This week I returned to New York in order to check in on one of my projects. I love spending time there. It feels like a home away from home.

The trip started brilliantly. Our corporate policy allows me to book a business class ticket both ways. But paying an additional £2k for a bigger seat and a better selection of food on the way out — a seven hour daytime trip — always feels way too indulgent. So I had booked myself into Premium Economy. When I handed my boarding pass over to the airline staff member at the gate, they exclaimed “Ooh, you’ve had a seat change.” My card was quickly ripped up and I was handed a new one, which clearly sat me at the front of the plane. I can’t remember ever having had a business class upgrade on a long-haul flight since I travelled as a kid with my dad, who worked for the airline.

Things went from good to great when I found that the in-flight Wi-Fi on the brand new plane allowed me to stream Sky Sports. I paid £18.99 for a full flight Wi-Fi package and settled in to watch the Formula One. The stream held up brilliantly, with only a few blurry moments and the odd cut-out. I was living the dream.

Topping even that, late on this Sunday afternoon, I found myself being the first person in the JFK airport immigration hall. Getting through immigration, a process that has previously taken me as much as four hours, was done in all of two minutes. As I waited for the cases to arrive in the baggage hall, I decided that if mine was the first to appear on the belt, I was going to go straight to buy a lottery ticket.

The hotel I stayed at was a little strange. New York hotel rooms are invariably dated and this was no exception. It was run with a skeleton crew, with entrance to the hotel and the room controlled by a six digit code instead of a key card. The receptionist informed me that I was “entitled to” one room clean and towel change during my stay, with additional visits charged at $40 each. Looking out of the window of the room at the construction site next door, I felt as though my luck had run out. But it turned out fine. The room had plenty of towels, the shower was great, the Wi-Fi was simple and I wasn’t disturbed by anyone or anything during my stay.

My hotel was half a block away from Trump Tower. The base of the building is surrounded by concrete blocks, with 56th street completely blocked off to traffic. It must be horrible for people who have purchased apartments in the building, which presumably are now worth much less than they once were.

This was my final visit to our current office before we move out. It was time to say goodbye to this wonderful view that greets everyone who makes a visit to our office kitchen.

Wandering around a city where I used to live is sometimes tinged with melancholy. I took a trip down to Chelsea, swung past my old apartment block and wandered down 9th Avenue, remembering how my wife and I used to go for a walk at the weekend, popping into shops and trying whatever food took our fancy. These days, there’s so much pressure to get stuff done with whatever time we have. But 20 years ago, this felt like a great use of time. And I think it was.

This was a week in which I:

• Worked on Monday, despite it being a public holiday in the UK. Taking a long-haul trip for less than a week doesn’t feel right, and I didn’t want to miss out on spending a day with the team in the office.
• Found that I had forgotten to pack my belt. Inevitably, there’s always something that I forget when going on a trip. I just hope that what I forget isn’t essential. Fortunately, belts are pretty easy to come by in midtown Manhattan. It’s great to work so close to 5th Avenue.
• Took the first delivery of the lovely new furniture for our office. It took the team the best part of four hours to unload two large trucks and to get the furniture up to our floor. This kind of work can only happen outside of office hours, so we didn’t leave until around 10pm.
• Reviewed the comprehensive, detailed post-construction snagging report for the new office, and found a couple of items that hadn’t made it to the list.
• Discussed and agreed the office entrance signage with the manufacturer, construction and landlord teams.
• Made some decisions on the installation of audio/visual equipment, where they hadn’t been specified in our design documents.
• Explored options for displaying TV channels on our Yodeck digital signage players in our new office.
• Had a brief meeting to review the latest costs for another office upgrade. Set up a more detailed review for next week.
• Met with the construction company assigned to one of our offices to agree an approach to improving our meeting rooms and adding some internal illuminated signage.
• Agreed how we will proceed with the logistical plans to open an office in a new country now that things are moving again.
• Completed the review of our annual operational risk self-assessment.
• Had an introductory meeting with the executive partner at our technology industry analyst vendor.
• Interviewed candidates for a vacancy in my team. One of the candidates appeared to be blatantly using a web search or generative AI tool to key in our difficult questions and read off an answer. He wasn’t even using any tools to make it look like we had his full attention. I wonder whether we’ll soon need to move back to in-person interviews as the default?
• Had some catch-up calls with the vendors that are finding candidates for the role.
• Took part in our monthly Lean Coffee session.
• Had some lovely drinks and lunch out with my colleagues in the New York team. Had the splendid discovery that one of my colleagues is a bit of an audiophile and a typography geek.
• Enjoyed some morning runs around Central Park. On a couple of mornings I decided to tackle the full road circuit, something I hadn’t done for a while. I was pretty pleased with my time, setting my fastest 5km and second fastest 10km, especially as the Harlem end of the route is a little hilly.
  

• Enjoyed eating out, revisiting Cafe Luce for a well-cooked bowl of pasta, Bill’s Bar & Burger for a traditional Friday afternoon lunch, Simo Midtown for personal pizzas (“hold the cheese”), Westville Chelsea for a wholesome homemade veggie burger, Springbone and Naya for healthy bowls and wakey fuel from Black Fox Coffee. It helped that my hotel didn’t have a kitchen, so I had to get out and find somewhere to eat every evening. Good Time IPA is a superb alcohol-free beer that I haven’t found anywhere outside of NYC, and the vegan Van Leeuwen ice cream flavours are too tempting to ignore.
  

• Spent the weekend with my body clock being all over the place. Despite ‘sleeping’ all the way home on the plane, I felt completely frazzled on Saturday and have carried it through into the start of the next week.
  

Media

Podcasts

• A few friends have encouraged me to sign up to Bluesky. I had resisted as I thought that it was yet another siloed platform, but it turns out that it’s actually a federated network. It was interesting to hear this interview with Rose Wang, COO of Bluesky.
  

Articles

• Had a conversation with a friend about social media and the recent far-right riots in the UK. I hadn’t seen that a 2020 speech by Humza Yousaf in the Scottish Parliament, in 2020 at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, had been clipped and was being shared with the narrative that he was racist. Reading the whole speech, it is actually exactly the opposite — it’s anti-racist. From Wikipedia’s entry on Ibram X Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist:
  

Kendi argues that the opposite of racist is anti-racist rather than simply non-racist, and that there is no middle ground in the struggle against racism; one is either actively confronting racial inequality or allowing it to exist through action or inaction. He defines racism as any policy that creates inequitable outcomes between people of different skin colors; for instance, affirmative action in college admissions is anti-racist in that is designed to remedy past racial discrimination, while inaction on climate change is racist because of the disproportionately severe impacts of climate change in the predominantly non-white Global South.

• I’m not climbing on the Oasis reunion bus. I saw them headline at Reading Festival in 2000 and was so bored by their performance that I returned to my tent early to get ahead of the crowds. But I found this assessment of their latest anniversary reissue of Definitely Maybe to be an interesting read.
  

Video

• Watched a couple of movies this week, trying to take advantage of my recent resubscription to MUBI.
• This Closeness (2023) had an interesting storyline of a couple renting a room in an Airbnb for a long weekend. The whole movie is filmed within the apartment, with what’s going on in outside brought into the narrative by the dialogue between the protagonists and the odd additional character. It didn’t feel entirely believable.
• Aftersun (2022) is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. Like poetry in movie form, it leaves so much unsaid, so that you are able to project your own life onto the situation and the characters. As the film finished, I found myself crying. Reviews of the film on Letterboxd are amazing; some are insightful about why the film was so affecting, and others are moving, bringing out stories from peoples lives about their own family relationships.
  

Web

• I love the campaign of I Am Not A Typo.
  

Books

• Continued with the mammoth beast that is The McCartney Legacy Volume 1: 1969-73.
  

Next week: Back in London, a 70th birthday, and an Album Club.

This week felt very intense. I have a bit of a break from work coming up, which is either particularly well-timed or the very fact that it’s on the horizon means that I’ve started to feel a bit worn out.

It was a week of late nights, not helped by problems with the trains. I haven’t missed the drama that happens when the service fails. A broken rail near Berkhamsted meant that the only route home was via the Met Line to Chesham and then going via taxi, for a total commuting cost of £55 for the day.

Monday was the first day of us working from a temporary space while our office undergoes some essential maintenance. The team had prepared brilliantly, with network connections, desk moves, meeting room fit-outs, etc., but you never quite know how things are going to go until day one hits. Judging by the first week, it’s been a huge success.

Friday was a public holiday in South Africa — Women’s Day. South African holidays always seem to have such understated names for such important historical events. In this case, the holiday “commemorates the 1956 march of approximately 20,000 women to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to petition against the country’s pass laws that required South Africans defined as ‘black’ under The Population Registration Act to carry an internal passport, known as a passbook, that served to maintain population segregation, control urbanisation, and manage migrant labour during the apartheid era.” Lots of people were out so I decided to take the afternoon off to wind down and get the pre-holiday ironing done.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the regular programme and project meetings.
• Resolved a couple of small issues with the fit-out of a new office. Phone calls always work better than emails for keeping things from blowing out of proportion.
• Met with colleagues from a partner firm to review the latest external cost estimates for one of our main projects. We also reviewed the standard JCT Minor Works contract and agreed next steps to get it into a working draft.
• Started to hand over a project for some additional office improvement works to a member of my team.
• Met with colleagues from a sister company to review our proposed financial operating model for a shared facility in one of our offices.
• Attended a meeting to agree our approach to signage and artwork at the entrance to a new office. Everyone is in agreement on the direction we should go in.
• Reviewed a draft of our annual operational risk self assessment submission.
• Joined a drinks reception in one of our new temporary meeting rooms for a colleague who is getting married. It feels like ages since there was a personal celebratory event at work.
  

Media

Articles

• Musk is off the rails. What is he trying to do?
  

Video

• Linford is a brilliant documentary. Back when he was at his peak, I was a schoolboy delivering newspapers that were regularly filled with his achievements on the back pages. It was difficult to watch how much the mockery and ‘humour’ affected him, as well as the devastating — but weird — drug test failure after he had retired.
  

Books

• Continued reading The McCartney Legacy Volume 1: 1969–73. I’m almost at the point where his first solo album is released in 1970. Loving it so far.
  

Next week: A big change of scenery.

It’s amazing how quickly something can become a ‘new normal’. For most of my career, I commuted into the office five days a week. The pandemic meant that I quickly shifted to working from home full time, which felt bizarre at first. Then, having been out of the office for 534 days, it felt bizarre to go back. For many months now, I’ve been working from the office at least three days a week, including most Mondays. But this week, as one of my projects hit a key milestone, our staff were asked to work from home. It felt very strange to be on my indoor bike trainer instead of on the commute. I’m now at a stage where I enjoy a balance of working in the office and working from home. Three days in the office feels about right. I’m looking forward to going in again this coming Monday.

Things feel under control at work. The main projects are reaching some critical periods, but they are on track and we have enough bandwidth to absorb the issues that will inevitably come up. This is the result of the amount of hard work and planning that the team have put in up until now. It’s paying off.

Zooming out, it’s been dreadful to see the fascist and racist far-right riots here in the UK. They aren’t demonstrations. Smashing up the community you live in doesn’t seem to be a great way to show how much you care about your country. I can’t imagine how terrifying it must be to be targeted by them, coming at you in your home. My view is that decades of racist ‘othering’ of people by the newspapers and dog-whistling politicians has prepared people to (want to) believe misinformation and disinformation online. Those online posts serve as a useful excuse to go out, smash things up and let your true feelings out. Many years ago I stopped clicking on any links to articles on the Daily Mail website. I’m now going to add Twitter/X to the ‘never click’ list. I deleted all of my Twitter content some time ago but it still feels icky to go to the site and contribute to the engagement statistics, so I’m not going to do that anymore.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the regular programme and project meetings.
• Prepared for and ran the Programme Steering Committee meeting. We’ve chosen a new office chair to (quite literally) roll out to our staff, a welcome upgrade as the current ones reach their end of life.
• Coordinated with our project management consultants on all of the things that are outstanding that we need to quickly resolve.
• Reviewed the latest design of a smart sensor system that we plan to install in one of our offices. The review revealed questions that we hadn’t thought about, relating to the ownership and management of IT kit that will be used to run the service locally. It took a couple of meetings to get to a conclusion on how we can take it forward. We’ve landed in a good spot.
• Spent a day in the temporary office space that will be our home for the next few months. The team did an excellent job of tearing down our regular office and building out the temporary one in such a short space of time.
• Picked up a couple of minor issues in the construction of one of our offices.
• Reviewed a draft contract for work with a construction company, learning about JCT and their off-the-shelf legal documents.
• Requested help from one of our vendors to design a solution for taking a TV feed and encoding it for use on our internal local office network so that it can be picked up by our digital signage players.
• Took part in our technical architecture governance meeting to review a proposal for a new printing solution.
• Discussed a strategy for moving towards a lower-cost, lower-risk PDF platform than our traditional one and agreed some follow-up actions.
• Agreed an approach for coordinated experimentation with, and learning about, Generative AI within our part of the organisation.
• Had a couple of broader conversations on AI and ethical frameworks. I continue to marvel at the cognitive dissonance of having ‘explainability’ as a principle, where this is fundamentally not how these systems work. ‘Transparency’ is another good one; the main AI models are not transparent about what data they have been trained on and what human labour has gone into the process, so how is this in any way achievable? Microsoft’s Responsible AI Transparency Report contains 12 instances of the word ‘training’; 9 of these refer to training people, one mentions how news content providers didn’t want to be excluded from search results despite having concerns about usage of their content, and two mention further training of new models. There is no mention whatsoever about concerns with how the models currently in use by their systems have been trained.
• Had a couple of meetings with our technology industry analyst vendor about making some changes to our contract. I’m really looking forward to getting back into the technology side of things later this year, making much better use of their services.
• Met with our Non-Financial Risk team to review and close out some historic records.
• Had more conversations with staffing vendors about our company and the specific requirement I have in my team.
• Took part in our monthly Lean Coffee session. We dived into a great selection of interesting topics, including the recent Crowdstrike outage and how IT is far from being a profession. Steve McConnell wrote about this in 1999 and not much has changed since. Just how big does an IT problem need to be before there is an overwhelming push for reform?
• Found myself with some bandwidth to process a bunch of actions that I had noted down in meetings over the past few months. I have a great system for capturing them, but carving out the time to go through them always seems difficult.
• Boarded a late train out of London and found myself looking down at a vandalised plug socket, where someone had left a piece of metal sticking out of one of the holes. I wasn’t sure whether this presented a danger to anyone who might accidentally touch it. I asked a fellow passenger to stop people from sitting in the seat and went off to find the guard. He wandered down with me to take a look, said he would put some protective tape over it and thanked me for alerting him. But we never saw the guard again. *Shrug.*
  

• Dabbled with watching the Olympics, catching whatever happened to be on at the time. South Sudan in the basketball was something I didn’t expect to stumble across.
• Went for a long run with my eldest son, he at his recovery pace with me wondering whether my lungs were going to remain in my chest cavity.
• Visited friends at their home for a beautiful and moving memorial service for someone that they recently lost. Despite the reason for the occasion being so sad, it was wonderful to see them and be with friends for a few hours. It got my wife and I thinking about how much time we spend with people we love and whether we need to reprioritise the structure of our weekends so that we see people more.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Interesting discussion about Trump running mate JD Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy. And by “interesting discussion about”, I mean “brutal takedown of”.
  

Articles

• Two articles that made me log out of Twitter and vow not to log in again:
  
  • An interview with Elon Musk’s daughter.
  • The Observer: “Dozens arrested in violent clashes across the country as government warns rioters ‘will pay the price’”:

A key factor in this spread of online disinformation involved Elon Musk’s decision to allow rightwing activists such as Tommy Robinson back onto his social media platform X, said Joe Mulhall, director of research at Hope not Hate, the anti-fascism organisation. “The initial disinformation and anger was being perpetrated by individuals on Twitter, for example, that have been previously deplatformed,” he said. “And now they’ve been replatformed.”

• From Super Deluxe Edition: “It’s so quiet at the moment, in terms of releases (and reissues), that Eminem’s new album The Death of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce) remains at number one in the UK for a third week, with a paltry 10,757 sales! And according to Music Week, of those 10k+ sales only 105 units were actually physical sales (all cassettes!). Remarkable.”
  

Video

• Finished watching Kin. A superb show which has left us wanting more.
  

Audio

• Picked up a few CDs from our local Oxfam shop including a 1993 copy of Wings’ Venus and Mars, with a few extra tracks. I love this album. My uncle lent me a vinyl copy when I was a kid, which I recorded to tape and then played so much. There’s so much not to like about it, with its cheesy McCartney lyrics and bubblegum songs. But when it’s good, it’s really good. The dirty, opening guitar, drums and bass on Letting Go and the eerie beauty of Love In Song make it a worthwhile listen.
• There are so many good box sets that are turning up at the moment. I’d love to buy them but it’s not going to happen. The Faces At The BBC, Pete Townshend Live in Concert, Rory Gallagher’s BBC Collection, Bryan Ferry’s Retrospective and Phil Manzanera’s 50 Years of Music have all suddenly appeared. I’ve already got a huge backlog of listening from things I’ve bought in the past so it’s probably a good thing that I don’t have the pocket money to buy any of these at the moment.
• “Beyond the Sea” with every note changed to C. More intolerable than you could possibly imagine. (via Waxy)
  

Books

• Finished reading Barbara F Walter’s How Civil Wars Start and need to write up my thoughts on it.
• Listening to Venus and Mars has inspired me to pick up Volume 1 of The McCartney Legacy. If I read at an average speed, I’ll see you in just under 15 hours.
  

Next week: New digs.

My happy mood continued into this week and I enjoyed the lightness that it brought with it. There were plenty of things to get done, but they seemed to be in front of me instead of weighing me down.

The rest of the family have been on holiday from school. My wife went away for a few days to visit her parents which meant that I was nominally ‘in charge’. It’s not quite the mission that it was when the boys were younger, but there were still more things to juggle. So much, in fact, that it has taken me until Tuesday to finish these weeknotes.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the regular programme and project meetings.
• Wrote up and published the minutes from last week’s programme Steering Committee meeting and immediately started the pack for the next one.
• Attended governance committees and executive forums to give updates on the local project that makes up a big chunk of the programme.
• Had a kick-off meeting ahead of a weekend of work to tear down the technology in one of our offices and rebuild it on a different floor of the building.
• Confirmed our planned move-out date for one of our offices with the sister company that we currently share with.
• Met with the Procurement team to review the latest responses to a request for quotation.
• Reviewed the technology installation plan for a new office with our infrastructure team and the vendor we are using to supply and fit the equipment.
• Reviewed a colleague’s draft presentation that they plan to deliver next week. It’s an important milestone where we take stock of what we’ve done and agree what our plan is from this point.
• Completed the mid-year review process for all of my direct reports.
• Confirmed a date to give my talk on Large Language Models and Generative AI to the board of directors of one of our African entities.
• Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour hosted by a colleague who gave us an overview of Windows Autopatch.
• Attended the quarterly Technology town hall meeting. One of the guest speakers was Michael Stevens, a South African who had a childhood accident involving an overhead electrical wire which led to him having both legs amputated. He now competes in bobsleigh. He’s also the Operations Manager at Jumping Kids, a nonprofit that is working to give African children access to, and maintenance of, quality prosthetic equipment. They also focus on giving the children access to mainstream education and sporting opportunities. The stories of what some of the children have achieved are incredible.
• Caught up with a colleague who is going through some major life changes. It was exactly the kind of impromptu conversation that wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t both in the office. Increasingly I think that being together in the same place is less about the work we do and more about the relationships and friendships that we foster.
• Had introductory meetings with two staffing vendors. I’d previously worked with a contact at one of the vendors 15 years ago; it turned out that his colleague who was also in the meeting would have been less than 10 years old at that time.
• Watched my son get a new 3000m PB at the Watford Open track meet.
  

• Had a couple of meetings about sporting scholarships in the US with the consultant that is helping my eldest boy to try and get over there.
• Got my own PB for cycling 50 miles on Saturday morning’s club ride. We had a big group and a flat route which led to some impressive speed in the sunshine. It was so much fun.

• Went for another Sunday morning run, this time a bit longer than last week. My legs already feel as though they are getting used to running again. I’m going to try and keep it up.
• Bought some new t-shirts from DJ Tees and Design By Humans. It’s been a couple of years since I had a t-shirt refresh.
• Enjoyed a pub garden lunch with my boys at the Green Dragon in Flaunden. I was a bit disappointed that the only food they did was pizza, but it was nice to sit outside in the garden and enjoy some time together.
• Hosted the latest round of the WB-40 Album Club, introducing the rest of the team to the late 1990s prog-rock weird and wonderfulness of Mansun’s Six.
• Consumed a lot of sport, watching some random Olympics events and the brilliant F1 Belgian GP.
• Watched Keir Starmer’s first Prime Minister’s Questions with him on the executive side of the house. I’ve been fascinated by parliament since I was a kid, coming home from school and flicking the TV on to watch whatever was being debated at the time. I’d love to go and see it in person one day.
  

Media

Articles

• Absolutely shocking articles from the Guardian highlighting the scale of violence against women in the UK. In this country, a woman is killed every three days by a man. They are putting names behind the statistics and highlighting the severity of the problem.
  

• An incredible story of how a technology security training vendor was infiltrated by a North Korean hacker. They hired him after he successfully passed a number of their checks, including four video conference based interviews.
• Enjoyed this interview with Pete Townshend on the occasion of the release of his live solo CD box set.
  

Video

• Continued watching Kin, rolling into season two. It’s excellent, gritty Irish drama.
• I originally watched Three Kings (1999) at the cinema 25 years ago. I didn’t think that much of it at the time. I remember feeling a bit uncomfortable with it being an action/comedy movie based on the (then) first Gulf War. Recently, the film has been mentioned on a few podcasts I listen to, with people talking about how great the film is. The reviews looked good so I decided to revisit it. It’s definitely a better film than I remember, but the aspects of it that made me uncomfortable are still there — slang words for middle-eastern people played for laughs and no real character development for any of the Iraqi characters. The film was made in that short space after the war and before 9/11, so I kept thinking about how hard it is now to relate to how people felt back then.
• Memories of Murder (2003) was a bizarre watch. About eight out of ten reviews online claim it to be a masterpiece with the other two saying that they have no idea why it’s so revered. I didn’t understand whether it was meant to be a comedy or not. Some of the scenes made me laugh out loud, particularly when one of the police officers randomly dropkicked someone, but I wasn’t sure whether I was meant to be laughing. Having read the Letterboxd reviews, I get the feeling that it was a serious film based on real life events.
  

Web

• The update from Sonos’s CEO on the state of their main app is ridiculous. Features that are missing and are on the roadmap include: “Implementing Music Library configuration, browse, search, and play”, “Improving Volume responsiveness”, “Improving Alarm consistency and reliability” and “Restoring edit mode for Playlists and the Queue”. These aren’t features, they are basics. The app should never have been released. I suspect that they put all of the code for their new headphones into the new S2 app codebase and then were stuck between putting out a not even half-baked app or delaying their hardware release. I’ve been largely isolated from it by having an older system and using the unchanged S1 app, which just reinforces my view.
  

Books

• Continued working my way through How Civil Wars Start. Reading it alongside the news coming out of the USA is quite alarming.
  

Next week: An unusual amount of working from home.

Yet another typically busy week. Somewhere along the way I seemed to turn a corner mentally, getting out of the funk that I’ve been in for the past few weeks. I have no idea why, but I’ll take it.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the regular programme and project meetings.
• Prepped for and ran our programme Steering Committee meeting.
• Did a ‘roadshow’ visit to various department team meetings, giving people more context for one of our major projects. It impacts everyone in the office, so it’s important that they know why as well as have the opportunity to ask questions.
• Heard that we have agreed on an early date to move out from one of our offices. This means that the local team will be working from home for a few weeks. It simplifies the technology work we need to do, but we have to ensure that the team can get together in the same physical space during that period.
• Added an important item into the scope of works for an office refit project. Doing the work later over a series of weekends would have been a number of times more expensive.
• Got agreement to proceed with putting technology into two rooms that we share with a sister company, enabling them to be used for hybrid and remote meetings.
• Continued discussions on how we will onboard a construction company to undertake work on various items in one of our offices.
• Met with our audio/visual design vendor to talk about the potential for demonstrations of equipment for large boardrooms and other complex spaces.
• Caught up with a vendor that provides office environmental monitoring equipment to discuss our planned implementation. There are technology requirements that I hadn’t previously appreciated, so it may be more complex than I thought.
• Had an introductory meeting with two new team members who joined us in the past couple of weeks.
• Was introduced to a new recruit in our Procurement department, working from a remote location but being very much part of the team.
• Enjoyed a Learning Hour meeting on the technical plans for an office move. If things get difficult during the work, it won’t be for lack of planning.
• Had a Random Coffee with a colleague who works in our Credit Risk team.
• Celebrated our youngest son’s birthday with a meal out for the four of us. We had such a lovely time. Both of the boys are great company these days. He followed it up with a trip to the cinema and dinner with his friends on Friday afternoon.
• Loved getting out on my bike on Saturday morning for the club ride. It took it out of me; I fell asleep watching the F1 qualifying and woke up during the post-event interviews. TrainerRoad told me that Sunday was a rest day but I couldn’t face doing nothing, so I went out for a run instead.
• Met with some friends for some nibbles and board games. We had a few rounds of Codenames, which I enjoyed so much that I’m determined to pick up my own copy to take on holiday later in the year.
• Enjoyed a lovely impromptu Sunday lunch at my mum and dad’s. I picked up a bunch of CDs that were on their way to the charity shop and took them home for ripping to my Plex library.
• Had our car serviced and MOTed. Yet again, the suspension needed some work. I’m wondering if the traffic calming speed bumps on a main road near to our house are causing the suspension to wear prematurely.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Finally got around to listening to Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey’s Origin Story podcast. The episode on conspiracy theories is excellent, making a good distinction between a conspiracy theory and the theory of a conspiracy, as well as why certain topics become a focal point whereas other major events are ignored.
  

Articles

• Jailing five protesters for talking about planning a climate change protest is a dystopian outrage.
• An argument for a large single display instead of multiple smaller displays in a Microsoft Teams Room.
• A splendid takedown of a company that says it will be ‘employing’ ‘AI’ ‘workers’.
  

Video

• I’ve only watched two of the three episodes so far, but the BBC’s Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution is superb. Combining pop music with social and cultural history is like catnip for me. What a time to be alive it would have been.
  

Audio

• The latest Your Undivided Attention podcast episode from the Center for Humane Technology covers the fascinating and frightening realities of how DNA is synthesised and distributed. There are mechanisms in place to protect us from people recreating known viruses but they seem to me to be flimsy and trivial to someone who knows what they are doing and is determined to do it. Having heard how this works, I think I’m less of an optimist than Kevin Esvelt, the interviewee on the podcast who runs a biological laboratory.
  

Web

• If I had the time and the money, I’d love to build my own split flap display.
  

Next week: Clearing things out and taking them home, plus an online album club.

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

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

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

Media

Podcasts

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

Articles

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

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

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

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

Video

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

Audio

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

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

Next week: Turning the handle again.

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

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

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

Media

Podcasts

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

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

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

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

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

Articles

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

Video

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

Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

Media

Podcasts

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

Articles

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

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

Video

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

Audio

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

Web

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

Books

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

Next week: Work experience.

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

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

Media

Podcasts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video

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

Audio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

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

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

Media

Podcasts

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

Video

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

Books

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

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

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

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

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

This was a week in which I:

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

Media

Podcasts

• The prospect of a second Trump presidency is terrifying.
  

Articles

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

Video

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

Audio

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

Next week: Travel.