A four-day working week. My brothers and I had all booked Friday off. We’d planned a surprise day in London for my mum to belatedly celebrate her 70th birthday. Last year we took my dad away to Berlin to celebrate his 70th, so we wanted to try and do something special with mum for hers.

We had such a lovely day. All my parents knew was that they had to meet us at Tottenham Court Road tube station at half past one in the afternoon. After a quick drink in a pub at Cambridge Circus, we wandered down to The Ivy in West Street for lunch. Our table wasn’t quite ready so they invited us to sit at the bar, which just added to the fun. As we sat there, I turned around and did a double-take as I came face to face with Rory Stewart, who was meeting his wife Shoshana for lunch. The atmosphere, food and service were all exceptional and we left with a lovely warm glow.

Next stop was Archer Street in Soho, a beautiful cosy bar where the staff dazzle everyone as they burst into song every few minutes. We had a lovely couple of hours relaxing, laughing and enjoying the music.

We then wandered to the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand to see Back To The Future: The Musical. The production is a lot, with non-stop action all the way. The special effects were breathtaking, particularly at the climax of the story. I couldn’t understand why people around me were laughing so hard at some of the jokes that were lifted from the film. And then I realised that the movie is 39 years old, so it’s quite possible that for some people this might have been their first ever exposure to the storyline. I don’t think anyone is going to be buying the original soundtrack album from the production — it was no Hamilton — but it was a lot of fun.

Everyone went home feeling like they’d had a thoroughly great day out. It was so lovely to make some more memories together.

This was a week in which I:

• Did a comprehensive review of our real estate/facilities financial forecast now that we have a better idea of the timing of future work.
• Prepped for and ran the programme Steering Committee meeting.
• Caught up with our audio/visual vendor on the latest design of the shared meeting space in our building. Reviewed the design with our CIO and COO ahead of a broader review with our sister company next week.
• Started to look again at the software developer vacancy in my team.
• Worked late in the office as new signage was installed, an illuminated company logo at one of our entrances. It was fascinating to watch it being put in with such skill. Connecting the illuminated letters to a transformer involved using fishing rod-like sticks to grab hold of the cables from inside the wall cavity. The whole job probably took six hours, spread over a couple of evenings.
• Had to remind myself that “feedback is a gift” when someone grabbed me and reeled off a list of things that aren’t working for them in our refurbished office. You have to look past how it feels and listen to what’s being said.
• Had our regular operational meeting with our Non-Financial Risk team.
• Met up with our Group Head of Enterprise Architecture and our functional Enterprise Architect when they visited us in London. Talking to them made me realise that I feel as though technology has taken a back seat in my professional life this year, with my focus on our real estate projects. I’m looking forward to getting geeky again.
• Had a final meeting with the key vendors from the work we did to build out a brand new office earlier in the year. The entire purpose of the meeting was to say thank you, and to reflect on what we’d achieved together. Sometimes you have to stop and look around.
• Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour session where a colleague presented about company culture.
• Joined the first part of a webinar on AI for Everyone, run by O’Reilly Media. The presentations were short and snappy but I didn’t feel like I got too much out of them.
• Took part in the latest Teams Fireside Chat where the topic of the month was Microsoft Places. There’s a lot going on in this space and — of course — some licencing to get our heads around. I’ve signed up to the new monthly Copilot Fireside Chat and expect it to be just as engaging.
• Helped out the neighbours with a couple of problems with their house while they were on holiday. Carbon monoxide monitors are LOUD. They sent us a lovely little hamper of goodies as a thank you, which was completely unnecessary.
• Had a physio appointment to find out what’s going on with the calf that I injured when I ran a half marathon back in October. Apparently the problem is likely to be “a grade 2 strain of [my] medial gastrocnemius”. I’ve got some exercises to do, but it’s likely going to be some months before I’m back running again.
• Bought a ticket to see Gang of Four on their farewell tour next year. Their gig in 2023 was one of my unexpected musical highlights of the year, so I can’t wait for this.
• Attended the Annual General Meeting of our cycling club. It was the first one that I’ve made in the two and a bit years that I’ve been a member. I love being part of the club. It was great to look back on the events of the year and say thank you to the people that make it all run so smoothly. Unfortunately for the new ride coordinators, they had to cancel Saturday’s ride due to the predicted cold and stormy conditions.
• Spent the weekend in a tired stupor as one of our blinds broke. Although the sun doesn’t rise particularly early this time of year it was still a bit disturbing, alongside storm Bert rattling our tiles and spraying water at the window.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Enjoyed John Gruber and Merlin Mann’s ‘holiday party’ (post-USA election) episode of The Talk Show. Merlin’s advice of asking whether someone needs to be “helped, hugged or heard” is great. They also talked about how the old people we see around us today are not the same old people that we saw around us decades ago, even though it feels like they are. I often think about this when I see someone who is in the autumn of their years, wondering what they might have looked like 20 years ago, which to me feels like it was just yesterday. On that note, it was a shock to hear about John Prescott’s passing this week. I did a double-take when I read that he was 86 and had been suffering with Alzheimer’s. His famous punch was 23 years ago. Such a short time for so much to change.
  

Articles

• Blown away by this chart. Peer-to-peer information now has so much more of a role than ever before. It’s a shame that for many people this means that they only consume small video soundbites from questionable publishers.

Unsurprising but still mindblowing chart www.washingtonpost.com/business/202…

— Josh Nicholas (@joshnicholas.com) 2024-11-24T23:37:06.212Z

Video

• Continued watching the new series of Bad Sisters on AppleTV+. I’m not convinced that it is as good as the first season, but we’re sticking with it for now.
• We tried watching Loudermilk on Netflix as it was recommended to us, but we couldn’t get past the first episode. So corny.
• So, we moved onto Shrinking, also on AppleTV+. Jason Segel is brilliant in the lead role — he comes across as a modern day Chevy Chase, in a good way.
  

Books

• Ploughed through the rest of John Major’s My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall, which picked up again towards the end.
• Started reading How To Lose A Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship by Ece Temelkuran. Seems like the kind of important and relevant book to read right now.
  

Next week: An online Album Club and a Thanksgiving dinner.

The day had come to re-open our office following all of the mechanical, engineering, technology and decorative works that had been done over the past three months. At the start of last week it felt very touch-and-go that we would be ready on time, but the team were incredible. The office looked, felt and smelled great; the final carpet clean had given the whole place a ‘new car’ smell.

The stakes were high as we had our new CEO in town as well as our Group CEO, and a special breakfast organised by our Marketing and Communications team. In last week’s Steering Committee meeting, we agreed that as Programme Manager I would say a few words to everyone in the office to welcome them back. I’d written and rehearsed a short speech but was conscious of trying to make it look organic, so in the end I printed it on an A5-sized sheet of paper and just used it for reference while I held a mic in my other hand.

As I packed up to leave the office on Monday evening, I checked in with a member of our Helpdesk team to find out how his day had been. His response of “I’ve had busier Mondays” left me smiling. I don’t think the reopening could have gone better.

When I hit a big milestone, I always find it difficult to get straight onto the next thing. There’s definitely a ‘post-launch depression’ that lingers for a couple of days. It was interesting to hear Paul Forde and Rich Ziade talk about this phenomenon on a recent episode of their podcast:

Rich: …I gotta tell you, I’ve launched a lot of products, like full products, that the world was kind of waiting for. The day after the euphoric day of launching and things went okay? It’s kind of quiet. Why? Because people are living their lives and your product’s not that important. It is a very depressing day. It’s actually really hard. You can’t believe there isn’t a ticker-tape parade down the street after you launch. And the world doesn’t work that way. And it feels very deflating.

Paul: This is real. I’ve often advised people on sort of post-launch depression. It’s very…

Rich: [laughing] It’s a real thing.

By the middle of the week I’d started to make good inroads on the fifteen other priorities that have been neglected over the past few weeks as we hit our big programme milestones.

It’s amazing how quickly hedonic adaptation takes place. By the end of the first week, most people will be used to their new desks, new chairs, and the new functionality and decor of the office. In some ways, I’m glad that we still have some visible enhancements to complete and that we didn’t get everything done ahead of our move back.

This was a week in which I:

• Wrote up the minutes for last week’s Steering Committee.
• Changed the scope of the remaining works for our office with our construction vendor, following feedback from the team.
• Met with our audio/visual design company to get me back up to speed with one of our projects and agree what we will be doing over the next couple of weeks.
• Discussed plans for new boardroom tables with our furniture vendor.
• Had our monthly meeting to agree on the value of the work done so far by our construction vendor.
• Set up and ran a workshop to review and brainstorm ideas in response to some physical changes that will be taking place near our office over the next couple of years.
• Met with Internal Audit to give them an overview of our business and technology architecture.
• Spoke to our technical account manager at our SD-WAN network provider, following up with some feedback I gave the company at the recent Gartner Symposium/Xpo.
• Met with colleagues to talk through the next steps in the process of opening up a new office, with a focus on physical security.
• Had a catch-up with a vendor to talk about the services they offer and to discuss how we might use them more extensively in future.
• Started turning my attention to 2025 and what the shape of the year might be.
• Popped into the leaving drinks of a colleague who is going back to Johannesburg after being with us in London for a while.
• Listened to a fascinating talk by our Group CEO. He always speaks with such clarity, making the case for investment and business in Africa. I learned that:
  • Ethiopia is the first country in the world to ban the import of all internal combustion engine-powered cars.
  • South Africa is ranked fourth for budget transparency in the Open Budget Survey, just behind Georgia, New Zealand and Sweden.
  • After the most recent elections, political parties in South Africa agreed to form a Government of National Unity after just a couple of weeks of negotiations. In other democracies this process has recently taken hundreds of days.
• Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour session, hearing about the products and priorities of our Infrastructure and Operations team.
• Demonstrated our digital signage solution and ultrawide digital display to representatives from our sister company.
• Attended a webinar hosted by Leesman on The Value of Variety. One of the conclusions for me was that the best and most effective workplaces have unassigned seating with a good variety of places to work.
• Helped a friend to fix his Sonos system that had stopped working after the lightning storm a couple of months ago. We had to faff around with resetting each of his units and using the app on my iPhone as opposed to his Android device to get it working. I don’t understand how non-technical people are expected to wrestle with this.
• Got to see Magdalena Bay in concert for the second time. I’d decided to go on my own; I didn’t know any other enthusiasts for the band and wanted to make sure I secured a ticket.¹ I’ve not taken to their new album quite as quickly as I did their earlier work, but the songs sounded great live.

• Spent time messing around with Bluesky and Mastodon like it’s 2009. This week felt like Bluesky suddenly reached critical mass with tons of well-known people turning up on the platform. As fun as it is — and it can be fun — in some ways I wish I wasn’t sucked into it. Playing around reminded me of why I had taken a meaningful and conscious step back. As good as the platforms can be, I find them exhausting and not great for my mental well-being.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Your Undivided Attentioncontinued the conversation from the previous week’s episode about the harms being done — literally deaths being caused — by chatbots that are set up specifically for companionship. As difficult as the subject matter is, the episode contains some interesting thoughts.
  
  • The principle that platforms are not responsible for what users create on them may not be true if the users are creating chatbot ‘characters’ using an underlying large language model that is not user-generated.
  • There is a view that a chatbot is a ‘blinking cursor’ that will only respond to your input, and therefore you bear the majority of the responsibility for using the tool. However, does this still hold true when the chatbot continues a conversation with you, unsolicited?
  • Apparently, when the character.ai chatbot app was originally listed on the mobile app stores it was rated for users aged 12 and above. Google featured it as an editor’s pick app for kids, despite the company saying that user inputs would be used to retrain their model.
• It’s amazing to me how quickly we got from the release of ChatGPT to these kinds of problems being surfaced. The philosophy of ‘move fast and break things’ can have dreadful consequences.
• Ben Thompson’s Stratechery interview with Understanding AI author Timothy B. Lee was revealing when he spoke about his own use of ChatGPT:
  

So yeah, definitely, I don’t want to say never use it or it’s not useful. It’s definitely useful, but it’s 1% to 2% more productive over the course of a week rather than really transformational.

Video

• Finished watching Rivals on Disney+. Not life-changing, but a lot of fun with excellent casting.
• Charged through Boybands Forever on iPlayer over the course of two evenings. I was amazed at how many Five and 911 songs that I knew, without knowing that they were the bands behind them. I love a slice of pop culture, and this programme was perfect.
• So pleased that Bad Sisters is back. Season one was superb. I love having a show to watch where you can’t consume the whole thing in one evening.
  

Audio

• Still continuing to have Tears for Fears earworms. I started exploring the different versions of Mothers Talk and came across this video which has strong BBC Micro 3D Maze vibes.

Next week: A four-day week packed with meetings from beginning to end, and a visit to the physio.

1. It turns out that Sky News’ Sam Coates is one of them, though. I walked past him as I went to retrieve my coat and bag from the automated locker. ↩

The busiest, most stressful week I’ve had in a long time. On Sunday evening I flew to Barcelona to attend the annual Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo. I’d booked the trip months ago, and at that time it was due to take place after our last major programme milestone of the year. But our timeline had slipped and that milestone moved to the Monday following the event. So I found myself at the conference while the project team navigated a variety of last-minute issues without me.

It was very difficult to focus and concentrate while things were happening back at home. At one point I left a session as I needed to make a phone call, and later squirmed in my seat as a keynote overran into time where I was due to be in a project meeting. Added to this was the drama of the US election; I went to bed on Tuesday night after watching CNN for a while, had a restless night, and then woke up to find that Trump had walked it. I’m still having random moments of shock, disbelief and despair peppering each day.

Last year I went to the conference by rail, but my need to get back to the office and my experience of trying to work on the train put me off doing the same thing again. The catastrophic weather system in Eastern Spain was persisting, which meant that we were kept on the ground for two hours after boarding our plane at Heathrow as they waited for the area around Barcelona to clear. The delay meant that the in-flight food cart was in high demand; it never made it to where was sitting at the rear of the plane before we started our final approach to land. I ended up at my hotel just before midnight, having to find something to eat from a little shop nearby.

The first keynote presentation of the week always has maximum attendance. Like last year, the main auditorium was full, so I ended up watching it in a second giant room via a live video feed.

Ten minutes in to the presentation, it sounded as though the fire alarms were going off. I wondered how the presenters would cope, but they just carried on. It turned out that the noise was the collective sound of thousands of smartphones, all of which had received a government alert that warned of torrential rain that was heading our way. As I sat in sessions throughout the morning, I could hear the thunder outside the conference centre. Later I learned that rain flooded the airport and roads around Barcelona, but we seemed to dodge the worst of the impact.

This year our subscription meant that I had access to the CIO Lunch on the first three days. These lunches are held in the giant overflow hall. You wander in and get directed to an empty seat by a small army of staff with illuminated marshalling wands, say hello to your immediate neighbours at your table and then tuck in. It was an incredible operation; setting this many places and switching people from their starters to their hot main courses was amazing to watch.

Each day, as people tucked into their desserts, we settled in to hear from a guest keynote speaker on the stage in the room. The first of these was Carla Harris, who ended up being my favourite speaker of the entire event. Her talk was called Lead to Win: How to Be an Impactful, Influential Leader in Today’s Environment, but the title didn’t really do it justice. She weaved a wonderful narrative about her time at Morgan Stanley, where she continues to work, and what she has learned about effective leadership.

Versions of talks from most keynote speakers are usually available on the Internet, and Harris is no exception. Here she is talking to an interviewer in December 2022 at the Wharton School:

Most of each day at the conference is filled with short presentations, in rooms of all shapes and sizes. Some of these were really valuable, such as Laurie Shotton’s presentation on a framework for evaluating emerging technologies, Tom Scholtz’s 3 Essential Tactics for Mastering Board-Level Cybersecurity Presentations and Kevin Smith’s How New CIOs Can Accelerate Their First-Year Impact and Value as an Executive and Functional Leader. Others, not so much.

Last year, ahead of my first Symposium, I spent ages agonising over which talks to sign up to in the Conference Navigator app, trying to avoid any timeline clashes. This year I took a completely different approach, adding everything that looked even remotely interesting to my personal agenda. Typically I would then have a choice of three or four sessions to attend at any given slot throughout the four days. I’d make a just-in-time decision based on downloading and skimming through a copy of the slides for each of the sessions in the app, making a call on what I thought would be most valuable one to go to.

I also had access to some ‘CIO Roundtable’ sessions, which were peer-based conversations led by a Gartner facilitator. These were valuable but too short, particularly one on the use of Generative AI in Banking which was just getting warmed up by the time we had to stop.

At a Roundtable session on AI Governance we were deep into a fascinating conversation about ethics when, ironically, I spotted that the CIO sitting next to me was recording the audio of the conversation on his phone. I spent the rest of the session wrestling whether to say something about the ethics of recording without people’s consent, versus the fact that anyone could be recording any of us at any time, and it being incumbent on us to not say anything that we wouldn’t be happy sharing in a public forum. I didn’t say anything at the time, and I’m not sure that was the right thing to do.

In another lunchtime keynote we heard from Martha Lane Fox on Strategic Leadership in the Digital Age: Driving Innovation, Inclusion and Impact. She told us that McKinsey had published a report on how long it will take for different industries to reach parity between the sexes. For technology, the answer was ‘never’ — we’re actually standing still or going backwards.

Some of the sessions felt as though they were there just for the ‘wow’ factor as opposed to being actually useful. It was amazing to be in the same room as Arnold Schwarzenegger (and to hear him quote lines from Kindergarten Cop), but I don’t think he offered any insights that I will take back to my day job. Gartner had originally announced that Jensen Huang would speak — which would have been great, and very relevant — but Schwarzenegger replaced him in the build-up to the event.

At Monday night’s drinks reception they brought Ruud Gullit in, simply for the purpose of having photos taken with him. I posed for a photo without us speaking a word to each other, and wondered if he even knew where he was.

I was excited to hear Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote talk, but a few days after the event I find it difficult to recall the key points.

Mick Ebeling gave an inspiring talk on the work that he has done to ‘make the impossible not impossible’, including 3D printing low-cost prosthetics in Sudan, enabling an artist with locked-in syndrome to paint again, and helping a jazz pianist with Parkinson’s disease to be able to play the piano.

The final keynote of the week was by digital anthropologist and author Rahaf Harfoush, talking about ‘wellbeing in a constantly connected world’. None of what she said was revelatory, but it was a good reminder to look after ourselves and our teams. As she discussed burnout, I was thinking about another blogger and weeknoter who has been writing about his own experience of this.

I spent most of Thursday working and in meetings instead of attending sessions. I’m hoping to catch up with the recordings of anything significant that I missed. (But I’m also hoping that I don’t encounter this song¹ again, which was played in the countdown to the start of each keynote.)

I’m glad I went, but it wasn’t as impactful as last year. I’m sure that there’s much more that Gartner can do to foster communication and collaboration between CIOs, which would be extremely valuable. They do provide a ‘Peer Community’ app and website, but from my experience most people just want to be in a WhatsApp or Signal group. You need to build trust and friendship, which isn’t easy to do. At dinner on Tuesday evening I spent time talking with an account executive about the WB-40 podcast Signal group and how invaluable it is to me, wondering what the special sauce is that makes it such a successful forum.

One last thought is that Gartner really should start sharing the secrets of their own technology. The conference looks and feels absolutely stunning, with incredible Wi-Fi, breathtaking audio/visual setups and apps that just work. I’d love to learn how they do it.

Aside from the Symposium, this was a week in which I:

• Contributed a written section to our quarterly board report.
• Updated a report for one of our next Governance Committee meetings.
• Prepped for the programme Steering Committee and ran the meeting.
• Fielded a variety of last-minute issues on the programme as we got ready for our go-live date.
• Prepared and rehearsed a short speech to make to our staff on Monday.
• Went for a run in Barcelona but quickly hit a problem with my calf again, the same one that caused me a problem when I ran a half marathon a few weeks back. I had to pull up after a couple of kilometres and ended up limping for the rest of the day.
• Was very proud of my eldest son who achieved a new 5k PB in Manchester:
  

• Got out with the bike club for the first time in weeks. It was lovely to see everyone again.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Your Undivided Attention have yet another important episode, this time covering how companies are offering AI chatbots as companionship, one of which led to the death of a teenager.
  

Most of the time when we talk about AI today, we talk about what it can do and not really so much about what it’s doing to us. And when people talk about the harm of AI, of course there are many harms that we talk about like misinformation or deception and many things, but the psychological harm of AI I think is a really, really important topic.

• 404 Media’s subscriber-only feed had a brilliant interview with Susanna Gibson of My Own Image, where she talked frankly about her experience of experiencing sexual violence through having an explicit video of her shared online. For people that have been a victim of this kind of abuse, it never ever goes away, and they never know when the trauma will re-surface afresh and impact them all over again.
  

Articles

• Ken White’s thoughts the day after the US election.
• Paul Graham’s post about the “writes and write-nots” struck a chord with me. “[W]riting is thinking.”
• There have been a few things this week that have got me concerned as to whether violence against women, and women’s rights in general, are taking steps backwards. And how technology will play a significant role in this. Heather Burns writes compellingly about this:
  

It pains me to report that yesterday the voting women of America, and many men too, adopted her as a role model as well, but not as a force for good. They have no intention of having other women’s backs. They want Savita as an exemplar of what can, and should, happen to women every day, everywhere.

They want more dead women, they are already getting them, and they are not going to stop until no one knows their names because there are too many to count.

• 404 Media also recently wrote about technology used by the US government that can track individual phones. They also covered this story on their podcast. Imagine this now being in the hands of Trump and the rest of the new administration.
  

Video

• This documentary from Channel 4 of the experience of women in Magaluf is simultaneously shocking and completely unsurprising. Coupled with the articles I read above, it left me feeling a little depressed about the normalisation of treating women so dreadfully.
  

• Continued to scratch my Tears for Fears itch with this timely release from Trash Theory:
  

Books

• Got about halfway through My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall by John Major. It feels as though a book is the wrong format to learn about these old music hall stars and their songs. A three-part documentary would probably be much more immersive and enjoyable.
  

Next week: Returning to the office, and getting to see Magdalena Bay again.

1. Don’t click this link, you’ll end up with a dreadful earworm. You have been warned. ↩

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

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

Media

Podcasts

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

Video

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

Web

• The Earth is spinning faster, bucking the trend from previous years. Fascinating and slightly concerning?
• Started a paid subscription to 404 Media after finding myself being sent there more and more from various sources. They do great work, and seem to be the kind of organisation that I should be supporting.
• Great resource showing technology apprenticeship jobs in the UK.
• AI-generated listings resulted in hundreds of people turning up in Dublin for a non-existent Halloween parade.
  

Books

• Continued reading My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall by John Major. I’m about a fifth of the way through, and not finding it a gripping read so far.
  

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

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

• Had some pre-cinema food at Gordon Ramsay’s Street Burger on Charing Cross Road. Grim and expensive. Would not recommend.
• Went to pump up my bike tyres on Friday evening ahead of the club ride on Saturday morning. As I unscrewed the dust cap on the rear wheel, the valve shot out like a missile and the whole thing rapidly deflated. I had no idea that the valve was a detachable part. I’d been meaning to replace my bike tyres but didn’t have the energy to start after a long week at work. Approaching the job on Saturday afternoon, I found that I couldn’t get the rear wheel off. One bent multitool, a visit to a friend down the road and a trip to the bike shop later and I was finally in business. (Embarrassingly, I think I was turning the bolt the wrong way.) At some point I’m going to tackle changing the disc brake pads which the Internet tells me is simultaneously “easy” and “quite tricky”.
  

• Took advantage of Sunday’s extra hour in bed by getting up early to go and ride the route I missed the day before. It was a glorious sunny autumn morning, the kind that fills your heart and makes you glad to be alive.
• Had a lovely afternoon walking around Virginia Water with our friends, followed by a late lunch at The Wheatsheaf.
• Didn’t expect to love the F1 Mexican Grand Prix as much as I did. Typically it’s a relatively boring race but this one was all action.
  

Media

Podcasts

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

Articles

• Ian Dunt’s writing is consistently excellent. His thoughts on the upcoming US election are a chilling read. His review of Aftersun, which I saw back in August, is also spot on.

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

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

Video

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

Audio

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

Web

• Stopped paying for Substack newsletters after seeing what they hosted on the Hope Not Hate documentary.
  

Books

• Finished reading Kimberly Williams-Paisley’s Where The Light Gets In and started John Major’s My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall
  

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

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

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

My latest haul from our local Oxfam Books and Music store

Media

Podcasts

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

Video

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

Web

• Continued to read some of the posts about Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, WP Engine and various other things in this space. There’s so much going on.
• Found myself again sharing this article that explains why USB-C is a specifically-shaped connector, not a standard.
• “It turns out I’m still excited about the web.” Love this.
• Molly White has written about writing on your own site and then syndicating the content everywhere else, something that I’ve done for the past few years.
• This Sketchplanation about ‘leading from any chair’ touched a nerve with me. I think that this is one of the keys to a mature, high performing team.
• Interesting viewpoint on capitalism and gig workers.

Books

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

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