For no explainable reason, this week I varied my walk between the train station and the office. As I walked down Herbrand Street, parrots flew overhead. I found a bunch of them gathered on a bird feeder.
The end of my streak of four-day weeks at work. After last weekend’s giant bike ride, Sunday was spent in an overtired stupor and Monday was restful, ahead of going back to work on Tuesday. All week I’ve had mild pain in my left knee, which I think was caused by trying to keep up with the rest of my group on the cycling climbs. They are better riders than me, so I found myself standing up and grinding out a higher gear than usual to keep up. I got on my indoor bike trainer on Friday and found that it irritated my knee; by the end of Saturday morning’s club ride I was in a lot of pain. I’m going to try and get it looked at next week so that I can minimise the time away from exercising.
This was a week in which I:
Got a Teams message on my way into work on Tuesday from one of our senior execs about an issue in the office. We’d had some work done over the weekend but it hadn’t been left in an acceptable state. I spent my morning trying to get things to a place where the immediate issues were fixed as well as working with the team to ensure the next batch of work would be done to a higher standard.
Caught up with colleagues who had been out on holiday. A late Easter and public holidays meant that quite a few people had taken advantage of booking an extended break.
Had a sprint progress review meeting with our development team.
Reviewed the latest iteration of a master services agreement with our heads of Procurement, Legal, and Governance and Control.
Stepped in for my boss to represent our department at the Governance Committee meeting for one of our legal entities.
Had further conversations with senior client-facing staff about the process of producing newsletters and insights.
Reviewed the output and insights from one of my colleague’s recent business trips as we look to refurbish one of our offices.
Joined the weekly project meeting for the refurbishment of our sister company’s space, as well as our shared areas. Reviewed the latest financial forecast for the shared works. We have a busy few weeks ahead.
Met with colleagues who wanted advice on the next steps on a project, expanding the scope of a new tool or bolstering what has been put in place already.
Attended our fortnightly Microsoft Copilot working group.
Agreed our approach to purchasing more Microsoft Copilot licences as requests to use the tools come in.
Had an update meeting on our document management project.
Met with colleagues in our Learning and Development team to see how they can assist us with our Copilot journey as well as with some of our other projects that require substantial change management.
Attended an excellent Learning Hour, with Gartner’s Rob O’Donohue as a guest speaker. He gave a presentation on The Neurodiversity Advantage, the same one that I saw at the Gartner IT Symposium in 2023. It was just as fascinating the second time around, and sparked a lot of conversation within our team.
Met a colleague in our Operations team to talk through his approach to measuring and tracking ongoing process improvements. It’s been a while since I thought about Six Sigma, which was once very much the flavour of the month.
Was a little shocked when our car insurance renewal premium came through at £1,600. This is apparently only £100 more expensive than last year, but it doesn’t feel like it. In the past twelve months we gradually changed the scope of our insurance as my eldest son worked his way through his provisional licence and then passed his test. We’ve got used to paying a few hundred pounds just for my wife and I for one car, where we each have 30 years of driving history. Trying to find comparative quotes is difficult and time-consuming as you need to look at all cars and drivers on one policy versus different policies. It seems as though there isn’t much of a better deal around at the moment.
Dropped our Mini in for a service and MOT, expecting it to be expensive as it is 15 years old and we know it has a few issues. And so it proved.
Saw both of our boys finish school, our eldest for the final time. Our youngest one also had his first GCSE exam and is quickly in the thick of it. In a few weeks, the exams will be done and they can hopefully enjoy their summer.
Enjoyed a beautifully sunny club bike ride on Saturday morning, but by the end of 70km I was struggling with pain in my left knee, which persisted throughout the weekend. I’m going to look at getting some help with it next week as I don’t want to be off my bike for any length of time.
Signed up for The National 400 Audax ride on 28 June. It sets off at the civilised time of 10am, with a time limit of 1pm the next day. I’ve never ridden those roads before. I’m hoping I can get the logistics in place and my knee problem resolved so that I can ride it.
Went with Matt to the National Film Theatre to see The Extraordinary Miss Flower (2024). Matt had played Emiliana Torrini’s Miss Flower album at our latest Album Club night and I was captivated. The film is a beautiful, hard to describe thing. After the passing of Torrini’s friend’s mum, Geraldine Flower, they discovered a suitcase full of letters that were written to her by various men throughout her life. Torrini used these as inspiration for her album as well as this film. We don’t really get to know much about Miss Flower, as there are very few letters from her, so you end up with an impression of what she was like. The film includes all of the wonderful songs from the album. The event finished with a live Q&A with Torrini, Caroline Catz (who plays Miss Flower in the film), and the directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, followed by a couple of live songs from Torrini. Sophie Ellis-Bextor sat a couple of rows behind us in the theatre. A lovely way to start the weekend.
Media
Podcasts
Superb episode of WB-40 this week with Dr Nancy Doyle talking about neurodiversity and leadership. I thought that the things she raised are generally applicable and not just relevant to neurodiverse people. She says that popular models, such as being a ‘servant leader’, are targeted at the ‘historically bullying leader’ to make them “calm down and be a bit nicer”. I’m much more comfortable being in the ‘nice’ leader role, so having advice on how to hold boundaries and standing my ground would be much more useful than ‘servant leadership’ training. She also argues against the idea that neurodivergent characteristics are fixed “foibles” that others have “just got to accept” and that individuals shouldn’t be expected to change them.
…considering the urgency felt by the LGBTQ+ community, Apple releasing Pride bands and wallpapers is simply not enough to compensate for its decision not to speak out against President Trump’s attacks on trans people. There are certainly risks to Apple if it were to do more to stand up for the LGBTQ+ community, but those risks pale in comparison to the increasing threats trans and other people in the LGBTQ+ community face in the U.S. and around the world every day.
I’m sad to read that Ton Zijlstra’s weeknotes have come to an end, but understand the reasons why. The format he used was inspirational in that it meant that the whole weekend wasn’t taken up with writing something. I wonder how long mine will last for?
Rob Skinner’s reflections on London-Wales-London from both this and last year are excellent. I read his 2024 notes before I set off on my own adventure and they were very worthwhile.
Video
Subscribed to Paramount+ in order to watch Mobland but abandoned it after half an episode. It is so incredibly dreadful, almost like a parody of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Ridiculous London slang that the actors sometimes explain in the next sentence. Completely unwatchable.
Alicia Clara has announced her new album, Nothing Dazzled, which for me was an instant buy.
Bought a copy of Plum by Widowspeak. My friend Mat introduced me to them via a playlist he made for me last year. It’s not their latest and may not even be their greatest — I haven’t yet explored enough of their work — but it’s full of lush songs like this one:
T’Pau’s Heart and Soul popped up on a random playlist at the weekend. I think this is an underrated masterpiece of songwriting, which I’ve loved since it came out in 1987. It’s so clever how the backing vocals take the lead for the verses before colliding with the lead vocal. This lyric video that someone put together illustrates the point; it’s almost impossible to read all of the lyrics in real time.
Books
Continued reading Code Dependent by Madhumita Murgia. Superb writing so far.
Next week: The Interesting conference, and the WB-40 Album Club crew go to a gig.
Ever since I bought a bike back in 2013, I’ve been fascinated by long rides. It didn’t take long before I was venturing further than I could cope with. I remember that first summer, where I planned a route at home, printed out the cue sheet telling me what roads and turns to take, and held it awkwardly in my hand as I covered what felt like a gargantuan 70 miles. Neither the paper nor my fingers were in good shape after that ride, so I soon bought a cheap Garmin to make the route available to me through a handlebar-mounted sat-nav. It was revolutionary. The next year, in the early Spring, I managed my first century ride, covering 100 miles by riding to Silverstone and back. I had the bug. One year later — and ten years ago this month — I tackled Ride 999, a nine-day, 900 mile ride from London to Milan.
Last year I was on a business trip to New York when a friend from my cycling club announced that sign-ups for the 407km London-Wales-LondonAudax ride would open in the early hours the next day. This was the last thing at night for me, so I was in the perfect spot to secure a place. I’ve signed up to many events in the past that I’ve not shown up to, typically because of freezing temperatures or incessant rain. But I figured that for £29 it was worth it to at least have the option of riding. I signed up, paid the money, put it in the diary and went to bed.
Liam FitzPatrick, the enthusiastic organiser of the event, got in touch via email in late November and again at Christmas. These were handy reminders that I’d signed up to something significant. I think at this point I’d started to mentally commit to doing it, but knew — and kept telling anyone who would listen — that if there was torrential rain forecast for the whole weekend I wouldn’t feel bad about pulling out.
In late March, thoughts about the ride moved into the foreground. I read the super detailed and incredibly helpful pre-event notes in the emails that Liam sent out. We were well warned that rear flashing lights would not be tolerated under any circumstances. On Saturday mornings, I usually ride with the 16–17mph group at the bike club, but I knew that I would be much slower at this distance once refuelling stops and fatigue were factored in. At 12mph, setting off from the start at 6am would see me back to the final checkpoint by around 3am. I started to worry that my big front light wouldn’t last the ride. I bought it in 2021 to tackle a 300km Audax but had only used it for a couple of hours before consigning it to a drawer. Last week I tested it by charging it to full and running it flat, but I was still worried that it wouldn’t last for a whole night. Fortunately, the manufacturer created a rechargeable battery that straps to your bike to keep things going, so I picked one up from an online store. I also bought a second rear light so that I had a spare in case the first one wouldn’t last.
As the week of the ride arrived, I couldn’t stop myself from checking the weather forecast multiple times a day. Early in the week, Epic Ride Weather was predicting a bit of mid-ride rain, but as the days rolled by the probability of getting wet evaporated. Aside from the near-constant side wind, the biggest challenge was going to be the temperature changes. Cool when I set off from home, hot in the middle of the ride and then cold by the time we got back. I decided to buy arm warmers and leg warmers, bits of kit that I had never used before, as they could be easily taken off and stuffed into a jersey pocket or one of my small bike bags.
I was soon to find out the difference between ‘feels like 10°C’ and ‘feels like 4°C’.
On Wednesday I took my bike for a safety check at my local bike shop and asked them to swap out my old brake pads for new ones. I’d bought the brake pads a few months ago as I realised I’d been riding my bike for a couple of years and hadn’t changed them. But I’ve never swapped disc brake pads over before and hadn’t got round to fitting them. I figured that trying to do it myself for the first time a few days before a big ride was a recipe for disaster. When I picked the bike up they told me that it was in good shape but would need a proper service soon. I also learned from them that brake disc rotors are a consumable part and that they wear out — I had no idea.
I took Friday off work to relax, eat, charge all the things and prep my kit so that I could just wake up and go on Saturday morning. Fellow rider Mary and I had agreed to meet in the high street at 4:30am for the hour-long ride to Chalfont St Peter, ideally picking up Dave and Ian on our way through Chesham, and giving us half an hour at the start to grab our brevet cards and faff about. I tried to get to bed early, but my excitement for the ride and anxiety that I would somehow miss my alarm meant that sleep was fragmented and light. I ended up waking just before 4am and turned off my alarms before they even went off.
Despite not being hungry at 4am, I wolfed down half a bowl of muesli and granola as I knew from past experience that a lot of the day would be about managing food consumption. I started to get my kit on. It was 10°C and rising outside, so I decided that I didn’t need to don my leg warmers. But I also didn’t have enough room to stuff them in anywhere. Not thinking clearly about the forecast, I left them at home. This was a mistake.
Ready to go, complete with a note left by my wife after I’d gone to bed.
Mary was waiting for me in the High Street. After some quick hellos and knowing looks at each other that said ‘I can’t believe we’re up this early and doing this’, we hit our first hill of the day. I shared my live location to our group on WhatsApp so that Dave and Ian would be able to see when we were approaching their houses. We didn’t spot Dave, but Ian suddenly appeared behind us and quickly took the lead to guide us to the start.
There was a buzz in the air as the riders said hello to familiar faces and were greeted by the smiling volunteers who signed us in and handed each of us our Audax brevet card. This card has a box for each of the places that we are required to prove that we’ve been to, either by getting it validated by a volunteer at a mandatory control stop, writing down the answer to a question (such as ‘What is written on the house at X?’) or getting a time-stamped receipt from an ATM or a local shop. Each stop has both an earliest and latest time of arrival, with the gaps between them widening as the ride progresses. At the end of the ride, you hand over the completed card and receipts at the finish for final validation.
Checking in and anticipating what was to come.
Some light breakfast items were on offer, so I made myself a couple of slices of toast that I slathered with butter and honey. It had been over an hour since my half bowl of muesli and I knew I’d have to keep forcing food down me, even when I didn’t feel like eating.
Second breakfast.
At the start we caught up with Dave, as well as Ed whom I hadn’t met before. One of the team had a longer than expected visit to the loo, so we finally got pedalling a few minutes after ride organiser Liam gave his introduction and set everybody off on their journey.
Listening to Liam Fitzpatrick give his final instructions before we set off.
Ready to go at the start. (Photo: Ian Biller)
Our pace in the first stint was good, but probably a little too high. It can be difficult when riding in a group to slow down; you tend to be carried along by whoever is setting the pace at the front, tucking in behind them to take advantage of the drafting effect. If you lose the group, you may end up having to pedal even harder than when you were with them. We passed many groups and individual riders which gave me the impression that we were making good progress.
We soon reached the first mandatory control stop in Islip, 61km from the start. This is a typical distance for a Saturday morning club ride, but today we’d only covered 15% of the journey. The catering was superb, with sausage baps (even veggie ones), hash browns, croissants and all kinds of other breakfast things on offer. Two hours after my second breakfast, it was time for my third.
Third breakfast at the Islip control.
As we set off again, the sun was out and we had started to warm up. I wasn’t quite ready to put away my cosy gilet and arm warmers, but I think I took the gilet off somewhere along the way to Tewkesbury, our next stop at the 145km mark.
Setting off from Islip. (Photo: Ed Hems)
For the next stint, we started to drop Dave a little bit. He was never too far behind, but didn’t stay with the group. It was understandable given that he had run the London Marathon the weekend before; it was slightly crazy that he was doing this event at all. He had told me that the trick with a ride like this is that you need to ride it at your own pace, and he was absolutely right.
I always seem to look this pained when taking a bike-riding selfie.
I’ve ridden through the beautiful villages of the Cotswolds quite a few times. Guiting Power is my favourite, a little oasis in the middle of rolling countryside. I’ve stopped there occasionally to refuel at The Old Post Office cafe, but not this time. We breezed through, passing people enjoying themselves as they spilled out across the street outside.
Tewkesbury was familiar to me as I stopped there on my previous Audax ride. As we entered the town we stopped to regroup. As we waited, we were approached by the town crier dressed in fabulous full regalia. I resisted the urge to ask him “what have you come as?” He was good-humoured and told us that he was new in the job. Looking him up after the ride, I found out that his name is Richard Whincup and he has been on an incredible journey to overcoming a profound stammer and land this role.
The Tewkesbury Town Crier. I resisted the opening quip of “What have you come as?” (Photo: Ian Biller)
I remembered where I stopped for food last time and suggested we roll through the town to find it again. Coffee #1 was just what we needed. Locking our bikes together outside the shop we bought ourselves coffees, crisps, cakes and toasted sandwiches.
Before I knew it, we were rolling again, this time tackling the 41km to Walford, situated right next to Ross-on-Wye. This was the only information control of the ride — where we had to write down the answer to a question on the brevet card — before continuing to ride another 28km to Chepstow, just inside the Welsh border.
Climbing up Symonds Yat was hard. I’ve done longer and more difficult climbs, but this was the closest that I’ve ever come to getting off of the bike and walking. I was out of the saddle and grinding away in first gear, huffing and puffing my way to the top, where I found the others waiting.
Made it up the Symonds Yat climb! (Photo: Ian Biller)
As we set off again, things started to get weird. I didn’t feel like I could keep up with Ian, Mary and Ed and let them go. I needed to ride at my own pace. They soon disappeared out in front. Dave also disappeared from behind me, so for the first time I was on my own. I was feeling bizarre; a little light-headed, cold and shivery despite the sun beating down on us. I wasn’t bonking as I still had energy to pedal, but I didn’t feel like I was making good decisions such as where I was steering. The ride into Chepstow is via a series of descents, which I perhaps should have slowed more on than I did. Arriving at the border I found the others waiting for me, greeting me with shouts of “You’re in Wales!” I think my response was “I feel a bit f— up”, which quickly changed the mood. They sprang into action, quickly agreeing that we should head to control. I gingerly made my way through the town and got stuck at a traffic light that turned red after everyone else had all passed through. When the light went green I struggled to clip back into my pedal and instead rode my bike up the hill like I was on a skateboard, propelling myself along with my left foot. I missed the turn to the control and ended up at a difficult and busy junction. Instincts told me that I had gone too far, so I called Ian to check. Trundling back down the hill, I found the building and parked up. I was so grateful for the stop.
A week later, Ian told me that at this point he wanted to tell me to quit as I looked dreadful, but he decided not to say anything as he felt it was each rider’s decision as to whether they could do it and wanted to continue. All I remember was that the others cared about me and were keen to make sure I got some food and warmed up.
I sat shivering as we sat eating delicious bowls of chilli and drinking tea. After the second bowl, I turned my attention to the home-made cakes on the tables, munching away on the most delicious ginger cake. I was starting to feel a bit like myself again. I’m still not sure if I was dehydrated, low on sugar, or if something else was going on.
I’ve never needed a bowl of chilli more. (Photo: Ed Hems)
All of the volunteers at the stops were so incredibly lovely. At this stop they asked us to bring our water bottles inside and put them on a table. By the time we were ready to leave we found that they had been refilled for us.
I think this is where I started to find things a little tough mentally. It had been a good, solid ride to Wales but now it was early evening — albeit a beautiful one — and I knew we had to cycle all the way back again. We set off as a group of five and made our way down to the old Severn Bridge that crosses the River Wye before spanning the River Severn. Crossing the bridge is a sweet moment when you realise that you’ve made it there from home, under your own steam on two wheels.
Across the Severn Bridge (Photo: Ed Hems)
As we got to the end of the bridge I realised I couldn’t keep up with Ed, Mary and Ian. I hung back with Dave for a few minutes, but the next time I looked behind me he was quite far behind me, so I decided to keep ‘tapping it out’ at my own pace. This was the first ride I’ve done where I’ve been conscious of my heart rate, which I made visible on my Garmin’s default screen. I tried to keep it at or below a number where I know from an ‘active recovery’ ride on my indoor trainer that I’m working, but not too hard. At this point, I mentally resigned myself to riding the rest of the route on my own. I figured that if I could just keep turning the pedals and keeping my heart rate where I wanted it, eventually I’d make it to the next stop. The sun had started to go down, so I stopped to turn on my lights.
Riding alone is a very different experience to riding in a group. I find that my inner monologue doesn’t shut up, and I have to try and keep it on positive thoughts or listening to whatever music is on my ‘inner radio’. Just keep going Andrew, you’ll get there. My main focus at this point was on keeping the chilli and cakes down. A climb took me to what I now know is the Somerset Monument, a giant column at the top of a hill, but I could only think “oh, that’s interesting” as I didn’t know what it was at the time.
The Somerset Monument. When I cycled up to this I was on my own and had no idea what it was. (Photo: Ed Hems)
I kept pedalling. Passing some roadworks and reaching the top of the hill I came across a petrol station, which I thought would be a great place to refill my water bottles. As I pulled in I found Mary, Ian and Ed had also pulled up. I was baffled when they told me that they had only been there for a couple of minutes or so; I hadn’t been riding hard, and yet there they were. Ed suggested that we ride as a group from this point onwards as it was now dusk and the temperature had started to drop. I protested and told them to go on if they felt they could do it — I figured that nobody wanted to be out longer than necessary (not that any of this ride was strictly necessary) — but they insisted. Inside, I was so glad.
Cycling into dusk. (Photo: Ian Biller)
The next control, at Lambourn, was over 100km on from our previous stop. Our big night lights went on before we got to the checkpoint. I found myself getting dazzled by some of the rear lights from riders ahead. I should have cleaned my glasses as they were covered in sweat stains and salt, which gave me a lot of glare. It felt better when I was on the front of our group, but I wasn’t strong enough to take the lead role for very long.
Dark and difficult. (Photo: Ian Biller)
When I wasn’t thinking about how cold I was getting, riding in the dark was special. Owls darted in front of us as they flew from one tree to another. Rabbits decided it was a great time to run across the road as we approached, at one point causing us to brake heavily to avoid hitting one, as it suffered from indecision of which way to turn.
Lambourn was a beautiful sight as the outdoor team with reflective jackets and torches directed us towards the control. They told us that we could wheel our bikes into the hall, which meant there was less faffing around to secure them and find the things we wanted to bring in. Empathy oozed from the volunteers as they told us what a fantastic job we had done to get this far. They couldn’t have been more thoughtful and caring, offering us tea, coffee, biscuits, beans on toast, more bowls of hot chilli and words of encouragement. I wasn’t hungry, but I knew I had to keep eating, piling some fig rolls and Bourbon creams on top of the beans on toast. I was now really struggling to get warm — I really could have done with those leg warmers that I left at home — and asked the group whether they minded me getting another hot drink before we set off. At this point, I remember texting my wife and saying that I didn’t want to go out again. Dave turned up as we were finishing our food and getting ready to leave. It was so good to see him, but I didn’t have a lot of chat and banter left in me. This would be the last time we’d meet on the ride.
Lambourn. The last time we saw Dave. I’m texting my wife to say I didn’t want to go back out in the cold again. (Photos: Ian Biller)
I really didn’t want to go out again. But I knew I would. Having come this far, I couldn’t abandon the ride now.
On a ride like this you get to see the same people, sometimes passing them or having them pass you if one of you is faster but spends more time at the controls. In my head I’d started recognising ‘Great Britain Lady’ (who was wearing a white ‘Great Britain’ cycling top) and ‘Long White-Haired Guy and his Black-Coated Female Friend’. At this control it amused me that someone else started talking about ‘Great Britain Lady’ out loud.
The hot drinks caught up with me on our way to Henley-on-Thames. I wasn’t alone; two of our group stopped for a wee which I only noticed when they later overtook me, surprising me as I thought they were in front. Our next destination was a petrol station in Henley where we had to pick up a receipt, but I wasn’t sure whether there would be a toilet. Finding a convenient gate next to a field where I could park my bike, I made a sudden decision to stop. I did what I needed to do, got bitten a couple of times in the legs and then tried to set off again. It was here that I learned how much I rely on visual feedback when I clip into my pedals. I tried a few times and failed, so eventually had to point one of my front lights towards the floor so I could see what I was doing. I was now on my own, but not for long; in another act of kindness, I found Ian waiting for me at a junction a few hundred metres up the road. Little things like this mean so, so much when you’re cold and tired. I was feeling quite emotional.
The petrol station at Henley was a bizarrely happy memory. We queued to use the Starbucks self-serve coffee machine. I grabbed myself a hot chocolate and a Cadbury’s Boost, remembering to ask for a receipt and wondering how many Audax riders fail because they forget the receipt part. It was 1:15am and we were sitting around in a petrol station with a bunch of knackered strangers who were also on the same crazy quest. As I queued to use the toilet — they had one, after all — another rider said to me, “You’re not doing okay, are you?” I told him that I hadn’t packed enough warm clothes and was freezing cold. He said “come here”, put his arms around me and gave me a warm hug for about five minutes, with his wife — a fellow rider — standing beside us.
We were now only 32km from the ‘arrivee’, our final control back at the start. This was half the distance of a usual Saturday morning club ride. Despite being cold, I knew I could do it.
1:15am in a petrol station in Henley.
We got ready to set off, but just as we were about to go I saw that the LED indicators on my lights had turned red, which meant they were about to run out of charge. I changed the rear one and then faffed around with the front, plugging it into the battery pack. The others could have got annoyed at me, but they didn’t.
The last stretch of the journey was bizarre. We found ourselves going up a single track road at 2:30am to suddenly hear the surprising shout of “car back” followed by a reply of “really‽” Why were these cars going up such a remote road at this time of night? The climbs were feeling larger than they were, but it wasn’t surprising after more than 400km of riding.
We rolled into Chalfont St Peter at 3am, greeted by yet more amazingly chipper volunteers. Once again they let us roll our bikes into the control, which made everything just that little bit easier. I recognised Richard Bragg at the validation table, who made quick work of reviewing and stamping our cards to say that we’d completed the course. We’d done it!
My completed brevet card. Six hours to spare.
The volunteers offered us a bowl of pasta and some cherry Bakewell cakes because…why not? I started to think about whether pasta at 3am made any sense, but quickly put the thought out of my mind. Trying to make sense of everything again could start tomorrow.
My cuddly friend rolled in a few minutes later. As we ate and contemplated what we had done, he kindly offered me his waterproof jacket for my 25km ride back to my house, provided I posted it back to him. I said thanks but no; I thought I’d be able to tackle the route home without too much trouble. How much colder could I get in the space of an hour?
All done, ready to head back into the night for the hour ride home.
Ian guided us back to Chesham, and from there we knew the way back to Berkhamsted via the main roads. Climbing out of Chesham to Ashley Green I lost Mary but caught her again at the top. We parted ways as we finally entered Berkhamsted, with the sun coming up. I live on a hill and usually ride up my steep driveway, but I wasn’t going to attempt it today. I found that I couldn’t unclip from my pedal outside my house so had to crawl past it to the top of the hill, unclip and then walk back down. It was 5am, the sun was coming up, and I could see the mist from my breath across the beam of my front light.
A shower wasn’t enough to warm me up. I found some pyjamas and got into bed, shivering. Eventually I got to sleep.
A week on from the ride, my main feeling is one of gratitude. For Liam FitzPatrick, who had organised a brilliant event, for the volunteers that looked after us at all of the major controls, and for my riding companions who showed so much empathy and care, particularly when I had the ‘Chepstow dip’. Despite at some point asking my friends never to let me sign up to anything like this again, I’ve already been peeking at the Audax calendar to see what’s next.
Every year we get about two weeks to enjoy our lilac, which looks fabulous and smells even better.
My third four-day working week in a row, with one more to go. Work was busy, keeping my mind off of the big bike ride planned for the weekend. Many of my colleagues were on holiday, which meant things were both quieter and busier than usual. I took Friday off in order to relax and eat some carbs ahead of the early start on Saturday.
This was a week in which I:
Refined the slide deck for the design of a space we share with a sister company and published it to the core team.
Wrote up and published the minutes from last week’s programme Steering Committee meeting.
Had more conversations about using AI for research purposes.
Met with my development team to review and refine their work backlog.
Had the weekly project call for the construction works taking place in our office this year.
Had an interesting discussion about people recording calls and conversations for their personal AI transcription. No matter what the law says, I think that you now have to assume that you are being recorded anywhere, at any time. And that those recordings are going to be processed by third-party speech-to-text tools and large language models. And that the companies providing these services won’t have your best interests at heart.
Had the thought that it’s imperative that Microsoft Copilot keeps pace with the tools that people use outside of work, to avoid people defaulting to using their favourite ‘bring your own AI’ and disclosing confidential information to these services.
Found myself using ChatGPT Deep Research in a couple of different ways. It was interesting to see the types of responses it gave and where it was lacking.
Met with a couple of senior colleagues to talk through their ideas on creating a new product for our clients.
Was elected to the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee at work. Given recent events, it feels even more important to be involved than ever.
Helped to set up a town hall-style talk with our CEO and one of our business heads. The event was followed by leaving drinks for one of our senior colleagues who is moving to another of our offices.
Enjoyed the weekly Learning Hour session where a colleague presented on the FINRA Cybersecurity Conference that he attended last year.
Met with an ex-colleague who left my team towards the end of last year. He’s moved himself and his family to the Isle of Man. Although I knew the island has a special status from a tax regime perspective, I hadn’t realised it is outside of the UK.
Had a last-minute invite to a social event at work. We went to The Cube in Canary Wharf, which is apparently based on a TV show. We were put into teams of two and then used an app to turn up at different cubes to undertake physical challenges. Our team did great, somehow topping the daily points leaderboard. It felt like a long time since I’d been out with colleagues.
You find out who your truly competitive colleagues are when you’re top of the leaderboard.
Noticed that I had auto-renewal turned on for my NordVPN plan. They were going to charge me around £130 for another year from July. I cancelled the auto-renewal and then found that I could buy another two years of service for £77. It never feels right when companies make additional profit from auto-renewals.
Dropped my bike into my local bike shop for a safety check, and to get my brake pads replaced. I’d bought new pads a while ago as I figured that after 5,000km of riding they would probably need changing. But I wasn’t confident enough to change them myself for the first time ahead of the big ride. Lovelo did a great job of checking things over, greasing a couple of things that needed it, and advising me that I’ll need to replace my disc rotors at some point soon. (It was also at this point that I discovered that disc rotors are consumable parts. I had no idea.)
Looked at some lovely properties in Berkhamsted for some relatives who are thinking of moving house.
Next week: Four days of work and a trip to the cinema.
📚 Finished reading Thatcher Stole My Trousers by Alexei Sayle. This is his second autobiography, covering the period after he left school to the early 1980s, by which time he had become a popular live comedian. Sayle is one of those people whom I have vague fond memories of from my childhood, but I didn’t really know much about. His TV programme Alexei Sayle’s Stuff seemed edgy to me when I was 11 years old. I also remember when people used to burst into singing the title of ’Ullo John! Gotta New Motor? without warning. An enjoyable journey through his years of leaving home and starting a career.
The second of a series of four four-day working weeks. My mind has started to turn to London Wales London, which is only six days away. I have a mild anxiety that has me thinking through the kit that I need to take and checking the weather forecast which has now come into view. Currently it looks as though the temperature is going to go from 6–7°C overnight to 21–23°C during the day, with one spot of light rain thrown in for good measure. So, clothing-wise, I’m going to need a little bit of everything. I’ve got my bike booked in for a check-up on Wednesday and have some new brake pads ready to be installed. I’m looking forward to the event but a little daunted too.
When I sat at my desk on Tuesday morning I didn’t feel ready for the week. I had too many open loops and couldn’t see how I was going to get on top of everything to make it through to Friday evening with any semblance of success. Sometimes, the only way out is through; I started picking up the big things one by one and working my way through them, and by Tuesday afternoon the week felt achievable.
This was a week in which I:
Spent Easter Monday at my parents’ house, with my brothers and their families too, for a barbecue lunch. It was lovely to see everyone. The British weather oscillated from freezing cold to warm and sunny depending on whether a big cloud was passing by. I’d planned to cycle over to their place to get another long ride in, but the rain put me off; my front gear mechanism has been sticking a little bit after a wet ride and I didn’t want to exacerbate the problem ahead of the big adventure.
Met with senior colleagues to review a draft slide that I put together to explain our approach to licensing and rolling out Microsoft Copilot within our region. It’s always great to get different views, and involving people helps to get alignment ahead of wider circulation.
Completed the draft of our quarterly report to our Board of Directors and sent it for review.
Prepared for and ran our monthly programme Steering Committee meeting.
Had the fortnightly meeting with my development team, reviewing our roadmap and discussing how I can help without getting in the way.
Made further updates to our proposal for how we will kit out and support a shared meeting area in one of our locations, following feedback from one of my colleagues. We reviewed the slides with the project team at our sister company, making more changes as a result of their thoughtful suggestions.
Had our weekly meeting with our AV consultancy.
Joined the project meeting for the opening of a new office.
Met with colleagues to discuss our work so far on using AI tools for research and where we should go next.
Had a very productive afternoon with my Executive Partner from our technology consultancy vendor. We explored good, challenging questions about my team, my role and my future career. I need to spend some time thinking about this.
Joined the first part of our Lean Coffee meeting before I had to rush off.
Had a good coffee and a catch up with a project manager that I’ve been closely working with at our sister company.
Loved talking to a couple of colleagues who were both in the ‘stretch zone’ as they tackled work that was new to them.
Am still struggling with the Office Timeline PowerPoint plugin. The software is superb, but I have an issue where PowerPoint hangs for ages when I’ve had the application open for a very long time and I select a slide containing a timeline. Restarting PowerPoint gets things moving again. I’ve previously emailed the company, who effectively told me that ‘it works on my machine’, and as nobody else has reported the issue they can’t (or won’t) look into it further.
Finished adding all of the records and CDs that are on my Amazon Wish List to my Discogs wantlist. Inspired by Ton Zijlstra, I’m trying to move away from Amazon where I can. The big advantage of having everything in Discogs is that when I go shopping for something, the website will tell me that the seller ‘Has X more items I want’. This means that I can typically add more items into the order without dramatically increasing the postage charge.
Finally managed to join a Quiet Riot podcast ‘Ask Us Anything’ session on Zoom.
Booked our Mini in for its MOT and a service. We bought the car last year when it was already 15 years old, as something that our boys could drive. It’s been great, but there have been a series of little issues. Hopefully booking it into a Mini garage for the service will mean that they will be able to diagnose and fix whatever problems remain.
Had a fun, fast bike club ride on Saturday morning. Probably my last until the big one next weekend.
Enjoyed a weekend of pottering around at home with the odd potter into town. On Saturday my wife and I had a lovely lunch of avocado, cherry tomatoes and chilli flakes on sourdough toast at Jester. On Sunday the sun came out, so we strolled down the high street to find Altobells Gelato, picking up a scoop of banana, and another of chocolate orange that was made with real oranges.
Someone at work has scheduled an after-hours meetup to discuss the new book by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count. I’ve avoided book clubs in the past as I only get time to read the book club book and nothing else. But I do want to support the idea of getting colleagues together. I’ll make up my mind once I’ve finished my current book.
This magnificent blossom-laden tree is right outside the rear entrance of Berkhamsted station. I took this picture early on Saturday morning as I cycled down to the start of the weekly club ride.
The first of a series of four-day working weeks. It’s lovely having time off, but it adds pressure to get things done during the remaining four days. This week felt quite productive, but I’m still picking up many more tasks than I’m completing, and feeling that I’m spread very thin.
This was a week in which I:
Had the weekly meeting with our AV design consultants.
Put together the first draft of some slides to present to our sister company on our proposed AV equipment, support and cost profile for our shared meeting rooms.
Met with colleagues to review our mandatory compliance call and meeting recording setup for one of our offices.
Had an excellent discussion about how to break down a problem and use generative AI tools as an accelerant, without compromising critical steps in the problem-solving process. It was refreshing to be in the room with someone who wasn’t taking an approach of just throwing AI at everything and seeing what happens.
Updated the slides to be submitted to our next Governance Committee meeting, including an update on our approach to using Microsoft Copilot.
Had my fortnightly staff meeting. It feels as though we are getting into our stride.
Helped a colleague with an approach to the analysis work on one of our key projects.
Met with the Head of Workplace Services at our sister company to discuss some of our shared amenities managed by our landlord and how they can be improved.
Discussed the configuration of a planned new office and proposed equipment list with our CTO.
Reviewed proposed changes to the master services agreement for a contract with one of our vendors. Met with colleagues and agreed next steps.
Had an impromptu discussion with our cybersecurity team on a range of hot topics, including their roadmap.
Met with colleagues to discuss the legal and operational risk aspects of a project that is about to reach a key milestone.
Asked the vendor of our password management solution for a simple primer on passkeys. Troy Hunt has mentioned that he has a draft blog post on the topic and I can’t wait to read it. They are being pushed by an increasing number of websites but I haven’t managed to get my head around the nuances of how they work. I want to fix that before our staff start asking questions so that we can support them.
Also asked them for some supporting material to help us with some changes that we plan to make to nudge even more people into using the tool.
Did some research into the UK Government’s Access To Work scheme.
Met with colleagues in our Learning and Development team to talk about our department’s training needs for this year. I’m trying to reframe our approach so that it is much more continuous and day-to-day, looking for opportunities for the learning experts to contribute more broadly with our Digital Literacy initiatives.
Had a handover from a colleague who will be on holiday for the next two weeks.
Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour session where one of our team members gave a presentation on British food. One reason we set up the weekly session is so that people can practice giving presentations in a relatively safe space, and it’s so good to see it paying off.
Found my name on a list of nominees for our internal Diversity and Inclusion Committee after one of my team members put me forward for it.
Got notified that I have a number of days’ leave to take before the end of June, otherwise I will forfeit them. Booked a couple of weeks off over the next two months.
Tried to use my sit/stand desk in the office a little more, in the hope that standing up will gradually strengthen my lower back. I find that standing up for long periods, particularly at gigs, is horrible. I’m not sure it’s meant to be like this at 48.
Took the plunge and bought a new MacBook Air as my home computer. I’ve been using a 2017 MacBook Pro, which is now very long in the tooth. It’s on its second battery, and once again has started to struggle with bizarre power issues. It reports that the battery is dead, but when I plug it in it already has a 70% charge. I’d been thinking about upgrading for some time, but was planning to wait until Apple stopped creating security patches and ended support for my current laptop. The recent market turmoil caused by Trump’s tariffs made me wonder whether prices will go up in the near future, so I decided to upgrade while I could. Although I’ve gone from a Pro to an Air, the new laptop is a significant upgrade in every way that matters. I opted to move my files and install my apps manually on the new laptop as the Migration Assistant tool wanted to bring across a gigantic ‘Library’ folder that I couldn’t deselect; this took me longer, but it seems to have saved hundreds of gigabytes of space. The biggest improvement between devices is the battery life. On a full charge, with all of my apps installed (including some that run constantly in the background) it reports that the battery will last for just under 20 hours.
Enjoyed a random night out with my family, going for a couple of games of bowling and dinner. We’ve not been bowling for years. I was surprised to find that the pins now all have strings attached to their tops, allowing them to be re-racked much more quickly. It felt a bit cheap and nasty, as the only other time I’ve come across a setup like this was with a small single lane in an arcade on holiday. But a quick search of the web tells me that it looks like it’s the way that all lanes could be going, and I might have misjudged it. But it is controversial.
Gave my home office a much overdue spring clean.
Felt great on the weekly cycling club ride, despite having tackled a two hour indoor bike session the day before. It was a little confidence boost for the big ride coming up in a couple of weeks’ time. I’ve got my bike booked in for what I’m hoping is a minor safety check just before the ride and plan to ask them to install some new brake pads. (Now is not the moment to try and replace disc brake pads for the first time myself.) My bike isn’t indicating that it needs new pads, but I’ve done over 5,000km, so I assume they must be nearing the end of their life. I also tested my big front light by running it to see if it lasts; I’ve only ever used it in anger once about four years ago, so I was a bit worried about whether it would still hold a charge. I’ve bought a back-up battery for it just in case.
Quiet Riot published a sensitive and useful breakdown of the issues raised by the UK Supreme Court ruling about the definition of a woman as it pertains to the Equality Act. I learned so much from Alex Andreou and Naomi Smith’s discussion here.
Gary Marcus writing about “Sam Altman’s attitude problem” highlights why I am conflicted about giving money to OpenAI to use ChatGPT. The tool has so much utility, but like most of the useful AI tools out there, it has been built on the backs of other people without compensating them for their work. This isn’t news, but it is unresolved.
Video
Started watching season two of The Last Of Us. Once again, a YouTube recap video of the first season came in so handy. We’ve learned to do this before we start watching the next season of something that hasn’t been on for a while.
Watched the latest season of Black Mirror. The episodes were entertaining, but none of them left me with that weird hollow feeling that some of the earlier ones did.
Audio
Had two Album Clubs, one online and another in person. Emiliana Torrini’s Miss Flower is a superb find and I didn’t hesitate to buy a copy. I’m also booked in to see the film with an Album Club friend.
Next week: Lunch with the family, and cramming everything into just four days.
📚 Finished reading Intimacies by Katie Kitamura. A small slice of the life, relationships and feelings of an American working at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It’s a novel that feels like a novella — we drop into and out of the story in a very short space of time. I enjoyed this.
📚 Finished reading Rainbow Diary: A journey in the new South Africa by John Malathronas. I’ve had this in my library for years, since meeting the author by chance at work. His recent passing and my return to Johannesburg prompted me to finally read it. It’s an interesting journal of the author’s trip around South Africa in 2005, with enough historical background to give context without disrupting the narrative. I’ve been to South Africa many times for work, but only once ventured beyond the centre of Johannesburg. This book brought to life just how much I’ve been missing out.
Fearless speech, where a person speaking ’truth to power’, despite risks to themselves from doing so, and
Reckless speech, where the person speaking puts other people in danger, typically those with less power than themselves.
Franks looks at two key texts that are often referred to in today’s world by people who claim to be ‘defending free speech’. The first and most famous example is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Here’s the full text:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The First Amendment restricts what the Government can do to curtail freedom of speech. It has absolutely nothing to do with public or private companies, and doesn’t dictate what they can and cannot do. When we look at social media platforms, for example, there is no obligation under the First Amendment to allow their users to post anything they like without moderation in order to preserve their ‘free speech rights’.
In fact, the law says that these platforms can moderate their content. The second key text referred to in the book is Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, enacted as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. People who have heard of ‘Section 230’ may generally be aware that it stops platforms from being treated as publishers. Platforms are not responsible for anything horrible that their users post. This is in contrast to traditional media. Newspaper owners, for example, are liable for the content on their pages. However, Section 230 also includes a ‘Good Samaritan clause’. In the same way that someone acting in good faith to try to resuscitate a stranger who has had a suspected cardiac arrest is not liable if they break that person’s rib when they administer CPR, platforms are immune from liability if they act in good faith by removing harmful or obscene content from their platform. The relevant text is here:
47 U.S. Code § 230 – Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material
…
(b) Policy It is the policy of the United States— … (4) to remove disincentives for the development and utilization of blocking and filtering technologies that empower parents to restrict their children’s access to objectionable or inappropriate online material; and (5) to ensure vigorous enforcement of Federal criminal laws to deter and punish trafficking in obscenity, stalking, and harassment by means of computer.
(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material (1) Treatment of publisher or speaker No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. (2) Civil liability No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or (B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1). …
So, not only do corporations not have an obligation to let people say whatever they like on their platforms, there is even legal protection for them to remove ‘bad’ content. Hosting hate speech is therefore a choice, not an obligation under some notion of ‘free speech’.
The book was published in October 2024, prior to the most recent Presidential election. Events from Trump’s first term as president are referred to throughout the book, and I suspect that there could easily be a bumper second edition just based on what has happened in the six months since publication.
Doing nothing is always cheaper than helping, and harmful content can be very profitable. As long as tech platforms are allowed to enjoy the benefits of doing business without any of the burdens, they will have little incentive to take care and every incentive to be reckless in their pursuit of profit. … It must first be noted that whether an online platform leaves content up or takes it down, it makes a choice—there is no neutral position. Platforms already make choices about whether to leave content up or take it down, and they make that choice primarily based on their corporate bottom line.
Trump’s election victory, and the administration’s rhetoric on ‘free speech’, has given Zuckerberg the cover he needs to dial down the moderation and dial up the angry exchanges on his platforms. More eyeballs, more clicks, more monetisation, all under the cover of being a champion of free speech. But the action of a private company has nothing to do with the First Amendment as defined in the constitution. Franks calls it ‘consumerist constitutionalism’:
This consumerist constitutionalism—the conflation of a commercial product with a constitutional right—serves corporate interests in multiple ways. First, given the deep emotional attachment Americans have to their constitutional rights, convincing them that they need a particular product in order to exercise those rights is sure to be a lucrative enterprise. This is especially true if the public believes that they are always on the verge of losing those rights and that the only way to avert this crisis is to consume more of the product. Consumerist constitutionalism leads individuals to not only acquire but also to identify with certain products and services, creating an endowment effect that makes any interference with access feel like an existential threat.
Not all ‘free speech’ is equal in the eyes of the Trump administration. Peaceful protests on university campuses about the war in Gaza are a form of free speech that are clearly protected in the First Amendment. Government intervention to shut them down is the opposite. Members and supporters of the administration preach free speech but this is blatant hypocrisy, as this recent Jon Stewart piece on The Daily Show illustrates. Watch from 3m11s in:
The book’s distinction between ‘fearless speech’ and ‘reckless speech’ is incredibly insightful, and has stayed with me as a way of looking at the actions of people speaking out. Every year, on International Women’s Day (IWD), I look forward to reading Sharon O’Dea’s comments on LinkedIn. She comments on posts from well-known organisations where they celebrate IWD in some fashion, calling them out with data and facts about how they are really doing. Sharon has a form where people can submit stories about their companies anonymously so that she can follow up with research ahead of their IWD posts.
Here she is responding to Foxtons, Metro Bank, and Rio Tinto. This year, I found myself thinking about these comments for longer than usual. Shamefully, perhaps, one of my first thoughts when I read them was something along the lines of, “Doesn’t Sharon sell her freelance services to companies like these?” It makes what she’s doing even more poignant. This is fearless speech. I’m not as brave as she is.
I’ve barely scratched the surface in this post of what is covered by this book. I’m going to be thinking about it for a very long time.
🎶 It’s Album Club#170. Blowing our previous record for longest album (Pink Floyd’s The Wall) well out of the water.
Another week filled with meetings. Although I still feel that I’m spread very thin, I did manage to get some things completed which started to restore my sense of balance.
This was a week in which I:
Watched a presentation from Microsoft on the legal aspects of their Copilot AI toolset. A couple of comments frustrated me, such as a general allusion that because Copilot cites sources, it doesn’t hallucinate. This is fundamentally not how this technology works. I wonder how many people are working with the tools without a basic understanding of what’s going on? Maybe that’s what the AI companies want. It was also interesting to hear that Microsoft has a ‘Customer Copyright Commitment’, where they will pay your legal bills if you are successfully sued for copyright infringement. It sounds good, but in practice, if you’ve ended up losing a case that has been tried in court, you’re likely to have issues beyond simply covering the plaintiff’s legal fees.
Met with the project team for a status update and review of the scope of works for our document management initiative. Separately spent time reviewing and giving feedback on the project documents produced so far.
Took part in the sprint planning session run by our development team, a reboot of a process that has been on hold while we were hiring.
Assisted with the handover of an office refurbishment project between colleagues.
Had lots of discussions about how we currently manage macOS and ‘bring your own device’ computers in our organisation, where we want to get to, and what we need to do to get there. In conversation, we zoomed out even further and reviewed our stance on devices of all types that could feasibly appear in our environment in some way.
Caught up with the Corporate Services manager at a sister company to discuss our plans to manage the AV equipment in a space that we share.
Met with our Head of Procurement to discuss our approach for sourcing the equipment we need for this shared space.
Had a catch-up meeting with the CEO of our AV design vendor to discuss where we are and some details on how we want to continue to work in the future.
Hosted our AV consultant who has recently joined our account. At my request, I asked him to come in and re-check all of our spaces to ensure that the equipment we plan to purchase will fit and meet our needs.
Met with our sister company for an update on their office refurbishment work, and attended the steering committee for the project.
Reviewed a draft communication to all of our staff on the next steps towards mandatory use of a password manager.
Had our monthly operational risk review meeting and agreed some specific follow-up actions.
Attended a Leadership Talk in our office with our CEO and two colleagues from Africa who had been visiting clients in Europe. The conversation was dominated by the impact of the tariffs in the US and subsequent market volatility.
Saw scaffolding appear in our main office reception as the landlord prepares to improve the acoustics of the space.
Was grateful for a random act of luncheon kindness where a colleague tapped their bank card at the till as I was getting my phone ready to pay.
Helped a friend with reviewing their CV and their personal statements for a couple of job applications.
Met my eldest boy for lunch as he was in town and close by to my office.
Looked aghast at my pension funds as they plummeted over the past two weeks. It’ll be interesting to see how long they take to recover. Luckily I’m not planning on retiring any time soon.
Had to leap into action on Tuesday night after our Ubiquiti Amplifi HD router finally died. I think it had started playing up after the lightning strike in September. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve had progressively more failures, each time needing us to power cycle the device. On Tuesday night, it stopped booting up. By a stroke of ridiculous good fortune and fortuitous timing, last week my parents returned the Amplifi HD system that we bought for them to fix their Wi-Fi coverage issues in their house. They recently changed their internet service provider, and the company provides a mesh network as standard. It took me a couple of hours to replace the router and rebuild the network — finding the two mesh wands that were paired to the failed router and swapping them out with the new ones, and re-pairing each of the other devices to the new router — but this is a much shorter time than having to buy new kit.
Finally upgraded my Pi-hole network ad-blockers to version 6. This was somewhat forced by the network change that I made, as I had to re-issue the devices with new static IP addresses. I discovered that one of the Raspberry Pis was running Debian and the other Raspbian, for no reason whatsoever. It explained a lot why one of the devices had been behaving slightly differently to the other. On the second device I decided to re-flash the MicroSD card and start again. Somewhere during this process the card got damaged and went nuclear, burning my fingers as I removed it from the Raspberry Pi and later the card reader in my laptop. Fortunately I had a spare card, and both blockers are now both up and running.
Once again, found my Weeknotes useful in remembering something important. When you configure a Pi-hole, you need to choose an upstream DNS service so that any DNS requests that aren’t blocked can be legitimately served. I used to use OpenDNS so that I could block certain categories of website, preventing my kids from seeing at least some of the inappropriate content on the Internet. I remembered that I had moved away from OpenDNS but had no idea what I’d picked instead. Searching my blog for ‘OpenDNS’ revealed that I’d picked 1.1.1.1 for Families in late 2023. Thank you, past self. 🙏
Used ChatGPT to find out the meaning of this warning light on the dashboard of our Mini. It came back impressively fast with a correct diagnosis, that one or more of the tyre pressures was low. But I didn’t trust it when we asked follow-up questions on what the correct tyre pressures should be.
Low tyre pressure, apparently
Had my haircut, and saw solid proof fall into my lap that I’m finally going a little grey. It was a good innings.
Used ChatGPT Deep Research for the first time, asking it to create a report on a topic important to me. My first response was deeply unimpressive; it chugged away for a quarter of an hour before producing a report where the only source it cited was Wikipedia. A second run of the same prompt wasn’t much better. Scratching my head, I wondered what could be wrong. My suspicion was that something had stopped working on the back-end and, given it was in the wee small hours on the west coast of the US, ƒit may get looked at and fixed when people went to work at OpenAI headquarters. I waited until just before midnight my time to run my query and, just as I thought, this time things were working well. It gave me a much lengthier, more detailed, and better researched report. Producing a substandard report and using up one of the 10 credits I get per month on the £20/mo Plus plan is a terrible failure mode. I’d rather it just said “Something’s not working right now, please try again later.”
Enjoyed the most glorious sunshine-filled bike club ride. Things started a little chilly but soon warmed up. I felt very happy with my choice of clothes. Our route took us down The Lines between the villages of Aston Abbott and Weedon, which I think is the most beautiful descent in the whole area. You get an incredible panoramic view of the surrounding countryside as you accelerate down the hill.
Had my wife’s parents come and stay with us for a night. It’s been years since we’ve called the pull-out bed into action, but it didn’t let us down. It was so lovely to see them.
My exploration of ChatGPT Deep Research led me to this excellent article by Benedict Evans on what he calls ’The Deep Research problem’:
At this stage, the obvious response is to say that the models keep getting better, but this misses the point. Are you telling me that today’s model gets this table 85% right and the next version will get it 85.5 or 91% correct? That doesn’t help me. If there are mistakes in the table, it doesn’t matter how many there are – I can’t trust it. If, on the other hand, you think that these models will go to being 100% right, that would change everything, but that would also be a binary change in the nature of these systems, not a percentage change, and we don’t know if that’s even possible.
Finished watching the third season of The White Lotus. It was nowhere near as good as the first two. Once again, my failing memory is grateful for a succinct story recap.
Paid my first ever visit to the BFI IMAX cinema, the UK’s largest cinema screen. It’s hard to get your head around just how big the screen is until you’re in there. I’d booked tickets to see One To One: John & Yoko (2024), which I saw advertised on a billboard at Euston station at the start of the week. The film is brilliant, consisting of footage of Lennon’s only full length post-Beatles concert performances, interspersed with recordings of phone calls and ephemeral US television content from the early 1970s. I felt like I was getting educated and rocked at the same time. It also made me remember that there have always been a lot of eccentric and crazy people around; the difference in 2025 is that they can much more easily find each other and get organised.
The screen at the BFI IMAX in London
Re-watched Mannequin (1987) for the first time in years. Don’t ask me why. I can see why a film like this would have been a riot when I watched it as a child. It is ridiculous from start to finish, with everyone playing an extreme caricature and a flimsy plot that romps along seemingly of its own accord. That’s not to say it isn’t still enjoyable.
Beautiful blossom everywhere, and for once there’s no wind to rip it from the branches as soon as it appears
Our eldest son turned 18 this week. Our work here is done! He didn’t come with a manual, so we’ve been improvising all this time; this week I’ve learned that when a child reaches adulthood, you aren’t meant to drive them somewhere and release them back into the wild. So, I guess we’ll be keeping him. He’s a fine young man and we love him a lot. It’s a strange feeling to be the parent of another adult, especially as it feels like no time at all since we first met him.
At work, I had one of those weeks where I feel as though I’ve picked up lots of actions, started doing many things, and haven’t finished any of them. As much as I’m really enjoying a balance between being in the office and working from home, Thursday felt as though it had all of the distractions and none of the advantages. By the time I came to shut my laptop down, I hadn’t managed to finish any of the things I had aimed to complete that day. I get angsty when I’m not getting things ticked off the list.
This was a week in which I:
Had my fortnightly team meeting. I’ve been looking at how to add some more definition to this session, giving it more of a structure. I went back and relistened to the two Manager Tools podcasts on the topic, but they weren’t quite as insightful as I remembered. We’re in a small department that already meets regularly across the whole team, so that takes away some of the need for this smaller group of us to get together. But there’s still value in sharing updates as a group, and it also helps with understanding interpersonal dynamics.
Reviewed the status of our plans to open a new office and the process we will follow to procure the IT/AV infrastructure for the space.
Met with our AV consultants to agree next steps for testing the proposed configuration of our large meeting rooms that we share with a sister company. We now have an approach and design for how we will implement the cabling. We also collectively resolved questions about provisioning physical telephones in the rooms and implementing guest Wi-Fi.
Met with one of our senior executives to review the proposal, philosophy and expected fit-out and running costs for the AV equipment in our shared meeting rooms, ahead of presenting the proposal to a wider audience.
Reviewed our department finances, looking specifically at the items that are competing for discretionary spend.
Agreed the handover of the project to refurbish one of our offices to a colleague in our team.
Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour meeting where a colleague presented on the physical security aspects of a planned new office.
Joined the weekly project meeting for the setup of this new office.
Helped our Group CIO who was in town for the afternoon, getting him set up in a room for a series of meetings.
Wished a colleague a happy 40th birthday, celebrated with a huge cake in the office.
Had a fantastic meal at The Olive Tree in Berkhamsted for our eldest son’s 18th birthday. My parents joined us and it was great to celebrate with them.
Was meant to go out on Friday night for some drinks for a friend’s birthday, but I was completely drained from the week and ended up heading up to bed. I needed the reset.
Had my brothers and their families over for lunch on Sunday afternoon. We fired up the pizza oven and cooked a personal pizza for everyone. We’re still not back in the habit of having people over to our house since the pandemic, and it really feels like something we need to fix. It was a great forcing function for getting the house in shape, so all of Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning were spent cleaning. Our guests gravitated towards sitting on our decking at the top of the garden, which we’ve actually spent very little time on since it was installed. I’m not sure what the decking boards are made of, but they seem to defy the laws of physics, emitting twice as much heat as they absorb. It was a sunny spring day, and we sat there sweltering. It was so good to see everyone.
Had another cold but beautifully sunny bike ride with the club on Saturday morning. Only a month to go until London Wales London.
The Japanese Grand Prix was a snooze-fest. I’m glad I watched it on catch-up and didn’t set an alarm.
This obsession with goods is insane. The US is replicating the utterly muddle-headed conversation about goods over services which we had in the UK over Brexit.
Video
Continued watching The White Lotus, which this season feels like an excruciatingly slow burn.
Scooted through Last One Laughing after repeated recommendations from my brother. Jimmy Carr is not my thing but Bob Mortimer definitely is. It was like watching a hyper-compressed Big Brother with an emphasis on silliness.
Watched all four episodes of Adolescence. The rest of my family saw it while I was away a couple of weeks ago and told me how good it was. I agree with Tom Stuart’s thoughts on it. It’s a difficult watch with incredible performances, but I’m not sure I can draw any dots directly to many things that people — parents, governments etc. — should take action on as a result of it.
Watched the first few episodes of Alma’s Not Normal as recommended by a friend. A lovely comedy with great characters.
Next week: More visitors, and trying to get some things ticked off the list.
View from a bridge across the Thames, 29 March 2025
Back in London after my trip. I started the week a little tired and grumpy, but the feelings soon dissipated. The weather has taken a turn for the better and spring has taken root.
This was a week in which I:
Had an office-based jump scare when an old piece of kit decided to try and escape from behind one of the information screens in our office, right next to where I was sitting. The sticky side of the Velcro pad that had been keeping it prisoner for the past few years had failed.
Said goodbye to colleagues at one of our key vendors, and showed one of the new team members around our office space. Met with our sister company to discuss the handover and the remaining work on our joint project.
Presented the proposed approach and audio/visual technology costs for our shared meeting room space to our CIO.
Had a fascinating meeting on the topic of how to represent and present the value that our organisation provides beyond what is measured by the raw profit and loss numbers.
Sat down with our development team to review the roadmap for the next few quarters.
Met with our construction vendor to discuss the remaining few things we want to get done within our office space.
Requested laminate samples for a new piece of office furniture.
Reviewed the themes for our department from our annual employee engagement survey and agreed how we will follow up.
Had a very productive call with my executive partner at our technology advisory firm and agreed some specific things to follow up on. We’ve booked in a workshop together in a couple of weeks’ time.
Attended a fascinating briefing from the Centre for Risk Analysis on the political situation in South Africa.
Attended the first part of a Microsoft webinar on Purview. I’m coming to the conclusion that I don’t find the webinar format ideal for learning.
Took part in our monthly Lean Coffee session, where the team decided to spend time discussing the topic of digital literacy.
Started testing a Logitech Zone Wireless 2 headset. I’m usually a one-ear headset guy, but am making an exception for this as it oozes quality. It looks a bit strange on my head, but the sound quality is superb. I love that raising the microphone mutes my call automatically, unmuting when I lower it again. I’ve been happily using a one-ear Plantronics headset for the past five or six years, so this is a bit of a change.
Found myself unable to catch up with my podcast backlog after a week out of the country. Staying in a hotel right near to the office is disruptive to a listening routine. I may need to make some difficult choices about what shows to give up if I can’t get back on top of things.
Was delighted to find that using the new ‘touch in/out’ reader at my train station means that I’m ending up with lower commute costs. I was buying digital ‘books’ of eight flexi-season tickets, which worked out at about £22 a day, plus £2.80 for each tube ride I took when I got to London. Using the new system I’m now paying about £19.35 including a tube ride in the evening.
Saw the wonderful, incredibly talented Helena Deland again. She played an acoustic set at St Matthias Church, the same venue where I saw the Smoke Fairies in November 2023. The venue is stunning, but the wooden pews are not; next time I will try and remember to take something soft to sit on. Support was in the form of Olivia Kaplan, who also played some beautiful acoustic songs. Originally I was going to the gig on my own, but my friend Mat bought a last-minute ticket. We booked Corrochios, a Mexican restaurant close to the venue, and had an excellent meal.
Helena Deland at St Matthias Church, London, 26 March 2025
Had a lovely dinner on Friday night at Per Tutti in Berkhamsted, with lots of our local friends. I usually choose something vegetarian when we eat out, but this time I went for the sea bass, which turned out to be absolutely incredible.
Went into London on Saturday to meet my two brothers and my sisters-in-law for lunch at Ping Pong and an evening at the theatre. My Neighbour Totoro is a beautiful production that had us all smiling with delight. I watched the film with my boys many years ago and we all loved it. The fun is in the surreal parts of the plot; I found that the second half paled in comparison to the first, and the show came to an abrupt end.
Tried a Greggs Vegan Sausage Roll for the first time. I’m rating it 9/10. The ‘sausage’ is excellent, and the puff pastry is superbly crumbly, forcing you to brush down the front of your top after every bite. Why did nobody tell me about these before?
Scratched my head when lots of spam messages started appearing on Teams. I then realised that Microsoft have merged Skype into Teams, which brought a bunch of rubbish along with it.
Sigh.
Started thinking more about the 407km bike ride that I’m doing in just over a month. I bought a big expensive front light ahead of the 300km Audax ride I did in 2021, but I haven’t used it at all in the four years since then. I’m a bit concerned that the battery won’t hold up, and probably need to test how long it will last. To compensate, I’ve bought a special power pack that I think I can carry in a crossbar bag and plug in if things start getting dim. I’ve also bought a new rear light as the organiser of the ride is insistent on not having them in ‘flash’ mode, and I’m not sure how long my current light can last. I now need to contemplate changing my brake pads, and whether my bike needs any other kind of attention before the big ride.
Enjoyed a lovely bike club ride in the wonderful sunshine. Compulsory mudguards disappear next week so spring must be here.
Media
Articles
Apple’s AirPods Max nearly pulled me in with the news that they will allow lossless audio to be streamed from an iPhone. But it would involve (a) going back to using a cable and (b) using Apple Music (as far as I can tell). I’ll wait until there’s a wireless technology that will do the same thing.
We loved watching School Swap UK to USA. The kids on both sides did themselves proud. I’m not sure if it’s by design, but having a two-year gap between the filming and broadcasting of the film was probably a blessing in that it would minimise any blowback from their classmates.
Beautiful morning in Delta Park, Randburg, Johannesburg
On Saturday evening I flew to Johannesburg. I hadn’t spent any time in person with our team there in over two years, so a visit was long overdue. Everything was familiar, but so much had changed. I said hello to new team members that we’d recruited over the past couple of years; I’ve spent so much time with them on Teams calls, but nothing beats meeting up in person. Our office had been remodelled, with old cafes being swapped out for new ones, and new meeting rooms created with glass and metal partitions. Businesses around our office had changed, and even the hotel that I stayed at had a new owner and a new name.
Years ago I used to fly out on Sunday night, heading to the office via the hotel to arrive there late on Monday morning. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the flights end up getting in too late to make this work. I briefly toyed with getting up at 3:30am UK time in order to try and get the Wi-Fi working so that I could watch the first Formula 1 race of the year, but I needed to sleep. Once I got to the hotel, I tried to find out the time of the full replay on Sky Sports F1 without reading about who won, or anything else that happened in the race. This was a tricky feat that involved me squinting to try to block out any peripheral details as I searched the Internet for the information. It turned out that I had just over an hour to have a shower and grab some lunch before the coverage started again.
On Thursday’s flight home, I was woken by the captain announcing that we were 30 minutes away from landing at Gatwick. This was a surprise to everyone, as we were meant to be landing at Heathrow. An electrical substation was on fire which meant that Heathrow was without power. We landed and sat on the tarmac for an hour or so while buses were arranged to take us to the terminal. I found my bag, wandered out and found a taxi, feeling grateful that I hadn’t ended up in another random airport.
This was a week in which I:
Put together the pack for the programme Steering Committee and ran the meeting. I felt surprisingly articulate in the meeting despite having travelled back overnight from Johannesburg.
Spent a day in a town-hall/workshop event with other senior managers from our Investment Bank Technology team, discussing the climate emergency and how we can contribute to being part of the solution.
Learned that a lead consultant from one of our vendors is moving on at the end of next week. It’s always bittersweet when someone leaves — you’re pleased that they’ve found their next thing, but it’s sad not to be working with them anymore.
Had a good catch-up with our recently appointed Group Head of Non-Financial Risk, whom I’ve known for over a decade. He has a fascinating job.
Enjoyed a wonderful team dinner at Marble in Johannesburg. We had wonderful food and many laughs, a fitting end to the major works that we completed last year.
Attended our weekly Learning Hour hosted by the owners and curators of a Group Technology information repository.
Got onto a running treadmill for the first time in over a decade. I didn’t feel safe enough to go running around outside my hotel and didn’t fancy the typically terrible hotel gym bikes, so this was the next best thing. Years ago, the treadmill gave me shooting pains through my knees, but I think that cycling and general fitness have dialled this out, so I was able to complete a few runs.
Had a lovely morning run with a friend in Delta Park in Johannesburg. We had to get an Uber there and back, but it was worth it.
Did another long run on Sunday, upping my distance to 17km. With London Wales London coming up in just over a month, I probably need to shift my attention back to riding my bike.
Unbelievably, we’re five years on since the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK. Ian Dunt’s essay touched a nerve with me.
I promised myself when it was happening that I would never take these things for granted. I would never shake a man’s hand like it was nothing, I would never embrace a friend without remembering what a privilege it was. But of course I do take these things for granted. Those promises never last.
Video
Finished watching Severance. My annoyance with this second season dissipated with the final episode, which I loved, as it brought a lot of threads together. I suspect that by the time season three rolls around, I’m going to need an hour-long YouTube catch-up video to remind me of everything that’s happened.
Audio
Discovered the existence of the Original Album Classics series. Three to five CDs by a particular artist in one low-cost package.
Books
Continued reading Rainbow Diary: A journey in the new South Africa by John Malathronas. Despite having been there so many times, I’ve never really seen the country beyond business hotels, offices and taxis.
Next week: Helena Deland again.
📚 Finished reading The McCartney Legacy Volume 2: 1974–80 by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair. A gigantic book that took me many weeks to read, but I enjoyed it immensely. It was just as readable as the first volume. Paul Sinclair at Super Deluxe Edition has written a superb review which is worth checking out.
Mum was seven months pregnant with me when she and my dad attended one of the concerts at the Empire Pool in October 1976. I’m pretty sure I would have felt the vibrations of Soily at the end of the show. I wonder if that contributed to me becoming a fan.
A view of Canary Wharf, over the river from Greenwich, on a cold Tuesday morning in March
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.
Tim Harford on stage at the Gartner CIO Leadership Forum in London, 11 March 2025
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:
Restart the computer. Please DO NOT skip this step.
When the computer is up and running, open the installer and click install now.
Restart the computer one more time.
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
Hold down the option key on your keyboard and press the Restore Options button in the application
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?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had an interesting conversation with a friend who didn’t see the Musk gesture in the same way. However, in our discussion he suggested that people going to jail in the UK for what they said on social mediawas fascist. I wasn’t so sure. Believing in ‘free speech’ as a principle doesn’t necessarily mean you get to say anything you like to anyone whenever you feel like it. There have to be rules. I’m definitely not a free-speech absolutist. As I wrote in my recent weeknotes:
On one level, putting people in prison for writing a post on Twitter or Facebook seems extreme. But it doesn’t seem right that people can publish posts encouraging others to burn down hotels and religious buildings without consequence. Is jailing people for their posts fascist? I didn’t think so. But I wasn’t completely sure.
By chance, I saw that Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey had posted an ‘emergency’ episode of their Origin Story podcast, called Trump’s inauguration: Can we call it fascism yet? The fact that the title was pitched as a question, while the image for the episode is a picture of Elon Musk doing his Nazi salute, shows that this wasn’t something straightforward to answer. On the podcast, Ian Dunt decided that yes, we can call this fascism, and explained why:
Dorian Lynskey: …it has to be said that Elon Musk throwing what appears to be a fascist salute more than once doesn’t require the historian Richard J. Evans to decode that one. Ian, obviously one does not like to be hysterical about this. We were talking about how not to cry fascism and everything. What did you make of the inauguration?
Ian Dunt: Oh, I would really like to cry fascism now.
DL: OK.
ID: I mean, there’s a certain… I know that you’ve discovered that apparently the frog’s in water and it’s bollocks, and apparently the frog does jump out of the water, but you do sort of feel because it’s like an everyday degree by degree by degree increase, you feel trapped by it. There is a point when you have to take a step back or deal with… I mean, I could do all of this list with Trump, obviously, but you have to do it with Musk. It’s like just over the last couple of months, this is a guy that is explicitly telling people, go out and vote and support Tommy Robinson, Alternative for Deutschland, extremist street thugs. These are the people who support him. He’s interacting with far right accounts. He’s using all of the modern day online far right imagery, Pepe the Frog and all of his nonsense monikers that he’s adopted. The accounts that he interacts with, the conspiracy theories that he spreads, they’re all on the far right. So then when he gets up and repeatedly does something that looks like a Nazi salute, if that was someone else, if it was George Bush who did it, you’d think like, “he got that all funny and it came out weird and don’t be weird about it.” But it takes so much generosity that you have really reached the point of being fundamentally irrational to not interpret it in this way, given the series of actions that led up to it. Years ago, when we did our episode on fascism, we were like, you need the alarm to be pulled when things get really sketchy. Well, to me, honestly, yesterday, that’s what really sketchy looks like.
The episode also had a reading from their most recent Origin Story book, called Fascism, which sounded exactly like what I was looking for. So I picked up a copy and dived in.
The book explores fascism primarily through the history of the two classic examples where it was indisputably how the countries were run — Italy under Mussolini (whose political party was literally called the Partito Nazionale Fascista, the National Fascist Party) and Germany under Hitler. There is general consensus that these were both fascist dictatorships, but they were very different to each other. Part of the problem with calling anything ‘fascist’ today is that you are immediately drawing a comparison to these two regimes, both of which precipitated extreme suffering through their actions in World War II:
If you invoke 1930s Germany to criticise a draconian right-wing policy, you will be widely understood. But if, for the sake of accuracy, you reference modern Hungary, 1970s Chile, 1940s Spain, or even 1920s Italy, most people will not have any idea what you are talking about. This narrow band of shared knowledge erases most of the history of authoritarianism and creates a false binary: either a country is a healthy, tolerant democracy or it is on the road to Nazism. The vast middle ground must be understood, now more than ever, because that is where the populists operate. Even if we are in the business of sounding the red alert about them, we must have a sense of the precise threat they pose if we are to effectively challenge them.
Using the word ‘fascist’ for something ‘less’ than Nazi Germany seems to either be too over-the-top, or has the effect of diluting the meaning and impact of the word. (This is echoed by Dorian Lynskey’s tentative approach in the podcast episode to the question of whether to “cry fascism” or not about Trump and Musk.)
And now, in the early twenty-first century, we seem surrounded by figures who can’t reliably be called fascists but who trade in similar feelings and inspire similar anxieties in their opponents. That makes us want to call them fascists – to shake people by the collar and tell them that we’ve played this game before and it did not end well. But it deprives us of the confidence to do so, because we’re never quite sure if we’re using the word correctly, or if deploying it will make us look like hysterics.
But trying to pin down exactly what we mean by fascism is inherently difficult. It isn’t the same as other ideologies:
There is no flawless, objective test for fascism. This is not due to any weakness in scholarly analysis, but to the weakness of fascism itself. We can define socialism very easily, as the collective ownership of the means of production. We can define liberalism as the belief in the freedom of the individual. That is because these are both meaningful political traditions with a huge body of intellectual contributions. We struggle to define fascism because it is not a meaningful political tradition and it has few, if any, intellectual contributions.
The authors suggest that something does not need to be ‘fully fascist’ for the word, or a derivative of it, to be useful in pointing out something that is on the road to fascism:
One solution is semantic: terms that allude to someone or something having fascist elements without necessarily satisfying the full definition. President Biden referred to Trump’s philosophy as ‘semi-fascism’, a term also used by the historian Stanley Payne. There are many other variants: proto-fascism, quasi-fascism or borderline fascism. And there is the term ‘fascistic’, to describe a particular element of a populist movement. These phrases can seem slightly cowardly and evasive, but they’re actually very helpful. They provide options. They let you point to worrying elements of a movement or party without having to go all the way. They add nuance while retaining the capacity for historical comparison and political warning.
The rise of populism across the worldis something to be concerned with in the same way that we should have been concerned about the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s:
Fascism and populism share a conceptual root. They both feature an all-encompassing insistence on the ‘will of the people’ as the only source of political legitimacy, unlike liberalism, which places a strong emphasis on individual rights, diversity and the separation of powers.
This, then, is the moral lesson of the story of fascism. It is not necessarily about precise definitions, or watertight checklists, or strictly policed usage. It is about recognising that fascism appeals to some of the darkest instincts of human nature: the hatred of difference, the yearning for order, the sublimation of the individual to the group, the enchantment of violence. At heart, Orwell suggested, fascism meant ‘something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist . . . almost any English person would accept “bully” as a synonym for “Fascist”’. The story of fascism shows us what happens when these instincts are given free rein and reach their ultimate expression. It therefore serves as a reminder to treat with extreme vigilance any individual or group that seeks to encourage those ideas, and to dedicate oneself to stopping them.
Having read the book, I don’t see how jailing people for social media posts that incite hatred and violence can be considered to be fascist. Being the bully, hating the differences that refugees, asylum seekers, people of colour or LGBTQ+ people represent and promoting violence towards them is fascist. For a tolerant society to thrive, paradoxically my belief is that it needs to be intolerant of this kind of world view and behaviour.
