Weeknotes #377 — Accessible

This week felt tough. I ended up in the office four days in a row. The end of each day arrived too quickly as I still had plenty of things left to tackle. It was great to get to Friday when I could get some exercise on my indoor bike trainer and then climb into my cave in order to catch up with some things on my own.

This was a week in which I:

• Welcomed the newest member of our department, someone who has joined our small development team. It was a tough process to find them, but worth maintaining our high standards to get the right person on board.
• Tackled a difficult conversation about one of our service contracts.
• Interviewed candidates for a role on our nascent internship programme. One of the interviews had to be rescheduled, which meant that I had to go in on a day that I had planned to work from home.
• Wrestled with a technology configuration change that meets an internal requirement but has unintended side effects. We’ve agreed to continue to work on a better implementation.
• Reviewed and made changes to some project-related slides for display on our internal digital signage system.
• Discussed the snagging list and proposed remedial works with the vendors for the recent building project in our office.
• Reviewed vendor responses for furniture that we plan to deploy in a new office.
• Continued discussions on the potential models for implementing ‘architecture as a service’ for our team, meeting with another possible vendor.
• Met with colleagues who look after our internal SharePoint setup to discuss one of our projects and the short-term support that we need.
• Had our regular governance and project meetings.
• Joined a call where our CTO led an education session on SD-WAN networks, including how SASE works.
• Met with colleagues who are compiling a scorecard for our division, discussing how we can contribute to the metrics.
• Heard from a colleague in our weekly Learning Hour meeting about a conference that they recently attended.
• Had fun making connections. One of my colleagues from our office in China came over to my desk at the end of the day to say hello; I hadn’t seen her since February and didn’t know she was in town. Another colleague overheard us and asked for an introduction, as he is tackling a business problem that she might be able to help with.
• Had a lovely lunch at Haz with a colleague who was visiting from New York for the first time in a few years.
• Met with my executive partner at our technology research and advisory vendor to work through a specific problem that I’m tackling.
• Found some time to clear down even more old work emails, getting the remainder to a manageable set of things.
• Went to Lisa Riemers and Matisse Hamel-Nelis’s launch party for their book, Accessible Communications, at the Canva event space in London. It was lovely to celebrate their achievement of getting the book written and published. It felt like a very special evening, meeting up with old friends and making new ones. Spending time chatting to an artist like Natalie Webb isn’t something that I do every day. Lisa has posted a lovely write-up of the event on LinkedIn.
  

• Used Claude Cowork and the Remember The Milk MCP server for a focused clear-down of tasks in my to-do system. I now plan to use RTM primarily for date-driven reminders as opposed to a general backlog of potential to-dos. All my other personal tasks can live in Obsidian.
• Spent time manually clearing down over 1,100 items that had built up in the Drafts app. I am excellent at capturing stuff but much less good at processing it and putting it where it needs to be. Claude Cowork helped me to create a couple of Drafts actions that take the first line and prepend it to one of two Kanban boards that I have set up in Obsidian.
  

Media

Articles

• The FT reports on how innovations in the architecture of houses in rural Tanzania help to save lives:
  

A group of researchers has since found that children living in these purpose-built two-storey “Star Homes” showed more robust health on average than peers living in traditional one-storey mud-and-thatch huts. Youngsters in the homes, who had their health measured over three years, saw fewer cases of malaria, diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections, which are among the major killers of children in sub-Saharan Africa. Under-fives in the homes were also taller for their age.

• Fascinating insight into how loading data from tape on home computers in the 1980s actually works.
• EY are the latest company to have to deal with something that they published that contained AI hallucinations. The risk of this happening must be on every large company’s risk register.
• The concept of posts that aren’t easily accessible from a website but are in the RSS feed is interesting. These are articles that only RSS ‘insiders’ are made aware of; to the casual browser they would be invisible. I don’t think I publish enough to need to hide types of post on my site. RSS is also the basis for syndicating my posts to places like Mastodon and Bluesky, which would mean rearchitecting my setup if I went down this route.
  

Video

• Finished watching Rooster, which was very entertaining. It’s all set up for a second series. I’m sure we’ll watch it, but I can already sense the many ways in which there will be diminishing returns.
• Once again, we have no idea who will triumph in Race Across the World. Each series seems to get more breathtaking in terms of the places the contestants have to navigate, but less high-stakes in the decisions that they seem to make. I’m sure there were more people going off-piste and having a harder time dealing with the consequences of their transport decisions in previous years. It’s so well-produced, with the personalities and backstories of the contestants being slowly and sensitively revealed across the episodes.
• Watched Project Hail Mary (2026) after recommendations from lots of different friends. The movie was…fine, I guess? It was engaging enough but felt very much like a children’s film. I didn’t realise that it was going to be so comedic.
• Got stuck into series two of Rivals after first watching a 10-minute recap video on YouTube. (My memory is a complete sieve for the details in lots of the TV shows that we watch.) Danny Dyer continues to be a revelation.
• Watched the first two episodes of Michael Jackson: An American Tragedy. As the title suggests, it’s not a fun watch; we see a boy with a very bizarre upbringing quickly reach unfathomable heights of fame and then implode. I have a penchant for pop music documentaries of all stripes, but this is tough. We’ve got one episode left but really need to be in the right mood before we tackle it.
  

Audio

• A while ago, my brother-in-law bought me a copy of the Anthology Recordings compilation Sad About The Times. It’s a collection of obscure songs from 1970s North American artists. The final track, Maybe Someday/Maybe Never, by Dennis Stoner, has been on my internal jukebox over the past few days. It’s lovely.
  

Web

Clearing down my Drafts uncovered a bunch of fascinating places on the web.

• rentahuman is a platform to let AI bots rent people to do tasks that they can’t do themselves. (h/t Mat)
• Bubbles looks like another useful website for surfacing interesting things to read from personal blogs. Users can log in with a Fediverse account and upvote items. You can subscribe to a thoughtful collection of algorithmic RSS feeds too.
• Speaking of blogs, I subscribed to a bunch of RSS feeds for sites surfaced by the Hacker News Popularity Contest table.
• Making a note to self to check out Airalo for cheap eSIMs the next time I go somewhere not covered by my standard plan.
• Stasher lets you find places that will store luggage for you. Useful if you’re in a place where you don’t want to walk around with your bags all day.
• Vintage Obscura Radio curates songs found and posted to a Reddit community, each of which had fewer than 30,000 views on YouTube at the time of discovery and was released before the year 2000.
• Damien Charlotin has created a database that tracks legal decisions where generative AI produced hallucinated content.
• An excellent tool for finding album artwork, particularly useful for updates to Album Club websites.
• Added Ultion smart locks to my potential home upgrade list.
  

Books

• Nearly finished Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins. It’s excellent.
  

Next week: Welcoming our eldest son home, and my third time at Interesting.