📷 Had a lovely meal out for my mum’s 70th birthday last night, along with my dad and my brothers. I had to compare it to a photo taken on our family holiday almost exactly 30 years before. My two boys are now exactly the same ages that my brothers and I were in 1994.

📷 Beautiful bougainvillea in Zakynthos, Greece.

📷 Zakynthos cafe vista.

🎶 Very excited to hear the new Magdalena Bay album, Imaginal Disk, which was released on Friday. Their debut album, Mercurial World, is one of my favourite things I’ve heard over the past few years.

📷 I think this Greek ice cream might be overplaying its hand.

“Ah, yes. I see that you know your judo well.”

So much meme gold in such a short video. Sad to hear that Jack Karlson has passed away.

If you turn up to an online meeting with your ‘AI assistant’ and we haven’t had a chat about you bringing it along, I’m going to kick it out of the call. Doing this is not okay.

🎶 I love a random, unexpected gift that drops through the door. The Smoke Fairies have sent me a CD of their performances at Rough Trade East in London. What a lovely thing.

Generative AI just doing its thing. Simple question, two ‘market leading’ models from the same vendor, opposite answers.

📚 Finished reading PWNED by Troy Hunt. I can’t quite remember how I stumbled across his work; it was probably via a link from a Twitter post to his brilliant ‘;–have i been pwned? service. It’s been fascinating to learn about data breaches and disclosure processes, Internet of Things adventures, 3D printing, public speaking, travelling the world and so much more through his weekly update podcast, which I’ve listened to for at least half a decade now. This wonderful book brings together a collection of his blog posts as well as introductions, epilogues and comments to each one. If you’re remotely interested in information security or carving your own path away from a corporate job, this is well worth your time.

📚 Finished reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. It was just what I needed — a novel light enough to not require my full attention but gripping enough to make me want to pick it up whenever I had a spare moment. It’s a lovely thing that I don’t want to spoil by going into too much detail here, but I will say that it has made me think again about my relationship with computer games. Maybe when I retire I’ll spend time catching up on the decades of games that I missed.

❎ Voted.

📷 Skyscraper under construction. New York City, May 2024.

📚 Finished reading Attack Warning Red! How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War by Julie McDowall. A forensic look at the approach this country took as we navigated the Cold War. This largely involved pretending that World War II-style preparations were adequate, denying the realities to the public until a sufficient consensus emerged among that same public that nuclear war was not survivable. It’s interesting how much the films The War Game (1966) and Threads (1984) played a part in showing people the stark realities. I too saw Threads as a child and it had a profound effect on me.

📷 A neighbour took a photo of my son and I looking up in wonder at the Northern Lights last night.

📷 Quite a show over our street this evening. Never seen this before.