Weeknotes #328 — Awareness creates choice

A week of two halves. Back at my desk after a week off, I felt a bit rudderless and unsure of myself. I’m very good at switching off when I’m not at work, but this means that there is lots to catch up on when I return. On Wednesday morning, I met with one of my colleagues to discuss our overall approach to the work that our teams need to do and I felt completely rejuvenated by the conversation. Suddenly my sense of purpose was back and it felt as though a number of things had slotted into place.

This was a week in which I:

• Was asked for guidance from multiple colleagues on how to deal with clients who are bringing their own AI recording tools into meetings. I gathered my thoughts on this and sent an email to some of our senior leaders to try and find out what we already have in place to help our staff. It would be useful if staff are able to point to a public-facing webpage about our approach to this.
• Had an interesting conversation with an AI developer/consultant, who shared that he is also completely overwhelmed by the announcements and pace of change from the big technology vendors.
• Took part in our development team’s sprint review and sprint planning sessions.
• Collaborated with a colleague on some analysis in Excel. I see Excel as a Swiss Army Knife for people working in technology, useful for all sorts of data analysis and even text manipulation. Showing someone little tips and tricks to achieve an outcome makes me realise how much stuff I’ve learned over the years.
• Met with colleagues working on the project to open a new office in a new location. Reviewed a document with options for the initial technical stack that we will use until we have found a more permanent home.
• Had the weekly meeting with colleagues in our sister company on their office refurbishment project.
• Reviewed the proposed submission of technical policy documents to one of our regulators.
• Joined our bi-weekly Microsoft Copilot working group. I think we are doing better than I expected in terms of people collaborating and sharing with each other, but there is always so much more that we could do. I’d love to spend some time exploring Emily Webber’s work on successful communities of practice.
• Met with colleagues in our Learning and Development team to discuss our approach to digital literacy, particularly in relation to AI and data.
• Joined our quarterly governance meeting to review services provided to us by a sister company.
• Had some interesting conversations about team dynamics, reflecting on how the world of hybrid work is the toughest place to exist. If everyone is in an office or everyone is working remotely, clear practices can be put in place to optimise how people work together. It’s the messy middle where things can go wrong.
• Attended diversity, equity and inclusion training, following my election onto the committee for our technology division. It was a fascinating discussion. There are aspects that relate specifically to the goals that the organisation is trying to meet in South Africa, but the concepts are universal. It felt refreshing to be involved with like-minded people where the dominant narrative in the news has been to roll back on DE&I initiatives, following the lead of the Trump administration in the US.
• Had fun at our office pub quiz. Our team got a respectable 75 points out of 114, but we still came fourth. The quiz host was excellent, bringing music questions to life by playing live piano, guitar and kazoo.
• Had one of the days in the office disrupted by a fire alarm.
• Enjoyed the free office snacks that we’ve put in place while our canteen is shut. I’m not sure how large I’m going to be by the time it reopens.
• Joined the rest of my colleagues for pizza and beer in our office, one of the things we are doing while so much disruptive office refurbishment is going on in the rest of the building.
• Subscribed to Allmusic for USD 16 for the year, getting rid of the insane amount of adverts and pop-ups on their site. I regularly use the site for looking at an artist’s entire discography, including ratings and reviews. This is particularly useful when looking for a way into listening to a well-established artist who has an extensive back catalogue.
• Had my bike serviced at the local bike shop. It’s done just over 6,000km and needed a new front brake disc rotor. Other than that, a light greasing was all that was required.
• Drove up to Birmingham on Saturday afternoon to get my son to his latest 1,500m race, this time in the British Milers Club Birmingham Uni Grand Prix.
  

Media

Podcasts

• I loved listening to Sherry Turkle talk about AI and human relationships on the latest episode of Your Undivided Attention. I’ve heard her on a couple of podcasts, which has made me want to explore more of her work. I also loved Daniel Barcay’s statement that “awareness creates choice”.
• Word In Your Ear have a wonderful interview with Rob Caiger, the producer behind the recent reissue of the Small Faces’ 1970 album The Autumn Stone. I bought this reissue on CD and it’s fabulous. Caiger tells some incredible stories, such as when Olympic Studios was taken over by Virgin Music in 1987. They decided to discard their vast library of master tapes into skips, with artists being given one week’s notice to collect them. And by ‘given one week’s notice’, I mean that a note was put into a newspaper.
• I’ve occasionally listened to episodes of the EconTalk podcast for many years, discovering it as we went through the 2008–2009 financial crisis. For no reason that I can recall, I was recently thinking about the show and discovered that it has just hit 1,000 episodes. I enjoyed Russ Roberts’ reflections on hosting for the past 20 years or so.
  

Articles

• ‘Vibe Coding’ might be the digital equivalent of DIY around the house, with all of the mistakes and trial-and-error that it entails. You’ll probably still need to call in the professionals to get the job done to a lasting high standard.
• Unsurprisingly, enterprises are ‘repatriating’ workloads from the cloud.
• It’s brilliant to learn that 20mph zones in urban areas really do reduce injuries and save lives. TfL’s study shows that looking at the three year periods surrounding each implementation of a 20mph zone introduced between 1989 and 2013 led to:
  

• A 40 per cent reduction in the number of people killed (from 15 to 9), compared against the background trend of 7 per cent fewer fatalities across borough roads.
• A 34 per cent reduction in the number of people killed or seriously injured (from 395 to 260), compared against the background trend of a 15 per cent fall in people killed or seriously injured across borough roads.
• A 75 per cent reduction in the number of children killed (from 4 to 1), compared with no change across the control group. Additionally, a 50% reduction in children’s casualties (from 517 to 280), against the background trend within the control group of 20%.
• A 35 per cent reduction in collisions and 36 per cent reduction in casualties on borough roads, against a background trend of 12 per cent fewer collisions and casualties across all borough roads.

Video

• We’ve made most of our way through Dept. Q, which is fun enough to see past the silly bits.
• We were surprised to find that we’d reached the final episode of season two of The Last of Us. There was a cliffhanger at the end, but it didn’t have a ‘final show of the season’ vibe.
• It’s great to see the B-52’s get featured on the latest Trash Theory video.
  

Audio

• Snowpoet’s Thought You Knew is a beautiful, delicate thing. I didn’t get as much into their last release, Wait For Me which (I can’t quite believe) came out four years ago. Their new album, Heartstrings, is lovely.

Books

• I’ve been playing with using ChatGPT to pick my next read, uploading my giant text file lists of books I’ve bought and what I have on my wish list. After discouraging it from putting together a complex spreadsheet with lots of attributes for my books, it is now giving me a range of options based on how I might be feeling, what my energy levels are, etc. I’m enjoying how it is narrowing my focus down to a few books from which to choose.
  

Next week: Four days in the office, and the next instalment of Album Club.