A cold, frosty morning on my way to the train station
This week was a bit too much. Last week’s relatively slow start had lulled me into a false sense of security, so it felt as though reality hit me hard this week. There was so much going on both at work and at home. It felt as though I picked up more things than I put down.
This was a week in which I:
Wrestled with the trains. My usual morning train was cancelled until the final couple of days of the week due to a points failure somewhere on the line. The next one rolled into the station with a fraction of the carriages it normally has, so I had to run down the platform to catch it. We were standing, squeezed together from the start of the journey. After a quarter of a century of commuting I actually quite enjoy it — it’s where I write most of my weeknotes — but not when the service starts to fall apart.
Prepared for and ran our programme steering committee meeting. Preparing the pack was a useful exercise for me to get my head around where we are at after a flurry of activity at the end of last year. I spent a couple of hours at the weekend writing up the minutes as I know that there won’t be any time to do this next week and didn’t want it to be hanging over me.
Also finished off the preparation for next week’s management team offsite meeting over the weekend, confirming the final agenda and sending it out to my colleagues.
Met with the CEO and Office Manager for one of our regional offices for a review of the services provided by our department, and our plans for this year.
Bumped into another of our regional CEOs who was visiting our office ahead of an offsite meeting. We discussed the potential provision of a technology in his office and agreed a plan to gather some more information before making a decision.
Handed over background documentation for a document management project that we would like to make progress with this year.
Met with our audio/visual consultants following last week’s trial of demo equipment in one of our boardrooms. The Integrated Systems Europe conference is just around the corner, and we’re hoping for product announcements that will help us with our large shared meeting rooms. The solution that we tested may be more suited to another space that we’d like to improve.
Met with our real estate services consultancy firm to review their proposal to support us in 2025.
Caught up with our sister company on their revised draft schedule for their office renovation and maintenance.
Reviewed lots of CVs from recruiters for the vacancy in my team. I also hosted one of the recruiters when they came to visit our office. The CVs are getting closer to what we’re looking for and we have a couple of interviews lined up for next week.
Joined our architecture governance meeting and reviewed proposed changes to some of our technology infrastructure. The changes are deep in the weeds, but should result in a smoother experience for all of the staff working in our offices.
Had a career coaching session with my executive partner at a technology industry analyst firm. Thinking about what I would like to spend my time doing if there were no constraints was an interesting exercise. Very early in my career I fell into project management, but I’m a geek at heart and sometimes wish my role was more technical than it is.
Had my regular meeting with our account manager at the same technology industry analyst firm.
Discussed the needs of one of our departments that fields a large number of staff queries. What was initially pitched to me as a conversation about AI ended up with us deciding that a rule-based chatbot would be more suitable.
Met with the Product Owner of Planview AgilePlace for a demo of possible new features. We took the opportunity to give some extensive feedback on the tool. It’s been an excellent tool for us over the past few years and it’s so lovely to be able to give feedback directly to the person in charge. Another example of the magical Internet.
Spent many, many hours trying to find a suitable venue for dinner to celebrate our programme’s success and to thank our team. After a slow start to my search I soon realised that I had to cast a wide net. I spent time running around the City of London to look at venues that were in the running; this proved to be invaluable as I found rooms that looked great on the web were inaccessible or located next to the restaurant toilets. I now have both a venue as well as a newfound respect for our Marketing and Communications team who have to do this kind of work as part of their day job.
Enjoyed a wonderful Learning Hour meeting where our CTO talked to us about SpaceX, Starlink, and their status in Africa.
Hosted the latest WB-40Album Club. I’d struggled to make time to think about what to play, and picked Joe Jackson’s debut album Look Sharp! at the very last minute. I was very happy with my choice. There are so many great songs on there.
Had a frustrating experience at a stationery shop. My wife had ordered a few packs of coloured pencils to give as prizes to children in a school art contest. Her order was sent to the shop close to my office so that I could pick them up. When I got there and showed them the order on my phone, they asked for a physical copy of her ID, which I didn’t have. I asked whether I could just buy some more, but they said that the packs they have are put aside for my wife’s order. I asked whether I could call her and ask her to cancel her order, putting the packs of pencils back into stock. Apparently that wouldn’t work either, as the process takes a while. So, I walked out without the pencils.
Enjoyed this week’s in-person Album Club. I’d heard lots about Big Country over the years but had never knowingly heard any of their songs, so this was a great opportunity to listen intently. I’ve now tried it, and made up my mind that I didn’t like it.
The Standard Bank In-Market Insights podcast is excellent. The latest episode covers the relationship and geopolitics between China and Africa.
Articles
Local police forces are launching an initiative to tackle drivers who pass cyclists too closely. This article is from 2018, but the scheme is being rolled out in Hertfordshire soon. Lots of drivers don’t understand that when overtaking they need to use the whole of the other lane as if they were overtaking a car. A couple of months ago I was involved in an extremely narrow pass that just had a couple of centimetres between me and the car.
I had a conversation in the office last week about whether it’s better to read AI-generated summaries of books or to not read them at all. I don’t know what the answer is. This Bluesky post serendipitously turned up in my timeline.
Spent a baffled 45 minutes watching the first episode of season two of Severance. This recap of season one was exactly what we needed to remind ourselves of everything that happened. We’d forgotten nearly everything.
Started watching The Breakthrough, a drama about a double murder in Sweden that went unsolved for 16 years.
The first week of work for 2025 was a strange one. In many ways I hit the ground running, getting on with some important items that I need to complete early on this year. But it still felt very fragmented, with lots of little things pulling me in different directions.
I had a few conversations with colleagues that veered off in different directions, many of them fascinating. It brought into sharp relief one of my flaws in that I’m interested in ALL THE THINGS, and usually want the detail on each of the topics too. The structure of my week and my commitments don’t give me enough bandwidth to deeply indulge in the things I want to learn about.
Had a rainy, windy start to my first day back in the office. It broke my exercising streak as I chose to take the tube instead of walking to my office.
Tried to start the year by flushing all of the key priorities out of my head before getting mired in the detail of Teams messages and emails. On my first day I had a very useful impromptu catch-up with my boss which helped us to get aligned with each other at the start of the year.
Had lots of discussions about the ethics and use cases of large language models and generative AI, such as whether consuming potentially inaccurate AI-generated summaries of books is better or worse than not reading them at all.
Finished the annual appraisal process for my team. I haven’t managed a team of permanent staff in a while and I had forgotten how much I enjoy it.
Restarted the process of trying to recruit for a vacancy in my team. It was useful to re-review the role spec and tweak it a bit further. It’s out with quite a few recruitment companies and we’ve already started to get CVs back.
Had lunch with my contact at one of the recruitment firms, and had a call with another to get the process moving again.
Took part in tests of an advanced videoconferencing system in one of our large client meeting rooms. Getting the equipment set up on site was invaluable to see how it would perform in our space. The audio was incredible but the video experience started to struggle once we filled the room. One of our colleagues at our sister company in the building managed to bring along tons of ‘extras’ in the form of our cleaning, catering and maintenance staff so that we could fill the room with people.
Met with my counterpart at our sister company to catch up with what’s been happening with their major programme over the Christmas period.
Continued planning for our management team offsite in a couple of weeks’ time, firming up some of the agenda as well as a venue for dinner.
Gave feedback to our team for a couple of small tweaks to our office environment settings, which have already been implemented.
Helped a colleague to solve a problem with logging into their password manager.
Had a catch-up call with our consultant who is helping my eldest son to find a scholarship at a university in the US. The next few weeks seem critical to get solid offers nailed down.
Didn’t manage to get out on my bike, so did lots of indoor rides. The temperature has remained at or below freezing all week, making it too icy to attempt an outdoor cycle. The cycling club cancelled the Saturday morning ride, which is usual if the temperature isn’t high enough by the time we are due to set off.
Enjoyed a lovely Saturday afternoon lunch out in town with my wife. We’ve got into the habit of doing this regularly and I love it.
Went through my blog posts with the plan of creating a ‘highlights’ page, linking to posts that are important to me.
Discovered that a noisy pan on an induction hob is not a good thing. One layer of metal gave a cracking sound as it separated from another. We only discovered the problem when we found that the pan wasn’t heating up.
Nigel Farage, Elon Musk, Robert Jenrick, Tommy Robinson – when have you ever heard these people give a shit about women’s issues, let alone make a speech or put forward a policy dedicated to advancing them? Robinson very deliberately nearly collapsed a grooming trial, which would have put the victims through months and months of the horror of having to testify twice. People threaten to rape and kill women pretty much every second on Musk’s platform and nothing gets done about it – if I were him I’d be cleaning up my own streets. If he can’t manage it, maybe he should immediately call for himself to be imprisoned?
We finished watching season two of Shrinking on AppleTV+. The characters were fabulous and made me laugh out loud every episode. But who lives in a world where people just randomly pop into each other’s houses all the time? As fun as it looks to be a part of their gang, would anyone really like to live like that?
I’d never heard of the BBC TV programme Open Door before. It’s like an early precursor to YouTube, commissioned by David Attenborough.
Sky’s Dart Kings documentary offers a great slice of cultural history through three episodes, covering Eric Bristow, Jocky Wilson and Phil Taylor. I didn’t watch darts as a kid but everyone knew the names of the top players. I loved looking back at the old TV footage in this series; the venues, the crowd and the copious amounts of beer show a much simpler time.
Black Bird on AppleTV+ is an incredible drama, based on the real-life serial killer Larry Hall. We started watching it with no prior knowledge of the events or the subject matter and it blew us away. The main character, played by Taron Egerton, gets ever so slightly changed and impacted by events as the series progresses, and it’s only at the end that you see how much he has transformed from where the story began.
Audio
So excited to hear from Alicia Clara. Her music was one of my favourite things to listen to over the past year.
Finally finished my hobby project of cleaning up my digital music library and sorting out all of my Plex metadata. It took me days of work — I must have spent three or four hours just fixing the data for the 24-disc Mansun Closed For Business box set — but now it’s done. Albums have the correct covers, songs are where they should be, random old downloads were purged and everything now looks present and correct.
After getting back from our Mexican holiday on Monday, I spent most of this week pottering around. I managed to get out on my bike on New Year’s Eve just ahead of a storm, and since then it’s been too cold and yucky to ride outside. So my routine has been to wake up a little later than usual, go on the indoor bike trainer, and then fill my afternoon with either jobs that need doing or hobbies that I want to make some progress with. Work will soon be in the foreground again, but I’m hoping that I will go back on Monday feeling properly rested.
New Year’s Eve was also my 48th birthday. After my bike ride, I went out with my family for a late lunch at Here, where they serve the best all-day vegetarian cooked breakfast in town. We spent a very quiet but lovely evening with friends who had invited us over for dinner. At midnight we watched the fireworks on TV. Every year they always look exactly the same to me.
My family know me well
One of my friends gifted me a second-hand vinyl copy of The Hits Album 6, a compilation that we both had on cassette tape when we were kids. There are some great tracks on there as well as one or two quite questionable songs towards the end. But mainly, it’s a great excuse to hear Donna Allen’s Serious, an underrated gem.
Reunited with a copy of Hits 6
I spent a lot of time cleaning up my digital music collection, including two or three hours alone which went into fixing up Mansun’s 25-disc Closed For Business box set. Getting the data corrected and organised in the Music app (which in my head will forever be iTunes) doesn’t necessarily mean that Plex will use it. Tracks seemed to jump between the discs, which all needed to be manually corrected. Taking the time to fix up the data is worth it, as it is helping me to rediscover my own music collection. I started the work before Christmas and have made it up to artists with the letter ‘U’, which felt good until I realised that I still have ‘Various Artists’ to go.
The episode also got me thinking again about how Internet platforms are largely unregulated, allowing people to spread fake news and make dangerous accusations without any checks. The planned ban of TikTok in the US makes sense; the platform is controlled by a state adversarial to the US that has itself restricted and banned many US social media platforms. What will the UK’s response be to a foreign platform whose owner uses it to incite division and hatred? Media regulation in the Internet age fascinates me. I made a note to myself to find a book that covers the complex topic of ‘free speech’ in the modern world; later that day I read Heather Burns’ post on her best reads and listens of 2024 where she recommends just the thing.
Articles
Alex Tabarrok says that India has too few tourists. I last visited in 2006 and still maintain that it is the most incredible place I’ve ever visited for a holiday.
Video
Despite our jet lag on the day we came back from our holiday, the finale of Gavin & Stacey kept us going. It’s amazing to think that we’ve known the characters for 17 years. It’s cheesy, but I love it.
Elliot Roberts’ video review of the Beatles ‘64 film and the Beatles’ US Albums box set is superb as usual.1 I adore his YouTube content, and am happy to support his work through Patreon.
Books
Despite trying to vary what I read, I couldn’t help but pick up the second volume of The McCartney Legacy by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair, which was published last month. It covers the years 1974 to 1980 and is another whopper at 768 pages, but I’m here for every detail.
Next week: Getting back to work.
At the time of writing, the video is only available to Patreon supporters with early access. It should be on YouTube soon, if it isn’t already. ↩
View of the beach from The Fives Hotel, Playa del Carmen, Mexico
We’ve just come back from a wonderful holiday in Playa del Carmen, a short drive south of Cancún in Mexico. There were 14 of us — my two brothers and I, our families, plus our parents. Back in summer 2022 we went away on a big family trip to Turkey and had such a lovely time that we wanted to repeat it. After my lovely Nan passed away in January, my mum suggested that we plan another trip. We jumped at the idea.
The best thing about a big family holiday is how much time you all get to spend together. There’s no time pressure of having to fit in all of the conversations you want to have into a few snatched hours, as there usually is when you just get together for an afternoon. Of course, it helps if you like the members of your family. I feel very lucky to be part of such a great crew whose company I really enjoy. Spending quality time with my niece and nephews is a precious thing, and it was great to be able to get to know them better. When we get together, I always think of Tim Urban’s Wait But Why post on The Tail End:
I’ve been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I’ve probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time. 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood.
Being in their mid-60s, let’s continue to be super optimistic and say I’m one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the ten days a year thing holds, that’s 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years.
When you look at that reality, you realize that despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life.
[…]
It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
It’s a similar story with my two sisters. After living in a house with them for 10 and 13 years respectively, I now live across the country from both of them and spend maybe 15 days with each of them a year. Hopefully, that leaves us with about 15% of our total hangout time left.
My eldest son may be off to college in August this year. Given that he and his younger brother both have important exams in the summer, the only time we could plan our holiday for was the Christmas break. There were some nerves and reluctance about going away at this time of year as there is something special about being in the wind, rain, cold and snow, and enjoying everything Christmassy with the youngest children in our group. But there wasn’t any real alternative. For the first time that I can remember, I spent Christmas somewhere warm.
We woke up early to drive to Gatwick, dropping our car off and meeting everyone in the departure hall. Our flight was uneventful, but fun. I love a daytime flight going west, as it means that you just end up with a long day.
Vapour trail across the wing
Arriving at Cancun airport was a different story. As we came to the end of our long walk from the aircraft gate and descended into the immigration hall, we quickly realised that we had entered the gates of hell. The room was jam-packed and completely disorganised. People had little idea of where they needed to be, and no means of getting there even if they did. As we inched our way forward, people started shouting at each other for pushing in or somehow ending up in front of them in the pack. There was no queue, just one big scrum. We tried to make light of the situation, but any smiles were offset by the frayed tempers around us. A little panic set in when we realised that our airport transfer would only wait 45 minutes for us before leaving; I tried calling them but had no luck getting through.
This photo does not do justice to how disorganised the immigration hall was
Remarkably, by the time we got through immigration our bags had not yet turned up. After more waiting and a brief moment of panic that our suitcases weren’t with us, we finally left the airport and eventually found our transfer. Our driver didn’t have a clue where we were going, so I sat next to him in the front of the vehicle, holding up Waze on my iPhone to navigate us to the hotel. We were laughing as I relayed hazards reported by Waze to the driver and exclaimed “La Luna!” every time we found a pothole that hadn’t been logged.
Our home for the week was The Fives Beach Hotel and Residences, just north of the town of Playa del Carmen. It’s a strange mix of hotel and condominiums. Our rooms were superb, with separate kitchen and lounge areas, but they had no cutlery or other utensils for self-catering. The hotel is all-inclusive, so I doubt that guests would typically make use of any of the cooking facilities, but it was weird not to have a single implement in any of the drawers.
The rooms are spread out over a sprawling estate with plenty of amenities on site: a big variety of restaurants, a gym, multiple swimming pools, bars, a beach and small pier as well as wooden walkways through a lightly cultivated mangrove swamp. Monkeys, coatis and lizards roam around the complex, turning up unexpectedly as you pass.
Comedy footprints by reception. We have no idea what animal made these, or why its paws were so muddy.
A monkey on the wooden walkway. At one point my wife was busy pointing at a monkey in a tree, not realising that one was sitting about half a foot away from her. I’ve not seen her jump as high as when she spotted it.
One of the resident lizards
Coatis, making mincemeat of the lawn as they foraged for food
You can get around the site by chauffeured golf buggy, which you are introduced to when the staff first take you to your room. But it was much more efficient to get around by foot. The perimeter of the site is about 1.75km and makes for a perfectly usable running route. After a couple of mornings of sweating litres of water on the spin bikes in the humid gym, I couldn’t face doing it for a third time, so I tentatively tried running again. I was so pleased that my calf injury didn’t come back, so I switched to morning runs for the rest of my stay.
The main pool and beach area was lovely. You needed to get down there early to secure any sunbeds, as people got there early and left towels on them all day. I think that hotels like this one would benefit from having some proper rules in place, such as needing to have at least one member of your group present to keep hold of any sunbeds, and for each person to be able to ‘keep’ no more than four.
Early morning at the beach
View from the sunbeds, out to sea
Early on in our trip we saw an area of the beach turned into a wedding venue. It was beautiful, but strange that there were a bunch of strangers in swimwear milling around the smartly-dressed wedding attendees.
Wedding on the beach
The on-site restaurants were good, but getting a table was a pain. According to other guests that had visited the year before, the hotel had removed the ability for you to pre-book dinner at a certain time. You had to turn up at a restaurant, ask for a table and then wait around with a buzzer until one became available. If there were just two of us I think we would have been fine, but with such a large group we found ourselves eating quite late on a couple of evenings, with the youngest children falling asleep at the table. After some complaining and negotiating, we managed to secure a table for all 14 of us at the Thai restaurant on Christmas Day, which worked out brilliantly. My favourite restaurant was the Italian, which served some incredible butternut squash ravioli.
On the days where it was more difficult to secure a table, some of the group took advantage of the buffet restaurant or the pizzeria in the main plaza. These facilities made things a lot easier when we wanted a more relaxed, less formal evening.
A couple of days into the trip, my wife discovered a little frozen yoghurt shop that was slightly hidden away. It quickly became a daily staple for everyone, with many of us walking out of the shop with overflowing tubs that consisted of at least 50% toppings.
The hotel had a good programme of events for Christmas, which went a long way to keeping it special. Christmas Eve was so much fun. It started with a very good musical duo who were accompanied on stage by a snowy fireplace scene. (Is this as bizarre to people that live in the southern hemisphere as it is to me?) We then had an enactment of The Nutcracker followed by another band and plenty of drinking, dancing and having fun with the other guests around us. It was a blast.
Events at the hotel for Christmas 2024
There’s a cognitive dissonance of sitting in shorts and a light shirt in the early evening while the stage played a snowy scene complete with a roaring fireplace
The Nutcracker
The fun continued down on the beach the next day when The Grinch appeared, followed by Santa Claus who arrived — of course — by catamaran. Children and their parents queued up to go along the little pier to receive a gift from him.
The Grinch kicked things off before Santa Claus arrived by boat.
The hotel entertainment was pretty good quality throughout the week, with a programme of events each evening. I loved the enthusiastic mariachi band who played down by the beach, singing songs such as Guantanamera and La Bamba until the rain started.
I’ll never get used to the size of a guitarrón in a mariachi band
The weather was pretty good all week, reaching about 28°C most days. We had a little cloud, which stopped it from feeling too hot. There was one day of significant tropical rain, but given it was December, we couldn’t begrudge everything around us getting watered.
Looking out on a stormy evening
A couple of days into the trip we discovered the Lizzard Pool [sic], which made a gesture towards healthy living with regular water aerobics workouts and games of volleyball.
Volleyball in the Lizzard Pool
Aside from lounging around by the pool and the beach, we did a few activities. We took a taxi into the nearby town of Playa del Carmen for a look around. The main street in the town is amusingly called 5th Avenue, and is filled with lots of souvenir shops and quite sad-looking restaurants and tequila bars. I imagine that the venues come to life in the evening with the place taking on the persona of a typical resort town, with loud music and people drinking long into the night. It was a handy trip for us to pick up some flip-flops and cheap pairs of water shoes for our adventures later in the week.
Wandering around Playa del Carmen
One thing it did have was a fantastic ice cream shop called Aldo’s. The coffee ice cream was superb, and the boys both enjoyed a humongous ice cream sandwich.
Seriously good ice cream
A few of us had a very busy day out at Xplor, part of the Xcaret group of theme parks. We woke up early to catch the coach from our hotel, stopping to pick up additional passengers on the way. When you get in the park you are given a locker key and a helmet and then let loose on the various attractions. The zip lines were breathtaking — you finish one and then climb up to the start of the next one, covering fourteen different zip lines across two different routes, two of which end up in water at the finish.
As we waited on the steps to our second set of zip wires, we spotted a giant iguana in one of the treetops. We figured that it was a model that had been put there by the park to entertain people in the queue, but an unexpected giant yawn and shake of its head startled us into realising that it was real. We then noticed the iguanas all over the park, basking in the heat in the treetops as we slid overhead.
We then quickly made our way to the giant water slide, which you must tackle as groups of four. I’ve never been on a water slide with so many stages; it was epic. We spent the rest of the day navigating underground caves, swimming through some and using hand paddles to race and bump our way through others. The favourite activity turned out to be using the all-terrain vehicles to bump our way through two bumpy 5km tracks that included cave sections and massive water hazards. At one point my 17 year-old cried out that “It hurts so much but I love it!” Lunch took the form of an excellent buffet, better than the one at our hotel. The day out was expensive, but it didn’t feel that we had been ripped off. We were sad to leave, but satisfied with a brilliantly fun day out.
We were up early again the next day for an organised trip, this time with all 14 of us. Our first stop was the Mayan ruin of Tulum. Once you get past the souvenir and tat shops you find a well-preserved site in a beautiful setting, but surprisingly young at only 575–825 years old. (Berkhamsted Castle, located a short walk from our house, is approaching its 1,000th anniversary.) It was a super hot day and the site offered little shade, so by the time we had walked around we were happy to get back to somewhere where we could buy a drink.
The cove at the ruins of Tulum
Lizard at Tulum
Our next stop was a site where we could descend some steep steps to explore a cenote, a cave filled with groundwater that was formed by the erosion of the limestone bedrock. Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula has thousands of these, scattered all around. Cenote Caracol is located off of a long bumpy road in Tulum. Our trip included a swim in the cave, a walking tour through part of the cave network and a delicious lunch.
Steps into the cenote…
…and steps into the water
Swimming in Cenote Caracol
Walking through the caves, with strong Goonies vibes
The last stop of the day was Bahía de Akumal, a beach that is famous for being able to spot sea turtles as you swim your way around. I chose not to take part as I didn’t think the turtles needed to see me all that much. Everyone donned a life jacket and snorkel and were taken out as a group by a guide. While they were out at sea, a massive brawl broke out on the beach that resulted in soldiers from the National Guard turning up. As I sat chatting with my parents, we had no idea that this was going on a few yards down the beach from us. Our guide spotted it from where everyone was swimming and he first thought that the commotion was due to a shark or stingray being close to the shore. As everyone waded in at the end of their swim, one guy was sitting on the beach with a bag of ice held to his head. I have no idea what the commotion was all about.
Beach site for turtle spotting at Bahía de Akumal
One of the biggest highlights of our trip was an evening at La Casa De Rosa on-site at our hotel. This was a paid add-on to our stay where we gathered together in a little purpose-built kitchen and dining area to cook and eat a Mexican meal together. The evening started with introductions with our host, followed by a tasting journey through different tequilas and mezcals. Having had tequila before, and finding it difficult to believe that there could be a less appealing alcoholic drink, I politely declined to take part. But it was so funny to see the various faces that were pulled as people sipped from their shot glasses.
We were then each given a flashcard with a Spanish word on it which would become our names for the evening. Everyone had to learn everyone else’s name. The penalty for getting it wrong, or calling someone by their actual name, was either an additional shot of tequila, or a ‘shot’ of baked crickets. I kept my mouth shut.
Our table at La Casa De Rosa
The meal itself was delicious, and a real team effort. After we all made tortillas and gorditas that were then cooked on the comal, some people continued to make more while others prepared fish tamales, two of the children got busy making different types of salsa and others prepared a salad. There was mild panic in the eyes of our hosts when I told them I didn’t eat meat, which I tried to diffuse by saying that I would just eat the vegetarian things. But they insisted in rustling up a dish of roasted courgettes filled with corn, cheese and other delights. We ate so much — I haven’t been that full in a very long time. It was a lovely thing to do together.
Our last evening at the hotel was so much fun. They set up a silent disco in the plaza, with three DJs playing different music on different colour-coded stations. Most of our crew had never been to a silent disco before; their skepticism melted away as soon as they put their headsets on. We danced all night and everyone loved it.
Queuing for silent disco headsets
Cutting some shapes, tuned into the green channel
Travelling home overnight was always going to be tricky. My brother smooth talked his way into getting all of us access to the BA lounge. Once we had gotten through security we tried to locate it but couldn’t see it anywhere. A quick web search revealed that the BA lounge is located in the airport before you go through security. I find airports quite stressful places, so I found a seat in the terminal and donned my headphones to catch up with my podcast backlog.
Everyone seemed to snatch a small amount of poor-quality sleep on the way back. We then tried to keep ourselves awake all day in order to shorten our jet lag, but it will take a few days to recover.
We had a wonderful holiday. I feel so lucky to have been able to spend time together with my whole family in such a luxurious setting. We’ve made memories that will stick with us for a very long time, and I can’t wait for us to get together again.
Next week: Another week off before work begins again. And turning 48.
A week off work, largely spent pottering around at home. My wife and the boys were still going to school, so it didn’t feel quite right to spend the morning lounging around in bed while they dashed about as they got ready to leave the house.
Despite the early starts, it was lovely to not have anywhere that I needed to rush off to. On Monday I did a hard 100km ride out to Ampthill and back. It’s a loop that I had previously ridden a few times with my eldest son when he was enthusiastic about cycling. This time felt much harder as I was pushing myself, and I felt the effects of the ride for a few days afterwards.
The rest of the week was filled with domestic chores, catching up on the washing, and ironing all the things. I also managed to spend a whole morning at Deco Audio, thumbing my way through their entire collection of physical music and walking away with 19 new CDs for a fraction of what I would pay elsewhere.
I had dinner and drinks with a couple of close friends as one of them is working on a job nearby. I also had a lovely lunch and catch-up with Mat at Jester, over spicy avocado toast.
My final week of work of 2024. It’s our company policy that all staff need to take two weeks of consecutive leave each year. I’ve been so busy that I’m only able to do this now. Next week my wife is still working and my kids are still at school, so it feels a bit indulgent to be off.
At the start of the week I found myself getting annoyed with an issue at work and had to stop and think why. I’m just a bit worn out. By the time that Thursday arrived, I found myself pushing along low-value work as my energy was sapped. I’m looking forward to getting away from my work keyboard to rest and recharge.
This was a week in which I:
Discovered a bug with either Microsoft Teams or the software that we use for compliance recording. When recording is triggered, it displays people’s names in the ‘why this call needs to be recorded’ banner in Teams even if those people don’t meet the specific criteria for recording.
Made progress with our audio/visual technology plans for a shared area of one of our buildings. Early in the new year, we’re going to get test equipment on site to see whether it performs as well in our environment as it did in the demo.
Met with the team involved with our construction programme to go through the snagging list.
Continued my personal mission to try out as many of our updated meeting rooms as possible. I want to make sure I experience them for online or hybrid meetings myself and deal with any issues before our staff let us know about something that can be improved.
Met with two members of my team for their year-end appraisals. Prior to this year, I hadn’t managed any permanent members of staff for about a decade. I quite enjoy it.
Had my own year-end appraisal.
Added four more people to our Microsoft Copilot pilot and working group. Giving licences to people that come asking for them and involving them in a community may morph into our rollout approach, with some monitoring to see whether they continue to use it.
Had a conversation with an analyst about using Microsoft 365 and Copilot in some of our more remote locations.
Discussed the provision of coffee in the office and how we can ensure that there is a continual supply whilst the building’s coffee bar is out of action for refurbishment.
Met with our sister company to discuss options for staff catering for the period that our company cafe will be closed next year. I had to work from home on the day of the meeting, so I missed out on the free food samples.
Joined December’s Teams Fireside Chat where we heard lots about the features of Teams Premium from Mansoor Malik and Margi Desai.
Wrote-up the minutes from the final Steering Committee meeting of the year.
Came up with an impromptu format for our last all-team meeting of the year. I asked everyone to send me a song that meant a lot to them or reflected their current mood. I then put these together in a playlist and played them in the meeting, asking the team to guess the person who chose each song.
Got one of our cars fixed with a new water pump at the side of the road by an RAC Mobile Mechanic. £262 seemed pretty good for something that took about three and a half hours to fix.
Enjoyed some drinks at a neighbour’s house. We need to do a bit more hosting next year.
Had fun on Berkhamsted Cycling Club’s annual Mince Pie Ride where we were treated to a free mince pie along with a coffee or mulled wine at the end of the ride. I decided to ride dressed as a Christmas pudding. It turned out that I’d thought through whether I would be able to pedal and control my bike, but not how aerodynamic the costume would be. Everyone else in our group loved riding behind me as I acted as a massive windbreak for 60km or so.
Photos by me (selfie), Ian Biller (action shots) and Janice Bell (alongside Ian Taylor, who put an incredible amount of effort into decorating himself and his bike).
Media
Podcasts
I loved John Harris’s interview with a Syrian woman who came to the UK, settled in Yorkshire, built a business and had her children grow up here. It’s an excellent illustration of one human story behind the headlines about the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the future treatment of refugees.
The culture engendered by Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang of calling people out on stuff publicly and them responding to that by doing things better, even if it is ridiculously embarrassing for them and everyone else in earshot at the time.
The flipside of Huang rewarding people on the spot with bonuses or stock when they’ve done a great job on something.
The culture of everyone in Nvidia being a specialist and their ‘career progression’ being defined as them getting to be the best in their field. Then the CEO is the only, ultimate, generalist. This is great for a while, but what do you do about succession?
Articles
Ben Elton: “The dead person at a funeral is literally the last person who should get a vote in either the entertainment or the catering. So I have no song – all I want is to make sure I’m composted in an environmentally friendly way.”
Video
Finished season one of Shrinking on AppleTV+. It’s a little bit twee, but the characters are great and it gave me lots of laugh out loud moments. Jason Segel’s mannerisms remind me so much of what I loved about Chevy Chase during his mid-1980s movie period. He can speak volumes just with his eyes.
The Making of Do They Know It’s Christmas? (iPlayer) is essential viewing for a pop music documentary buff like myself. But it’s not a patch on The Greatest Night In Pop (2024) which documents the recording of We Are The World. The Band Aid film just consists of footage from the recording with very little context or narrative; an important artefact but without as much context or reflections as the American film.
On Tuesday my company had a party to celebrate both our 10th anniversary and the upcoming retirement of our CEO. Drinks and canapés were followed by a formal dinner and speeches. An incredible live band kicked in as desserts were served and the evening was rounded out with a great DJ. Time went by so fast; glancing at my watch I realised that I had already missed the train that would get me home by midnight. I didn’t get in until nearly 1am. Given how tired I felt for the rest of the week I can’t fathom how I used to drink at these events and still function. The organisation of the event was amazing as usual, and everyone seemed to have a brilliant time.
This was a week in which I:
Prepped for and ran our final programme steering committee meeting of the year.
Had calls with our audio/visual consultancy to talk through how we could improve the multi-function ‘collaboration space’ in our office. Our main consultant came on-site to continue the conversation and to review our newly-commissioned meeting rooms.
Joined an online technology demo of audio/visual equipment for larger meeting spaces. The equipment was impressive, picking up clear audio from everywhere in the room and doing a great job of the video feed.
Met with the company that provides us with our office smart sensors for a post-install handover and demonstration of the technology. It’s exciting to be able to have quantitative data about how the office is performing that we can use to further improve the space.
Met with a vendor to discuss how they can continue to support us over the next year with expertise that we don’t have internally.
Started to draft a structure for our offsite meeting in January. ChatGPT has helped me to source some companies to speak to that could help us with part of the event.
Got pulled into a conversation on provisioning of accounts and access to internal resources.
Had meetings with representatives from our sister company to discuss plans to mitigate disruption in the building over the coming months, as well as coordinate the work to improve one of our shared spaces.
Spent a couple of hours with our SD-WAN vendor to learn about their roadmap and to discuss how we can make better use of their technology.
Met to review our licensing requirements from a key software vendor for the coming year.
Had the final check-in of the year with our technology consultancy vendor.
Had an introductory meeting with the UK arm of a vendor used by colleagues in Johannesburg.
Continued writing the year-end performance reviews for my team members.
Joined the year-end celebratory meeting for our entire global Technology function. I picked up an award for ‘executing with excellence’. It’s lovely to have the recognition, but I felt quite uncomfortable with receiving an individual award given that it is our team as a whole that pulled together to make everything great this year.
Enjoyed our local year-end talk, hosted by our incoming CEO. This year has been a blur, so it was fun to look back at photos of everything that happened. We also got an excellent overview of one of our local offices from the Chief Executive there.
Spent some time curating and finessing my music collection, using a combination of Plex and the Music app on my Mac. Both of the tools are great at identifying and tagging most of my music, but I wanted to fix issues such as different versions of the same album looking identical in the user interface. I spent a few enjoyable hours doing the work and have got as far as artists beginning with D.
Didn’t get out on my bike. Storm Darragh resulted in the club cancelling the Saturday ride because the conditions were too dangerous. I’m very grateful to have the option of riding indoors available to me when I need it.
Took a trip to Stroud to meet up with my wife’s family for lunch. Our car was telling us it was 5°C but it felt like a minus sign could have been added to the front of it.
Enjoyed the last F1 race of the season. Given the recent form of the runners and the upcoming driver changes, I’m so intrigued by what 2025 might have in store.
I asked ChatGPT “Based on what you know about me, draw a picture what my current life is.” It came up with this:
Media
Podcasts
Useful update from Henry Levak, Head of Product at Logitech, about their plans for multi-camera and multi-stream setups in Microsoft Teams. I’m not sure whether the ability to control the camera streams from home is a good thing or whether it’s a little creepy. The intelligent auto booking and auto-releasing of meeting rooms sounds interesting, including a setting where all future room bookings get cancelled if someone doesn’t turn up in the room a preset number of times in a row, synchronised to Microsoft Exchange. I’m looking forward to us experimenting with this.
Watched Steve McQueen’s new World War II drama, Blitz (2024) on AppleTV+. I was expecting Great Things, but it somehow didn’t land like that.
Beatles ‘64 on Disney+ is a lovely addition to the myriad of films about the group. I’ve never seen the behind-the-scenes video footage of their first trip to the US and it’s lovely to see them laughing and joking around. I’m now very familiar with the area around the entrance to the Plaza Hotel in New York, which made it even more fascinating.
Audio
Getting access to my friends’ music collections via PlexAmp has sent me into an obsessive loop about the Faith No More songs Midlife Crisis and Epic. I vividly remember first hearing Epic on MTV as a kid when I was on holiday in the US; it stunned me as it was so different to everything that I’d heard before. There are so many videos on YouTube of people reacting to these videos, including vocal coaches who are dazzled by the range of sounds that Mike Patton makes on this appearance on the Jay Leno show. Just imagine seeing this on prime time TV.
Books
I’ve been struggling to get some focused reading time over the past week or two. How To Lose A Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship is denser than I expected. I’m halfway through. I find myself agreeing with paragraphs and sections of the book but I struggle to zoom out and understand exactly where I am in the narrative.
Next week: My final week of work for the year, a meetup with friends and two album clubs.
Maintaining our track record of misjudging quite how big a thing is before we get it home
The remnants of Storm Bert meant that I spent the entire week working from home. The River Nene had burst its banks, flooding Northampton station and resulting in most of the trains being cancelled. The odd train was still running, but it seemed ridiculous to try to catch one with no clear plan to be able to get back home again. Working at home for the week was great for productivity, but it reinforced to me how much I do like being in the office. Three days in and a couple at home is a pretty good balance.
This was a week in which I:
Had a great discussion with a colleague about how we use checklists in our department and how our practice could be improved. I haven’t yet read Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, but I can guess what it says, and why. An immensely experienced commercial airline pilot will still go through a checklist before a flight, not because they don’t know what they are doing, but because the checklist removes any residual human error from the procedure. In my Technology career I’ve seen many checklists, but they are often used as a rough guide as opposed to a document to be meticulously checked off. How do you change a culture when it isn’t safety-critical?
Asked some friends whether they considered document management within a team to be a solvable problem. For years, we’ve had an outstanding project on our backlog to consolidate a bunch of SharePoint sites together into one, but I wonder how much payback there will be for the amount of work that will be required. Filing things in the right place matters less now that search is so good. I also wonder whether it is inevitable that someone new coming into the team will decide to start filing things their own way, adding another repository to the situation. Being a team librarian and showing people the way is a lost art.
Continued to edge forward in agreeing a follow-on contract with our construction vendor. There are so many little moving parts and different parties involved.
Marvelled at our CTO as he gave an incredibly informative presentation to one of our client-facing teams about a prospective client in the technology sector.
Met with two of our client-facing teams to give them an overview of construction work that is taking place in our building over the next couple of years and to answer their questions.
Attended our Information Risk Steering Group meeting and spoke about how we plan to tackle a refresher of our document management standards across our division next year.
Reviewed and made some refinements to the slide deck that gives an overview of my team and the work we do.
Had a discussion on the principles of how we give contractors access to our computer systems and equipment.
Reviewed our approach to our Microsoft Copilot initiative. We heard an enthusiastic take from one of our colleagues who has been embracing it in his daily work to make himself much more productive.
Took our sister company through the latest design proposal for the audio/visual setup of our shared space.
Had our final Lean Coffee session of the year. One of the topics I proposed and we discussed was whether people felt that Lean Coffee meetings worked well and whether we should continue them. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
Spent some time cleaning up our team Kanban board, removing duplicates and things that we are never going to do.
Attended a BIE Executive webinar on Overcoming Prejudice in the Workplace.
Joined the inaugural Copilot Fireside Chat a monthly Teams meeting on the subject of Microsoft Copiot. Unlike the Teams Fireside Chat, I was the only attendee besides the presenters who kept my camera on for the whole meeting. I’m amazed at the difference in culture between the two calls. The topic of conversation went very deep, very fast, and made me realise how little I know of this space.
Got on top of my work emails, processing the 2,000 or so that were in my backlog. I now have a screenful of messages that I actually have to do something with.
Managed a nine-day streak on the bike, primarily as a result of working from home. TrainerRoad recommended a rest day on Sunday to prevent long-term fatigue. I didn’t argue. I’m feeling quite old at the moment, with a calf that won’t let me run, a painful shoulder when I raise my arm up too high and a bunch of bites on my leg that I presumably got when we stopped out on the club bike ride on Saturday. The club ride was eventful, with one of the crew getting two punctures on the same wheel, one of which was caused by hitting a massive pothole on a very fast descent.
‘Fixing’ puncture number two, wondering if the wheel rim would hold up after its collision with a pothole
Surprised myself by how much I enjoyed listening to Alanis Morissette at an online Album Club night.
Enjoyed a belated Thanksgiving dinner with friends old and new on Friday night. I don’t think I’d ever been invited for Thanksgiving dinner before. It was lovely to get out and meet a bunch of new random people.
Had another dinner out with friends on Saturday evening, eating an incredible chickpea and cauliflower curry with just the right amount of spice.
Bought our Christmas tree. We knew he was a big boy before we got him in the car, but we didn’t anticipate that he would be quite this huge.
Bought a new tuxedo ahead of the work celebration this week. Perhaps I’ll get a bit more use out of this one than the last one I had.
Enjoyed playing with Plexamp now that two of my friends are using Plex and have given me access to their music libraries. It’s so much more fun than browsing someone’s collection of Spotify playlists.
Media
Podcasts
Superb episode of The Guardian’s Politics Weekly UK on the topic of assisted dying, ahead of the vote that took place in parliament last week. It really is a topic where I can see both sides of the argument. Wouldn’t it be great if most parliament business was debated and decided on in a similar way as opposed to MPs being whipped to vote?
I love hearing arguments that make me change my views on things. In this episode of the Risky Business podcast, they talk about the use of facial recognition cameras in an Australian hardware store chain. Typically I would object to this technology being used anywhere, but the store released footage of the abuse that their staff have been subject to. They use the technology to detect and alert staff when someone on their list turns up at a store, and the data for anyone that is not a positive match is quickly deleted. This seems like a reasonable compromise.
Articles
London’s Smithfield meat market and Billingsgate fish market are both going to close after 850 years. What a shock that Brexit has something to do with it.
Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem is a superb documentary. I was 17 in 1994 when the first issue of Loaded appeared, and I remember devouring the magazine from cover to cover. It was interesting to see it in perspective as part of mid-90s culture here in the UK. Those first issues had long interviews with people who are now cultural icons that I knew very little about at the time, as well as documents of trips to extraordinary places and parties that felt like an adult world that I didn’t quite have access to yet. In my teenage years I spent a small fortune on magazines, somehow having the time to devour their contents. As the documentary notes, magazines were our Internet of that era. It is fascinating to look back and see how quickly the ‘lads mag’ concept degenerated into a race to the bottom. By the time I went to university in late 1996 I was just an occasional Loaded reader and soon stopped buying it.
A four-day working week. My brothers and I had all booked Friday off. We’d planned a surprise day in London for my mum to belatedly celebrate her 70th birthday. Last year we took my dad away to Berlin to celebrate his 70th, so we wanted to try and do something special with mum for hers.
We had such a lovely day. All my parents knew was that they had to meet us at Tottenham Court Road tube station at half past one in the afternoon. After a quick drink in a pub at Cambridge Circus, we wandered down to The Ivy in West Street for lunch. Our table wasn’t quite ready so they invited us to sit at the bar, which just added to the fun. As we sat there, I turned around and did a double-take as I came face to face with Rory Stewart, who was meeting his wife Shoshana for lunch. The atmosphere, food and service were all exceptional and we left with a lovely warm glow.
Lunch at The Ivy
Next stop was Archer Street in Soho, a beautiful cosy bar where the staff dazzle everyone as they burst into song every few minutes. We had a lovely couple of hours relaxing, laughing and enjoying the music.
We then wandered to the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand to see Back To The Future: The Musical. The production is a lot, with non-stop action all the way. The special effects were breathtaking, particularly at the climax of the story. I couldn’t understand why people around me were laughing so hard at some of the jokes that were lifted from the film. And then I realised that the movie is 39 years old, so it’s quite possible that for some people this might have been their first ever exposure to the storyline. I don’t think anyone is going to be buying the original soundtrack album from the production — it was no Hamilton — but it was a lot of fun.
Everyone went home feeling like they’d had a thoroughly great day out. It was so lovely to make some more memories together.
This was a week in which I:
Did a comprehensive review of our real estate/facilities financial forecast now that we have a better idea of the timing of future work.
Prepped for and ran the programme Steering Committee meeting.
Caught up with our audio/visual vendor on the latest design of the shared meeting space in our building. Reviewed the design with our CIO and COO ahead of a broader review with our sister company next week.
Started to look again at the software developer vacancy in my team.
Worked late in the office as new signage was installed, an illuminated company logo at one of our entrances. It was fascinating to watch it being put in with such skill. Connecting the illuminated letters to a transformer involved using fishing rod-like sticks to grab hold of the cables from inside the wall cavity. The whole job probably took six hours, spread over a couple of evenings.
Had to remind myself that “feedback is a gift” when someone grabbed me and reeled off a list of things that aren’t working for them in our refurbished office. You have to look past how it feels and listen to what’s being said.
Had our regular operational meeting with our Non-Financial Risk team.
Met up with our Group Head of Enterprise Architecture and our functional Enterprise Architect when they visited us in London. Talking to them made me realise that I feel as though technology has taken a back seat in my professional life this year, with my focus on our real estate projects. I’m looking forward to getting geeky again.
Had a final meeting with the key vendors from the work we did to build out a brand new office earlier in the year. The entire purpose of the meeting was to say thank you, and to reflect on what we’d achieved together. Sometimes you have to stop and look around.
Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour session where a colleague presented about company culture.
Joined the first part of a webinar on AI for Everyone, run by O’Reilly Media. The presentations were short and snappy but I didn’t feel like I got too much out of them.
Took part in the latest Teams Fireside Chat where the topic of the month was Microsoft Places. There’s a lot going on in this space and — of course — some licencing to get our heads around. I’ve signed up to the new monthly Copilot Fireside Chat and expect it to be just as engaging.
Helped out the neighbours with a couple of problems with their house while they were on holiday. Carbon monoxide monitors are LOUD. They sent us a lovely little hamper of goodies as a thank you, which was completely unnecessary.
Had a physio appointment to find out what’s going on with the calf that I injured when I ran a half marathon back in October. Apparently the problem is likely to be “a grade 2 strain of [my] medial gastrocnemius”. I’ve got some exercises to do, but it’s likely going to be some months before I’m back running again.
Attended the Annual General Meeting of our cycling club. It was the first one that I’ve made in the two and a bit years that I’ve been a member. I love being part of the club. It was great to look back on the events of the year and say thank you to the people that make it all run so smoothly. Unfortunately for the new ride coordinators, they had to cancel Saturday’s ride due to the predicted cold and stormy conditions.
Spent the weekend in a tired stupor as one of our blinds broke. Although the sun doesn’t rise particularly early this time of year it was still a bit disturbing, alongside storm Bert rattling our tiles and spraying water at the window.
Media
Podcasts
Enjoyed John Gruber and Merlin Mann’s ‘holiday party’ (post-USA election) episode of The Talk Show. Merlin’s advice of asking whether someone needs to be “helped, hugged or heard” is great. They also talked about how the old people we see around us today are not the same old people that we saw around us decades ago, even though it feels like they are. I often think about this when I see someone who is in the autumn of their years, wondering what they might have looked like 20 years ago, which to me feels like it was just yesterday. On that note, it was a shock to hear about John Prescott’s passing this week. I did a double-take when I read that he was 86 and had been suffering with Alzheimer’s. His famous punch was 23 years ago. Such a short time for so much to change.
Articles
Blown away by this chart. Peer-to-peer information now has so much more of a role than ever before. It’s a shame that for many people this means that they only consume small video soundbites from questionable publishers.
Unsurprising but still mindblowing chart www.washingtonpost.com/business/202…
Continued watching the new series of Bad Sisters on AppleTV+. I’m not convinced that it is as good as the first season, but we’re sticking with it for now.
We tried watching Loudermilk on Netflix as it was recommended to us, but we couldn’t get past the first episode. So corny.
So, we moved onto Shrinking, also on AppleTV+. Jason Segel is brilliant in the lead role — he comes across as a modern day Chevy Chase, in a good way.
Magdalena Bay on stage at HERE at Outernet, London, 13 November 2024
The day had come to re-open our office following all of the mechanical, engineering, technology and decorative works that had been done over the past three months. At the start of last week it felt very touch-and-go that we would be ready on time, but the team were incredible. The office looked, felt and smelled great; the final carpet clean had given the whole place a ‘new car’ smell.
The stakes were high as we had our new CEO in town as well as our Group CEO, and a special breakfast organised by our Marketing and Communications team. In last week’s Steering Committee meeting, we agreed that as Programme Manager I would say a few words to everyone in the office to welcome them back. I’d written and rehearsed a short speech but was conscious of trying to make it look organic, so in the end I printed it on an A5-sized sheet of paper and just used it for reference while I held a mic in my other hand.
As I packed up to leave the office on Monday evening, I checked in with a member of our Helpdesk team to find out how his day had been. His response of “I’ve had busier Mondays” left me smiling. I don’t think the reopening could have gone better.
When I hit a big milestone, I always find it difficult to get straight onto the next thing. There’s definitely a ‘post-launch depression’ that lingers for a couple of days. It was interesting to hear Paul Forde and Rich Ziade talk about this phenomenon on a recent episode of their podcast:
Rich: …I gotta tell you, I’ve launched a lot of products, like full products, that the world was kind of waiting for. The day after the euphoric day of launching and things went okay? It’s kind of quiet. Why? Because people are living their lives and your product’s not that important. It is a very depressing day. It’s actually really hard. You can’t believe there isn’t a ticker-tape parade down the street after you launch. And the world doesn’t work that way. And it feels very deflating.
Paul: This is real. I’ve often advised people on sort of post-launch depression. It’s very…
Rich: [laughing] It’s a real thing.
By the middle of the week I’d started to make good inroads on the fifteen other priorities that have been neglected over the past few weeks as we hit our big programme milestones.
It’s amazing how quickly hedonic adaptation takes place. By the end of the first week, most people will be used to their new desks, new chairs, and the new functionality and decor of the office. In some ways, I’m glad that we still have some visible enhancements to complete and that we didn’t get everything done ahead of our move back.
This was a week in which I:
Wrote up the minutes for last week’s Steering Committee.
Changed the scope of the remaining works for our office with our construction vendor, following feedback from the team.
Met with our audio/visual design company to get me back up to speed with one of our projects and agree what we will be doing over the next couple of weeks.
Discussed plans for new boardroom tables with our furniture vendor.
Had our monthly meeting to agree on the value of the work done so far by our construction vendor.
Set up and ran a workshop to review and brainstorm ideas in response to some physical changes that will be taking place near our office over the next couple of years.
Met with Internal Audit to give them an overview of our business and technology architecture.
Spoke to our technical account manager at our SD-WAN network provider, following up with some feedback I gave the company at the recent Gartner Symposium/Xpo.
Met with colleagues to talk through the next steps in the process of opening up a new office, with a focus on physical security.
Had a catch-up with a vendor to talk about the services they offer and to discuss how we might use them more extensively in future.
Started turning my attention to 2025 and what the shape of the year might be.
Popped into the leaving drinks of a colleague who is going back to Johannesburg after being with us in London for a while.
Listened to a fascinating talk by our Group CEO. He always speaks with such clarity, making the case for investment and business in Africa. I learned that:
After the most recent elections, political parties in South Africa agreed to form a Government of National Unity after just a couple of weeks of negotiations. In other democracies this process has recently taken hundreds of days.
Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour session, hearing about the products and priorities of our Infrastructure and Operations team.
Demonstrated our digital signage solution and ultrawide digital display to representatives from our sister company.
Attended a webinar hosted by Leesman on The Value of Variety. One of the conclusions for me was that the best and most effective workplaces have unassigned seating with a good variety of places to work.
Helped a friend to fix his Sonos system that had stopped working after the lightning storm a couple of months ago. We had to faff around with resetting each of his units and using the app on my iPhone as opposed to his Android device to get it working. I don’t understand how non-technical people are expected to wrestle with this.
Got to see Magdalena Bay in concert for the second time. I’d decided to go on my own; I didn’t know any other enthusiasts for the band and wanted to make sure I secured a ticket.1 I’ve not taken to their new album quite as quickly as I did their earlier work, but the songs sounded great live.
Spent time messing around with Bluesky and Mastodon like it’s 2009. This week felt like Bluesky suddenly reached critical mass with tons of well-known people turning up on the platform. As fun as it is — and it can be fun — in some ways I wish I wasn’t sucked into it. Playing around reminded me of why I had taken a meaningful and conscious step back. As good as the platforms can be, I find them exhausting and not great for my mental well-being.
Media
Podcasts
Your Undivided Attentioncontinued the conversation from the previous week’s episode about the harms being done — literally deaths being caused — by chatbots that are set up specifically for companionship. As difficult as the subject matter is, the episode contains some interesting thoughts.
The principle that platforms are not responsible for what users create on them may not be true if the users are creating chatbot ‘characters’ using an underlying large language model that is not user-generated.
There is a view that a chatbot is a ‘blinking cursor’ that will only respond to your input, and therefore you bear the majority of the responsibility for using the tool. However, does this still hold true when the chatbot continues a conversation with you, unsolicited?
Apparently, when the character.ai chatbot app was originally listed on the mobile app stores it was rated for users aged 12 and above. Google featured it as an editor’s pick app for kids, despite the company saying that user inputs would be used to retrain their model.
It’s amazing to me how quickly we got from the release of ChatGPT to these kinds of problems being surfaced. The philosophy of ‘move fast and break things’ can have dreadful consequences.
So yeah, definitely, I don’t want to say never use it or it’s not useful. It’s definitely useful, but it’s 1% to 2% more productive over the course of a week rather than really transformational.
Video
Finished watching Rivals on Disney+. Not life-changing, but a lot of fun with excellent casting.
Charged through Boybands Forever on iPlayer over the course of two evenings. I was amazed at how many Five and 911 songs that I knew, without knowing that they were the bands behind them. I love a slice of pop culture, and this programme was perfect.
So pleased that Bad Sisters is back. Season one was superb. I love having a show to watch where you can’t consume the whole thing in one evening.
Audio
Still continuing to have Tears for Fears earworms. I started exploring the different versions of Mothers Talk and came across this video which has strong BBC Micro 3D Maze vibes.
Next week: A four-day week packed with meetings from beginning to end, and a visit to the physio.
The busiest, most stressful week I’ve had in a long time. On Sunday evening I flew to Barcelona to attend the annual Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo. I’d booked the trip months ago, and at that time it was due to take place after our last major programme milestone of the year. But our timeline had slipped and that milestone moved to the Monday following the event. So I found myself at the conference while the project team navigated a variety of last-minute issues without me.
It was very difficult to focus and concentrate while things were happening back at home. At one point I left a session as I needed to make a phone call, and later squirmed in my seat as a keynote overran into time where I was due to be in a project meeting. Added to this was the drama of the US election; I went to bed on Tuesday night after watching CNN for a while, had a restless night, and then woke up to find that Trump had walked it. I’m still having random moments of shock, disbelief and despair peppering each day.
Last year I went to the conference by rail, but my need to get back to the office and my experience of trying to work on the train put me off doing the same thing again. The catastrophic weather system in Eastern Spain was persisting, which meant that we were kept on the ground for two hours after boarding our plane at Heathrow as they waited for the area around Barcelona to clear. The delay meant that the in-flight food cart was in high demand; it never made it to where was sitting at the rear of the plane before we started our final approach to land. I ended up at my hotel just before midnight, having to find something to eat from a little shop nearby.
The first keynote presentation of the week always has maximum attendance. Like last year, the main auditorium was full, so I ended up watching it in a second giant room via a live video feed.
Getting ready for the first keynote presentation of the week
Ten minutes in to the presentation, it sounded as though the fire alarms were going off. I wondered how the presenters would cope, but they just carried on. It turned out that the noise was the collective sound of thousands of smartphones, all of which had received a government alert that warned of torrential rain that was heading our way. As I sat in sessions throughout the morning, I could hear the thunder outside the conference centre. Later I learned that rain flooded the airport and roads around Barcelona, but we seemed to dodge the worst of the impact.
Hearing thousands of phones go off at the same time is pretty scary
This year our subscription meant that I had access to the CIO Lunch on the first three days. These lunches are held in the giant overflow hall. You wander in and get directed to an empty seat by a small army of staff with illuminated marshalling wands, say hello to your immediate neighbours at your table and then tuck in. It was an incredible operation; setting this many places and switching people from their starters to their hot main courses was amazing to watch.
The first of three CIO lunches
Each day, as people tucked into their desserts, we settled in to hear from a guest keynote speaker on the stage in the room. The first of these was Carla Harris, who ended up being my favourite speaker of the entire event. Her talk was called Lead to Win: How to Be an Impactful, Influential Leader in Today’s Environment, but the title didn’t really do it justice. She weaved a wonderful narrative about her time at Morgan Stanley, where she continues to work, and what she has learned about effective leadership.
Most of each day at the conference is filled with short presentations, in rooms of all shapes and sizes. Some of these were really valuable, such as Laurie Shotton’s presentation on a framework for evaluating emerging technologies, Tom Scholtz’s 3 Essential Tactics for Mastering Board-Level Cybersecurity Presentations and Kevin Smith’s How New CIOs Can Accelerate Their First-Year Impact and Value as an Executive and Functional Leader. Others, not so much.
Last year, ahead of my first Symposium, I spent ages agonising over which talks to sign up to in the Conference Navigator app, trying to avoid any timeline clashes. This year I took a completely different approach, adding everything that looked even remotely interesting to my personal agenda. Typically I would then have a choice of three or four sessions to attend at any given slot throughout the four days. I’d make a just-in-time decision based on downloading and skimming through a copy of the slides for each of the sessions in the app, making a call on what I thought would be most valuable one to go to.
I also had access to some ‘CIO Roundtable’ sessions, which were peer-based conversations led by a Gartner facilitator. These were valuable but too short, particularly one on the use of Generative AI in Banking which was just getting warmed up by the time we had to stop.
At a Roundtable session on AI Governance we were deep into a fascinating conversation about ethics when, ironically, I spotted that the CIO sitting next to me was recording the audio of the conversation on his phone. I spent the rest of the session wrestling whether to say something about the ethics of recording without people’s consent, versus the fact that anyone could be recording any of us at any time, and it being incumbent on us to not say anything that we wouldn’t be happy sharing in a public forum. I didn’t say anything at the time, and I’m not sure that was the right thing to do.
In another lunchtime keynote we heard from Martha Lane Fox on Strategic Leadership in the Digital Age: Driving Innovation, Inclusion and Impact. She told us that McKinsey had published a report on how long it will take for different industries to reach parity between the sexes. For technology, the answer was ‘never’ — we’re actually standing still or going backwards.
Some of the sessions felt as though they were there just for the ‘wow’ factor as opposed to being actually useful. It was amazing to be in the same room as Arnold Schwarzenegger (and to hear him quote lines from Kindergarten Cop), but I don’t think he offered any insights that I will take back to my day job. Gartner had originally announced that Jensen Huang would speak — which would have been great, and very relevant — but Schwarzenegger replaced him in the build-up to the event.
Arnold Schwarzenegger talks to a packed auditorium. You had to get there early to get a seat.
The main auditorium is a gargantuan space
At Monday night’s drinks reception they brought Ruud Gullit in, simply for the purpose of having photos taken with him. I posed for a photo without us speaking a word to each other, and wondered if he even knew where he was.
Ruud Gullit, still smiling after having hundreds of photos taken with random CIO types
I was excited to hear Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote talk, but a few days after the event I find it difficult to recall the key points.
Malcolm Gladwell giving his guest keynote
Mick Ebeling gave an inspiring talk on the work that he has done to ‘make the impossible not impossible’, including 3D printing low-cost prosthetics in Sudan, enabling an artist with locked-in syndrome to paint again, and helping a jazz pianist with Parkinson’s disease to be able to play the piano.
The final keynote of the week was by digital anthropologist and author Rahaf Harfoush, talking about ‘wellbeing in a constantly connected world’. None of what she said was revelatory, but it was a good reminder to look after ourselves and our teams. As she discussed burnout, I was thinking about another blogger and weeknoter who has been writing about his own experience of this.
I spent most of Thursday working and in meetings instead of attending sessions. I’m hoping to catch up with the recordings of anything significant that I missed. (But I’m also hoping that I don’t encounter this song1 again, which was played in the countdown to the start of each keynote.)
I’m glad I went, but it wasn’t as impactful as last year. I’m sure that there’s much more that Gartner can do to foster communication and collaboration between CIOs, which would be extremely valuable. They do provide a ‘Peer Community’ app and website, but from my experience most people just want to be in a WhatsApp or Signal group. You need to build trust and friendship, which isn’t easy to do. At dinner on Tuesday evening I spent time talking with an account executive about the WB-40 podcast Signal group and how invaluable it is to me, wondering what the special sauce is that makes it such a successful forum.
One last thought is that Gartner really should start sharing the secrets of their own technology. The conference looks and feels absolutely stunning, with incredible Wi-Fi, breathtaking audio/visual setups and apps that just work. I’d love to learn how they do it.
Aside from the Symposium, this was a week in which I:
Contributed a written section to our quarterly board report.
Updated a report for one of our next Governance Committee meetings.
Prepped for the programme Steering Committee and ran the meeting.
Fielded a variety of last-minute issues on the programme as we got ready for our go-live date.
Prepared and rehearsed a short speech to make to our staff on Monday.
Went for a run in Barcelona but quickly hit a problem with my calf again, the same one that caused me a problem when I ran a half marathon a few weeks back. I had to pull up after a couple of kilometres and ended up limping for the rest of the day.
Was very proud of my eldest son who achieved a new 5k PB in Manchester:
Got out with the bike club for the first time in weeks. It was lovely to see everyone again.
Most of the time when we talk about AI today, we talk about what it can do and not really so much about what it’s doing to us. And when people talk about the harm of AI, of course there are many harms that we talk about like misinformation or deception and many things, but the psychological harm of AI I think is a really, really important topic.
404 Media’s subscriber-only feed had a brilliant interview with Susanna Gibson of My Own Image, where she talked frankly about her experience of experiencing sexual violence through having an explicit video of her shared online. For people that have been a victim of this kind of abuse, it never ever goes away, and they never know when the trauma will re-surface afresh and impact them all over again.
Paul Graham’s post about the “writes and write-nots” struck a chord with me. “[W]riting is thinking.”
There have been a few things this week that have got me concerned as to whether violence against women, and women’s rights in general, are taking steps backwards. And how technology will play a significant role in this. Heather Burns writes compellingly about this:
It pains me to report that yesterday the voting women of America, and many men too, adopted her as a role model as well, but not as a force for good. They have no intention of having other women’s backs. They want Savita as an exemplar of what can, and should, happen to women every day, everywhere.
They want more dead women, they are already getting them, and they are not going to stop until no one knows their names because there are too many to count.
This documentary from Channel 4 of the experience of women in Magaluf is simultaneously shocking and completely unsurprising. Coupled with the articles I read above, it left me feeling a little depressed about the normalisation of treating women so dreadfully.
Got about halfway through My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall by John Major. It feels as though a book is the wrong format to learn about these old music hall stars and their songs. A three-part documentary would probably be much more immersive and enjoyable.
Next week: Returning to the office, and getting to see Magdalena Bay again.
Don’t click this link, you’ll end up with a dreadful earworm. You have been warned. ↩
A tough, busy week. We’re now just a couple of weeks away from the final big project milestone of the year and things are ramping up. On Monday I felt as though I was being put through the wringer a little bit with a couple of difficult situations; things got significantly easier after that, but no less busy. We have everything and everyone in place to be successful, we now just need to get it over the line.
At long last, we finally got to the week of the budget announcement by the government here in the UK, almost four months after they won the general election. Their plans to borrow more, tax more and spend more on investment are things that need to be done given the state of the country. It has amazed me — but not surprised me — how little coverage there has been on Brexit as a root cause of some of the trouble we find ourselves in today. It has cost the economy £140bn so far.
I have my fingers crossed for Harris to win next week’s election in the US. The idea of Trump getting in for a second term is stomach-turning.
This was a week in which I:
Triaged a couple of issues that have come up late in our project, agreeing on how we will test and assess solutions.
Joined the project completion meeting with our construction vendor, reviewing the outcome of the mechanical and engineering work that they have done on one of our sites.
Briefly met with our furniture vendor who was visiting our site to discuss fabric finishes and our plans for new boardroom tables.
Took part in a risk assessment meeting for our plans to open a new office in a new location.
Reviewed the latest design presentation for a shared space in one of our offices. Gave feedback on a couple of concerns that we have with the plans.
Had an introductory meeting with a new joiner at our sister company.
Submitted a narrative and photos to our regional internal newsletter about the opening of a new office that we completed in October.
Started year-end appraisals for my team. I’ve not had ‘permanent’ staff reporting to me for a decade or so. I’m already looking forward to the conversations and objective setting.
Took my team through the overview presentation that I put together a while ago that describes our function: the services and capabilities we offer, the products we own, and the current initiatives that we’re working on. Gathered lots of feedback on how we can change and improve the document.
Had a follow-up conversation with a new recruitment vendor, giving an overview of our company and what I’m looking for in a candidate to fill my vacancy.
Had a genuine ‘water cooler moment’ with a colleague that has led to a meeting being set up between a technical expert in our team and one of our business units. It’s exciting to have the opportunity to leverage the skills of our team in a broader way.
Picked up a new iPad Mini which I plan to try out as a dedicated reading device. I love my old Kindle, but it would be better if I could also read articles and PDFs that I’ve saved to Readwise Reader. At the moment I end up saving maybe 20 or 30 articles for every one that I read. I’ll see how it goes.
Ran our monthly Lean Coffee session with the team. It felt a bit flatter than usual, so we decided to wrap things up a little early.
Took Friday off in order to drive up to Mansfield with my eldest son as he was taking part in a cross-country relay race on Saturday. We were booked into a Premier Inn with a Beefeater restaurant attached to it; I’d not been to either of these in years. The Beefeater was full for dinner, so we booked ourselves a table across the road at The Nuthall. I tried deep-fried corn ribs for the first time. When they arrived, they looked to me just like halloumi fries. My son laughed at me as I tried to eat them whole, not realising the ‘rib’ part. I’m not sure my digestive system was expecting to have to deal with a corn husk. The race itself was good, with my son running a superb time in his leg, and the team doing themselves proud despite the first leg runner being tripped up by someone who fell in front of him.
Rode the cycle club ride a day early, the second time in as many weeks that I’ve tackled it solo. Being in Mansfield on Saturday morning meant I would miss out, so I assumed which route we’d be riding and pedalled it on Friday.
Media
Podcasts
Nick Robinson’s interview with Matt Goodwin got me thinking about how cultural integration of immigrants is always presented as a one-way street, i.e. the immigrants need to change their ways to fit in with the country. Wouldn’t we all end up culturally richer if it was two-way?
Video
Started watching Rivals on — surprisingly — Disney+. We’re really enjoying it. It’s bubblegum, but the casting is inspired. I never thought I’d be watching a moving performance from Danny Dyer.
Started a paid subscription to 404 Media after finding myself being sent there more and more from various sources. They do great work, and seem to be the kind of organisation that I should be supporting.
A typically busy week. On a couple of days I finished work and felt good about all of the things that I’d completed. This was short-lived as I then took a look at the still giant ‘to do’ pile.
Our clocks went back by an hour over the weekend. Half of our meetings are scheduled from London-based diaries and the other half from those in Johannesburg. As only one of us changes our clocks, I’m expecting the usual diary bumps for a few days.
This was a week in which I:
Wondered if other countries have as much train-related drama as we do. For two days, my regular train approached us at the station, on time … and then whistled straight past as it was half its usual size. No explanation given.
Finished writing the script for our presentation at our quarterly Technology town hall meeting, and delivered it in the session. It was a wonderfully collective effort on the part of many members of our management team, knitting together some important strategic narratives for our company along with the day-to-day work that the team has been doing. I delivered the speech again at our all-team meeting on Friday. I quite enjoy being ‘on stage’, particularly when it’s from the comfort of my desk in my home office.
Prepped for and ran our programme Steering Committee meeting. We’re a couple of weeks away from our second big milestone of the year, so attention is already turning to the things that will happen after that.
Joined a Finance meeting to hear about the future technical treatment of specific types of costs.
Completed my annual self-appraisal.
Had an introductory call with a new account manager at one of our technology and staffing vendors.
On recommendation, met another recruitment vendor who might be able to help with the vacancy in my team.
Had a call with an ex-colleague who has declared that they are ‘#OpenToWork’ on LinkedIn to see if they would be interested in putting themself forward for the role.
Raised a ticket with QNAP as the cloud backup process that runs on my NAS drive has suddenly started to report a problem. I’d deleted a whole bunch of music files that I’m never going to listen to and the Hybrid Backup Sync process now aborts every night with a 404 ‘file not found’ error.
Went with my youngest son to a small careers fair at his school. There was a diverse mix of companies on show, from the military to small local startups. It was lovely to spend some dedicated time discussing his future with him.
Joined my son’s parents’ evening sessions online from my office. I couldn’t leave work early enough to join my wife and son at home for the first appointment, so stayed at work and dialled in from there. For me, online parents’ evenings is one of the best things to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Took an after-work trip to a cinema in Leicester Square to see Tears for Fears Live (A Tipping Point Film) (2023). I’m always swapping recommendations for music films and documentaries with the friend who came with me, so it was good to sit and watch something together for once. The concert was beautiful and the band sounded great; Roland Orzabal’s voice continues to stun even as he moves through his 60s. I’ve not heard much of their new music and now feel like I do need to check it out.
Had some pre-cinema food at Gordon Ramsay’s Street Burger on Charing Cross Road. Grim and expensive. Would not recommend.
Went to pump up my bike tyres on Friday evening ahead of the club ride on Saturday morning. As I unscrewed the dust cap on the rear wheel, the valve shot out like a missile and the whole thing rapidly deflated. I had no idea that the valve was a detachable part. I’d been meaning to replace my bike tyres but didn’t have the energy to start after a long week at work. Approaching the job on Saturday afternoon, I found that I couldn’t get the rear wheel off. One bent multitool, a visit to a friend down the road and a trip to the bike shop later and I was finally in business. (Embarrassingly, I think I was turning the bolt the wrong way.) At some point I’m going to tackle changing the disc brake pads which the Internet tells me is simultaneously “easy” and “quite tricky”.
Various levels of faff and drama
Took advantage of Sunday’s extra hour in bed by getting up early to go and ride the route I missed the day before. It was a glorious sunny autumn morning, the kind that fills your heart and makes you glad to be alive.
Had a lovely afternoon walking around Virginia Water with our friends, followed by a late lunch at The Wheatsheaf.
Didn’t expect to love the F1 Mexican Grand Prix as much as I did. Typically it’s a relatively boring race but this one was all action.
Media
Podcasts
I’m drowning in podcasts at the moment. I’m hoping that it’s just a ramped-up schedule of the imminent US election, UK budget and the fact that the F1 season has restarted again after a second break. If not, I’m going to have to start trimming my subscriptions.
Watched this as I waited for a flight a few weeks back and finished it as we took off. Turned me into a snotty, crying mess with no tissues, and no ability to get up and find any as we went skyward. Incredible film.bsky.app/profile/iand…
Watched One Day In October on Channel 4, about the attack on Kibbutz Be’eri in 2023. I knew the subject matter would be tough, but I wasn’t quite prepared to see people getting killed on screen. What happened there is beyond dreadful. What’s happening all over the region is also beyond dreadful. There doesn’t seem to be a beginning or a feasible end to the whole thing.
Audio
Spent a little time tidying up my home music library. Years ago I worked for a lovely man who used to pass classical music CDs on to me from his extensive collection, ones that he didn’t want anymore. Having these tracks in my library has caused me more problems than the joy they have brought, with the odd random movement being included in some of the auto-generated Plexamp ‘radio’ playlists. I’ve decided that if I ever, in my remaining years, get into a new piece of classical music, I can check out whether I own it already and then add it to my collection at that point.
Web
Stopped paying for Substack newsletters after seeing what they hosted on the Hope Not Hate documentary.
I spent the first half of the week walking around like an old man, tentatively tackling stairs and taking an age to move between sitting and standing positions. It’s been a while since I’ve had delayed onset muscle soreness from running and I wasn’t really expecting it after the half marathon. This was me:
I was grateful for an early morning meeting on Monday that meant I would be working from home; I’m not convinced that I could have tackled the walk to the train station as well as all of the stairs at the tube stations.
By Thursday the stiffness had passed except in the calf muscle that caused me the problems during the run. I get the feeling that there’s something else going on in there as it still feels very tight and sore when I move any faster than walking pace. I decided to skip running this weekend and give it a bit more time to sort itself out.
This was a week in which I:
Gave my presentation on An Introduction to Large Language Models and Generative AI to the board of directors of one of our African companies. It had been a few months since I last presented on the topic, but I found that I didn’t need to make many updates to my slides. It’s amazing how much content is still valid 18 months on from the first draft.
Met with our external legal team to review a vendor contract for some minor works that we need to finish off in one of our office spaces.
Collaborated with my colleagues to write a speech that we are due to give at a ‘town hall’-style meeting on Tuesday. We’ve seamlessly knitted our own narrative with key internal content from the past few weeks. I’m very pleased with the results. Most of the attendees will be in the room in Johannesburg, but I’m grateful to be stuck in my home office as it will allow me to read from the document instead of clutching paperwork in my hand.
Caught up with the project team for opening a new office for the first time in a while. Things will get busy again soon.
Had my first monthly meeting with our technology advisory consultancy.
Heard from two different vendors that a key person from each of their teams is leaving. Agreed an approach for how we will mitigate one of these changes for the next few weeks.
Made a couple of visits to our vacated office with a colleague to work out where our new meeting room artwork should go.
Visited a corporate furniture vendor to look at new meeting room furniture. I loved the analogy that buying a boardroom table is like a car; it comes with a basic chassis and you can upgrade various components that are factory-fitted before delivery.
Joined the first part of a follow-up workshop on sustainable careers.
Had a useful meeting with my team, primarily focused on our upcoming Microsoft Copilot trial.
Met an online friend for a chat about the vacancy in my team. It was lovely to meet them in ‘high fidelity’ after having just been talking in a Signal group for so long.
Attended the Thoughtworks Technology Radar preview. I asked a question in the Q&A about where the company had seen Generative AI deployed with a massive impact as I am increasingly skeptical about it having ‘breakout’ value, but didn’t get much of an answer.
Fixed a problem with my laptop. I had rebooted and then suddenly the desktop and Office applications on my external monitor were VERY LARGE. After tentatively exploring some simple causes for a few days I ended up going for the full driver uninstall and re-download from the Lenovo website. The fix didn’t even ask for a reboot.
Bumped into a friend and enjoyed a lovely morning commute with him. He has been a Chief Financial Officer for many different companies. I felt like an information vacuum as he answered the many questions that I bombarded him with about his current business.
Went to a special event at school with my wife and youngest son to learn about the subjects he might take for A-Levels in the Sixth Form. Just like the last time I went to this event, I was jealous of the learning adventure he has ahead of him. He’s quite sure about what he wants to do, but we made full use of the time by checking out some other subjects that were on his long list.
Had our main bathroom repainted. This now seems to need doing on a roughly annual basis as (a) some people in the house like to drain the whole tank of hot water and (b) possibly these same people are reluctant or forgetful in opening the window. As a consequence, the bathroom regularly resembles the aftermath of particularly packed, jaunty evening at the legendary Cavern Club. We probably need to get an extractor fan in there, but I’m not sure they make one powerful enough.
Enjoyed two Album Club evenings, both with albums I’d never heard before. Talk Talk are definitely on my ‘to explore’ list.
Found a couple of gems at our local Oxfam Books and Music store.
My latest haul from our local Oxfam Books and Music store
Media
Podcasts
Fascinating episode of Quiet Riot where host Naomi Smith talks to Gareth Dennis about Britain’s railways. I loved the sentiment that successive governments have “lost a diamond whilst chasing the glitter” with their focus on FM (f’ing magic) as opposed to AM (actual machines). There’s lots that I learned here, including how intensively used Britain’s railways are, which makes maintaining and fixing them more expensive as it has to be done more intensively in a shorter timeframe. Electric vehicles are important, but the ‘embodied carbon’ in their manufacture and usage versus the train means that they can’t be the only vision of the future.
Finished my book. Crippled with indecisiveness about what to read next and the commitment involved after picking one, I started wondering how I could make better decisions. Over time, I’ve built up a backlog of around 1,400 unread books and have their information in a list I keep in Obsidian. It feels a bit like I can no longer see the wood for the (mainly electronic) trees. So, I used Claude.AI to help me to put together some Python code to take a title (and author, where available) and use the Google Books API to fetch additional data. After an hour or two I got everything working and now have descriptions, genres and other metadata about my books in a spreadsheet. I now need to work out how to get better ratings information as this seems to be very sparsely populated in the Google data. I’m hoping that once I finish a book and am deciding what to read next, I can use the metadata to narrow things down. For example, I should be able to filter the list by biographies or fiction and pick something from the smaller selection.
Next week: Starting the annual review cycle, joining a conference from my chair and heading to the cinema with a friend.
An exhausting week. Despite getting a big sleep on Saturday night, it took me a couple of days to get over the jet lag from my New York trip. I found myself barely able to keep myself awake on the trains home. I hadn’t planned to spend four long days in the office, but as the week unfolded it was clear that I wouldn’t be able to work from home. Our divisional CIO came to town for a couple of days and then our new regional CEO hosted a welcome event with drinks afterwards. Friday was a very busy day, but it was good to work from home again for the first time in three weeks.
5°C when I started, 7°C by the time I finished
On Sunday I ran the Royal Parks Half Marathon. This was my first competitive half marathon event and only the second time that I’ve run this distance. A friend had an entry but could no longer make it, so he kindly offered me his place. The entries aren’t officially transferable this late in the day, so I raced without a name on my race number and he ended up getting the text message with ‘his’ official time. I was in the first wave and got sucked along with the crowd at a fast pace. This was fine until around the five mile mark, when my right calf started complaining and feeling stiff. I adjusted my style so that I didn’t put too much pressure on it and managed to hobble my way through the remaining eight miles. It’s now very sore and I’m hobbling around, but I’m hoping it will pass in a day or two.
A clear visual of when my calf started playing up, my pace dropping by around half a minute per kilometre
This was a week in which I:
Formally agreed to close the project for our New York office move. We still have a few items on the snagging list, but they will be picked up as ‘business as usual’ items. It’s a big success.
Refocused on the remaining work for the final big project of the year. We only have four weeks to go until the bulk of the delivery is complete. There are a lot of moving parts, with many companies and people involved, making it a complex beast. I’m now quietly excited about the changes that it will bring for our staff.
Took our divisional CIO for a site visit to show him how things are shaping up.
Had our regular programme and project meetings.
Prepped for and chaired our programme Steering Committee meeting.
Received an update on works that will be going on in one of our buildings for a number of years and started to plan for how we will manage this for our staff.
Took part in the monthly payment valuation meeting for the work done so far by our main construction project vendor.
Attended an internal data-focused webinar with a guest speaker on the now perennial topic of AI. As with so much stuff that I read and hear about AI, I found myself thinking about how problematic the words in this space are. ‘Understanding’, ‘learning’ etc. should always be in quote marks in the context of AI.
Met with colleagues to discuss our approach to running an experimental Generative AI forum, focused on Microsoft Copilot. Whilst I think that the technology has many problems, I’m interested in how our staff can use it in interesting ways. The focus will be on ‘15% solutions’ as opposed to transformational change.
Took part in our monthly operational risk review meeting.
Had the quarterly meeting with our account manager from our technology advisory firm.
Had a ‘random coffee’ with a colleague who has recently joined the company, her first time working at a financial services firm. It was fascinating to hear about her career journey so far and to explain a bit how I understand a typical investment bank works.
Met with an ex-colleague and heard about his new role at a consultancy firm.
Had a catch-up with a friend who used to work in our team. Since she left we’ve kept a regular diary date that often gets moved around, but we eventually find time to meet up. It’s always lovely to find out what’s been happening with her.
Had a video call with another ex-colleague to talk through what she’d been doing since she left us and the potential next steps in her career. It was so lovely to have a check-in.
Learned that I take for granted how easy it is to find and attend a meetup in the western world. In other countries, people can be nervous about going to events; they need to make sure that they are the right kind of events and their attendance won’t get them into trouble down the line.
Had an evening out at the local tennis and squash club for a charity Rock and Roll Bingo evening in aid of Teenage Cancer Trust and Sarcoma UK. It’s a simple concept, with everyone getting bingo cards with songs on them instead of numbers, crossing them off as the songs are played. A fun night.
Had an impromptu drink at The Electric Bar at The Ned. I haven’t quite got my head around how The Ned operates, with its centrally located musicians and various bars and restaurants scattered around a gigantic room. We turned up early enough to get a nice table to ourselves and enjoyed a couple of drinks and snacks.
Electric Bar and Diner, The Ned, London
For the first time in what felt like forever, we had friends over for dinner at our house. We are well out of practice due to the pandemic and busy, structured weekends (my brother often jokes “Where is it you live now?”), but have resolved to try and entertain a bit more.
My eldest son passed his driving test on his first try. I’m so pleased for him. He was more than ready and I’m glad it all went well. We’ve now moved into a different phase of worrying about him as he’s off driving himself here, there and everywhere. The change to our car insurance was a surprisingly low £200 which was an unexpected surprise.
Media
Articles
Back in January I wrote about Matt Mullenweg that “I use loads of his products — WordPress, Jetpack, Pocket Casts — and I’m so pleased that he’s successful. He seems like one of the good guys with a good philosophy.” Reading blog posts like this one over the past week, I really hope that my words remain true.1 I remember thinking about the words as I wrote them as so many people have let me (us?) down over the years.
Video
Continued enjoying Kaos on Netflix. Disappointed to hear that they have already cancelled the show only a few weeks after season one was released.
A double-helping of weeknotes. I spent the last two weeks in New York City, working with our team to open our new office in Midtown Manhattan. This was the culmination of years of work that started with the search for new premises as we approached the end of our previous lease. On my first day in New York, I had a one-day handover with another colleague from London who had been leading our team on the technical fit-out, working on the physical and logical setup of the equipment. They had made massive progress, with the office at that point already meeting the minimum standard that we required to allow our colleagues to come in and work.
Last-minute prep to make the office as good as it could be
It was wonderful to see our planning and preparation pay off in such a big way. On 1 October, our New York team walked through the door for the first time, found their desks and set themselves up for work. It was seamless. We’ve moved from an office that we shared with another company that had inadequate space and technology, to one that gives our staff a wide variety of types of places to work depending on what they are doing and who they happen to be working with. The day had a ribbon-cutting, breakfast and drinks, a team lunch and an evening cocktail reception.
There are still many things on the snagging list, but all of the major items were dealt with. It feels great to get one of this year’s big projects over the finish line. My focus will now turn back to another of our offices that is undergoing major renovation. By mid-November this project should be largely complete as well. I have my fingers crossed that it will be just as smooth.
This was a week in which I:
Started to feel ill before I left for my flight to the US. I had been boasting about how many people I had hugged and kissed at my parents’ 50th anniversary without catching anything, but spoke too soon. A scratchy throat developed into a full-on head cold, which required tissues, Tylenol1 and lozenges. I tried to ignore it, going for a run in Central Park on Monday morning, but it made the first few days exhausting.
Stayed at the CitizenM hotel just off of Times Square. The UN General Assembly meeting in the first week meant that hotel rooms were hard to come by and expensive, which meant that I was relegated to staying much further from the office than usual. One of the photos on their website shows the hotel being right next door to the ‘Bare Essentials gentlemans club and lounge’ and the ‘Mixed Emotions adult video store’, remnants of the Times Square of decades ago and both of which were thankfully closed. The hotel turned out to be fine, with very small but clean rooms. Upon arrival I found out that there were no ironing boards in the rooms, but I was “welcome to use Ironing Heaven on the second floor.” I found that Ironing Heaven seemed to be overplaying its hand a bit when it turned out to be a small room with a single ironing board. The rooftop bar was lovely, with great illuminated views over New York.
Spent Sunday working in the office, getting a bunch of things off of my plate in the knowledge that the following week would be difficult to get any focused work done with so many staff and visitors in the office for the opening.
Tried out all of the meeting rooms in anticipation of them being used by our staff on day one. The team have done brilliantly in designing and equipping a wonderful variety of spaces for staff to use.
Met with the building contractor and landlord’s project manager to go through our snagging list. As the week went on we refined the list down to a more manageable set of critical things in order to increase our chances of getting them done before we opened.
Prepped for and ran the programme Steering Committee meeting.
Drafted a narrative for the New York CEO to use as input into his opening speech. I discovered that 2024 marks the start of our fourth decade in the city, and our fourth address, after the return of our company to the US post-apartheid in 1994.
Created a communication for our staff to help them get started with using the features of the new office, such as our Microsoft Teams Rooms.
Interviewed another candidate for the Digital Solutions Developer role in my team.
Met with my executive partner at our industry analyst firm for a reflective conversation about my career and where I want to go.
Discussed our plans and approach for getting a Microsoft Copilot working group up and running. We now have a small number of licences that we will deploy with the most enthusiastic members of staff that are ‘pulling’ on us to get started.
Had the regular programme and project meetings.
Watched half of the vice presidential debate from the Work Café at our new office. I called it a day and headed back to my hotel halfway through, catching up in the morning with what the media thought Alex Andreou on the Quiet Riot podcast.
Attended the book launch for The Tech Coup by Marietje Schaake, hosted by Esther Dyson with Alondra Nelson. Chatting with Esther Dyson at the post-panel drinks, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look at me with such incredulity as when I casually asked her where Princeton is. (I’d heard of it, but being from the UK I had no idea.) From her dad’s Wikipedia entry:
In December 1952, Oppenheimer, the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, offered Dyson a lifetime appointment at the institute, “for proving me wrong”, in Oppenheimer’s words. Dyson remained at the Institute until the end of his career.
Social media advert and photo of the panel event for the launch of The Tech Coup by Marietje Schaake
Ate a couple of times at PS Kitchen, a good vegan restaurant a couple of blocks away from my hotel that gives all of its profits to charity. Their winter walnut soup was just the thing I needed when I was feeling under the weather. When I returned for the second evening I found a GIGANTIC fearless rat roaming around the tables outside, so I quickly opted for indoor dining.
Linguini Alfredo with crispy ‘chicken’ at PS Kitchen
Out for dinner one evening, got randomly chatting to the mum of Brighid Fry from the band Housewife who is currently touring the UK.
Ate at some lovely restaurants including Spicy Moon (delicious vegan Szechuan), Benoit (upscale French for a pre-go-live team dinner), Cafe Luce (lovely pasta in a cosy Italian), Salinas (delicious Spanish tapas), Simò (pizza for one), Bill’s Bar and Burger, Naya (falafel salad), Toasties (eggplant Parmesan sandwiches with wonderful marinara sauce) and the Carnegie Diner (Sunday morning waffles made with organic eggs, with fruit and granola). I didn’t starve.
Waffles with fruit and granola from Carnegie Diner
Enjoyed lots of morning runs around Central Park, sometimes just as far as a loop around Stephanie and Fred Shuman Running Track at the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir and other times covering a full loop of the road track. I had two good runs with my friend and colleague Paul who has offered me his place at the Royal Parks Half Marathon next week as he can no longer make it. I’ve only ever run one half marathon distance before, but I’m hoping it should be achievable.
Two sweaty runners on two different mornings
Signed up to the London-Wales-London Audax ride scheduled for the start of May next year. It will be by far the longest ride I’ve ever done in one stint. We start at 6am and have 27 hours to complete the route.
Enjoyed a lovely stroll around Central Park with a colleague. You would think that running the whole length of the park would give you a sense of scale, but it was actually wandering around the insides of the park and stumbling across its various delights that makes you realise how big it is.
Had a fabulous night out at Union Pool in Brooklyn to see Katie Von Schleicher. It was brilliant to finally get to see her play some of her own songs after having previously seen her as part of Julie Byrne’s band in London last year. As we had a drink in the bar, we heard music drifting in and thought that the gig had started; we stumbled into the back room and watched her and her band run through their sound check, only realising our mistake when we went to order a drink and were told that they weren’t open yet. The next two artists, Sima Cunningham and Adeline Hotel, were both launching their new albums that evening, the latter of which was produced by Katie Von Schleicher. Sima Cunningham’s drummer Dan Knishkowy morphed into the lead singer of Adeline Hotel. The net result was that the whole event gave the impression of a big musical love-in. The venue was brilliant. After the gig finished it filled up with very cool young Brooklyn hipsters, leaving me feeling a little old and out of place.
Katie Von Schleicher at Union Pool, 27 September 2024
Managed to catch the Formula One race on my flight over, paying £18.99 for streaming from the moment I sat in my seat. It wasn’t perfect — I had to restart the stream a bunch of times — but it blows my mind that I can do this as I cross the Atlantic.
F1 Singapore Grand Prix streamed on-board a transatlantic flight
Media
Podcasts
Love the concept of “employer engagement” mentioned on the WB-40 podcast. Perhaps we should measure that alongside employee engagement.
Went to the cinema to see the theatrical release of McCartney’s One Hand Clapping. Although we could only get seats right at the front of the theatre, it was a total joy from start to finish.
Watched the Netflix series on wrestling promoter Vince McMahon, which started life before the sexual assault and sex trafficking allegations. The series gives an interesting history of the development of professional wrestling and ‘sports entertainment’ in the US. My brothers and I used to watch WWF wrestling on TV when we were kids; it turns out that this ‘Golden Era’ ended soon after we drifted away from it. I found the footage from the ‘Attitude’ and ‘Ruthless Aggression’ eras to be genuinely shocking, with ridiculous and highly offensive storylines. McMahon may be an excellent businessman but he seems like a dreadful person.
Caught up with the latest couple of episodes of Slow Horses on AppleTV+. It was weird to see the last scene of episode 5 as it appears to have been filmed right outside my office.
Re-watched Rocky V (1990) for the first time since I saw it in the cinema when it was originally released. It’s genuinely terrible.
I love that there is a Japanese word for something we’ve talked about at work for years: Nemawashi.
Nemawashi (根回し) is a Japanese business informal process of laying the foundation for some proposed change or project by talking to the people concerned and gathering support and feedback before a formal announcement.
Books
Finished reading Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer. A superbly readable book on a fascinating topic.
Next week: Getting over jet lag and getting re-focused on the final big project of the year.
I spent some time in a pharmacy looking for paracetamol. When I asked an employee for help, she said “I don’t think we have that brand”. I later learned that what we call paracetamol, the Americans know as acetaminophen. ↩
The photo doesn’t do justice to how big this cake was
On Saturday we celebrated the 10th birthday of Berkhamsted Cycle Club, with a specially-organised route for our weekly club ride, followed by cake and fizz at Church Farm Cafe in Aldbury.
I took up cycling a year before the club was formed. I thought about joining, but as I was then the dad of 7 and 5 year-olds who had a myriad of weekend activities to go to, it didn’t seem right to disappear every Saturday morning and leave it all to my wife. When my eldest boy turned 14 he started dabbling with road cycling, so we joined the club together. Three years later and getting out for a weekend club ride is now part of my routine. I’ve made some lovely friends and enjoyed some great rides.
Speeches from club chairs past and present
The celebration came at the end of a long week that was shaped by dates slipping on one of the big projects that I am running this year. A four-week delivery date delay for mechanical hardware has resulted in a two-week delay to when we will finish the main part of the work. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s the second time the date has moved and is a pain for our staff who need to rearrange their plans for hosting guests at our offices.
This was a week in which I:
Had my regular call with our information technology advisory firm. I also met with an Executive Partner at the firm, someone that I’m hoping to work with over the next few years to help me in my role.
Had an interior design meeting with one of our building contractors, reviewing colours and materials for acoustic panelling as well as other design elements. With something as subjective as colours, I’m glad that the responsibility for picking the final shades doesn’t sit with me.
Met with an external legal firm to give them an outline of a contract that we would like to get reviewed.
Met with our own internal legal and procurement teams to review terms, conditions and contracts for the software component of some new hardware we are installing in one of our offices.
Had an introductory meeting with an interior design and fit-out team that operate in a couple of countries where we have offices.
Caught up with one of our office managers to discuss renovations and improvements to their space. It’s a location that I haven’t visited in many years and is overdue some work from our team.
Resumed weekly meetings with the working group who will coordinate a move back to one of our offices following extensive mechanical and engineering work.
Had a demo of an audio/visual solution aimed at larger boardroom-style meeting rooms.
Held another interview for the vacancy in my team after our chosen candidate decided to take a different role. I’ve now started to worry about candidates trying to use AI chatbots during remote interviews, typing out questions as they are asked and reading back answers. I think we will need to move back to in-person interviews where possible. It’s even more frustrating when you think that the candidate is underperforming in the interview because they are using the tools.
Had meetings with the two recruitment vendors we are trying to source candidates from in order to give them more background on our company, our team, and the role.
Met with a colleague to walk them through the ‘random coffees’ spreadsheet tool that I developed in the pandemic. Attempting to explain how it works made me realise how many steps there are and how complex it is.
Said goodbye to one of my team members who has been with us for the past couple of years. We had a team lunch at Ping Pong. They have an inscrutable ordering process where you need to write down everyone’s requests on a single ridiculously long menu, but they did a great job of catering to our specific dietary and physical needs.
Took part in a two half-day workshop on the topic of ‘sustainable careers’. It was fascinating to hear career stories from colleagues from all across our part of the organisation, and brought up lots of memories for me.
Said hello to a new cleaner at home. Our previous cleaner was with us for many years and we’ve missed her since she stopped working.
Enjoyed the monthly WB-40 Album Club, hearing Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain by Pavement for the first time. I was familiar with — and loved — the song Range Life as it was featured in the cover CD for Uncut magazine’s December 2004 issue (yes kids, before Spotify’s Discover Weekly, we used to get samples of music from magazines) but didn’t know any of the rest of the tracks. It’s definitely an album to listen to again. A quintessential Album Club evening when you think “I wonder why I haven’t listened to more of that band’s stuff?”
Media
Video
Watched The Hypnosis (2023), a weird Swedish film centred around a couple who are attending a Dragons Den/Shark Tank-style event to pitch an app. It made me laugh out loud, but the couple were somehow unconvincing as technology developers. And by the time the film finished, I had questions.
Books
Finally finished The McCartney Legacy Volume 1: 1969-73 and was sad that it was over. Fortunately it looks as though I won’t need to wait very long before the next instalment is published.
Started reading (and ploughing through) Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer. A superbly readable exploration of what we do (or what to do?) with good art by bad people.
Next week: The final week before we finish a major project.
I love the formality of this sign at the entrance to the venue
On Saturday night we had a wonderful time celebrating my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. They had hired a room in a hotel, booked a DJ and a band, and invited friends and family from all over. I spent most of the evening saying hello to people — particularly those I hadn’t seen in a very long time — and don’t think I managed to get around the whole room by the time it all wrapped up.
Party time
It got me looking back at photos of mum and dad’s 25th anniversary party. I’m trying to reconcile myself with the fact that I’m now older than they were in the pictures; they seemed so much more grown up than I feel today. On that night in 1999 we had a really fun evening which finished with a few of us heading on to a local nightclub for drinking and dancing until the early hours. I never would have imagined that 25 years later I would be celebrating my own 20th anniversary and have two children who are both taller than me already.
50th and 25th. Time goes by so fast.
I know my mum and dad read these weeknotes. Love you both! Congratulations and I hope you had a wonderful evening. 😘
This was a week in which I:
Had a visit from a Virgin Media engineer to get us back online at home. The lightning strike had done much more damage than we first thought. As well as a dead TV and Internet router, we also lost our TiVo box and had to have all of the internal wiring replaced for our cable service.
Took delivery of a new TV. The old one was just outside of its five year warranty window. It cost about £400 to replace it with a like-for-like model, less than half of the £899 that we spent back in 2019.
Was disappointed to hear that a candidate we were looking to onboard into my team had decided to take a different job. One of the reasons cited was that the other role is fully remote; I wonder how much of a factor that will be in our search. Back to the drawing board.
Prepared for and ran the programme Steering Committee meeting, the first one for three weeks.
Conducted a thorough review of the costs for one of our real estate projects.
Reviewed costs for a construction project as part of a regular monthly valuation session, agreeing how much we should pay versus what we were being asked to pay.
Attended an ad-hoc Architecture Governance Authority meeting, jointly presenting on our planned office environmental monitoring platform.
Played a small part in helping get one of our new offices online, configuring two of our digital signage players to work with our 3,840 x 600 pixel monitors. The technical infrastructure team are making excellent progress, despite some of the equipment being damaged in transit.
Took part in our information risk steering group and non-financial risk review meetings.
Reviewed a colleague’s presentation that summarises some project work done to date and frames the next steps.
Enjoyed an informative Learning Hour meeting on PingCastle reports and how to use them to improve an organisation’s security profile.
Had a software demo of a SaaS platform for managing Health and Safety assessments and incidents.
Met with a new colleague in Johannesburg to welcome him into the team and give him an overview of my function.
Enjoyed the latest Teams Fireside Chat, this time led by Ron Pessner on the topic of Microsoft Loop. I use the product regularly, creating collaborative documents in-line in Teams chats where we need to quickly agree on some content together. Although the session wasn’t AI free, it made a lovely change that the focus was on the core features of the product and the discussion about Copilot was minimal.
Had to wrap up warm for Saturday morning’s bike ride. It was 5°C when I set out from my house, requiring bib tights and full-finger gloves. Things started to warm up the next day just in time for my now regular Sunday run. Just as I got back into town from my long loop, my wife called to ask whether I wanted to pop out for a coffee and a pastry, which made for a lovely unexpected end to the route.
Media
Video
Media consumption seemed to slow down this week, probably as a function of how busy the week was. We did manage to start and finish Beef on Netflix, a brilliant story that stems from a random road rage incident that veers off in all sorts of unexpected directions. We also started the new season of Slow Horses on AppleTV+, which continues to be excellent.
Early on Sunday morning we had an incredible thunderstorm, with a lightning strike that fried the routers for a swathe of people in our street. It also killed at least two TVs, including ours. Thunderstorms typically don’t scare me, but when the sound hits your ears before you see the lightning, it is terrifying.
The strike before the one that did all of the damage.
Ended up awake with my eldest son paying us a visit as it woke him up. Incredibly, our youngest slept through it.
I’ve captured footage from the two closest strikes that hit us about a minute apart, each from two different angles. It’s the second one that does all the damage. Unfortunately, the camera that probably had the best view was temporarily taken offline by the second strike.
One thing the lightning did highlight is the need for us to sweep the cobwebs away from the front of our house.
The earliest I can get an appointment with an engineer from our Internet Service Provider is next Saturday. So I’m now assuming that I’m going to be in the office all week next week.
This was a week in which I:
Suffered from jet lag following the previous week’s trip to New York. My eyes were falling out of my head on Monday and it was difficult to catch up with sleep as the week went on.
Had the regular programme and project meetings.
Spent a lot of the week reviewing and discussing the detailed cost breakdown of one of our projects. It’s going to be top priority for next week too.
Met with vendors to discuss acoustic panelling, decorating and signage in one of our offices.
Agreed how we would move forward with the proposed cost model for one of our shared spaces.
Reviewed the draft technical architecture for the new smart environmental sensors that will be installed in one of our offices, ahead of next week’s architecture governance authority meeting.
Continued with interviews for the role in my team. I’m hopeful that we will conclude the process next week.
Joined the interim design meeting for the shared space in one of our offices. When we start getting into fabrics and textures and there are already half a dozen different views and opinions in the room, I tend to conserve my energy and let everyone else make the choices.
Agreed on a solution for getting TV feeds onto the screens in a new office.
Reviewed the pricing of Microsoft Copilot and Teams Premium. As much as I think there is way too much hype about — and inappropriate uses of — AI, there is definitely some value in the technology. We are going to look and see if we can find some of it.
Completed our final review of our annual operational risk self-assessment.
Caught up with our audio/visual design vendor for the first time in a few weeks.
Had lunch with a colleague and friend who has been out of the office for an extended period. It’s great to see him and start to work with him again.
Attended our weekly Learning Hour meeting, with our host presenting on the topic of being a drone pilot in the UK.
Got struck in the face by a MacBook Air. A colleague and I had a one-on-one meeting; as we got up from our seats, he fumbled his laptop and it ended up skidding into my head, just above my right eye. The rim of a MacBook’s screen is sharp. It was painful — there was blood and bruising — but my pain was at least equalled by how mortified he looked.
Am still regretting being missold two pairs of shoes six years ago. The fact that they are so uncomfortable, and were completely unused during the period of the pandemic where I worked from home, means that they are still going strong.
Deleted my Telegram account. The news coverage of Pavel Durov’s arrest has been an education in how the platform works versus those that are end-to-end encrypted. I don’t need it in my life, so it’s time to say goodbye.
Had another enjoyable Album Club evening, with brilliant hosting. I wasn’t keen on the album, but that’s okay.
Added Gabriel Birnbaum’s latest album to Discogs. I’d lazily waited a few weeks to see if anyone did the hard work of adding it before I stepped in and did it myself.
Enjoyed my first outdoor bike ride with the club for a few weeks. It was lovely to get out riding again. The weather has turned just enough so that I doubted my clothing choice for the first five minutes, but it soon warmed up once we got going. I’m going to try and keep my running going as well. I ran in the rain on Sunday and it was actually good not to be melting to death when I finished.
Had a look at potential new carpets for the stairs in our house. The current carpet was laid almost 20 years ago and is starting to look threadbare.
Media
Podcasts
WB-40’s episode on rebooting hiring came at a good time, as I’ve been interviewing for a role in my team. “Recruiting for the human skills” struck a chord with me.
Articles
I had never considered that ‘estimated reading time’ could be ableist. I don’t disagree with any of the points made, but I know that for me — an able bodied reader, typically reading via one or two different ebook or ‘read later’ apps — it has been very useful to see this before diving in to read something. Maybe I’d get used to a different measure such as number of words?
Finished watching Lady In The Lake. It took us three episodes to get into it; just as we started to enjoy it, the show went overboard with one crazy long dream sequence too many. I’d worked out the plot twist before the final episode and the end was quite unsatisfying.
This week I returned to New York in order to check in on one of my projects. I love spending time there. It feels like a home away from home.
The trip started brilliantly. Our corporate policy allows me to book a business class ticket both ways. But paying an additional £2k for a bigger seat and a better selection of food on the way out — a seven hour daytime trip — always feels way too indulgent. So I had booked myself into Premium Economy. When I handed my boarding pass over to the airline staff member at the gate, they exclaimed “Ooh, you’ve had a seat change.” My card was quickly ripped up and I was handed a new one, which clearly sat me at the front of the plane. I can’t remember ever having had a business class upgrade on a long-haul flight since I travelled as a kid with my dad, who worked for the airline.
Things went from good to great when I found that the in-flight Wi-Fi on the brand new plane allowed me to stream Sky Sports. I paid £18.99 for a full flight Wi-Fi package and settled in to watch the Formula One. The stream held up brilliantly, with only a few blurry moments and the odd cut-out. I was living the dream.
Ready to go, both the flight and the race
Topping even that, late on this Sunday afternoon, I found myself being the first person in the JFK airport immigration hall. Getting through immigration, a process that has previously taken me as much as four hours, was done in all of two minutes. As I waited for the cases to arrive in the baggage hall, I decided that if mine was the first to appear on the belt, I was going to go straight to buy a lottery ticket.
The hotel I stayed at was a little strange. New York hotel rooms are invariably dated and this was no exception. It was run with a skeleton crew, with entrance to the hotel and the room controlled by a six digit code instead of a key card. The receptionist informed me that I was “entitled to” one room clean and towel change during my stay, with additional visits charged at $40 each. Looking out of the window of the room at the construction site next door, I felt as though my luck had run out. But it turned out fine. The room had plenty of towels, the shower was great, the Wi-Fi was simple and I wasn’t disturbed by anyone or anything during my stay.
Demolition. Fortunately it only started long after I was already up and about.
My hotel was half a block away from Trump Tower. The base of the building is surrounded by concrete blocks, with 56th street completely blocked off to traffic. It must be horrible for people who have purchased apartments in the building, which presumably are now worth much less than they once were.
The base of Trump Tower, surrounded by concrete blocks and police.
This was my final visit to our current office before we move out. It was time to say goodbye to this wonderful view that greets everyone who makes a visit to our office kitchen.
Empire State view.
Wandering around a city where I used to live is sometimes tinged with melancholy. I took a trip down to Chelsea, swung past my old apartment block and wandered down 9th Avenue, remembering how my wife and I used to go for a walk at the weekend, popping into shops and trying whatever food took our fancy. These days, there’s so much pressure to get stuff done with whatever time we have. But 20 years ago, this felt like a great use of time. And I think it was.
This was a week in which I:
Worked on Monday, despite it being a public holiday in the UK. Taking a long-haul trip for less than a week doesn’t feel right, and I didn’t want to miss out on spending a day with the team in the office.
Found that I had forgotten to pack my belt. Inevitably, there’s always something that I forget when going on a trip. I just hope that what I forget isn’t essential. Fortunately, belts are pretty easy to come by in midtown Manhattan. It’s great to work so close to 5th Avenue.
Took the first delivery of the lovely new furniture for our office. It took the team the best part of four hours to unload two large trucks and to get the furniture up to our floor. This kind of work can only happen outside of office hours, so we didn’t leave until around 10pm.
Reviewed the comprehensive, detailed post-construction snagging report for the new office, and found a couple of items that hadn’t made it to the list.
Discussed and agreed the office entrance signage with the manufacturer, construction and landlord teams.
Made some decisions on the installation of audio/visual equipment, where they hadn’t been specified in our design documents.
Explored options for displaying TV channels on our Yodeck digital signage players in our new office.
Had a brief meeting to review the latest costs for another office upgrade. Set up a more detailed review for next week.
Met with the construction company assigned to one of our offices to agree an approach to improving our meeting rooms and adding some internal illuminated signage.
Agreed how we will proceed with the logistical plans to open an office in a new country now that things are moving again.
Completed the review of our annual operational risk self-assessment.
Had an introductory meeting with the executive partner at our technology industry analyst vendor.
Interviewed candidates for a vacancy in my team. One of the candidates appeared to be blatantly using a web search or generative AI tool to key in our difficult questions and read off an answer. He wasn’t even using any tools to make it look like we had his full attention. I wonder whether we’ll soon need to move back to in-person interviews as the default?
Had some catch-up calls with the vendors that are finding candidates for the role.
Had some lovely drinks and lunch out with my colleagues in the New York team. Had the splendid discovery that one of my colleagues is a bit of an audiophile and a typography geek.
Enjoyed some morning runs around Central Park. On a couple of mornings I decided to tackle the full road circuit, something I hadn’t done for a while. I was pretty pleased with my time, setting my fastest 5km and second fastest 10km, especially as the Harlem end of the route is a little hilly.
A Monday morning run around Central Park
Enjoyed eating out, revisiting Cafe Luce for a well-cooked bowl of pasta, Bill’s Bar & Burger for a traditional Friday afternoon lunch, Simo Midtown for personal pizzas (“hold the cheese”), Westville Chelsea for a wholesome homemade veggie burger, Springbone and Naya for healthy bowls and wakey fuel from Black Fox Coffee. It helped that my hotel didn’t have a kitchen, so I had to get out and find somewhere to eat every evening. Good Time IPA is a superb alcohol-free beer that I haven’t found anywhere outside of NYC, and the vegan Van Leeuwen ice cream flavours are too tempting to ignore.
Indulgent. But so good.
Spent the weekend with my body clock being all over the place. Despite ‘sleeping’ all the way home on the plane, I felt completely frazzled on Saturday and have carried it through into the start of the next week.
Media
Podcasts
A few friends have encouraged me to sign up to Bluesky. I had resisted as I thought that it was yet another siloed platform, but it turns out that it’s actually a federated network. It was interesting to hear this interview with Rose Wang, COO of Bluesky.
Articles
Had a conversation with a friend about social media and the recent far-right riots in the UK. I hadn’t seen that a 2020 speech by Humza Yousaf in the Scottish Parliament, in 2020 at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, had been clipped and was being shared with the narrative that he was racist. Reading the whole speech, it is actually exactly the opposite — it’s anti-racist. From Wikipedia’s entry on Ibram X Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist:
Kendi argues that the opposite of racist is anti-racist rather than simply non-racist, and that there is no middle ground in the struggle against racism; one is either actively confronting racial inequality or allowing it to exist through action or inaction. He defines racism as any policy that creates inequitable outcomes between people of different skin colors; for instance, affirmative action in college admissions is anti-racist in that is designed to remedy past racial discrimination, while inaction on climate change is racist because of the disproportionately severe impacts of climate change in the predominantly non-white Global South.
I’m not climbing on the Oasis reunion bus. I saw them headline at Reading Festival in 2000 and was so bored by their performance that I returned to my tent early to get ahead of the crowds. But I found this assessment of their latest anniversary reissue of Definitely Maybe to be an interesting read.
Video
Watched a couple of movies this week, trying to take advantage of my recent resubscription to MUBI.
This Closeness (2023) had an interesting storyline of a couple renting a room in an Airbnb for a long weekend. The whole movie is filmed within the apartment, with what’s going on in outside brought into the narrative by the dialogue between the protagonists and the odd additional character. It didn’t feel entirely believable.
My latest haul from our local Oxfam Books and Music store
