Four days in London followed by Friday at home. The main event of the week was attending the Gartner CIO Leadership Forum on Tuesday and Wednesday, held in the Intercontinental Hotel, right next to The O2. I really enjoyed the event. It felt like less of a commitment than heading to Barcelona for the four days of the annual Symposium, and also benefited from being a smaller-scale event so that you kept seeing and bumping into the same people all the time. The content was also much more focused and relevant.

Being at the conference meant that I had to fit everything else into the remaining three days. It felt doable this week.

This was a week in which I:

• Got lots out of the CIO Leadership Conference.
  
  • AI was, of course, the most prominent subject throughout the two days, although there seemed to be some acknowledgement that driving value out of AI investments seems to be trickier than people first thought. It was great to find out through Graham Waller’s opening keynote presentation, and a roundtable discussion later that day, that our approach of investing in literacy alongside licences seems to be the way to go.
  • Mary Mesaglio’s presentation on How AI is Changing Human Behavior and What To Do About It was a refreshing take. The big, generic takes of ‘AI will take all the jobs’ or ‘AI won’t take your job, people using AI will take your job’ are well known, but I don’t hear many people having the more nuanced discussions such as what AI will do to traditional career paths and talent pipelines. If an LLM is equivalent to having ‘an enthusiastic intern’, what does that mean for the pipeline of enthusiastic interns? Mesaglio’s presentation asked many provocative questions like this. Superb.
  • I attended two sessions hosted by Christie Struckman, the first on using social intelligence in ‘high-stakes’ moments, and the second on Making Culture Change Stick. She made a great point that we often denigrate people working in silos, but don’t often stop to look at how that group of people have been tasked with their role — sometimes it literally is to focus on something in a silo and ignore all of the other noise.
  • Christian Stephan gave me some good ideas in his presentation on 5 Ways to Innovate With Scarce Resources.
  • Erick Brethenoux gave a good overview of an AI Governance Playbook.
  • At the Gartner Symposium in 2023, Rob O’Donohue’s presentation on Neurodiversity was a personal highlight for me. At this conference he was talking about The Art and Science of Motivation.
  • Leo Brenner gave some guidelines on Navigating the Psychology of Organizational Change that included some useful models and things to think about.
  • I’m not sure about Nate Suda’s guidance on where to focus for maximum impact from generative AI. The model he presented seemed to be oversimplified.
  • We also had a keynote speech from Tim Harford on How To Make The World Add Up. Someone bought me a copy of his book a couple of years ago and it is sitting in my unread pile, so it was good to get a bit of an overview of what it is all about. I much prefer this type of keynote speaker, someone that has some relevancy to the topic of the conference, than the big star names such as Martina Navratilova and Arnold Schwarzenegger, no matter how amazing those individuals are.
  • I noticed how many people are now recording talks that they attend. Ten years ago, people sitting in the audience took photographs of key slides that they wanted to save. Nowadays it is easy to spot someone recording the talk on their phone, sometimes directly transcribing it via an AI-enabled app. I wonder how many times each day I am recorded without knowing about it? It all feels a little Black Mirror. I have Siri turned off on my devices and don’t have any voice assistants enabled in the house, but it feels futile when everyone else has their voice recognition on by default. And now Amazon will soon start processing all Alexa recordings in the cloud, because (of course) AI.
  • A vendor sales rep annoyed me by doing a ‘fly by’ scan of my badge in order to get me onto his company’s mailing list, without my consent. He looked sheepish when I told him that yes, I did mind if he scanned me. It’ll be interesting to see whether he deleted my details, or I start getting spam from his organisation.
  • We had a lovely Financial Services dinner hosted by the conference organisers, giving me an opportunity to meet CIOs from other companies.
  • There was a funny moment where two people I know emerged from one of the conference event rooms as I was going in. Gartner had paired them up as they have similar challenges in their roles. They both said hello to me at the same time and then turned to each other in surprise, not realising that the other person also knew me. One is a colleague I worked with 20 years ago and the other was a previous boss of mine at another company.

• Wandered into a long impromptu end-of-day meeting in the office with a bunch of people from our department. It was the kind of meeting that wouldn’t have happened if everyone was working from home. As we talked, we pulled in other colleagues who were wandering by in order to ask them specific questions related to our discussion. It was very illuminating and gave us plenty to think about.
• Met with our audio/visual vendor to continue to push forward with the design of our shared meeting room floor. We are narrowing down our options, and still have some testing and costing to do before we settle on a final design.
• Had lunch with our CTO to agree how we could move forward with implementing our physical environment monitoring platform in our shared space.
• Met with the organisations involved in our construction project to agree what work is outstanding, when it is likely to be completed and when we will pay for it.
• Had our fortnightly Microsoft Copilot working group where a colleague gave an excellent presentation on how to construct better AI prompts.
• Completed the annual review process with my team.
• Caught up with the recording of the Information Risk Steering Group meeting that I missed as I was at the conference.
• Met with the team that are working on our document management project. We’ve agreed next steps as well as how we will monitor the work.
• Was told that I have won a major internal award for the work that I did last year. It’s an honour to be recognised, but the award is bittersweet. Although I was the face of our major programme, everything we achieved was a result of the work done by our brilliant team. The way the recognition programme works is that there are a number of individual winners and one team winner; it should probably be the other way around.
• Had a conversation with a friend that reinforced to me how much people are living in their own confirmation-bias information bubbles. At the CIO Leadership Conference there was so much discussion about AI. I wonder whether it would be just as immediately useful for CIOs to have content about the impact of social media and information bubbles on their teams.
• Fielded a request for AI-enabled earbuds that perform voice translation in real-time. I can see the massive Star Trek-like benefit, but they are probably a privacy bin fire.
• Had an issue with Backblaze backup on my personal laptop where it suddenly told me it had stopped working. Apparently, my ‘bzfileids.dat’ file had gotten too large to process. This didn’t sound good. I dug around on the web and found a ridiculous solution written by Backblaze themselves where they suggest that you delete your backup and start all over again. There was no way I was about to do this, leaving me exposed without a cloud backup while the process ran from scratch. The problem seems to have been around for years. I decided to open a problem ticket. A support engineer got back to me promptly with this advice, which seemed to do the trick. (But that I had to email them to discover these details doesn’t seem right.)
  

Yesterday, Backblaze encountered an issue impacting a subset of our users running the Backblaze Client on MacOS. We’ve identified a remediation process that should only take 5-10 minutes to complete. Please follow these steps:

1. Please follow this link: https://secure.backblaze.com/update.htm 
2. Download the installer for your computer.
3. Please do NOT uninstall Backblaze.
4. Restart the computer. Please DO NOT skip this step.
5. When the computer is up and running, open the installer and click install now.
6. Restart the computer one more time.
7. Open the Backblaze application on your computer by clicking on the Backblaze icon in the Menu Bar then selecting Backblaze Preferences from the top of the list
8. Hold down the option key on your keyboard and press the Restore Options button in the application
9. Let the process run for three to four hours
   

This process will resolve the issue that displayed the “Your bzfileids.dat is too large” error pop-up. Please let us know if you have any additional questions or if any of the above steps do not appear to work as expected and we’ll be glad to assist.

• Skipped the weekly Saturday morning bike club ride as it was forecast to drop below 2°C overnight once again. I also had a lot to get done that day, so a shorter indoor ride seemed like the best idea.
• Thoroughly enjoyed the first F1 race of the new season. The new crop of rookie drivers seem to be a real bunch of characters. They were thoroughly tested by the conditions; hopefully it will make them stronger.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Keir Starmer is looking at cutting benefits for people deemed ‘unfit for work’. I hate the way that cutting benefits for the most vulnerable people in society is being presented as a ‘moral imperative’ to fund our planned increase in defence spending. I suspect that doing this kind of thing will drive people away from the Labour Party. Why vote for Labour if you are going to get some flavour of the Conservatives or Reform?
  

Articles

• Interesting LinkedIn post from Greg Jeffreys on “Why did 21:9 displays never really take off” for Teams Meeting Rooms?
• The Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority are dropping diversity and inclusion rules for firms that they regulate. I hope this isn’t the start of a wider rollback of DEI initiatives in the UK.
• If the problem isn’t DNS, it’s likely to be certificates.
  

Audio

• Heard the super fun Cansei de Ser Sexy by CSS for the first time at the WB-40 Album Club. Two people knew of them and had heard the album; the rest of us didn’t know they existed.
• After much soul-searching, I picked Roxette’s Tourism when I hosted Album Club on Friday night. I first heard this album in 1994 when I bought a copy on tape on holiday in Bulgaria. It cost me less than £1. It didn’t take me long to fall in love with it. Roxette were best when they didn’t over-produce their music, and this is a lovely melancholy record that was made as they travelled the world on their Joyride tour in the early 1990s.

• Hat tip to my friend Ray for this tour of London via old music videos.

Web

• Sharon O’Dea was back to calling out companies in response to their International Women’s Day posts on LinkedIn. This is fearless speech.
  

Books

• Finished reading both Fearless Speech by Mary Anne Franks and The McCartney Legacy Volume 2: 1974–80 by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair. I have some write-ups to do.
  

Next week: Meeting up with the other big chunk of our team.

A very busy week, but one where I enjoyed being myself again. I’m now pretty much illness-free.

This was a week in which I:

• Unusually, worked from home on Monday. The main drain from our house was blocked, something we discovered last week after a couple of days of heavy rain. Dyno-Rod sent us Mick, the same guy who unblocked the same drain just over a year ago. (Weeknotes are brilliant for remembering when stuff happened.) It’s great to watch a person at work who is excellent at their job. We’ve lived here for 20 years and in that time have only had drain problems in the past year. I’m hoping that it doesn’t mean that we have a bigger issue.
• Spent quite a bit of time with our audio/visual vendor, discussing and reviewing the latest designs for our client meeting rooms as well as our internal work cafe/presentation space. We also reviewed our financials and agreed how we will manage our contracts with them in 2025.
• Continued work on the department roadmap, nudging the draft forward in between meetings.
• Reviewed the draft scope and acceptance criteria for our document management project. Talked to the Project Manager about the next steps.
• Met to agree next steps with our pilot of Microsoft Copilot. I’d like it to be BAU as soon as possible, but we agreed to review the finances before coming back with a revised proposal.
• Participated in a workshop to look at how we can drive further adoption of good practices for password hygiene, with a focus on our password manager. Adoption has been good, but we always want it to be better.
• Met with colleagues in Johannesburg and Dubai to review the projected costs of the next planned office refurbishment.
• Met our furniture vendor and their partner consultant at our office to review finishes for a potential new boardroom table, and to discuss our plans to further enhance our office space.
• Spent some time digging into an issue to assess whether we have a risk that we need to manage or not.
• Continued with coordinating some on-boarding activities for our new team member.
• Attended our weekly Learning Hour meeting to hear about an internal digital products catalogue.
• Met with a colleague from another part of the Technology organisation who is looking to relaunch an internal resource and build some community discussion around it. I gave my feedback that for anything like this you always need a ‘community manager’ to keep nudging it forward in the right direction. There will always be 80% who don’t participate, 15% that occasionally do, and 5% who are enthusiastically involved. But you can’t assume that 5% and need to plan for having someone planted in there to keep things moving.
• Joined the divisional technology ‘Connect’ town hall-style meeting, where we heard from our CIO as well as the Head of Transaction Banking. It’s still a lot harder to be a remote participant in these things, but it’s better than not being involved at all.
• Attended my second business Executive Committee meeting, as a permanent stand-in for my boss.
• Had friends over for dinner on Friday night. We still feel a bit rusty at hosting since we fell out of the habit of hosting through the pandemic. I love how much having people over is a forcing function for cleaning and tidying the house.
• Enjoyed a glorious bike ride with the club on Saturday morning.
• Went to a friend’s 60th birthday party on Saturday night at her beautiful house. She’s a member of Album Club, so we bought her a suitable gift in the form of Queen’s News Of The World 40th anniversary box set. She wore the replica ‘access all areas’ tour pass all night.
• Agreed to join my eldest boy for his ‘long, slow-paced run’ on Sunday morning. Having not run since December, I’m not sure immediately tackling a 15km run was the best idea. I maxed myself out while he barely broke a sweat. I know that I’ll be walking around like John Wayne until at least the middle of the week.
• Had a dreadful lunch at The Bridgewater Arms in Little Gaddesden. Someone in the kitchen doesn’t know how to use the deep fat fryer. We’d never seen squid so hard, or fish so cremated. Still, it was nice to sit outside in a pub garden in the sun for a little while.
• Started using the new touch-in/touch-out facility at our local train station. I’m not sure how much it costs relative to buying tickets through the train company’s app. It’s convenient, but there’s a significant risk of forgetting to do one of the taps, which could end up as an expensive mess.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Some great insight on Monday’s episode of Sharp Tech:
  
  • Large language models don’t learn, you learn how to use them better.
  • Removing ‘hallucinations’ removes their creativity.
  • Google monetised search in 2001/2, Facebook invented the feed in 2007, both many years after the web was opened to the public in 1993. So what does a similar timeline look like for Generative AI?
  • Tech is not going to connect you to other people, it will facilitate connections you make on your own. You still need to do the hard work of connecting.
    

Articles

• Ethan Mollick always has excellent, readable summaries of the state of AI. This week I dug into these posts from the recent archives:
  
  • 15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to
  • Which AI to Use Now: An Updated Opinionated Guide
    

Video

• Continued watching the second season of Severance but I’m not enjoying it as much as the first one. The episodes are now going deep on different aspects of individual characters, so I’m continuing to worry that it’s turning into Lost. I’m not sure I’ve got the patience for it.
  

Audio

• It’s been a week of trying to decide what to play when I host Album Club next week. I really wish we held our Album Club nights more frequently. There’s a lot of music to get through.
  

Web

• Walkmanland is a wonderful resource. I used to own the beautiful Panasonic RQ-S25, which was barely larger than a cassette tape. It was matte black, made of metal, with a rectangular ‘gumstick’ rechargeable internal battery and a screw-on appendage which could hold a single AA battery for longer playing time. I loved it.
• Zuck Off. (Hat tip to José Albornoz.) The only Zuckerberg property where I have an account is WhatsApp, and I’m looking to see how I can ditch it.
  

Books

• Continuing to read both Fearless Speech by Mary Anne Franks and the second volume of The McCartney Legacy by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair. Both are excellent. I’m switching between them depending on my energy levels.
  

Next week: Two Album Club evenings and a two-day conference in London.

This week I was back on form and raring to go. I’m still not yet completely fine, but the brain fog lifted and I felt that I was in control again. I’m grateful that a bug like that doesn’t turn up too often.

This was a week in which I:

• Welcomed a new member of my team after getting the contract and on-boarding work completed. By the end of the first day he had built his laptop via Microsoft Autopilot and Intune, got set up with his new account, and collected a new door access pass. We’re very good at getting people up and running when they join.
• Met with the administrative contact at the vendor to agree how the timesheet and invoicing processes will work.
• Put together the pack for the programme Steering Committee, ran the meeting and got the minutes published.
• Met with colleagues and our audio/visual consultancy to agree the draft specs of the equipment we plan to install in spaces that we share with a sister company.
• Had meetings with a colleague at our sister company on their planned refurbishment project.
• Handed over details of the work to refurbish another of our offices, getting the project kicked off.
• Met with colleagues to review a report on data quality for one of our core systems. It’s fascinating how the type of work that I did at the very start of my career appears over and over again.
• Cancelled a workshop to give the team some more time for preparation. We had an impromptu conversation over lunch in the office on Thursday which was useful in clarifying the outcomes that we want from the workshop.
• Attended a ‘town hall’ meeting hosted by our divisional CEO and the Chairman of our Board of Directors.
• Took part in our regular Microsoft Copilot working group. I love it when people from outside of the Technology department show and share their work. We had an interesting discussion about the non-deterministic nature of large language models; even if you ask it to do something and it reports back that it has done it, it may be making it up.
• Solved the SSL issue that I had with the WB-40 Album Club website. In the process, I learned what a DNS Certificate Authority Authorisation (CAA) is.
• Enjoyed hearing The National at the latest WB-40 Album Club. My brother-in-law had recommended Boxer to me about 15 years ago but I didn’t like it. First Two Pages of Frankenstein seemed much more accessible.
• Took Friday off work to spend with my wife for her birthday. We walked over to The Alford Arms in Frithsden for lunch and then finished off with a coffee and cake at Joan, a new cafe in Berkhamsted.
• Got together with friends on Friday night at a pub in Sunningdale to surprise another of our friends on her birthday.
• Rode my indoor bike on Saturday morning as the weekly cycling club ride was cancelled due to risk of ice. It’s been cold again for the past few days but it looks as though we’ve got proper spring weather ahead.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Found this interview with Clay Shirky to be a great listen. He puts forward a great insight: we are not good at being able to predict the impact of new technology, so what we should focus instead on being flexible. I laughed when he recalled that it wasn’t too long ago that we were telling everyone to save their work at regular intervals. It took decades before autosave turned up.
• On their latest episode, the hosts of the Risky Business podcast make a great point about the recent theft of USD 1.4bn of cryptocurrency from Bybit. If this happened using the non-crypto, traditional financial system, most of that money would be recovered. I still think that crypto has two primary uses — speculation and criminal activity — and there isn’t anything that blockchains do that isn’t better served by an alternative.
  

Articles

• The Is This What We Want? campaign is very timely, given the UK’s proposal to let AI companies use copyrighted works for their systems and putting the onus on artists to opt out. It’s a shame that the album only seems to be on streaming services and there isn’t a physical product. Maybe it would have just been too expensive as only a few copies would sell. It feels like the UK is trying too hard to be liked by the cool kids at the AI party at the moment.
• It really should be easier to screenshot video on an Apple device.
• Ian Dunt’s writing following the hideous meeting between Zelenskyy, Trump and Vance was cathartic.
  

The government must now break its red lines on tax and borrowing. There is no way around this. There is no alternative to it. We must build an independent Europe that can guarantee its own security. It is not even a goal. It is simply the only option left behind when all alternatives have been eradicated.

• “The Real Reason Trump Berated Zelensky — He simply likes Vladimir Putin better.”
  

All of this ignores the much more plausible explanation of what happened today: It was a setup. Trump and Vance appear to have entered the meeting with the intention of berating Zelensky and drawing him into an argument as a pretext for the diplomatic break. Why should anyone have expected anything different? Trump has been regurgitating Russian propaganda, not only regarding Ukraine, since before Zelensky even assumed office. He defended Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2018 (the year preceding Zelensky’s election), has repeatedly refused to acknowledge Russian guilt for various murders, and has even stuck to Russian talking points on such idiosyncratic topics as the Soviets’ supposedly defensive rationale for invading Afghanistan in 1979 and their fear that an “aggressive” Montenegro would attack Russia, dragging NATO into war.

• An extraordinary story of a mother who is working with a man who killed her son with one punch in a pub.
  

Video

• Finished watching the first season of A Thousand Blows. I loved this.
• Watched Leon (1994) for the first time in 30 years or so. Gary Oldman is excellent in his role as an unhinged police officer, but other than that it hasn’t aged well. Reading the reviews on Letterboxd was shocking as they revealed that there were more intimate scenes that were cut, and that the director was himself involved with a child in real life. If I’d read the reviews or knew more about the director ahead of time, I wouldn’t have watched it again.
  

Books

• I’m now over halfway through the second volume of The McCartney Legacy. It’s as engrossing a read as the first one.
• Picked up Fearless Speech by Mary Anne Franks, which argues against First Amendment absolutism in the United States.
  

Next week: Birthday celebrations, and hoping that spring is finally here.

Another week of recovery. On Sunday my wife and I drove to her parents’ house, to catch up with them and give them a hand with a few bits and pieces. They live almost three hours away, so we had a lovely dinner out, stayed overnight and I took Monday off work.

I made it back into the office on Wednesday and Thursday, but it felt like a big push to be there. I’d been feeling better, but at the end of each of those days I was coughing again and exhausted. Occasionally I get the odd very mild migraine, perhaps three a year, with the worst bit being an aura before the headache which stops me from being able to see properly. This week I had two in two days, which felt very disconcerting.

There seem to be so many people that have been laid low with this bug or something similar. It’s a nasty one. It was only on Friday that I started to feel my brain fog finally lift and I was back on my game again, two weeks after it started. I’m hoping for much more of a normal week ahead.

This was a week in which I:

• Continued the process to on-board a new team member. We’ve agreed the terms and conditions and now just need to sign the final versions of the documents.
• Met with our sister company for the first governance meeting on the building and facilities services that they provide to us.
• Visited a furniture showroom near Old Street to see examples of boardroom tables.
• Got feedback from our AV partner on the latest design of our boardroom.
• Reviewed and gave feedback on the latest proposal for an AV technology refresh of a shared space in our office.
• Put together a presentation about the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo events that I’ve attended over the past couple of years, and delivered it at our weekly Learning Hour.
• Had my monthly call with my executive partner at an IT analyst firm. The conversation came at the right time; it got me thinking about what success would look like this year and helped me to refocus on what we need to do.
• Had a random chat with one of our group architects in South Africa who wanted to know more about our part of the organisation.
• Attended our internal Generative AI working group, the first time in a while that I’ve been able to join the meeting.
• Caught the tail-end of a Yodeck webinar on the best ways to schedule content.
• Spent some time with my very clever friend who created the Album Club website. He had refactored the code so that I could replicate the site for the WB-40 Album Club. I spent time going through the 19 albums we have played so far and getting the detailed data into the correct format. He also showed me how to set it up so that it builds on Vercel every time a change is committed to GitHub.
• Helped my father-in-law to get set up with YNAB for his personal finances. I’ve been using the app for 15 years or so and it has changed my life. I just wish I’d started using it, or a system like it, when I was much younger.
• Enjoyed dinner at Avellino, Ross-on-Wye’s Italian restaurant.
• Used some gap filler to plug a hole in our brickwork that last year served as a home for a family of blue tits. The cans of filler are so big; you could probably insulate all of your cavity walls with just one can. I needed a couple of squirts and now unfortunately need to take the rest to the recycling centre.
• Got back exercising again, tentatively at the weekend and then ramping things up over the course of the week. I made it out for the Saturday morning club ride and managed to keep up, despite coughing my way through parts of the route. We had a comedy moment in trying to change a friend’s front tyre which ended up with me cutting myself and bleeding all over his wheel.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Really enjoyed the latest episode of Reqless where Paul Ford and Rich Ziade spoke with Clay Shirky about the use of AI in higher education:
  

Clay: … People love this because it feels like learning. It’s not actually learning, but it feels like it. And so you think, “I have a problem, and I’m gonna think about the problem for a little bit, and then all of a sudden I have a great answer,” that feels like you learned something. But what you learned was, “This is how I asked ChatGPT about this problem.” Now, if what you need to be learning is just, “How do I use this tool effectively?” That’s okay.

…

Clay: There is a Reddit thread that we all went to town on about a month ago, month and a half ago, an NYU student said, “Help, I can’t stop using AI.” They were a school—

Rich: A cry for help.

Clay: They were a student enrolled, they said, in their senior year in our engineering school, saying, “I’m using this thing all the time. I recognize that in my own major I’m learning less than I would if I wasn’t using it. But I can’t stop.” It was that sense of addiction that really started to change—and make me more pessimistic, frankly, about the kind of progressive, like, we’ll just appeal to the student’s natural love of learning.

Rich: Mmm. Mmm.

Clay: It’s like, if this is a student who is in the part of her education where she’s only taking classes in her major and by her, you know, at least by what she said in the, in the Reddit thread was interested in them.

Rich: Yeah.

Clay: And then was saying, “I actually can’t stop using this thing that I recognize is interfering with what I’m learning.”

• I loved Ben Thompson’s Stratechery interview with Bobby Healy, the CEO of Manna. It made me unashamedly excited about a technology again, something that I haven’t felt for a while. Manna provide drone-based delivery, currently only to Dublin 15 in Ireland and Pecan Square in Texas. The operation sounds incredible, and Healy’s case for his company is very convincing. They load the battery pack with the cargo so they don’t need to worry about drones being out of action for any length of time. Because Europe is so strict and has laid down such clear regulations, they knew what they had to build against. The drones have been designed and built in-house with multiple redundant safety features, as nothing was available off the shelf that met the specifications. However, looking at the YouTube videos of the operation from a Dublin McDonald’s car park, I’m not sure that it quite lives up to how Healy described it in the Interview:
  

Bobby Healy: But if you have a hot swap system, as we do, you get eight deliveries per hour throughput. But the person loading the cargo, one of our people will do between 25 and 30 deliveries per hour, that’s because we’ve about a 60-second turnaround time aircraft lands. It’s back in the air in less than 60 seconds.

Articles

• The Guardian and the New York Times get into bed with generative AI. Sigh.
• A wonderful list of travel tips from Kevin Kelly.
• Robert Breen on Why Blogs Matter.
• This UK government seems to be digitally dumb. As well as proposing that AI companies get access to use copyrighted creative works, their request to Apple for a backdoor to their encrypted cloud backups was only going to result in one outcome.
• I pass through Euston every day that I go into the office. This update from A London Inheritance reinforces the fact that very little seems to be happening there.
  

Video

• The podcast interview with Clay Shirky mentioned above led me to looking up the work of Joss Fong. Her video on the impact and implications of AI in education is superb.

• Watched a bit of the F1 75 launch event. Aside from the funny quips by the host, Jack Whitehall, it felt like an extended media event with little notable content. I love that F1 has been trying different things and has expanded the fan base, but I don’t think these kind of events are for me.
• Started watching season three of The White Lotus. A slow burn so far.
• Continued with Severance, which seems to have slowed down. I’m hoping that it doesn’t turn into some kind of long drawn-out incoherent series like Lost.
• Watched the first episode of the Jerry Springer documentary Fights, Camera, Action. What a hideous programme it was. It seemed to be more about the producers of the show than the presence of Springer himself.
• Started watching A Thousand Blows. It’s had me captivated from the start.
  

Audio

• Picked up an amazing vinyl copy of Floodland by The Sisters of Mercy. It’s great when a Discogs purchase turns up and exceeds expectations.
• Was so pleased to finally get my copy of Nik Kershaw’s box set The MCA Years. I ordered it when it was announced back in May and the release date was pushed back a few times. It’s a lovely thing.
  

Web

• I love Gina Trapani’s map of her life in weeks.
• Tony Redmond on Why Microsoft 365 Copilot Works for Some and Not for Others.
  

Books

• My brain fog finally lifted enough for me to finish my write-up of Fascism by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey.
  

Next week: Welcoming a new team member, and another Album Club.

My attempt at working on Monday morning lasted about an hour. I ran two half hour meetings — very badly — before admitting defeat and going back to bed. On Tuesday I got up at my usual time, had breakfast and then fell asleep on the sofa for four hours. This illness has knocked me sideways. I can’t remember ever having taken a day off sick from work before, and now I find myself having taken two in a row.

I got back to my desk on Wednesday. Concentrating on topics was difficult as my brain had a fuzzy, foggy feel to it, and this persisted all the way through the rest of the week. So I picked my battles, using the time to catch up with administrative tasks as opposed to trying to tackle any big hairy problems.

My eldest son had been suffering with what I assume was the same illness, but he was a few days ahead of me. The doctors prescribed him antibiotics, so I gave them a call on Tuesday and explained my symptoms, explaining that if antibiotics were a necessary remedy, I didn’t want to delay getting on them. They prescribed me a course of amoxicillin without even seeing me in person. I’m not sure if it was necessary, but I was willing to take whatever help I could get. (It got me thinking — why is there no swab-like test that you can take at the doctors so that they can diagnose exactly what it is that you have and then treat you accordingly? Is this just too expensive and impractical? Maybe we need to move some research money from generative AI to trying to develop a tricorder.)

At the end of the weekend it feels as though I’ve got it under control. But the chesty cough, runny nose and lack of energy are still lingering, and feel as though they might hang around for some time yet.

This was a week in which I:

• Continued work on the ‘definition of done’ for our document management project.
• Reworked our real estate/facilities financial projections now that we have better assumptions to base our projected spend on.
• Continued the on-boarding process for a new vendor, reviewing and amending the proposed contract.
• Had a request to look at how deleted Teams, SharePoint sites and Groups can be restored.
• Joined a workshop to start to look at how we can use AI to bring together informative data about our clients into a single pane of glass.
• Joined the weekly standup meeting for developments on our internal chatbot.
• Attended our weekly Learning Hour meeting about last year’s internal ITSM conference.
• Had the weekly check-in with our sister company on their real estate/office improvement project.
• Attended the Teams Fireside Chat with Michel Bouman from Microsoft.
• Took one of our cars in for repair. We’ve had the engine light come on and it has repeatedly lost power. Unfortunately they couldn’t find anything wrong with it. The garage is amazing in that they charged us only £9 for a lightbulb that needed replacing.
• Met with our personal financial advisor for our annual check-in.
• Had a bizarre experience while lying around in a feverish stupor. I was sleeping and dreaming on the couch and in my dream, I found my way to a couch with some random big fluffy cat, fell asleep and started dreaming. I was having a dream within a dream. I realised I was dreaming and then ‘woke up’ only back as far as being asleep on a couch in my dream.
• Smashed one of my toes against a leg of our bed in the middle of the night. We’ve been in the same room for ten years or so and I’ve never done it before. My toe has gone black and purple from the impact.
• Watched the Everton vs Liverpool derby with my son, the last one to take place at Goodison Park before Everton move to a new home. What an incredible football match.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Without a commute or time on my indoor bike trainer, I struggled to keep up with podcasts this week.
  

Articles

• Raiding bookshops in Palestine and detaining their owners is yet another low in the ongoing conflict.
• Google Maps is 20 years old. I still remember how magical this was when it was introduced. I was so much more of a techno-optimist then.
• Why are so many tech companies so problematic? Adding Shopify to my list of companies to try and avoid.
• IBM using a return to office mandate as a ’soft layoff’.
  

Video

• BBC4’s Tutankhamen in Colour was a fascinating look at the discovery of the pharaoh’s tomb, blended with technology that brought the black and white footage to life.
• Discovered the Techmoan YouTube channel. From what I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of moaning, but there does seem to be a lot of brilliant videos digging into technology. Highlights that I’ve watched so far:
  
  • Playing 78RPM records properly
  • Line out ≠ headphone out
  • The Tefi company and their Tefifon player (insane genius idea to blend a record player needle with a tape player)
  • VHD videodisc format
• Finished watching Mo on Netflix. The last couple of episodes were incredibly moving. It feels like an antidote to all of the hateful rhetoric around immigration and asylum.
• Watched The Substance (2024). We didn’t really know what we were letting ourselves in for. It’s … a lot. There’s potentially a great story in there, but the plot didn’t really make sense and it ended up as a gore-fest.
  

Audio

• I’ve been digging the Sisters of Mercy’s Floodland album over the past couple of weeks. Another album where I’m wondering why it has taken so long for me to listen to the whole thing.

Web

• A great resource that lists European alternatives to online services based elsewhere in the world (usually the USA). Being based in Europe is one thing, but it would be good to have the data cross-referenced with details on whether the people running each service are wrong-uns as well.
  

Books

• Continued reading the second volume of The McCartney Legacy. It’s been just what I need right now.
  

Next week: A long weekend and getting back into the office.

A week dominated by illness. Early on Monday morning my wife collected our eldest son at the airport, back from his running trip to Boston University. He was quite ill with a horrible cough, sore throat and a high temperature, and ended up spending the whole week at home. A few days in, he didn’t seem to be making any improvement, so we decided to try and get him a doctor’s appointment. Not only was he seen that afternoon, but the doctor even gave us a follow-up call the next day to see how he was doing. Very impressive.

Lots of my colleagues have been off work with a similar illness. There are definitely some horrible bugs going around at the moment. On Friday afternoon, I started to get a little tickly cough which by Saturday morning turned into a full-blown illness. I’ve spent the entire weekend drinking lemon paracetamol drinks, alternating between being freezing cold and too hot. I’m going to work tomorrow, but I’ll be staying at home.

I’ve been mentally struggling with the impact of keeping up with the news. In times of trouble, I always feel that it’s incumbent on me to keep informed about what’s happening as opposed to turning away because it’s all too depressing. In the US, it looks like a coup is underway, whereas here in the UK the government doesn’t seem to be particularly good at governing. Instead, they are leaning into trying to outcompete the right-wing Reform Party. What a mess.

This was a week in which I:

• Continued to pick up more responsibilities from my boss. I’m now responsible for our governance committee and board reports, as well as attending an executive committee run by one of our front office teams.
• Wrote and edited this quarter’s report to the board of directors.
• Collaborated with our team on our annual submission to one of our regulators about our technology setup and dependencies.
• Started to put together a portfolio roadmap for the work going on across our department.
• Ran a short workshop in our work cafe/presentation space to assess how we want it to work in the future, and what potential changes we would need to make to get there.
• Continued with the on-boarding process for a new vendor who will be providing us with a new contract staff member.
• Met with the head of one of our IT functions to discuss aligning part of my team to his organisation.
• Caught up with a colleague at our sister company on where they are with their office renovation project.
• Held an overview presentation for our programme Steering Committee members on the technology we have installed to monitor the performance of our physical space. We have only been using it for a couple of months, but it has already revealed lots of insights.
• Reviewed the proposal for implementing a data centre/network documentation and management tool.
• Had our weekly call with our audio/visual consultancy.
• Held my fortnightly team meeting. It feels like we are slowly getting into our stride as a group.
• Caught up with writing and posting four weeks’ worth of wins.
• Watched two Learning Hour sessions, catching up with the video of one that I missed on the topic of Infrastructure as Code, and another on the costs and benefits of space travel.
• Had some discussions about the potential of ChatGPT Pro and its deep research feature, off the back of a Stratechery Update and the subsequent discussion on the Sharp Tech podcast.
• Had my regular meeting with my friend and colleague, our Group Head of APIs.
• Attended our company-wide Microsoft Copilot/Teams Premium working group. Last year I couldn’t make many of the sessions due to other work priorities. It feels good to have a little bit of bandwidth to attend again.
• Started to make some moves of getting off Amazon for purchasing books. I downloaded my entire Kindle library and added the documents to Calibre, with a little help from a Parallels Windows virtual machine and Epubor. I also downloaded my wishlist, converting saved HTML pages to plain text. Getting off of a US-owned tech platform seems a sensible thing to do right now.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Fascinating discussion with Luke Jennings at Push Security on last week’s Risky Business podcast, all about ‘cross IDP impersonation’. (The link takes you directly to the start of the discussion on YouTube.) Users want to use OAuth buttons such as ‘sign in with Google’ to get into their corporate SaaS apps. There’s nothing to stop them from registering their corporate email address with an identity provider and verifying ownership of the email, allowing the button to work from that point onwards. The issue is that when their corporate account gets shut down, they would still have access to the SaaS app.
• Sharp Tech’s discussion of ChatGPT Pro Deep Research was fascinating. If it’s as good as it is reported to be (for USD 200/mo for the Pro subscription), it may do the work of a junior analyst in terms of the quality of the report that it returns. The problems are that (a) it makes extensive use of searching the web and can’t go beyond this with novel insights or information that isn’t on the open Internet, and (b) if you need to be an experienced analyst who is able to think deeply and use novel insights of your own, what does the pipeline of analysts look like?
  

Articles

• Baldur Bjarnason on ‘poisoning for propaganda’, how rising authoritarianism makes LLMs more dangerous. “The truth about modern AI is that there is that every major ‘AI’ company today is in bed with an authoritarian government. The ones that aren’t – such as the European ones – are distant runners up to the US or Chinese models.”
• Google’s not part of the US government, but it wants to keep its government contracts, so it has ended its DEI hiring goals.
• LinkedIn-style posts for the enterprise, all within Teams.
• Is this the beginning of the end of what3words? We can only hope.
  

Video

• Being ill this weekend means that I’ve spent quite a bit of time in bed and on the sofa, wandering around YouTube.
• Elliot Roberts’ latest video makes a case for us currently living through an all-time great era for pop music.

• This takedown of an Indian scam call centre is incredible in terms of the effort that the YouTuber went to over such a long period of time.

• A compilation of bands stopping shows to help fans.
  
• Watched Witches (2024), a very moving exploration of postpartum depression, linked to how women have been persecuted as witches over the centuries. Heavy-going, but brilliant.
  

Audio

• Alicia Clara has a new song out! 🥳

• Awesome Tapes From Africa had a Bandcamp sale on Friday. I picked up 11 digital albums for about £10.
  

Web

• Went to look at an old mind map and found that toketaWare, maker of the iThoughts app, shut down last year. It’s a shame; iThoughts was one of the first apps I installed when I got my first iPad, and I’ve used it on and off since. I don’t use mind mapping that much, but I do have a bunch of old maps that I refer to occasionally. I’m going to need to find another home for them. These articles have been quite helpful.
• Maggie Appleton’s approach to creating digital gardens is lovely. It’s got me thinking about how I might go about doing this myself.
  

Books

• Finished reading Fascism by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. I’ve started to write up my thoughts about the book in a blog post, but being ill doesn’t lend itself to tackling this one very readily. Hopefully I’ll post about this in the next few days.
• Picked up where I left off with volume two of The McCartney Legacy. I’ve just finished reading about the recording and mastering of Wings’ Venus and Mars. It’s not a perfect album, but I’ve always had lots of affection for it.
  

Next week: Working from home, at least for the start of the week, as I try to get over this bug.

The first ‘normal’ week of the year, where I wasn’t having to prioritise some near-term objectives. Our offsite meeting was behind us, so it was time to get on with the work. I struggled to find my mojo this week. The big, important things got done but there are lots of lower-level things that didn’t get my attention.

This was a week in which I:

• Was formally put into a standing deputy role for my boss. A mini promotion of sorts.
• Held three more in-person interviews for the developer role within my team. We ended up with a good problem in that we liked more than one of the candidates. It was close, but ultimately our decision came down to team fit. It’ll be fun to have someone new join the team.
• Took colleagues through a draft presentation on our company strategy at our department-wide team meeting.
• Met with colleagues to get aligned on our mission for our document management project.
• Had our regular project meeting for our plan to open a new office.
• Reviewed the data and insights produced by our recently installed office environment monitoring system. Having quantitative data about our space — temperature, usage, CO2 levels, noise — is going to be invaluable in making decisions about how to improve the environment further over the next few years.
• Checked in with our audio/visual consultants on the remaining work for this year. I have my fingers crossed that next week’s ISE conference will have the product announcements we are looking for.
• Met with our vendor that supplies the mini PCs that run our meeting rooms to look at the next generation of this technology.
• Met with our networking vendor to discuss our licence renewal and our plans for trialling additional products.
• Met with our Microsoft Copilot pilot working group. (Why do Microsoft always name their products in such a way that referring to them becomes clunky and awkward?) We’ve continued to see a steady trickle of people who are interested in trying out the tools.
• Attended the monthly Copilot Fireside Chat. What works so well for the Teams Fireside Chat seems to fall flat at the Copilot one. None of the attendees put their cameras on and the conversation at the session felt a little stilted.
• Attended an internal webinar covering the political outlook for South Africa.
• Took part in our first monthly Lean Coffee of the year. We have a completely open approach for agenda topics and it has served us well over the years. This week’s session left me wondering whether there should be a little bit of guidance for the topics. How have others managed this?
• Had a good introductory meeting with a vendor that we work with extensively in South Africa but have not utilised in the UK.
• Enjoyed a delicious free lunch at work to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
  

• Discovered that someone has been spoofing my mobile number to make scam calls. For a couple of months I’ve been receiving calls from people who said that they were returning a missed call from my number. This week, a man with a Scottish accent called me and said that someone had been trying to scam him from my number. Other than changing my mobile number — which I don’t want to do as I’ve had it forever — I don’t know what I can do to prevent this. I called up my network provider but they were useless; it took 15 minutes for them to understand the issue, only to tell me that there was nothing they could do. I logged the problem with Action Fraud, but I don’t hold out any hope that they can do something either; the reporting tools on their website are geared towards people who have received the scam call, not the person whose number is being spoofed. I don’t know much about ‘calling line identity’, but I assume that it’s trivial to pretend to be someone else.
• Met up with friends — ex-colleagues that I worked with 25 years ago — for a night in the pub. It’s always lovely to see them. It made me realise once again how lucky I was to have started my career in such a great department and team.
• Dropped my eldest boy off at Heathrow Airport. He’d been invited to take part in the Boston University John Thomas Terrier Classic, an indoor track meet. A fantastic opportunity to try out being in a US university setting.
• Caught up with some friends at The Perseverance pub in Wraysbury. We all had burgers, but didn’t eat the napkins.
  

• Managed to get out on the Saturday morning cycling club ride again. The temperature was cold, but slightly higher than the week before which meant that there was no ice anywhere. Three of my cycling club friends have signed up to this year’s London Edinburgh London, a 1,530km ride to be tackled in one go, with a 128 hour time limit. A completely mad adventure. The closest I’ll ever come to it is watching this documentary, which had the effect of completely putting me off:
  

• Enjoyed a sunny winter walk with my wife, following the footpaths across the fields at the back of our house. We live in such a beautiful place, but it has been years since I last wandered out there.
  

Media

Articles

• Ben Thompson’s Q&A-style analysis of the impact and implications of the DeepSeek large language models is superb.
• I’m not much of a computer game player, but Matthew Ball’s presentation on The State of Video Gaming in 2025, also surfaced via Stratechery, is a fascinating read.
  

Video

• Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story (2024) is a beautifully-made documentary about Reeve, his family and his friends. I was a teenager when he had his accident and remember reading all about it in the papers at the time, but I didn’t follow his life from that point. I had no idea how much pain the family went through, with his wife passing away shortly after him.
• Started watching Mo on Netflix, a gentle comedy about a Palestinian asylum seeker and his family in Houston, Texas, who haven’t had their case resolved in over 20 years. We’ve already breezed through season one.
  

Web

• If you don’t have time to read Ben Thompson’s DeepSeek analysis linked above, Anil Dash wrote a good thread on Bluesky last Monday as US technology stocks started to tank.
• Bill Gates on Elon Musk: ‘“You want to promote the right wing but say Nigel Farage is not rightwing enough,” Gates told the Sunday Times. “I mean, this is insane shit.”’
• Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
  

Books

• Continued reading Fascism by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Somehow I don’t seem to be putting enough time aside for reading at the moment. It’s already February and I haven’t read much.
  

Next week: Welcoming my son home from his trip, and trying to knock the roadmap for the rest of the year into place.

A very busy but fun week. Two of my colleagues flew in from Johannesburg to join our management team offsite meeting from Tuesday to Thursday. I’d put a lot of effort into planning these few days, and the week had finally arrived. Most of our management team have all been working together for seven or eight years and it feels like we’re a family, so it’s lovely when we can all be in the same place. Unfortunately, one of our local team members fell ill at the start of the week, so only joined one of our sessions remotely.

Going into London for a full five days was exhausting. By Friday night I was ready to drop.

This was a week in which I:

• Interviewed two candidates for the vacancy in my team. One of the interviews was in person, which felt a little like a step back in time. But after having met two candidates online last year that seemed to be blatantly using generative AI to answer our questions, being in the same room has its benefits.
• Had a couple of meetings on our document management project, clarifying the work done to date and agreeing on an approach for the next couple of weeks.
• Spent day one of our offsite meeting with Hoopla!, working on our collaboration and storytelling skills using improvisation techniques. The workshop was pitched as ‘yoga for your soft skills’ and this felt right; by the end of the day we’d all had a good workout, sharing many laughs and insights along the way. The phrase “wise wise wise…” is now with us for good. Thoroughly recommended.
• Had a fun night out at Electric Shuffle in London Bridge. It was just what we needed to unwind after an intense day of improv. The technology that runs the shuffleboard tables was very impressive, as was the range of games available to play.
• Got through the agenda for our offsite, covering a team check-in, the latest reading of our corporate strategy and presentations and discussions led by each of the function heads.
• Had a wonderful dinner to celebrate the success of last year’s major programmes with the extended team. The evening was perfect, with excellent food and a perfect ambience.
• Stayed up late on Tuesday night, watching the second inauguration of Donald Trump with horror. I’m not going to forget the tech leaders that stood there behind the new president as he announced that the federal government will recognise only two genders and the USA will look to expand its territory. Musk’s Nazi salute later that day was the disgusting icing on an abhorrent cake.
• Got out on my bike for Saturday morning’s club ride, my first outdoor ride of the year. The weather has been bad, with clear skies being accompanied by freezing temperatures. I’m too scared to go out when there’s a risk of ice. I was signed up for Sunday’s postponed Westerley Winter Warmer, but pulled out when I saw the weather forecast of heavy rain from the halfway point and a ‘feels like’ temperature of -6°C.
• Helped my son to dismantle his desk and replace it with a simple, inexpensive desk from Ikea. His friend has upgraded his gaming PC and has lent his old one to my son, but he didn’t have enough room to properly set it up.
• Had a lovely dinner out with close friends on Friday night at Tabure in Berkhamsted.
• Enjoyed a family lunch out in town on Sunday.
  

Media

Podcasts

• The Strong Songs analysis of Annie Lennox’s Walking On Broken Glass is superb. I’ve heard this song so many times on the radio, but this highlights so many details that I’ve never heard before. It makes you realise that something that seems simple is anything but.
  

Articles

• The Guardian: West Midlands teacher was ‘forced into hiding’ after doctored video alleged she made racist slur. Digital fakes don’t need to be very good in order to have a massively detrimental impact on your life. Although the victim in this case has been awarded damages, I’m not sure it can offset everything being turned upside down for her.
• Ben Werdmuller asks “In the face of rising fascism, what kind of person are you? What kind of person do you want to be?”
• Ian Dunt on How to resist the tech overlords.
• Jason Riddle, one of the January 6th rioters, rejected Trump’s pardon.
• Siri seems to be worse than ever, comically so.
• Ton Zijlstra articulates how difficult it is to buy ebooks outside of the big tech ecosystem. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve bought DRM-free ePub books from various publishers over the years but they probably make up about 1% of all of the ebooks I’ve purchased.
  

Audio

• Bought three second-hand Joe Jackson CDs from World of Books: Look Sharp!, Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive and Volume 4. World of Books is a great, and perhaps lesser-known, alternative to Discogs, eBay and Music Magpie.
• Picked up a copy of Rocky V: Music from and Inspired by the Motion Picture ¹ from eBay. This is not a great album, but this was one of the first three CDs that I ever bought² and I wanted to hear it again. I recently noticed that my original copy has gone missing and I only had poor 128kbps mp3 rips of some of the tracks in my library. The highlight of the album is Joey B Ellis’s Go For It, which was effectively the theme tune for the film. 13-year old me loved this.

Video

• Hearing Joey B Ellis again led me down a rabbit hole that culminated in watching Philly Boy: A Movie About MC Breeze (2002). It always feels strange to me to watch a historical documentary where the events being recounted are closer to when they made the film than they are to now. It’s not a great movie, and the quality of the YouTube upload is poor, but it was an intriguing bit of ephemera from the Philadelphia hip-hop scene. One of the talking heads was Funk Wizard Snow, the CEO/Editor of now defunct website phillyhiphop.com, who intrigued me as he had a copy of a FrontPage 2000 guidebook behind him. I couldn’t help looking up the archived pages from the website on the Wayback Machine.
• Watched The Breakthrough on Netflix, a four-part Swedish drama of a double murder that went unsolved for 16 years. The acting is good, but with the series being so short it felt like we didn’t really get to know the characters. I found myself putting that aside and coming back to the realisation that they were reconstructing things that actually happened.
  

Books

• Pressed pause on The McCartney Legacy Volume 2: 1974–80. I’m loving it, but it’s a big beast and I’m finding that there are too many other books that I feel that I need to get to right now…
• …which includes Fascism by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey, a book that arose from their Origin Story podcast. I’m way behind on their main feed but noticed that their latest episode addressed Trump’s inauguration and Musk’s Nazi salute, and included an audiobook excerpt from this book. After having a debate with a friend this week on whether certain actions are fascist, this is the book I need.
  

Next week: Taking what we did on our offsite and getting on with the work.

1. The title of this album is weird, because the MC Hammer tracks were neither from the film, nor inspired by it — they are remixes of tracks that appeared on one of his earlier albums. But maybe that’s just being pedantic. ↩
2. Alongside George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice: Volume One and a CD single of Do The Bartman. Eclectic. ↩

This week was a bit too much. Last week’s relatively slow start had lulled me into a false sense of security, so it felt as though reality hit me hard this week. There was so much going on both at work and at home. It felt as though I picked up more things than I put down.

This was a week in which I:

• Wrestled with the trains. My usual morning train was cancelled until the final couple of days of the week due to a points failure somewhere on the line. The next one rolled into the station with a fraction of the carriages it normally has, so I had to run down the platform to catch it. We were standing, squeezed together from the start of the journey. After a quarter of a century of commuting I actually quite enjoy it — it’s where I write most of my weeknotes — but not when the service starts to fall apart.
• Prepared for and ran our programme steering committee meeting. Preparing the pack was a useful exercise for me to get my head around where we are at after a flurry of activity at the end of last year. I spent a couple of hours at the weekend writing up the minutes as I know that there won’t be any time to do this next week and didn’t want it to be hanging over me.
• Also finished off the preparation for next week’s management team offsite meeting over the weekend, confirming the final agenda and sending it out to my colleagues.
• Met with the CEO and Office Manager for one of our regional offices for a review of the services provided by our department, and our plans for this year.
• Bumped into another of our regional CEOs who was visiting our office ahead of an offsite meeting. We discussed the potential provision of a technology in his office and agreed a plan to gather some more information before making a decision.
• Handed over background documentation for a document management project that we would like to make progress with this year.
• Met with our audio/visual consultants following last week’s trial of demo equipment in one of our boardrooms. The Integrated Systems Europe conference is just around the corner, and we’re hoping for product announcements that will help us with our large shared meeting rooms. The solution that we tested may be more suited to another space that we’d like to improve.
• Met with our real estate services consultancy firm to review their proposal to support us in 2025.
• Caught up with our sister company on their revised draft schedule for their office renovation and maintenance.
• Reviewed lots of CVs from recruiters for the vacancy in my team. I also hosted one of the recruiters when they came to visit our office. The CVs are getting closer to what we’re looking for and we have a couple of interviews lined up for next week.
• Joined our architecture governance meeting and reviewed proposed changes to some of our technology infrastructure. The changes are deep in the weeds, but should result in a smoother experience for all of the staff working in our offices.
• Had a career coaching session with my executive partner at a technology industry analyst firm. Thinking about what I would like to spend my time doing if there were no constraints was an interesting exercise. Very early in my career I fell into project management, but I’m a geek at heart and sometimes wish my role was more technical than it is.
• Had my regular meeting with our account manager at the same technology industry analyst firm.
• Made a plan to bring in Rob O’Donohue to talk to our department about neurodiversity, covering the talk that I saw him give at the Gartner Symposium/Xpo at the end of 2023.
• Had our monthly operational risk review meeting.
• Discussed the needs of one of our departments that fields a large number of staff queries. What was initially pitched to me as a conversation about AI ended up with us deciding that a rule-based chatbot would be more suitable.
• Met with the Product Owner of Planview AgilePlace for a demo of possible new features. We took the opportunity to give some extensive feedback on the tool. It’s been an excellent tool for us over the past few years and it’s so lovely to be able to give feedback directly to the person in charge. Another example of the magical Internet.
• Spent many, many hours trying to find a suitable venue for dinner to celebrate our programme’s success and to thank our team. After a slow start to my search I soon realised that I had to cast a wide net. I spent time running around the City of London to look at venues that were in the running; this proved to be invaluable as I found rooms that looked great on the web were inaccessible or located next to the restaurant toilets. I now have both a venue as well as a newfound respect for our Marketing and Communications team who have to do this kind of work as part of their day job.
• Enjoyed a wonderful Learning Hour meeting where our CTO talked to us about SpaceX, Starlink, and their status in Africa.
• Hosted the latest WB-40 Album Club. I’d struggled to make time to think about what to play, and picked Joe Jackson’s debut album Look Sharp! at the very last minute. I was very happy with my choice. There are so many great songs on there.
• Had a frustrating experience at a stationery shop. My wife had ordered a few packs of coloured pencils to give as prizes to children in a school art contest. Her order was sent to the shop close to my office so that I could pick them up. When I got there and showed them the order on my phone, they asked for a physical copy of her ID, which I didn’t have. I asked whether I could just buy some more, but they said that the packs they have are put aside for my wife’s order. I asked whether I could call her and ask her to cancel her order, putting the packs of pencils back into stock. Apparently that wouldn’t work either, as the process takes a while. So, I walked out without the pencils.
• Felt so sorry to hear about the passing of Tony Slattery. In 1994 I saw him being brilliant, live on stage, at a taping of Whose Line Is It Anyway?. His reappearance a few years ago in What’s the Matter with Tony Slattery? was so shocking and sad. Poor guy.
• Enjoyed this week’s in-person Album Club. I’d heard lots about Big Country over the years but had never knowingly heard any of their songs, so this was a great opportunity to listen intently. I’ve now tried it, and made up my mind that I didn’t like it.
  

Media

Podcasts

• An excellent interview with someone on the NHS front line. It sounds as though being an emergency medicine doctor is a role that you would only do for the love of the job.
• The Standard Bank In-Market Insights podcast is excellent. The latest episode covers the relationship and geopolitics between China and Africa.

Articles

• Local police forces are launching an initiative to tackle drivers who pass cyclists too closely. This article is from 2018, but the scheme is being rolled out in Hertfordshire soon. Lots of drivers don’t understand that when overtaking they need to use the whole of the other lane as if they were overtaking a car. A couple of months ago I was involved in an extremely narrow pass that just had a couple of centimetres between me and the car.
• I love that I joined and support the IndieWeb.Social Mastodon server. Timothy Chambers takes such a thoughtful approach to running the instance; his recent decision on posts federated from Threads is no exception.
• Interesting reflections on Elon Musk by Sam Harris.
• I had a conversation in the office last week about whether it’s better to read AI-generated summaries of books or to not read them at all. I don’t know what the answer is. This Bluesky post serendipitously turned up in my timeline.
• I’ve worked in the City of London for 26 years. Bank Junction has always felt like a special place. A London Inheritance gives a fascinating overview of its history.

Video

• Interesting video from the MIT Sloan Management Review on how forcing employees back to the office is the best way to lose your top talent. People want to work together in person, but it should be left up to individual teams to decide what is right for them.

• Spent a baffled 45 minutes watching the first episode of season two of Severance. This recap of season one was exactly what we needed to remind ourselves of everything that happened. We’d forgotten nearly everything.

• Started watching The Breakthrough, a drama about a double murder in Sweden that went unsolved for 16 years.

Web

• Some people’s moral compasses are completely out of whack. Who thought this was a good idea?
• It was interesting to read that Scott Yoshinaga has exactly the same problem as me when trying to syndicate his blog posts via micro.blog whilst using CloudFlare to protect and speed up his website. I’ve ended up turning CloudFlare off for now, which sadly feels like a defeat.
  

Next week: Visitors from South Africa and an offsite meeting.

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.