On Saturday night we had a wonderful time celebrating my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. They had hired a room in a hotel, booked a DJ and a band, and invited friends and family from all over. I spent most of the evening saying hello to people — particularly those I hadn’t seen in a very long time — and don’t think I managed to get around the whole room by the time it all wrapped up.
It got me looking back at photos of mum and dad’s 25th anniversary party. I’m trying to reconcile myself with the fact that I’m now older than they were in the pictures; they seemed so much more grown up than I feel today. On that night in 1999 we had a really fun evening which finished with a few of us heading on to a local nightclub for drinking and dancing until the early hours. I never would have imagined that 25 years later I would be celebrating my own 20th anniversary and have two children who are both taller than me already.
I know my mum and dad read these weeknotes. Love you both! Congratulations and I hope you had a wonderful evening. 😘
This was a week in which I:
- Had a visit from a Virgin Media engineer to get us back online at home. The lightning strike had done much more damage than we first thought. As well as a dead TV and Internet router, we also lost our TiVo box and had to have all of the internal wiring replaced for our cable service.
- Took delivery of a new TV. The old one was just outside of its five year warranty window. It cost about £400 to replace it with a like-for-like model, less than half of the £899 that we spent back in 2019.
- Was disappointed to hear that a candidate we were looking to onboard into my team had decided to take a different job. One of the reasons cited was that the other role is fully remote; I wonder how much of a factor that will be in our search. Back to the drawing board.
- Prepared for and ran the programme Steering Committee meeting, the first one for three weeks.
- Conducted a thorough review of the costs for one of our real estate projects.
- Reviewed costs for a construction project as part of a regular monthly valuation session, agreeing how much we should pay versus what we were being asked to pay.
- Attended an ad-hoc Architecture Governance Authority meeting, jointly presenting on our planned office environmental monitoring platform.
- Played a small part in helping get one of our new offices online, configuring two of our digital signage players to work with our 3,840 x 600 pixel monitors. The technical infrastructure team are making excellent progress, despite some of the equipment being damaged in transit.
- Took part in our information risk steering group and non-financial risk review meetings.
- Reviewed a colleague’s presentation that summarises some project work done to date and frames the next steps.
- Enjoyed an informative Learning Hour meeting on PingCastle reports and how to use them to improve an organisation’s security profile.
- Had a software demo of a SaaS platform for managing Health and Safety assessments and incidents.
- Met with a new colleague in Johannesburg to welcome him into the team and give him an overview of my function.
- Enjoyed the latest Teams Fireside Chat, this time led by Ron Pessner on the topic of Microsoft Loop. I use the product regularly, creating collaborative documents in-line in Teams chats where we need to quickly agree on some content together. Although the session wasn’t AI free, it made a lovely change that the focus was on the core features of the product and the discussion about Copilot was minimal.
- Had to wrap up warm for Saturday morning’s bike ride. It was 5°C when I set out from my house, requiring bib tights and full-finger gloves. Things started to warm up the next day just in time for my now regular Sunday run. Just as I got back into town from my long loop, my wife called to ask whether I wanted to pop out for a coffee and a pastry, which made for a lovely unexpected end to the route.
Media
Video
- Media consumption seemed to slow down this week, probably as a function of how busy the week was. We did manage to start and finish Beef on Netflix, a brilliant story that stems from a random road rage incident that veers off in all sorts of unexpected directions. We also started the new season of Slow Horses on AppleTV+, which continues to be excellent.
Books
- Just one chapter of The McCartney Legacy Volume 1: 1969-73 to go. Could this be the week I finish it?
Next week: Saying hello to a new face, saying goodbye to an old one, and enjoying an online Album Club.
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