in Weeknotes

Weeknotes #310 — Spoofed number

Out on a short ramble on a beautifully sunny Sunday.
Out on a short ramble on a beautifully sunny Sunday.

The first ‘normal’ week of the year, where I wasn’t having to prioritise some near-term objectives. Our offsite meeting was behind us, so it was time to get on with the work. I struggled to find my mojo this week. The big, important things got done but there are lots of lower-level things that didn’t get my attention.

This was a week in which I:

  • Was formally put into a standing deputy role for my boss. A mini promotion of sorts.
  • Held three more in-person interviews for the developer role within my team. We ended up with a good problem in that we liked more than one of the candidates. It was close, but ultimately our decision came down to team fit. It’ll be fun to have someone new join the team.
  • Took colleagues through a draft presentation on our company strategy at our department-wide team meeting.
  • Met with colleagues to get aligned on our mission for our document management project.
  • Had our regular project meeting for our plan to open a new office.
  • Reviewed the data and insights produced by our recently installed office environment monitoring system. Having quantitative data about our space — temperature, usage, CO2 levels, noise — is going to be invaluable in making decisions about how to improve the environment further over the next few years.
  • Checked in with our audio/visual consultants on the remaining work for this year. I have my fingers crossed that next week’s ISE conference will have the product announcements we are looking for.
  • Met with our vendor that supplies the mini PCs that run our meeting rooms to look at the next generation of this technology.
  • Met with our networking vendor to discuss our licence renewal and our plans for trialling additional products.
  • Met with our Microsoft Copilot pilot working group. (Why do Microsoft always name their products in such a way that referring to them becomes clunky and awkward?) We’ve continued to see a steady trickle of people who are interested in trying out the tools.
  • Attended the monthly Copilot Fireside Chat. What works so well for the Teams Fireside Chat seems to fall flat at the Copilot one. None of the attendees put their cameras on and the conversation at the session felt a little stilted.
  • Attended an internal webinar covering the political outlook for South Africa.
  • Took part in our first monthly Lean Coffee of the year. We have a completely open approach for agenda topics and it has served us well over the years. This week’s session left me wondering whether there should be a little bit of guidance for the topics. How have others managed this?
  • Had a good introductory meeting with a vendor that we work with extensively in South Africa but have not utilised in the UK.
  • Enjoyed a delicious free lunch at work to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

  • Discovered that someone has been spoofing my mobile number to make scam calls. For a couple of months I’ve been receiving calls from people who said that they were returning a missed call from my number. This week, a man with a Scottish accent called me and said that someone had been trying to scam him from my number. Other than changing my mobile number — which I don’t want to do as I’ve had it forever — I don’t know what I can do to prevent this. I called up my network provider but they were useless; it took 15 minutes for them to understand the issue, only to tell me that there was nothing they could do. I logged the problem with Action Fraud, but I don’t hold out any hope that they can do something either; the reporting tools on their website are geared towards people who have received the scam call, not the person whose number is being spoofed. I don’t know much about ‘calling line identity’, but I assume that it’s trivial to pretend to be someone else.
  • Met up with friends — ex-colleagues that I worked with 25 years ago — for a night in the pub. It’s always lovely to see them. It made me realise once again how lucky I was to have started my career in such a great department and team.
  • Dropped my eldest boy off at Heathrow Airport. He’d been invited to take part in the Boston University John Thomas Terrier Classic, an indoor track meet. A fantastic opportunity to try out being in a US university setting.
  • Caught up with some friends at The Perseverance pub in Wraysbury. We all had burgers, but didn’t eat the napkins.

  • Managed to get out on the Saturday morning cycling club ride again. The temperature was cold, but slightly higher than the week before which meant that there was no ice anywhere. Three of my cycling club friends have signed up to this year’s London Edinburgh London, a 1,530km ride to be tackled in one go, with a 128 hour time limit. A completely mad adventure. The closest I’ll ever come to it is watching this documentary, which had the effect of completely putting me off:

  • Enjoyed a sunny winter walk with my wife, following the footpaths across the fields at the back of our house. We live in such a beautiful place, but it has been years since I last wandered out there.

Media

Articles

Video

  • Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story (2024) is a beautifully-made documentary about Reeve, his family and his friends. I was a teenager when he had his accident and remember reading all about it in the papers at the time, but I didn’t follow his life from that point. I had no idea how much pain the family went through, with his wife passing away shortly after him.
  • Started watching Mo on Netflix, a gentle comedy about a Palestinian asylum seeker and his family in Houston, Texas, who haven’t had their case resolved in over 20 years. We’ve already breezed through season one.

Web

Books

  • Continued reading Fascism by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Somehow I don’t seem to be putting enough time aside for reading at the moment. It’s already February and I haven’t read much.

Next week: Welcoming my son home from his trip, and trying to knock the roadmap for the rest of the year into place.

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