Weeknotes #283 — PBs

My happy mood continued into this week and I enjoyed the lightness that it brought with it. There were plenty of things to get done, but they seemed to be in front of me instead of weighing me down.

The rest of the family have been on holiday from school. My wife went away for a few days to visit her parents which meant that I was nominally ‘in charge’. It’s not quite the mission that it was when the boys were younger, but there were still more things to juggle. So much, in fact, that it has taken me until Tuesday to finish these weeknotes.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the regular programme and project meetings.
• Wrote up and published the minutes from last week’s programme Steering Committee meeting and immediately started the pack for the next one.
• Attended governance committees and executive forums to give updates on the local project that makes up a big chunk of the programme.
• Had a kick-off meeting ahead of a weekend of work to tear down the technology in one of our offices and rebuild it on a different floor of the building.
• Confirmed our planned move-out date for one of our offices with the sister company that we currently share with.
• Met with the Procurement team to review the latest responses to a request for quotation.
• Reviewed the technology installation plan for a new office with our infrastructure team and the vendor we are using to supply and fit the equipment.
• Reviewed a colleague’s draft presentation that they plan to deliver next week. It’s an important milestone where we take stock of what we’ve done and agree what our plan is from this point.
• Completed the mid-year review process for all of my direct reports.
• Confirmed a date to give my talk on Large Language Models and Generative AI to the board of directors of one of our African entities.
• Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour hosted by a colleague who gave us an overview of Windows Autopatch.
• Attended the quarterly Technology town hall meeting. One of the guest speakers was Michael Stevens, a South African who had a childhood accident involving an overhead electrical wire which led to him having both legs amputated. He now competes in bobsleigh. He’s also the Operations Manager at Jumping Kids, a nonprofit that is working to give African children access to, and maintenance of, quality prosthetic equipment. They also focus on giving the children access to mainstream education and sporting opportunities. The stories of what some of the children have achieved are incredible.
• Caught up with a colleague who is going through some major life changes. It was exactly the kind of impromptu conversation that wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t both in the office. Increasingly I think that being together in the same place is less about the work we do and more about the relationships and friendships that we foster.
• Had introductory meetings with two staffing vendors. I’d previously worked with a contact at one of the vendors 15 years ago; it turned out that his colleague who was also in the meeting would have been less than 10 years old at that time.
• Watched my son get a new 3000m PB at the Watford Open track meet.
  

• Had a couple of meetings about sporting scholarships in the US with the consultant that is helping my eldest boy to try and get over there.
• Got my own PB for cycling 50 miles on Saturday morning’s club ride. We had a big group and a flat route which led to some impressive speed in the sunshine. It was so much fun.

• Went for another Sunday morning run, this time a bit longer than last week. My legs already feel as though they are getting used to running again. I’m going to try and keep it up.
• Bought some new t-shirts from DJ Tees and Design By Humans. It’s been a couple of years since I had a t-shirt refresh.
• Enjoyed a pub garden lunch with my boys at the Green Dragon in Flaunden. I was a bit disappointed that the only food they did was pizza, but it was nice to sit outside in the garden and enjoy some time together.
• Hosted the latest round of the WB-40 Album Club, introducing the rest of the team to the late 1990s prog-rock weird and wonderfulness of Mansun’s Six.
• Consumed a lot of sport, watching some random Olympics events and the brilliant F1 Belgian GP.
• Watched Keir Starmer’s first Prime Minister’s Questions with him on the executive side of the house. I’ve been fascinated by parliament since I was a kid, coming home from school and flicking the TV on to watch whatever was being debated at the time. I’d love to go and see it in person one day.
  

Media

Articles

• Absolutely shocking articles from the Guardian highlighting the scale of violence against women in the UK. In this country, a woman is killed every three days by a man. They are putting names behind the statistics and highlighting the severity of the problem.
  

• An incredible story of how a technology security training vendor was infiltrated by a North Korean hacker. They hired him after he successfully passed a number of their checks, including four video conference based interviews.
• Enjoyed this interview with Pete Townshend on the occasion of the release of his live solo CD box set.
  

Video

• Continued watching Kin, rolling into season two. It’s excellent, gritty Irish drama.
• I originally watched Three Kings (1999) at the cinema 25 years ago. I didn’t think that much of it at the time. I remember feeling a bit uncomfortable with it being an action/comedy movie based on the (then) first Gulf War. Recently, the film has been mentioned on a few podcasts I listen to, with people talking about how great the film is. The reviews looked good so I decided to revisit it. It’s definitely a better film than I remember, but the aspects of it that made me uncomfortable are still there — slang words for middle-eastern people played for laughs and no real character development for any of the Iraqi characters. The film was made in that short space after the war and before 9/11, so I kept thinking about how hard it is now to relate to how people felt back then.
• Memories of Murder (2003) was a bizarre watch. About eight out of ten reviews online claim it to be a masterpiece with the other two saying that they have no idea why it’s so revered. I didn’t understand whether it was meant to be a comedy or not. Some of the scenes made me laugh out loud, particularly when one of the police officers randomly dropkicked someone, but I wasn’t sure whether I was meant to be laughing. Having read the Letterboxd reviews, I get the feeling that it was a serious film based on real life events.
  

Web

• The update from Sonos’s CEO on the state of their main app is ridiculous. Features that are missing and are on the roadmap include: “Implementing Music Library configuration, browse, search, and play”, “Improving Volume responsiveness”, “Improving Alarm consistency and reliability” and “Restoring edit mode for Playlists and the Queue”. These aren’t features, they are basics. The app should never have been released. I suspect that they put all of the code for their new headphones into the new S2 app codebase and then were stuck between putting out a not even half-baked app or delaying their hardware release. I’ve been largely isolated from it by having an older system and using the unchanged S1 app, which just reinforces my view.
  

Books

• Continued working my way through How Civil Wars Start. Reading it alongside the news coming out of the USA is quite alarming.
  

Next week: An unusual amount of working from home.