Weeknotes #378 — Dust devil

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

Ollie the cat expressing how we were all feeling this weekend.

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

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

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

Rewrote the business case and approach documents for one of our projects. Microsoft Copilot was very helpful; I fed it the original files, including comments made by colleagues from their reviews, told it what I wanted to do with my rewrite, and it offered reams of suggested changes, a lot of which I incorporated back into the text.

Met with the project team for the fit-out of our newest office for our weekly call, and to review the furniture procurement plan.

Took part in our development team’s fortnightly sprint planning meeting, the first since our new team member got us back up to full strength.

Reviewed the draft internal scorecard for our department.

Had a coffee with an old colleague from a previous firm who has decided to retire. I’m not quite 50, but I’m definitely moving into the phase of life where people around me are calling time on work to go and do something else.

Learned about how one of our technical infrastructure teams is structured and how the internal chargeback mechanisms work for their services.

Met with the project team for one of our key initiatives and worked through the set of issues collected since our last meeting.

Had a couple of calls with my executive partner at our technology research and advisory firm, continuing our discussion about a specific issue I am working through as well as our general monthly catch-up.

Met with colleagues across the company to talk about a specific vendor product that we plan to rationalise and how we might get there.

Caught up with our sister company to talk about the services we provide in a shared space, and the steps we are collaborating on to improve the end-user experience.

Had some correspondence relating to a travel insurance claim from over a year ago. I called the company and made the point that it was unlikely that we would have any of the details after all this time, which they understood.

Thoroughly enjoyed this year’s Interesting conference, my third1. On the morning of the event, I noticed that there were still tickets available, presumably from people who had asked for a refund as they could no longer come, so I messaged a few people who I thought might enjoy it to see if they wanted to come. One did. I was also heading there with a couple of friends from the WB-40 podcast Signal group who had also never been before. Everyone had a brilliant time, watching 10-minute presentations from inspirational speakers, some of whom were trying their hand at presenting for the first time. We heard about Bertolt Brecht, growing up in the UK care system in the 1960s and 1970s, the joy of growing flowers from seeds, the brilliance of Radiohead’s song Videotape, trying to create a magazine of the best overlooked content from other magazines, and the very dubious history of the people behind Sea-Monkeys.

Presenters on stage at Interesting 2026.

Steve Watson, founder of Stack Magazines, on stage at this week’s Interesting conference. He is showing us a quote from the first ‘digest’-style magazine ever published. Information overload was as much a thing for some people in the 18th century as it is in the 21st.

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

Three Dorans go on a gorgeously sunny bike ride.

Sorted out my son’s insurance on our second car, after an unexplained system anomaly when I tried to do it online.

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

Media

Articles

Benedict Evans’s latest version of his presentation AI eats the world is a must-read.

I’d been meaning to get my head around passkeys for a while. Scott Helme gives a useful introduction to what they are and how they work.

A futures exchange for computing capacity is in the works, which feels somewhat inevitable in 2026. I wonder how much this will be utilised by companies wishing to hedge their future AI spend and how much will be speculation.

The US is now offering aid to African countries in exchange for up to 25 years of health data. “Critics have likened these transactional agreements to a form of digital and genomic colonialism, warning that data could be made available to unnamed private US corporations, including pharmaceutical companies and big data analytics groups.”

Interesting how East African countries are looking to curb imports of used clothes, known as ‘mitumba’, in order to try to develop their domestic businesses, and to read the range of views from people who live and work there.

Video

My boys got me watching the GCN team’s effort to try and beat the 51-year-old Cardiff-Monmouth-Cardiff cycling speed record as it features an interview with local legend Michael Broadwith. It’s interesting to think how some of these records have been made much more difficult to match due to road changes and the installation of traffic lights.

Finished Race Across the World. I won’t spoil it, but the winners were absolutely worthy champions and thoroughly deserved it. I love this show and can’t wait for the next series.

Audio

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

Web

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

Books

Finished reading Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins and started writing up my thoughts on it.

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

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

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