Weeknotes #375 — Smile

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.