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.

At the forefront of my mind this week was the concept of free speech, given the widely-reported changes at Meta. A conversation with a friend and a Stratechery post by Ben Thompson challenged my thinking, which led me to try to find resources that would help me to refine my understanding. I’ve bought Regulating Free Speech in a Digital Age by David Bromell as recommended by Heather Burns, as well as Fearless Speech by Mary Anne Franks. I lean towards free speech, but having this week learned about the paradox of tolerance, I know that I’m not a ‘free speech absolutist’. But I don’t know where or how the line should be drawn.

This was a week in which I:

• 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.
• Joined the monthly online Teams Fireside Chat.
• 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.
• Not entirely unrelated, I invested in a looooong hot water bottle.
• 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.
  

Media

Podcasts

• A fascinating discussion on how Microsoft’s tools make managing the equipment in ‘bring your own device’ conference rooms much easier for infrastructure and support teams.
• This interview with Mary Anne Franks on ‘first amendment orthodoxy’ is excellent. I bought her book Fearless Speech off the back of listening to this and can’t wait to get stuck into it.
• It was great to hear from John Drummond on the Sausage On A Fork Grange Hill podcast. He played Trevor Cleaver in the golden years of the programme.
  

Articles

• Apple settling a lawsuit for USD 95m relating to allegations that their devices spy on users is a really unsatisfactory outcome. I’ve had Siri disabled for years. Not because I think Apple is going to deliberately record my conversations and send or keep them somewhere, but because I don’t trust that their code — or any code — is free of bugs, and accidents happen. Turning it off reduces my risk profile. (But I recognise the futility where everyone around me has their voice assistants turned on.)
• So much billionaire tech bro reading this week.
  
  • ‘A new era of lies: Mark Zuckerberg has just ushered in an extinction-level event for truth on social media’.
  • ‘Facebook Is Censoring 404 Media Stories About Facebook’s Censorship’. Oh the irony.
  • Re-read The Parable of the Nazi Bar.
  • ‘On Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg Throws Stones from a Glass Metaverse’.
  • ‘How low will British politics go? Ask Elon, master of the Muskoverse – he’ll decide’.

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?

• ‘Nigel Farage Helps to Launch U.S. Climate Denial Group in UK’. Do these people really believe this stuff, or is it that doing so leads to some political or financial gain?
• ‘Mullenweg Shuts Down WordPress Sustainability Team, Igniting Backlash’. It really feels as though I need to seriously start looking at switching from WordPress to Ghost.
  

Video

• 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.

• Kirk Hamilton’s Strong Songs analysis of Jeff Buckley’s Last Goodbye had me smiling. I used to listen to the Grace album so much back in the 1990s but haven’t played it for a while. It was great to rediscover this song and to hear things that I had never noticed before.
• 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.
  

Web

• A handy list of Bluesky search operators.
  

Books

• I struggled to make time for reading this week, but continued to enjoy a little dose of The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2 — 1974–1980 at the end of the day.
  

Next week: More people back at work, and two Album Club nights.

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.

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.

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.

We caught the tail end of this year’s PDC World Darts Championship, tuning in from the quarter finals onward. All of us were glued to the screen to watch the final. I’m still thinking about the double bull that Luke Littler hit on his penultimate visit to the board.

Media

Podcasts

• The latest episode of Quiet Riot was a great way to start the year.
  
  • I hadn’t realised that the reason countries avoid declaring war on each other was because it has legal ramifications. Russia has been paying Ukraine around USD 800m/year to allow gas to be transported across its territory the West. Declaration of war would have had implications for contracts between entities located on either side of the border.
  • 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.

1. 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. ↩

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Media

Articles

• Fascinating to learn about the Bouba/kiki effect.
  

Video

• Carol (2015) was excellent. A slow-burner of a film with brilliant acting.
  

Books

• Needed something light to read for the holiday, so picked up Nick Duerden’s Exit Stage Left: The Curious Afterlife of Pop Stars.
  

Next week: A family Christmas.

My final week of work of 2024. It’s our company policy that all staff need to take two weeks of consecutive leave each year. I’ve been so busy that I’m only able to do this now. Next week my wife is still working and my kids are still at school, so it feels a bit indulgent to be off.

At the start of the week I found myself getting annoyed with an issue at work and had to stop and think why. I’m just a bit worn out. By the time that Thursday arrived, I found myself pushing along low-value work as my energy was sapped. I’m looking forward to getting away from my work keyboard to rest and recharge.

This was a week in which I:

• Discovered a bug with either Microsoft Teams or the software that we use for compliance recording. When recording is triggered, it displays people’s names in the ‘why this call needs to be recorded’ banner in Teams even if those people don’t meet the specific criteria for recording.
• Made progress with our audio/visual technology plans for a shared area of one of our buildings. Early in the new year, we’re going to get test equipment on site to see whether it performs as well in our environment as it did in the demo.
• Met with the team involved with our construction programme to go through the snagging list.
• Continued my personal mission to try out as many of our updated meeting rooms as possible. I want to make sure I experience them for online or hybrid meetings myself and deal with any issues before our staff let us know about something that can be improved.
• Met with two members of my team for their year-end appraisals. Prior to this year, I hadn’t managed any permanent members of staff for about a decade. I quite enjoy it.
• Had my own year-end appraisal.
• Added four more people to our Microsoft Copilot pilot and working group. Giving licences to people that come asking for them and involving them in a community may morph into our rollout approach, with some monitoring to see whether they continue to use it.
• Had a conversation with an analyst about using Microsoft 365 and Copilot in some of our more remote locations.
• Discussed the provision of coffee in the office and how we can ensure that there is a continual supply whilst the building’s coffee bar is out of action for refurbishment.
• Met with our sister company to discuss options for staff catering for the period that our company cafe will be closed next year. I had to work from home on the day of the meeting, so I missed out on the free food samples.
• Joined December’s Teams Fireside Chat where we heard lots about the features of Teams Premium from Mansoor Malik and Margi Desai.
• Wrote-up the minutes from the final Steering Committee meeting of the year.
• Came up with an impromptu format for our last all-team meeting of the year. I asked everyone to send me a song that meant a lot to them or reflected their current mood. I then put these together in a playlist and played them in the meeting, asking the team to guess the person who chose each song.
• Got one of our cars fixed with a new water pump at the side of the road by an RAC Mobile Mechanic. £262 seemed pretty good for something that took about three and a half hours to fix.
• Enjoyed two Album Club evenings, one online listening to Don’t Wait ‘Til Tomorrow by Yonaka and another in person to hear Van Morrison’s Moondance.
• Had a splendid time out at drinks and dinner with the WB-40 podcast crowd. Beers at Dovetail were great — I tried a Brugse Zot Sportzot, which may be the best alcohol-free beer that I’ve tried so far. We ate at Granger & Co in Clerkenwell, the same location as this time last year, and had a fabulous meal.
• Enjoyed some drinks at a neighbour’s house. We need to do a bit more hosting next year.
• Had fun on Berkhamsted Cycling Club’s annual Mince Pie Ride where we were treated to a free mince pie along with a coffee or mulled wine at the end of the ride. I decided to ride dressed as a Christmas pudding. It turned out that I’d thought through whether I would be able to pedal and control my bike, but not how aerodynamic the costume would be. Everyone else in our group loved riding behind me as I acted as a massive windbreak for 60km or so.
  

Media

Podcasts

• I loved John Harris’s interview with a Syrian woman who came to the UK, settled in Yorkshire, built a business and had her children grow up here. It’s an excellent illustration of one human story behind the headlines about the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the future treatment of refugees.
• Ben Thompson’s interview with Tae Kim about his new book The Nvidia Way was a great listen. What stood out to me was:
  
  • The culture engendered by Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang of calling people out on stuff publicly and them responding to that by doing things better, even if it is ridiculously embarrassing for them and everyone else in earshot at the time.
  • The flipside of Huang rewarding people on the spot with bonuses or stock when they’ve done a great job on something.
  • The culture of everyone in Nvidia being a specialist and their ‘career progression’ being defined as them getting to be the best in their field. Then the CEO is the only, ultimate, generalist. This is great for a while, but what do you do about succession?
    

Articles

• Ben Elton: “The dead person at a funeral is literally the last person who should get a vote in either the entertainment or the catering. So I have no song – all I want is to make sure I’m composted in an environmentally friendly way.”
  

Video

• Finished season one of Shrinking on AppleTV+. It’s a little bit twee, but the characters are great and it gave me lots of laugh out loud moments. Jason Segel’s mannerisms remind me so much of what I loved about Chevy Chase during his mid-1980s movie period. He can speak volumes just with his eyes.
• The Making of Do They Know It’s Christmas? (iPlayer) is essential viewing for a pop music documentary buff like myself. But it’s not a patch on The Greatest Night In Pop (2024) which documents the recording of We Are The World. The Band Aid film just consists of footage from the recording with very little context or narrative; an important artefact but without as much context or reflections as the American film.
• Started watching 40 Hidden Music Treasures at the BBC. It’s a mixed bag, but the highlights are incredible. Jeff Buckley’s performance of Grace, the B-52’s miming to Roam but looking fabulous, and INXS singing Bitter Tears are a good sample. I’ve got so much more to watch.

Next week: Unwinding by pottering around the house.

On Tuesday my company had a party to celebrate both our 10th anniversary and the upcoming retirement of our CEO. Drinks and canapés were followed by a formal dinner and speeches. An incredible live band kicked in as desserts were served and the evening was rounded out with a great DJ. Time went by so fast; glancing at my watch I realised that I had already missed the train that would get me home by midnight. I didn’t get in until nearly 1am. Given how tired I felt for the rest of the week I can’t fathom how I used to drink at these events and still function. The organisation of the event was amazing as usual, and everyone seemed to have a brilliant time.

This was a week in which I:

• Prepped for and ran our final programme steering committee meeting of the year.
• Had calls with our audio/visual consultancy to talk through how we could improve the multi-function ‘collaboration space’ in our office. Our main consultant came on-site to continue the conversation and to review our newly-commissioned meeting rooms.
• Joined an online technology demo of audio/visual equipment for larger meeting spaces. The equipment was impressive, picking up clear audio from everywhere in the room and doing a great job of the video feed.
• Met with the company that provides us with our office smart sensors for a post-install handover and demonstration of the technology. It’s exciting to be able to have quantitative data about how the office is performing that we can use to further improve the space.
• Met with a vendor to discuss how they can continue to support us over the next year with expertise that we don’t have internally.
• Started to draft a structure for our offsite meeting in January. ChatGPT has helped me to source some companies to speak to that could help us with part of the event.
• Got pulled into a conversation on provisioning of accounts and access to internal resources.
• Had meetings with representatives from our sister company to discuss plans to mitigate disruption in the building over the coming months, as well as coordinate the work to improve one of our shared spaces.
• Spent a couple of hours with our SD-WAN vendor to learn about their roadmap and to discuss how we can make better use of their technology.
• Met to review our licensing requirements from a key software vendor for the coming year.
• Had the final check-in of the year with our technology consultancy vendor.
• Had an introductory meeting with the UK arm of a vendor used by colleagues in Johannesburg.
• Continued writing the year-end performance reviews for my team members.
• Joined the year-end celebratory meeting for our entire global Technology function. I picked up an award for ‘executing with excellence’. It’s lovely to have the recognition, but I felt quite uncomfortable with receiving an individual award given that it is our team as a whole that pulled together to make everything great this year.
• Enjoyed our local year-end talk, hosted by our incoming CEO. This year has been a blur, so it was fun to look back at photos of everything that happened. We also got an excellent overview of one of our local offices from the Chief Executive there.
• Spent some time curating and finessing my music collection, using a combination of Plex and the Music app on my Mac. Both of the tools are great at identifying and tagging most of my music, but I wanted to fix issues such as different versions of the same album looking identical in the user interface. I spent a few enjoyable hours doing the work and have got as far as artists beginning with D.
• Didn’t get out on my bike. Storm Darragh resulted in the club cancelling the Saturday ride because the conditions were too dangerous. I’m very grateful to have the option of riding indoors available to me when I need it.
• Took a trip to Stroud to meet up with my wife’s family for lunch. Our car was telling us it was 5°C but it felt like a minus sign could have been added to the front of it.
• Enjoyed the last F1 race of the season. Given the recent form of the runners and the upcoming driver changes, I’m so intrigued by what 2025 might have in store.
• I asked ChatGPT “Based on what you know about me, draw a picture what my current life is.” It came up with this:
  

Media

Podcasts

• Useful update from Henry Levak, Head of Product at Logitech, about their plans for multi-camera and multi-stream setups in Microsoft Teams. I’m not sure whether the ability to control the camera streams from home is a good thing or whether it’s a little creepy. The intelligent auto booking and auto-releasing of meeting rooms sounds interesting, including a setting where all future room bookings get cancelled if someone doesn’t turn up in the room a preset number of times in a row, synchronised to Microsoft Exchange. I’m looking forward to us experimenting with this.

Articles

• I’d been a paid Substack newsletter subscriber for a while, but stopped when I heard about their zero content moderation. Anil Dash writes as eloquently as always about why calling your newsletter ‘a Substack’ is doing you a disservice.
  

Video

• Watched Steve McQueen’s new World War II drama, Blitz (2024) on AppleTV+. I was expecting Great Things, but it somehow didn’t land like that.
• Beatles ‘64 on Disney+ is a lovely addition to the myriad of films about the group. I’ve never seen the behind-the-scenes video footage of their first trip to the US and it’s lovely to see them laughing and joking around. I’m now very familiar with the area around the entrance to the Plaza Hotel in New York, which made it even more fascinating.
  

Audio

• Getting access to my friends’ music collections via PlexAmp has sent me into an obsessive loop about the Faith No More songs Midlife Crisis and Epic. I vividly remember first hearing Epic on MTV as a kid when I was on holiday in the US; it stunned me as it was so different to everything that I’d heard before. There are so many videos on YouTube of people reacting to these videos, including vocal coaches who are dazzled by the range of sounds that Mike Patton makes on this appearance on the Jay Leno show. Just imagine seeing this on prime time TV.

Books

• I’ve been struggling to get some focused reading time over the past week or two. How To Lose A Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship is denser than I expected. I’m halfway through. I find myself agreeing with paragraphs and sections of the book but I struggle to zoom out and understand exactly where I am in the narrative.
  

Next week: My final week of work for the year, a meetup with friends and two album clubs.

The remnants of Storm Bert meant that I spent the entire week working from home. The River Nene had burst its banks, flooding Northampton station and resulting in most of the trains being cancelled. The odd train was still running, but it seemed ridiculous to try to catch one with no clear plan to be able to get back home again. Working at home for the week was great for productivity, but it reinforced to me how much I do like being in the office. Three days in and a couple at home is a pretty good balance.

This was a week in which I:

• Had a great discussion with a colleague about how we use checklists in our department and how our practice could be improved. I haven’t yet read Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, but I can guess what it says, and why. An immensely experienced commercial airline pilot will still go through a checklist before a flight, not because they don’t know what they are doing, but because the checklist removes any residual human error from the procedure. In my Technology career I’ve seen many checklists, but they are often used as a rough guide as opposed to a document to be meticulously checked off. How do you change a culture when it isn’t safety-critical?
• Asked some friends whether they considered document management within a team to be a solvable problem. For years, we’ve had an outstanding project on our backlog to consolidate a bunch of SharePoint sites together into one, but I wonder how much payback there will be for the amount of work that will be required. Filing things in the right place matters less now that search is so good. I also wonder whether it is inevitable that someone new coming into the team will decide to start filing things their own way, adding another repository to the situation. Being a team librarian and showing people the way is a lost art.
• Continued to edge forward in agreeing a follow-on contract with our construction vendor. There are so many little moving parts and different parties involved.
• Marvelled at our CTO as he gave an incredibly informative presentation to one of our client-facing teams about a prospective client in the technology sector.
• Met with two of our client-facing teams to give them an overview of construction work that is taking place in our building over the next couple of years and to answer their questions.
• Attended our Information Risk Steering Group meeting and spoke about how we plan to tackle a refresher of our document management standards across our division next year.
• Reviewed and made some refinements to the slide deck that gives an overview of my team and the work we do.
• Had a discussion on the principles of how we give contractors access to our computer systems and equipment.
• Reviewed our approach to our Microsoft Copilot initiative. We heard an enthusiastic take from one of our colleagues who has been embracing it in his daily work to make himself much more productive.
• Took our sister company through the latest design proposal for the audio/visual setup of our shared space.
• Had our final Lean Coffee session of the year. One of the topics I proposed and we discussed was whether people felt that Lean Coffee meetings worked well and whether we should continue them. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
• Spent some time cleaning up our team Kanban board, removing duplicates and things that we are never going to do.
• Attended a BIE Executive webinar on Overcoming Prejudice in the Workplace.
  

• Joined the inaugural Copilot Fireside Chat a monthly Teams meeting on the subject of Microsoft Copiot. Unlike the Teams Fireside Chat, I was the only attendee besides the presenters who kept my camera on for the whole meeting. I’m amazed at the difference in culture between the two calls. The topic of conversation went very deep, very fast, and made me realise how little I know of this space.
• Got on top of my work emails, processing the 2,000 or so that were in my backlog. I now have a screenful of messages that I actually have to do something with.
• Managed a nine-day streak on the bike, primarily as a result of working from home. TrainerRoad recommended a rest day on Sunday to prevent long-term fatigue. I didn’t argue. I’m feeling quite old at the moment, with a calf that won’t let me run, a painful shoulder when I raise my arm up too high and a bunch of bites on my leg that I presumably got when we stopped out on the club bike ride on Saturday. The club ride was eventful, with one of the crew getting two punctures on the same wheel, one of which was caused by hitting a massive pothole on a very fast descent.
  

• Surprised myself by how much I enjoyed listening to Alanis Morissette at an online Album Club night.
• Enjoyed a belated Thanksgiving dinner with friends old and new on Friday night. I don’t think I’d ever been invited for Thanksgiving dinner before. It was lovely to get out and meet a bunch of new random people.
• Had another dinner out with friends on Saturday evening, eating an incredible chickpea and cauliflower curry with just the right amount of spice.
• Bought our Christmas tree. We knew he was a big boy before we got him in the car, but we didn’t anticipate that he would be quite this huge.
• Bought a new tuxedo ahead of the work celebration this week. Perhaps I’ll get a bit more use out of this one than the last one I had.
• Enjoyed playing with Plexamp now that two of my friends are using Plex and have given me access to their music libraries. It’s so much more fun than browsing someone’s collection of Spotify playlists.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Superb episode of The Guardian’s Politics Weekly UK on the topic of assisted dying, ahead of the vote that took place in parliament last week. It really is a topic where I can see both sides of the argument. Wouldn’t it be great if most parliament business was debated and decided on in a similar way as opposed to MPs being whipped to vote?
• I love hearing arguments that make me change my views on things. In this episode of the Risky Business podcast, they talk about the use of facial recognition cameras in an Australian hardware store chain. Typically I would object to this technology being used anywhere, but the store released footage of the abuse that their staff have been subject to. They use the technology to detect and alert staff when someone on their list turns up at a store, and the data for anyone that is not a positive match is quickly deleted. This seems like a reasonable compromise.
  

Articles

• London’s Smithfield meat market and Billingsgate fish market are both going to close after 850 years. What a shock that Brexit has something to do with it.
• Claims of ‘ethical AI’ are difficult if there is no transparency about how an AI model has been developed. This includes transparency about the workers that have been training the models with their human feedback.
  

Video

• Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem is a superb documentary. I was 17 in 1994 when the first issue of Loaded appeared, and I remember devouring the magazine from cover to cover. It was interesting to see it in perspective as part of mid-90s culture here in the UK. Those first issues had long interviews with people who are now cultural icons that I knew very little about at the time, as well as documents of trips to extraordinary places and parties that felt like an adult world that I didn’t quite have access to yet. In my teenage years I spent a small fortune on magazines, somehow having the time to devour their contents. As the documentary notes, magazines were our Internet of that era. It is fascinating to look back and see how quickly the ‘lads mag’ concept degenerated into a race to the bottom. By the time I went to university in late 1996 I was just an occasional Loaded reader and soon stopped buying it.
  

Next week: An end-of-year and retirement party.