Weeknotes #360 — Carefree

I really enjoyed this week. A couple of projects came to a conclusion, something that is usually anticipated long in advance but never fails to feel like a little surprise when it happens. I spent four days in the office, partly to be on-hand as we reopened our refurbished external-facing meeting rooms, and partly for convenience as I was going out with some colleagues on Friday night. I feel that I’m still carrying some of the good feeling from having relaxed at Christmas. I’m also having some good conversations about our priorities and planning for the year. As always, there’s too much to do, but it isn’t drowning me.

This was a week in which I:

• Was happy to see our external meeting room space go live after the extensive refurbishment. The facilities are shared with a sister company, and we are now responsible for the technology that sits within the rooms. Feedback so far has been very positive, justifying the design choices that we made. We have a small list of issues to follow up with.
• Had our final weekly meeting with our audio-visual design consultancy. We’ve been speaking every week for the past few years, so it will be strange to stop.
• Had the weekly meeting with our sister company on the refurbishment project, as well as preparing a slide for and attending the project’s monthly steering committee.
• Wrote a slide for two of our governance committees with an update on our document management project. I also reviewed and submitted a slide for one of our security projects, as well as a slide deck on our proposed approach for requests for additional corporate laptops.
• Took part in our quarterly committee on information risk.
• Met with a colleague to review our approach to the digital signage setup in our office. Our footprint and content have grown, so it’s time that we start to formalise our setup a little more.
• Participated in our development team’s retro and sprint planning meeting.
• Joined our fortnightly Microsoft Copilot working group where we heard from a guest about relevant things they had seen at the recent Microsoft Ignite conference. Microsoft are pushing Facilitator as a key part of online meetings, but I find the tool more of a distraction than a help. It seems far too noisy. You might already be chairing a meeting and contributing to the conversation, but you’re now expected to keep up with the Facilitator-generated summaries and interventions in the chat as well? It feels like a case of technologists implementing what makes sense in theory versus how people run a good meeting in practice.
• Caught up with lots of stray notes from last year, putting a few actions into the right places for follow-up.
• Met with our contract staff supplier to discuss their offering as well as issues with the service that I’ve encountered in the past.
• Joined our monthly Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee meeting. I’m thinking about how to use a theory of change to get our efforts focused.
• Caught up with our account manager at our technology advisory vendor.
• Had my year-end performance review and catch-up with my boss.
• Enjoyed a lovely evening out with colleagues, taking a look at the Nigerian Modernism exhibition at the Tate Modern. It has been many years since I wandered around a gallery, reading about the artists as I viewed their work, and the evening had an air of nostalgia. My favourite piece was Untitled by Georgina Beier, shown below, as it made me laugh when I spotted the red-headed guy at the top of the painting. I found an error in one of the rooms, where the paintings didn’t align with the descriptions on the wall label. I pointed it out to one of the staff and couldn’t believe that nobody had mentioned it before. We finished off our evening in the Founders Arms, a place that I used to come to 25 years ago and really hadn’t changed much. Eight of us went out, all from different countries — Brazil, France, Iran, Lesotho, Nigeria, Peru, the UK and Uganda — and it was a reminder of how diverse our office is.
  

• Wrestled with the train service, which seems to have got a lot worse recently. One evening I ran for a train which turned out to be the last one out of Euston not affected by an incident, which resulted in a bunch of friends getting home by cab. The train company is making a habit of services with reduced numbers of carriages, especially in the morning, which makes things extra special.
• Felt as though our house has decided to let go all at once. Our back gate seems to have completely rotted and fallen in, and I’ve noticed that our fence that separates us from our neighbours is severely bowed. Along with a repair to our roof, we’ve got a lot of things to pay for over the next few months. We sat down and updated our financial spreadsheet that sees us all the way to when both our boys should have finished university, if that’s where they want to head.
• Tried to stop eating like it’s still Christmas. Someone opened a fresh box of Quality Street in the office on Thursday and it was carnage.
• Signed up to The Willy Warmer, a 200km Audax ride through the Berkshire countryside next Saturday. Riding to and from the start means that it will be a long day in the saddle. I’m going to need to charge up my Big Light. I don’t think I’ve made it out on my bike so far this year due to the rain and ice, opting for indoor rides instead. The forecast looks good; I reserve the right to waive my place if it changes.
• Was so pleased to hear that my youngest son thinks he’s getting better at road cycling, feeling that he is able to keep up with the rest of his friends. His indoor sessions on TrainerRoad are paying off.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Interesting episode of the Microsoft Teams Insider podcast where Bill Compton, Head of Digital Adoption at Centrica, talks about how he approaches his work in his 22,000-person organisation.
• The 404 Media Podcast episode with Craig Silverman on the topic of OSINT (open source intelligence) had the strange side effect of educating me about the existence of ads.txt, a transparent text file-based system to combat advertising fraud. The whole interview is interesting, but this part starts around 30 minutes into the discussion.
• I enjoyed episode one of the Scarred For Life podcast, where the hosts shared the media from their childhood in the 1970s and 1980s that affected them. Looking back, it was a weird time to grow up in the UK with such bizarre shows and brutal public information films.
  

Articles

• The first notable reminder of the year to always — ALWAYS — check the text generated by an AI chatbot before submitting it as your work. This guy subsequently retired in a hurry.
  

Video

• For, I don’t know — no reason that I could POSSIBLY think of — I started watching The World at War, the documentary series on World War II from the early 1970s, narrated by Laurence Olivier. Here in the UK it’s currently available to stream on Channel 4. With a running time of nearly a whole day, it’s going to keep me going for a bit. The first two episodes are very well made, and it’s fascinating to see interviews with people who lived through the experience.
• I was a little sceptical last week, but The Night Manager has pulled me in and I’m now just enjoying it.
• Continued my journey through Fred Astaire’s musical films by watching Carefree, a strange little movie from 1938 with a problematic storyline. Irving Berlin wrote the few songs that are in the film. Of these, Change Partners has to be one of the best in any of Astaire’s movies. It’s so beautiful, especially the instrumental coda in the bit where he and Ginger Rogers go outside. I’ve known the song for years, but hearing it again I’ve not been able to get it out of my head.

Web

• I’ve signed up to attend this online event, hosted by the Internet Archive, on AI as Normal Technology on 29 January. The presenters have written a book called AI Snake Oil, which details “why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own.” I’ve seen Anil Dash post on this topic, and agree that we should be looking at this technology in the same way that we look at anything else that’s new. It should be an interesting chat.
  

Books

• Continued reading Indie Microblogging by Manton Reece. He’s packed a lot in here.
  

Next week: An online Album Club, and probably riding an Audax.