I was out the door early on Tuesday to head to Heathrow to pick up our eldest son, who has come back from university for the summer. It’s great to have him back; the house is a very different place with him in it. He arrived on a cold and drizzly day and had to listen to my insistence that this was an anomaly compared with the past few weeks. By the end of the weekend we were all trying to stay cool as the temperatures ramped up beyond 30°C. The cats have been expressing their views on the weather through their body language, flopping to the ground and stretching themselves out every chance they get.

The heat means that my walks to the office from Euston will be on hiatus until it passes. I’d rather sacrifice the walk for a dry shirt.

On Sunday my eldest son and I drove over to my mum and dad’s place for a lovely lunch and passed what we thought was a tornado next to the motorway. My weather forecasting neighbour Brian told me that it was actually a dust devil, the difference being that tornadoes form from the sky downwards whereas dust devils start from the ground and head up. Either way, it seemed nuts.

Aside from trying to keep cool, this was a week in which I:

• Rewrote the business case and approach documents for one of our projects. Microsoft Copilot was very helpful; I fed it the original files, including comments made by colleagues from their reviews, told it what I wanted to do with my rewrite, and it offered reams of suggested changes, a lot of which I incorporated back into the text.
• Met with the project team for the fit-out of our newest office for our weekly call, and to review the furniture procurement plan.
• Took part in our development team’s fortnightly sprint planning meeting, the first since our new team member got us back up to full strength.
• Reviewed the draft internal scorecard for our department.
• Had a coffee with an old colleague from a previous firm who has decided to retire. I’m not quite 50, but I’m definitely moving into the phase of life where people around me are calling time on work to go and do something else.
• Learned about how one of our technical infrastructure teams is structured and how the internal chargeback mechanisms work for their services.
• Met with the project team for one of our key initiatives and worked through the set of issues collected since our last meeting.
• Had a couple of calls with my executive partner at our technology research and advisory firm, continuing our discussion about a specific issue I am working through as well as our general monthly catch-up.
• Met with colleagues across the company to talk about a specific vendor product that we plan to rationalise and how we might get there.
• Caught up with our sister company to talk about the services we provide in a shared space, and the steps we are collaborating on to improve the end-user experience.
• Had some correspondence relating to a travel insurance claim from over a year ago. I called the company and made the point that it was unlikely that we would have any of the details after all this time, which they understood.
• Thoroughly enjoyed this year’s Interesting conference, my third¹. On the morning of the event, I noticed that there were still tickets available, presumably from people who had asked for a refund as they could no longer come, so I messaged a few people who I thought might enjoy it to see if they wanted to come. One did. I was also heading there with a couple of friends from the WB-40 podcast Signal group who had also never been before. Everyone had a brilliant time, watching 10-minute presentations from inspirational speakers, some of whom were trying their hand at presenting for the first time. We heard about Bertolt Brecht, growing up in the UK care system in the 1960s and 1970s, the joy of growing flowers from seeds, the brilliance of Radiohead’s song Videotape, trying to create a magazine of the best overlooked content from other magazines, and the very dubious history of the people behind Sea-Monkeys.
  

• Picked up a cheap second-hand road bike from a fellow cycling club member for my son to use while he’s back from uni. I fitted some SPD pedals and bottle cages that I had spare, and sent my son to the local bike shop for two new tyres as the old ones looked as though they could blow at any moment, and fitted some new cleats to his cycling shoes. I’m quite pleased with how little we had to spend to get him up and running. We got out for a ride together on Saturday morning, following the scheduled club ride route but 30 minutes behind everyone else. It was brilliant.
  

• Sorted out my son’s insurance on our second car, after an unexplained system anomaly when I tried to do it online.
• Went for my biennial eye test. I’ve been short-sighted and worn glasses since I was nine years old, but in recent years I’ve had to move to varifocals as my near vision has also started to deteriorate. My prescription has changed again as it always seems to do, with my distance vision being roughly the same but my reading prescription being 33% worse than it was before. It’s never a cheap visit, but I do like to support the high street optician as it’s important that they are around for people who can’t easily access online spectacle shops.
  

Media

Articles

• Benedict Evans’s latest version of his presentation AI eats the world is a must-read.
• I’d been meaning to get my head around passkeys for a while. Scott Helme gives a useful introduction to what they are and how they work.
• A futures exchange for computing capacity is in the works, which feels somewhat inevitable in 2026. I wonder how much this will be utilised by companies wishing to hedge their future AI spend and how much will be speculation.
• The US is now offering aid to African countries in exchange for up to 25 years of health data. “Critics have likened these transactional agreements to a form of digital and genomic colonialism, warning that data could be made available to unnamed private US corporations, including pharmaceutical companies and big data analytics groups.”
• Interesting how East African countries are looking to curb imports of used clothes, known as ‘mitumba’, in order to try to develop their domestic businesses, and to read the range of views from people who live and work there.
  

Video

• My boys got me watching the GCN team’s effort to try and beat the 51-year-old Cardiff-Monmouth-Cardiff cycling speed record as it features an interview with local legend Michael Broadwith. It’s interesting to think how some of these records have been made much more difficult to match due to road changes and the installation of traffic lights.
• Finished Race Across the World. I won’t spoil it, but the winners were absolutely worthy champions and thoroughly deserved it. I love this show and can’t wait for the next series.
  

Audio

• musomuso has a review of Paul Draper’s new album that doesn’t hold back on how pointless the project seems. I don’t understand why you would listen to these songs instead of the originals.
  

Web

• Someone has put together a website to track Reform UK councillors who have left their positions for reasons such as “resigned after having never attended a council meeting”, “resigned from Reform after reports he had called the Holocaust a hoax” and “suspended for saying Nigerians should be melted down and used to fill potholes”. So far, they have lost councillors at a rate of over one per day.
  

Books

• Finished reading Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins and started writing up my thoughts on it.
• Started reading Kae Tempest‘s new novel, Having Spent Life Seeking. It’s a physical book that I picked up at his event, which is a problem due to our house rule of having one and only one of either windows open or lights on, but not both, in our rooms in the evening. So, I’ve had to resort to picking up a Kindle book to read in the dark as well. Tsunami Kids by Paul Forkan and Rob Forkan is good so far. This brought back memories of my own childhood:
  

Next week: Somehow getting through 35°C heat in London, an online Album Club, meeting a technology CEO and going on a long bike ride.

1. You can read my write-ups from 2025 and 2023. ↩

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.

A four-day week due to the plainly named Early May bank holiday in the UK. Recovery from the big bike ride felt good; unlike the year before, I had no major after-effects apart from slightly stiff legs and feeling thirsty for a couple of days. I recounted the tale of the ride to colleagues who humoured me when they found themselves hearing my stories for a second or third time.

Following a long ride, after a couple of days’ recovery, I inevitably find myself scouring the Audax UK website looking for the next adventure. London-Anglesey-London looks particularly interesting and somewhat ridiculous, covering 1,000 km in 75 hours. You set off at 10pm, riding overnight and through the first day to get the first 400 km done. After a sleep you then tackle 300 km on each of days two and three. I haven’t been able to find much about the ride online apart from this gorgeous video made back in 2022. My experience of almost falling asleep on the bike makes me very hesitant about tackling something like this. Riding with a friend would work, but over that distance it is difficult to be sure that you will keep riding together, if you could even find someone who is willing to give it a go in the first place.

This was a week in which I:

• Attended our divisional technology Architecture Board meeting, joining it from my pocket on Teams as I walked to the City from Euston. It got me thinking about how and where decisions are made and who is in the room. Sometimes there are lots of good questions, but the people who need to hear them and answer them aren’t part of the group. But you can’t have everyone in the room in one giant meeting. Governance is hard.
• Continued to explore the concept of ‘architecture as a service’, meeting up with different contacts in two separate meetings to discuss what we’re looking for. We’ve got another conversation lined up for next week as well as the names of some vendors to talk to. The discussions helped us to refine what it is that we’re looking for.
• Met with colleagues to review responses to a request for proposal for a technology fit-out of one of our offices, agreeing how we will proceed.
• Had some catch-up meetings with a colleague who has recently been out of the office for a while. It’s so good to have them back.
• Met with colleagues to review updates to the dashboards that are being delivered by one of our projects.
• Had a meeting with an analyst from our technology research and consulting vendor, discussing the market for alternative tools to in the data governance/compliance space. Our analyst had only recently left Microsoft, and it was interesting to hear a bit about the history of the product.
• Joined an online ‘show and tell’ event hosted by the people at the heart of the nascent Society of Hopeful Technologists. There has been a lot of hard work behind the scenes, and some exciting plans for the future. I’ve not been able to keep up to date with the chats in the Signal groups in real time, but when I do catch up there are always so many interesting things in them.
• Started digging into Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard for making tools available to large language model-powered systems. Lots of the tools that I use — Remember The Milk, Drafts, Readwise — already have implementations that can be trivially connected to AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude. I connected Remember The Milk and Drafts to Claude Cowork and started discussing how I might tweak my information workflow. It was interesting context to catch up with Simon Willison’s post on MCP’s prompt injection problems.
• Had to get the Metropolitan Line to Chesham one evening when the mainline trains from Euston stopped working. Taking the Met Line actually results in a cost saving on my train fare, although there is often a £20 cab ride when I get there. This time I had the good fortune to be on the Tube with a friend, whose kind husband picked us up from the station.
• Changed our eldest son’s flight back from the US for the summer break. It’s hard to believe that he’s been gone for the best part of a year already.
• Enjoyed a fantastic club ride on a fast, flat route that took us north of the Chiltern Hills. Now that summer is here — or, at least, it’s light earlier in the morning — we’re setting off 30 minutes earlier and doing longer rides, typically over 80 km instead of our usual 60 km.
  

Media

Articles

• The story of PocketOS losing all of their production data while working with AI is a shocker. It’s not just one failure, but multiple, and not all directly attributable to AI. They have since recovered, after finding that their own backups had not been running for three months.
• Google has a big ownership stake in Anthropic. Not long ago, it felt that it would be difficult for Google to lose the battle to be dominant in the AI space, given its deep pockets to be able to keep funding their AI tools without advertising revenue from those tools directly. But now that its free cash flow is predicted to hit zero in 2027, I’m not so sure.
• Ian Dunt’s column on “how Keir Starmer has failed us” is an excellent read, but a depressing one.
  

The Prime Minister’s greatest failure is his operational absence. British politics relies on a figure at the top setting the path forward. They tell a story about what they are trying to do. This story forms their electoral mandate and it guides the civil service in what the prime minister wants. It grants ministers authority. It directs spending decisions. It resolves disputes between government departments.

Under Starmer, this guiding effort has been almost completely absent. Outside of net zero and, to a certain extent, housing, there has been a complete absence of leadership.

• ‘Together Mode’ in Teams is being retired. I don’t think I ever sat through a whole meeting with it turned on. It was a fun gimmick at the start of the pandemic, when so many people were adjusting to life on video calls, but never seemed like the optimal way to view other participants in the virtual room. Even slight differences in how close people sat to their cameras resulted in silly sizing issues between everyone in the meeting.
• My recent NAS RAID rebuild after a couple of drive failures was time-consuming and expensive. It’s hard to imagine what it takes to keep 210 petabytes of material online at the Internet Archive, but it’s getting more difficult and much more expensive. If you ever use the Internet Archive, Wikipedia or any other sites that store vast amounts of reference material, now would be a good time to set up a regular donation.
• I had not previously heard of ‘Browsergate’, where LinkedIn are allegedly cataloguing installed extensions on people’s browsers. This is data that they can trivially link to individuals, because those individuals are logged into LinkedIn and are visiting it in their web browser.
• Research on whether one ‘bad apple’ can ruin your team:
  

Putting up with a nightmare person might feel like part of the normal ups and downs of team work, but the research shows that it imposes an invisible tax on everyone else in the group.

Also, shout out to the good apples: if you’ve got someone who can keep the team flowing in harmony, who can help everyone stay on track despite the moaning around them, then they’re probably doing more for the team than they get credited with. Your good apples must be protected at all costs.

Video

• Finished watching Hulk Hogan: Real American. I have a fascination with the stories and spectacle of 1980s/early 1990s-era wrestling, seeded when my brothers and I got into watching it on TV as children. Our first encounter was WrestleMania V in 1989, in which Hogan won the title fight at the end of the evening. He was the clear king of the ring and we loved watching him. This documentary does a reasonable job of covering his story, including not only his career highlights but also his steroid abuse, the breakdown of his marriage, his support for Donald Trump, his racist comments caught on tape and the crowd booing him at an event launching Netflix’s tie-in with the WWE. Even the talking heads from the wrestling business who didn’t rate him as a wrestler noted how important he was in building the business into what it became.
• Enjoyed some videos from the inappropriately named Techmoan YouTube channel, including a tour of an amazing (and amazingly complex) hi-fi setup that can play just about anything, and an insight into the world of digital HD movies on VHS tapes.
• Race Across the World is still great. I have no idea who will win this season.
• We watched Heretic (2024) after hearing it recommended by Naomi Smith on a recent episode of the Quiet Riot podcast. I was expecting a cerebral dialogue-filled movie but it turned into a full-on horror show. Who knew that Hugh Grant could be so menacing?
• Watching Fred Dibnah scale a massive chimney stack with zero safety gear in order to demolish it brick by brick is completely mesmerising.
  

Audio

• Only realised on Wednesday that a new Aldous Harding album was being released on Friday. I ordered a copy via Bandcamp and the vinyl turned up at my house on the day of release. Very impressive.
  

Books

• Still reading Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins. There’s so much good stuff in here.
  

Next week: A friend’s book launch.

A quiet week at work. There were two public holidays in South Africa on Monday and Friday, so quite a few of our SA-based colleagues took the other three days as leave. I had some nice gaps in my diary to allow me to get things done.

I took Friday off to relax ahead of an early start on Saturday, but ended up spending a lot of it in Bedford, trying to work out how to contact my bank as we attempted to buy a used car. I’d sent the transfer on Thursday but the payment was blocked as suspected fraud. This is a great feature — thank you for looking out for us, bank people — but it is missing one essential ingredient: letting the account holder know that the payment has been blocked. Eventually we found a phone number for the bank, got hold of the right person, and discovered what had happened. They unblocked the payment, the seller acknowledged receipt, and we could then drive away. After our misadventure with buying a 15-year-old Mini that died after 18 months, costing us a small fortune, we’ve gone the other way and bought a second-hand car from a dealer with an extended warranty. Hopefully this will mean that we have a limited financial downside for the next four years or so.

Aside from riding the London Wales London Audax over the weekend, this was a week in which I:

• Had an impromptu chat with our CTO about some things that have been bugging me about the current state of consumer AI. I always get so much out of our conversations. I need to do some more thinking, and perhaps try to wrestle with my ideas by writing a blog post or two.
• Wrote a query on the topic of compliance and legal software to pose to an analyst from our technology research and advisory partner ahead of a meeting next week. I also had my monthly call with my executive partner at the firm, sharing some key documents that I have been working on.
• Spent time creating Microsoft Power Automate flows to help me keep my email inbox under control. I now have routines that run every morning, clearing out newsletters and time-sensitive informational updates, putting some of them in the bin and others into my archive once the time has passed that I am likely to read them. The Microsoft Copilot interface was great at helping me create the basic structure of a flow, and it seemed to be able to form queries in ways that I was unable to reproduce by hand.
• Represented our department at one of our regional governance committee meetings.
• Had our regular check-in with colleagues at our sister company on the building works in our offices.
• Met with a consultancy that is working with another part of our organisation to discuss our specific needs and to find out if it is worth talking further.
• Had our weekly project meeting for setting up a new office.
• Strategised with a colleague who is managing one of our key projects on how we can improve our approach to different aspects of the work, and had our regular project check-in meeting.
• Met with our account managers from one of the vendors we recently onboarded, giving them an overview of our company and a brief tour of our London office.
• Reviewed two profiles and introductory videos from applicants for our upcoming summer internship. The quality of the candidates was very impressive and made me think about how much easier it was for my generation back when we were looking for our first post-university roles.
• Had discussions with our People & Culture and Learning & Development teams on my personal development plan, and my proposal for plugging some of my gaps.
• Enjoyed listening to The Beach Boys’ Smile for the first time at the WB-40 Album Club.
  

Media

Articles

• It was a shock to read about the last-minute cancellation of RightsCon, the digital human rights conference, in Zambia.
• Rands’ guide to USB is superb. So useful. USB-C is a connector shape, not a protocol.
  

Books

• Still not spending anywhere near as much time reading this year as I would like. Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins is excellent, but I’m only snatching a few pages just before I go to sleep.
  

Next week: An online catch-up with the Society for Hopeful Technologists.

One of my lifelong school friends recently lost his dad, so on Monday I took the day off to attend the funeral. It was a lovely service, with many heartfelt and moving eulogies from family and friends, and a mix of Indian and American musical influences that included Ravi Shankar and Elvis Presley. I’m so glad I went.

One of my other school friends gave me a lift there and back. I love the opportunity to spend more time with him as we never ever seem to run out of things to talk about. On the way home, I pulled out Google Gemini and asked it:

I’m in the car with my lifelong friend of 40 years. We have an hour. Please give us 10 questions that we can both answer that would possibly reveal something to each other that we might not have known. Think carefully.

It didn’t disappoint. We only got through three of them by the time we rolled back into Berkhamsted:

1. The Invisible Pivot: “Was there a specific moment or decision in your life—one I wasn’t there for—that you think completely changed the trajectory of who you became?”
2. The Silent Season: “In all the years we’ve known each other, was there a period where you were struggling significantly more than you let on? What was really going through your head then?”
3. The Unsung Win: “What is an accomplishment or a ‘small win’ in your life that you are incredibly proud of, but for some reason, we never actually sat down and celebrated?”

I liked the tip at the end of the list, as this is exactly what happened:

Pro-Tip for the Drive: Don’t feel the need to rush through all ten. If question number two takes you forty minutes because it opens up a story you’ve never heard, you’ve won the game. Enjoy the ride.

I spent Wednesday and Thursday in Hemel Hempstead, renewing my First Aid at Work qualification. I’ve now been a first aider on and off for 25 years, but the renewal is so helpful. Fortunately, I don’t go around putting people’s arms in slings every week, so it’s great to get some practice every three years or so. I need to find somewhere that I can store the mnemonics so that they embed themselves even deeper into my brain. One of the other trainees commented that all of us on the course were of a certain age; where are the youngsters?

All of this meant that I only had two days at work, but they felt very productive. It was a good week.

This was also a week in which I:

• Had an excellent coffee catch-up with our CTO. I’m feeling hopeful and confident about the future. We have some great things ahead of us.
• Was pulled into some work with our Legal team.
• Raised multiple queries with our technology advisory vendor for advice on tools and services that other companies use.
• Met with colleagues to hear about our pilot graduate summer intake scheme that is running this year. It’s very exciting to be involved in something so positive in bringing young people into the organisation.
• Joined a call to review qualitative feedback about the audio-visual equipment and support that we provide in our shared meeting rooms. We had a very useful discussion, coming up with some ideas on how we can improve the experience for the people who use the rooms.
• Made some last-ditch attempts to find any relevant work experience for my son. I think young people have it really hard in so many ways compared to the simpler time when I grew up.
• Met up with an old work friend who moved to Berkhamsted over a decade ago, but whom I have almost never bumped into in town. We ate at Per Tutti, where they cook a lovely bowl of pasta. Food for the soul.
• Started refreshing next weekend’s weather forecast multiple times a day, crossing my fingers that it will be dry for the upcoming Big Bike Ride. I’ve also joined the WhatsApp group full of other riders who will be attempting the journey.
  

Media

Articles

• This Reform UK picture posted by Richard Tice is obviously AI-generated or manipulated, as you would expect. But what happens when photos like these become too convincing for us to tell whether they are real or fake?
• I love Matt Haughey’s “pro-level travel tips”. I may need to find a travel router, and will definitely be using ‘the pants hanger’ in future.
  

Video

• We finished watching season two of Beef. It seemed to lose its way somewhere along the line, ending up nowhere near as good as the first season.
• I’m still in love with Race Across the World. Meeting random people and staying with them in their homes, despite not being able to speak the same language, is the stuff of magic.
• We’re enjoying Rooster, with jokes that come thick and fast and make me laugh out loud each episode.
  

Audio

• As I left the office on Tuesday, I felt that I needed to put aside the podcasts and switch to some music. I put on Judy Garland’s concert at Carnegie Hall. By the time I’d made it to the train station, I’d been moved to tears twice. It’s that amazing. When I get into something, I tend to want to explore it in lots of different ways. I found out that the original mono vinyl version — the version most people will have heard over the years as the album established itself as a legendary recording — was remastered for CD in 2012. I had to buy a copy and can’t wait to listen to it. I’m going to enjoy hearing it back-to-back with the extended ‘as it happened’ CD that I already have.
  

Books

• Still enjoying Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins.
  

Next week: An online Album Club, more weather watching, and final prep for London Wales London again.

A good, solid week at work. It felt like I got lots done. I had a very busy end to the week, including a lot of socialising and an excellent long bike ride in the spring sunshine.

This was a week in which I:

• Agreed how we will move forward with a temporary setup in our new office — both technology and furniture — to allow our colleagues to get in and start using it. Synced up with all of the main project team members on our plans, including the project manager who was on holiday. I don’t like calling people when they are out of the office, but I figured that these decisions are things that they would want to be aware of before we committed.
• Updated the tender specification documents for the longer-term technology setup of this new office, cross-checking the bill of materials and updating the diagrams of the floor plan.
• Met with colleagues to discuss their need to accelerate part of their business process, given the possibilities and promise shown by generative AI. There are a few different ways for us to approach the problem.
• Held my team meeting with a slightly reduced group. One of the group is on an internal secondment to another department, and we are a few weeks away from having our new software developer start with us.
• Joined our internal Disability Network meeting for the first time, listening in to the forum on my walk to the office.
• Met with the project team running a document management initiative. We had a great conversation, uncovering a big requirement that we hadn’t realised we needed.
• Attended a very useful Gartner webinar on IT Organizational Design.
• Enjoyed a brilliant Learning Hour meeting hosted by one of our colleagues who has deep expertise in the Microsoft desktop stack. He took us through the big components of Intune, showing us how compliance and conditional access policies work, as well as how applications are packaged for deployment.
• Had a slightly frustrating day on Monday, half listening to a big town hall meeting that would have been ten times better in person, half trying to get some work done on the side, and not doing a satisfying job of either. Most of our colleagues are in another location; we’d be upset if we weren’t invited to join the big town hall events remotely, but they are very much geared to prioritise the people in the room.
• Ran our monthly facilities/real estate oversight forum, agreeing in principle to some additional audio-visual maintenance and improvements in our office.
• Joined the monthly M365 Change Community Round Up, hearing about significant updates that are coming down the pike. It’ll be interesting to see where Copilot Cowork lands once it exits the ‘Frontier Program’; will we get it as part of our Copilot licences or will we need to upgrade to Microsoft E7?
• Met up with an old colleague for a coffee, hearing about their journey since they left our company and what they want to do next.
• Had a call with the Programme Manager for Gartner’s CIO Community for the UK and Ireland ahead of the next summit in June. I’ve not been to one of these events before, but I’m looking forward to meeting new peers.
• Thought that I was losing my mind. On Sunday night I made a sandwich for work, but instead of putting it in the fridge, I put it into my work bag. The next morning I discovered my error and had to make a sandwich all over again, cursing myself under my breath. On Monday night I went to make my sandwich for Tuesday, repeating in my head like a mantra that I had to make sure I put it in the fridge. On Tuesday morning I found it in my work bag. At some point this tipped from being an amusing mistake to a mildly terrifying one. Maybe there’s just too much going on in my head.
• Struggled with getting my youngest son some work experience. I tried about a dozen friends from across the City but with hybrid working and complex internal processes it has so far proven impossible.
• Got my bike serviced. With London Wales London only two weeks away, it made sense to make sure that everything was working fine. They fitted a new chain and cassette, and checked over all of the other essentials. I’ve started looking at the long-term weather forecast, but unfortunately we are still just a bit too far out for anything to be certain.
• Enjoyed a lovely long bike ride with a friend from the cycling club. We met up after finishing the Saturday morning club ride and went out for another 130km or so, just to get some miles in. The weather was glorious. I’m glad I’ve found out that my leg warmers are too large, with one of them refusing to stay attached to my thigh, before I pack them for the ride in a couple of weeks’ time.
  

• Hosted the latest round of Album Club, playing Tears for Fears’s 1985 album Songs From The Big Chair, to almost universal acclaim. It’s an incredible record. I went for the slightly scratchy original vinyl, which sounded more dynamic than the remastered CD.
• Went out with three of the WB-40 Album Club crew to Kae Tempest’s book launch at the Roundhouse in London. Everyone who attended was given a hardback copy of his new book Having Spent Life Seeking, which after an evening of inspiring conversation I am really looking forward to reading. Tempest made reference to the connection between a piece of work, the creator of the work, and the person receiving the work; there is a deep connection with Clare Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, which I recently revisited. He also spoke movingly about “the incredible technology” of a novel, which allows you to put yourself in another person’s shoes, feel what they feel, and take that with you back into your everyday life. I have barely started to explore Tempest’s work, but he seems to be an incredible artist.
  

• Met up with some school friends on Friday night. A couple of them I haven’t seen in 20 years and now we’ve got together twice in the past six months or so. It’s lovely to be back in touch again.
• Had to call a boiler engineer after we lost hot water. It’s happened so many times over the years, and is always stressful for the first person to get in the shower. The engineer managed to be in and out in 15 minutes, replacing a part that had failed.
• Spent a lot of time on Sunday, working with Claude Cowork to think through a problem. It’s so good. I really do think that the people that still think AI is rubbish aren’t paying for access to the ‘deeper thinking’ models and the additional tools. I am sure the companies are losing money on my queries, so who knows how long this period will last? There is also going to be a gap between those who can pay for this stuff and those who can’t, which doesn’t sit well. At least Google searches were open to everyone.
• Started thinking that I need a new approach to my weeknotes. I want to keep posting them — as well as documenting my life, which is useful for me to look back on, it gives me a vehicle for regular writing practice. I’m wondering if the format needs a tweak. I’m never going to have the style and panache of someone like Alice Bartlett, but maybe leaving routine things on the cutting room floor will make them more enjoyable to write, and to read.
  

Media

Articles

• Benedict Evans’ article in his weekly paid newsletter, called Price with pride, is similar to Paul Forde and Rich Ziade’s conversation on their recent podcast that I highlighted last week. He says that “No one really knows what token capacity, token consumption, token cost, or token pricing will look like in five years.” On top of that, to Forde and Ziade’s point, nobody really knows how they will charge for digital products and services in a world where people can accelerate what they do using those tokens.
• Stories of people being arrested in Dubai for photographing events that they find themselves involved in, such as missile attacks by Iran, continue to astonish me.
  

Video

• Continued watching Race Across The World. They seem to have fewer teams than usual in this series so I was surprised that they eliminated one of them.
• Beef series two feels completely different to series one. It’s more like The White Lotus this time. We’re enjoying it.
• Watching University Challenge has become a Monday night routine, despite us only getting a handful of answers right each time. I’m looking forward to the final next week, and the presentation of the trophy in a random venue with a random celebrity.
  

Books

• I’m about halfway through reading Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins and I’m really enjoying it.
  

Next week: A funeral, and requalifying as a first-aider.

Despite last week being filled with illness and unexpected jobs that consumed me for days, it felt great to be back at my desk on Tuesday, so my time off must have been restful after all.

Over the weekend, my friend Nick texted me to ask how I planned to get to the office this week and whether I wanted to car share. I didn’t know what he was talking about. It turned out that the West Coast Main Line, which takes me from Berkhamsted to Euston, was undergoing some major upgrades and wouldn’t be open again until Thursday. Argh. The fallback route is taking the tube from Chesham, about 15 minutes’ drive from home. Taxis came to the rescue on Tuesday, and my wife helped me out on Wednesday. I never thought I’d miss the train service from Berkhamsted so much.

This was a week in which I:

• Finished off a few jobs around the house on Monday, wondering out loud how a week had passed and that it was time to go back to work already.
• Reviewed a draft request for quotations for some on-site technical training in one of our offices, and discussed the approach with the project manager.
• Interviewed two more candidates for the developer role in my team. By the end of the week we had made a decision on who we want to bring on board. It’s taken a very long time to review CVs and interview for this role, but I’m a strong believer in holding on for the right person. Our company is a fantastic place to work, and we owe it to ourselves to be picky about the next person that we bring on board.
• Met with a representative from one of our vendors to retrieve an ex-employee’s laptop.
• Took part in our information risk committee meeting.
• Attended our monthly Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee meeting.
• Stepped in to chair the project meeting for fitting out and equipping our newest office as the project manager was on holiday. We had a brief handover before he left, where he brought me up to speed with the myriad of changes on the project.
• Had a couple of meetings with someone on work experience in our office. Although they are the same age as my youngest son, it dawned on me that we now have people who were born in the financial crisis entering the workforce. Their questions were impressive and they seemed extremely polished.
• Met with colleagues and representatives from a new vendor for a final review of our master services agreement.
• Had one of our vendors come on-site to look at our recently installed boardroom table, determining where we need to drill holes for a table-mounted camera and cables for Teams Room consoles, as well as improving the setup of power delivery to USB charging sockets.
• Ran a Lean Coffee session with our team, the first one I have chaired in a while.
• Reviewed the input into our next formal governance committee meeting for one of our legal entities. I also attended one of these meetings on behalf of our department, reviewing business performance and leading the discussion on the relevant technology topics.
• Took part in a discussion and planning session for how we might upskill our Technology team and our executives on AI outside of the broad education that is taking place across the rest of the organisation.
• Met with a representative from a business school about a course that I have found to help plug a specific gap in my capabilities.
• Decided to go ahead and buy the fourth hard disk drive for my RAID array after seeing the price trend graph at PCPartPicker. I shut down the NAS, added the drive, restarted it, and with some guidance from Claude, worked out how to kick off a RAID 5 to RAID 6 migration. This process ended up running for nearly four days after I kicked it off on Wednesday evening. It also got me thinking about how the big cloud providers manage things like this. I’d love to see a ‘behind-the-scenes’ video.
  

• Decided to miss the Saturday morning club ride after the weather swung from 26°C on Wednesday to ‘feels like 1°C, with rain showers’ in just a few days. So many riders posted on Strava that they were frozen by the time they were done, so I didn’t regret my choice of jumping on the indoor trainer instead. However, I’ve realised that we’re now only three weeks away from the 2026 edition of London Wales London. I daren’t look at how my preparation this year compares to twelve months ago. I’ve started to look at the long-range forecast in the hope that the rain stays away; I won’t be riding if it will bucket down for the whole journey. I’m going to put my running on hold for a bit, just until this event is complete.
  

Media

Podcasts

• I’ve subscribed to too many podcasts, many of which are now publishing too many episodes. (Increased quantity isn’t always a feature, podcast publishers.) For the ones I prioritise above all others and listen to religiously, I’m now about a month behind. I’m trying to catch up by being even better at treating it like a stream instead of a bucket, fast-forwarding episodes where I find myself tuning out of the content, or skipping complete episodes where the content doesn’t feel central to what I want to know about.
• Paul Forde and Rich Ziade’s conversation about how consulting and development efforts should be priced in an age of AI is superb. What do you charge for your expertise at the start of a client relationship, when you can work on their problem and get some vibe-coded software stood up in a few hours, for a few dollars of tokens? There is so much to think about with this.
  

Rich: The first is acknowledging just how, like, exploding the mind this all is. This is the equivalent of me calling a restaurant saying, “Hey, we saw your website, we might want to book a reservation, but we’re not sure yet. Are you guys open Saturday?” And they’re like, “Yeah, we’re open Saturday.” “Okay, great. We’ll call you back.” And then an hour later, the restaurant’s van shows up, rolls out a leg of lamb on a spit, and says, “Well, listen, I don’t know if you’re booking this Saturday, but if you want to try the lamb, it’s here.”

Articles

• Ian Betteridge’s article on Claude Mythos, which is apparently being held back from public use as it is so adept at finding vulnerabilities in software, raises some interesting points about how these models ‘learned’ bad behaviours of humans, that they now mimic. But I still struggle with the language we use when we talk about this type of software. ‘Training’ I can understand as a word to define a process of changing a model based on some data. ‘Learned’ is a bit more problematic for me as I wonder what it means for something to actually be ‘learned’. But I start to get very uneasy when we use phrases such as “Did Claude just blame its parents for its failings?” It anthropomorphises these computer programs way beyond my level of comfort. I catch myself doing it all the time, and it feels as though it takes quite a lot of cognitive load to keep my language about AI factual and reasonable. Baldur Bjarnason talked about this in a blog post last year:
  

You can’t trust your own instincts or judgement about Large Language Models and chatbots because they trigger a number of cognitive biases and psychological “effects” that short-circuit our judgement.

• Because the capabilities of Claude Mythos are allegedly so dangerous, Anthropic, the owners of Claude, have created ‘Project Glasswing’. This gives access to security researchers so that they can get ahead of fixing defects in software before the model — or others like it — become generally available. Simon Willison thinks that this sounds necessary, and gives some good evidence as to why.
• The African Union has called for the adoption of the Equal Earth projection, “on the grounds that it is a more fair and proportionate method of showing Africa’s true size and geographical significance in the world.” I fully endorse this idea.
• It’s been a horrible week in global news. Ian Dunt is on blistering form when he says that “The battle against Trump is a battle against genocide”. When I read the timeline, it made my stomach turn. I remember seeing clocks on two channels in the news section of my cable TV box, NDTV and GB News, counting down to the deadline that Trump had set for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. When did people lose their humanity? Ian Dunt:
  

We do not know how many people felt death approach that night. We don’t know how people slept in Tehran, or Mashhad, or Isfahan. Did they imagine that this was their final night? Did they assume it could never happen? Did the children ask their parents if they were going to die? Did young lovers find ways to secretly meet each other before the bombs fell? Did friends arrange to spend their final hours together? Can we even begin to imagine the scale of the trauma that was inflicted upon them? And for what? For nothing.

• Matt Haughey has written up how he has vibe-coded his own home dashboard. This has been on my to-do list for a while. I’d love to get something up and running like this on my home Yodeck player.
• It looks like macOS Tahoe has a bug which causes it to crash after 49 days of uptime.
• Tey Bannerman’s mapping of all of the Microsoft products named ‘Copilot’ is comforting in that it validates that the cognitive overload is real. As Ben Thompson recently said on an episode of Sharp Tech, someone at Microsoft has likely given staff a goal of including Copilot in everything, so this is what we’ve ended up with.
  

Video

• Loved Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen on Netflix. It ended up getting less scary as the episodes progressed, but I found myself enjoying it more and more.
• Watched most of The Tony Blair Story. I wonder if those first four years of his time in office as Prime Minister will remain the most politically happy of my lifetime. It illustrates why it is healthy to have changes of political leadership on a regular basis.
• Finished the latest season of Shrinking. I’ve not loved this season as much as the earlier ones, but it still made me laugh.
• Got an offer from MUBI to renew at a reduced rate of £5.99 a month. Despite rarely putting the time aside to watch movies, they run a service I want to exist, so this doesn’t feel like a hard thing to justify paying for.
  

Audio

• For some reason this song by the almost forgotten Kiss AMC popped back into my consciousness this week. For a short time at the end of the 80s, this was on heavy rotation on MTV Europe, and the opening bars of New Year’s Day by U2 have always triggered a memory of this tune. I should have recalled it for my post on songs from this era of the channel.
  

• Made a decision about what to play at next week’s in-person Album Club. I have a slightly scratchy original vinyl, but it sounds better than the more recent CD version. I’m excited to play it.
  

Books

• Inspired by watching Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen, I bought The Definitive Guide to Horror Movies on Kindle for the giveaway price of £2.99. The 383 films are documented chronologically; the first few are from the 1920s, so they should be available in the public domain via YouTube.
  

Next week: Hosting Album Club, seeing Kae Tempest and meeting up with some old school friends.

A week off work, dominated by having a streaming cold for a few days and a catastrophic failure of my home network drive, resulting in multiple days of effort to get it up and running again.

All last week I had felt as though I was on the cusp of getting sick, but it never quite took hold of me. On Monday I decided to go out and cycle the club ride route that I had missed on Saturday, as I was fed up of feeling ill and wanted to get out and do something. I’m glad I went, as on Tuesday and Wednesday I mainly sat around on the sofa, getting through hundreds of tissues as my eyes and nose ran all day. I turned a corner on Thursday and was largely back to normal by the weekend. I am a complete cliché in terms of how much my illnesses time themselves to occur during weekends and holidays.

At the start of the week, my QNAP NAS drive, which has been happily spinning away in the house for the past five years, let me know that it had successfully installed the latest firmware update. This happens regularly and was nothing out of the ordinary. Later that day, I was out of the house and tried to use PlexAmp to access my music library on the drive, but found that the service wasn’t responding. When I got home I saw that the ‘STATUS’ light was flashing green and red, so I assumed that it needed a reboot. I turned it off and on again using the button on the front of the unit. This is where the problems really took hold. After it came back up, I found that one of the four disks was reporting errors. This has happened before and is an easy problem to fix — you just buy another disk and then hot-swap the old one for the new one, which is a major point of having a NAS in the first place. So, I ordered a replacement disk. It arrived the next day, and I swapped it out as I had done before. The RAID array started to rebuild itself, a process that was going to take many hours. I was happy that I’d resolved the problem, so I walked away and planned to check on the RAID rebuild later.

But it wasn’t that simple. Coming home later that night, the unit was alerting that another disk had failed. The whole drive was now in a ‘read only’ state as the RAID array hadn’t finished rebuilding before the second disk died. In a RAID 5 array like I had, you can lose one disk, but no more. I was pretty sure I had data loss. It was late, and I didn’t want to start tackling the problem straight away. I went to bed with my brain buzzing about the ‘spec’ I would give Claude or ChatGPT the next day. This prompt would define what I wanted to achieve from the process of rebuilding the drive and restoring all of the data, as well as fixing one or two things that I had never been happy with in my setup but had never got around to resolving.¹ The failure was the perfect opportunity to start again. In the morning, I put together a prompt on what I wanted to achieve and fed it into both AI tools. I liked Claude’s approach the best and decided to follow that. It put together a whole step-by-step document on what I needed to do, which wasn’t perfect but it was pretty close. The process of rebuilding and configuring the NAS, restoring all of the data, setting up the shares, configuring the drive for Time Machine backups for our home Macs, and lots of other small tweaks must have taken the best part of three days.² In some ways it was super frustrating that it took up so much time, but I was grateful that it happened when I did actually have the time available to do it.

Aside from sitting around being ill and providing technical support for myself, this was a week in which I:

• Started looking seriously at what second car we will buy. Our short ownership of a 15-year-old Mini was a financial disaster, so we are looking at spending a little bit more to buy something newer, trying to keep the insurance costs for our two boys as low as possible. Current thinking is something like a Hyundai i10, Kia Picanto, or Toyota Aygo X. The Aygo is interesting as Toyota continue to give you a warranty for up to 10 years as long as you get the car serviced with them.
• Finally relented to ‘upgrading’ our Virgin Media boxes to ‘TV 360’. This involved clicking an option on the existing TV box and then getting sent new remotes in the post, which you use to complete the upgrade. I don’t really understand the reasons for them pushing this software change.
• Bought a new CD player from Deco Audio, replacing a 23-year-old Cambridge Audio unit that had been recently repaired but had failed again. The Pro-Ject CD Box DS3 sounds great, and fits perfectly with the other components in my Hi-Fi system. It was lovely to play some CDs again during the week at home.
• Loved getting regular updates on the chat group tracking my youngest son and his friends as they cycled around the Balkans. He has gone from being a non-cyclist before Christmas to cycling over 1,000km in about a week.
• Had a lovely family lunch at my mum and dad’s house, along with my brothers and their families, as well as an aunt and uncle, and some friends I haven’t seen in a long time. It was strange to turn up without our boys as they were both abroad pursuing their various adventures. We always go home so well-fed and well looked after.
• Finally got outside to take down our Christmas lights. It won’t be long until I’m putting them up again.
• Gave our back lawn its first mow of the year. Although so much of what was grass is now moss, seeing it go from shaggy to smartly chopped makes me feel that spring is definitely here.
  

Media

Podcasts

• I found myself getting mad once again about the damage done by Trump, Musk and DOGE last year in Jonathan Freedland’s conversation with Sasha Abramsky. USAID was destroyed. And for what? For me, how much Musk and co revelled in the cruelty is the most shocking part.
  

Sasha Abramsky: So there were people with HIV dying. There were people with malaria and tuberculosis who were dying. And perhaps most scandalously, there were people, children, who had been told they needed anti-starvation interventions.

There’s this thing called Plumpy’Nut. It was designed by the French in the 1980s. And it’s a sachet of very high-density peanut-based paste. And four doses a day of that for about six to eight weeks can bring a kid who’s on the verge of death and starvation back to the land of the living. And that entire six- to eight-week course costs about $50.

And Taly Lind [senior employee at USAID] was in tears. She said, “Look, I’ve lost my job, I’ve lost my pension security. I’ve lost my income. But here’s what’s keeping me up at night. What’s keeping me up at night is that USAID cannot distribute Plumpy’Nut because it’s now being locked up in warehouses in the US and overseas.” But there Elon Musk is on social media, prattling on about how we can’t afford it and how too much altruism equals death.

Articles

• Microsoft Copilot is usually my last choice of AI tool, except where what I am asking is either (a) confidential to work, or (b) a request to help me find something at work. But they do keep bringing value to the tool, not least of which is how they give you access to both OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s models. The Copilot Researcher agent will now have a ‘Critique’ feature to use both models for the same task.
• A lack of checking AI output has led to yet another person losing a job. This time it is a New York Times journalist who used AI to write a book review.
• Ethan Mollick has written an interesting piece on AI interfaces.
  

Video

• Fallen Leaves (2023) was a strange film that, on reflection, I probably wasn’t in the mood for as I descended into a well of unwellness. Everybody in the film — everybody — is completely deadpan. But fishing around on YouTube afterwards highlighted the subtlety of some scenes that I had completely missed. I could be tempted to rewatch this. Oh, and this song is fab.

• I somehow stumbled across a reaction video to another video about ‘27 things allowed in the UK but not the USA’ and watched right to the end. I did not know that parking the wrong way on a street, or having an open container of alcohol as a passenger in a car, are both illegal in America. Watching the video, it struck me again how harsh an environment the US is for the average person. I’ve always felt that in the US, the corporations and the government are king and everyone is expected to fit around them, whereas in Europe it is the other way around.
• Went to our local cinema to see Hamnet (2025) and was left in a pool of tears at the end. Mark Kermode makes a compelling case that the film is designed to manipulate this emotional reaction from you, but I am absolutely here for it.
• Last One Laughing 2 was very, very funny.
• The new series of For All Mankind feels somewhat spoilt by Joel Kinnaman’s terrible makeup and unconvincing portrayal of a very old version of his character Edward Baldwin, but we’ll stick with it.
• We are so delighted that the new series of Race Across The World has started. It’s such splendid escapism. My wife and I are convinced that there are rules to the show that we’re not told about, where they have to take time to do jobs or activities and not just race. If it was me, I would focus on getting as far as I could as quickly as possible, only stopping for employment if I got close to my money running out. Instead, each of the pairs seem to spend time ambling about, looking at stuff and earning money when they still have over 85% of their budget left. Can someone please leak the full rules?
  

Audio

• My music library being out of action for a few days meant that I resorted to listening to a friend’s Plex ‘Library Radio’ on a car journey. I’d never heard of Puddle of Mudd or their song Blurry before, and it isn’t usually my kind of thing, but I found myself enjoying it. Wikipedia tells me that it was “2002’s most successful rock song in the United States”. I spent most of 2002 living in the United States, but I guess I didn’t listen to much radio at the time.
  

Books

• Continued with Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins.
  

Next week: Back to work.

1. One of these was to implement a small location on the disks to keep log files. The QNAP OS needs this to be an unencrypted location on the disk. Previously, I had allocated all of the storage to an encrypted data volume and was scratching my head as to how I would reduce this to free up a small amount for this log file storage. Rebuilding gave me the opportunity to implement the storage locations from scratch. I also set up local snapshots, scheduled ‘RAID scrubbing’ and S.M.A.R.T. tests, which I had never considered before. ↩
2. I’m not quite done yet; I’m now running the three good disks in a RAID 5 configuration and plan to add one more disk next month and move to RAID 6. ↩

A really tough week, mentally and physically. I spent the first two days at the Gartner CIO Leadership Forum, an event that I really like as it is relatively small, resulting in you bumping into the same faces in different sessions. I felt all jumbled up and out of sorts, which I first attributed to the after-effects of a weekend of cycling, but as the week went on I realised that I was actually ill with some kind of cold. On top of this, or maybe partly because of it, I felt stressed. When this happens, I struggle to keep focused on the thing directly in front of me, e.g. the content of a meeting, as my brain is eager to move to thinking about the hundred other things I need to get done. Wednesday was a day spent working from home, but an early meeting meant that my dalliance with my indoor bike trainer was fleeting. Thursday and Friday were back in the office, with the main goals of that last day being to take delivery of new furniture for our internal boardroom and to hold an in-person interview.

I’ve now got a week off, which feels like it’s coming at just the right moment. My wife and I will be home alone, as our eldest is at university in Texas and our youngest is cycling around the Balkans with some friends. I’ve not planned much in my head other than a couple of must-do jobs around the house and checking in on a few items at work, so it should be pretty relaxing.

This was a week in which I:

• Attended the Gartner CIO Leadership Forum. Although the four-day Symposium/Xpo in Barcelona is the flagship event, I think this two-day session is more valuable as it’s smaller, is focused on CIOs, and is easier for an attendee to book onto sessions with limited places. After a few years of attending these conferences, I’m starting to bump into familiar faces.
  

• Had a good conversation over lunch about Gartner’s research that says “74% of boards want enterprises to take more technology risks.” Do they really? What are the negative consequences of taking these risks that they are prepared to put up with? I get the feeling that there is FOMO in relation to AI — CEOs and boards think that all of the other companies are well ahead — and they are pushing their CIOs to take more chances with AI. But Microsoft claim to have 450 million subscribers to Microsoft 365, of which 15 million have a paid Copilot subscription. That’s less than 4%. It is still early. Others are not likely to be much further ahead than you are.
• Learnt that Gartner research has found that AI-related layoffs are actually decreasing, contrary to how it feels from the news cycle at the moment. They analysed data for 1.4 million layoffs in 2025 and found that less than 1% were attributable to AI productivity gains.
• Went to more workshops and round tables than usual, which were much more valuable than attending more seminar- or lecture-style sessions. They were excellent, and I came away with good insights and some practical things that I can follow up with at work. These covered the topics of:
  
  • Assessing and transforming your IT operating model
  • AI literacy in the enterprise
  • A structured approach to accelerating ‘speed to value’ for new CIOs
  • Attracting and integrating neurodiverse talent
• Enjoyed the celebrity keynotes as they were reasonably related to technology and leadership. On Monday afternoon we saw Tim Peake, who has made a wonderful speaking career out of his trip into space. On Tuesday morning I found myself sitting two seats away from Hannah Fry before she got up to give her presentation. I couldn’t help but listen in to her conversation with her host from Gartner who was sitting right next to me, discussing what they think the impact of AI will be.
  

• Went out for a CIO networking dinner on Monday night at Gaucho at the O2. By the time we left I was so full up. I’d been eating all day on Monday like I was still on my weekend bike rides.
• Met with the project team who are working on the fit-out of our newest office to review the latest design. We also met with a broader stakeholder group to review the journey of how we got to this point, what decisions we need to make, and the data and insights that we will base these on.
• Took part in the formal kick-off meeting for one of our key projects with all of the people that need to be involved in the work. The project team did an excellent job of presenting the background, what happens next, and lining up our CEO to reiterate the importance of what we need to do.
• Joined our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion meeting.
• Attended an internal webinar on the macroeconomic and political outlook for South Africa, the latest in an ongoing series. They are so well put together, and extremely informative.
• Met with colleagues to discuss how we might approach using AI to streamline one of their main business processes, and the pitfalls of working with vendors in this space.
• Had a meeting to discuss our provision of audio-visual support for the meeting rooms that we share with our sister company, and how we might improve the service.
• Had an introductory chat with a colleague who has joined us in the office for a six-month assignment that will be focused on business strategy.
• Took delivery of a new table and credenzas for our internal boardroom. They are a massive upgrade from what we had before. There are still a couple of snags to resolve, but it will be excellent once the project is complete.
• Did some mandatory online basic AI training that has been rolled out across our organisation.
• Interviewed a candidate for our developer role and lined up three more for the week that I return from leave.
• Heard the very sad news of the passing of an ex-colleague who retired only a couple of years ago.
• Spent some time with our youngest boy, making sure he was ready for his bike ride. On Saturday morning we headed over to the house where his friends were doing their final packing, and the cardboard boxes containing their bikes were being loaded onto the back of a van. I really hope it’s the experience of a lifetime for him, and that he’s keen to keep up the cycling habit after the trip.
  

• Was pleased that the company responsible for our wastewater pipes found what they think is a root cause of the drain collapse. Unfortunately it sits on our neighbour’s side and is linked to how the two drains join together before meeting the sewer in the road. The next step is for them to dig up our neighbour’s driveway.
• Didn’t get much exercise in, due to being in London four days out of five, being time-crunched on the other days across the weekend, and feeling a bit under the weather. My wife and I went out for a lovely Sunday morning run, splitting up halfway round and then reconvening for coffee and pastry in town.
• Got a second quote for cutting back the big beech tree in the garden, not too different from the first quote. Trimming it isn’t going to be cheap.
• Had a plumber come and take a look at our leaking bathroom. They pointed out a couple of issues with the en suite that we need to fix before they start to open up the ceiling to track down the issues with the waste pipes.
  

Media

Video

• Watched The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), the latest in my journey through Fred Astaire’s musical films. I first saw this about 25 years ago at the BFI cinema on the South Bank when they showed all of the Astaire and Rodgers films. It’s a strange picture that ends their run of movies at RKO, but contains some lovely moments. Vernon and Irene Castle were very famous in their day, but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who knows a thing about them. This YouTuber gives a good overview of the movie:

Audio

• Took delivery of a bunch of bargain-basement-priced CDs and a few records from a seller on Discogs. I was after one particular album, but the seller had so many that were on my wishlist that I could add for no additional postage that I couldn’t help myself. I am now once again the proud owner of the superb 1985 compilation Love Songs (20 Classic Hits) which showcases the early work of Stevie Wonder. It contains wall-to-wall classics, including my personal favourite I Don’t Know Why. What a song.

Web

• Death by Clawd is fun for a few minutes. You feed it the URL of a website or software-as-a-service platform and it uses AI to determine how vulnerable it is to being replaced by AI.
• Fascinating insights into batteries and charging for Apple devices.
• Speaking of Apple, it was also interesting to read about their launch of Apple Business, a platform to help companies to manage their Apple product estates.
  

Books

• Continued reading Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins. I’m not reading anywhere near as much as I’d like this year, but I’m enjoying this.
  

Next week: Some more time away from the desk.

My first five-day work week for a while, and it was a tough one. Despite twenty years of following GTD and working on simplifying my workflow, in busy periods I end up falling back to a simple list. A mental sweep of all of the things I really need to get done as quickly as possible resulted in a very long list. I’d caught up with sleep at the weekend but had a bad night’s rest on Monday, and this seemed to affect everything for the rest of the week.

This was a week in which I:

• Took part, but mainly listened, in a workshop about how we might move forward with leveraging the data and analytics capability in our wider organisation for the strategic initiatives in our part of the firm.
• Reviewed the ideas for the floor plan of a new office in conjunction with the project team working on the fit-out. We reached a broad consensus on the office design very quickly. We also had the weekly project meeting for this initiative.
• Saw another example of how nuance and tone of voice don’t carry that well over texts and emails. Any time there is disagreement, people should default to the richest communication medium: a face-to-face discussion in person, a face-to-face discussion over video, a voice call, a text message or — as a last resort — an email, depending on the facilities available.
• Had my staff meeting where I told my team that one of our members will be moving to another department for a six-month secondment. They will be missed, but it is an excellent opportunity for them, as these opportunities do not come along every day.
• Said hello to an old colleague who is back working at our sister company as a Technology Project Manager.
• Reviewed the proposed master services agreement with a new staffing vendor along with our heads of Procurement and Legal.
• Met with colleagues in our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team to finalise the plan for a talk on disabilities in the workplace.
• Had my monthly call with my Executive Partner at our technology research and advisory firm.
• Took part in the fortnightly backlog refinement meeting with our development team.
• Enjoyed a whole-office burrito lunch with colleagues followed by a live town hall-style broadcast from our divisional CEO on our annual results.
• Caught up with an old colleague who now works as our Head of APIs.
• Met with colleagues to discuss how we can approach implementing a business process for staff in our broader organisation who sit outside of our immediate remit.
• Had a one-on-one introductory meeting with the newest member of our department.
• Attended the M365 Change Community Round Up to hear about the major changes coming down the pipe for Microsoft 365. I say this every month, but this meeting is still criminally under-attended. The content is excellent, but this time there were only about 50 people in the meeting at any one time.
• Interviewed another candidate for the software developer role in my team.
• Met with one of the recruiters from the firms that we are using to fill the role. We’ve worked together for a couple of years, but this was the first time that he had been to our office. It was good to show it to him in its recently-refurbished state.
• Dealt with a couple of security-related changes and issues.
• Arranged the delivery date for our new boardroom table.
• Enjoyed the latest WB-40 Album Club, where a friend hosted for the first time. Generally, people are so nervous when they start to share the music they love, but get used to it after a few goes.
• Had an electric roof lantern blind installed. It’s lovely, letting light into the room without the direct glare of the sun. It’ll help to keep my record collection in good working order.
• Had our beech tree assessed for a trim. We haven’t had it cut back in 10 years or so, and it has started to shed more branches on recent windy days. The quote is astronomical, so I’ve got two more companies lined up to quote for the work.
• Blocked one of my cards when I started seeing notifications for purchases that I wasn’t making. Scammers (fraudsters?) spent money with Apple three times in quick succession before I could reach for the block button. Interestingly, Apple sent me an email to say that my payment method had been added to someone’s account where they are not in my family group. I like this feature. Conversely, talking to Apple support is painful; after a stilted conversation with a chatbot and (potentially) a human, they call you, and then put you on hold after you answer. After waiting ten minutes or so, I gave up. The card company were great, issuing me with a new virtual card and refunding the three transactions in no time at all.
  

• Spent time with my brother-in-law and his family who stayed with us for the night, visiting my wife’s parents who have recently moved up the road. Hopefully we’ll see a lot more of them in future.
• Went out for dinner with friends on Friday to The King’s Arms in Egham. The company was great; we caught up with some old friends that we hadn’t seen in years. The food was generally poor, with the exception of the desserts, which were absolutely horrible. Fortunately, the service was superb; I complained and got them removed from the bill.
• Spent a big chunk of the weekend on my bike. Saturday morning’s club ride was fun, and it was followed on Sunday by the club hosting an event in the Spring Classics series. After going out hard on Saturday, I don’t think I spent enough time refuelling. My mental approach of “Sunday is just a regular club ride plus 40km” wasn’t quite correct. Usually I don’t eat on a club ride, so I thought that a couple of energy bars would see me through the extra 40km. I was wrong. By the time we got back to the start at Church Farm Café I had run out of energy and was absolutely starving. It’s made me think more about my food strategy for this year’s London Wales London ride which is now only about six weeks away. My youngest son also took part in Sunday’s ride, along with his friends, as preparation for their Easter bikepacking trip around the Balkans. I was so impressed that most of them have gone from being non-cyclists at the end of last year to rolling in just a few minutes behind me. Oh, to be young.
  

• Bought a seemingly endless stream of things related to my son’s ride, including SPD pedals and shoes so that he can walk about with ease when off the bike, gloves, hats, spare mechanical components etc. I’m still not completely convinced that he has everything he needs yet.
  

Media

Podcasts

• This episode of Your Undivided Attention largely came from this year’s World Economic Forum meeting at Davos. Towards the end of the episode, Tristan Harris quotes “someone I know” who “spoke to a lot of the top lab leaders at the companies” and came back with this, which has strong Bill Joy Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us vibes:
  

In the end, a lot of the tech people I’m talking to, when I really grill them on it, they retreat into number one, determinism. This is going to happen.

Number two, the inevitable replacement of biological life with digital life, meaning a digital intelligent species rather than biological species.

And number three, that being a good thing anyways. It’d be good if we had a digital successor that’s more intelligent than us. Why do we need to survive?

The next point is, at its core, it’s an emotional desire to meet and speak to the most intelligent entity that they’ve ever met. And they have some ego-religious intuition that they’ll somehow be a part of it.

It’s thrilling to start an exciting fire. They feel they’ll die either way, so they prefer to light it and see what happens.

Articles

• The Office 365 for IT Pros blog brings news that Microsoft are moving to block third-party recording bots in Teams meetings. I’m fully on board with this.
• They also have a breakdown of the new Microsoft 365 E7 licence and whether it is worth the USD 99/month list price.
• It’s been interesting to learn about some of the restrictions on what you cannot take photographs of in Dubai.
• John Gruber expresses his frustration with the state of news websites, inspired by a blog post by Shubham Bose:
  

The web is the only medium the world has ever seen where its highest-profile decision makers are people who despise the medium and are trying to drive people away from it. As Bose notes, “A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.” It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites.

Video

• I enjoyed Amol Rajan’s interview with Nile Rodgers, and definitely buy into Rajan’s argument that Rodgers is one of the most important and influential people in pop music. They both alluded to the state of the world and how disappointed Rodgers was with where we are, so I assumed the comments related to the second Trump term. It was also shocking to hear about how he still deals with racism every day, particularly internally — going out of his way to make people feel comfortable, or cleaning up water on the floor in the restroom because he thinks that someone who may see him come out would assume that he made the mess.
  

Web

• I paid for, and then stopped paying for, the Kagi search engine as I didn’t like the philosophy of the people that run it. But their new serendipitous tool to explore the small web is quite fun.
  

Books

• Continued reading Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins. I don’t quite understand how the investors were happy for the company to keep going once it had abandoned its original ideas.
  

Next week: Conference.

The start of the week was spent travelling back from Kingsville, Texas. Saying that it is 5,000 miles away from Berkhamsted isn’t doing justice to quite how long it takes to travel between them. I was up at 6am and on the road less than an hour later in order to get the car returned at San Antonio airport. It was then a two-and-a-half-hour flight to Atlanta, followed by a long bus ride to the international terminal and an eight-hour flight back to Heathrow. The International terminal at Atlanta is lovely, but completely different from the gigantic maze of the domestic terminal. Georgia itself looked beautiful on a bright spring day, even around the airport. It may be worth a visit sometime.

I arrived back on Tuesday morning, feeling quite ‘special’ from having tried to sleep sitting up in my chair on the plane. I’d taken the day off, leaving just three days at work to navigate. Lack of rest and jetlag meant that I yawned my way through them.

This was a week in which I:

• Spent most of my three days of work in meetings.
• Joined our monthly Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Forum meeting. We also met with our DEI officer to discuss our approach to a planned town hall-style meeting on disability in the workplace.
• Had the weekly project meeting for the fit-out of a new office. We also met with the vendor that is assisting us with the project locally, reviewing an initial ‘test fit’ of how we can configure the space.
• Met with the project manager from our sister company who is managing their office refit work.
• Presented at our weekly Learning Hour meeting on my dabbling with Claude Code.
• Discussed how we will approach picking up ownership for an AI software tool developed in-house last year by a different team.
• Met with colleagues to discuss how we can approach Microsoft Copilot upskilling in one of our offices.
• Continued to review CVs for the developer vacancy in my team.
• Met colleagues to discuss a problem that one of our front office teams is trying to solve, how they haven’t got much traction with their approach, and what we might do to help.
• Had our monthly operational risk review meeting.
• Gave year-end remuneration feedback to my permanent team members.
• Took my wife to the hospital for what we hope will be the final bit of follow-up surgery on her eye. After a quick final blast of a laser, everything is looking good.
• Helped my wife’s parents to get set up in their new home. My wife had done so much last week when I was away, so I was keen to get there to help out. We got their computer connected to the Internet, got their television service in place, set them up with a portable Bluetooth speaker, hung up pictures, built a wardrobe and took a bunch of boxes away to the recycling centre. Most of the work is now in the rear-view mirror, so I am hoping that they soon get down to enjoying their new place. We all went out for dinner on Saturday night, which felt like a little relaxing reward after a hectic couple of weeks.
• Bought more gear for my son’s upcoming bikepacking trip. The number of things one might need for such a trip is staggering, considering he’ll be carrying everything on the bike the whole time.
• Went to a quiz night at my son’s school and had a very amusing evening, with a lot of laughs. We came second, missing out on the top spot by just one point.
• Woke up in time for the Saturday morning cycling club ride but decided to go back to bed after seeing all of the cars covered in frost. I have a low risk appetite for icy roads, and an extra hour’s sleep felt like a good choice. It’s so handy to have the choice of riding indoors, which I did later that morning.
• Finally capitulated to buying a smartwatch after finding the chest strap of my heart rate monitor cutting into me on recent runs. I’ve had a Garmin Forerunner 55 for a few days and I’m very impressed. It’s one of the cheapest models they make, which fits my criteria of (a) broadcasts heart rate to other devices via Bluetooth and (b) doesn’t need charging very often. I’ve disabled a bunch of the features such as notifications from my phone. I’ve also found that I have a resting heart rate of 46 beats per minute, which I think is pretty good for my age.
• Experimented a little with Claude Cowork, getting it to scan a copy of my Obsidian notes library and give me feedback on how I’m using the tool. I also downloaded a copy of all of my blog posts and got it to use them to create a file that describes my writing style and tone of voice. It was interesting to read through the result. I don’t have any interest in using it to create new written content, but it’s fun to learn about its capabilities in a hands-on way.
• Discovered the latest problem in a string of issues with our house. We found water dripping from our en-suite bathroom through a light fitting into the bathroom on the floor below. We’ve stopped using the shower and sink in the en-suite for now until we can get someone to take a look. I don’t think diagnosing and fixing the root cause is going to be straightforward.
  

Media

Articles

• I guess we are now going to see a steady stream of people who get fired for their use of AI-generated content that includes hallucinations. This week, a notable example is — incredibly — the senior AI reporter at Ars Technica.
• Derek Sivers is offline for 23 hours a day, working like he’s travelling in 1996 and the only way to get online is at an expensive Internet cafe.
  

Video

• Stopped watching Industry late in episode two, as the entire show seems to be too bleak to tolerate. It’s clearly well-liked as there are already four seasons, and it’s set in a world of investment banking that I’ve worked in for nearly 30 years, but I don’t think I can do it.
• Enjoyed Evolver62 (2025), the film version of Mark Lewisohn’s detailed and fun stage show about a single year in The Beatles’ early career.
  

Audio

• Have had a week-long earworm of What We All Want by Gang of Four. How can something so punky be so funky?

Books

• Started reading Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins. I find this kind of computing history memoir fascinating.
  

Next week: An online Album Club, a night out and some outdoor cycling.

A hectic week of travel. On Monday I came back from Austria where I’d spent a long weekend in the skiing town of Kitzbühel with colleagues. On Tuesday I worked from home, with my day packed full of meetings and messages to catch up with. That evening my wife and I checked in on her parents, who had that day moved into their new house five minutes up the road from us. Then on Wednesday I was up early for a taxi to the airport to begin my journey to Kingsville, Texas, to visit my eldest son. Getting to Kingsville involved flying to Atlanta and getting a connection to San Antonio. My first flight, with Virgin Atlantic, had over 100 empty seats, which was so unusual that even the staff commented on it.¹ By the time I arrived, it was around 3am in the UK, so I spent the night in a nearby airport hotel.

On Thursday morning, looking out of my hotel window, it was pretty clear I was in Texas. I jumped in a rental car for the 2.5-hour drive south to Kingsville.

It was so lovely to catch up with my son, to see how he’s living, watch him compete at a track meet and get to know some of his friends. We did the usual parent/student stuff of heading to the supermarket to stock him up with groceries, as well as treating him to dinner a couple of nights that I was there.

On Friday he competed at his home track in a ‘local’ competition against Angelo State University, a college that is about five hours away by road. He ran in the 1500m and 3000m races, with the goal of winning both of the events to contribute to the team’s points tally, but not necessarily setting record times. It was great to see him come through in the final laps in each race to take first.

It was the first outdoor track meet of the season. I was grateful that the day was overcast, as it was still so hot and humid. With no shade in the stands, I covered every inch of myself in sunscreen. Both the men’s and women’s teams from Texas A&M-Kingsville beat Angelo State, “avenging” their losses from a year ago.

Kingsville is an interesting place in that it feels as though it’s in the middle of nowhere, a sense that is added to by the sparseness of the South Texas landscape. It is super flat to the horizon on all sides, with massive open spaces surrounding the town. The population is down 15% from its peak in the 1980 census, and it shows through the number of shuttered buildings that are dotted about. Aside from the clusters of gigantic stores and drive-thrus, Kleberg Avenue seemed to be the main ‘old’ street in the town, with an abandoned cinema, a barbershop, and various other stores dotted along it. There was a sign saying that parking on the avenue is limited to two hours, but the local coffee shop owner assured me that it hadn’t been enforced in a decade or so. It made sense, as there were plenty of spaces, and the avenue was almost empty.

The King Ranch Saddle Shop seemed out of place on the street, with its high-end clothing, silverware and leather goods, with prices to match. The 825,000-acre King Ranch — over twice the size of Greater London — is what gives Kingsville its name. On my drive from San Antonio to Kingsville I had seen a small truck with ‘King Ranch’ embossed on the back and assumed that it was a staff vehicle. But one of the assistants in the shop told me that Ford actually produces a series of luxury trucks and SUVs under the King Ranch brand.

Further down the street I came across Mr Bruce’s Coffee House, owned by the eponymous Mr Bruce, who was very happy to have a long, fun chat. The coffee and locally produced small-batch cakes were great.

The avenue is also the home of Harrel’s Pharmacy, a store that contains a small diner, with prices that date back decades. After hearing about the place from my wife who visited last August and seeing it profiled on YouTube, I had to check it out. I had a tray of french fries and a soda for the princely sum of $5.

Visiting somewhere where I am unlikely to come across another tourist is my kind of trip, as I love meeting and talking to locals. I was staying at the Holiday Inn, just off Highway 77 in the south-east corner of town. On my first night there, I asked the staff whether there was somewhere to get a glass of wine, and they pointed me to Chili’s, which was “just across the street”. Getting across the street was a small mission, as the entire area is built for cars only. I had all my wits about me as I wandered through the underpass, making sure that the cars could see me, and doubling back when I found that I had walked the wrong way and was headed towards a ditch.

I’d never been to a Chili’s before. It was a typical meaty diner, with a small bar and more televisions than a local electronics store. I sat at the bar, watching the local sports broadcast of bareback horse-riding and steer roping. I have no idea how anybody who competes in a bareback horse-riding event is ever able to walk again.

Blake, the barman at Chili’s, told me that on the first Friday of every month, the nearby town of Corpus Christi holds an ‘ArtWalk’, where streets are closed for live music and street vendors. I told my son about it and we decided to go.

Somehow we found a parking spot right by a couple of streets with food vendors and market stalls. We grabbed some food and wandered about. It didn’t seem that big of a deal; there were plenty of people enjoying themselves but it seemed quite small. After exploring all of the streets, we got back in the car. On the way out of Corpus Christi we discovered that we had completely missed most of where the action was, including live bands that had set up on some of the closed roads. We drove around looking for somewhere to park but couldn’t spot any spaces, so decided to head for home, via Sonic Drive-In for dessert.

One of my son’s friends has a holiday beach house in Rockport, a further 30 minutes’ drive north-east from Corpus Christi. He and a few friends planned to go there for the weekend, and asked me to join them for dinner. I spent the day mooching around Corpus Christi, visiting Hybrid Records and Disc Go Round, its two vinyl and CD stores.

We had a lovely seafood meal at the Moondog Seaside Eatery. We had to wait 45 minutes for a table, but this wasn’t so bad as it showed that the restaurant was popular. It gave us the opportunity to wander along to the funfair at nearby Fulton Beach Park.

When I’m away from home I try and get some runs in, which this week was particularly important in order to offset the high-octane Texan food. Running close to my hotel was impractical as the car park was too small and the roads too dangerous. So I hopped in the car for a short drive to Dick Kleberg Park, the main open public space in the town. Running loops around the park was hard work, and after 10km I was done. On my second visit, I remembered to bring a couple of towels from the hotel gym so that I didn’t end up with a soggy, sweaty seat and seatbelt on the drive home.

The main other thing that struck me from my trip was that sustainable materials and recycling don’t seem to have reached this part of Texas. Food and drink were served with styrofoam plates and cups like it was 1985, and everything was always gathered together into a single trash can.

It was lovely to see my son, and I am so glad I went.

Aside from mooching around southern Texas, this was a week in which I:

• Celebrated my wife’s birthday, her most un-birthday-like birthday ever as she waited around all day for the call to say that her parents’ house purchase had completed. We’ll have a belated celebration next week.
• Attended an early morning Technology Architecture Board meeting, my first invite to a long-standing series.
• Met with colleagues to review the list of installed software across our estate, making decisions on what we think should be part of the standard build, what should be available on-demand and what should be by request only.
• Had an introductory meeting with an AI software development startup. They are looking to simplify an intensive manual process in a specific area that is highly relevant to us.
• Joined the steering committee for our sister company’s office refit project. Given that the work in our own office and our shared spaces is nearly complete, we agreed that we will no longer routinely attend the meetings.
• Met with the team working on our document management project, who gave an overview to colleagues in a couple of different functions that have an interest in the project’s success.
  

Media

Articles

• David Sparks makes the case for using Cowork for AI automation. I haven’t tried it yet, but am going to investigate.
  

This model is consistent with the way we humans historically handle high-risk situations. You don’t trust your accountant completely. You verify the numbers. You don’t trust automated backups. You test them. Supervised AI is just the same principle applied to autonomous agents.

If you’re thinking about AI automation, start with Cowork.

Video

• On my plane journey over to the US I caught up with some music-related downloads from BBC iPlayer.
  
  • Rick Astley’s chat with Dermot O’Leary on Reel Stories is excellent. Astley comes across as a talented, lovely, self-aware man who is at peace with the career he’s had and his place in the world.
  • I realised that I was rewatching Mr Blue Sky: The Story of Jeff Lynne and ELO as soon as it started. The documentary is from 2012, which feels like yesterday but is almost a decade and a half ago. It’s strange seeing Tom Petty as a talking head and a remarkably young-looking Paul McCartney; young, that is, compared to his ‘interview’ at the end of the recent Man on the Run movie. McCartney references Lynne’s work on Free As A Bird and Real Love for The Beatles Anthology, and alludes to another track that he plans to finish one day. We now know that this is the song Now And Then, and McCartney was as good as his word. The documentary doesn’t really get much into the background story of Lynne, other than referencing his love of Del Shannon, Roy Orbison and The Beatles, all of whom he came to work with.
  • I enjoyed the Piano Room sessions with Squeeze, Tori Amos and Labi Siffre. Siffre’s session is particularly great; I love his music and could listen to him talk for hours. His new song, Far Away, is beautiful and deeply affecting, given the knowledge that he lost both of his partners in quick succession a few years ago. It’s an incredible piece of work, particularly given that he’s the ripe old age of 80.
    

• Elliot Roberts posted a really interesting and thoughtful video for his Patreon subscribers on his experience of psychedelic drugs. I have no desire whatsoever to try them myself, but it was interesting to hear first hand from someone whose work I enjoy on what the effects can be.
  

Web

• Once again, Sharon O’Dea’s comments on LinkedIn for International Women’s Day were brilliantly brave. She says that “…every year on International Women’s Day I clear my diary and spend the entire day replying to companies’ posts about how much they support women — with awkward questions about their actual record on pay, leadership, flexible working, and more.” It’s an annual joy.
  

Books

• Finished reading Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. I’m not fully committed to my choice of what I’ll read next, and want to give it some thought.
  

Next week: Travelling home, and a three-day work week.

1. Congratulations to crew member Rachel, who was taking her first flight after her training. ↩

A four-day working week with a long weekend away at the end. I needed it. At the start of the week I noted that I felt as though I was going through a tough period, but one week on I’m doing much better.

The highlight of the week was a trip with fifteen other colleagues to the town of Kitzbühel in Austria. This was the inaugural version of what is likely to become an annual trip, with staff being nominated and voting on who would win the award of a weekend away. Most of us came from our office in London, but we were also joined by three of our colleagues from Beijing.

The whole weekend was excellent. I have never skied and didn’t fancy starting to learn now, given how often I hear and see people who have been away on a skiing trip coming home with an injury. Most of my colleagues went on the slopes, but I was joined by a few others who had also opted not to ski. Our days were filled with eating, walking, laughing and generally having a great time as we made memories together. By Monday evening I was shattered from the late nights and early mornings and my social battery was low, but I was so grateful to have been chosen to go on the trip.

Aside from swanning around an Austrian skiing town, this was also a week in which I:

• Created and submitted a personal development plan for the first time in many years, as part of an internal leadership programme that I am on.
• Joined the rest of our Technology team for a meeting with our recently-appointed local CEO. We had a great conversation and gained an excellent insight into how he’s thinking about our business.
• Interviewed a couple more candidates for the software development role in my team. In the words of Bono, we still haven’t found what (or who) we’re looking for.
• Discussed and agreed a tactical solution for a privacy/security issue raised by one of our offices.
• Met with colleagues to discuss the potential use of a SaaS AI tool to speed up a key part of the workflow in their team, and agreed next steps.
• Had a demo of a tool that helps an organisation to manage the vast amount of change notifications that come through the Microsoft 365 Message Center.
• Reviewed a proposal for on-the-ground project management services for helping us to set up a new office in a new country. We need help coordinating vendors and suppliers for facilities, furniture and technology.
• Met with a CIO from another division of our group who has asked for help with managing a small office located close to us, but far from them.
• Joined our development team for the fortnightly retrospective and sprint planning meeting.
• Had my monthly call with my executive partner from our technology research and advisory firm.
• Met with one of our vendors, a technology staffing provider, to introduce them to our CISO.
• Met with colleagues in our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum for a check-in on our plans for the year.
• Had a catch-up with the founder and CEO of a company we are working with to measure and manage the environmental impact of technology.
• Joined our weekly Learning Hour meeting where we heard more from our internal Learning and Development team.
• Attended an International Executive Committee meeting for one of our business areas. It’s always so fascinating to hear about things from the perspective of a different team.
• Met with colleagues who are exploring how we use data to support strategic business opportunities.
• Attended the latest M365 Change Community Round Up meeting. This monthly session is criminally under-attended, with around 45 people joining. The content is superb and the presenters are great at picking things up in the chat so that it doesn’t have that ‘one-way webinar’ feel. If you have any responsibility for Microsoft 365 in your organisation, or want to know what major features are coming down the pipe, it’s well worth attending.
• Went to my youngest son’s school for a careers evening. We heard from the Head of the Sixth Form, the Head and Deputy Head Pupils, and a guest from the University of Birmingham. The content was excellent. Now that university education is no longer ‘free’ in the UK, it feels like there is much more of an important decision to be made about what’s next.
• Was pleased for my eldest son, whose team finished second in the distance medley relay at a race meet in Houston.

Media

Podcasts

• Kiran Stacey gave a great explanation of the government’s plans for changes to the special educational needs and disabilities system on The Guardian’s Politics Weekly UK podcast. It seems to me that the introduction of individual support plans (ISPs) will bring a critical change to the dynamics of obtaining additional support for a pupil. With the current education, health and care plans (EHCPs), school staff work with parents to try and obtain funding from the local authority. Staff and parents are on the same team. With ISPs, the parents will now be trying to obtain assistance directly from the school, which may pit them against each other and, if awarded, will directly impact the school’s own finances. If an ISP is refused, parents will have to go through the school’s complaints system, creating work for staff and governors, and potentially bad feeling between everyone involved.
• On Sharp Tech from 6 February (I’m behind and trying to catch up), Ben Thompson gave a great explanation of how Meta is antifragile. When big-company advertisers boycott them, the prices of ads reduce, which means that other companies are able to buy more ads and reach more people, strengthening Meta’s advertising ecosystem.

Articles

• I found this article from someone who is apparently using “personal business agents” to get their job done more efficiently to be an interesting read. The diagrams are in Chinese so I asked Claude to translate them for me.
• A friend wrote a heartfelt article about being South African and ‘loving the suffering’:

What is it about all these South Africans that makes them do something that would seem both preposterous and unfathomable to most of the rest of the world’s population? The answer is complicated and simple. The simple answer is, we love suffering. The complicated answer is we need suffering.

• “Hobby coder accidentally creates vacuum robot army”. Internet of Things becomes Internet of Crappy Things once again. The interesting thing is that there is finally some legislation coming which may improve the situation:

Regulation is arriving, slowly. The EU’s Cyber Resilience Act will require mandatory security-by-design for all connected products sold in the bloc by December 2027, with fines up to €15 million. The UK’s PSTI Act, in force since April 2024, became the world’s first law banning default passwords on smart devices. The US Cyber Trust Mark, by contrast, is voluntary.

• Simon Willison posted a great write-up of how he vibe-coded his “dream macOS presentation app”.

Video

• Finished watching Small Prophets on BBC iPlayer. A beautiful thing, so lovely that I hope they don’t make another series.

Audio

• Enjoyed hearing The Pretty Things’ S. F. Sorrow at the latest WB-40 Album Club. I haven’t listened to it for a very long time. Surprisingly, this is the first album that we’ve listened to that was released in the 1960s.

Books

• Nearly done with Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.

Next week: Texas.

Last week was tough for no reason. This week was hard, but in a different way. There are so many balls in the air and I’m struggling to juggle them all. The good news is that it isn’t raining quite as much, and it’s starting to be light in the morning as I head out to work. Spring is just around the corner.

This was a week in which I:

• Had more conversations about the reopening of the basement in our building. We need to put a sustainable process in place for people to gain access, automated as far as we can.
• Spent time at the weekend putting together a personal development plan to be used in conjunction with my line manager and our Learning and Development team.
• Helped a colleague to get back on board with using our Kanban tool.
• Met with two potential suppliers of people and reviewed some sample CVs. I’m looking to expand the set of firms we work with for temporary staff.
• Had a couple of walk-throughs of the work a colleague has done on how our technology department will respond to the overall strategy of our region, once in my team meeting and again at our broader management team meeting.
• Met with our CTO to discuss our draft change portfolio.
• Sat with a colleague to review his responses to an internal AI-focused survey that is being conducted by a well-known management consultancy.
• Had a call with my Executive Partner at our technology research and advisory firm as a follow-up to the career conversation we had last week. I also met with our account manager and our CISO to review their offering in the cybersecurity space.
• Met with an ex-colleague to see if she might be interested in a temporary role that may be emerging in my team.
• Joined the inaugural weekly project meeting for fitting out and equipping our newest office.
• Caught up with colleagues from our sister company for the weekly meeting on their office refurbishment project, and had our internal monthly meeting to review the status of the work.
• Ran our bi-weekly management team meeting.
• Met with colleagues who wanted to learn about the technology in one of our offices.
• Documented my amateur dabbling with Claude Code, publishing a post about how I resurrected my long-dead university project.
• Took my wife to the hospital for the next check-up on her eye. We seemed to be scheduled at the busiest time, and at the back of the queue for everything. On a not unrelated note, I have no idea how or why a dispensing chemist can take the best part of an hour from the point you hand over your prescription to the point you receive the drugs. Why isn’t it a case of: read form, see that it’s just for something in a box on the shelf, bag up, hand over, goodbye?
• Made plans to visit my son at university. It’s not straightforward given that he’s some 5,000 miles away from us. I’m looking forward to seeing him in his new habitat, going somewhere off the beaten track and meeting some local people.
• Along with a bunch of other paying subscribers, joined the Quiet Riot podcast editorial meeting for an hour of constructive chat.
• Had a great Saturday morning ride with the cycling club. I felt very strong going up a bunch of our local hills and found at the end that I’d set new personal best times on each of them.
• Ignored TrainerRoad’s advice to rest on Sunday and instead went for a 10km run. I always feel better after I exercise, but I was feeling quite sleepy later that day.
• Watched the roofers get to work on the repair to our house.
  

Media

Podcasts

• The FT’s News Briefing podcast posted a good interview with Daniel Chait, CEO of Greenhouse, on the current job market.
• Really enjoyed this long interview with Peter Steinberger, creator of the currently famous in tech circles OpenClaw. Some highlights from the conversation:
  
  • He talked about working on his first big commercial project, PSPDFKit. He loved working on support tickets and would always pick up the most recent issue first, as getting a response from the CEO in five minutes would feel magical to someone. If it has been one or two days, getting a response wouldn’t have as much impact.
  • He reflects on the time he spent in the past ‘bike shedding’ and wondering whether it was worth it, given that the customer never sees the inside of the product.
  • Using agentic AI to code has made him realise that he no longer has to pick his side projects, he can work on everything now.
  • He talks about “closing the loop”, using automated tests (also created by the AI) so that it solves the problems and issues that it creates. He says that using the tools makes you a better architect as you need to think about how to set your project up for fast cycles where you can make rapid changes that are tested. As a developer, he hated writing tests and documentation but now those outputs are just part of the process.
  • “It’s very rarely that I actually revert and have to go back. It’s just like, ‘Okay no, then let’s change this; no, no, let’s do this’ and it’s like it’s like shaping. I love how like you start with a rock and then you like chisel away at it, like pick different areas, and and then slowly like this statue emerges out of marble. That’s how I see building something.”
  • Clawdbot started off as a WhatsApp relay between his phone and his computer. He “added a heartbeat” where every few minutes it would automatically be asked to “do something cool and surprise me”.
  • When people submit pull requests for changes to the OpenClaw codebase, he asks them to include in their submissions the prompts they used, as he finds the prompts more interesting to read than the code.
    

But this new world needs people that that have a product vision that can be able to do everything. And you need far fewer of them, but ultimately just very high agency and and high competency people. But you can you can probably like trim the company down to like 30%, which is very scary because, I mean, economically, this will all lead into a fiasco.

And a lot of people will have trouble finding a place in this new world, but I’m not the least surprised that current companies cannot very successfully use AI.

I mean, they do to a degree, but you have to do a big refactor first, you know?

Like, not just on your code base, but also on your company.

• The Guardian’s Politics Weekly America featured an excellent profile of Jesse Jackson, who passed away this week.
  

Articles

• It’s interesting to see more companies releasing enterprise browsers.
• Simon Willison has coined the term ‘Deep Blue’ to denote “the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work”.
• Margaret Storey writes about “How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt”:
  

I saw this dynamic play out vividly in an entrepreneurship course I taught recently. Student teams were building software products over the semester, moving quickly to ship features and meet milestones. But by weeks 7 or 8, one team hit a wall. They could no longer make even simple changes without breaking something unexpected. When I met with them, the team initially blamed technical debt: messy code, poor architecture, hurried implementations. But as we dug deeper, the real problem emerged: no one on the team could explain why certain design decisions had been made or how different parts of the system were supposed to work together. The code might have been messy, but the bigger issue was that the theory of the system, their shared understanding, had fragmented or disappeared entirely. They had accumulated cognitive debt faster than technical debt, and it paralyzed them.

• Storey’s article was again via Simon Willison, who recognises this condition from the work he has been doing with AI coding:
  

I’ve experienced this myself on some of my more ambitious vibe-code-adjacent projects. I’ve been experimenting with prompting entire new features into existence without reviewing their implementations and, while it works surprisingly well, I’ve found myself getting lost in my own projects.

I no longer have a firm mental model of what they can do and how they work, which means each additional feature becomes harder to reason about, eventually leading me to lose the ability to make confident decisions about where to go next.

• Ethan Mollick has written another exceptional guide to the current world of generative AI and how to approach using the different tools.
• Matthew Haughey documented his attempt to make practical use of AI, and how it failed him.
• The charity Mind is launching an inquiry into AI and mental health after a Guardian investigation found that Google’s AI Overviews feature gave people “very dangerous” medical advice.
• It was interesting to read that banks will begin to discuss a UK alternative to Visa and Mastercard. Of the big four card networks, three of them — Visa, Mastercard and American Express — are all US-based, with UnionPay based out of China.
• JP Rangaswami’s post about the cloud and enterprise cost allocation may be 15 years old, but it still comes up in conversation and I’m still sharing it. The bullet points in his article about the madness of internal cost allocations will be familiar to anyone who has worked as a manager in a large enterprise.
• John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times says that “‘Is university still worth it?’ is the wrong question”. Graduates are finding it hard in the UK due to our general economic malaise:
  

Since the 1990s the share of managerial and professional jobs in the US economy has risen from 28 to 39 per cent. In Germany it’s up from 19 to 30 per cent and in the Netherlands up from 34 to 45 per cent since 2005. The UK has seen just a six percentage point rise from 27 to 33 per cent since 1991.

As a result, more and more UK graduates are working in non-graduate jobs and earning non-graduate wages — not because of an absolute oversupply of graduates, but an oversupply of graduates relative to the numbers of well-paid professional jobs in the economy. Elsewhere in the world, robust increases in the population of graduates have been matched by skilled job creation.

• Robert at Coinerella documents his attempt to build the technology for a startup entirely on European infrastructure. (via Jan Wildeboer)
• I like Roger Swannell’s rejection of the metaphor of ‘steering the ship’ for large organisations and instead proposes a new one:
  

I’ve mentioned before how metaphors like steering the ship don’t fit our modern pluralistic understanding of organisations so I’ve been wondering what metaphors might fit. Here’s my first try… Organisations are like plants. Small start-ups are flowers, they can point in one direction at a time, towards the sun (the sun is the market) to collect it’s resources, and they change direction as the sun moves. Large organisations take a different approach. They are more like trees with lots of leaves pointing in all different directions. As the sun moves, different leaves collect its resources, but the tree doesn’t move. Metaphorically, it suggests leader’s job is to grow the right leaves on their branch so the org can get sunlight from lots of directions at the same time.”

• Manuel Moreale is stopping his People and Blogs series when he gets to 150 interviews. Sad, but understandable.
• The experience of logging into Facebook after eight years away. I deleted my Facebook account almost a decade ago and was instantly happier.
• Colin Gorrie has an excellent post that shows how English has changed over the past thousand years.
  

Video

• Started watching Small Prophets on BBC iPlayer. It’s a lovely thing.
• Watched Parasite (2019), which made me happy before we even got started as it made use of my £1 for three months subscription to MUBI. This film was full of surprises, shocks and humour. Excellent.
• Went to the cinema with a friend to see Man on the Run (2025), the new documentary about Paul McCartney. It roughly covers the period from the break-up of the Beatles at the start of the 1970s to the assassination of John Lennon at the beginning of the 1980s. I loved it. McCartney doesn’t seem afraid to mock the more ridiculous parts of his story, and there were plenty of moments where everyone in the cinema laughed out loud. I know the story well, having recently read the first two volumes of The McCartney Legacy, so like many music documentaries it fell short for me through what it excluded. For example, there was no coverage of his controversial period in the early 1970s where he was releasing songs like Give Ireland Back to the Irish, Wings’ first single. I’m here to pay good money for the 10-hour version, if anyone chooses to make it.
  

Audio

• For some reason I’ve once again been obsessed with The Prophet’s Song, the first track on side B of Queen’s A Night at the Opera. You can hear the track and read the amazing lyrics here. When a song gets buried into my brain I usually look for videos on YouTube of people reacting to hearing it for the first time. I absolutely love this guy’s face when he hears the a cappella section in the middle of the record:

Books

• I’m still not reading as much as I’d like. Progress through Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman is slow, which is taking away from some of the narrative. I’m going to have to look at my copious highlights when I’m done in order to connect all the pieces together.
  

Next week: An online Album Club, and going on a trip.

A tough week. Last weekend, for no reason whatsoever, the cloudy, grey feelings descended on me as they have occasionally done since I was a teenager. When it happens, everything gets tinged with sadness and negativity, without any cause. It’s hard to find the joy in anything and you just want to go back to bed. I end up feeling really tired despite having had a good night’s sleep. My wife knew I was in a funk. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I know it will pass. I just have to be kind to myself until it does. I carried it all the way through Monday, but it started to dissipate as the week went on. Brains are bizarre.

This was a week in which I:

• Had several meetings with our Digital Insights team in South Africa to discuss how we can work together to investigate business opportunities.
• Discussed our approach to phishing training across the organisation, and how it fits into the broader context of mandatory training for all staff.
• Met with a project manager in my team to talk about how we might build a roadmap for our work. I love a simple but insightful question such as “Why do we want to do it?” as it brings clarity.
• Finally completed a long email to a COO of one of our business functions, highlighting a pain point, and suggesting both a tactical next step as well as longer-term strategic changes. I’ve been thinking about some of the points for years, and it felt great to finally get it out there. A response from one of his colleagues showed that my note was taken in the constructive spirit that it was intended. Hopefully it will come to some good.
• Enjoyed a lunch laid on for the office, followed by a talk about our strategy from our regional CEO.
• Booked into sessions for the Gartner CIO Leadership Forum in March.
• Had an introductory meeting with the CEO of our largest technology supplier, after his firm completed the acquisition of the company that we have worked with for many years.
• Joined the weekly project meeting for our sister company’s office refurbishment initiative.
• Rewrote and rebranded the office-wide communications for the reopening of the refurbished basement facilities in our building.
• Had a catch-up with my People & Culture Business Partner on a bunch of ongoing topics relevant to my team.
• Interviewed another candidate for our software developer role.
• Met with my boss and my Executive Partner at our technology consultancy and advisory firm for a discussion about my career. I am very fortunate to have such good people who want to give their input and guidance to me.
• Had the monthly formal meeting of our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum.
• Had our annual meeting with our financial adviser. All of our discussions and planning have been focused on the assumption that I will retire at 67, but with various people calling time around me, I started to ponder whether this is really how it will play out.
• Felt very proud of our eldest son, who broke his college’s mile record at a race meet in Houston, Texas.
• Took my son’s bike into our local shop for a service ahead of his planned big cycling adventure with his friends. It needed two new disc rotors, a new left-hand brake/gear lever and a new headset bearing. So, it was well worth the visit. Hopefully it will stop raining soon, so he can take it out for an enjoyable test ride.
• Bought and set up a new laptop for my wife, as her old one was fraying at the seams and out of support after nine years of active service. Being the home IT admin guy is great, but this stuff can take up so much time.
• Reviewed the detailed lease documents for my wife’s parents’ new house ahead of their upcoming move.
• Enjoyed using some vouchers for a Sunday night dinner at Pizza Express with the three-quarters of the family currently in the UK.
• Left my umbrella on the train, paying my regular idiot tax. I was on such a good run of form too. Amazon tells me that the latest one had lasted about 17 months, and my replacement will be the fourth of this particular model. There must be a big pile of umbrellas somewhere, in my case either at Milton Keynes or London Euston. What happens to them after that? I’m wondering whether in the future it’s actually OK to take an umbrella that seems to have no owner, as this completes the cycle?
  

• Made some tweaks to my blog, moving over to Libre Franklin as a consistent typeface, reducing aggressive hyphenation at the end of each line, and making a small change to the CSS for related posts. Claude helped me immensely with guidance on how to do both. I also cleaned up the categories on a couple of posts that caused some weird rendering issues on the Archive page, as well as deleting some very old posts that frankly were just a bit embarrassing two decades on. Posting things in the early days of blogging, prior to modern social media, when the only people that read what I wrote were my immediate friends, is very different to now. I’m in good company in doing this.
• Started paying for Claude as I wanted to get my hands on the web-based version of Claude Code. Within 45 minutes, despite barely knowing what I was doing, I got it to implement my first change, a small tweak to the code for the WB-40 Album Club site. This was an obvious place to start as it is a project I host on GitHub, which Claude Code interfaces with directly. I went to bed on Sunday night with my head racing with thoughts of how I might experiment with it.
  

Media

Podcasts

• After a tumultuous few days for the UK Prime Minister in relation to the fallout of the Epstein Files, Alastair Campbell’s thoughts were an interesting but far from optimistic way to start the week.
• The deconstruction of Prince’s Kiss on Strong Songs is superb. I’ve always thought it to be such a unique-sounding record, particularly for the time it came out. Kirk Hamilton breaks down exactly why, and also reveals that it’s actually a blues track.
• Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, has been railing against people working from home. The absolute brass neck of the man. On Quiet Riot, Alex Andreou breaks down Farage’s voting record in the House of Commons, a place that he is meant to attend as his place of work to represent the people of Clacton:
  

Alex Andreou: So since being elected, Nigel Farage has voted 162 times. Now, let’s compare that, for instance, to Richard Tice, who has voted 235 times. So that’s quite a significant 30% more than Nigel Farage. And we’re looking at someone who was elected at the same time for the same party.

Naomi Smith: And lives in Dubai.

[…]

AA: Miatta Fahnbulleh, friend of the podcast, 306 times. And she’s a junior minister. They often get paired and often have a legitimate excuse not to go to votes that are not particularly controversial, I guess.

Sian Berry, elected at the same time, party of a similar size to Reform, she has voted 336 times. And that is elegantly just over twice the times that Nigel Farage has voted.

So we can look at that and we can look at his record as an MEP. In 2019, when Byline researched attendance and amendment contributions, out of 751 MEPs from 28 countries, Farage’s record was the third worst of everyone, and joint worst having made zero amendment proposals. So he contributed nothing to any legislation and only showed up just over half the time.

NS: Yet pocketed the pension.

AA: So on that, I would agree with him. There are some professions which require you to be present. And being a member of Parliament, Mr Farage, is one of them.

• Over the weekend I wrote about Matt Shumer’s post that “something big is happening”, and how I don’t understand the big-picture end goal that the AI companies are ultimately pursuing. It made me smile to hear the hosts of the Sharp Tech podcast talk about how Mark Zuckerberg plans to spend $135bn — Meta’s entire free cash flow — on AI capital investment, but effectively admitted on an investor call that he can’t say what the return is. I guess time will tell whether this is genius or madness.
  

Articles

• A Mastodon thread from Jurgis Kirsakmens on how LLM AI coding agents are not good for mental health.
• Along these same lines, Simon Willison covers a Harvard Business Review paper by Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye on how “AI Doesn’t Reduce Work — It Intensifies It”:
  

I’m frequently finding myself with work on two or three projects running parallel. I can get so much done, but after just an hour or two my mental energy for the day feels almost entirely depleted.

I’ve had conversations with people recently who are losing sleep because they’re finding building yet another feature with “just one more prompt” irresistible.

The HBR piece calls for organizations to build an “AI practice” that structures how AI is used to help avoid burnout and counter effects that “make it harder for organizations to distinguish genuine productivity gains from unsustainable intensity”.

• Reading Baldur Bjarnason’s book The Intelligence Illusion a couple of years ago was incredibly helpful for me as I got my head around the world of generative AI. This week he reflects on whether his views have hardened since then. I agree that it’s not that the tools aren’t useful in specific cases, it’s that they are applied in terrible ways:
  

Personally, my personal conclusion was that the only usable tool to come out of this all are the speech recognition and transcription models. They aren’t great, you need to edit the output a lot to make it usable, but they reduce the work of transcribing audio by a substantial margin as long as you don’t use OpenAI’s Whisper. OpenAI’s model fabricates in its transcripts. To this day, it still regularly makes shit up in its transcripts. That it’s being adopted in healthcare around the world should terrify you. That it’s being sold into these sensitive industries by OpenAI even though they seem well-aware of these flaws should make you question the integrity of the people running that company.

[…]

I never had high expectations of this industry, but it still managed to disappoint me.

• Nolan Lawson wrote a sad but pragmatic piece about mourning the craft of software development.
• An interesting article by Maria Rosala about “How AI Literacy Shapes GenAI Use”:
  

You might expect that users with a stronger technical understanding of AI would be open to using AI for various tasks, including personal information seeking. This pattern generally holds in tech: Those who understand how a technology works tend to adopt it more. However, research published in the Journal of Marketing found the opposite: lower AI conceptual knowledge predicted higher receptivity to using AI. This counterintuitive finding was replicated across 6 studies with diverse samples, from undergraduates to a nationally representative U.S. sample. Even after controlling for numerous conditions, such as general tech attitudes, general knowledge levels, and beliefs about AI’s capabilities, lower AI conceptual knowledge still correlated with greater receptivity.

The authors found that a sense of awe helped explain the trend: users with lower conceptual knowledge were more likely to see AI as “magical.”

This finding illustrates why adoption (and even enthusiasm) is not a reliable indicator of critical evaluation skill.

• A friend shared this article on how “AI isn’t replacing radiologists”. It’s a useful sense-check after reading Matt Shumer’s post on how AI is coming for everything. If AI makes things more efficient, perhaps that will help with getting waiting times down in our National Health Service?
• David Allen Green writes with typical clarity on “The constitutional significance of what happened to the Prime Minister last week”. Reading this gives me hope that our constitution in the UK is sound, and that it will remain so in the event of someone like Nigel Farage (or worse) ending up as Prime Minister.
• In the context of the appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK Ambassador to Washington DC, the revelations in the Epstein files, and the subsequent mess that Keir Starmer finds himself in, Arthur Snell breaks down how the vetting process for these senior civil service roles actually works. It’s shocking reading.
• Ben Werdmuller wrote an important note about personal security after he joined a public Signal group with his full name visible.
• I enjoyed this post about having ‘too many’ interests, which has always felt like the perennial problem of my life.
  

Video

• Dipped into more of the Winter Olympics, including figure skating, and the Snowboard Cross Mixed Team where we were shouting at the television from our seats as Team GB won gold.
• Colin Hoad’s video about the gold-plated BBC Micro in the Science Museum is excellent. I used to own a copy of the edition of The Micro User magazine where they gave this away as a prize. It has a slightly mysterious journey from 1985 to now, but it’s brilliant that it is now displayed in public for people to enjoy.
  

Audio

• Enjoyed Album Club #180 where we listened to Sugarcoat by Blushing, a band whose name does not seem to stick in my head no matter how hard I try.
  

Books

• I’m about halfway through Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. My reading feels very distracted at the moment as I have been lured into explorations of blog posts. Picking up a book is a soothing balm for a busy brain.
  

Next week: Another trip to the cinema, this time to see the new Paul McCartney film.

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.” ↩

This felt like another tough week. At the start, I was feeling run down, which I think was an after-effect of Saturday’s bike ride. Work was really busy, with multiple days consisting of back-to-back meetings, pretty much all day. It required a lot of focus to keep all of the plates spinning.

This was a week in which I:

• Tried to push forward with the work to prepare for a new office in a country that we added to our footprint last year. The Microsoft Copilot Researcher agent was very useful in helping me to find prospective building contractors and IT integrators. I remember some late nights back in 2019 where I was trying to find similar firms in Brazil, doing the research through manual web searches and phone calls from a hotel room in Dubai. The AI Researcher agent massively accelerates this process. Because we don’t have anyone from our team on the ground in-country on a permanent basis, we are looking to contract some local project management capability to help us coordinate things. This week, we had an introductory meeting with someone who should be able to help us with this.
• Wrestled with more comments and complaints about the construction noise from the floor above us in our office. There’s very little we can do besides a ‘Shawshank Redemption’ strategy of writing and sending a note every day. I’m just hoping that tea crates full of library books don’t suddenly show up in six months’ time.
• Had to wrestle with last-minute schedule changes for reopening a communal area within our office building and getting communications out to staff.
• Reviewed the work a colleague had put together on how our department can contribute to the business strategy of our region. We reviewed it with our CIO and, later in the week, with our regional Business Manager. We are on the right lines.
• Represented our department at one of our legal entity regional Governance Committee meetings.
• Took part in a stress testing workshop, looking at various macroeconomic scenarios and determining their impact on our ongoing operations. This is part of a mandatory regulatory process.
• Reviewed a draft slide deck planned to be used at a divisional level to tell a story about our Technology department’s achievements over recent years. Collaborated with colleagues to determine what our input into this process should be.
• Participated in a ‘dry run’ of the process we plan to take colleagues through as part of our document management project. A hard but very useful exercise that has given us a bunch of things to think about and actions to follow up with.
• Caught up with our sister company’s Head of Corporate Services to talk through some key building-related issues and upcoming changes. Also had the weekly project check-in for their construction project with both the outgoing and incoming project managers.
• Made some minor updates to a draft contract between our company and our sister firm, which hopefully is now ready for final review and signing.
• Attended the kick-off meeting for an internal audit that will look at certain security aspects of the technology setup across our organisation.
• Took part in our development team’s retrospective and sprint planning.
• Started to look at CVs for a software developer role in my team.
• Had a follow-up meeting with our key infrastructure support vendor and our internal team on a proposed technical change to our support process.
• Spent time thinking about the philosophy of software and firmware updates in our environment, and what change governance is needed for anything that is applied manually.
• Had the regular meeting with colleagues from our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Forum.
• Submitted a nomination for a colleague to win our most prestigious internal award. I’ve tried to nominate them a few times over the past few years as they really deserve it, but haven’t been successful yet.
• Attended an interesting webinar run by law firm Bird & Bird called AI Disputes Decoded where they reviewed recent litigation in the AI space. They covered Getty v Stability AI, Gema vs OpenAI, Kadrey et al vs Meta Platforms, and New York Times, Daily News vs OpenAI & Microsoft. It was very factual, with the hosts giving an overview of key points from each case and things to think about. Although there was a Q&A, they didn’t answer the questions that I submitted:
  • Is there a difference between the LLMs ingesting fiction and non-fiction as part of their training, and how much this can infringe copyright? Reading an LLM version of a fiction work would likely be a poor facsimile and therefore it could be argued that it doesn’t diminish the value of the original work. For non-fiction, the content can be much more ‘useful’ and using an LLM could potentially bypass the reason for purchasing a copy of the book.
  • If someone exercises an ‘opt out’ for their content after a model has been trained, does this have implications for models needing to be discarded and retrained on data sets that exclude the works that have opted out? Is this practicable?
• Spent a lot of time reading through Manuel Moreale’s blog archive. I came for his People and Blogs interview series but stayed for his other posts. The whole site is presented so beautifully, with a list of past posts at the bottom of every page, that it made it a joy to browse. I’ve moved towards using my iPad mini as my primary reading device as it gives me access to Kindle books, RSS feeds via Feedbin, articles I’ve saved later in Readwise Reader, etc. Browsing a well-designed blog as the author intended it to be presented is fun.
• Inspired by Manuel Moreale’s and Annie Mueller’s blogs, I spent a few hours changing the front page of my site to a similar chronological list of all of my previous posts.¹ I think this is a much friendlier format to the casual reader, who can now see at a glance the types of things I’ve been writing about instead of being plunged straight into the content of the latest post. ChatGPT was a great help to me in finding a tool that would display the list and then customising it so it looks the way I want it to. I’d love to have the web design chops to make the whole site look aesthetically pleasing — it’s far from that right now — but will settle for these tweaks.
• Continued dealing with issues with our house. We’ve accepted a quote to repair our roof as well as another for an electric roof lantern blind. I’ve also had to chase up the wastewater company about our collapsed drain as it isn’t clear what the next steps are.
• Enjoyed a Saturday morning ride with the cycling club. 65km felt super easy compared with the 250km monster we tackled last week.
• Loved hearing from my son who competed in Boston at the weekend. At Harvard University, his team won the race, beating the school record in the distance medal relay by more than 16 seconds. Unfortunately, the next day he was on the receiving end of a spiked shoe during his race at Boston University and ended up with a DNF. I’m sure he’ll recover quickly and is already looking forward to the next event.
• Went to a Burns supper event at our son’s school on Friday night. They put a tremendous amount of effort into the evening, but I wasn’t feeling it after a long week of work.
• Had so much fun on Saturday night at our friends’ house, singing karaoke songs from not long after we arrived until it was time to go. There are few things I love more than a karaoke evening.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Hearing Esther Ghey on the Guardian’s Politics Weekly UK podcast be so honest, open and clear-headed about her experiences, and what she is putting her energy into now in campaigning for an Australian-style social media ban, made me sit up and listen. I have been noticing more people wondering whether social media will prove to be one big terrible experiment in the long term.
• I liked Naomi Smith’s dream wish list for government bills to be in the upcoming King’s speech on the Quiet Riot podcast:
  
  • An act that would crystallise beneficial regulatory alignment with the EU. This is to avoid ‘passive divergence’ where the EU updates its regulations but we don’t follow. It will give businesses some certainty and will help us to be prepared for any closer relationship we may want in the future. In her words, “We know that if you align on goods, you can claw back about a third of the GDP we’ve lost from Brexit. If you align on goods and services, you could be clawing back about half of that GDP. And that allows you to fund all the other things that you’d like to do and tackle living standards crisis here in the UK.”
  • A commitment to reform the electoral system. As far as I can tell, nobody is happy with how things work today. 404 out of 650 MPs are currently Labour, and they won their massive majority with just 33.7% of the popular vote. In 2010, UKIP got almost 920,000 votes, 3.1% of the share, but ended up with no MPs at all. I never agreed with UKIP’s policies in any way, but I think it is a travesty that three in every hundred people in the country that voted for them were not represented in Parliament. Moving to some kind of proportional representation would mean that the work of the government, and Parliament, would be much more shaped by compromise. I think this would be a very good thing. But it needs the current government to want it to change, even though it will reduce their numbers. If they don’t do it, we risk having a far-right government in the UK with an absolute majority at the next election. It would also give confidence to our neighbours and trading partners that we won’t lurch violently one way and another every time we have a general election.
  • Land value taxation, including re-rating properties for council tax for the first time since 1993, moving us to a fairer system.
    

Articles

• I like this post from Christiano Anderson that defines both the IndieWeb and the Small web.
• Loren Stephens’ post on Life before social media is so good I sent it to my family. It’s an example of the narrative I mentioned earlier that social media may ultimately be looked at as a thing that was unhealthy for us.
• Ton Zylstra comments on Vimeo apparently laying off a big chunk of its staff. I’ve tended to reach for Vimeo first when uploading video that I wanted to share as it seemed to be a better, classier place than YouTube. Another reminder that nothing is permanent on the Internet.
• Read about Moltbook, “a social network where digital assistants can talk to each other”, via Simon Willison. Gary Marcus wrote a good summary of the story so far. There does seem to be a late 1990s/early 2000s feel to things in the generative AI space, where new experiments are popping up on a regular basis.
• I’ve said before that I love how thoughtful Manton Reece is with the Micro.blog platform. His approach to AI is no exception. There are experiments that will be available to people on the platform, but there is also a master kill switch for people who want nothing to do with AI whatsoever.
  

Video

• Gave up on season two of Hijack just a few minutes into the second episode. I don’t think Idris Elba is a particularly good actor — he seems to play the same character in everything — and he was the best thing about it. The storyline is completely ridiculous. I realise that with fiction you always need to suspend disbelief a little, but this show requires you to leave your brain somewhere else. Utter rubbish.
• Reading about Melania (2026) first had me laughing at the stories of poor ticket sales. But then I heard about who attended the private premiere of the film at the White House (which happened to take place on the same day that Alex Pretti was killed in Minneapolis), and how the movie was directed by someone previously accused of sexual assault (which he denies) who also appears in the Epstein files. The movie currently has a rating of 1.3/10 on IMDb and 1.2/5 on Letterboxd. I shall not be watching.
• Finished season two of Platonic, a show that I’ve fallen in love with. Every episode made me laugh out loud multiple times and I was so disappointed to reach the end.
• Rolled straight into watching season three of Shrinking. After watching Platonic, I feel as though I am enjoying this a little less, but it’s still nice to have the characters back with us again.
• BBC Archive is killing it again with a short video report on duvets from 1974 (which I distinctly remember being referred to as ‘continental quilts’ when they first turned up in our house.)
• Music Mongoose has a good profile of British folk band The Strawbs. They used to play at The White Bear in Hounslow, a pub that my grandparents ran and my mum grew up in. I’ve inherited all of my grandparents’ Strawbs LPs, including a couple of white label pressings of some of their early albums.
  

Audio

• I grabbed some tickets to go and see the new documentary, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley (2025), next week. After finding Jeff Buckley Live in Chicago last week I’ve been down a couple of YouTube rabbit holes listening to his music. His live cover of Elton John’s We All Fall In Love Sometimes is sublime.

• When I’m in the groove, enjoying an artist’s work, I do like to see what good reaction videos there are out there. Watching someone hear a song that you love for the first time is like playing a track to a friend and seeing them enjoy it. Anna Vaskelainen is a vocal coach from Finland who has posted a wonderful reaction to Jeff Buckley performing Grace at the BBC in 1995. The original is here, including Buckley’s reaction to the presenter saying that he sounds like his dad, Tim Buckley.

Web

• Intrigued by the upcoming talk at the local Civic Centre on ‘Berkhamsted in 50 Buildings’.
• I thought that my friend was speaking metaphorically when he said that back in the 1980s people appeared on TV for doing unusual things like the guy who ate a whole aeroplane. Turns out that this was literal. “Lotito died of natural causes at age 55”; of course he did.
  

Books

• Finished reading Indie Microblogging by Manton Reece.
• Continued reading Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
  

Next week: A trip to the cinema and a day off to visit my in-laws.

1. The ones with titles, anyway. Posts without titles can all be found in the Snippets archive. ↩

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.

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.