Weeknotes #363 — Aquaplaning

February already. Can you believe it¹? Although the month has changed, the weather has not, and it feels like an endurance test that is starting to get to me. It seems that it is always raining (and apparently, it is), with any glimpse of the sun just a teaser before it gets covered up by a blanket of cloud once again.

This was a five-day week squeezed into four, as I took Friday off. My wife and I used the day for a round trip to Ross-on-Wye, where we helped her parents to get a little more prepped for their upcoming house move. We took apart a dining table, assembled a new, smaller one, cleared out things they no longer need and took a trip to a large charity shop with boxes of old things. The drive there and back was a bit of a white-knuckle ride as it rained the entire way, leaving pools of water on various motorways that had us aquaplaning at multiple points. At one point, the car’s cruise control decided to completely reset itself as we hit some standing water.

This was a week in which I:

• Had an initial meeting with senior colleagues, including our Deputy CEO, who are working in our newest location where we opened a presence last year. We have a basic floor plan of the new office that we plan to lease, and need to make some decisions on the layout.
• In my staff meeting, had one of our team take us through the high-level version of the strategy response work that they have done so far.
• Met with colleagues to review the status of our key client data-related initiative and to decide how the team can best apply their effort in the next few months.
• Had an initial meeting with colleagues in our Digital Insights team to discuss how we can work together this year.
• Had the weekly meeting with our sister company for their office refit project. The new project manager has now taken the reins.
• Enjoyed a lovely lunch with the outgoing project manager at STEM + STEM, a hidden gem of a restaurant located inside a florist shop in the City.
• Found out that South Africa are playing a FIFA World Cup match in June at 5pm UK time, which we will want to show on a TV in the office. I did some research into what we need to do to be compliant and followed up with PPL PRS for a quote for a music licence.
• Met with colleagues from the Disability sub-group of our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee to allocate tasks for this year amongst our team.
• Had a colleague take me through the design of our internal chatbot, helping me to get a better mental model of how it works. The tool has both menu-based and generative AI-based modes, and I didn’t understand how it switched between them.
• Took part in our development team’s backlog refinement meeting.
• Met with two recruiters that I am using to try and fill the developer vacancy in my team. I’ve had quite a few CVs which I have given feedback on, as only a couple of them have been quite right. We also had our first interview.
• Caught up with a colleague in our Technology team based in the USA. I’m so glad I keep check-ins with far-flung colleagues in my diary as it goes a little way to reducing the distance between us. Sometimes, like this week, our meetings are very timely based on what’s going on.
• Met up with our Group Head of APIs for our regular call.
• Went out with a couple of friends to see a preview screening of It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley (2025), including a Q&A with director Amy Berg. I loved the film. As the screening was so early we grabbed dinner after, ending up in Honest Burgers in Soho.
• Popped to my friend’s house to wish him a very happy birthday by gifting him a copy of The Oral History of Guitar Hero, Rock Band and the Music Game Boom. He was the first person I know to get hold of one of these games and we spent many nights playing as a plastic instrument-based band. He also has a very lovely dog.
  

• Caught up with Jon Stewart and Jimmy Kimmel on YouTube with my youngest son over dinner. Tuning into Jon Stewart’s weekly monologue on The Daily Show has become a regular slot in our house.
• Added my blog directly to the Fediverse. I’d installed the WordPress ActivityPub plugin months ago but never got around to setting it up. As my blog doesn’t sit at the top-level of andrewdoran.uk I had to implement a web server rewrite rule for the creepily-named WebFinger. So, if you’re on the Fediverse, you can now follow my blog’s account at @andrewdoran.uk. (No, that’s not a typo.) It turns out that by default the plugin spews the entire contents of a blog post onto the Fediverse, which doesn’t seem like a good choice. I’ve now changed it so that it posts a link to the post as well as any images, but that isn’t particularly satisfactory either. It’s technically fun, but I still think publishing on your own site and syndicating elsewhere (known as POSSE) is a better solution, particularly via Micro.blog which does it very thoughtfully and elegantly.
• Inspired by Annie Mueller’s blog, I added links to the bottom of each blog post on this site for email, the RSS feed and a link back to the homepage. The email link appeals as a good choice for someone who doesn’t want to publicly comment, but does have something to say. Feel free to email me, I’d love to hear from you!
• Noticed that my WordPress plugin that checks for broken links was no longer installed. I assume I removed it at some point in the past. It used to flag broken links to me, which I then manually replaced with links to the relevant snapshots in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Looking for the plugin again, I came across one that was authored by the Internet Archive themselves, which does this process automatically. It turns out that my timing was perfect, as the plugin was only released this week.
• Booked in to see the new Paul McCartney film, Man on the Run (2025), in a couple of weeks’ time. Apparently it will be in cinemas in the UK for one day only.
• Enjoyed watching some of the Winter Olympics, including the final of the ‘Men’s big air’, an event that a week ago I had no idea existed.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Your Undivided Attention has an interesting interview with Dr Zak Stein on ‘AI psychosis’ and people becoming ‘LLMings’.
• I’m happy to listen to pretty much any interview with comedian and writer Stewart Lee. Marina Purkiss and Jemma Forte have a great conversation with him on The Trawl.
  

Articles

• Cal Newport writes about “The Dangers of ‘Vibe Reporting’ About AI”, where articles play on attention-catching fear about AI to imply connections that may not be there.
• I love Sharon O’Dea’s take on teams using software that they already have because it’s ‘free’ without considering the total cost of ownership:
  

We’ve been helping a client weigh up building a SharePoint/Viva Engage digital workplace versus buying something off-the-shelf. Comms teams get nudged—shoved, really—towards SharePoint on the basis that it’s “free,” which is a bit like saying a puppy is free if you ignore the food, the vet bills, the training, and the fact it’ll outlive your sofa.

• I enjoyed reading about Jason Cox’s “journey towards intentional technology use”. I feel very far from going cold turkey on podcasts.
• This article about a US citizen criticising the Department for Homeland Security in an email, and then getting a visit from them to his house, is a good reminder that I need to look into moving away from Gmail.
• I’m sad to hear that the CIA World Factbook is no more. I’ve used the Factbook for years to look up flags, stats and data for different countries, but that has come to an end.
• What it’s like to be the Microsoft Excel World Champion.
• Ian Dunt’s post on Kier Starmer’s “moment of reckoning” includes this point, which makes me sad about where we are with politics right now:
  

“…so many policy ideas are clearly based on the newspaper headlines they will promote rather than any effect they will have on the country. Yesterday, for instance, the Home Office banned asylum seekers using taxis to get to medical appointments. “I will stop at nothing to remove the incentives that draw illegal migrants to Britain,” the home secretary said. But of course no-one believes that this policy will prevent a single asylum seeker coming to Britain. No-one who was going to set foot on a boat will refrain from doing so because sometime in the future they may not be able to get a taxi to a GP. The policy is there for newspaper coverage, not to actually achieve an outcome. It is a classic example of broken Westminster incentives.”

• I’ve enjoyed reading some more random blogs this week. Tadaima writes about “If nothing is curated, how do we find things?”:
  

As convenient as social media is, it scatters the information like bread being fed to ducks. You then have to hunt around for the info or hope the magical algorithm gods read your mind and guide the information to you.

I always felt like social media creates an illusion of convenience. Think of how much time it takes to stay on top of things. To stay on top of music or film. Think of how much time it takes these days, how much hunting you have to do. Although technology has made information vast and reachable, it’s also turned the entire internet into a sludge pile. And now, instead of relying on professional curators to sort through things for us, now we have to do the sorting.

• They also write about how “Everyone has been lying about cats.” As an owner of two cats, I can say that this statement is correct. Before we got our cats, people said things like “They are so clean!” and “They just look after themselves!” These statements are absolutely not true. I do love them, but they can be, and often are, a complete pain in the butt.
• It was so good to see The Guardian feature a report at the top of their front page on Substack’s willingness to make money from hateful content.
• Evan Schwartz’s approach to writing documentation like it’s a product is brilliant. As you read through the guide to Scour, his excellent article discovery tool, you read examples that are directly relevant to you, with tools that you can interact with right there in the document. This is the way.
  

Video

• Mark Kermode’s review of Melania (2025) is perfect.
• They keep making documentaries about pop culture and I keep lapping them up. The three-part Netflix documentary on Take That is excellent.
• Watched episode three of The World at War, covering the German push into France in 1940.
• Succumbed to another bargain subscription offer from MUBI. I’ve paid £1 for three months, so I just need to put some time aside to watch something — anything — for it not to be a waste. In my mind I’d like to be a person who regularly enjoys quirky, long art-house movies, but I rarely prioritise sitting down to watch a film.
  

Web

• AntiRender takes a sunny, joyful architectural render of a place and shows you what it will actually look like in an overcast, rainy and depressing November day.
• Someone has put together A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts and it’s been a joy to dip into. This advert from 1983 is the jumping off point for an article focused on the Acorn Electron, my first home computer.
  

Books

• Continued with Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. It was interesting to read that the Stanford prison experiment, where guards and inmates quickly turned hostile with each other, was unscientific as the guards were urged to act aggressively towards the prisoners.
  

Next week: Undoubtedly more rain, but with an Album Club to bring some internal sunshine.

1. Newsreader: “I literally cannot.” ↩