
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.

Media
Podcasts
- A fascinating discussion on how Microsoft’s tools make managing the equipment in ‘bring your own device’ conference rooms much easier for infrastructure and support teams.
- This interview with Mary Anne Franks on ‘first amendment orthodoxy’ is excellent. I bought her book Fearless Speech off the back of listening to this and can’t wait to get stuck into it.
- It was great to hear from John Drummond on the Sausage On A Fork Grange Hill podcast. He played Trevor Cleaver in the golden years of the programme.
Articles
- Apple settling a lawsuit for USD 95m relating to allegations that their devices spy on users is a really unsatisfactory outcome. I’ve had Siri disabled for years. Not because I think Apple is going to deliberately record my conversations and send or keep them somewhere, but because I don’t trust that their code — or any code — is free of bugs, and accidents happen. Turning it off reduces my risk profile. (But I recognise the futility where everyone around me has their voice assistants turned on.)
- So much billionaire tech bro reading this week.
- ‘A new era of lies: Mark Zuckerberg has just ushered in an extinction-level event for truth on social media’.
- ‘Facebook Is Censoring 404 Media Stories About Facebook’s Censorship’. Oh the irony.
- Re-read The Parable of the Nazi Bar.
- ‘On Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg Throws Stones from a Glass Metaverse’.
- ‘How low will British politics go? Ask Elon, master of the Muskoverse – he’ll decide’.
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?
- ‘Nigel Farage Helps to Launch U.S. Climate Denial Group in UK’. Do these people really believe this stuff, or is it that doing so leads to some political or financial gain?
- ‘Mullenweg Shuts Down WordPress Sustainability Team, Igniting Backlash’. It really feels as though I need to seriously start looking at switching from WordPress to Ghost.
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
- A handy list of Bluesky search operators.
Books
- I struggled to make time for reading this week, but continued to enjoy a little dose of The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2 — 1974–1980 at the end of the day.

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