A tiring week, with four days in the office and not much sleep.
This was a week in which I:
- Started the process to get microwaves installed in our office, a temporary measure while our canteen is closed for the rest of the year.
- Wrote up and circulated my notes from our quarterly facilities governance meeting with our sister company.
- Took part in a valuation meeting for work that has been done in our office space. We have only one thing outstanding, which hopefully should be wrapped up shortly.
- Attended a webinar on our mid-year performance review process.
- Had a call with Microsoft and a member of our internal technical team to help me to get my laptop updated to Windows 11 24H2. The update was offered to me a few weeks ago but the installation failed as I ran out of disk space. After cleaning up a bunch of things, the update never appeared again. A few registry tweaks here and there resulted in a successful update. Unfortunately, Microsoft Office then stopped working and I couldn’t find any way to get it reinstalled, so I ended up switching to a brand new laptop.
- Sat in on a Q&A with our divisional CEO, hosted by our regional CEO. It was good to hear directly from someone so senior in the organisation.
- Enjoyed our divisional CIO being our guest speaker at our weekly Learning Hour session. It was good to spend some time with him in the same room.
- Joined the company-wide Technology town hall meeting.
- Took part in the final legal review of a proposed contract with one of our vendors.
- Participated in our monthly operational risk review meeting.
- Spoke to our technology research vendor about their request for me to appear on an interview panel at an upcoming event. I’m keen to get some more experience at public speaking, so this aligns quite well.
- Met with our development team for their regular backlog refinement session.
- Helped one of my colleagues get started with Microsoft Copilot, taking a document and getting it to compress the content down to a couple of pages.
- Had a discussion with colleagues in our Technology and Learning & Development teams about our approach to digital literacy. It got me thinking about a multi-layered framework that we could use to give everyone a base understanding of key concepts, but could also help individuals who want or need to go deeper.
- Said goodbye to one of our team members who had been with us for a long time.
- Found myself caught up in a rail shambles at Euston on Monday evening. The trains weren’t going anywhere due to a trespasser somewhere up the line. We sat on the train, waiting for news. Eventually they asked everyone to get off so that the train could be switched off and on again — to reboot it (no, really). After everyone got back on board and sat down, they announced that it would only be stopping at Hemel Hempstead and then coming straight back to Euston, presumably to try and stop the timetable being out of kilter for the rest of the day. Cue most people getting off again. Then they said that the train would additionally stop at Tring. A few minutes later, they told us it would no longer be stopping at Hemel Hempstead. As we eventually pulled away, our destination not entirely clear, I noticed that there was a bag sitting on the floor, not close to anyone. I asked people around me whether it belonged to anyone but nobody claimed it. One person decided to move out of the carriage altogether and I followed him, walking the whole length of the train in an ultimately futile attempt to find the guard or conductor. Having failed in my mission, I texted the British Transport Police to report it. After a bit of back and forth, answering questions on whether it appeared “a deliberate attempt had been made to HIDE the item”, whether the bag possessed “any OBVIOUSLY suspicious characteristics”, and whether the item is “TYPICAL of what you would expect to find in the given environment” they concluded that it would “be for rail staff to treat as lost property.”
- Was surprised to find the cost my tap-in/tap-out rail commute jumped from £19.35 to £29.80. I can’t work out whether the price has gone up, or it is just that we were previously benefitting from some kind of time-limited discounted rate. I think I’m going to switch back to buying books of eight flexi tickets via the London Northwestern app as they will work out cheaper.
- Tried to pay a small bill of $29 for a medical provider in the US. They have spent a significant chunk of this sending me paper bills by air mail over the past few months. When I got the first one, I gave them a call, explained that we were insured, and handed my insurance details over again. This seemed to have zero impact on the letters. Not wanting to have a ‘bad debt’ on my record, I decided to bite the bullet and pay it. The website on the bill didn’t work, it just showed a blank page. So I tried calling the bill pay hotline, but instead of getting through to someone they read out the address of a different website that I needed to go to. It took a few minutes to register and log in; when I did, I found that I had a balance of $0. So…I’m not sure what to do next. I feel like I’m recording this here for posterity in case this $29 comes back to get me.
- Wondered whether Lando Norris was visiting Berkhamsted over the weekend. My son spotted this car parked at a jaunty angle on the High Street, so we both wandered down to take a look. If you had enough money to buy the vehicle, would you buy this licence plate to go with it if your name wasn’t Lando?
- Walked across the valley to deliver a cycling top that I won at Tour de Ricky but doesn’t fit me. I offered it out to people in the cycling club to see if anyone could make use of it. My walk took me along a footpath that I never knew existed, despite having lived in Berkhamsted for over 20 years.
- Picked these up in the supermarket as I had never seen them before. I love an Eccles cake and apparently they are similar.
- Had a great time at Album Club, listening to a superb record that I’d never heard before.
Media
Podcasts
- Great episode of the Microsoft Teams Insider podcast, where Ritika Gupta, Microsoft Group Product Manager, talks about everything related to Teams recording and transcription. I hadn’t thought about how transcription isn’t sufficient to convey sarcasm, nor how words can mean something completely different in a local context which is difficult for an AI system to process. For example, my South African colleagues call traffic lights ‘robots’, which led to a confused look on my face the first time they dropped the word into conversation.
Articles
- Baldur Bjarnason on why trusting your own judgement on ‘AI’ is a huge risk.
- The High Court here in the UK issued a warning to lawyers using generative AI tools in their cases.
- New Department of Energy buildings in the US don’t need to meet accessibility standards as this would be “unnecessary and unduly burdensome”. What a backwards step.
Video
- We are in love with the new series of Faking It. Every episode is a joy, and we always find ourselves nervous for the consistently lovely people that are taking part.
- Race Across The World was superb. All of the contestants ended up being very likeable, to the point where it didn’t matter who won. Yes, I cried.
- Dept. Q was worth watching, despite the somewhat ridiculous plot.
- A friend pointed us to You Can’t Ask That. It’s an Australian show where every episode has a bunch of talking heads associated by a theme — e.g. firefighters, nudists, disaster survivors — who answer a series of questions about their identities and experiences. Once you get used to the style of rapidly cutting between each of the people it is extremely watchable. The episode featuring people who’ve killed someone had me in tears.
- I love how easily the modern world lets me explore films and shows from my past. Apropos of nothing, this week I sought out V, the TV series from the early 1980s where an alien race turns up on Earth claiming to come in peace but with other, hidden motives. Re-watching it this week made me realise that there are so many scenes that burrowed deep into my childhood brain and stayed there. It was a bit of a puzzle to find out how to watch it based on the episodes available online. There’s a two-part miniseries from 1983, followed by V: The Final Battle (a three-part miniseries from 1984) and then a 19-part TV series from 1984–1985 confusingly called V. I’ve made my way through the first of these and will watch the second, but reviews have set low expectations for the third. The scenes where scientists started to be persecuted because of their ‘conspiracy’ against the visitors are fascinating; it’s not hard to draw a parallel to recent narratives against experts, judges and scientists by the Conservatives in the UK and the Trump regime in the US.
Audio
- SomaFM is 25 years old. I’ve been listening to Groove Salad on and off since about 2001; I don’t think there’s a better radio station to work to.
- I’m enjoying hearing from Lauren Kinsella and Chris Hyson talk about Snowpoet on a new podcast. I have all of their albums, and still consider Thought You Knew as one of my favourite records.
- Delighted to find that there is a way of creating smart playlists in PlexAmp.
- Had an insatiable earworm of the opening track of Stevie Wonder’s 1995 live album Natural Wonder, a somewhat patchy album that I probably haven’t listened to for 25 years. I don’t think there is a studio version of Dancing To The Rhythm but if there is, I’d love to hear it. This song is so good. All of the musicians seem so dialled in and the percussion is incredible. I’ve always thought that the recording doesn’t match the quality of the music.
Books
- Tried using ChatGPT to recommend my next read to me based on my giant list of already-purchased books alongside even bigger wish list. The experiment failed dismally, with the LLM recommending books that were in neither of the lists — three times in succession — despite me telling it that I didn’t want this. Gemini seemed to fare better, and Claude did an ok job too. This seems like a basic thing that these tools should be able to do successfully, but I fear that I am myself falling into the trap of expecting too much from computer programs that just generate plausible text.
Next week: An online Album Club, and getting as much done as I can before another week off.
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