Our eldest son turned 18 this week. Our work here is done! He didn’t come with a manual, so we’ve been improvising all this time; this week I’ve learned that when a child reaches adulthood, you aren’t meant to drive them somewhere and release them back into the wild. So, I guess we’ll be keeping him. He’s a fine young man and we love him a lot. It’s a strange feeling to be the parent of another adult, especially as it feels like no time at all since we first met him.
At work, I had one of those weeks where I feel as though I’ve picked up lots of actions, started doing many things, and haven’t finished any of them. As much as I’m really enjoying a balance between being in the office and working from home, Thursday felt as though it had all of the distractions and none of the advantages. By the time I came to shut my laptop down, I hadn’t managed to finish any of the things I had aimed to complete that day. I get angsty when I’m not getting things ticked off the list.
This was a week in which I:
- Had my fortnightly team meeting. I’ve been looking at how to add some more definition to this session, giving it more of a structure. I went back and relistened to the two Manager Tools podcasts on the topic, but they weren’t quite as insightful as I remembered. We’re in a small department that already meets regularly across the whole team, so that takes away some of the need for this smaller group of us to get together. But there’s still value in sharing updates as a group, and it also helps with understanding interpersonal dynamics.
- Reviewed the status of our plans to open a new office and the process we will follow to procure the IT/AV infrastructure for the space.
- Met with our AV consultants to agree next steps for testing the proposed configuration of our large meeting rooms that we share with a sister company. We now have an approach and design for how we will implement the cabling. We also collectively resolved questions about provisioning physical telephones in the rooms and implementing guest Wi-Fi.
- Met with one of our senior executives to review the proposal, philosophy and expected fit-out and running costs for the AV equipment in our shared meeting rooms, ahead of presenting the proposal to a wider audience.
- Reviewed our department finances, looking specifically at the items that are competing for discretionary spend.
- Agreed the handover of the project to refurbish one of our offices to a colleague in our team.
- Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour meeting where a colleague presented on the physical security aspects of a planned new office.
- Joined the weekly project meeting for the setup of this new office.
- Helped our Group CIO who was in town for the afternoon, getting him set up in a room for a series of meetings.
- Wished a colleague a happy 40th birthday, celebrated with a huge cake in the office.
- Had a fantastic meal at The Olive Tree in Berkhamsted for our eldest son’s 18th birthday. My parents joined us and it was great to celebrate with them.
- Was meant to go out on Friday night for some drinks for a friend’s birthday, but I was completely drained from the week and ended up heading up to bed. I needed the reset.
- Had my brothers and their families over for lunch on Sunday afternoon. We fired up the pizza oven and cooked a personal pizza for everyone. We’re still not back in the habit of having people over to our house since the pandemic, and it really feels like something we need to fix. It was a great forcing function for getting the house in shape, so all of Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning were spent cleaning. Our guests gravitated towards sitting on our decking at the top of the garden, which we’ve actually spent very little time on since it was installed. I’m not sure what the decking boards are made of, but they seem to defy the laws of physics, emitting twice as much heat as they absorb. It was a sunny spring day, and we sat there sweltering. It was so good to see everyone.
- Had another cold but beautifully sunny bike ride with the club on Saturday morning. Only a month to go until London Wales London.
- The Japanese Grand Prix was a snooze-fest. I’m glad I watched it on catch-up and didn’t set an alarm.
Media
Articles
- Wikipedia’s bandwidth costs are soaring, and the owners are attributing it to AI crawler bots.
- Better features are much more useful than just connecting everything to the Internet.
- The crazy Trump tariffs have been extensively written up everywhere, but I particularly liked this summary on Techdirt.
- I enjoyed Ian Dunt’s thoughts on the topic too.
This obsession with goods is insane. The US is replicating the utterly muddle-headed conversation about goods over services which we had in the UK over Brexit.
Video
- Continued watching The White Lotus, which this season feels like an excruciatingly slow burn.
- Scooted through Last One Laughing after repeated recommendations from my brother. Jimmy Carr is not my thing but Bob Mortimer definitely is. It was like watching a hyper-compressed Big Brother with an emphasis on silliness.
- Watched all four episodes of Adolescence. The rest of my family saw it while I was away a couple of weeks ago and told me how good it was. I agree with Tom Stuart’s thoughts on it. It’s a difficult watch with incredible performances, but I’m not sure I can draw any dots directly to many things that people — parents, governments etc. — should take action on as a result of it.
- Watched the first few episodes of Alma’s Not Normal as recommended by a friend. A lovely comedy with great characters.
Next week: More visitors, and trying to get some things ticked off the list.
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