Another difficult week. I’m feeling a little crumpled by the weight of work at the moment, something that hasn’t happened in years. July was always going to be a difficult month with the amount of change that our projects are running through the organisation. It’s not a surprise, but it still feels difficult. I’ve found myself waking up somewhere between 4am and 5am, struggling to get back to sleep.

I’m typically in the office three days a week and usually end up being one of the last to leave. I cover the same hours at home, but the difference is that my commute is 30 seconds from my home office versus 90 minutes on the train. Later this year there is likely to be a push to get staff into the office at least four days a week. When we get to that point I’m going to need to try and adjust to getting out of the office at a reasonable time so that I don’t just get to see my family at weekends.

My colleagues and team members are excellent. Most of us have worked together for many years, which makes delivering a complex programme so much easier. Autonomy and division of responsibility are features of what we do. I’ve also brought in some external management assistance for our two main projects which has made things much easier. Most of the time I don’t need to micromanage or chase people up for things. But despite the load that the team are carrying, there is still too much left on my plate.

At the back end of the week my wife and I found ourselves home alone for a couple of evenings, a little sample of the future. Our youngest boy had gone to the Peak District for his Duke of Edinburgh expedition and our eldest was up in Birmingham, running for Hertfordshire in the English Schools Athletic Association Track and Field Championships. On Friday we had a lovely impromptu dinner out in town. Both of us were exhausted, falling asleep in front of the TV by 10pm. Hopefully we won’t be quite as worn out by the time we get to retire.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the regular programme and project meetings.
• Met to run through the pre-construction programme plan for changes to one of our offices.
• Reviewed the scope of our major programme with our Procurement team.
• Gave an overview and update on our programme to our divisional CFO.
• Met the divisional CFO again in a town hall meeting, hearing about his career and his view of our priorities.
• Was thrown a curveball from another company which means that we need to modify one of our plans.
• Prepared for and chaired a short Programme Steering Committee meeting. Getting into executive diaries is a problem that gets much more difficult as the summer months approach. Big decisions were made at the meeting, resulting in work to replan one of our projects.
• Had the first of a series of meetings with individual teams in one of our offices, taking them through the background to one of our key projects, explaining how the changes will impact them and fielding questions. We’ve got four or five more of these sessions lined up for the start of next week.
• Reviewed the responses to a request for quotation that we issued the week before and agreed our follow-up actions.
• Helped a colleague with a niche Office Timeline issue. I love it when someone says “don’t just do it for me, please show me how to do it.”
• Had conversations with members of our HR teams on a vacancy that I have in my team.
• Had our regular catch-up with our Non-Financial Risk team.
• Spent time looking at a long-running document management project, agreeing an approach and next steps with the project team ahead of talking to representatives from each of the departments who will be impacted by the proposed changes.
• Concluded that quality coffee is not my thing. I’ve been conducting a small unscientific experiment, trying americanos with oat milk from various coffee shops on my way into the office. I’ve had brews from Blank Street, Rosslyn and Dartbrooke, all shops of some renown. I consistently find the taste of the coffee to be too strong, too bitter, with an unattractive curdling of the oat milk. Starbucks was by far and away the most enjoyable. It’s not you, good coffee, it’s me.
• Was too tired to contemplate getting up early for a sixth day in a row to go on the weekly cycling club ride. I love it when I’m out there but I couldn’t summon the energy, particularly as it was going to be yet another grey and damp day, in a summer filled with grey and damp days.
• Enjoyed hosting Album Club, having picked an album that split the room.
  

Media

Podcasts

• It was interesting to hear Lisa Nandy speaking to Matt Forde in 2022 when she was the Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, passionately talking about towns and communities not being left behind. I wonder whether part of the solution to distribute wealth and spending into more parts of the country could be to give white collar workers more rights to live and work remotely?
  

Articles

• Ian Dunt writes about how campaigning for proportional representation is still the right thing to do, despite it meaning that our voices will be united with the most unsavoury parties in parliament. I often wonder whether the Brexit referendum would have happened if the UK Independence Party had been represented appropriately in parliament; in the 2015 general election they had 3.9m votes, 12.6% of the total, and yet only ended up with one of the 650 members of Parliament. I disagree with UKIP, the Brexit Party and Reform UK with every bone in my body, but I do not think it’s democratic for such disproportional representation. Having them in parliament with the light shone on them, needing to work with other parties in order to get anywhere near power would likely have neutralised them and left the main parties to focus on their traditional centrist policies.
• Project 2025 looks like a nightmare. When I read Heather Burns’ 2023 end-of-year reading list I made a note of the books as I thought they seemed interesting. I’m now prioritising them, starting with Barbara F. Walter’s How Civil Wars Start, as I can now see more clearly why she made the list that she did.
  

I hate to break it to you, but you need to be preparing for the very real prospect of the second Trump presidency.

And to bring it full circle, you need to be preparing for what a second Trump presidency will likely mean for internet governance and infrastructure.

This goes well beyond platform T&Cs, or culture wars over content moderation, or pushes for surveillance disguised as child safety. This goes to what happens when the country which happens to host most global platforms, and a good chunk of physical infrastructure, either splits into 1990s Yugoslavia or splits into 1920s Germany. Because it’s going to be one or the other. Whether you want to deal with that or not.

Video

• We’ve been enjoying Kin on Netflix, an Irish crime drama. It’s interesting to watch this so soon after The Dry as it has some of the same actors in the form of Cairán Hinds and Sam Keeley. They are superb, being quite believable in very different roles.
  

Audio

• Magdalena Bay announcing a new album resulted in an instant purchase from me. It comes out in August, giving me three months to get to know the songs before I see them live in November. I love them.

• I’d forgotten how good All About Eve’s In The Meadow is. I bought a second hand copy of their debut album on vinyl a few weeks ago. The record is missing a couple of songs that are on the CD, so this song finishes things off, and does it in style.

Next week: Turning the handle again.

Work continues to be tough. Every day feels like a battle, ticking things off the to-do list and trying to keep our projects moving forward. Most of my regular working day is spent in meetings, leaving a few small gaps and the time after work to get things done like reviewing documents, preparing information and drafting communications. Sometimes I look at my diary for the week ahead and wonder how I will get to Friday evening having done all of the things I need to. Somehow it happens.

Trying to keep focused was supremely difficult as we went into Thursday’s General Election. I had my fingers crossed for a good outcome. I’d already voted a couple of weeks ago by post. In 2019 I voted for the Green Party in the knowledge that my constituency was going to return a Conservative MP as it had done in every election since it was created in 1950. They didn’t have a hope of winning, but I wanted to register that I saw the climate emergency as the biggest crisis that we face. This year, a boundary change meant that I am now in the newly-created Harpenden and Berkhamsted constituency. If the constituency had been around in 2019 it would also have been Conservative, so initially I didn’t have much hope that it would change. Tactical voting websites showed me that the Liberal Democrats would be the ones most likely to topple the Conservatives here, so they got my vote. And they won, spectacularly. Victoria Collins is our new MP.

On Thursday night I went to bed at my usual time but had a restless sleep, knowing that the election result would be revealed to me when I woke up. A few times I stirred, wondered what time it was, checked my watch, saw it was the middle of the night and resisted the temptation to pick up my phone, rolling over to try and get back to sleep. The exit poll and the early declarations in Sunderland had spooked me, with the far-right party company Reform UK being predicted to win 13 out of our 650 seats. What if the poll was wrong and they ended up with many more? I expelled a giant sigh of relief when they only ended up with five. My hope is that now they are in the spotlight, needing to meet parliamentary standards and actually do things for the constituents that they represent, they will be seen for what they are. I feel so sorry for the constituencies that elected them.

Watching Keir Starmer on the steps of 10 Downing Street, and in his press conference the next day, a feeling of relief washed over me. There is a lightness knowing that we have competent, decent, grown-up people running the country once more. I haven’t felt like this for a very long time. There is hope again, where it has been so long since there has been reason to be hopeful. Of course, the new government won’t get everything right and I’m sure they will have their own demons. There are very difficult times ahead immediately. But it’s the turn of a page and I am absolutely here for it.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the regular programme and project meetings.
• Met with two of our vendors to discuss a ‘change tracker’ for construction works we plan to do at one of our offices.
• Had to move our programme Steering Committee meeting out by a few days as we didn’t have enough attendees. I’m grateful for the additional time to put the material together.
• Took part in a final review of the plan to vacate one of our offices for essential works and to set up temporary space for us to work from.
• Met with our management team to review our collective travel schedule for the rest of the year.
• Met with our Procurement team to discuss our planned technical/AV fit-out of two rooms in a shared area of one of our buildings.
• Completed work on the documents proposing how the rooms will be fitted out and run from a technical, financial and operational perspective and sent this to the company with whom we share the space.
• Had a walkthrough of the latest financial estimates for one of our big construction projects.
• Met with the technical representative from a vendor whose product we want to trial as part of our meeting room set-up. The product can exist completely outside of our network, which makes life much easier from a cybersecurity perspective.
• Had another discussion about mandatory compliance call recording in Teams and the options available.
• Took part in an interview for a technical role in our Johannesburg team.
• Met with a colleague to brainstorm our approach to document reorganisation across our business unit and how we can use it to streamline our client on-boarding processes.
• Met with our whole team to discuss the company’s intent to push on with a ‘return to office’ agenda.
• Had my regular check-in with our technology research and advisory vendor.
• Caught up with a colleague in Johannesburg. It was interesting to learn that while she is in great demand as a public speaker, she doesn’t like doing it due to the burden of anxiety before and after.
• Enjoyed this week’s Learning Hour session where a colleague fed back about their experience at the Salesforce World Tour.
• Had a Random Coffee with a brilliant colleague who studied journalism, joined our organisation as a PA and is now managing clients.
• Ran our fortnightly team meeting as our usual meeting chair was on holiday.
• Met with a young boy who was visiting us for his work experience. I was almost the last person on his timetable, so I tried not to bore him by going over the same ground that he would have heard from everyone else. I think that most of the experience is not about the content but more about interacting with adults in a professional setting.
• Opted for indoor bike training this weekend due to the dreadful weather. The rain made for a brilliant British Grand Prix at Silverstone, but I wasn’t going cycling in it.
• Enjoyed a weekend of TV sport, with the key F1 sessions being timed perfectly around the Euro 2024 football.
• Did a bit of preparation for hosting next week’s Album Club. I think I know what I’m going to play, but it’s a bad time to find out that my CD player is on the blink.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Fascinating, thoughtful discussion with Anil Seth on How to Think About AI Consciousness. Made me think about Jamie Woodhouse’s work on Sentientism. Anil Seth:
  

There’s a real need for a certain humility here. I always think if you hear a confident pronouncement from somebody that AI could never be conscious or AI is conscious, then I think we should be pretty skeptical.

There are no grounds for extreme confidence either way here. The consequences of being wrong about the fact of the matter, about AI actually being conscious are huge, which is another reason we need to respect this humility. If AI is on a path to being conscious or already slightly conscious as Ilya Sutskever puts it, then we face a moral and ethical catastrophe of kind of unprecedented proportion, and that sounds very dramatic, but I think it’s warranted.

As soon as something is conscious, it has moral considerability. It has its own interests. It plausibly has the potential to experience suffering, and it may be suffering of a kind that we won’t or constitutively unable to recognize because of the very different constitution of these systems. If we artificially bring new forms of suffering into existence through developing real artificial consciousness, well, that is, with capital letters, a very bad thing indeed. So I think it’s really ethically crucial, but epistemologically, which is say, how will we know highly uncertain situation.

• Loved hearing from Matt Cloke on the Endava Tech Reimagined podcast. Matt and I worked together briefly many years ago and it’s great to hear about his backstory and what he’s been up to for the past decade and a half.
  

Articles

• Ian Dunt being his typically articulate self following the first round of the French election.
• Another week, another poorly thought-out AI ‘feature’. This time it’s Figma.
• We generally aren’t prepared to deal with our digital assets after our death, and neither are the tools and platforms that we use.
  

Video

• The new Mind Games box set is utterly preposterous. I’ve never met anyone who has told me it’s their favourite John Lennon album, let alone their favourite album. Yours for just £1,350!
• Generative AI’s take on gymnastics is both grotesque and mesmerising.
  

Books

• Still making my way through Troy Hunt’s PWNED.
  

Next week: A delayed Steering Committee, and two Album Clubs.

A very tough week. Ollie¹, one of our two cats, had started being a bit off his food for a few days. This was completely out of character for him. We’ve always joked that he thinks he’s a dog, as usually he will be at his bowl until there’s nothing left and then continues to look around for more. He’d also started doing his ‘furball cough’ routine a bit more than usual. Typically every evening he would come for a cuddle and a gigantic purr, which quite often would make him cough. Once he’d cleared his throat he’d be back for more attention and purring. But over the past few days we’d found him coughing randomly around the house.

As I got ready to head into the office on Monday, I looked out at him in the garden and noticed that he was breathing very rapidly. Later that morning I called the vet to try and make an appointment to bring him in the next day. After describing the symptoms, I felt as though I was being told off; they said that they really needed to see him sooner. So I packed up my things and left the office at lunchtime in order to take him for a diagnosis.

Ollie didn’t come home again until Tuesday evening. Our regular vet examined him until the clinic closed for the day. We then had to take him over to the emergency/out of hours vet where he stayed the night. In the morning we then had to pick him up and get him back to the regular vet. Scans, x-rays, examinations, oxygen and intravenous fluids were all deployed as they tried to find out what was wrong with him. The suspicion is that he has some kind of lung infection or pneumonia which he’d been fighting for a few days. Apparently cats hide their illnesses, so by the time that there are visible signs, things may have already progressed quite far.

After we got him home, he couldn’t seem to settle down. It was difficult to know whether it was the illness or just the experience of being away from home for a couple of days that had got him excited. Late that evening, he lay on the couch, breathing rapidly and panting. So we decided to take him back to the emergency vet once more.

Upon arrival, the vet told me that she had done some calculations as to what the worst case could be financially if they kept Ollie in overnight and had to do various things while he was there. £1,600. This is a lot of money, but I said that it didn’t worry me too much as I knew he was covered under an insurance policy that we’d had in place for years. As he’s almost eleven years old I knew that there would probably be a copayment of 20% or so, but I was confident that we could manage it. The vet kindly suggested that I take a look at the policy as sometimes there were caps and limits on various things. I’m so grateful that she did. Ollie was taken off to spend a bit of time in an oxygen box and I went and sat in reception, looking up the details of our insurance policy on my phone. I could have cried. The policy has a limit of £1,000 for any vet treatment as well as much smaller limits such as £100 for an overnight stay — a crazily small amount given that a consultation fee at the emergency vet is about £285, and our 90-minute visit on Tuesday cost us £444. So far we have spent about £2,000 and won’t expect to see much of the money back. I was kicking myself. Usually I am so risk averse and make sure that we have insurances in place to cover any unexpected financial event. I guess that life was busy when we took out this insurance policy and I didn’t take the time to read through the terms and conditions. I won’t make that same mistake again.

Ollie’s now at home with us and doing much better. He’s on a course of antibiotics and seems to be taking less rapid breaths. Hopefully he’s on the mend. We’ve moved his sister over to a much more comprehensive insurance policy so that we don’t end up with another major unexpected bill.

Managing the cat’s health and dealing with the stress of trying to balance the books hasn’t been the best set of circumstances for getting back into work after a week off. We’re at a very critical time for our major projects. Lots of information needs to be gathered and written up so that we can make some key decisions on the scope of the work at a meeting the following week. I also have my youngest boy joining me for work experience next week; it’s exciting for both of us and I can’t wait to have him there, but my time is going to be spread even more thinly than usual.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the regular project meetings.
• Tried to catch up with emails and teams messages. The amount of things going on has meant that I’ve finally reached the stage where I never get to ‘Teams Inbox Zero’ anymore.
• Spent a significant chunk of time helping to diagnose and remediate some network issues in one of our offices.
• Reviewed a consolidated cost view for all of our real estate/facilities cost centres for the next decade ahead of a senior leadership meeting next week.
• Started to prepare for a quarterly leadership meeting taking place next week.
• Met with a colleague in the Marketing and Communications team about the project that I am running for our London office. It’s going to cause significant disruption to everyone working there, so we need a proper communications plan for the next few months. It was also good to hear about the leadership offsite that took place the week before.
• Had a meeting with colleagues from Marketing and Communications and Corporate Services to talk through our plans to move out of one of our offices. Every time we get something out of someone’s head that we haven’t considered yet, the risk of a problem goes down.
• Dug into our proposed doorbell/intercom system for one of our offices. Although it’s a great solution, we may need to scale it back for day one to avoid having to wait for various assessments and approvals.
• Reviewed the latest iteration of the proposal for AV equipment upgrades for our office.
• Had another discussion about mandatory compliance call recording.
• Met with the real estate team to review our progress in opening a new office from scratch.
• Met with my project leadership team to discuss how we can optimise our delivery process. The distinction between ‘acceptance criteria’ (what we plan to deliver) and ‘definition of done’ (the quality criteria we need to meet) is a useful one. I think that I’ve been conflating them in the past, using a list of ‘things that need to be true in order to mark this as complete’.
• Joined a webinar hosted by our Senior Political Economist on the outcome and implications of last week’s election in South Africa. The next two weeks are going to be fascinating as the ANC tries to form a coalition government or a ‘government of national unity’.
• Attended the bi-monthly Information Risk Steering Group meeting.
• Met with the vendor of our corporate password management solution. They were very impressed with our >90% signup rate, something that we’ve managed to maintain through enrolling all of our new joiners as part of the setup process.
• Met with our new interim head of Operational Risk for a general catch-up and overview of our function.
• Had my regular catch-up with our technology research and advisory firm.
• Had a long, and long overdue, one-on-one meeting with my boss. All bases were covered.
• Was proud of my son who passed his driving theory test. He’s been spending a lot of time behind the wheel, mainly with his mum, and is improving all the time.
• Finished planning my other son’s timetable for his work experience at my office next week. I am so grateful to work with such a lovely bunch of people who are happy to give up some of their time to spend with him.
• Was bowled over by an unexpected kindness. Some people are so incredibly generous.
• Cancelled our family subscription to Spotify. It’s recently gone from £17.99 to £19.99 a month. We already pay for YouTube Premium Family for the same price and it was only this week that I realised it includes YouTube Music. I’ll need to find a tool to recreate a bunch of playlists, but in the context of the recent vet bills it will be great to save £240 a year. Most of my mobile music listening is done through PlexAmp anyway, but it’s good to have the use of a ‘listening post’ for albums I might want to buy.
• Enjoyed hearing a recent Vaccines record at the WB-40 Album Club. It took me back a decade or so to when a friend of mine used to rave about their first album.
• Missed my youngest son as he was away on a practice DofE expedition.
• Had a lovely meal out at Warehouse Pizza with my wife and my eldest son. It’s so good to have a proper sit down meal instead of getting takeaway, scoffing it down and then everyone scurrying off to do their own thing again.
• Loved this week’s cycle club ride. It was a bit longer and lumpier than usual, super fast in places where I was drafting with another couple of riders who were hitting it hard.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Photographer Paul Clarke nails a problem with the usefulness of AI in his conversation on the WB-40 podcast. If he’s taken photographs at an event and asks AI to select the ‘best’ ones for submission to the client, it will have no idea when one of the photos is of the CEO’s daughter and therefore should probably be left in.
  

Articles

• The latest in a regular series of guides for people wanting to use generative AI to do stuff.
• Even if you personally decide not to use Windows Recall, it’s still bad for you as everyone else you work with might be using it.
• Finding alternatives to Adobe products would typically be a good thing based on my experience of using Acrobat. But now they are planning to use your cloud-hosted content in such broad ways, it looks like an imperative.
• Really enjoyed Sasha Chapin’s 50 things I know. Particularly this quote about learning to recognise what your special skills are:
  

• Rory Stewart has always come across as a very good egg. But boy, is his outlook on UK politics bleak.
  

Video

• Elliot Roberts’ review of the new version of Let It Be is excellent as usual.
  

Audio

• Someone reminded me of this incredible cover of Neil Young’s Down By The River by the Indigo Girls. I love the 1200 Curfews album and this is probably my favourite track on it.
  

Web

• A 1909 version of using sat-nav in your car.
  

Books

• Started reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. I need a bit of food for the soul, so it’s time for a work of fiction.
  

Next week: Work experience.

1. Also known as Great Uncle Bongos (amongst other aliases), for reasons that are lost in time. ↩

This was my first week off work since Christmas and I was ready for it. Of course, my body decided that it was a fantastic time get sick. I spent most of the week with the various symptoms of a heavy cold. I’m sure it must have happened, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a day off from work because of sickness. Particularly now that there is no technical reason to go to an office, I would have to be at least mown down with a fever not to be able to drag myself to my desk at home.

Despite feeling rubbish, it was lovely to have some time to potter around at home and then later in the week to get things done. It felt like time well spent.

This was a week in which I:

• Spent a couple of hours writing up the minutes from last week’s Steering Committee meeting. I didn’t want it hanging over me into next week where I should be focusing on the next cycle.
• Got almost all of the remaining post-kitchen installation tidying done. We took a big load of things to the recycling centre, where for the first time since we moved here 20 years ago they asked us for proof that we lived in the area.
• Cleaned our small patio and mucked out all of the floor-level gutters that surround the back of our house. A perfect job for a week off at home.
• Got through my backlog of about 500 personal emails, leaving a small handful of messages that I want or need to do something with. Every time I do a big purge I wonder how it got to this stage and vow never to let it happen again. But then it happens again.
• Bought a second car, a 15-year old Mini. We’ve got by with one car forever, but now that we have a 17-year old who is learning to drive, with his brother following fast behind him, it made sense to have something that they can get insured on. The first car I bought in the mid-1990s was a Ford Escort that cost about £500, which is £993 in today’s money. Those cars don’t really exist anymore; at least, not safe ones. And insurance for a newly-qualified 17-year old now seems to be about £1,800 whereas thirty years ago it was a few hundred pounds. With both boys learning to drive and thinking about going to university, we’re realising that we’re about to enter a very expensive period of our lives. The new car is great and very fun to drive.
• Had dinner with some old friends that we hadn’t seen in a couple of years. I had no idea that we had such a good Lebanese restaurant so close by. The food was excellent but the music accompanying the belly-dancing was SO LOUD.
• Met up with the neighbours in our street for a party in our road. We’ve had a few of them over the years, usually coinciding with a royal anniversary. This one was just because it was a fun thing to do. The sun shone all day and everyone had a great time.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Really enjoyed Ben Thompson’s Stratechery interview with Terraform Industries CEO Casey Handmer about the solar energy revolution. It’s the first thing I’ve heard in months that makes me hopeful for the future from a climate change perspective. He’s put together a reading list on the future of energy which I’d love to dive into.
  

Compare this [nuclear energy] to a solar panel, which is essentially an inert piece of glass. In fact, solar panels are about as expensive as glass right now, and you don’t need any advanced technology, or labor, or understanding, or certifications or anything to deploy, you literally put it in the sun.

• The latest Your Undivided Attention covers the use of artificial intelligence in war in a fascinating interview with Paul Scharre. I loved these quotes:
  

To put it in Nick Bostrom’s terms, AI is like philosophy on a deadline, we have these urgent philosophical questions and now we have a deadline to actually answer them because we are instrumenting our society with more AI.

So if you can compress parts of that loop that are easy for automation to do, you can expand more space for humans, if you are the only one doing this. But when your competitor is doing it, they’re accelerating their time cycles too. And now you get into this dynamic where everyone’s just having to make decisions in split seconds. Now we’ve seen this in stock trading. This is not a theoretical concept. We’ve seen this whole domain of high-frequency trading emerge where algorithms are making trades in milliseconds, at superhuman speeds that humans could never try to be in the loop for those kinds of trades.

And then we’ve seen accidents like flash crashes as a result of that because of, I mean in part because of high-frequency trading and other factors too, of just these sort of weird interactions among algorithms because of course you’re not going to share with your competitor exactly how your algorithm works, whether you’re in finance or in warfare. I think what’s concerning to me is the way that financial regulators have dealt with this problem is they’ve installed circuit breakers to take stocks offline if the price moves too quickly, but that doesn’t exist in warfare. Right? There’s no referee to call time out in war if things start to get out of control. So how do you then maintain human control over war when war is being fought at superhuman speeds?

Video

• We finished watching series one of The Dry on ITVX. It’s not the greatest show I’ve ever seen but it’s very good.
• Ever wondered what happened to the guy that was found in the grounds of John Lennon’s house in Ascot in 1971? You’re not the only one.
• Watched Slade in Flame (1975). I’d heard that it was a lost classic, a gritty film about the music business that most people had forgotten. It turns out that they had forgotten it because it’s pretty forgettable. Bizarre characters with a storyline that is simultaneously simple and yet hard to follow. (I don’t understand how Noddy Holder’s character ended up as the lead singer of the band.) See for yourself:
  

Audio

• Took a trip to Deco Audio in Aylesbury to go crate digging. It’s my favourite place to buy second hand vinyl as the quality is so consistently high. As well as a few LPs I picked up seven CDs for £12, all of which I’ve ripped to my NAS drive so that I can stream them to my ears through PlexAmp.
  

Next week: Back to it, with an online album club thrown into the mix.

New York City was the destination for my first overseas business trip this year. Of all the places that we regularly visit, New York is my favourite. Having lived there for a year in my early 20s and visited many times since, it feels like home away from home. It’s relatively safe, so despite not having access to my bike or indoor trainer I usually manage to get some exercise by running around Central Park in the morning and going for a wander in the evening. This was a rainy week, so I crammed my running into the first two days of my trip. Not having run for a while, I found myself walking like John Wayne for the rest of my visit, struggling to descend any staircase that put itself in my path.

Business travel stopped being exciting some time ago, but the opportunity to be in the same place as people that I usually work with remotely is golden. Going on a trip forces me to squash all of my weekend jobs into one day before I leave and to do the same thing when I return. The journey to New York was a very long day — literally five hours longer than usual. Despite following Mark Horstman’s advice on how to pack (using the plastic wrappers that dry cleaning is returned in to put shirts into), inevitably I have to spend an hour or so re-ironing everything once I arrive.

The main purpose of my visit was to see the work being done to build out a floor for our new office as well as to meet the myriad of people working on the project across a number of different organisations. I’ve spent 25 years working in Technology but this year find myself running a number of real estate and facilities projects. This is part of the fun of being in a small team.

A highlight of this trip was meeting up with two old friends from Ride 999 who have recently moved to the city. It was nine years ago this month that we rode from London to Milan; it was fun to reminisce and catch up with what they’re doing now. We had drinks and shared food at Dutch Fred’s, discovering the most incredible alcohol-free IPA.

The journey home from New York is only six and a half hours, which always feels too short for travelling overnight. Between the half hour to get airborne and the need to be sitting upright an hour before landing there’s really only an opportunity to grab five hours sleep. (If there was an option, I’d definitely choose a slower plane.) A big sleep on Saturday night helped me to reset but going to bed on Sunday was difficult as I lay there wide awake.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the regular programme and project meetings. In our team, most of my colleagues are based in the UK/Africa timezones so I had to rearrange a few meetings to be able to attend them from five hours behind. Each day became a burst of online meetings in the morning followed by local in-person meetings in the afternoon — a pattern that is quite normal for people in our New York office.
• Reviewed the furniture choices for the new office.
• Utilised a portable conference speaker that we took on site for our weekly office build-out meeting. It worked fantastically well.
• Met with the landlord for the new office in person for the first time.
• Reviewed the technical specs for the technology, audio/visual and security build-out of the office.
• Wrote up and sent the minutes from last week’s programme Steering Committee meeting.
• Enjoyed some great things to eat. Bill’s Bar and Burger does exactly what it says (with superb service), Abitino’s pizza by the slice was excellent (and cheap), Il Gattopardo was a treat, The Little Beet was a saviour for healthy fast food, Pasta Corner had perfect handmade pasta and Café Luce left me full for most of the next day.
  

• Took advantage of being downtown for a meeting to visit the Strand Bookstore. I think it’s one of my favourite places in the world.
• Watched my eldest son compete in a 4x400m relay at Eton athletics track.
  

• Was delighted to come home to a completely finished kitchen. We’re so pleased with it.
• Missed the Interesting conference as I was away. I’m also missing RideLondon at the weekend. Perhaps I need to stop buying tickets to things.
• Got back on the bike on Sunday morning after a big sleep, doing a two-hour turbo ride. I could still feel twinges in my legs from my runs on Monday and Tuesday.
• Had some terrible news from a close friend and wished there was something I could do to help.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Being away without my usual indoor cycling and commuting routines meant that I fell behind on all of my listening. I’ve got some catching up to do.
  

Video

• Thought that ABBA: Against The Odds was much better than the blurb that was posted on iPlayer. It covers their whole career, not just their Eurovision Song Contest entry fifty years ago. Well worth a watch.
  

Books

• Started reading Mapping the Roads by Mike Parker, which explores the history of road maps in the UK. It’s a lovely thing, with lavish illustrations alongside the written history.
  

Next week: Turning my attention back to my other major projects, with an Album Club to round out the weekend.

On Friday night I was lying on my couch, idly browsing messages on various WhatsApp and Signal groups, when I spotted a photo posted by a neighbour. She’d taken it a few steps away from our house. It was amazingly beautiful. All of us went outside to see for ourselves and were joined by neighbours from up and down the street who had the same idea. To the naked eye we could see streaks and patches of purple sky, but the beautiful shapes and colours were revealed as soon as we raised our cameras to take photos. It was a night to look up in wonder, and to talk to neighbours that we rarely see as we shared the experience. Years ago I remember walking to the pub with my dad and both of us stopping to watch comet Hale–Bopp as it hurtled through the night sky, something we knew we might not see again. Friday night felt the same way.

Last week’s Bank Holiday bike ride took it out of me; I was feeling the effects throughout the first couple of days at work. I’ve ridden much longer distances before but nothing of this size for a while, so maybe I’m just out of practice.

Most of my week was spent at home, with only one venture into the office. I needed to be around to let various tradies into the house and we also had a midweek train strike. Our kitchen renovations are now almost finished; the flooring and skirting boards are down, the plumbing is complete and the worktops are on. We’re just waiting to get our hob installed, the decorating to complete and a couple of small adjustments to various things before we can return to normal. We’re so pleased with the work that everyone has done and can’t wait to start having people over to visit again.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the weekly programme and project meetings.
• Pulled together the latest Steering Committee pack for our programme and chaired the meeting. I used the first part of the meeting to have our audio-visual designer present the ideas for what we will do in a couple of rooms that we share with another organisation.
• Attended the first construction meeting for a new office, hosted by the general contractor. It was based on-site with an audio-only Teams conference for everyone else to dial into, which instantly took me back 15 years to how we used to get together remotely. We have to get a proper conference speaker on-site for the meetings in future.
• Reviewed and agreed the list of items and their costs that we will spend on beyond the standard fit-out for the office.
• Met to review the responses to our RFP for fitting out our new office from a technology, security and audio-visual perspective, and appointed a vendor.
• Reviewed our real estate and facilities costs for one of our offices as preparation for our planned work over the next couple of years. We ‘filled in the blanks’ with super rough estimates for everything we don’t have a proper estimate or quote for yet. Some number is always better than no number at all.
• Met with our internal insurance specialist to discuss our cover for a space that we share with a sister company.
• Discussed the risk of a popular tool that comes with its own cloud storage and whether we should be removing it as an option. It’s not a trivial decision as the storage offers better functionality than our other cloud applications for certain tasks and we know that people are using it in their workflow.
• Had a discussion on how our twice-weekly change approval process could be improved and offered some suggestions to help us make changes faster, with less risk and with more of an audit trail.
• Assisted a colleague as they got to grips with Office Timeline Pro+. The software is such a time-saver and works beautifully. Sometimes you just need someone to spend 10 minutes with you to show you how to get the best out of a tool.
• Met with a sister company to discuss the process we went through to move from hard phones on desks to soft phones. We spent a painful time with Cisco Jabber before moving across to Teams when it was ready for prime time.
• Was fascinated by a colleague’s presentation at our weekly Learning Hour as they talked about their recent visit to Beijing.
• Had a delightful Random Coffee with a colleague in China that I’d never properly met with before. It turns out that she was born on the exact same day as my two brothers.
• Replaced the doors on our fridge freezer, ridding ourselves of random dents that have accumulated over the past few years. Swapping them over wasn’t trivial but we managed to do it in a couple of hours.
• Enjoyed the latest WB-40 podcast Album Club where our host chose Hard-Fi’s Stars of CCTV for us to listen to. I’d never heard it before; the first few songs didn’t grab me, but somewhere halfway through side A I started getting into it.
• Had the spoke repaired on my bike’s back wheel ahead of the weekly club ride. £1.25 in parts and £20 in labour.
• With both children out of the house, my wife and I decided to wander down into town for a casual dinner. I guess we’ll be doing more of this again now that the boys are older.
• Got myself ready for a business trip, the first one in over a year.
  

Media

Podcasts

• The prospect of a second Trump presidency is terrifying.
  

Articles

• The Guardian’s article off the back of their survey of “every contactable lead author or review editor of IPCC reports since 2018” left me aghast. Most of the respondents think that the current climate targets are already unachievable. I don’t see how we can avoid catastrophe. When the world stopped for the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 it caused a minuscule temporary drop in carbon dioxide emissions. Imagine what would be required to bring these emissions down significantly.
  

Video

• Started watching The Dry on recommendation from Andrew Harrison on the Oh God, What Now? podcast
• Caught The Art of Tommy Cooper before it left iPlayer. A fascinating character. It’s weird to watch a TV programme from 2007 — which feels like it should be recent — and realising that all of the talking heads have themselves now passed away.
• Victoria Derbyshire’s interview with Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus was captivating.
• Started season two of How To with John Wilson. I can’t imagine the effort it takes to put this show together, matching a narrative with just the right visuals from his archive.
  

Audio

• I’m still exploring Tears for Fears and somewhat obsessing over Songs from the Big Chair. This live version of The Working Hour from 2014 is so good.

Next week: Travel.

The feeling of being slightly broken followed me into a third week. But somehow, like a change in the weather, it cleared as the days went by. I remember heading out to this month’s Album Club evening feeling light and unburdened and I wasn’t sure why. I wonder how much stress and anxiety is a function of a big to-do list versus something more basic. Working from home on Thursday and Friday meant that I got my morning exercise in on both days; maybe that has something to do with it.

There are so many projects in progress at the moment. As well as all of the initiatives at work, we have a new kitchen being fitted at home. All of the contents of the kitchen have been distributed around the house, making every step a perilous one. It also makes unloading the dishwasher look like an episode of The Crystal Maze as we run around the house trying to find where everything goes. Friends have kindly lent us a portable induction hob so we aren’t just eating microwave meals and takeaways, but we’ve had our fair share of both over the past couple of weeks.

I had Elton John’s Nikita as an earworm for the first few days of the week and couldn’t work out why it had popped back onto my inner turntable. Then I noticed all of the power tools that our kitchen fitter had been using.

At one point early this week it looked as though a family project that we had outsourced was going to come back to us to do ourselves and I found myself staring into space, wondering how we would fit it in. Thankfully it was a false alarm. Our plates are full and there is no room for anything else.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the weekly programme and project meetings.
• Prepped for and ran our fortnightly programme Steering Committee meeting, including a first draft proposal of how we can break one of the programme’s projects down into individual streams.
• Found that the materials we had sent out as part of an RFP were missing a file, so had to quickly follow up to get it distributed to all of the companies that have been invited to respond.
• Held Q&A sessions with the prospective vendors as part of the RFP, collating a summary of all of the questions from all of the sessions for distribution straight afterwards.
• Met with a colleague from our People & Culture team to work out how I can kick off recruitment for one of the vacancies in my team.
• Fleshed out a job spec for the other vacancy in my team and sent it to my team for review.
• Attended a meeting to kick off a review of some of our Group-wide internal processes.
• Welcomed a new team member on board for one of our projects, an old colleague who is now working on a freelance basis. He should add some invaluable experience to our team.
• Agreed how we would progress with setting up a hardware ‘lab’ environment in our office in order to do development and evaluation work without putting our production environment at risk.
• Met with a colleague in another department to discuss our approach to the use of AI in our respective businesses.
• Had our monthly Lean Coffee session, where — in response to a topic — most attendees learned that the office dress code has indeed changed at some point in the past few years.
• Enjoyed our monthly office lunch and catch-up with colleagues.
• Was amazed at how much progress our kitchen fitter made in just a few days. I can start to see how it will all look when it’s done. It’s quite exciting. Our appliances have arrived and should be fitted soon.
• Spent a big chunk of the weekend loading up a skip outside our house. We’d waited to do it, keeping our driveway free so that the people delivering the new kitchen and appliances would have easy access to our door. As a result, all the pieces of the old kitchen had accumulated on our back patio. We had to borrow a sledgehammer from a friend in order to break up old pieces of granite that were otherwise immovable. I’ve used muscles this weekend that had previously lain dormant for decades.
• Enjoyed hearing a Janis Joplin album for the first time. I don’t know much about her, but her voice was old beyond her years.
• Dropped the manufacturers of Ulysses a question about how to add alt text to images. Apparently this isn’t a feature yet, but it’s now on the list.
• Sent a note to the folks at Readwise to ask for a couple of new features. Sometimes I flit between the digital and physical versions of a book; currently Readwise will log highlights from these under two separate entries. It would also be great to be able to use the OCR capability when I’m offline or have a poor Internet connection. Both feature requests are now on their list.
• Moved my website hosting from SiteGround to Cloud Above. My new host came highly recommended from a friend and I can see why; the move was painless and they were so helpful and responsive as I sorted out the tiny issues that come with jumping from one host to another. I was on the 10GB plan at SiteGround and had used up over 90% of the space. Moving to 20GB was going to cost around £345 per year. Cloud Above do it for £96.
• Had a delicious impromptu dinner at Prime in Berkhamsted. (We are easily swayed when the only options at home are microwave meals or some kind of pasta.)

Media

Podcasts

• Took the first step at pruning my ‘current affairs’ listening by unsubscribing from The Rest Is Politics. Of all of the politics shows that I listen to — Oh God, What Now?, The Guardian’s Politics Weekly UK and America, and the Financial Times’ Political Fix — it feels like it is the least valuable. When I first started listening I was hoping that Alistair Campbell and Rory Stuart would spend time arguing from different points of view; perhaps the Overton window has shifted so far that they seem like two sides of the same coin.
• Politics Weekly America continues to be fascinating. The latest episode digs into humour in US politics. It gives a fascinating insight into Trump as he attempts a joke whose basis and setup doesn’t sit within the parameters of our shared reality.
• Also stopped listening to The Nowhere Office. The latest season looks to be snippets of discussions that have just gone behind a Substack paywall, so I’m out.

Articles

• “McKinsey is to the middle class what flesh-eating bacteria is to healthy tissue.“

Video

• Re-watched Reservoir Dogs (1992). I was 15 when it came out and I remember what a cultural impact it had. Watching it now, it’s jarring to hear so many N-words from a nearly all-white cast.
• In what turned out to be a 1992-themed week, I also watched Scent of a Woman again. I still adore this film.

Web

• An amazing 3D mini-game that sits in your web browser.

Books

• Started Heather Burns’ Understanding Privacy, a super clear articulation of what privacy is and the different approaches taken to it between the US and the EU.

Next week: An offsite meeting.

The week wore me out. It steadily built towards the fortnightly programme Steering Committee meeting on Friday afternoon; after that I crashed. I’ve spent a lot of the weekend in a sleepy stupor. On Saturday afternoon I wandered into town for an errand and found myself browsing lazily through the bookshops. It was good to be doing something that wasn’t thinking about the work I haven’t done yet.

Spring is breaking through. Trees are blossoming and down by a footbridge that crosses the little river that runs through town a swan has built its nest. It didn’t seem bothered by the crowd of people that had stopped on their walks to take a close look.

This was a week in which I:

• Enjoyed a near-empty train on Monday morning and suffered from massive overcrowding on the same train on Tuesday. There were less trains running because of strikes, so presumably each one was carrying the people that would usually be on two or three different services. Do people not go in on Mondays anymore and I just haven’t noticed?
• Had the weekly programme meetings.
• Met with our sister company for our monthly programme check-in.
• Reviewed and consolidated the documents to issue as an RFP for the technology, audio/visual and security fit-out of one of our new offices.
• Had a number of meetings to review the financial forecast for the same office in preparation for the programme Steering Committee meeting.
• Started a new weekly meeting with my entire Digital Product team.
• Met with a cross-functional team who have been making good progress in making improvements to one of our long-standing, and much derided, critical business processes.
• Enjoyed a Learning Hour session that gave an overview of the technical processes we use for building digital products. We also explored the concept of an internal Technology Radar.
• Had my six-weekly check-in with our Technology research and advisory team.
• Had a lovely Random Coffee with a colleague that works in our Marketing and Communications team.
• Caught up with Matt Ballantine for a virtual coffee and a chat.
• Revised the dates of my upcoming business trips to fit in better with everything else that is going on.
• Enjoyed another wonderful club ride on Saturday morning. We had 10 riders in our group; I don’t think I’ve ever ridden with such an evenly-matched set of cyclists. I appreciate TrainerRoad’s new ‘Red Light Green Light’ feature as it looks at what work I’ve been doing and adapts my planned rides accordingly. After Saturday’s club ride, a planned two-hour indoor push on Sunday was relaxed to a one-hour near-recovery ride.
• Moved to the next stage of kitchen renovations as we said goodbye to our trusty old oven. Some close friends have lent us a portable induction hob which will help us avoid microwave meals and takeaways for the next few weeks.

Media

Articles

• Gary Marcus asks an important question in ”what if Generative AI turned out to be a dud?”

“I am not saying anyone’s particular policies are wrong, but if the premise that generative AI is going to be bigger than fire and electricity turns out to be mistaken, or at least doesn’t bear out in the next decade, it’s certainly possible that we could wind up with what in hindsight is a lot of needless extra tension with China, possibly even a war in Taiwan, over a mirage, along with a social-media level fiasco in which consumers are exploited in news, and misinformation rules the day because governments were afraid to clamp down hard enough. It’s hard to put odds on any of this, but it’s a sobering thought, and one that I hope will get some consideration both in Washington and Beijing.” — What if Generative AI turned out to be a Dud? (substack.com)

• Although I don’t eat meat I can appreciate Matt Haughey’s adoration of this incredible sandwich.

Audio

• Enjoyed this interview with Gary Marcus (again) on AI.
• Jonathan Haidt has a new book out which explores his ideas that we have switched from a ‘play-based childhood’ to a ‘phone-based childhood’. This interview with him live at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club is very interesting. Given that my boys are in their mid-teens and already spend significant chunks of their waking hours in front of smartphones and videogames, it makes me feel a little powerless. I love my digital devices and being connected to everyone across the Internet, but I am so glad that these things didn’t exist when I was a child. Some quotes from the transcript of the podcast:

So my argument, in brief, is that humans had a play-based childhood for millions of years, because that’s what mammals do. All mammals play. They have to play to wire up their brains. But that play-based childhood began to fade out in the 1980s in United States, and it was gone by 2010. And that’s because right around 2010 is when the phone-based childhood sweeps in. Our children are now raised largely with a phone at the center of everything. And let’s talk about what happened when that change happened. Another way I can summarize my book is by saying we have overprotected our children in the real world and we have underprotected them online. And both of those are mistakes.

…multiplayer video games take up a huge amount of time. They’re great fun. They’re incredibly immersive. And so anyway, the point is boys’ lives have been upended too. It doesn’t show up as much in depression and anxiety. It shows up as just withdrawing from effort in the real world. Boys are just not really doing the things. They’re not making the efforts and experiencing the failures and setbacks that would strengthen them to grow into men. So Tristan and I will talk about this, but there’s actually a way out, because almost all the parents hate what’s going on. All the teachers hate what’s going on. All the principals and heads of school hate what’s going on. And guess what? Gen Z hates what’s going on. They see it. They’re not in denial.

They really see that they’re trapped. And you say, “Well, why do you waste your life this way? Why don’t you just get off?” I can’t because everyone else is on. So it’s a social dilemma, it’s a collective action problem.

And then the final point is in every previous moral panic, one of the features is lurid stories about this thing that happened. A kid smoked marijuana and then he chopped off his parent’s head or whatever, some thing. And I read it in a newspaper. And, “Oh, my God, this is terrible.” And so maybe most of them didn’t happen. Maybe some did. This one is entirely different. As I go around, almost every journalist who interviews me, either before the interview or during the interview, they say, “I’ve seen this in my own kids,” or, “I’ve seen this in my kids’ friends.” Everyone sees it. This is not lurid examples trumped up to make people afraid.

Books

• I’ve really been enjoying reading physical books again. Mad At The World was a great read. I’ve now picked up  More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech by Meredith Broussard.

Next week: Going even deeper on the projects and looking at how we need to re-gear the work for the next stage.

A four-day week, but it didn’t feel like it.

On Monday our eldest boy turned 17. How I am suddenly a parent to a 17 year old, I really have no idea. It feels no time at all since he turned up in our lives. As usual, we celebrated a family birthday with a meal out together. I love these moments. It’s always so fascinating to think how much our boys have both changed as they grown; thinking about our birthday meals together is a lens to look at how the years have passed. Our boy has some driving lessons as his birthday gift and has his first one booked in for next week.

It finally feels like spring is here. Despite being on the edge of Storm Kathleen this weekend, it was lovely when the sun broke through. The outdoor clothes dryer has carried its first load and I’m going to mothball the jumpers from my working from home wardrobe.

This was a week in which I:

• Gave my ‘digital literacy’ presentation on Large Language Models and Generative AI at an internal quarterly online town hall-style meeting. There were over 350 people online, but the beauty of presenting remotely is that it would have felt no different if it was ten times as many.
• Had the weekly project meetings for the office refurbishments and moves. A colleague and I had to quickly sketch out a Technology and Real Estate ‘shaping’ budget for a new office we are opening.
• Wrote up and published the minutes from last week’s programme steering committee.
• Received a first draft of the AV/IT bill of materials for a new office that we are moving into.
• Met with the CIO for our African footprint to talk about our office footprint and how we should work together.
• Spoke to our corporate insurance broker to update him on our upcoming office changes.
• Met with one of our business line heads to introduce our development team and look at what her business priorities are.
• Had a check-in with the landlord of one of the new offices we are moving into.
• Met with our Finance team to review the first draft of our cost projections for our office refurbishment project.
• Met with a real estate project company to look at bringing in additional support for the work we are doing.
• Attended our working group for Microsoft Copilot and Teams Premium. I’m still not incorporating Copilot into my everyday workflow. I try, but so often I just get this:

• Got lucky with the trains despite major disruptions on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning. They had closed the lines for four days over the Easter break for engineering work. I’m assuming this didn’t go quite to plan as they would have liked.
• Booked some overseas business trips. I’ve been trying to keep my business travel to a minimum, but I can’t put these visits off.
• Made some suggestions to how we can improve some of our facilities management processes and our overall office experience.
• Bought a bunch of appliances for our new kitchen that is getting fitted out over the next month or so. The changes we are making are complicated and there are lots of moving parts — and people — to coordinate. As ever my wife is doing an amazing job of getting everything lined up.
• Finally had our house connected directly to the power line in the street after 70 years of being ‘looped’ off of our neighbours’ supply. I love it when the infrastructure beneath our feet gets revealed. Our supply is the black cable at the bottom of this picture, connected into the grey plastic-looking container that sits atop the main power cable.

• Heard that England and Wales are the only countries in the world that have fully privatised their water supplies. It’s insane to privatise an essential utility where customers can’t choose between providers. Thames Water are in deep, deep trouble and it’s going to be a scandalously expensive problem to resolve.
• Pondered, yet again, whether I listen to too many podcasts and not enough music. I loved Elliot Roberts’ ’reaction video’ to Rob Sheffield’s list of the 100 best Beatles solo songs that he made for his Patreon Supporters. When I was a teenager I would have been so excited to read a list like this and to seek out the songs and albums I hadn’t heard. I spend so little time listening to music as I’m constantly trying to keep up with all of the time-sensitive podcasts that I subscribe to — tech and cybersecurity news and commentary, politics, F1 news etc. But I love these podcasts; many of them are useful in the work that I do. There’s just not enough time.
• Finally made it out for a club bike ride again. The start of April means that the club’s ‘mandatory mudguards’ rule is retired and people can opt to head out a little earlier to do a longer version of the route. It was a glorious morning and so lovely to get out.

• Enjoyed a lovely dinner hosted by our close friends, who put up with my fussiness of admitting that I’m not a fan of quiche. I can’t wait to get our kitchen finished so we can once again do some entertaining of our own. It’s been years.

Media

Podcasts

• Enjoyed this discussion of Madonna’s Like A Prayer album.
• Found Ben Thompson’s interview with Benedict Evans super interesting. Evans made the point that learning prompt engineering for AI models is like learning the command line, when really all you want is to press a button and the machine to do the work. He also offered this fascinating observation into the difference between finding information from web searches versus prompts to AI:

Benedict Evans: Years ago, someone pointed out to me something, I was very annoyed at myself for not realizing it, that Google Search is manually curated, Google doesn’t give you the answer, it gives you ten links and ask you to pick the right one.

Ben Thompson: That’s right.

BE: Google doesn’t say, “This is the answer”, and there’s a product problem here in that an LLM says, “This is the answer”. Or at least as they’re currently constituted, they do.

BT: This was the Gemini problem, in that it was giving you one answer, so the sense of burden of proof, Google took that on, as opposed to it’s always been on the user previously.

Articles

• The XZ backdoor has had a lot of coverage. As ever, Michael Tsai has a great roundup.
• The fact that Amazon’s ‘just walk out’ grocery stores were powered by 1,000 people sitting in India reviewing video footage is perhaps unsurprising given the company literally provides a Mechanical Turk as a service. It feels so dishonest versus how it was presented. I’m a technologist, but there is so much hype and grift around at the moment.

Next week: Wrestling with trying to fit everything into five days again, an album club and this blog’s 20th birthday.

I really struggled this week. I knew something was up on Sunday night when I sat down to watch TV with my wife and I just couldn’t get into it. My brain was filled with clouds which meant that I couldn’t focus. I carried this feeling into the office on Monday and spent all week waiting for it to pass. The root cause is that there’s just too much going on at the moment. Work is exceptionally busy and we’re in the middle of some major house renovations. It will get better. I’ve been very glad that the long Easter weekend had arrived.

This was a week in which I:

• Juggled preparing for a programme steering committee with coordinating with our plumber, builder and kitchen fitter as we navigated problems thrown up by our chimera of a house and the order in which things need to get done.
• Ran the programme steering committee and agreed on an approach in principle for one of the more complex aspects of the work we are doing. Putting the slides together to frame the problem took me the best part of a day complete. One of my colleagues has volunteered his time to run with this issue which lifts a significant piece of work from my shoulders.
• Met our AV/IT vendor at our office to review our current internal meeting room setup.
• Met with a prospective vendor whose product we are looking to install in our spaces to monitor a vast array of metrics such as air quality, temperature, humidity, meeting room usage etc.
• Attended our weekly programme meetings.
• Met with the Head of Operational Risk to review our programme risks.
• Caught up in-person with a senior colleague in the Risk team who was visiting from South Africa for the week.
• Attended our Information Risk Steering Group meeting.
• Enjoyed our monthly free lunch in the office, catching up with colleagues that I don’t usually speak to.
• Had our monthly Lean Coffee session, using FigJam for the first time. Switching over from InVision Freehand was pretty seamless, with the session made easier by not needing to have everyone set up with an account beforehand.
• Said goodbye to two colleagues, one who has retired after 42 years with the firm and another who is closer to the start of his career than the end. It’ll be strange not having them around in the team anymore.
• Enjoyed two Album Clubs on successive evenings. As well as instalment 157 of our long-running in-person OG club, I joined the good people of WB-40 for our online meetup. Our host went left-field by choosing a ‘video of an album’ to play. I’m not sure it was entirely within the rules as the video cut some songs short and left others out, but we loved it.

• Went shopping in search of chairs and pendant lights for our kitchen but came up empty-handed.
• Popped into my brother’s house who was barbecuing for the family. Our boys were busy doing their own thing, which made me wonder how many family gatherings will include all of the children in the future. It was lovely to see everyone.
• Had the most fabulous time at Bread Ahead in Borough Market doing a three-hour doughnut-making course. My wife booked it when she spotted a ‘two for one’ offer at Christmas, mainly (I suspect) as a vehicle for us to all do something together. As the kids get older we have to be more deliberate about putting time aside as everyone is usually busy with their own things. We had so much fun. Our host, Victoria, was excellent — she had a great sense of humour, kept everyone on track and was super knowledgable about all aspects of baking. I’m no chef but I do enjoy the process as long as someone is supervising me or I have super clear instructions to follow. We walked out of the session with 24 doughnuts and four brioche loaves between us.

• The train line was undergoing significant work all weekend so we had to drive from Berkhamsted to Borough. JustPark is an invaluable tool for a trip like this, finding us somewhere safe and secure to park close to the venue. Although we had to pay £24 for parking, £15 for the Congestion Charge and whatever it cost us in fuel, between the four of us it probably didn’t work out any more expensive than taking the train.
• Switched from the AA to the RAC for breakdown cover, thanks to my brother’s ‘friends and family’ discount. He’s saving us around £200 a year.

Media

Podcasts

• Enjoyed listening to Martha Lane Fox talk about her life and experiences that have shaped her. I loved hearing her honest admission that her wealth saved her life.

Articles

• Shocked but not surprised that over 70% of all fossil fuel emissions — ever — have happened during my lifetime.
• 1Password should know better than to use a ‘cousin’ domain to send emails to customers.

Video

• Thought Anatomy of a Fall (2023) was excellent. I couldn’t quite place the lead actress, until I realised that I’d seen her in Toni Erdmann (2016) a few weeks ago.
• Enjoyed 2 Tone: The Sound of Coventry and Terry Hall at the BBC on iPlayer. I much prefer the ‘…at the BBC’ shows where the music isn’t strictly chronological as you never know what gem is going to turn up next.
• Started watching Shogun on Disney+. Very enjoyable so far.

Books

• I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck by William Souder. I love picking up a book which looks like it might be hard work but you find yourself enjoying such quality writing that the pages are almost turning themselves.

Next week: A four-day week, getting disconnected from our neighbour’s power supply and presenting to 800+ people on the topic of Generative AI.

Maybe I’m just noticing now that I’m going into the office at least three days a week again. Or maybe the train service really is getting back to being its rubbish self once more.

Thursday morning gave us last-minute cancellations and trains rolling into the station on the wrong platform. There may have been some warning on the new digital signage, but only a person with a backstory of being bitten by a radioactive owl would know for sure.

The delays led to a collision with Ed from Album Club, which was a delightful way to pass the time on our drawn-out journey into London.

This was a big week for me, with a couple of important presentations to senior forums. I feel like I’m just about keeping afloat.

This was a week in which I:

• Gave a presentation to one of our executive governance committees, asking them to ratify decisions that we made at our programme steering committee. All of the decisions were supported.
• Took our board of directors through my presentation on Large Language Models and Generative AI. It went down so well that I’ve now been invited to speak to all of our Compliance professionals across the group.
• Hosted the steering committee meeting for the main programme I am running.
• Spent some time with our CIO on our strategy.
• Met the CEO of a company that we are looking to work with to give us data and analytics about our offices — temperature, CO2, humidity, occupancy, light intensity and noise levels. It’s exciting to think about what insights we might get from all of this information.
• Reviewed the technical AV/IT designs with our vendor and the landlord’s team for a new office that we are moving into.
• Had the weekly project meeting for an office fit-out and move.
• Got to see a number of 3D renders of the planned ‘work cafe’ space in one of our new offices, helping us to make decisions about the AV kit that we will install there.
• Assisted a colleague with how to put together a financial projection as part of a business case.
• Joined the weekly project meeting for opening a new office.
• Reviewed a conceptual design pack for the spaces we share with a sister company in one of our offices.
• Had my first set of one-on-one meetings with my recently expanded team.
• Joined the quarterly town hall event for our technology staff.
• Said goodbye to a couple of colleagues. One my peers is retiring after 42 years at the company. We surprised him by sending a parallel invite to our all-team meeting to a whole bunch of old friends and colleagues. It was lovely to hear stories from over the years. Both he and another team member are leaving us for their next adventures at the end of the month.
• Enjoyed a work social event at M Restaurant. It was great to talk and have a laugh with colleagues that I don’t usually speak to.
• Kicked off our project to remodel the kitchen. We sold our kitchen corner sofa to a guy who drove down from Derby to pick it up. When he got here he was on his own, which I thought was taking a little bit of a chance that there would be someone to help him to get the parts out of the house and onto his flat bed truck. We’ve also had all of our tiled floor removed, ready for the underfloor heating to be expanded to cover an area that will be open flooring in the new configuration. I’d forgotten how much dust gets generated when a workman even thinks about doing something. Next week we are having the remains of the floor tile adhesive being sanded down, so I expect our kitchen to be in full ‘moon simulation’ mode.

• Spent Saturday at the SportsShoes.com Podium Festival in Leicester. My eldest son was looking to get a good 5km time on the board. He managed to get around in 15m22s; it was so great to see him happy after his run. The festival itself was really cool — a mixture of running, live bands and DJs — but would have been so much better if the sun was shining. It had threatened to rain all day but had held off until the elite races in the evening. As soon as we saw the men cross the line in the last race we made a run for the exit. Returning to our car we found ourselves locked in a car park along with a bunch of other people who found themselves in the same boat. Fortunately, another driver made contact with the landowner who kindly send someone with a key to rescue us.

• Opted not to do the cycle club’s ‘Spring Classic’ reliability ride on Sunday. I’d paid to enter some time ago, but couldn’t face turfing myself out of bed into the pouring rain.

Media

Podcasts

• I’ve been enjoying this week’s discussions on the Stratechery, Sharp Tech and Dithering podcasts about TikTok and the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. If the act becomes law, TikTok owner ByteDance will be pushed to either divesting the app in the US (whatever that means on a technical level) or face having the app removed from the Apple and Google app stores. One thing is puzzling me though. Given that the bill may take a protracted time to get through the processes and become law, what would stop TikTok from using their platform in the run-up to the election to push content that paints the Republicans — and Donald Trump in particular — in a good light, influencing the vote? If this fails, at this point they probably haven’t lost anything. If it works, Trump may look more kindly on the platform from the help it gave him. He may decide not to sign the legislation when it comes to his desk, or revoke any law that has been put in place. What am I missing?

Articles

• A fascinating Twitter thread about the M25 motorway’s South-West Quadrant.

Video

• Finished watching season four of For All Mankind. What an incredible show. It feels bizarre to look up all of the main actors and find that most of them are younger than me; they play the parts so well.

Audio

• E911 sounds like a very important thing to get right with Teams telephony implementations.
• Loved hearing this interview with Tim Polley, aka Steven ‘Banksy’ Banks from Grange Hill. He was definitely one of the more interesting characters from the late 80s.

Web

• It’s appalling to read that Bitcoin is now consuming roughly the same energy as the whole of Malaysia.
• Matt Haughey observes the weird world of altruistic YouTube.

Books

• Manuel Betancourt’s book on Judy Garland’s Judy at Carnegie Hall informed me that there is a person called Mayo Simon. As Wikipedia says, “Not to be confused with Simon Mayo.”
• Bought a couple of books from people whose work I appreciate:
  • James Bore’s The Cyber Circuit
  • Heather Burns’ Understanding Privacy
• Started reading Toxic Positivity by Whitney Goodman.

Next week: A medical consultant, a driveway excavation, a dusty kitchen, a boiler inspection and a gig.

Demands of my work have started to exceed supply of my time and it’s starting to get a little bit stressful. It left me feeling out of sorts at the start of the week. I’ve been here before and I’ll get through it, but it’s uncomfortable. A couple of hours at the weekend can usually go quite a long way to bridging the gap, but the next few are already filled with things, so I’m going to have to cram during the week. Radical diary prioritisation is required.

Away from my desk, Spring has arrived. Armies of daffodils having sprung up seemingly everywhere. It’s not completely pitch black when I get up in the morning. There’s a promise and excitement to this time of year. If only it would stop raining so that I can mow the lawn.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the weekly and monthly meetings with the real estate project team at our sister company. We’ve now made some decisions about the work we are going to do in one of our offices which means that the detailed planning and execution can get underway.
• Created and submitted a set of slides to our senior governance committee on the decisions made in our programme steering committee. I’ll be presenting these to the forum next week.
• Updated my introductory presentation on Large Language Models and Generative AI ahead of presenting it to the board next week.
• Learned that my foundational knowledge of accounting and finance isn’t enough. It’s not just a about opex, capex, cash flow and depreciation. It also matters what you’re spending the money on and what that implies. It’s so great when you get into the weeds on a topic with a specialist who knows their stuff.
• Joined the weekly project meeting for setting up a new office. Dates have started to firm up.
• Discussed an approach for how we would provide day-to-day technical support to the new office.
• Met with our Procurement team to review all of the currently active and upcoming work that we are doing with vendors.
• Attended our quarterly Architecture Governance Authority meeting where we reviewed the architecture of our scripted, rule-based chatbot that assists staff with navigating our policies, processes and procedures.
• Made progress with bringing a consultant on board to help us with our move to a new office.
• Reviewed proposed artwork for our new office and reviewed the floor plan to agree where it might be displayed.
• Had the weekly meeting with the design team for our new office.
• Agreed on details of how the server room will be configured in our new office.
• Had the weekly meeting with our AV/IT design vendor.
• Agreed on a plan to use one of our small meeting rooms as an easily-accessible demo/infrastructure room.
• Met with the cross-functional team that have been collaborating on new digital products within our part of the business. We are at a crossroads in terms of what comes next and it was good to hear and understand the different points of view.
• Joined a couple of meetings on our document management initiative.
• Had an introductory meeting with an acoustician who then came along to our office later in the week. It is fascinating to see a space that I am so familiar with through the lens of someone who has never been there before. We have some acoustic issues in a number of our meeting rooms; I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to get a full diagnosis of the underlying issues.
• Was so pleased to see one of my colleagues do his first ever presentation at our weekly Learning Hour meeting. A crash course on PowerPoint from his daughter helped him to structure his talk. It was a brilliant overview of the finances of the modern gaming industry.
• Got one-on-ones in the diary with all of the members of my recently expanded team.
• Enjoyed the monthly free lunch at the office.
• Met my financial advisor for a check-in. We’ve got two children who are both potentially going through university over the next few years, so I’ve put together a simple spreadsheet to see what the projected impact could be on our finances.
• Had a fabulous board games night at our new neighbours’ house. We brought along two of our oldest and best friends that also live in our town as they also love a board game. I thought I wasn’t much of a board game fan, but Codenames was so much fun. We had a lot of laughs.
• Made it out for a Saturday morning cycle club ride for the first time in weeks. Had some lovely chats with riders that I don’t know that well — a Compliance officer in a bank based near to my own office, and a photographer/journalist who (amongst other things) reviews bikes and cycling gear.
• Enjoyed a curry with some fabulous old friends at Maya in Sunninghill. Everything, including the pubs, seemed a bit more upmarket than when I lived in the area thirty years ago.
• Made some decisions about upgrading our kitchen. The wheels are now starting to turn very quickly. It’ll be so good to have a space that will make us want to have guests.

Media

Articles

• Enjoyed this (bizarrely pulled) article by cycling journalist Kate Wagner on her experience of attending the 2023 Formula One Grand Prix at Austin. This passage encapsulates what makes the sport so enthralling:

The driver is the apotheosis of quick-moving prowess, total focus and control. The car is both the most studied piece of human engineering, tuned and devised in lab-like environments and at the same time a variable entity, something that must be wrestled with and pushed. The numbers are crunched, the forms wind-tunneled. And yet some spirit escapes their control, and that spirit is known only by the driver. Yes, we watch this perfect blend of man and machine, but we speak of the machine as though it were not of human origin, as though the machine, being born from science could—eventually, through its iterative processes—sublimate human flaws. The driver, being human, knows this is false. His intimacy with the machine is the necessary missing connection, and even if the machine were perfect, it was made for imperfect hands. But it is never perfect. The gaps in its perfection are where disasters transpire, but also miracles.

• Microsoft have recognised that it’s a tall order for most companies to clean up their sharing permissions before enabling AI services. Microsoft 365 Copilot can now be told to refer to just a few curated SharePoint sites as opposed to everything the user can access.

Video

• Watched the first part of Chris Packham’s two-part documentary on autism, Inside Our Autistic Minds. Thought-provoking and deeply moving.

Web

• You can easily get lost looking at these geolocated photos of New York taken circa 1940.

Books

• Picked up Judy Garland’s Judy At Carnegie Hall by Manuel Betancourt. I got into this album via the wonderful Rufus Wainwright version and am very grateful for the introduction. I love these 33 1/3 books about albums that I know well. (I wonder if anyone will write one about the George Harrison album Thirty Three & 1/3?)

Next week: Many days in the office presenting to governance committees and boards, meeting vendors and heading out for a company social event.