the public perception of someone — usually male — as a ‘genius’ is sometimes sufficient for them to have their stain diminished or ignored. Some of the acts described in the book, such as Picasso stubbing out a cigarette on his partner’s face, or the details of Hemingway being “a hitter, a beater-upper, an insulter”, are shocking to read. I had never heard about them before, perhaps because the stains had been sufficiently erased by the perceived weight of their respective works.

The author then spends time examining herself. She asks whether she is a monster, even in part, mainly for working while she has children. “This is what female monstrousness looks like: abandoning the kids. Always.” I read this part of the book in my hotel room when I was on a two-week business trip, having left my wife back in the UK to run the household. The circumstance was not lost on me.

My friend was intimating something about the continuum of abandonment. There’s a spectrum. Here are some ways to be judged an abandoner of children:

Shut the home office or studio door against the child

Depend on the other parent to do the lion’s share of the childcare

Let a grandparent or a nanny or a babysitter watch the child

Put the child in day care

Go away for work for days or weeks or months at a time

Get a divorce and let the other parent have majority custody

Give the child to your parents to raise

Flee the family home

And perhaps: give the child up for adoption at birth

Add your own! The thing is, each of us can draw a line across the page at any point on this list, and say: Here. Here is where abandonment begins. Where is that line for you? Day care? Surrendering custody? Flight? Why is that the line, for you? Is it an ethical thought, or a moral feeling?

Please note that none of these behaviors count as abandonment if practiced by men. This is extra-true if the men in question are artists. As Jenny Diski so rightly points out: men do this all the time.

There is definitely truth to this. Generally, I get to go to a room and work without being disturbed. This isn’t a luxury afforded to women in equal measure.

I love the author’s writing style, which made the book a joy to read and contemplate. It’s stuck with me since I finished it and sparked some interesting conversations with friends.

Although the book focuses on artists, similar questions can be raised of monsters in other fields. If you think Elon Musk is a monster, should you never buy or use one of his products? Will you never own a Tesla or use Starlink as your Internet service provider? Perhaps the choice is more clear-cut when there is a financial transaction involved. Buying another Bluetones or Ryan Adams album feels like a bigger step than listening to records that I already own.

It was interesting to hear my two favourite information security podcasts talk about Cloudflare. In March 2019, Risky Business had an episode that was literally called Stop giving Cloudflare Money, protesting that the company was continuing to help keep an awful website live that had been used to post links to the live stream of a mass shooting in New Zealand. Fellow antipodean Troy Hunt’s weekly podcast had mentioned Cloudflare many times; he had also written extensively about how he has used their technology to optimise his services in fascinating, clever ways. From memory, Hunt made no mention of the story on his podcast. I don’t know what the right answer is — drop the Cloudflare service and do things a different way or continue to use it — but I remember at the time being fascinated by the contrast between the two podcasts.

What about the people you work with who have done something terrible in their personal lives? What about family members? Dederer asks this question and answers it:

We’ve all loved terrible people. How do I know this? Because I know people, and people are terrible.

[…]

What do we do about the terrible people in our lives? Mostly we keep loving them.

Back to the point at the start of the book — it is always two biographies meeting, in every case. How we feel about a particular person and their work isn’t just about them alone, but about us as well.

Weeknotes #294 — Half marathon

An exhausting week. Despite getting a big sleep on Saturday night, it took me a couple of days to get over the jet lag from my New York trip. I found myself barely able to keep myself awake on the trains home. I hadn’t planned to spend four long days in the office, but as the week unfolded it was clear that I wouldn’t be able to work from home. Our divisional CIO came to town for a couple of days and then our new regional CEO hosted a welcome event with drinks afterwards. Friday was a very busy day, but it was good to work from home again for the first time in three weeks.

5°C when I started, 7°C by the time I finished
5°C when I started, 7°C by the time I finished

On Sunday I ran the Royal Parks Half Marathon. This was my first competitive half marathon event and only the second time that I’ve run this distance. A friend had an entry but could no longer make it, so he kindly offered me his place. The entries aren’t officially transferable this late in the day, so I raced without a name on my race number and he ended up getting the text message with ‘his’ official time. I was in the first wave and got sucked along with the crowd at a fast pace. This was fine until around the five mile mark, when my right calf started complaining and feeling stiff. I adjusted my style so that I didn’t put too much pressure on it and managed to hobble my way through the remaining eight miles. It’s now very sore and I’m hobbling around, but I’m hoping it will pass in a day or two.

A clear visual of when my calf started playing up, my pace dropping by around half a minute per kilometre
A clear visual of when my calf started playing up, my pace dropping by around half a minute per kilometre

This was a week in which I:

  • Formally agreed to close the project for our New York office move. We still have a few items on the snagging list, but they will be picked up as ‘business as usual’ items. It’s a big success.
  • Refocused on the remaining work for the final big project of the year. We only have four weeks to go until the bulk of the delivery is complete. There are a lot of moving parts, with many companies and people involved, making it a complex beast. I’m now quietly excited about the changes that it will bring for our staff.
  • Took our divisional CIO for a site visit to show him how things are shaping up.
  • Had our regular programme and project meetings.
  • Prepped for and chaired our programme Steering Committee meeting.
  • Received an update on works that will be going on in one of our buildings for a number of years and started to plan for how we will manage this for our staff.
  • Took part in the monthly payment valuation meeting for the work done so far by our main construction project vendor.
  • Attended an internal data-focused webinar with a guest speaker on the now perennial topic of AI. As with so much stuff that I read and hear about AI, I found myself thinking about how problematic the words in this space are. ‘Understanding’, ‘learning’ etc. should always be in quote marks in the context of AI.
  • Met with colleagues to discuss our approach to running an experimental Generative AI forum, focused on Microsoft Copilot. Whilst I think that the technology has many problems, I’m interested in how our staff can use it in interesting ways. The focus will be on ‘15% solutions’ as opposed to transformational change.
  • Took part in our monthly operational risk review meeting.
  • Had the quarterly meeting with our account manager from our technology advisory firm.
  • Had a ‘random coffee’ with a colleague who has recently joined the company, her first time working at a financial services firm. It was fascinating to hear about her career journey so far and to explain a bit how I understand a typical investment bank works.
  • Met with an ex-colleague and heard about his new role at a consultancy firm.
  • Had a catch-up with a friend who used to work in our team. Since she left we’ve kept a regular diary date that often gets moved around, but we eventually find time to meet up. It’s always lovely to find out what’s been happening with her.
  • Had a video call with another ex-colleague to talk through what she’d been doing since she left us and the potential next steps in her career. It was so lovely to have a check-in.
  • Learned that I take for granted how easy it is to find and attend a meetup in the western world. In other countries, people can be nervous about going to events; they need to make sure that they are the right kind of events and their attendance won’t get them into trouble down the line.
  • Had an evening out at the local tennis and squash club for a charity Rock and Roll Bingo evening in aid of Teenage Cancer Trust and Sarcoma UK. It’s a simple concept, with everyone getting bingo cards with songs on them instead of numbers, crossing them off as the songs are played. A fun night.
  • Had an impromptu drink at The Electric Bar at The Ned. I haven’t quite got my head around how The Ned operates, with its centrally located musicians and various bars and restaurants scattered around a gigantic room. We turned up early enough to get a nice table to ourselves and enjoyed a couple of drinks and snacks.
Electric Bar and Diner, The Ned, London
Electric Bar and Diner, The Ned, London
  • For the first time in what felt like forever, we had friends over for dinner at our house. We are well out of practice due to the pandemic and busy, structured weekends (my brother often jokes “Where is it you live now?”), but have resolved to try and entertain a bit more.
  • My eldest son passed his driving test on his first try. I’m so pleased for him. He was more than ready and I’m glad it all went well. We’ve now moved into a different phase of worrying about him as he’s off driving himself here, there and everywhere. The change to our car insurance was a surprisingly low £200 which was an unexpected surprise.

Media

Articles

  • Back in January I wrote about Matt Mullenweg that “I use loads of his products — WordPress, Jetpack, Pocket Casts — and I’m so pleased that he’s successful. He seems like one of the good guys with a good philosophy.” Reading blog posts like this one over the past week, I really hope that my words remain true.1 I remember thinking about the words as I wrote them as so many people have let me (us?) down over the years.

Video

  • Continued enjoying Kaos on Netflix. Disappointed to hear that they have already cancelled the show only a few weeks after season one was released.

Books

Next week: Recovering from my run, giving my AI presentation to a board of directors, and relaxing at a couple of Album Clubs.

  1. There’s a summary of the situation at CNBC.

🎶 Mix from May 2006

One of my friends recently stumbled across a mix CD that I put together back in 2006, filled with songs that I had been listening to at the time. Through the marvels of modern cloud services, I’ve recreated it as a Spotify playlist. I think the tracks and the sequencing both hold up pretty well.

There are videos of the tracks along with a bit of commentary below.

Flying — Faces

I’d been a big Small Faces fan since I was a teenager. But I hadn’t explored much of their post-Steve Marriott work, when they rebranded as Faces and brought Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood into the band. Flying is the first track on the ’best of’ Faces compilation Good Boys… When They’re Asleep…. It’s such a different-sounding song to the rest of the compilation that including it as track one made sense. Maybe that influenced me into including it as the first track here. I put the studio version on the CD, but this live version is a cracker.

Wrap It Up — Sam & Dave

Sam & Dave’s greatest hits became familiar to me when I explored 60’s and 70’s music as a teenager. But I probably first heard this song via the Eurythmics cover version on their album Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). The original is clearly the best, with an incredible sound. I can’t believe that this was just a B-side.

Coconut — Fred Schneider

Being a B-52’s fan led me to Fred Schneider’s solo album Just Fred. It’s much punkier and thrashier than the B-52’s albums. Despite getting very familiar with this song, even after all these years I still feel that the record is on my ‘to listen’ pile. When I heard the song Coconut, I had no idea that it was a cover of a Harry Nilsson track. I think I still prefer Fred’s version.

Somethin’ Else — Eddie Cochran

I love simple, catchy rock and roll. There’s something about this one where the sound is propelled along by Cochran’s singing. It feels so heavy by the standard of the early rock and roll songs, and hits like a punch. This video from 1959 is amazing, a chewing-gum sponsored TV programme where everyone in the audience seems to be clapping and masticating to the sound of the music.

Gin & Juice — The Gourds

Probably included on the compilation to raise an unexpected smile. If you don’t know what you’re listening to, it probably takes a few bars to realise that it’s a cover of a Snoop Dogg track. This cover was built for YouTube reaction videos, like the one below. It’s great fun, but it’s not something that I reach for or get excited about when it gets randomly thrown up on a shuffled playlist.

Rene — The Small Faces

We started the playlist with a Faces track but now go back to 1968 for a song from their incredible Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake album. I love this song, with its cheeky cockney singalong lyrics and brilliant outro that takes up two thirds of the track. The box set of this record comes with both the stereo and mono mixes which are very different to each other; the mono has an overall better sound but the vocals on this track are buried and more difficult to hear.

Out The Blue — John Lennon

The Beatles were my first musical obsession as a teenager and I spent (or rather, am still spending) many years afterwards digging through their solo works. Mind Games isn’t Lennon’s finest album, but this song became an earworm for me. It could easily have been a single.

Old Man — Neil Young

A friend introduced me to Neil Young’s Harvest album while I was at university in the late 1990s. It’s a fascinating record, with more straightforward pop songs next to tracks that have much more complicated structures. This is the one that I latched onto. The live acoustic version below misses a bit of the delicate instrumentation and backing vocals of the album track, but it still gives me goosebumps.

Get Thee Behind Me Satan — Ella Fitzgerald

Of all of the songs in this playlist, this is the one that I’ve found myself singing over and over since I re-listened to it all. This is a beautiful song, written by Irving Berlin, about trying to resist the temptation of someone you’re attracted to. The reference to the devil in the title and lyrics probably means that it isn’t as frequently played or as well-known as it could have been, and hasn’t turn up on many ‘American Songbook’-type albums. I first heard it sung by Harriet Hilliard in Follow The Fleet (1936) as I made my way through all of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films. An introduction on the DVD told me that for the UK release of the film, the frames where she sings the word “satan” were jarringly cut out. So the title of the song must have been controversial even in the 1930s.

Years ago, my friends bought me a copy of The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books as a birthday present and it’s a cherished possession. Her version of this song is outstanding.

He Needs Me — Nina Simone

My discovery of Nina Simone was through the re-release of My Baby Just Cares For Me when it shot up the UK charts to number one in 1987. I was ten years old. Simone is still on my list of artists to spend more time with. Here she is being amazing with her singing of He Needs Me in 1989, 40 years after she first recorded it.

Something In The Way She Moves — James Taylor

I think I picked up a James Taylor ‘best of’ CD off the back of having read about the probable inspiration this song gave to George Harrison to write Something. I never got into Taylor’s work very deeply — there’s something about it that is a teeny bit too syrupy for my taste — but I liked this track.

Superwoman — Stevie Wonder

In my teenage years, if you’d asked me to name my favourite album, Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions might have been the reply. Wonder’s albums in the first half of the 1970s are extraordinary and I loved exploring them. Superwoman is the second track on 1972’s Music of My Mind and it’s stunning. I am guessing that two songs have been stitched together, giving this track an epic eight minute runtime. From Wikipedia:

In essence a two-part song, there is a coherence in that it tells a story of the singer’s relationship with “Mary”. The first part covers her desire to be a star, and to leave behind her old life to become a movie star. The second part covers the narrator’s wondering why she had not come back as soon as he had hoped. The second part of the song is also a reworking of the song “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer” from the 1971 album Where I’m Coming From.

The song, both in its sound and length, was a change of pace for Wonder, who was trying to establish his own identity outside of the Motown sound. Besides its floaty ambience, it featured the singer as a virtual one-man band.

Honeysuckle Rose — Fats Waller

Fred Astaire was my gateway into music from the pre-rock and roll era. (Well, that and my mum singing very old songs to me when I was little.) Many great songwriters such as Irving Berlin and George Gershwin wrote songs specifically for Astaire, and I can understand why; I love listening to those recordings from his films almost a century later.1 I’ve always thought that the fidelity of a recording doesn’t diminish a good band with a good song. This brilliant Fats Waller track is from wonderful compilation Hits of ‘34. I’ve got a few of these CDs from the Living Era label as well as many more on my want list. They are well worth checking out if you enjoy this kind of thing.

Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag — Georgie Fame

A cover of the classic James Brown song that I prefer to the original. My wife, some friends got to see Georgie Fame play at Ronnie Scott’s back in 2004 and he was still incredible even then. The final “bag” that he bends upwards at the end of this song brings a smile to my face every time.

Bust A Move — Young MC

For ages, iTunes told me that this was my most played track. After my wife and I got married in 2004 we bought a car and went hunting for a place to live outside of London. This song accompanied our journeys as we tried to bust our own move. I first heard this as I watched Uncle Buck (1989) in the scene where John Candy’s eponymous character is looking for his niece at a house party, spurring me to find out what it was. My boss of 20 years ago told me that the whole Stone Cold Rhymin’ album was worth hearing so I picked up a copy. He wasn’t wrong. I love ‘singing’ this one at karaoke.

¿Do the Digs Dug? — The Goats

Back in my teenage years I used to buy and read so many magazines, usually related to computing or music. Working as a paperboy, I got to see new magazines on the shelves when they came out and started picking up titles such as Mojo and Vox from their first issues. The ‘Bob Muslim Mix’ of this Goats track appeared on a Vox magazine cover CD in 1993, with hilarious album art that parodies Roxy Music’s Country Life . I loved this tune from the moment I first heard it.

The Goats were a politically-focused rap band from Philadelphia. The songs on their politically-charged first album, Tricks of the Shade, are superb, but I’ve had to create a playlist that excludes the ‘skits’ that feature inbetween many of the songs.

What’s Going On — Taste

I hadn’t heard of Rory Gallagher when I first encountered him on an Old Grey Whistle Test DVD at the turn of the century. His performance was electric. This song, What’s Going On is actually from his time with the band Taste. I think I mislabelled it as I heard it on a ‘best of’ compilation that I had bought and ripped to listen to on my iPod. Some of his music is borders on being too heavy for me, but I know that guitarists love him. This song is excellent.

Who Are You — The Who

If The Beatles were my first obsession, The Who were the second. Back when I used to drink we used to have people over our house for dinner and inevitably, if it was very late in the evening we were talking about music, I’d end up asking if they had seen the Won’t Get Fooled Again footage from The Kids Are Alright (1979). If they hadn’t, I would persuade them to retire to the lounge to watch it on my DVD copy. I think that this brilliant ‘rockumentary’ introduced me to Who Are You, a song recorded just before drummer Keith Moon sadly passed away.

  1. The compilation Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers At RKO is superb.

Weeknotes #292–293 — Open office

Imagine opening a new office in New York City
Imagine opening a new office in New York City

A double-helping of weeknotes. I spent the last two weeks in New York City, working with our team to open our new office in Midtown Manhattan. This was the culmination of years of work that started with the search for new premises as we approached the end of our previous lease. On my first day in New York, I had a one-day handover with another colleague from London who had been leading our team on the technical fit-out, working on the physical and logical setup of the equipment. They had made massive progress, with the office at that point already meeting the minimum standard that we required to allow our colleagues to come in and work.

Last-minute prep to make the office as good as it could be
Last-minute prep to make the office as good as it could be

It was wonderful to see our planning and preparation pay off in such a big way. On 1 October, our New York team walked through the door for the first time, found their desks and set themselves up for work. It was seamless. We’ve moved from an office that we shared with another company that had inadequate space and technology, to one that gives our staff a wide variety of types of places to work depending on what they are doing and who they happen to be working with. The day had a ribbon-cutting, breakfast and drinks, a team lunch and an evening cocktail reception.

There are still many things on the snagging list, but all of the major items were dealt with. It feels great to get one of this year’s big projects over the finish line. My focus will now turn back to another of our offices that is undergoing major renovation. By mid-November this project should be largely complete as well. I have my fingers crossed that it will be just as smooth.

This was a week in which I:

  • Started to feel ill before I left for my flight to the US. I had been boasting about how many people I had hugged and kissed at my parents’ 50th anniversary without catching anything, but spoke too soon. A scratchy throat developed into a full-on head cold, which required tissues, Tylenol1 and lozenges. I tried to ignore it, going for a run in Central Park on Monday morning, but it made the first few days exhausting.
  • Stayed at the CitizenM hotel just off of Times Square. The UN General Assembly meeting in the first week meant that hotel rooms were hard to come by and expensive, which meant that I was relegated to staying much further from the office than usual. One of the photos on their website shows the hotel being right next door to the ‘Bare Essentials gentlemans club and lounge’ and the ‘Mixed Emotions adult video store’, remnants of the Times Square of decades ago and both of which were thankfully closed. The hotel turned out to be fine, with very small but clean rooms. Upon arrival I found out that there were no ironing boards in the rooms, but I was “welcome to use Ironing Heaven on the second floor.” I found that Ironing Heaven seemed to be overplaying its hand a bit when it turned out to be a small room with a single ironing board. The rooftop bar was lovely, with great illuminated views over New York.
  • Spent Sunday working in the office, getting a bunch of things off of my plate in the knowledge that the following week would be difficult to get any focused work done with so many staff and visitors in the office for the opening.
  • Tried out all of the meeting rooms in anticipation of them being used by our staff on day one. The team have done brilliantly in designing and equipping a wonderful variety of spaces for staff to use.
  • Met with the building contractor and landlord’s project manager to go through our snagging list. As the week went on we refined the list down to a more manageable set of critical things in order to increase our chances of getting them done before we opened.
  • Prepped for and ran the programme Steering Committee meeting.
  • Drafted a narrative for the New York CEO to use as input into his opening speech. I discovered that 2024 marks the start of our fourth decade in the city, and our fourth address, after the return of our company to the US post-apartheid in 1994.
  • Created a communication for our staff to help them get started with using the features of the new office, such as our Microsoft Teams Rooms.
  • Interviewed another candidate for the Digital Solutions Developer role in my team.
  • Met with my executive partner at our industry analyst firm for a reflective conversation about my career and where I want to go.
  • Discussed our plans and approach for getting a Microsoft Copilot working group up and running. We now have a small number of licences that we will deploy with the most enthusiastic members of staff that are ‘pulling’ on us to get started.
  • Had the regular programme and project meetings.
  • Watched half of the vice presidential debate from the Work Café at our new office. I called it a day and headed back to my hotel halfway through, catching up in the morning with what the media thought Alex Andreou on the Quiet Riot podcast.
  • Attended the book launch for The Tech Coup by Marietje Schaake, hosted by Esther Dyson with Alondra Nelson. Chatting with Esther Dyson at the post-panel drinks, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look at me with such incredulity as when I casually asked her where Princeton is. (I’d heard of it, but being from the UK I had no idea.) From her dad’s Wikipedia entry:

In December 1952, Oppenheimer, the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, offered Dyson a lifetime appointment at the institute, “for proving me wrong”, in Oppenheimer’s words. Dyson remained at the Institute until the end of his career.

Social media advert and photo of the panel event for the launch of The Tech Coup by Marietje Schaake
Social media advert and photo of the panel event for the launch of The Tech Coup by Marietje Schaake
  • Ate a couple of times at PS Kitchen, a good vegan restaurant a couple of blocks away from my hotel that gives all of its profits to charity. Their winter walnut soup was just the thing I needed when I was feeling under the weather. When I returned for the second evening I found a GIGANTIC fearless rat roaming around the tables outside, so I quickly opted for indoor dining.
Linguini Alfredo with crispy ‘chicken’ at PS Kitchen
Linguini Alfredo with crispy ‘chicken’ at PS Kitchen
  • Out for dinner one evening, got randomly chatting to the mum of Brighid Fry from the band Housewife who is currently touring the UK.
  • Ate at some lovely restaurants including Spicy Moon (delicious vegan Szechuan), Benoit (upscale French for a pre-go-live team dinner), Cafe Luce (lovely pasta in a cosy Italian), Salinas (delicious Spanish tapas), Simò (pizza for one), Bill’s Bar and Burger, Naya (falafel salad), Toasties (eggplant Parmesan sandwiches with wonderful marinara sauce) and the Carnegie Diner (Sunday morning waffles made with organic eggs, with fruit and granola). I didn’t starve.
Waffles with fruit and granola from Carnegie Diner
Waffles with fruit and granola from Carnegie Diner
Two sweaty runners on two different mornings
Two sweaty runners on two different mornings
  • Signed up to the London-Wales-London Audax ride scheduled for the start of May next year. It will be by far the longest ride I’ve ever done in one stint. We start at 6am and have 27 hours to complete the route.
  • Enjoyed a lovely stroll around Central Park with a colleague. You would think that running the whole length of the park would give you a sense of scale, but it was actually wandering around the insides of the park and stumbling across its various delights that makes you realise how big it is.
  • Had a fabulous night out at Union Pool in Brooklyn to see Katie Von Schleicher. It was brilliant to finally get to see her play some of her own songs after having previously seen her as part of Julie Byrne’s band in London last year. As we had a drink in the bar, we heard music drifting in and thought that the gig had started; we stumbled into the back room and watched her and her band run through their sound check, only realising our mistake when we went to order a drink and were told that they weren’t open yet. The next two artists, Sima Cunningham and Adeline Hotel, were both launching their new albums that evening, the latter of which was produced by Katie Von Schleicher. Sima Cunningham’s drummer Dan Knishkowy morphed into the lead singer of Adeline Hotel. The net result was that the whole event gave the impression of a big musical love-in. The venue was brilliant. After the gig finished it filled up with very cool young Brooklyn hipsters, leaving me feeling a little old and out of place.
Katie Von Schleicher at Union Pool, 27 September 2024
Katie Von Schleicher at Union Pool, 27 September 2024
Sima Cunningham at Union Pool, 27 September 2024
Sima Cunningham at Union Pool, 27 September 2024
Adeline Hotel at Union Pool, 27 September 2024
Adeline Hotel at Union Pool, 27 September 2024
  • Tried Sweetarts and Lemonheads again, both of which made my tongue sore.
  • Managed to catch the Formula One race on my flight over, paying £18.99 for streaming from the moment I sat in my seat. It wasn’t perfect — I had to restart the stream a bunch of times — but it blows my mind that I can do this as I cross the Atlantic.
F1 Singapore Grand Prix streamed on-board a transatlantic flight
F1 Singapore Grand Prix streamed on-board a transatlantic flight

Media

Podcasts

  • Love the concept of “employer engagement” mentioned on the WB-40 podcast. Perhaps we should measure that alongside employee engagement.

Articles

Video

  • Went to the cinema to see the theatrical release of McCartney’s One Hand Clapping. Although we could only get seats right at the front of the theatre, it was a total joy from start to finish.
  • Watched the Netflix series on wrestling promoter Vince McMahon, which started life before the sexual assault and sex trafficking allegations. The series gives an interesting history of the development of professional wrestling and ‘sports entertainment’ in the US. My brothers and I used to watch WWF wrestling on TV when we were kids; it turns out that this ‘Golden Era’ ended soon after we drifted away from it. I found the footage from the ‘Attitude’ and ‘Ruthless Aggression’ eras to be genuinely shocking, with ridiculous and highly offensive storylines. McMahon may be an excellent businessman but he seems like a dreadful person.
  • Caught up with the latest couple of episodes of Slow Horses on AppleTV+. It was weird to see the last scene of episode 5 as it appears to have been filmed right outside my office.
  • Re-watched Rocky V (1990) for the first time since I saw it in the cinema when it was originally released. It’s genuinely terrible.

Audio

Web

  • I love that there is a Japanese word for something we’ve talked about at work for years: Nemawashi.

Nemawashi (根回し) is a Japanese business informal process of laying the foundation for some proposed change or project by talking to the people concerned and gathering support and feedback before a formal announcement.

Books

Next week: Getting over jet lag and getting re-focused on the final big project of the year.

  1. I spent some time in a pharmacy looking for paracetamol. When I asked an employee for help, she said “I don’t think we have that brand”. I later learned that what we call paracetamol, the Americans know as acetaminophen.

Weeknotes #291 — Significant dates

The photo doesn’t do justice to how big this cake was
The photo doesn’t do justice to how big this cake was

On Saturday we celebrated the 10th birthday of Berkhamsted Cycle Club, with a specially-organised route for our weekly club ride, followed by cake and fizz at Church Farm Cafe in Aldbury.

I took up cycling a year before the club was formed. I thought about joining, but as I was then the dad of 7 and 5 year-olds who had a myriad of weekend activities to go to, it didn’t seem right to disappear every Saturday morning and leave it all to my wife. When my eldest boy turned 14 he started dabbling with road cycling, so we joined the club together. Three years later and getting out for a weekend club ride is now part of my routine. I’ve made some lovely friends and enjoyed some great rides.

Speeches from club chairs past and present
Speeches from club chairs past and present

The celebration came at the end of a long week that was shaped by dates slipping on one of the big projects that I am running this year. A four-week delivery date delay for mechanical hardware has resulted in a two-week delay to when we will finish the main part of the work. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s the second time the date has moved and is a pain for our staff who need to rearrange their plans for hosting guests at our offices.

This was a week in which I:

  • Had my regular call with our information technology advisory firm. I also met with an Executive Partner at the firm, someone that I’m hoping to work with over the next few years to help me in my role.
  • Had an interior design meeting with one of our building contractors, reviewing colours and materials for acoustic panelling as well as other design elements. With something as subjective as colours, I’m glad that the responsibility for picking the final shades doesn’t sit with me.
  • Met with an external legal firm to give them an outline of a contract that we would like to get reviewed.
  • Met with our own internal legal and procurement teams to review terms, conditions and contracts for the software component of some new hardware we are installing in one of our offices.
  • Had an introductory meeting with an interior design and fit-out team that operate in a couple of countries where we have offices.
  • Caught up with one of our office managers to discuss renovations and improvements to their space. It’s a location that I haven’t visited in many years and is overdue some work from our team.
  • Resumed weekly meetings with the working group who will coordinate a move back to one of our offices following extensive mechanical and engineering work.
  • Had a demo of an audio/visual solution aimed at larger boardroom-style meeting rooms.
  • Held another interview for the vacancy in my team after our chosen candidate decided to take a different role. I’ve now started to worry about candidates trying to use AI chatbots during remote interviews, typing out questions as they are asked and reading back answers. I think we will need to move back to in-person interviews where possible. It’s even more frustrating when you think that the candidate is underperforming in the interview because they are using the tools.
  • Had meetings with the two recruitment vendors we are trying to source candidates from in order to give them more background on our company, our team, and the role.
  • Met with a colleague to walk them through the ‘random coffees’ spreadsheet tool that I developed in the pandemic. Attempting to explain how it works made me realise how many steps there are and how complex it is.
  • Said goodbye to one of my team members who has been with us for the past couple of years. We had a team lunch at Ping Pong. They have an inscrutable ordering process where you need to write down everyone’s requests on a single ridiculously long menu, but they did a great job of catering to our specific dietary and physical needs.
  • Took part in a two half-day workshop on the topic of ‘sustainable careers’. It was fascinating to hear career stories from colleagues from all across our part of the organisation, and brought up lots of memories for me.
  • Said hello to a new cleaner at home. Our previous cleaner was with us for many years and we’ve missed her since she stopped working.
  • Enjoyed the monthly WB-40 Album Club, hearing Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain by Pavement for the first time. I was familiar with — and loved — the song Range Life as it was featured in the cover CD for Uncut magazine’s December 2004 issue (yes kids, before Spotify’s Discover Weekly, we used to get samples of music from magazines) but didn’t know any of the rest of the tracks. It’s definitely an album to listen to again. A quintessential Album Club evening when you think “I wonder why I haven’t listened to more of that band’s stuff?”

Media

Video

  • Watched The Hypnosis (2023), a weird Swedish film centred around a couple who are attending a Dragons Den/Shark Tank-style event to pitch an app. It made me laugh out loud, but the couple were somehow unconvincing as technology developers. And by the time the film finished, I had questions.

Books

  • Finally finished The McCartney Legacy Volume 1: 1969-73 and was sad that it was over. Fortunately it looks as though I won’t need to wait very long before the next instalment is published.
  • Started reading (and ploughing through) Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer. A superbly readable exploration of what we do (or what to do?) with good art by bad people.

Next week: The final week before we finish a major project.

📚 The McCartney Legacy Volume 1: 1969-73

It took some weeks for me to finish this very large book. I was given this as a very thoughtful Christmas gift, but ended up buying and reading an ebook version of it as there was no way I was going to lug this around with me.

The authors started writing with the intention of creating a McCartney solo-specific version of Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, but found that they couldn’t avoid telling a story at the same time. The text of the book is punctuated by distinctive sections for each recording session, in a consistent format, informing us of what songs were worked on. They also include a little narrative to add some colour to the events:

An example recording session call-out.
An example recording session call-out.

This book was a great read. I’ve consumed so many Beatles-related books over the years, but there was still lots in here that I didn’t know. For a Beatles nut, I’m actually not that familiar with McCartney’s early solo discography. I’m a long-time fan of McCartney (1970) and Band on the Run (1973), but have only recently picked up Wild Life (1971) and am yet to explore Ram (1971) and Red Rose Speedway (1973). It’s been fun to read about a track and then listen to it on a streaming service, particularly when I wasn’t familiar with it. For the songs that I was familiar with, there were fascinating nuggets and insights. For example, I hadn’t realised that the high-pitched sound a few seconds into The Lovely Linda, the first track on Paul’s first solo album after the Beatles broke up, is the squeaking of a door that was accidentally captured and left in. This is the first example in his solo career of going with the flow when something happens:

Unlike other artists and producers inclined to erase extraneous noises or accidental instrumental strikes on individual tracks, Paul would leave them as they were recorded, allowing the potential to “explore the accident, not fix the mistake” as Seiwell put it. Though aiding the creative process, for Alan Parsons this posed a problem. “You try to keep the tracks clean and try to avoid having to pull down faders every time if there is a noise or a talking voice or something,” he explained. “Whereas McCartney was notorious for never allowing engineers to wipe anything, so it always made the mix take twice as long.”

It was amazing to hear that Henry McCullough got to appear on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon through the accident of Wings being booked in a neighbouring studio:

“They were next door making Dark Side of the Moon,” said Paul. “The engineers were quite interchangeable, so an engineer that’d work on their stuff would work on ours. And he did play us some of the Dark Side of the Moon stuff.” For an hour or so, during the weekend of January 19 and 20, Wings and Pink Floyd joined forces, on Pink Floyd’s turf, when the latter were recording voices that would be woven into the fabric of several songs.

And so it was that a hazy recollection of McCullough’s—“I don’t know, I was really drunk at the time!”—found its way into ‘Us and Them,’ a track on one of the most revered albums in the history of rock.

Despite its size, the book didn’t feel overly-long or too detailed. I found myself picking it up at any available moment and was disappointed when I reached the end. Fortunately there’s a sequel in the works that is due out in December this year, covering the period 1974–1980. Here’s how we leave things:

With a critically lauded, Gold-certified hit album on his hands, Paul found himself in a very different position at the end of 1973 than he’d been in at the end of 1969. Four years earlier, he was crawling from the wreckage of the Beatles, unsure of himself and his future. But he had also been nursed, coaxed, and sweet-talked by Linda into recognizing his strengths sufficiently to borrow a Studer four-track from EMI and set down some tunes, taking his first steps toward reinventing himself. But what he recorded then was a motley batch, assembled largely of belatedly finished songs from the Beatle days, revived and polished juvenilia from the late 1950s, and jams molded into instrumentals. He started with only two new songs; others had sprouted as he worked, including the enduring ‘Maybe I’m Amazed.’ But the music on Band on the Run was fresh—its oldest songs were written during the Red Rose Speedway sessions—and the album was fully conceived before the first session.

I’m excited to find out what the next book brings.