My attempt at working on Monday morning lasted about an hour. I ran two half hour meetings — very badly — before admitting defeat and going back to bed. On Tuesday I got up at my usual time, had breakfast and then fell asleep on the sofa for four hours. This illness has knocked me sideways. I can’t remember ever having taken a day off sick from work before, and now I find myself having taken two in a row.
I got back to my desk on Wednesday. Concentrating on topics was difficult as my brain had a fuzzy, foggy feel to it, and this persisted all the way through the rest of the week. So I picked my battles, using the time to catch up with administrative tasks as opposed to trying to tackle any big hairy problems.
My eldest son had been suffering with what I assume was the same illness, but he was a few days ahead of me. The doctors prescribed him antibiotics, so I gave them a call on Tuesday and explained my symptoms, explaining that if antibiotics were a necessary remedy, I didn’t want to delay getting on them. They prescribed me a course of amoxicillin without even seeing me in person. I’m not sure if it was necessary, but I was willing to take whatever help I could get. (It got me thinking — why is there no swab-like test that you can take at the doctors so that they can diagnose exactly what it is that you have and then treat you accordingly? Is this just too expensive and impractical? Maybe we need to move some research money from generative AI to trying to develop a tricorder.)
At the end of the weekend it feels as though I’ve got it under control. But the chesty cough, runny nose and lack of energy are still lingering, and feel as though they might hang around for some time yet.
This was a week in which I:
- Continued work on the ‘definition of done’ for our document management project.
- Reworked our real estate/facilities financial projections now that we have better assumptions to base our projected spend on.
- Continued the on-boarding process for a new vendor, reviewing and amending the proposed contract.
- Had a request to look at how deleted Teams, SharePoint sites and Groups can be restored.
- Joined a workshop to start to look at how we can use AI to bring together informative data about our clients into a single pane of glass.
- Joined the weekly standup meeting for developments on our internal chatbot.
- Attended our weekly Learning Hour meeting about last year’s internal ITSM conference.
- Had the weekly check-in with our sister company on their real estate/office improvement project.
- Attended the Teams Fireside Chat with Michel Bouman from Microsoft.
- Took one of our cars in for repair. We’ve had the engine light come on and it has repeatedly lost power. Unfortunately they couldn’t find anything wrong with it. The garage is amazing in that they charged us only £9 for a lightbulb that needed replacing.
- Met with our personal financial advisor for our annual check-in.
- Had a bizarre experience while lying around in a feverish stupor. I was sleeping and dreaming on the couch and in my dream, I found my way to a couch with some random big fluffy cat, fell asleep and started dreaming. I was having a dream within a dream. I realised I was dreaming and then ‘woke up’ only back as far as being asleep on a couch in my dream.
- Smashed one of my toes against a leg of our bed in the middle of the night. We’ve been in the same room for ten years or so and I’ve never done it before. My toe has gone black and purple from the impact.
- Watched the Everton vs Liverpool derby with my son, the last one to take place at Goodison Park before Everton move to a new home. What an incredible football match.
Media
Podcasts
- Without a commute or time on my indoor bike trainer, I struggled to keep up with podcasts this week.
Articles
- Raiding bookshops in Palestine and detaining their owners is yet another low in the ongoing conflict.
- Google Maps is 20 years old. I still remember how magical this was when it was introduced. I was so much more of a techno-optimist then.
- Why are so many tech companies so problematic? Adding Shopify to my list of companies to try and avoid.
- IBM using a return to office mandate as a ’soft layoff’.
Video
- BBC4’s Tutankhamen in Colour was a fascinating look at the discovery of the pharaoh’s tomb, blended with technology that brought the black and white footage to life.
- Discovered the Techmoan YouTube channel. From what I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of moaning, but there does seem to be a lot of brilliant videos digging into technology. Highlights that I’ve watched so far:
- Playing 78RPM records properly
- Line out ≠ headphone out
- The Tefi company and their Tefifon player (insane genius idea to blend a record player needle with a tape player)
- VHD videodisc format
- Finished watching Mo on Netflix. The last couple of episodes were incredibly moving. It feels like an antidote to all of the hateful rhetoric around immigration and asylum.
- Watched The Substance (2024). We didn’t really know what we were letting ourselves in for. It’s … a lot. There’s potentially a great story in there, but the plot didn’t really make sense and it ended up as a gore-fest.
Audio
- I’ve been digging the Sisters of Mercy’s Floodland album over the past couple of weeks. Another album where I’m wondering why it has taken so long for me to listen to the whole thing.
Web
- A great resource that lists European alternatives to online services based elsewhere in the world (usually the USA). Being based in Europe is one thing, but it would be good to have the data cross-referenced with details on whether the people running each service are wrong-uns as well.
Books
- Continued reading the second volume of The McCartney Legacy. It’s been just what I need right now.
Next week: A long weekend and getting back into the office.
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