Weeknotes #336 — Sleepy bones

I’m a little self-conscious that my weeknote preambles may often come across as grumbling as I look back across the previous seven days. But this week was another struggle. A tiredness has seeped into my bones that I’ve not been able to shake. Something has to change. On Friday night I went up very early as I knew I’d be getting up just after 6am for the weekly cycling club ride and it definitely made a difference. So my current plan is to try heading up to bed half an hour earlier than I’ve done for the past couple of decades to see if that changes anything. There will be less time to do things, including writing here, but I’m not sure what else to try.

This was a week in which I:

• Reviewed a proposal for what we will implement as our IT infrastructure stack in our first office in a new country. After some back and forth between a few of us we seem to have reached a consensus on what we’ll do and the approach we’ll take to get there.
• Met with colleagues, our construction firm and our landlord for a formal handover of the accessible door that we installed earlier in the year.
• Attended the Steering Committee for our sister company’s office refurbishment project, as well as the weekly project check-in meeting.
• Reviewed the final design proposal from our audio/visual technology vendor for the equipment to go into our shared meeting spaces later this year. We’ve now got a tender pack ready to go, as well as updated options for discussion for day-to-day support once we’re live.
• Interviewed the first candidate for the Project Manager / Agile Development Lead role in my team.
• Spent time working on some data analysis with a colleague. He taught me a bit more about PowerQuery, and in return I took him through how we can use Pivot Tables for the final steps.
• Had the fortnightly retrospective and sprint planning meeting with our development team.
• Joined the weekly project meeting for the refurbishment of one of our offices.
• Met with colleagues for a workshop on the risks presented by artificial intelligence tools. I dusted off a slide deck that I created a couple of years ago, largely based on material found in Baldur Bjarnason’s excellent book The Intelligence Illusion. If you work in a company considering using generative AI (and at this point, who isn’t?) it’s thoroughly recommended.
• Had our quarterly architecture governance authority meeting. We had a robust and useful debate about a proposal that had been submitted to the forum, arguing for the exploration of an alternative desktop software product for something that many people use across our organisation. We may end up with something that is cheaper, easier to use, has less risk of leaking data to the vendor and is more robust. Our small part of the organisation has a history of successful experimentation that we can then bring back as information for the wider group, and this will progress along the same lines.
• Met with colleagues to talk about how technology may be able to help us with client leads. The next step is to document our thinking to ensure we have agreed consensus on the problem before proposing what we’ll do next.
• Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour meeting where our CTO gave a talk on measuring and using data about our physical office spaces that he had previously given at a vendor event.
• Reviewed and signed off on the latest iteration of the CAD plan for our office.
• Had my mid-year review with my line manager.
• Reapplied for a postal vote, as I found out that requests to vote by post now expire after three years. The process to renew was super simple. I do wonder whether this was brought in to combat a real risk of fraud, or whether it’s just politics.
• Cancelled my MUBI subscription yet again. I really want the service to exist, but I just don’t watch enough movies to justify the subscription. I’ve not watched a film on the platform this year.
• Added a bunch of friends to Plex, giving them access to my digital music library. Using PlexAmp along with all of the server-side monitoring tools is a delight.
• Enjoyed a cracking WB-40 Album Club. New member Susi introduced us to Jean-Jaques Perrey’s Moog Indigo, one of the earliest records to make extensive use of sampling. Updating the WB-40 Album Club website with the album details was a challenge as the release date wasn’t easy to track down. It seemed like a perfect use case for ChatGPT Deep Research, which looked at lots of sources and came to a conclusion based on information on websites I doubt I would have found on my own.
• Had our oven repaired by an engineer from NEFF, replacing one of the two cooling fans. It’s a delight to be able to turn it on without feeling like it was going to take off. Fortunately it was still within warranty, so the work was done for free.
• Enjoyed a wonderful barbecue at our friends’ house on Saturday. At multiple points I felt like I was on holiday, lounging around on their ridiculously comfortable patio furniture, having long, expansive conversations with friends. They really know how to host.
• Journeyed to Ross-on-Wye on Sunday to spend a couple of days with my wife’s parents. It was my father-in-law’s birthday on Sunday, so we went for lunch at The Hen & Dot at Flanesford Priory, near Goodrich Castle. It was lovely to spend some time with them, as well as my brother-in-law, sister-in-law and their splendid three-year-old. We got a few jobs done for them while we were there and even found time for coffee and cake at Truffles Cafe.
  

• Loved Saturday morning’s cycling club ride, pushing hard up lots of local hills. My eldest boy decided to come out on a trial ride again after having been away from the club for a few years. He rode with a slightly slower speed group than me; we passed them with about 10km to go at which point he switched over and rode with us for the rest of the way. I had a terrifying near-off after falling into a long pothole in the road as we were chugging along at speed. My wheels dropped into the depression and scraped along the side of the tarmac, making a massive noise and unbalancing me on the bike. Somehow I managed to keep everything pointing in the right direction, and my wheels looked to be undamaged.
  

Media

Podcasts

• This week’s Politics Weekly UK podcast with John Harris focused on the UK riots that took place a year ago. I think that the discussion succinctly articulated something that makes sense to me:
  

The reason that hotels in Skegness were being used to house asylum seekers was that people aren’t going to Skegness for their holidays anymore. And you have a lot of hotels standing empty because it’s not a big tourist trap anymore. And its glory days are past it as a resort and all the rest of it. That’s why hotels are turning to signing contracts with the Home Office. And you see the same thing all over the country.

It’s places that are run down and that’s where you’ve got hotel rooms being sold off cheaply, whether it’s to house asylum seekers or to use as temporary accommodation for the homeless or whatever it is where the state suddenly needs to find spaces quickly.

Clearly to the local community, that feels like a kind of symbol of decline. It’s the hotel where your mum had a ruby wedding anniversary, your daughter had her 18th, and now it’s not a hotel anymore. It was the posh place in town and now it’s not and now the town doesn’t have any posh places and it’s your anger about that that becomes displaced onto what it’s now being used for.

• Stumbled across a delightful conversation between Kathryn Williams, a musician whose early work I loved when it came out at the tail end of the 1990s, and Kathryn Joseph, who I discovered in the past few years.
  

Articles

• A great Sketchplanation of The Trolley Problem.
• I’m not a big video game player but I have lots of friends that are. I enjoyed Matt Haughey’s reflections on his current favourite games.
• Michael Tsai’s collection of reflections on the UK Online Safety Act.
• Excellent interactive infographic on the evolution of the Tour de France. (Via the quantum of sollazzo newsletter.)
• An argument for retiring the word ‘technology’, which has become too vague to be useful.
• Jason Koebler and Matthew Gault offer sobering reflections on that Coldplay concert Jumbotron and the subsequent public shaming. It made me think about the Internet pile-on with the Star Wars Kid 20 years ago. Yes, it’s not exactly the same thing, but there are parallels. Everyone involved will have had their lives turned upside down. Well, except the members of Coldplay.
• Incredible that Microsoft was using support engineers based in China to assist the US military.
• News that The Samaritans plan to close 100 branches is devastating. Many years ago I used the service, driving to the branch in Coventry in a moment of desperation. The hours I spent there that night, talking with one of the volunteers, was life-changing for me. Peter Ormerod is right when he says that “We have tended to see the issue in terms of what is physically possible, rather than what is emotionally wise: the charity may be doing us an indirect favour by making us consider the importance of both.”
• Another reminder that nobody should be using Substack. There are so many newsletters out there that I would be prepared to pay for and subscribe to, but not while they are on the Substack platform.
  

Video

• Started watching the 1980s children’s TV show Star Fleet. I bought the DVD years ago but never got around to putting it on. I watched the show on TV when I was very little and found the aliens genuinely scary, but in an exciting way.
• Watched the second episode of Shifty.
  

Audio

• Have been listening a lot to Waiting, the incredible second album by the Fun Boy Three. Digging into Terry Hall’s discography, I came across this Mojo article where they revisit an interview with him in 2014.
  

Next week: Three days of work and a short break.