A fully-packed week with plenty going on. Multiple days of back-to-back meetings coupled with things happening in the evenings. And when things weren’t happening, the football was on. The football is always on.

This was a week in which I:

• Have been really enjoying having an intern in the team. It has got me thinking about how much context someone gathers over many years of working that someone new to the workforce doesn’t have. The nature of the problems we deal with is also different to those in schools, colleges and universities — there, problems get set and the problem statement is unquestionable. Contrast this with work, where someone gives you a spec, you can review it, comment on it, and even change it until you get to something you all agree on. It’s a different mindset.
• Met with my boss’s boss for an ad hoc catch-up. Our conversation got me reflecting that of the 27 years I have worked in investment banking, there have only been a couple of periods of significant growth. The first was the dotcom boom around the time I started my career and the second was the insane period just before the global financial crisis less than a decade later. For the rest of the time it has mainly been about doing more with the same (or less) budget.
• Discussed our approach to a business growth project that has started to spawn sub-projects, and how we could make sure that the work is sufficiently joined-up.
• Reviewed and circulated a specification document sent to us by the head of a department, with the expectation that we will help to develop their idea.
• Reviewed another request from a different team who also want help, this time with dashboards and management information tooling. The requests are coming thick and fast at the moment.
• Met with the owner of an internal system to discuss their approach to the collection of specific data, and to review the compatibility of the process demanded by the system with what we need to do in the regions we are responsible for.
• Attended the final two training sessions for our document management project. The project team did some things slightly differently at each session. This, coupled with different questions from each audience, kept it interesting.
• Met with our chosen training and workshop provider ahead of an upcoming management team offsite, giving them information about who we are and what we are trying to achieve so that they can effectively shape our day with them.
• Also met with the venue provider for the other days of our offsite to clarify how things work and the options we have to configure our room.
• Met with two of our functional heads to talk about long-term succession planning and any actions we need to take to prepare future leaders on our radar.
• Joined a company-wide webinar to hear about our relaunched employee value proposition.
• Assisted in putting together some slides for an upcoming governance committee meeting, tackling a difficult issue.
• Had a wonderful random surprise gift of a set of AirPods Pro from my wife. I’d been toying with buying some for months but never quite committed. Having used them for a few days, I can report that they are every bit as good as people say they are. The noise cancellation is incredible and the sound is great.
• Helped out with taking a family member to and from the hospital for treatment on Saturday and Sunday. It was lovely to spend some time with them on the journey and felt great to be useful, even if it was just a little bit.
• Ran the JPMorganChase Corporate Challenge for the first time in 23 years. The last two times I tried to enter, in 2004 and 2005, the event was cancelled due to poor weather and terrorist attacks respectively. Fortunately, this year went off without a hitch. I felt as though I didn’t leave anything on the table, and at 49 years old I can probably say that I’m unlikely to beat this time in the future. David Seaman was on hand with an air horn to start proceedings.
  

• Had a longer-than-planned Saturday club ride due to two punctures that our group suffered in quick succession. By the time we made it back, I was pretty sure that the other cyclists would have had their coffee and be on their way home, so I skipped it and headed straight home too. It was lovely to ride with some new faces, people who had recently joined the club or didn’t get out with us that much.
• Met up with my oldest and closest friends for a weekend consisting of a barbecue, football and Formula 1. We had meant to go to the race at Silverstone, but the company we had bought tickets from went into administration the day before, giving us a clue as to why we hadn’t received our tickets. We made the most of it, though, and it was lovely to hang out together.
• Enjoyed our latest Album Club evening, hearing Pavement’s first album, Slanted and Enchanted. I’ve now heard three of the five Pavement albums at Album Clubs.
  

Media

Podcasts

• I loved Paul Ford’s description, on the Aboard podcast, of bespoke AI-engineered software being “like a weird shoe for a weird foot”, and that it doesn’t make sense to put software for one person into GitHub for everyone to see and use. It got me thinking about how faster and more efficient hardware has masked inefficient software implementations over the decades; shifting to vibe-coded applications for one user is taking this to extremes. In the episode, Ford also makes the point that people typically learn things like software architecture through implementations using known languages and frameworks. What happens when they are no longer doing this?
• This passage in Ben Thompson’s Stratechery update about ‘The AI Stack’ reminded me of strategic thinking with a Wardley Map (“do we open source a component to undermine a competitor or do we slow down evolution through a dark art[…]?”), albeit one for an industry and not the insides of a single company:
  

The AI Stack looks something like this, starting from the bottom:

• Semiconductor equipment makers
• Logic fabs
• Packaging
• Memory fabs
• Chip makers
• Networking
• Data centers
• Model makers
• Applications
• Users
  

In the short run, as long as there are shortages, there is money to be made at every level of the stack; in the long run, once supply and demand come into balance, the most value accrues to whoever in the stack is able to integrate around a bottleneck in the stack and commoditize everyone else.

• I learned from The Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast that “well over a third of the teachers in America’s History (high school) classrooms are coaches, and very few of them have any substantive education in history.”
  

Video

• When we weren’t watching football, we carried on with season two of The Four Seasons. It doesn’t require a lot of effort, and is still making me laugh out loud.
• Sitting in a hospital waiting room on Sunday morning, my attention was drawn to the TV in the corner, which was playing an old black-and-white movie. It turned out to be Jane Eyre (1943). I caught the last 20 minutes, and it completely sucked me in, so I’ve added it to my ‘to watch’ list.
  

Books

• Nearly done with Tsunami Kids by Paul Forkan and Rob Forkan. It’s strange reading the end of the book, which is in part a celebration of what they achieved with the Gandys flip-flop brand, with the knowledge that the company recently went into administration.
  

Next week: Another two Album Clubs, and a long-anticipated family get-together.

Boiling. In the UK we are not equipped to live through day after day of mid-30s°C heat, with the temperature only dropping into the mid-20s overnight with barely a breeze in the air. Sleeping was a tough gig, lying on top of our bed with a fan trying its best to help us get some rest. You wake up hot and dehydrated, lusting after a shower set to a cold temperature that you previously could never have imagined being brave enough to use.

It’s been many years since I read George Orwell’s Burmese Days but I do remember it describing how oppressive the heat felt:

They went out into the glaring white sunlight. The heat rolled from the earth like the breath of an oven. The flowers, oppressive to the eyes, blazed with not a petal stirring, in a debauch of sun. The glare sent a weariness through one’s bones. There was something horrible in it—horrible to think of that blue, blinding sky, stretching on and on over Burma and India, over Siam, Cambodia, China, cloudless and interminable. The plates of Mr Macgregor’s waiting car were too hot to touch. The evil time of day was beginning, the time, as the Burmese say, ‘when feet are silent’. Hardly a living creature stirred, except men, and the black columns of ants, stimulated by the heat, which marched ribbon-like across the path, and the tail-less vultures which soared on the currents of the air.

I had Monday off, which I seemed to fill with barely anything except a long-ish run in the morning. There were plenty of jobs to do around the house, but it was too hot to do them. From Tuesday, I decided to take my chances with the flaky transport system for the reward of being able to sit in an air-conditioned office with a free supply of cold drinks for 10 hours or so. It turned out to be the right idea. After so much time away from my home office, it felt good to work from home on Friday morning, but I was glad that I had a half-day and could go and do something else as the temperature continued its inevitable rise once again. We sought solace in the cinema, whiling away a couple of air-conditioned hours before heading back out into the steamy evening.

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

• Noticed that there is so much going on at work at the moment — I’d got through Wednesday and still hadn’t caught up with everything from my couple of days off — but it doesn’t feel stressful. Over the past few years I’ve observed that my levels of stress are, strangely, only loosely correlated to the amount of work there is to do.
• Welcomed an intern to our team as part of our first intake. It’s been great to start to get to know him and to make him feel part of what we do.
• Learned that we have a new office fit-out and technology enablement project coming over the horizon.
• Reviewed a draft spec for a new initiative and started to think about the implications of the work. It’s interesting to have something on our plate that needs to be considered from different angles aside from ‘Can we do this?’ and ‘How would we do it?’
• Met with colleagues from another team to discuss the broader organisation’s approach to agentic software engineering.
• Enjoyed attending two training sessions led by our project manager for one of our key initiatives. They seemed to be in their element as they took people through a set of engaging slides, polls, and demos. It was fun to be involved with them.
• Met with colleagues to review the plans for an office seating restack.
• Reviewed a draft document for an important proposed technical architecture change.
• Synced up with a colleague on our internal software list, agreeing the categorisation of each application before handing it over for broader review.
• Dialled into an internal webinar to get an update on South Africa from a political and macroeconomic perspective. These occasional webinars are so good, quickly bringing me up to speed.
• Joined our internal Disability Network meeting and was very impressed to have a South African Sign Language (SASL) interpreter on the call. I couldn’t help but go down a rabbit hole of learning about different sign languages, and how SASL is different to British Sign Language, American Sign Language, etc. They are not mutually intelligible.
• Had a nice impromptu lunch with my boss. You can’t go too far wrong with an unplanned trip to Nando’s. This was followed up with an unscheduled trip to the pub with a bunch of colleagues after work.
• Met another work experience visitor for a brief chat about my career, working in technology, and what they want to do after they finish their A-levels. It’s the season for it.
• Watched our boys set off on an evening bike ride, having made plans to meet them at a pub for dinner at the end of their ride. Rain put paid to our plans, so we ended up ordering and collecting pizzas while they headed home to get refreshed.
• Picked up another second-hand bike from a fellow cycling club member. Our eldest son wants to be able to continue his cycling while he’s away at university in Texas, but finding a cheap second-hand bike in his local area is a tricky mission. We figured that it would be easier to find one in the UK and ship it over there. One of the big advantages of finding a bike via the cycling club is that you can have a high degree of confidence that the bike is genuine and has been well-maintained. Incredibly, the previous owner generously let us have it for nothing and suggested we make a donation to charity instead, which we did.
• Was very pleased to get an email from Hunt about the cracked wheel rim that my local bike shop discovered last week. Although my wheel is well outside of the warranty period, they offered to send me a new rim and set of spoke nipples for no charge. I’ll need to get the new wheel built, but this is much better than having to buy a replacement.
• In a week of replacement goods, I also got in contact with HP Poly to report a problem with my Voyager 4310 headset. It frequently disconnects and reconnects with my iPhone, and on more than one occasion has dropped its connection with my laptop while I’m on a Teams call. The people behind the web chat quickly got to a point where they offered to send me a new one, free of charge.
• Couldn’t resist signing up for Windsor Chester Windsor, a 600 km Audax bike ride planned for next June. Despite thinking I was tired of long-distance rides after a heavy month of them in May, I figured that putting the money down is about having the option to ride. Both Audax UK and I will be 50 this year, and this is the original Audax route that was used as a qualifier for the iconic Paris–Brest–Paris. What better way to celebrate our half-centuries?
• Got out for a nice long run on Sunday. I’m really enjoying running and cycling at the moment, and am grateful that I’m able to do both. Next week we have the JPMorganChase Corporate Challenge, something I don’t think I’ve done for about 23 years.
• Watched a lot of football. The men’s FIFA World Cup is dreadful for personal productivity in the evenings. Almost all other television is on hold while the tournament is on.
• Felt like I was living in paradise when the temperature dropped by about 10 degrees at the weekend. It was just so pleasant outside. I took advantage of the cooler weather to do some basic external tidying-up jobs that I had been putting off — mowing our pitiful excuse for a rear lawn and ridding the driveway of weeds and other organic detritus that had gathered over the past few months.
  

Media

Podcasts

• This exchange from Paul Ford and Rich Ziade’s conversation with oncologist Kamal Menghrajani on the limits of AI healthcare really struck me (emphasis mine):
  

Kamal Menghrajani: I mean, people come in to me as an oncologist and they say “Hey, a friend of a friend gave me this New England Journal article. Have you read it?” And that has been happening for a long time.

Rich Ziade: And you don’t want to be dismissive, I’m guessing. [The] patient’s in a vulnerable place.

KM: Yeah. And I think they’re trying to learn and get up to speed on something that requires decades to train and really understand about.

Paul Ford: This is a really interesting thing because people think that information will yield knowledge very quickly as opposed to needing to bake for decades, which is something we run into a lot.

Articles

• I wish I had 1% of the ability to write like Ian Dunt. He nails what he calls “The tragedy of Keir Starmer”:
  

Starmer was an absence. He was absent on leadership, absent on policy, absent on values, absent on everything beyond the nuts and bolts of process, which seemed the only level on which he engaged with political debate at all.

• Terence Eden has written a handy guide to cybersecurity for the paranoid business traveller.
• An interesting data-driven investigation into how The New York Times has covered trans people.
• John Gruber wrote a post about how Microsoft is raising Xbox prices and is dropping the high-end storage models from their lineup, but the bit I found most interesting is how much high-spec Macs are now going for:
  

“The only way to buy a Mac Studio with more than 96 GB of RAM is to buy a used one — which eBay sellers are offering for $25,000 to $30,000.”

• I love this in Sean Goedecke’s post about “Saying the obvious thing”:
  

When I write a technical design document at work, it’s very important to state the obvious. In fact, technical communication is so hard and general understanding is so poor that just getting people aligned on the obvious things is often enormously valuable.

Video

• Watched 500 Miles (2026) at the cinema. I cried, although with me it doesn’t take much. It has an excellent twist, but there’s something about it that doesn’t quite connect — some of the acting feels as though it is a little over-egged.
  

Books

• Temperatures rose and windows opened at night, so in order to avoid an insect invasion our lights went out. This meant that I hopped back to reading on my Kindle and making progress with Tsunami Kids by Paul Forkan and Rob Forkan. It got me thinking that there was a time in my life when STA Travel seemed to loom large as a place to find low-cost travel adventures. I had no idea that they went out of business in 2020.
  

Next week: More football, an Album Club, and a race.

When last week’s Sun City-based conference was announced, I decided to extend my stay in South Africa so that I could spend some time with our team members who are based there. It wasn’t perfect timing; Tuesday was a public holiday for Youth Day, so many people chose to take Monday as leave in order to get a four-day weekend. But the time I did get to spend with the team and other colleagues from across the company made it worthwhile.

I was based at a hotel in Rosebank, close to the malls and shops and a five-minute walk to the office. When I wasn’t working, I spent most of my time watching World Cup games in my hotel room. South African coverage featured John Terry as a pundit. It also had in-match advertising that appeared with annoying regularity, where the match video would shrink, using the newly revealed space at the left and bottom of the screen to display an ad.

I recently got Tailscale up and running and worked out how to use my NAS drive at home as an exit node, which meant that I could stream UK TV on my iPad as well as download some programmes to watch on the way home.

The reality for me, as a visitor to Johannesburg, is that it isn’t feasible to go for a run around the streets in the morning, so I confined myself to the hotel gym, clocking up four consecutive 10 km runs. It feels good to be running-fit so that I don’t have too much DOMS the next day.

It was strange to land back in the UK at the start of a heatwave, with temperatures much higher than the ones I’d left behind.

This was a week in which I:

• Enjoyed catching up with my colleagues in a relatively quiet office on Monday, and going out for an organised team lunch on Wednesday. I also managed to grab a coffee with a colleague from our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team who I had never met in person before.
• Locked in the dates and plans for our management offsite meeting in London next month.
• Gave an update to the whole team about the leadership conference that some of us attended last week.
• Had a run-through of the draft slide deck that our CTO was going to use to present to our intake of interns, giving them a high-level overview of technology within our organisation.
• Started to think about how we are going to deal with the demand for Copilot Cowork and similar AI tools that are paid for on a metered basis. Users have little idea before they press the Enter key how much their prompt will cost them in tokens, or the organisation in hard currency. Do you pool the budget for everyone and then, when you run out during a month, no-one can use any more tokens? Or do you instead give everyone a personal token allowance?
• Remotely joined a town-hall-style meeting being held in our office in London with one of our business heads. I really enjoy relaxed interviews where you get to hear more about the person.
• Was very impressed with the treadmill feature on my Garmin Forerunner 55 that I bought a few months ago. At the end of a run, I saw that the distance shown on the treadmill didn’t match the distance on my watch. But as I went to save the workout, it asked if I wanted to calibrate it. I entered the distance from the treadmill and it updated the statistics before it saved the run. Very cool.
• Got our main car booked in for a service.
• Volunteered to swap seats with a lady on the flight who was awkwardly leaning over to talk to her husband. As a lone traveller, I didn’t really mind where I sat. As I left the aircraft, the cabin crew informed me that they had added some points to my account as a thank-you. It was an unnecessary gesture, but I’m grateful; they will come in handy for buying cheap flights between home and university for our eldest son.
• Had a day off on Friday, which turned out to be a good move considering how tired I was after the trip. I’ve also got Monday and Friday afternoon off next week, using up my remaining leave from 2025 before I lose it.
• Got out on the bike on both Saturday and Sunday, my first time out riding since the Tour de Ricky at the end of May. To state the obvious, it was hot. My eldest came out for Saturday’s club ride, and was the instigator of a plan to cycle over to my parents’ house in Ascot on Sunday. Somehow I suffered yet another broken spoke in my rear wheel on the club ride, probably the fourth one that has gone since I got the bike in 2022. The team at Lovelo, our local bike shop, were brilliant as usual. They had the spoke repaired for me on the same day that it broke, so that I was ready for the ride on Sunday. However, they did point out that I have a small crack in the wheel rim. I’m not sure if that’s related, but I do know the wheel has never been quite right since I started using it. I’ve emailed Hunt, the manufacturer, to see what they think.
  

• Went to a joint 50th birthday party on Saturday night, hosted by a couple of friends of ours at their house. They had a gigantic marquee in their back garden, two bands, a free bar and a caterer making toasted sandwiches all night. I kept bumping into people I knew but hadn’t realised were mutual friends of the hosts.
• Was given some wine, chocolate and two lovely cards for Father’s Day.
• Ordered six bottles of wine from our namesake vineyard in South Africa for our dad. The owner, Tom, delivered them in person, and during their chat they discovered that one of our dad’s brothers used to service Tom’s dad’s car. The wine itself is lovely.
  

Media

Articles

• Jane Dallaway has a lovely post with images from leaflets published by food marketing boards and councils in the UK many years ago. “Cheese makes parties easy.” They give the impression of a country discovering food for the first time. What happened to these organisations?
• Having read scores of books on the Beatles over the years, I’m very familiar with the story that Frank Sinatra thought that Something was his favourite Beatles song, and that he mistakenly believed it was written by Lennon and McCartney. Terence Eden does a deep dive into whether that’s true.
• I love the transparency that Tiago Forte gives as he breaks down the details of his book sales and what he has learned from selling half a million copies of them.
• Lots of interesting data on “Where the world’s top AI researchers were educated, where they work now, and how talent flows between nations.”
• Amazon’s post about how they are making their data centres more water-efficient is an interesting read, albeit with the knowledge that it is a self-promoting marketing piece.
• The Financial Times reports on companies attempting to rein in their AI usage in order to control costs. I think that a switch to consumption-metered pricing is going to be a major headache for most large enterprises that have spent the past couple of years pushing for people to use more and more AI.
• Manuel Moreale has found a new custodian for his lovely People and Blogs interview series.
• I was in South Africa the weekend that Comrades, the world’s largest ultramarathon, was being run. I congratulated a colleague for completing such an incredible running feat, at which point she told me it was her 10th finish. The mind boggles.
  

Video

• Brexit: A Very British Civil War was compelling viewing, but also a horrible reminder of what a dreadful thing our country did to itself. Given what happened afterwards, it is mad to think that one of the leading figures of that time is still many people’s preferred candidate to be Prime Minister.
  

Audio

• My mental hi-fi seems to be stuck on tracks from Mariah Carey’s eponymous debut in 1990. I always think that X-Factor-style vocal gymnastics are not my thing, and some might say that Carey had a significant hand in inventing the style. But, for me, her debut doesn’t go too overboard with vocal showboating for its own sake. It’s a record filled with excellent pop songs.

Books

• After a week when I didn’t manage to pick up a book, I continued with Having Spent Life Seeking by Kae Tempest. It’s getting good.
  

Next week: Bracing for the collective lack-of-sleep hangover of another heatwave.

Two days in the office followed by two conferences, one in London and another in Sun City, South Africa.

On Tuesday evening and all day Wednesday I attended the Gartner UK & Ireland CIO Community Executive Summit for the first time. Compared to other Gartner conferences, this one is very intimate, with only CIOs from the UK and Ireland in attendance. It was good to see some old faces and meet many new ones. As was true of the CIO Leadership Forum in March, the best slots were the roundtable sessions where people got to talk to each other. I wasn’t as taken by the plenary sessions this time, and it didn’t help that the venue was freezing cold for the whole day. Tuesday’s dinner was a good way to start things off, chatting to other CIOs and hearing a conversation between Pooja Bagga, Group CIO at The Guardian, and Paul Dongha, Head of Responsible AI and AI Strategy at NatWest Group, about — surprise! — AI.

As soon as the conference finished, I headed to Paddington Station to catch the train to Heathrow, and a flight to Johannesburg. One of my colleagues and friends picked me up from the airport on Thursday morning for the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Sun City. I felt very looked after as she handed me an incredibly thoughtful bag full of snacks for the journey.

It had been over a year since I was last in South Africa. Having worked in and around my Johannesburg-headquartered company for the past 17 years, I always feel a powerful sense of reconnection when I visit, both with colleagues and with the purpose of the organisation. The reason for this visit was to join our divisional Leadership Conference, being held over a couple of days at the resort.

On Thursday night we wandered down to The Shebeen to watch the opening game of the FIFA World Cup, where the South African team (known locally as Bafana Bafana, which means ‘the boys’ or ‘go boys’) took on their Mexican hosts. There were so many people there that I hadn’t seen in person for a long time. We gathered outside, eating a buffet dinner and shouting over the sound of the DJs before the match started. Unfortunately, things didn’t go quite to plan, but that probably meant that people got to bed at a decent hour instead of celebrating all night.

The conference itself was excellent. Our colleagues in South Africa really know how to put on a show, one that is distinctly African. We had a mixture of keynote addresses, panel interviews and insights about significant recent deals that our company had been pivotal in achieving. During the breaks, I kept bumping into even more old friends and colleagues.

Towards the end of the day, we were treated to a conversation between our Group CEO and the Chairman and CEO of a leading US bank, probably one of the most significant leaders in our industry. It was amazing to have him dial in for the discussion. It made me think how some of the conferences I’ve been to bring in celebrities and sports personalities, but this always leaves me a little wanting; having someone on stage who is a significant person from one or both of the two areas I am involved in professionally — technology and banking — is always going to be more relevant and directly applicable to me.

After an exercise-starved week, I managed to get up and out for a couple of laps of the 5 km track at the Gary Player golf course. It was very cold until the sun came up, and I was regretting not bringing any thin running gloves. But the area was stunningly beautiful, with mist rising from the lake and impala chasing each other across the course.

We then hopped on a coach for a ride back to Johannesburg. On both legs of the journey, it was fascinating to see parts of the country that I hadn’t been through before. (Which, to be fair, is pretty much everything outside of the metropolitan area of Johannesburg.) I left the conference feeling connected, happy that I work for an organisation filled with such friendly and talented people.

This was a week in which I:

• Met with the project manager for a security infrastructure change to review the issues and actions log for the work. We took advantage of having people in the office to pull in our CTO to answer some of the more technical questions. It was a great session, making extensive use of the whiteboard; it would have been much more difficult if everyone had been working from home.
• Had a separate meeting on the same topic with our Head of Infrastructure and Operations to discuss and agree next steps.
• Joined the quarterly governance review meeting for a key contract that we have with our sister company.
• Met with colleagues on the disability-focused stream from our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum to catch up with where we are and what our to-do list looks like for the remainder of the year.
• Received draft feedback from an internal audit.
• Met with another potential vendor for our team offsite next month to brief them on our requirements and understand more about what they offer.
• Had our monthly departmental operational risk review meeting.
• Made some configuration changes to Tailscale running on my NAS drive, setting it up so that I can use it as an exit node and configuring it to use my two Pi-holes as DNS servers. I can now VPN back to my house and benefit from ad blocking wherever I am in the world.
• Welcomed my wife back home after a long weekend away. It was a shame we would only be together for two evenings before it was my turn to head out of the country.
  

Media

Video

• Watched Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) for the first time. It is excellent; funny and profound. The opening credits, where Rosie Perez dances to Public Enemy’s Fight the Power, are hypnotic. They seemed familiar; maybe MTV showed this sequence at the time as opposed to the official music video. Checking out Letterboxd reviews is usually good fun after watching a movie, but this time they really made me think. If you’ve seen the film, Wesley Stenzel’s and Penny’s reviews are worth reading. Aside from the themes of the film, I couldn’t help thinking how much the mass adoption of smartphones has taken away the everyday business of socialising with strangers. This point came up later in the week at our internal leadership conference too. I think I’m going to try to make an effort to keep my phone in my pocket when I’m out and about.
  

Web

• Another day closer to the end. Put your birthday in and behold.
  

Next week: Johannesburg.

Last weekend’s sore throat and feeling parched after a very warm cycle ride turned into something else on Monday. It started as a head cold and then later in the week worked its way down into my chest. I didn’t have any kind of fever; it felt as though I was running at about 85%, enough to be a little frustrating but not enough to keep me away from work. The week consisted of copious amounts of tissues, menthol lozenges and smoothies.

I’ve read somewhere that if you’re ill from the neck up, it’s still OK to do a cardio workout, but if you have a fever or something in your chest then exercise can prolong the illness. I skipped my midweek bike trainer session but by Friday I was itching to do something, so I hopped back in the saddle and had a long indoor ride on Saturday morning too. The cumulative effect of being slightly ill, having a long week of work and then doing some exercise meant that I found myself drifting off to sleep like an old man as soon as I sat down to watch anything on TV.

This was a week in which I:

• Joined the team for an impromptu ‘all-hands’ meeting for one of our projects and completed a review of a couple of key project documents after the meeting.
• Had an interesting discussion with a member of my team about how we organise our work and changes we could make for us to be more effective. We also looked at their priorities for the next few weeks before they take leave from the end of July.
• Reviewed more RFP responses related to the setup of a new office.
• Spent more time on one of our projects, getting into the detail of how we will make an architectural change to one of our platforms and the implications it will have. There are strong opinions about what we are doing and the speed at which we are doing it.
• Dived into the task of finding out whether, how and how effectively one of our SaaS vendors manages their disaster recovery processes. It was great to find that they have a ‘Trust and Security Center’ where you can view the outcomes of independent reviews. I guess at some point your company reaches the size where investing in a portal like this makes sense. It was super handy and gave me exactly what I needed, without having to speak to anyone at the company.
• Started planning our upcoming management team offsite meeting, something that was delayed from the start of the year. I spent some time researching and contacting a few different organisations to help us with the event, talking to two suppliers and lining up a meeting with another next week.
• Caught up with an old colleague to talk about our need for a fractional technical architect role.
• Enjoyed our monthly Lean Coffee meeting.
• Met with two young people who were in our office for work experience. I love doing things like this. Having seen many people on work experience over the past few years, I find it fascinating how different they are and how varied the lines of questioning can be.
• Booked some time off in order to utilise my ‘use it or lose it’ remaining leave days.
• Had to negotiate the Tube strike during a rain-filled week. With the notable exception of walking home on Tuesday, I somehow managed to completely avoid the rain on my commutes. A colleague also discovered, bizarrely, that the Circle Line via Hammersmith was still running — an oasis in a sea of dead Underground lines — so I could hop on that to get between Euston Square and Moorgate.
• Caught up with our personal financial adviser to look at our projected costs for the next few years in a bit more detail.
• Had a weekend at home with my two boys as my wife went off for a well-deserved long weekend in Portugal with her friends. The whole weekend felt like a long series of home admin tasks with some breaks for shopping, cooking and watching the F1.
• Ditched the club ride due to the rainy weather and made it onto the bike trainer instead, doing a two-hour session for the first time in a while. It was a big help in trying to get back on top of my podcast backlog, where I always seem to be a month behind. I worried that I’d overdone it as I wasn’t feeling great for the rest of Saturday, but a big sleep that night made all the difference. I made it out for a run on Sunday and felt good afterwards. Maybe I’ve just been a bit exhausted.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Really enjoyed this episode of the Aboard podcast, where Paul Ford describes a personal software project to create a custom newsletter for himself using a bunch of RSS feeds and AI. It made me think of Scour, the very cool tool that Evan Schwartz is building that does a similar job.
  

Articles

• Bradley Olson reports in the Wall Street Journal that “Corporate America Is Starting to Ration AI as Cost Skyrockets”. Whether I’m using Copilot, Claude or ChatGPT, I’ve developed the habit of checking the model before submitting a query and ensuring that it’s on the most recent, most ‘thinking’ version. I wonder whether this choice will be taken away at some point in order to keep costs down.
  

Just a few months ago, the prevailing sentiment around AI use at many big companies was the more, the better. All-you-can-eat subscriptions amounted to a subsidy by the model-makers, which often lost money on the intensive activity of power users. Exhorted to embrace the wave of change, employees at some companies engaged in tokenmaxxing, or using as much computing as possible in order to be seen as AI-forward—a practice that continued even as the model companies shifted to usage-based pricing. 

Matan Grinberg, chief executive of coding automator Factory, said one executive at a top financial institution told him his employees were burning hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on tokens. Some, the executive said, were using powerful premium-tier models to answer the simplest of questions, or just engage in small talk. 

“If your daughter needs tutoring in algebra, you can probably find someone cheaper than Albert Einstein,” he said.

• Jamie John in the Financial Times reports on young people’s growing unhappiness with AI. Anecdotally, there does seem to be a growing backlash, particularly in the US.
• Heather Burns posted about what looks like a very interesting symposium at the University of Edinburgh on “Rewilding the Web: Diversity & Resilience in Sociotechnical Infrastructure”. I love how she skilfully writes a post that is informative and celebratory whilst simultaneously calling out bad behaviour by a large corporate organisation.
• Speaking of bad behaviour, the topic of Google Chrome came up in conversation at work this week. I’d glimpsed the story from a few weeks ago about how it silently installs a 4GB AI model on your device without users’ consent but hadn’t read the detail at the time. Chrome is almost the generic default browser for most people and is now abusing that position. It may not take much for companies to decide that they don’t want it on their standard desktop build.
• My wallet is pretty excited that some waste ground not far from where we live will soon be turned into a Lidl store. Opening early next year, apparently.
• Ted Chiang’s forcefully argued and well-reasoned philosophical essay in The Atlantic that artificial intelligence is not conscious is excellent.
  

Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded. Should you consider the possibility that every time you open a Word document, you are bringing multiple conscious interlocutors into existence, and every time you close one, you snuff their existence out? No. Contemplating that scenario is not a good use of your time.

• According to Cloudflare, bot traffic has now exceeded human traffic on the web.
  

Video

• Finished watching series two of The Assembly, including the episode with Rylan and another episode of bits and bobs that were cut from the main show. It’s superb.
• Continued watching Paradise, but three episodes in, I’m still not convinced. If I could never watch another episode, I think that would be fine.
• Finally got around to watching Portrait of a Lady on Fire and can see why it is so critically acclaimed. I’m sure this is a film that could easily be rewatched, where you would notice a whole lot of subtle things that you didn’t spot the first time around.
  

Audio

• Enjoyed this Trash Theory episode on the Sneaker Pimps and how their delusions of grandeur and the sacking of their lead singer led to their demise.
  

Web

• Is AI profitable yet? No.
• What is the opposite of enshittification? Last.fm have announced that they are becoming an independent company. 🥳
  

Books

• Continued with Kae Tempest‘s Having Spent Life Seeking. It’s fine, but not gripping.
  

Next week: Two days of work and two different conferences.

We’ve properly entered Phil Collins season, with extremely hot temperatures dominating the week. My morning walk from Euston to the City of London is now on hiatus until either (a) it cools down again, or (b) the Tube goes on strike. The train line between Berkhamsted and London couldn’t take the heat; the rails weren’t happy, so I had to use the Metropolitan Line to and from Chesham for a day and a half of the three that I spent in the office. For some reason that I can’t fathom, this week I also had the habit of waking up at exactly 5am each day, checking my watch and then trying to go back to sleep for the hour before my alarm went off.

One evening we popped up to see my wife’s parents to check they were doing ok in the heat. Having them five minutes from us makes an emergency ice cream delivery feasible. It’s been lovely to find that their house keeps cucumber-cool in the summer and cosy in the winter.

On Saturday I annoyingly woke up even earlier than usual with a sore throat, doubly frustrating as I was due to wake up a little later — but still early — to ride the Tour de Ricky for the second year in a row. After popping a couple of paracetamol tablets and squeezing in another hour’s disturbed sleep, I got up at 5am and headed out to meet other cycling club members in the high street for the ride over to the start. I found this ride really tough this year, mainly due to the heat, but also because I wasn’t feeling well. For a lot of the ride I had it in my head that “I just want this done now”.

But it wasn’t all bad. About a quarter of the way around we found ourselves in a village, clustered with a bunch of other groups of cyclists on the same ride. The road opened up into a beautiful, smooth and flowing descent. I got myself behind Phil from West London Cycling and hung on as we breezed past everyone, with me hardly pedalling and being pulled along by the draft. It was joyous.

After a typically glamorous lunch standing on the pavement outside the Nisa convenience store in Silverstone, we set off again to cover the remaining slightly-more-than-half of the ride. I quickly spotted that my back tyre was a little squidgy but hadn’t gone flat. There was only one obvious mark on the tyre, a small cut, but whatever had got in there seemed to have left again. I decided to fill the tyre using one of my CO2 canisters and to cross my fingers that it would stay inflated. A few miles later I had my answer, leaving me no choice but to change the inner tube. You can go for many months without having a puncture, and suddenly something happens; I suspect I must have run over a piece of glass or other sharp object that cut through the tyre and nicked the tube.

By the time we made it back to the start, I was more than done. A year after it first happened, I now know that my feet get very painful in hot temperatures. When I take my shoes off I expect to see blood-soaked socks, but there are no visible marks whatsoever. London Wales London may be twice the length of Tour de Ricky, but the cooler temperatures and slower pace made it feel easier in some ways than this ride. At the end, my face was so salty that I looked like I had been prepared for long-term meat storage. I’ve spent the rest of the weekend trying to rehydrate and get some electrolytes back into my body again.

This was a week in which I:

• Was meant to have taken the week off as holiday, but decided to cancel my leave as I had too many things going on at work that I wanted to come in for.
• Enjoyed a bank holiday ride with both of my boys again, along with one of their friends. We tackled a lovely flat route north of the Chilterns, with one big climb up Ivinghoe Beacon at the end.
• Learnt a bit about my family history on my dad’s side. My father-in-law has been researching the family tree for years and has been slowly discovering things on my branch too. The 1921 census is amazing, showing that my one-year-old grandfather was living in a small terraced house in Twickenham with nine other people.
• Joined the inaugural project meeting with colleagues across our organisation to expand an area of our business. It’s exciting to be involved in something that is visibly growing.
• Met with colleagues to discuss our first intake of summer interns, how the logistics of their first few days will work, and how we will organise the placement and work for the intern who will be joining my team.
• Finalised and submitted our draft proposal for an internal scorecard.
• Reviewed the final technology bill of materials with our chosen vendor for a new office.
• Met with colleagues who are responsible for managing policies and standards for our group, reviewing our department’s current processes for assessing and adopting them.
• Had an excellent in-person meeting with the CEO and Director of Enterprise Sales of a well-known technology company, which is also one of our vendors. As well as hearing about where their products and the company are heading, we took the opportunity to present the capabilities of our own firm and how we might be able to help their business.
• Caught up with the project manager from our sister company to hear about the latest developments with their office refurbishment project, as well as changes that the landlord is making.
• Went for a local team lunch in the City. The restaurant and food weren’t great, but we didn’t let it get in the way of how lovely it was to get together outside of the office as a team.
• Popped back into the optician to order my new glasses and shades. Getting old is an expensive business.
• Wrote to my financial adviser to see what approach my pension funds will be taking to the upcoming planned mega-IPOs of SpaceX and various AI companies. These IPOs are so large that the index providers are looking at relaxing their rules about how long it takes for a recently floated company to be included; one argument is that if these companies end up representing a massive percentage of the stock market, then buying into an index isn’t really buying the basket that is meant to represent the market as a whole. Katie Martin at the Financial Times has warned that this may be “the ‘enshittification’ of markets”:
  

Companies come and go out of indices all the time and investors generally do not and should not care. And if Musk’s company really is worth $1.75tn then, sure, indices would be weirdly distorted if they had a SpaceX-sized black hole in them. But if SpaceX stumbles after it lifts off and hooks straight into the veins of passive flows, there are consequences for all investors.

• Had a lovely Sunday afternoon at the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust’s Nature Discovery Centre in Thatcham. My wife used one of the tools to find a halfway point between Berkhamsted, our home town, and Bristol, where her brother and his family live. It was a perfect meeting point, with lots of outdoor space, extra-long picnic tables, a good café, a beautiful lake with a path to walk around, and a playground for the youngest member of the family. Our picnic was excellent and we topped it off with a cake-fuelled celebration for my wife’s mum’s birthday.
• Went to two album club events in the same week, both of which were excellent. On Tuesday at the WB-40 Album Club we heard some 1980s Australian country music courtesy of Graeme Connors, and on Friday at the original Album Club we heard the most contemporary album that we have ever played, Gans’s Good For The Soul. One of the things I love most about both of the Album Clubs is exposure to records that I would otherwise probably never have heard.
  

Media

Podcasts

• The FT News Briefing podcast had an interesting report from their Chief Data Reporter John Burn-Murdoch about how global birth rates are falling, linking this to mobile phones:
  

So this is another one where I should just say, you know, everything we’re talking about here, there are theories, there are arguments. Some evidence seems stronger than others, but none of this is completely watertight. But the reason that a bunch of the researchers I spoke to are starting to point the finger more at technology and devices is that this is a simple question of time use.

If the age groups that would typically be the ones settling down and having kids are spending significant amounts of time on their phones, that is time a lot of which might previously have been spent hanging out face-to-face with their peers. And we have hard evidence on this, that the amount of time young people spend socializing in person has fallen very steeply from the late 2000s in high-income countries through to the present day.

The deep, strong relationships that lead to things like marriage, perhaps children, are the result of a lot of time hanging out with people to get there. You hang out with a lot of people to find the right person, and then you hang out with that person long enough to settle down. And if we are simply hanging out a lot less, by some measures, half as much as we used to, then that process is going to take a lot longer if it happens at all.

Articles

• It was interesting to read in the Financial Times about a tool that automatically removes safety protections from AI models.
• Simon Willison has an excellent write-up of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI.
• I hadn’t heard about Apple’s Stolen Device Protection feature until I saw John Gruber’s mention of it in his post about a New York Times article.
  

Video

• Finally finished The Tony Blair Story. I’m not sure that a biographical documentary made in conjunction with the main subject can ever be completely forensic in its analysis, but this wasn’t bad. I remember those first few years of his time as prime minister being full of hope, but it all went sour very quickly after 9/11. I don’t think that he could ever fundamentally change his view on whether the Iraq War was a good thing, as it would involve dismantling all of the structure and scaffolding that he has built his mind and his life around.
• Continued with season two of Rivals, which is still an enjoyable romp.
• Watched the BikeRadar documentary on Michael Broadwith’s record-breaking ride from Land’s End to John o’Groats in 2018. I’d struggle to maintain his speed on a club ride, let alone for 839 miles.
• Started watching series two of The Assembly. Most episodes bring at least one tear to my eye. The whole series is available on YouTube.
• Also started watching Paradise on the recommendation of a few different friends. We’re a couple of episodes in and I am not convinced that I’ll be able to go the distance; there’s something about it that seems wooden and contrived, with a slow reveal of the backstory through lengthy flashbacks.
  

Audio

• It was sad to hear about the passing of Rob Base. I Wanna Rock was one of my favourite tracks on one of the first CDs I ever bought.
  

• Watching a random episode of Top of the Pops on iPlayer uncovered I Won’t Let You Down by Ph.D., which I must have heard at some point but which felt completely new to my ears. I love that there are still so many gems out there that I haven’t heard yet.
  

Books

• Reading Tsunami Kids has put me off eating watermelons.
  

Next week: Rain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media

Articles

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

Video

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

Audio

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

Web

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

Books

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

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

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

This week felt tough. I ended up in the office four days in a row. The end of each day arrived too quickly as I still had plenty of things left to tackle. It was great to get to Friday when I could get some exercise on my indoor bike trainer and then climb into my cave in order to catch up with some things on my own.

This was a week in which I:

• Welcomed the newest member of our department, someone who has joined our small development team. It was a tough process to find them, but worth maintaining our high standards to get the right person on board.
• Tackled a difficult conversation about one of our service contracts.
• Interviewed candidates for a role on our nascent internship programme. One of the interviews had to be rescheduled, which meant that I had to go in on a day that I had planned to work from home.
• Wrestled with a technology configuration change that meets an internal requirement but has unintended side effects. We’ve agreed to continue to work on a better implementation.
• Reviewed and made changes to some project-related slides for display on our internal digital signage system.
• Discussed the snagging list and proposed remedial works with the vendors for the recent building project in our office.
• Reviewed vendor responses for furniture that we plan to deploy in a new office.
• Continued discussions on the potential models for implementing ‘architecture as a service’ for our team, meeting with another possible vendor.
• Met with colleagues who look after our internal SharePoint setup to discuss one of our projects and the short-term support that we need.
• Had our regular governance and project meetings.
• Joined a call where our CTO led an education session on SD-WAN networks, including how SASE works.
• Met with colleagues who are compiling a scorecard for our division, discussing how we can contribute to the metrics.
• Heard from a colleague in our weekly Learning Hour meeting about a conference that they recently attended.
• Had fun making connections. One of my colleagues from our office in China came over to my desk at the end of the day to say hello; I hadn’t seen her since February and didn’t know she was in town. Another colleague overheard us and asked for an introduction, as he is tackling a business problem that she might be able to help with.
• Had a lovely lunch at Haz with a colleague who was visiting from New York for the first time in a few years.
• Met with my executive partner at our technology research and advisory vendor to work through a specific problem that I’m tackling.
• Found some time to clear down even more old work emails, getting the remainder to a manageable set of things.
• Went to Lisa Riemers and Matisse Hamel-Nelis’s launch party for their book, Accessible Communications, at the Canva event space in London. It was lovely to celebrate their achievement of getting the book written and published. It felt like a very special evening, meeting up with old friends and making new ones. Spending time chatting to an artist like Natalie Webb isn’t something that I do every day. Lisa has posted a lovely write-up of the event on LinkedIn.
  

• Used Claude Cowork and the Remember The Milk MCP server for a focused clear-down of tasks in my to-do system. I now plan to use RTM primarily for date-driven reminders as opposed to a general backlog of potential to-dos. All my other personal tasks can live in Obsidian.
• Spent time manually clearing down over 1,100 items that had built up in the Drafts app. I am excellent at capturing stuff but much less good at processing it and putting it where it needs to be. Claude Cowork helped me to create a couple of Drafts actions that take the first line and prepend it to one of two Kanban boards that I have set up in Obsidian.
  

Media

Articles

• The FT reports on how innovations in the architecture of houses in rural Tanzania help to save lives:
  

A group of researchers has since found that children living in these purpose-built two-storey “Star Homes” showed more robust health on average than peers living in traditional one-storey mud-and-thatch huts. Youngsters in the homes, who had their health measured over three years, saw fewer cases of malaria, diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections, which are among the major killers of children in sub-Saharan Africa. Under-fives in the homes were also taller for their age.

• Fascinating insight into how loading data from tape on home computers in the 1980s actually works.
• EY are the latest company to have to deal with something that they published that contained AI hallucinations. The risk of this happening must be on every large company’s risk register.
• The concept of posts that aren’t easily accessible from a website but are in the RSS feed is interesting. These are articles that only RSS ‘insiders’ are made aware of; to the casual browser they would be invisible. I don’t think I publish enough to need to hide types of post on my site. RSS is also the basis for syndicating my posts to places like Mastodon and Bluesky, which would mean rearchitecting my setup if I went down this route.
  

Video

• Finished watching Rooster, which was very entertaining. It’s all set up for a second series. I’m sure we’ll watch it, but I can already sense the many ways in which there will be diminishing returns.
• Once again, we have no idea who will triumph in Race Across the World. Each series seems to get more breathtaking in terms of the places the contestants have to navigate, but less high-stakes in the decisions that they seem to make. I’m sure there were more people going off-piste and having a harder time dealing with the consequences of their transport decisions in previous years. It’s so well-produced, with the personalities and backstories of the contestants being slowly and sensitively revealed across the episodes.
• Watched Project Hail Mary (2026) after recommendations from lots of different friends. The movie was…fine, I guess? It was engaging enough but felt very much like a children’s film. I didn’t realise that it was going to be so comedic.
• Got stuck into series two of Rivals after first watching a 10-minute recap video on YouTube. (My memory is a complete sieve for the details in lots of the TV shows that we watch.) Danny Dyer continues to be a revelation.
• Watched the first two episodes of Michael Jackson: An American Tragedy. As the title suggests, it’s not a fun watch; we see a boy with a very bizarre upbringing quickly reach unfathomable heights of fame and then implode. I have a penchant for pop music documentaries of all stripes, but this is tough. We’ve got one episode left but really need to be in the right mood before we tackle it.
  

Audio

• A while ago, my brother-in-law bought me a copy of the Anthology Recordings compilation Sad About The Times. It’s a collection of obscure songs from 1970s North American artists. The final track, Maybe Someday/Maybe Never, by Dennis Stoner, has been on my internal jukebox over the past few days. It’s lovely.
  

Web

Clearing down my Drafts uncovered a bunch of fascinating places on the web.

• rentahuman is a platform to let AI bots rent people to do tasks that they can’t do themselves. (h/t Mat)
• Bubbles looks like another useful website for surfacing interesting things to read from personal blogs. Users can log in with a Fediverse account and upvote items. You can subscribe to a thoughtful collection of algorithmic RSS feeds too.
• Speaking of blogs, I subscribed to a bunch of RSS feeds for sites surfaced by the Hacker News Popularity Contest table.
• Making a note to self to check out Airalo for cheap eSIMs the next time I go somewhere not covered by my standard plan.
• Stasher lets you find places that will store luggage for you. Useful if you’re in a place where you don’t want to walk around with your bags all day.
• Vintage Obscura Radio curates songs found and posted to a Reddit community, each of which had fewer than 30,000 views on YouTube at the time of discovery and was released before the year 2000.
• Damien Charlotin has created a database that tracks legal decisions where generative AI produced hallucinated content.
• An excellent tool for finding album artwork, particularly useful for updates to Album Club websites.
• Added Ultion smart locks to my potential home upgrade list.
  

Books

• Nearly finished Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins. It’s excellent.
  

Next week: Welcoming our eldest son home, and my third time at Interesting.

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

Media

Articles

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video

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

Audio

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

Books

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

Next week: A friend’s book launch.

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

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

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

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

Media

Articles

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

Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was also a week in which I:

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

Media

Articles

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

Video

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

Audio

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

Books

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

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

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

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

Media

Articles

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

Video

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

Books

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

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

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

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

Media

Podcasts

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

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

Articles

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

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

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

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

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

Video

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

Audio

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

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

Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media

Podcasts

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

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

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

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

Articles

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

Video

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

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

Audio

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

Books

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

Next week: Back to work.

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

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

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

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

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

Media

Video

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

Audio

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

Web

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

Books

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

Next week: Some more time away from the desk.

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

This was a week in which I:

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

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

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

Media

Podcasts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Articles

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

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

Video

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

Web

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

Books

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

Next week: Conference.

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

Media

Articles

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

Video

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

Audio

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

Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media

Articles

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

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

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

Video

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

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

Web

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

Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media

Podcasts

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

Articles

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

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

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

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

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

Video

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

Audio

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

Books

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

Next week: Texas.