Weeknotes #284 — 105 cassettes

It’s amazing how quickly something can become a ‘new normal’. For most of my career, I commuted into the office five days a week. The pandemic meant that I quickly shifted to working from home full time, which felt bizarre at first. Then, having been out of the office for 534 days, it felt bizarre to go back. For many months now, I’ve been working from the office at least three days a week, including most Mondays. But this week, as one of my projects hit a key milestone, our staff were asked to work from home. It felt very strange to be on my indoor bike trainer instead of on the commute. I’m now at a stage where I enjoy a balance of working in the office and working from home. Three days in the office feels about right. I’m looking forward to going in again this coming Monday.

Things feel under control at work. The main projects are reaching some critical periods, but they are on track and we have enough bandwidth to absorb the issues that will inevitably come up. This is the result of the amount of hard work and planning that the team have put in up until now. It’s paying off.

Zooming out, it’s been dreadful to see the fascist and racist far-right riots here in the UK. They aren’t demonstrations. Smashing up the community you live in doesn’t seem to be a great way to show how much you care about your country. I can’t imagine how terrifying it must be to be targeted by them, coming at you in your home. My view is that decades of racist ‘othering’ of people by the newspapers and dog-whistling politicians has prepared people to (want to) believe misinformation and disinformation online. Those online posts serve as a useful excuse to go out, smash things up and let your true feelings out. Many years ago I stopped clicking on any links to articles on the Daily Mail website. I’m now going to add Twitter/X to the ‘never click’ list. I deleted all of my Twitter content some time ago but it still feels icky to go to the site and contribute to the engagement statistics, so I’m not going to do that anymore.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the regular programme and project meetings.
• Prepared for and ran the Programme Steering Committee meeting. We’ve chosen a new office chair to (quite literally) roll out to our staff, a welcome upgrade as the current ones reach their end of life.
• Coordinated with our project management consultants on all of the things that are outstanding that we need to quickly resolve.
• Reviewed the latest design of a smart sensor system that we plan to install in one of our offices. The review revealed questions that we hadn’t thought about, relating to the ownership and management of IT kit that will be used to run the service locally. It took a couple of meetings to get to a conclusion on how we can take it forward. We’ve landed in a good spot.
• Spent a day in the temporary office space that will be our home for the next few months. The team did an excellent job of tearing down our regular office and building out the temporary one in such a short space of time.
• Picked up a couple of minor issues in the construction of one of our offices.
• Reviewed a draft contract for work with a construction company, learning about JCT and their off-the-shelf legal documents.
• Requested help from one of our vendors to design a solution for taking a TV feed and encoding it for use on our internal local office network so that it can be picked up by our digital signage players.
• Took part in our technical architecture governance meeting to review a proposal for a new printing solution.
• Discussed a strategy for moving towards a lower-cost, lower-risk PDF platform than our traditional one and agreed some follow-up actions.
• Agreed an approach for coordinated experimentation with, and learning about, Generative AI within our part of the organisation.
• Had a couple of broader conversations on AI and ethical frameworks. I continue to marvel at the cognitive dissonance of having ‘explainability’ as a principle, where this is fundamentally not how these systems work. ‘Transparency’ is another good one; the main AI models are not transparent about what data they have been trained on and what human labour has gone into the process, so how is this in any way achievable? Microsoft’s Responsible AI Transparency Report contains 12 instances of the word ‘training’; 9 of these refer to training people, one mentions how news content providers didn’t want to be excluded from search results despite having concerns about usage of their content, and two mention further training of new models. There is no mention whatsoever about concerns with how the models currently in use by their systems have been trained.
• Had a couple of meetings with our technology industry analyst vendor about making some changes to our contract. I’m really looking forward to getting back into the technology side of things later this year, making much better use of their services.
• Met with our Non-Financial Risk team to review and close out some historic records.
• Had more conversations with staffing vendors about our company and the specific requirement I have in my team.
• Took part in our monthly Lean Coffee session. We dived into a great selection of interesting topics, including the recent Crowdstrike outage and how IT is far from being a profession. Steve McConnell wrote about this in 1999 and not much has changed since. Just how big does an IT problem need to be before there is an overwhelming push for reform?
• Found myself with some bandwidth to process a bunch of actions that I had noted down in meetings over the past few months. I have a great system for capturing them, but carving out the time to go through them always seems difficult.
• Boarded a late train out of London and found myself looking down at a vandalised plug socket, where someone had left a piece of metal sticking out of one of the holes. I wasn’t sure whether this presented a danger to anyone who might accidentally touch it. I asked a fellow passenger to stop people from sitting in the seat and went off to find the guard. He wandered down with me to take a look, said he would put some protective tape over it and thanked me for alerting him. But we never saw the guard again. *Shrug.*
  

• Dabbled with watching the Olympics, catching whatever happened to be on at the time. South Sudan in the basketball was something I didn’t expect to stumble across.
• Went for a long run with my eldest son, he at his recovery pace with me wondering whether my lungs were going to remain in my chest cavity.
• Visited friends at their home for a beautiful and moving memorial service for someone that they recently lost. Despite the reason for the occasion being so sad, it was wonderful to see them and be with friends for a few hours. It got my wife and I thinking about how much time we spend with people we love and whether we need to reprioritise the structure of our weekends so that we see people more.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Interesting discussion about Trump running mate JD Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy. And by “interesting discussion about”, I mean “brutal takedown of”.
  

Articles

• Two articles that made me log out of Twitter and vow not to log in again:
  
  • An interview with Elon Musk’s daughter.
  • The Observer: “Dozens arrested in violent clashes across the country as government warns rioters ‘will pay the price’”:

A key factor in this spread of online disinformation involved Elon Musk’s decision to allow rightwing activists such as Tommy Robinson back onto his social media platform X, said Joe Mulhall, director of research at Hope not Hate, the anti-fascism organisation. “The initial disinformation and anger was being perpetrated by individuals on Twitter, for example, that have been previously deplatformed,” he said. “And now they’ve been replatformed.”

• From Super Deluxe Edition: “It’s so quiet at the moment, in terms of releases (and reissues), that Eminem’s new album The Death of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce) remains at number one in the UK for a third week, with a paltry 10,757 sales! And according to Music Week, of those 10k+ sales only 105 units were actually physical sales (all cassettes!). Remarkable.”
  

Video

• Finished watching Kin. A superb show which has left us wanting more.
  

Audio

• Picked up a few CDs from our local Oxfam shop including a 1993 copy of Wings’ Venus and Mars, with a few extra tracks. I love this album. My uncle lent me a vinyl copy when I was a kid, which I recorded to tape and then played so much. There’s so much not to like about it, with its cheesy McCartney lyrics and bubblegum songs. But when it’s good, it’s really good. The dirty, opening guitar, drums and bass on Letting Go and the eerie beauty of Love In Song make it a worthwhile listen.
• There are so many good box sets that are turning up at the moment. I’d love to buy them but it’s not going to happen. The Faces At The BBC, Pete Townshend Live in Concert, Rory Gallagher’s BBC Collection, Bryan Ferry’s Retrospective and Phil Manzanera’s 50 Years of Music have all suddenly appeared. I’ve already got a huge backlog of listening from things I’ve bought in the past so it’s probably a good thing that I don’t have the pocket money to buy any of these at the moment.
• “Beyond the Sea” with every note changed to C. More intolerable than you could possibly imagine. (via Waxy)
  

Books

• Finished reading Barbara F Walter’s How Civil Wars Start and need to write up my thoughts on it.
• Listening to Venus and Mars has inspired me to pick up Volume 1 of The McCartney Legacy. If I read at an average speed, I’ll see you in just under 15 hours.
  

Next week: New digs.