Weeknotes #352 — Doing thought work

A regular week, back in the office after last week’s trip to Barcelona. Things have suddenly turned very cold here in the UK. It’s feeling dark and wintry.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the weekly call with our audio-visual design company and agreed the design change to swap the digital signal processor for a different model.
• Met for a short debrief of the ‘Microsoft Copilot Week’ we held a couple of weeks ago.
• Joined our Copilot working group meeting. We had a brilliant demonstration from one of our colleagues in the front office on how she is using the tools. For years, in our Technology team, we have discussed the concept of people becoming ‘citizen developers’. We saw this as largely positive, as long as it is visible to us; we want to avoid the age-old situation of someone turning up at Technology’s doorstep with a critical Microsoft Access database that is now running some core part of the firm, but the person responsible for it has left. It seems that the motivation to experiment with Copilot is enough to get many people interested in going further. We talked about when it would be appropriate for someone outside of the Technology team to reach for Copilot Studio. I’m not sure where the boundaries lie or what needs to be in place to make sure that this work is done in a safe way, but we’ll need to think about it.
• Met with colleagues to discuss real-time audio translation in Teams meetings using Microsoft Copilot Interpreter, and the process we would need to follow to get it reviewed and approved for use within the organisation.
• Took part in our development team’s retrospective and sprint planning meeting.
• Spent time with our project manager to review the backlog of items on our Kanban board.
• Joined the kickoff meeting for an internal audit that is focused on our front office colleagues, but touches our technology space.
• Met with colleagues in our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team to agree the message and content for an upcoming ‘fireside chat’ on disability rights.
• Had my monthly call with my executive partner at our technology research consultancy vendor. It was good to catch up after last week’s conference.
• Met with our contract staff supplier to discuss their planned system replacement and its potential impact on us.
• Sat in on a briefing from the Economist Intelligence Unit where they shared a global and regional outlook, with particular focus on Africa.
• Had a conversation about how we manage people data throughout our organisation, and took an action to follow up with the core team that owns the technology.
• Joined the third ‘open house’ meeting of the Society of Hopeful Technologists. There are so many wonderful people involved with this initiative, doing excellent work to build on the meetings and discussions that we’ve had so far. Meeting interesting folk in the breakout room during one of these discussions is a joy.
• Had my first ever GitHub pull request accepted. My code is now part of the Feedbin connector for Tapestry.
• With some help from ChatGPT, managed to find a solution for publishing to this website and getting the posts picked up by micro.blog without having to disable and re-enable Cloudflare every time.
• Delighted in having our stairs carpet replaced. Our last carpet had 20 years of service and it was in a bit of a sorry state, with the bottom step becoming threadbare. It’s amazing how soft and bouncy the stairs are now. We’re still squealing with delight every time we use them.
• Met a couple of friends for a lovely dinner at Zaza in Berkhamsted, who we met through our children’s running club. We both now have one of our boys at university in the USA, so it was interesting to compare notes on how they are getting on.
• Had a follow-up with the gastroenterologist after my colonoscopy a few weeks ago. He found absolutely nothing wrong, so now wants to do a couple more tests in the next few weeks.
• Went to a great talk hosted by the Internet Archive about Cory Doctorow’s new book, Enshittification. He spoke for half an hour or so and then the excellent hosts did a great job of fielding questions from the chat. Internet Archive have some excellent events lined up which are worth checking out.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Caught up with this good 404 Media interview with Joshua Aaron, creator of the ICEBlock app. There is no justification for removing this app from the iOS App Store.
• It was fascinating to hear Troy Hunt talk about the challenges of sending large bursts of email on his weekly update. The nature of his data breach notification service at Have I Been Pwned means that when he loads a large breach, he suddenly has to send out lots of notification emails to subscribers. These can get throttled or marked as spam by the recipient mail servers, so he’s had to implement an outbound mail queue for popular domains to try and solve the problem.
  

Articles

• One day my journey between London Euston and Berkhamsted won’t be like travelling through a series of Faraday cages. I’m honestly not sure if that’s a good thing or not. Sometimes being disconnected is a feature, and forces you to do disconnected things.
• Heather Burns writes about how we should be concerned about Christian Nationalist rhetoric appearing at a public inquiry.
• Michael Tsai talks about ‘needy software’, and how it’s now impractical to live with auto updates turned off. It’s more about the development team’s needs than those of the end users. I think about that every week when Microsoft Office demands an update that forces all of my documents to close and reopen, with no noticeable feature changes when it happens.
  

Video

• BBC Archive posted another fascinating video from their technology archives, this time from 1979. Will Computers Revolutionise Education?
  

• I found myself going down a YouTube rabbit hole of watching people react to hearing Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights for the first time. Finnish vocal coach Anna Vaskelainen’s reaction is a joy, and I also loved Elizabeth Zharoff’s too.
• Bumbling about YouTube looking at these videos led me to Hue and Cry’s live cover version of Bush’s The Man With The Child In His Eyes from 1989. Superb.
  

• Finished watching Girlbands Forever on iPlayer. I didn’t follow the girl bands through the late 1990s and early 2000s. Although I recognised the big hits, most of the content and the personalities were new to me. Like its male counterpart, it’s an excellent slice of pop culture history.
  

Books

• Still reading Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy. I’ve loved discovering Pilvi Takala’s performance art, particularly The Trainee, where she starts doing weird things in the office at work and seeing what the impact is on the social cohesion of everyone around her. Sitting there “doing thought work” is the new staring out the window.
  

Next week: Two Album Clubs, and the start of the deployment phase for one of our key projects.