On Tuesday my company had a party to celebrate both our 10th anniversary and the upcoming retirement of our CEO. Drinks and canapés were followed by a formal dinner and speeches. An incredible live band kicked in as desserts were served and the evening was rounded out with a great DJ. Time went by so fast; glancing at my watch I realised that I had already missed the train that would get me home by midnight. I didn’t get in until nearly 1am. Given how tired I felt for the rest of the week I can’t fathom how I used to drink at these events and still function. The organisation of the event was amazing as usual, and everyone seemed to have a brilliant time.
This was a week in which I:
- Prepped for and ran our final programme steering committee meeting of the year.
- Had calls with our audio/visual consultancy to talk through how we could improve the multi-function ‘collaboration space’ in our office. Our main consultant came on-site to continue the conversation and to review our newly-commissioned meeting rooms.
- Joined an online technology demo of audio/visual equipment for larger meeting spaces. The equipment was impressive, picking up clear audio from everywhere in the room and doing a great job of the video feed.
- Met with the company that provides us with our office smart sensors for a post-install handover and demonstration of the technology. It’s exciting to be able to have quantitative data about how the office is performing that we can use to further improve the space.
- Met with a vendor to discuss how they can continue to support us over the next year with expertise that we don’t have internally.
- Started to draft a structure for our offsite meeting in January. ChatGPT has helped me to source some companies to speak to that could help us with part of the event.
- Got pulled into a conversation on provisioning of accounts and access to internal resources.
- Had meetings with representatives from our sister company to discuss plans to mitigate disruption in the building over the coming months, as well as coordinate the work to improve one of our shared spaces.
- Spent a couple of hours with our SD-WAN vendor to learn about their roadmap and to discuss how we can make better use of their technology.
- Met to review our licensing requirements from a key software vendor for the coming year.
- Had the final check-in of the year with our technology consultancy vendor.
- Had an introductory meeting with the UK arm of a vendor used by colleagues in Johannesburg.
- Continued writing the year-end performance reviews for my team members.
- Joined the year-end celebratory meeting for our entire global Technology function. I picked up an award for ‘executing with excellence’. It’s lovely to have the recognition, but I felt quite uncomfortable with receiving an individual award given that it is our team as a whole that pulled together to make everything great this year.
- Enjoyed our local year-end talk, hosted by our incoming CEO. This year has been a blur, so it was fun to look back at photos of everything that happened. We also got an excellent overview of one of our local offices from the Chief Executive there.
- Spent some time curating and finessing my music collection, using a combination of Plex and the Music app on my Mac. Both of the tools are great at identifying and tagging most of my music, but I wanted to fix issues such as different versions of the same album looking identical in the user interface. I spent a few enjoyable hours doing the work and have got as far as artists beginning with D.
- Didn’t get out on my bike. Storm Darragh resulted in the club cancelling the Saturday ride because the conditions were too dangerous. I’m very grateful to have the option of riding indoors available to me when I need it.
- Took a trip to Stroud to meet up with my wife’s family for lunch. Our car was telling us it was 5°C but it felt like a minus sign could have been added to the front of it.
- Enjoyed the last F1 race of the season. Given the recent form of the runners and the upcoming driver changes, I’m so intrigued by what 2025 might have in store.
- I asked ChatGPT “Based on what you know about me, draw a picture what my current life is.” It came up with this:
Media
Podcasts
- Useful update from Henry Levak, Head of Product at Logitech, about their plans for multi-camera and multi-stream setups in Microsoft Teams. I’m not sure whether the ability to control the camera streams from home is a good thing or whether it’s a little creepy. The intelligent auto booking and auto-releasing of meeting rooms sounds interesting, including a setting where all future room bookings get cancelled if someone doesn’t turn up in the room a preset number of times in a row, synchronised to Microsoft Exchange. I’m looking forward to us experimenting with this.
Articles
- I’d been a paid Substack newsletter subscriber for a while, but stopped when I heard about their zero content moderation. Anil Dash writes as eloquently as always about why calling your newsletter ‘a Substack’ is doing you a disservice.
Video
- Watched Steve McQueen’s new World War II drama, Blitz (2024) on AppleTV+. I was expecting Great Things, but it somehow didn’t land like that.
- Beatles ‘64 on Disney+ is a lovely addition to the myriad of films about the group. I’ve never seen the behind-the-scenes video footage of their first trip to the US and it’s lovely to see them laughing and joking around. I’m now very familiar with the area around the entrance to the Plaza Hotel in New York, which made it even more fascinating.
Audio
- Getting access to my friends’ music collections via PlexAmp has sent me into an obsessive loop about the Faith No More songs Midlife Crisis and Epic. I vividly remember first hearing Epic on MTV as a kid when I was on holiday in the US; it stunned me as it was so different to everything that I’d heard before. There are so many videos on YouTube of people reacting to these videos, including vocal coaches who are dazzled by the range of sounds that Mike Patton makes on this appearance on the Jay Leno show. Just imagine seeing this on prime time TV.
Books
- I’ve been struggling to get some focused reading time over the past week or two. How To Lose A Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship is denser than I expected. I’m halfway through. I find myself agreeing with paragraphs and sections of the book but I struggle to zoom out and understand exactly where I am in the narrative.
Next week: My final week of work for the year, a meetup with friends and two album clubs.
@adoran2 You get a lot done. I’m a bit envious. Long time since I’ve listened to Faith no more. I was blown away by «We care a lot» back in the day. It was in my early adulthood.
@odd People say I get a lot done, but my theory is that I’m no different to most other people, I just write it down. I need to explore Faith No More as I only really know those two songs. They may be a bit too heavy for me. I need to find out.