Weeknotes #361 — Willy Warmer

In retrospect, the first two weeks of January were a honeymoon period after the Christmas break. This week was much tougher. At work I started something, got interrupted, and then as I tackled the second thing I’d get interrupted again. It was a week of trying to follow the threads back to the thing I was working on prior to the latest interruption. I rarely need to continue working in the evening once I get home from the office, but this week was an exception. And I still didn’t finish everything I wanted to.

Encouraged by other members of the cycling club and the long-range weather forecast, I’d signed up to The Willy Warmer, a cheekily named 209km ride through the Berkshire countryside. The name comes from it being organised by Willesden Cycling Club, who are celebrating their 100th birthday this year. The ride set off on Saturday from Chalfont St Peter, which is only an hour away from my house by bike, so it made sense to ride over to the start. (This had the added benefit of leaving my wife with the car, so she could come and pick me up if I got stuck. I’m not just a pretty face.) This meant getting up just after 5am. So part of my week was filled with a little anxiety of trying to get some sleep, minimising how tired I would feel on Saturday morning before I even got going.

Last summer, I tackled a couple of 200km rides and based on these experiences I anticipated that I’d be back at the start by about 5:30pm, an hour or so after it got dark. But this ride felt much tougher than I expected, and it ended up being closer to 8pm when we finished. Clothing choices were difficult: I felt that I was wearing all the right gear for the conditions, but before it started raining I was generally sweating at the top of the climbs and freezing on the descents. Our group of four from the club became three quite early on when our strongest rider started pushing a bit more. Another member of our group developed a problem with his left pedal which meant that it became increasingly difficult to clip out, something that got slightly more terrifying for him each time we came to a stop.

Riding home from a finish isn’t something that I relish, but it somehow feels different as you know you are done and this is just a few bonus miles on the clock. The three of us were tired and wet, but in good humour. We even started singing a bit until a hill took away the breath required. Unfortunately, we lost another of our team halfway between Amersham and Chesham. He’d had a flat earlier in the day which had sealed itself up, but was now terminal. He called his wife to pick him up. On a sunny afternoon I would have waited with him, but the dark, soaking wet night meant that I wasn’t going to hang around. So the two of us made our way back through the final few miles, getting home just before 10pm.

It’s not the biggest ride I’ve ever done, but it felt like one of the toughest. A poor night’s sleep and the weird imbalances I felt in my body made me feel like I had a hangover for most of Sunday. And then it was time to go back to work.

Aside from my cycling adventure, this was a week in which I:

• Dealt with excessive noise from the floor above us in our office as the landlord started the next major part of their building works.
• Had the weekly project meeting for our sister company’s office refurbishment works. The project will have a staffing change, which will result in us working with someone I hired about a decade ago. It’s good to see them again.
• Met with the Finance and Legal teams from both companies to agree next steps towards signing our service agreement for the shared facilities in our office.
• Started preparing for an internal audit, walking colleagues through my interpretation of what is required from us.
• Along with our CTO, had a catch-up with one of our divisional CIOs, who was visiting our London office for the day.
• Had a meeting with our Head of People and Culture to go through a list of HR-related topics that sit within my space.
• Prepared and submitted a one-page summary of our proposal for how we want to manage requests for second laptops.
• Updated slides for three governance committees, all of which are meeting next week.
• Had a couple of meetings with a colleague on the strategy for our part of the organisation, and how we in the Technology and Real Estate team could support the business goals.
• Talked to a colleague about their planning for Microsoft Copilot training in some of our regional offices.
• Met with our Diversity and Inclusion manager to get an understanding of where our group fits into the bigger picture across the organisation.
• Had a meeting with our disability-focused subgroup of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee to discuss and agree on plans and dates for this year.
• Met with the project team working to replace our default PDF editor, to agree the rollout approach, training plan, communications and schedule.
• Investigated why our office digital signage players had stopped streaming video. We tracked down the problem to an open-source package that is used as a software component by the manufacturer. Someone had already raised an issue on GitHub and it wasn’t long before another user implemented a fix.
• Had a couple of one-on-one meetings with members of our department that I don’t speak to that frequently.
• Created a technical questionnaire for our prospective landlords in the city where we have most recently established a presence.
• Met with our main technical managed service provider to discuss potential changes to how they access our infrastructure.
• Met with a global tax, audit and advisory firm to discuss their recent work with us as well as a broader review of the technology landscape.
• Had my first staff meeting of the new year.
• Got lots of value out of the latest M365 Change Community Round Up meeting. This monthly event feels like a well-kept secret, with about 50 people joining the Teams call. The updates and quality of the discussion and chat are very good.
• Enjoyed our team’s first Lean Coffee of 2026.
• Met with my executive partner at our technology advisory consultancy. I have a lot of work to do to leverage their organisation more this year, and need to carve out some time to make sure it gets done.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Absolutely loved this episode of Twenty Thousand Hertz that gives an excellent explanation of ‘the loudness wars’, where songs and albums were mastered with excessive volume, taking away all of the light and shade from a recording.
  

Articles

• Manuel Moreale’s thoughts on his People and Blogs project is good but uncomfortable reading. I know how it feels to start a project and wonder if there is anybody out there that it is resonating with. His blog and its associated sites feel like some of the most beautifully-designed pages on the web. I’ve only recently discovered People and Blogs and have a backlog of interviews to work through.
• The crazily large marketing technology landscape graphic came up in conversation this week. I went to find the latest example and wasn’t surprised to see that it is practically unreadable, with 15,384 tools on the map.
• Lindy West’s article in The Guardian about leaving Twitter was written over nine years ago, but still feels perennial. Manton Reece links to it in his book on Indie Microblogging. In that book he makes a compelling case for the open web instead of any of the social media platforms and I increasingly feel that he is right.
  

On 29 December, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted: “What’s the most important thing you want to see Twitter improve or create in 2017?” One user responded: “Comprehensive plan for getting rid of the Nazis.”

“We’ve been working on our policies and controls,” Dorsey replied. “What’s the next most critical thing?” Oh, what’s our second-highest priority after Nazis? I’d say No 2 is also Nazis. And No 3. In fact, you can just go ahead and slide “Nazis” into the top 100 spots. Get back to me when your website isn’t a roiling rat-king of Nazis.

• 2026 marks a decade since the UK Brexit referendum. The Financial Times also reports that UK consumer confidence has now gone a decade without a positive reading. Correlation isn’t causation, but we know that Brexit hasn’t helped us economically. To me, it’s incredible that so many people in the UK are viewing Nigel Farage’s Reform party as the answer to a problem that he is largely responsible for creating.
• Microsoft’s Bitlocker encryption technology protects your (or your organisation’s) data from rogue prying eyes, but it doesn’t protect you from government agencies.
• Every day there are stories like this one that shows how the White House altered a photo before posting it on social media. We laughed nine years ago during Trump’s first term when Kellyanne Conway used the phrase “alternative facts” but it’s not funny anymore. From my perspective, this felt like the first big crack in how we do things, which has a direct line to the disinformation hellscape that we are now living in.
  

Video

• Our youngest son and his friends are planning a cycling holiday this year. They are busy doing weekday indoor rides and longer outdoor rides at the weekend. Serendipitously, Katie Kookaburra posted a video to her YouTube channel about the things she would do (or not do) if she started cycling from scratch, knowing what she knows now. Katie got into cycling around about the same time that I did, and has built a lovely YouTube channel from her adventures. The joy she gets from being out on the bike comes through so loudly in her videos.

• Continued watching series two of The Night Manager. It has some ridiculously implausible moments that had us shouting “why the hell would he do that‽”, but it’s good enough for us to keep watching.
• Spotted that Jeff Buckley Live in Chicago is on iPlayer. I’m sure I’ve heard the audio from the concert in one of the albums I bought in the 1990s, but glancing at his Wikipedia discography I’m not sure where. Dream Brother and Mojo Pin are both incredible live.
  

Audio

• Two Album Clubs across two successive days.
• Our host at the WB-40 Album Club played us Mezmerize by System of a Down. I’d heard of the band, but this was my first encounter with their music. Not an album that I would have picked off the shelf and stuck with, but the playing was incredible.
• At our in-person ‘original gangsta’ Album Club we heard the self-titled album by This Will Destroy You. Super moody, cinematic and atmospheric instrumental music. As I sat there listening I started trying to remember a song that some of the motifs reminded me of. Once the album stopped, I remembered that it was this. I have no idea where I heard this or anything about the band, but it was good to hear it again.

Books

• Nearly finished Indie Microblogging by Manton Reece.
  

Next week: My calendar, bursting at the seams.