Weeknotes #383 — I’m hot just like an oven

A swan and their cygnets on the bank of the River Bulbourne by The Old Mill, Berkhamsted.

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.