Weeknotes #316 — Everything is listening

A view of Canary Wharf, over the river from Greenwich, on a cold Tuesday morning in March
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
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:

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

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

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

Media

Podcasts

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

Articles

Audio

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

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

Web

Books

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

Weeknotes #315 — Cremated fish

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

This was a week in which I:

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

Media

Podcasts

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

Articles

Video

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

Audio

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

Web

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

Books

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

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

Weeknotes #314 — Autosave

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 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.

Weeknotes #313 — Recovery

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

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

Media

Podcasts

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

…

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

Rich: A cry for help.

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

Rich: Mmm. Mmm.

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

Rich: Yeah.

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

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

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

Articles

Video

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

Audio

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

Web

Books

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

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

📚 Fascism

A few weeks ago I was making my way into work, catching up with the overnight news of Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Things that Trump did on inauguration day had a whiff of fascism. But seeing Elon Musk make multiple Nazi salutes on stage left me aghast. It fascinated me to see people and institutions bend over backwards to accommodate alternative interpretations of what Musk did, including the Anti-Defamation League which said “It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute“, and Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, who said that Musk “is being falsely smeared“. It’s as if calling it what it clearly was — a fascist salute — would cross a line.

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 media was 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:

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

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.

Ultimately, there is no easy checklist that you can use to define whether something is fascist, although Umberto Eco tried with his list of the 14 common features of fascism.

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.

Weeknotes #312 — Man down

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

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

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

Media

Podcasts

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

Articles

Video

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

Audio

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

Web

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

Books

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

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

Weeknotes #311 — Lurgy

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

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

Media

Podcasts

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

Articles

Video

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

Audio

Web

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

Books

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

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

Thinking of the (probably) billions of dollars that have been poured into the Amazon machine learning system, which is then brought to bear to regularly send me these incredible notifications.

Weeknotes #310 — Spoofed number

Out on a short ramble on a beautifully sunny Sunday.
Out on a short ramble on a beautifully sunny Sunday.

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

This was a week in which I:

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

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

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

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

Media

Articles

Video

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

Web

Books

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

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

The Center For Humane Technology announced that they have started a Substack. I’m so disappointed, and wrote to them a couple of weeks ago to say so but didn’t hear back. Substack is known to profit from newsletters that spout hate on their platform. It seems so bizarre for this organisation in particular to move their newsletter to the platform in 2025.

Email from the Center for Humane Technology
Email from the Center for Humane Technology

Weeknotes #309 — Offsite

The Monument, looking fabulous first thing in the morning
The Monument, looking fabulous first thing in the morning

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

Media

Podcasts

Articles

Audio

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

Video

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

Books

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

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

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

Weeknotes #308 — Look Sharp!

A cold, frosty morning on my way to the train station
A cold, frosty morning on my way to the train station

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

This was a week in which I:

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

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Video

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

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

Web

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

Weeknotes #307 — All the things

The first week of work for 2025 was a strange one. In many ways I hit the ground running, getting on with some important items that I need to complete early on this year. But it still felt very fragmented, with lots of little things pulling me in different directions.

I had a few conversations with colleagues that veered off in different directions, many of them fascinating. It brought into sharp relief one of my flaws in that I’m interested in ALL THE THINGS, and usually want the detail on each of the topics too. The structure of my week and my commitments don’t give me enough bandwidth to deeply indulge in the things I want to learn about.

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

This was a week in which I:

  • Had a rainy, windy start to my first day back in the office. It broke my exercising streak as I chose to take the tube instead of walking to my office.
  • Tried to start the year by flushing all of the key priorities out of my head before getting mired in the detail of Teams messages and emails. On my first day I had a very useful impromptu catch-up with my boss which helped us to get aligned with each other at the start of the year.
  • Had lots of discussions about the ethics and use cases of large language models and generative AI, such as whether consuming potentially inaccurate AI-generated summaries of books is better or worse than not reading them at all.
  • Finished the annual appraisal process for my team. I haven’t managed a team of permanent staff in a while and I had forgotten how much I enjoy it.
  • Restarted the process of trying to recruit for a vacancy in my team. It was useful to re-review the role spec and tweak it a bit further. It’s out with quite a few recruitment companies and we’ve already started to get CVs back.
  • Had lunch with my contact at one of the recruitment firms, and had a call with another to get the process moving again.
  • Took part in tests of an advanced videoconferencing system in one of our large client meeting rooms. Getting the equipment set up on site was invaluable to see how it would perform in our space. The audio was incredible but the video experience started to struggle once we filled the room. One of our colleagues at our sister company in the building managed to bring along tons of ‘extras’ in the form of our cleaning, catering and maintenance staff so that we could fill the room with people.
  • Met with my counterpart at our sister company to catch up with what’s been happening with their major programme over the Christmas period.
  • Continued planning for our management team offsite in a couple of weeks’ time, firming up some of the agenda as well as a venue for dinner.
  • Gave feedback to our team for a couple of small tweaks to our office environment settings, which have already been implemented.
  • Helped a colleague to solve a problem with logging into their password manager.
  • Joined the monthly online Teams Fireside Chat.
  • Had a catch-up call with our consultant who is helping my eldest son to find a scholarship at a university in the US. The next few weeks seem critical to get solid offers nailed down.
  • Didn’t manage to get out on my bike, so did lots of indoor rides. The temperature has remained at or below freezing all week, making it too icy to attempt an outdoor cycle. The cycling club cancelled the Saturday morning ride, which is usual if the temperature isn’t high enough by the time we are due to set off.
  • Not entirely unrelated, I invested in a looooong hot water bottle.
  • Enjoyed a lovely Saturday afternoon lunch out in town with my wife. We’ve got into the habit of doing this regularly and I love it.
  • Went through my blog posts with the plan of creating a ‘highlights’ page, linking to posts that are important to me.
  • Discovered that a noisy pan on an induction hob is not a good thing. One layer of metal gave a cracking sound as it separated from another. We only discovered the problem when we found that the pan wasn’t heating up.
Destination: bin.
Destination: bin.

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Nigel Farage, Elon Musk, Robert Jenrick, Tommy Robinson – when have you ever heard these people give a shit about women’s issues, let alone make a speech or put forward a policy dedicated to advancing them? Robinson very deliberately nearly collapsed a grooming trial, which would have put the victims through months and months of the horror of having to testify twice. People threaten to rape and kill women pretty much every second on Musk’s platform and nothing gets done about it – if I were him I’d be cleaning up my own streets. If he can’t manage it, maybe he should immediately call for himself to be imprisoned?

Video

  • We finished watching season two of Shrinking on AppleTV+. The characters were fabulous and made me laugh out loud every episode. But who lives in a world where people just randomly pop into each other’s houses all the time? As fun as it looks to be a part of their gang, would anyone really like to live like that?
  • I’d never heard of the BBC TV programme Open Door before. It’s like an early precursor to YouTube, commissioned by David Attenborough.
  • Sky’s Dart Kings documentary offers a great slice of cultural history through three episodes, covering Eric Bristow, Jocky Wilson and Phil Taylor. I didn’t watch darts as a kid but everyone knew the names of the top players. I loved looking back at the old TV footage in this series; the venues, the crowd and the copious amounts of beer show a much simpler time.
  • Black Bird on AppleTV+ is an incredible drama, based on the real-life serial killer Larry Hall. We started watching it with no prior knowledge of the events or the subject matter and it blew us away. The main character, played by Taron Egerton, gets ever so slightly changed and impacted by events as the series progresses, and it’s only at the end that you see how much he has transformed from where the story began.

Audio

  • So excited to hear from Alicia Clara. Her music was one of my favourite things to listen to over the past year.

  • Kirk Hamilton’s Strong Songs analysis of Jeff Buckley’s Last Goodbye had me smiling. I used to listen to the Grace album so much back in the 1990s but haven’t played it for a while. It was great to rediscover this song and to hear things that I had never noticed before.
  • Finally finished my hobby project of cleaning up my digital music library and sorting out all of my Plex metadata. It took me days of work — I must have spent three or four hours just fixing the data for the 24-disc Mansun Closed For Business box set — but now it’s done. Albums have the correct covers, songs are where they should be, random old downloads were purged and everything now looks present and correct.

Web

Books

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

Random pondering: can people take quotes way out of context and use them on book covers? For example, if I wrote a review that said “Simply nothing worth reading in this book”, could the author publisher write ‘“WORTH READING” — Andrew Doran’ and slap it on the book?

Weeknotes #306 — 48

After getting back from our Mexican holiday on Monday, I spent most of this week pottering around. I managed to get out on my bike on New Year’s Eve just ahead of a storm, and since then it’s been too cold and yucky to ride outside. So my routine has been to wake up a little later than usual, go on the indoor bike trainer, and then fill my afternoon with either jobs that need doing or hobbies that I want to make some progress with. Work will soon be in the foreground again, but I’m hoping that I will go back on Monday feeling properly rested.

New Year’s Eve was also my 48th birthday. After my bike ride, I went out with my family for a late lunch at Here, where they serve the best all-day vegetarian cooked breakfast in town. We spent a very quiet but lovely evening with friends who had invited us over for dinner. At midnight we watched the fireworks on TV. Every year they always look exactly the same to me.

My family know me well
My family know me well

One of my friends gifted me a second-hand vinyl copy of The Hits Album 6, a compilation that we both had on cassette tape when we were kids. There are some great tracks on there as well as one or two quite questionable songs towards the end. But mainly, it’s a great excuse to hear Donna Allen’s Serious, an underrated gem.

Reunited with a copy of Hits 6
Reunited with a copy of Hits 6

I spent a lot of time cleaning up my digital music collection, including two or three hours alone which went into fixing up Mansun’s 25-disc Closed For Business box set. Getting the data corrected and organised in the Music app (which in my head will forever be iTunes) doesn’t necessarily mean that Plex will use it. Tracks seemed to jump between the discs, which all needed to be manually corrected. Taking the time to fix up the data is worth it, as it is helping me to rediscover my own music collection. I started the work before Christmas and have made it up to artists with the letter ‘U’, which felt good until I realised that I still have ‘Various Artists’ to go.

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

Media

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  • Alex Tabarrok says that India has too few tourists. I last visited in 2006 and still maintain that it is the most incredible place I’ve ever visited for a holiday.

Video

  • Despite our jet lag on the day we came back from our holiday, the finale of Gavin & Stacey kept us going. It’s amazing to think that we’ve known the characters for 17 years. It’s cheesy, but I love it.
  • Elliot Roberts’ video review of the Beatles ‘64 film and the Beatles’ US Albums box set is superb as usual.1 I adore his YouTube content, and am happy to support his work through Patreon.

Books

  • Despite trying to vary what I read, I couldn’t help but pick up the second volume of The McCartney Legacy by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair, which was published last month. It covers the years 1974 to 1980 and is another whopper at 768 pages, but I’m here for every detail.

Next week: Getting back to work.

  1. At the time of writing, the video is only available to Patreon supporters with early access. It should be on YouTube soon, if it isn’t already. ↩

📚 Finished reading Exit Stage Left: The Curious Afterlife of Pop Stars by Nick Duerden. A large collection of vignettes about various pop stars, which I ultimately found to be a bit of a trivial and unsatisfying read. It’s the second book in a row where I’ve not been able to mentally keep track of how and why the anecdotes have been grouped into particular chapter headings, which implies it might be me instead of the authors. I did like Stuart Copeland’s reflection on playing new songs versus old ones at concerts: