On Wednesday I turned 49. One of the fun things about being born on New Year’s Eve is that the next day I can already say that I will be 50 this year. Because my birthday sits in the middle of a break from work, this part of the year is always very reflective for me.

When I turned 40, I was surprised that I had a bit more of a mid-life ‘wobble’ than I thought I would. I distinctly remember walking to my office, pondering where I was and what I wanted to do with the rest of my career. I started looking for a new job, which ultimately ended up with me becoming a contractor 18 months later, working for a client that is now my employer.

Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself in this same place of reflection, a year earlier than when it hit me last time. I’ve got 27 years of my working life behind me and — if I stay healthy and retire at 67 — 18 years ahead, which makes it feel more important that I spend my remaining time well.

Catching up with podcasts and reading over the Christmas break has got me thinking about what I should do with my career. I consider myself a technologist, but my career took an early turn into systems analysis and project management, and I am now a generalist technology manager CIO-type person.

(As an aside, I’ve always struggled with what my specialism is, which makes it very difficult to have a snappy way to present myself. I’ve watched with envy and admiration as my friend Lisa Riemers introduces herself as “usually the techiest person in a comms team, or the commsiest person in a tech team”, which is a superb description. The best I can come up with is a fumbly explanation of being “a generalist technology manager, with a background in managing large programmes and projects”, which feels as though it falls short of what I can do.)

Is managing teams of technologists how I should focus my remaining time? Or should I instead be looking at getting back into the technology, which ultimately was my first love? Simon Willison’s end-of-year summary of 2025 in large language models is an excellent read, and got me wondering whether the future of people working in technology departments will be those that can do all of the soft skills stuff, plus work with coding agent tools such as Claude Code to quickly create prototypes and applications? A ‘full stack IT manager’ who can bring code to the table, perhaps. Is exploring this a safer bet to keep myself employable until I retire, or should I continue my generalist, managerial focus?

I’m still thinking about Steve Kamb’s post on The Glass Cannon Strategy that I linked to a couple of weeks ago. In it, he transcribed Ben Thompson’s advice from an episode of the Sharp Tech podcast:

People are so hyper aware of what they’re bad at.

They spend so much time trying to get better at what they’re bad at.

You will never [receive outsized returns this way].

Figure out a series of hacks, systems, put yourself in a position where your weaknesses don’t matter…

and what matters is your strengths… so that you become so unique and powerful that companies will hire a hundred people to take care of everything you’re bad at.

They don’t want you wasting your time on what you’re bad at, they want you doing what you’re great at.”

I’ve never been completely convinced that what I’ve proven myself to be good at (managing programmes, working with teams of people) is what I love doing. Every time I sit down to write, I find myself loving the process. Making connections with people across the Internet has been a passion of mine for thirty years. The geek in me looks longingly at people who work with code all day. I don’t know whether diving into LLM coding is the best use of my time. The last time I was doing any serious coding, we worked with raw text files in a text editor and a basic source control tool, way before Git and GitHub were invented. Is it even feasible to dive into the world of integrated development environments (IDEs) for any useful outcome if I’m snatching an hour here and there? I’m sure I’m overthinking it. Maybe a little dabbling would be good.

What I do know is that I want to learn more until I’m happy that I have a good working knowledge of how stuff works. In a recent Stratechery update, Ben Thompson talks about Amazon’s announcement of Nova Forge, a large language model offering that allows you, the customer, to incorporate your own data into the model training:

Right now you have two ways to incorporate your company’s data into an AI model: first, you can use RAG to basically have a model search your company’s data in the context of providing an answer. Second, you can post-train a model on your company’s data. The shortcoming in both approaches is that your company’s data isn’t actually in the model, which can lead to unsatisfying results.

Nova Forge is an offering built on AWS’s internally produced AI models; because they own the Nova models, they own the training checkpoints. What you can do with Nova Forge is choose a checkpoint — say, when the model is 80% trained — and infuse your company’s data at that point, so that the data is integrated into the model itself, and not simply searched or trained-in after-the-fact.

I think this is a really compelling offering, even if Nova is fairly middling as a model. After all, what is more useful: an OK model that actually knows your company, or a leading-edge model that is hacking around the edges to give relevant answers?

I understand this conceptually at a high level, but it isn’t enough for me. What does “80% trained” mean? What 80%? And why is that better than training the model 100% and then extending the training with your own data? (Does that make it a new 100%?) I don’t know where I can go to get into the weeds on this without getting mired and lost in too much technical detail, but I want to learn.

I’m not big on New Year resolutions, but I have been thinking about trying to get back into the habit of messaging old friends to say hello. (Although I will try and avoid turning into one of the small collection of LinkedIn connections that message me every year on my birthday. Do they do this for everyone? It must be exhausting.) I’m also going to try and answer the phone to people I know the first time they call instead of letting it ring out and calling back at a time that’s slightly more convenient to me.

Aside from pondering my life as I approach my half century, this was a week in which I:

• Spent some bike-related time with our youngest son. Early in the week I was about to leap on the indoor trainer but he suggested we go out. He did great, tackling a 65km ride and opting to climb Tom’s Hill right at the end. The only blot on the ride was three ridiculously close passes in a row by some dreadful drivers that had me fuming. The weather turned too cold and icy for any more outdoor cycling, but we reset a very old iPad and installed TrainerRoad so that he can attempt a structured training plan. Watching him do his first ramp test was a proud moment.
• Went for a 10km run with our eldest boy, the same day that I’d been out cycling with the youngest. It was fun, and great to be out running with him again. But at this point, I started to have my suspicions that they had colluded and were attempting to hasten my demise.
• Took a couple of trips to the indoor running track at Lee Valley with our eldest. Both times, the ratio of travelling to running time seemed way out of kilter, but it was great to have an excuse to spend some time with him.
  

• Found it challenging that the daylight hours are so short. As soon as you’ve done any activity, it seems as though the sun is going down.
• Had fun talking to Evan Schwartz, the software engineer behind Scour. He got in contact after reading my recent post on tools for discovering the IndieWeb. I love giving feedback on products and getting on board with other people’s ideas. We had a great discussion, and before the day was out he had already implemented one of the features that I suggested. It’s a really interesting tool to play with and I’ve been discovering some great blog posts through using it.
• Found out that in order to claim on the house insurance, there needs to have been a specific ‘event’ and not just wear and tear. I got in contact with our insurer to find out about the process of claiming for our recent roof leak, given that we’ll need re-roofing and redecorating to repair the damage. The very helpful representative told me that they use some specific weather databases to find out if there was a storm around the time that we think the problem started. If there was no storm, we can’t claim.
• Hand-washed the car with an actual bucket and sponge. We’ve had our current car for over five years and I’m not sure that I’ve ever washed it before. After numerous complaints on the dashboard that the cameras needed cleaning I thought it was about time I did it.
• Took advantage of the dry weather to finally vacuum up most of the fallen leaves in our back garden. I managed to fill up an entire bulk bag before running out of daylight. The next day we had a light dusting of snow, which hasn’t thawed yet, so the remaining vacuuming will have to wait.
• Enjoyed listening to Massive Attack’s Protection at the WB-40 Album Club. I don’t think I’d heard it since the 1990s. I found out that Plex on Sonos automatically searches across all libraries that you have access to, which is seemingly the only place that I use Plex where it does this. (I’d love this functionality to appear in PlexAmp.) I streamed the album from a friend and it sounded great.
• Got an impromptu invite to a friend’s New Year’s Eve party at their house a couple of streets away. Our children are now at the age where they want to spend NYE with their friends, but until they have fully locked-in plans it’s difficult for us to decide what we’re doing. Walking two minutes to a proper old-school house party was just what we needed. They are amazing hosts and we had a great time. I don’t drink very much, so I left around 1am as the party started to move into overdrive. Apparently it didn’t finish until 4am, which would be enough to give me a hangover without having touched a drop.
  

• Went back to the same friend’s house a couple of days later for our in-person Album Club. We listened to Lost Souls, the first album by Doves. They are a band with a fascinating history, who in 1993 as Sub Sub scored a hit with Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use). I first heard them as Doves on Come On Try Young a cover CD compilation that was given away with the NME in 2000. At some point I think I ripped a friend’s copy of Lost Souls into my iTunes library, but I don’t remember ever sitting down to listen to the whole thing. It was wonderful to do that this week.

• Went for a belated birthday dinner on New Year’s Day at Pluma in Amersham. The food was excellent, but it is one of those places where you miss out quite a lot through not eating meat.
• Went on the indoor bike trainer almost every day, as it is too cold to ride outside. I came across this video of cyclists coming off on black ice when the temperature was 5°C. This once happened to me on a mountain bike, so I’m happy not to risk it.

• Went to a friend’s 40th birthday party at a pub in Taplow. People had come from far and wide to be there, including Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa. He and his wife always have such an interesting group of friends at their events and it was great to meet some more of them.
  

Media

Podcasts

• I’ve been trying to catch up with my podcast backlog over Christmas but so far have only made it to mid-December. Pocket Casts now tells me that I exited last year with 1,801 podcast episodes listened to. I’m not sure if that’s a thing to be proud of.
• Ethan Mollick and Molly Kinder, guests on a recent episode of Your Undivided Attention on the topic of AI and the Future of Work, posed some useful questions. What do agile software development practices, such as a two-week sprint, look like when a software developer is many times more productive due to having an AI coding assistant? What does a daily standup meeting look like? The tools may be steering us into a world which is not optimal or equitable for workers. Who really gains from the upside of AI? They note that AI benchmarks are weird in that they try to measure whether an AI is better than a human; wouldn’t it be better to benchmark how much better the AI can make a human?
• Sharp Tech tackled an interesting listener question whose family discussions around the Thanksgiving family dinner table had a big anti-technology slant to them. The listener wanted some advice as to how to push back when these topics come up, defending technology in a hopeful way. Technological shifts can be difficult for individuals, but the benefits to society — and the whole world — have been immense. Ben Thompson pointed to the world shown through the works of Charles Dickens and asked whether people would really rather return to that. He also said that “I like to point to the agricultural revolution. 98% of people used to work in agriculture and today 2% do.” I think the number is off from a global perspective, but the point is well made.
• Really enjoyed Manton Reece’s appearance on the Software Defined Interviews podcast. His micro.blog platform is directly responsible for making me think differently about my site, and its philosophy gave me the mental permission I needed to write and post more. This week he posted on his site that “The call to action is clear. Get a domain name and start writing. Short posts, long posts. It’s okay if you haven’t figured everything out yet. With time it’ll all come together.”
• Arthur Snell’s conversation with former MP and author Bob Seely on the Russia-Ukraine conflict is terrifying.
  

Bob Seely: So we need to understand how to develop hard power in the new era. Fundamentally, that means understanding drone warfare and the fundamental changes in doctrine that are being caused by drones, by mass of drones, by automation of drones, swarms linked by AI and artificial learning … we have to keep a much closer eye on our internet cables and energy supply cables, because I suspect the Russians have probably already planted devices on them to be able to blow them up and destroy them.

British and NATO generals who say, fundamentally, doctrine hasn’t really changed are talking nonsense. One or two of them do say that. Quite a few of them now don’t. And unless we learn pretty quickly, we are going to be in a world of pain.

Unless you have an answer to the problem, what happens on day one of a physical — a traditional war, for want of a better term — in, let’s say, the Baltic Republics, when you have at 6am in the morning, at D hour plus 30 seconds, you have 10,000 fibre-optic linked suicide drones come at your bases … unless you have a phenomenally good response to that, you are going to be in a world of pain. And right now, there is absolutely no response. Just to say we have 300 big sexy missiles that cost a million quid each and can do some damage, great. They may not survive Russian electronic warfare, and you will run out of them by the afternoon on the second day of the war.

• The conversation did float some good ideas about raising awareness amongst the public about where we are:
  

Arthur Snell: it feels to me as if society really has a very shallow grasp on the seriousness of what is facing us and the degree of change that’s needed. How do we tackle that?

Bob Seely: I think you need an informed population, which is what we don’t have at the moment. When the government says we need to prepare for war, but is not actually spending anything else on defence, it is very difficult to argue that the government believes its own message … I think what you need is to educate the population. And I would say there are two things immediately that one can do.

You need an annual statement of threat. So the British state needs to produce, maybe under the guise of a respected parliamentary committee, which will take evidence from MI5, MI6, GCHQ, other people within government, that you have a serious look of threats that are emanating from other countries. Whether those threats are military, whether they’re economic, whether they’re informational, you know, the whole gauntlet of threat in order to counter the total war or the forms of, you know, total integrated hybrid, call it what you will, warfare of our potential adversaries. So we need a respected part of our institutions and our establishment in the UK to actually produce something of worth that will educate and help inform people separate from the work being done by government.

I would secondarily also have a statement of economic dependency where, again, a respected committee, which is free of government influence, will produce a statement to understand the threats, the economic threats specifically, and specifically the over-dependence on any specific countries, i.e. China, in our supply chains.

Articles

• Veteran news reporter John Simpson has written a sober summary of 2025.
• The Polymarket website came to my attention through a couple of routes this week. It’s a website that allows you to bet on pretty much anything, including notable world events. 404 Media have a write-up of how an ‘unauthorised’ edit to the front line of the Russia-Ukraine conflict led to a payout. Dare Obesanjo pointed to someone turning USD 32k into USD 436k by betting on Maduro being overthrown in Venezuela. Polymarket exists because of course it does. However, it’s jarring and hideous to see people make bets about conflicts, and it does make you think that as soon as there is money at stake, there is an incentive to bring that thing about in order for the bet to pay out.
  

• Rob Skinner has a lovely reflective post on his year of long-distance cycling.
• Dominik Hofer writes about “A more social IndieWeb”. I do feel that the rise of Facebook and Twitter directly correlated with a reduction in how many people comment on blog posts.
• Dries Buytaert’s blog has turned 20 years old. I love this paragraph in his post, which relates to the conversation I had with Evan Schwartz about Scour earlier in the week:
  

Blogging starts conversations with people I have never met. Blog posts become invitations that never expire. They wait patiently for the right moment to be found. Someone reads an old post, reaches out, and suddenly we are talking. Even in person, conversations start more easily because people already have a sense of who I am or what I care about.

• Rachel Coldicutt makes a good point about the rise of “the acadamisation of AI” whereas in actual fact, at a basic level, it isn’t that complicated. “The idea that AI provides some kind of mystical, over-intellectualised sekrit answer to all the world’s problems is primarily a great way of extracting cash from people with too much money.”
• Simon Willison’s summary of 2025 in the world of large language models is a typically superb read.
  

Video

• It was lovely to watch the final episodes of Stranger Things together as a family. Doing stuff like this together is so rare these days. I didn’t read anyone else’s review of the ending but I personally loved it, and am not ashamed to say that I shed a tear.
• No Hard Feelings (2023) is a pretty poor film, like a large language model’s attempt at a romantic comedy. The ingredients were there, but it failed. The two main characters didn’t do anything of note together and yet we were expected to believe that they developed a caring relationship. A much better movie along the same lines is Can’t Buy Me Love (1987), which has always made me feel like I’m in an underground club of people who have seen it and love it.
• We finished the first season of Pluribus. The ending was…fine? There are so many directions that the show can go in. I’m sure we’ll tune into the next season when it comes along.
• We had a family trip to the cinema to see Marty Supreme (2025). The acting was great, but about halfway through I found myself getting annoyed at such a super unlikeable lead role. The eponymous Marty reminded me a little of Joe Lampton, the central character of John Braine’s ‘angry young man’ novel Room at the Top, but with much less depth of feeling.
• A few days later we watched Beautiful Boy (2018), turning this into Timothée Chalamet week. It’s a hard watch, but beautifully acted. I loved the soundtrack, but the music ended up being a bit of a distraction from the story.
• I restarted my project to re-watch all of Fred Astaire’s musical films, accompanied by the big book by John Mueller that dissects each of them. Shall We Dance (1937) suffers from an extraordinarily weak storyline, but the Gershwin soundtrack and some of the dance sequences are great. The end of They All Laughed is particularly spectacular. Next up is A Damsel in Distress (1937) which I’ve ordered on DVD.

• The BBC’s Christmas Hits: The Videos That Sleighed worked for a low-energy hour. It felt as though it was cheap to make, with interstitial title cards filled with information instead of a narrator. I had no idea that Elton John and Ed Sheeran had teamed up to create a Christmas song in 2021. It’s dreadful, which is probably why it passed me by.
  

Audio

• Andrew at Parlogram has a good video on Why We Don’t Listen To Our Box Sets. I’m definitely guilty of buying more than enjoying. My music purchasing has slowed down recently as I really need to listen more to what I’ve already bought. I do long for those days where I could spend a couple of hours in my room, listening to a CD a couple of times as I read every word of the inlay, with hardly a care in the world.
  

Books

• Started reading Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman, a book that my wife bought me for Christmas.
  

Next week: Wishing our eldest son bon voyage as he heads back to the US, and getting back to work.

As it always does, Christmas week came and went so quickly. We started it with everyone in the house under the weather in one form or another, recovering from either illness or injury. I was feeling a profound tiredness in my bones. I definitely need the next two weeks off work, living life in the slow lane in order to recharge my batteries.

We spent Christmas with my wife’s family in Ross-on-Wye. Usually we would stay at my wife’s parents’ house, but for a bunch of reasons we wanted to make life easier for everyone, so my wife found us a lovely apartment in the nearby village of Whitchurch that we rented for a couple of nights. It was perfect for us. There were only two bedrooms, but our boys took it in turns to stay either in the second bedroom or on the extremely comfy large sofa in the living room. The place was cosy, but only once we had turned on all of the electric radiators and fan heaters. It was a little shocking to see on the meter that we got through £20 of electricity in less than two days, considering we were only really there in the evenings.

Just outside the apartment is a lovely old clock tower, built in 1867 and refurbished in 2010. The information board told us that it originally cost £200, which according to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator is £19,532 in today’s money. Given that the refurbishment cost £25,000, this sounds like it was a bargain.

Christmas itself was lovely, and it was great to be able to be with everyone but know that we weren’t imposing on them. We got to see all of our nephews and their families, and had some delicious Christmas food. It was a good time.

As well as going away for Christmas, this was a week in which I:

• Set my alarm early on Monday in order to get on my indoor bike trainer before a roofer was due to come and take a look at our house. It turned out that I didn’t need to be up so early as he ended up cancelling on us. After a couple of attempts at rearranging, we told him not to bother. Given that it is likely to be an expensive repair, engaging a roofer who can’t keep an appointment doesn’t feel like a good idea.
• Joined our neighbours for an annual Christmas sing-song in the street. Two of our neighbours organise it every year, bringing lyric sheets, hot chocolate, and mulled wine. I love that they do this.
  

• Had one of the worst meals of my life at The Potting Shed in Whitchurch. We booked the restaurant for dinner on Christmas Eve as it was a short walk from where we were staying. It had so much promise — a quirky barn conversion with a fireplace and lots of festive decorations. But the food was terrible. My wife and I had mushroom stroganoff, but the congealed nature of the rice pointed to it having come from a microwaveable pouch. The starters weren’t much better. The boys ordered steaks; our eldest sent his back as it was slightly underdone, but it came back with the consistency of a burger. We all decided to skip dessert as we knew it wouldn’t be any better. I get the feeling that this is the type of food that you used to find all over the UK, because the restaurants are serving people who don’t have a lot of choice if they want to eat out. Handing over £160 for what we had was painful.
• Got stuck driving up the High Street in Ross-on-Wye as the horses gathered for the Boxing Day hunt.
  

• Started watching the PDC World Darts Championship. Tuning in has started to become a bit of a Christmas tradition. I love the game; it has similar qualities to snooker in that players can start to overplay or overthink what they are doing, but it is much faster paced. Missing a few darts can be heavily punished if your opponent is on form.
• Reset an old iPad Air 2 so that we can set it up with Zwift for my youngest son to use on the indoor bike trainer.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Troy Hunt’s weekly update from the start of December has an excellent, balanced view on Australia’s new law banning under-16s from using specific social media platforms.
  

Articles

• Simon Willison has been cooking with Claude. I’m such an inexperienced cook that I think adding technology to the mix would just lead to disaster, but it’s interesting to read about his experiment.
• The Guardian has a great feature on “46 photos that tell the story of the century so far”. An incredible set of photographs.
  

Video

• Continued with Pluribus on Apple TV. We’re not done yet, but I’ve seen blog posts that react to the season finale in different ways, so I’m not sure how we’ll feel about it when we finish.
• Inspired by a friend who was doing the same, re-watched Coming to America (1988) with the family. My youngest seems to enjoy the same humour as me and stayed the course, but the others drifted away.
• Tried rewatching Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) courtesy of a friend’s Plex library. (It doesn’t seem to be available on any streaming services at the moment.) We gave up and turned it off as none of us were enjoying it. It’s a film of its time that hasn’t aged well. The whole Guy Ritchie ‘style’ seems so dated now.
  

Books

• Started reading Faithful Ruslan by Georgi Vladimov. I fancied some fiction for the holidays. This was thrown up at random by an Obsidian query that looks at my whole reading backlog. I originally bought the DRM-free ebook over a decade ago but hadn’t read it.
• I couldn’t resist a £10 copy of Photography: The Whole Story from our local independent bookshop. I’m not sure how long it will take me to read it, but I’ve made a start. It’s already fascinating.
  

Next week: Turning 49.

My last working week of the year. This period always has a strange feeling about it. The trains are slightly emptier, and the office is quiet. The cogs of the office are turning and everything is going through the motions, but the soul has dissipated, ready to return next year. As we approached the end of the week, more people started to drift away. My brain and body seemed to know that a rest was around the corner, as by Friday afternoon I felt exhausted. I’m ready to finish the year.

I wasn’t in the office as much as I originally planned, as a lot of the week was spent at hospital appointments with my wife. We went there on Tuesday with only a vague idea of what the specialists would say and do. After more examinations, they booked her in for surgery on Wednesday afternoon. I hastily rearranged my work diary so that I could take her there and bring her home. Unfortunately, she had to have yet another vitrectomy — her third — and laser surgery to repair her retina further, which then resulted in needing to live with a new gas bubble in the eye, eye drops every two hours and being told not to exercise or drive for a while. Our son drove her to a post-op check-up on Thursday, and we have another next week to make sure things are progressing well. We’re both crossing our fingers that there won’t be any complications from this point onwards.

This was a week in which I:

• Visited our shared meeting floor in our office now that the building contractor has finished and the space is back in our control. The work to install and configure our audio-visual equipment is going very well and the rooms are looking great. We did some basic testing of our large boardroom space with multiple Logitech Sight cameras ahead of drilling holes in the table to accommodate them.
• Met with our firm’s external auditors and gave them an overview of our part of the organisation.
• Had a call with our internal audit team about their plans for 2026, highlighting the audits that we will need to participate in.
• Met with the project team for our document management initiative to brainstorm the data dashboards that we need to create as part of the project. It was another great session, creating shared agreement around a whiteboard.
• Made some more updates to our bill of materials for a new office in a country where we recently set up business, adding a column for the next action so that we can clearly see what we can get on with now and what needs to wait until we’ve signed a lease.
• Validated the costs for a service agreement between our organisation and a sister company.
• Agreed what snacks we will continue to provide staff with for free once the company cafe reopens in January. Hopefully we are striking a good balance that will be appreciated by our staff.
• Made my final updates to my team’s year-end written appraisals and had the appraisal meetings with each of them. It’s good to have this all done before the year is out. Managing people and helping them with their careers is a part of my job that I really love.
• Had my monthly meeting with my executive partner from our technology advisory vendor.
• Ran our final all-team meeting of the year as an online PowerPoint Karaoke session. It was the first time for all of us. Seven people had signed up to take part ahead of the meeting and they did a brilliant job. Each one had to present a 10-slide deck within a six-minute time limit, having never seen the deck before. I love how people see things in random slides that I hadn’t noticed, weaving them into a narrative across their talk. We had a lot of fun. I think it would be even better in person, with some in-room laughter as people present.
• Had a lovely impromptu and reflective year-end catch-up with my boss. We’ve been working together on and off for 15 years now. The end of the year inevitably makes me think about where I am and what’s next work-wise. I need to think more about this going into next year.
• Enjoyed the final M365 Change Community Round Up meeting for the year. This meeting doesn’t yet attract a large audience, but it should. The next one is on 22 January; if you’re responsible for Microsoft 365 tools in your organisation, it’s worth joining for a look at what’s coming down the pipe — and as an added bonus, not all of it is Copilot-related.
• Searched for roofers to come and have a look at the leak we discovered last week. One roofer that was recommended to us by a neighbour came round and gave a quick assessment of the job, sending us an estimate later that day. Another roofer that we found through Checkatrade came over on the same day that we contacted them. After a quick look, he used a drone to explore what could be going on. I was amazed when he showed me that one of our roof tiles had slipped, leaving what looked like a 10–20cm gap. We could peer in and see that the felt also had some holes in it. From street level, it was impossible to see that the tile had moved. He then had his colleague scramble up a ladder and across our roof, making a ‘ladder’ on the roof itself by shifting some tiles up, so that he could put the slipped tile back in place as a temporary measure. I was so grateful, and couldn’t quite believe that they would do this there and then. As we are on a hill and have a three-storey house, the roof is so high. Even the guy that went up there remarked on how high he was and took some panoramic photos of the view across the valley. We’ll need to get the roof fixed properly, but hopefully this will stop more water from coming in over the next few weeks.
• Had a wonderful evening, meeting with a couple of old friends from school, one of whom I probably hadn’t seen in 20 years. She was one of my closest friends for a very long time. But then life happened — getting married, moving house, having children — and I’ve never been a great one for planning and instigating get-togethers. You know you are good friends with someone when you see them again, even after such a vast amount of time, and you immediately pick up from where you left off. It was a late night as I dropped everyone home after the pub closed before heading back myself, but it was totally worth being tired the next day.
• Spent Sunday at my mum and dad’s house for a fabulous Christmas family gathering. It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since we were enjoying an incredible Christmas all together in Mexico. My parents made an excellent Christmas dinner and we topped off the evening with some YouTube-powered karaoke.
• Enjoyed a relatively sedate weekly cycling club ride. It was good to be out of the fancy dress this week.
  

Media

Articles

• Writing my team’s annual reviews made me think about what I’ve heard Ben Thompson say on various podcasts: focus on doing more of what you’re good at — not necessarily what you enjoy — and find other people to do the things that you aren’t as great at. Steve Kamb wrote this up as The Glass Cannon Strategy.
• Paul Sinclair, the man behind the excellent Super Deluxe Edition website, has been profiled in the Financial Times. The website is a must-read if you buy physical music, particularly classic albums from the 1960s to the 1990s, as it profiles upcoming reissues, and highlights where there are bargains to be had. In recent years, he has been issuing limited pressings of albums on Blu-ray discs that include Dolby Atmos versions. I don’t have the equipment to play these, but I wish I did as the feedback about them has been universally positive.
• An amazing story about how Amazon detected that an employee wasn’t who they said they were through observing a longer-than-usual lag from their keyboard input. It turned out that the IT developer was based in North Korea. This is very impressive cybersecurity detection work.
  

Video

• Finished watching the remastered Beatles Anthology on Disney+. It’s a long documentary, but it still feels like a whistlestop tour that barely scratches the surface of their story. I remember being so excited to watch it when it came out in 1995, and then later my wife bought me the DVD box set as a gift. It’s weird to think that at the time we were 25 years on from the break-up of the band, and we’re now 30 years away from when the Anthology first came out. Given that the Get Back series that covered just a few weeks in the lives of The Beatles was nearly eight hours long, covering their whole career in 11 hours still feels like I’ve been short-changed. Give me the mega director’s cut anytime.
• Continued watching Pluribus on Apple TV. It’s really drawn us in. We have no idea how the series will end.
  

Audio

• Still have tracks from Gang of Four’s Entertainment! buzzing in my brain.

Next week: Christmas.

Last weekend’s start of a cold turned into a full-blown one on Monday. I went into the office as usual but felt as though I was wandering around with a hangover. Everyone was telling me to go home, but it never felt quite bad enough. That night and the next day were the worst, getting through tissues like a chain smoker gets through cigarettes as my eyes watered and drooped. I even got woken up in the middle of the night by a runny nose, something that I can’t recall ever happening before. On Wednesday I felt that I had turned the corner and was well enough to go in again, although my first hot drink of the day was a concoction of hot lemon and paracetamol. The cold never got too bad and I’m now largely over it, but it is still lingering.

This was a week in which I:

• Created the technology and real estate/facilities ‘bill of materials’ for our new office in North Africa. We are still deciding on the exact location, but we’re ready to go when we do. I reviewed the list with our CTO and Head of Infrastructure and Operations, adding more detail and getting aligned on the technology that we plan to implement.
• Finished the small project of replacing two separate taps with a mixer and making good on the paintwork in our multifaith room.
• Had the weekly meeting with our audio-visual design vendor, discussing our project to install technology in our shared meeting room spaces. There are a few minor issues, but things are on track and the space is starting to look great.
• Attended the monthly steering committee meeting for our sister company’s office refurbishment, which includes the shared spaces in our office.
• Met with our catering vendor to discuss options for providing staff with free snacks from next year once our shared café re-opens.
• Had a couple of meetings with the project team for our document management initiative for a walkthrough of the plan.
• Wrote up the majority of the appraisals for my team. It’ll be good to close out the annual reviews before the year ends.
• Met up with the Disability subgroup from our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team to discuss what should go into our strategic plan for the next few years. I joined the broader group the next day for a workshop, which was good but made slightly more difficult by me being the only remote participant. 9am in Johannesburg is 7am in London, and on a day that I need to be physically in the office it is difficult to take part right at the start of a session at that time. The discussions were great and I’m looking forward to working with the team again next year.
• Held my final staff meeting with my team for this year. We took some time to reflect on what we’d done and what we hope 2026 can be.
• Caught up with our colleague in our technology team who is based in our Beijing office.
• Spent some time at the weekend writing up the ‘wins’ from the past few weeks. I had lots of notes sitting in Outlook but hadn’t managed to find the time to tidy them up and post them to our long Teams thread.
• Took Friday off to get my wife to the hospital — more on that later — and to pick our eldest son up from the airport to welcome him home. I hadn’t seen him in person since mid-August when he left to go to college in Texas. We got to the airport early and spent ages looking out for him at the two entrance doors to the arrivals hall. He was hungry after his flight from Houston so we went for a late lunch at Nando’s on the way home. Within hours, it felt as though he had never been away.
• Added him as a temporary driver to our car insurance. £190 for three weeks feels simultaneously like very little, but also a lot. It’ll be handy for him to be able to drive himself places over the next few weeks.
• Went to our work Christmas party at Eight members club near Moorgate. Bizarrely, we had a Wild West theme, so colleagues were all dressed up in cowboy boots and hats, with the occasional inflatable horse. I went with the intention of cleaning up this town.
  

• Met up with a bunch of old school friends that I hadn’t seen in years. We went to the intriguingly named Roux at Skindles as a couple of our friends knew the singer who was performing that night. It was a strange place, located in a cul-de-sac at the end of a residential street, with lots of old people dressed up for a posh Friday night out. We had a great laugh; at one point we got onto the small dance floor. It was lovely to catch up.
• Caught up with old colleagues and friends at the pub, including some faces that I hadn’t seen in a very long time. Meeting up with them always feels like a glimpse into my future. Many of them were in the first team I worked in when I started back in 1999. Back then, I was a spritely, single graduate in my early 20s whereas many of them were married and had young children. Now a few of them have retired, and in a couple of cases they are grandparents. It all goes so quickly.
• Spent a lovely Saturday afternoon with friends, having a long lunch and playing party games involving balls of wool and various hats.
• Found a massive damp and mould patch in our makeshift cupboard in the eaves of our loft conversion. My wife has been saying for a couple of weeks that the cupboard smelt a bit damp, but we couldn’t see any signs. I was taken aback by how bad it looks, as it seems to have appeared very quickly. We’ve also noticed another patch close by in the hallway. I can’t see any obvious missing tiles, but I’ve got in contact with some roofers to investigate.
• Took my wife for what we thought was a final check-up of her second detached retina. Unfortunately — or fortunately? — they spotted that there was a small part of her retina that still needed some work. The thought that she would have to go in for another operation on her eye was absolutely gutting. We find out next week what they plan to do.
• Had a disappointing coffee and sad croissant at The Grocer at 15 in Amersham. We went there to kill some time between the hospital and the airport, but it didn’t feel like a treat.
• Enjoyed this year’s Berkhamsted Cycling Club Mince Pie Ride. Last year’s Christmas pudding outfit made it a bit difficult to manoeuvre on the bike and also acted as a parachute, so I figured it was time for a new outfit. A Christmas tree dress made sense as it meant I would be able to sit down on the bike unencumbered. It worked well. The start of the ride felt brutally cold, with my fingers screaming at me as we went up our first hill. But it was a beautiful, clear day. The sun was a menace as it reflected off the road. We passed through a village that had a timidly-placed ‘Road Closed’ sign, ignoring it as we continued on our planned route. As we turned the next corner, the riders in front of me braked sharply. It was hard to see due to the sun glare, and I could just make out the fact that the road was super muddy. The reason for their deceleration, and the reason that the road was closed, was that someone had fly tipped AN ENTIRE HOUSE in the road, stuffed with lagging, plaster and other rubbish. It was absolutely shocking.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Great episode of The Guardian’s Politics Weekly UK podcast where John Harris speaks to Yinka Bankole about how Nigel Farage treated him while at Dulwich College. Bankole was nine and Farage was much older. I’m not sure whether the allegations will stick or will make any dent in his popularity, but they should. Keir Starmer and the current government are deeply unpopular, but I do think that broadly they are good people. The Reform Party is filled with the worst of us.
• Pocket Casts has shown me that my podcast addiction has only got worse this year:
  

Articles

• Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image. You can’t trust any photo you see anymore.
• Java applets will no longer be a thing from March 2026. The applet I built for my undergraduate final year project hasn’t worked in a modern web browser for a very long time.
• I’ve been exploring what it means to ‘have a theory of change’ and came across Aaron Swartz’s very useful blog post which explains it well.
• John Gruber shows that the report about Marco Rubio getting the US State Department to revert to using the Times New Roman font over Calibri, effectively suggesting that he thought the latter typeface was too ‘woke’, wasn’t quite right.
  

Video

• Finished season one of Platonic. It was a lovely show, with a lot of laughs.
• Watched A House of Dynamite (2025) with the rest of my family. It started well, but soon became taxing. Idris Elba was completely unconvincing as the President, dealing with the biggest crisis he may ever face in his lifetime, and yet talking about something he heard on a podcast.
• Started to watch Wake Up Dead Man (2025), the latest Knives Out movie, but gave up after 10 minutes. The boys were looking at my wife and me and asking “What the heck are we watching?”
  

Audio

• I have a new album obsession. And that album is Entertainment! by Gang of Four.

Books

• Nearly, but not quite, done with Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy.
  

Next week: Another reunion, more hospital visits, and my last week of work for the year.

The past couple of weeks have given us properly grotty weather. Wind and rain with a few days of freezing temperatures thrown in. This was another busy week where I’ve been feeling that the year has caught up with me. I’m ready for a rest.

This was a week in which I:

• Went down to the construction floor in our office for an induction, so that I can go down there and visit when I need to. I’ve been given a hard hat, gloves, a gilet and a pair of steel-capped boots that feel about seven sizes too large.
• Had our weekly meeting with our audio-visual design vendor. We have a few more small issues to deal with, but nothing that is pushing the project off track.
• Met with colleagues to discuss our approach to digital content sharing in our shared meeting room spaces. By default, we don’t provide connections for people to plug into. Using a random USB-C or HDMI cable isn’t good practice as you don’t really know what’s on the other end, or what the equipment in the room will do. It’s better that an attendee joins the meeting from another device and shares content from there, giving them control over what’s shown and minimising the risk of everyone else in the room or on the call seeing pop-up notifications and content they didn’t want to share. Despite all of this, we know we’ll need to keep a couple of cables squirrelled away somewhere that our support staff can grab if they need to.
• Had the weekly meeting with our sister company on the progress of the construction works.
• Met with three of my colleagues from our Technology management team to review a core part of our infrastructure and discuss where we should take it in the future. It felt good to get in a room together for a small workshop like this as we hadn’t done it in a while. We’re going to need a few more of these sessions over the coming weeks.
• Reviewed the latest materials for our document management project and gave feedback to the team.
• Attended an ExCo meeting at the last minute in place of my boss, and surprisingly found myself with quite a bit to add to the conversation.
• Received a presentation from another technology team within our division of the company on their journey with AI so far.
• Gave a Learning Hour presentation on my visit to this year’s Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in Barcelona.
• Picked up a tin of spare paint for our Prayer and Reflection Room from the construction company working in the building. There’s a bit of touching up required following some additional works we’ve done in that room, so it’s great to have the original paint to make it good.
• Had a useful career-focused meeting with my boss, an external consultant, and colleagues from both our People & Culture and Learning & Development teams. I’ll get a report in a week or so and have some specific things to follow up with.
• Attended the latest South African Politics and Macroeconomics webinar hosted by our company. The material is always pitched at exactly the right level and I invariably come away much better educated about what’s going on.
• Joined the latest Teams Fireside Chat, this time with Ilya Bukshteyn, Corporate Vice President of Teams Calling, Devices and Premium Experiences at Microsoft. I gave some feedback on the Facilitator agent, which I’ve found to be incredibly noisy and annoying in every Teams meeting where someone has added it. The agent seems to be quite central to where Microsoft are taking the Teams meeting experience. I honestly don’t need to be babysat through a meeting, it just needs to be chaired well. If we’re having a good discussion, I don’t want to tune out of that to read through all of the content that the agent has added to the chat. Chairing a meeting is a skill to be learned and practised; Facilitator will get in the way of people doing that.
• Watched an internal webinar on understanding disability in the workplace, organised by our Technology Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum. The interaction from the attendees was excellent.
• Joined a Digital Showcase meeting where colleagues discussed their approach to coordinating AI-related initiatives across our division of the company.
• Had a wonderful night out with my friends from the WB-40 podcast Signal group for our now traditional year-end dinner. We had drinks at The Three Kings in Clerkenwell followed by dinner at Camino in Farringdon. The conversation is always splendid and I got to meet some new people as Lisa Riemers brought along her Intranet friends for a geeky mashup. (Her year-end post about what she did in 2025 is lovely.)

• Went out for dinner with friends in Berkhamsted. It was lovely to catch up with everyone who could make it, and we missed those that couldn’t. I’ve never been that impressed by The Fat Buddha; the food is super expensive for what it is, and not particularly tasty.
• Bought our Christmas tree, for the first time without the boys coming with us to get it. We went for one that was less bushy than usual, which seems a lot taller now we’ve got it home.

• Put up our outdoor Christmas lights, ready for the street’s synchronised Sunday afternoon switch-on.
• Went out with my youngest son, his friends and another of the dads, for a short training ride as they prep for a cycling holiday at Easter. My son had never used clipless pedals on a bike before and took to using them really well. I hope the weather clears up so that they can get out a bit more over the next couple of months.

• Started to get a cold over the weekend, keeping me from exercising on Sunday for the first time in a while. I’m hoping it’s just a minor thing and goes away as quickly as it showed up.
• Was so happy to see Lando Norris secure the F1 driver’s world championship title. It’s always good to see someone reach this peak for the first time. I’m already looking forward to the new season in three months’ time.

Media

Articles

• Ending my Spotify subscription has long been on my to-do list. The only thing stopping me is that one of my family members relies on our family plan for their music. Brian Merchant has put together an article on why quitting Spotify is a good thing, and why Qobuz is probably the best streaming platform to move to.
• HBO have made a complete mess of ‘remastering’ Mad Men.

Video

• Continued enjoying Platonic. It borders on ridiculous but stays funny and surprising enough to keep us watching.
• Watched a few more episodes of The Beatles Anthology. I’d forgotten how much I love those early songs from the very early part of their career.
• Finished watching the first part of Stranger Things season 5. This is one that all three of us at home have watched as a family. I’m looking forward to all four of us watching the final episodes together over Christmas when our eldest son is back.

Web

• The Washing Machine Project are bringing mechanical washing machines to the 50% of the global population that hand washes clothes. This burden is largely on the shoulders of women and girls. Their flat-packable machine saves up to 50% of the water and 75% of the time compared to hand washing. (Via Naomi Smith on the Quiet Riot podcast.)
• I do wonder whether the time we will save in the future by using AI will be more than used up by the time we will spend verifying and validating sources.

Books

• Continued with Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy. I have noticed myself trying to be more in the moment, looking at the things around me. I haven’t ditched the podcasts coming at me through my headphones yet though.

Next week: A Christmas party, two reunions with old friends, and our eldest son returns.

Another packed week, brimming with meetings.

This was a week in which I:

• Joined various meetings about our sister company’s office refurbishment project, ahead of the start of the audio-visual installation work in our shared spaces. The teams are working around each other and are on a deadline to get everything up and running before Christmas. We reviewed a couple of last-minute minor changes and snags with our audio-visual design vendor and agreed how we would manage them.
• Discussed ideas for the metrics that we should report in the quarterly management packs for our components once the shared meeting spaces are up and running.
• Had a great meeting where our project manager and I got around a whiteboard to map out one of our key security initiatives. There’s something about the process of starting with an empty canvas and filling it with pictures and words that feel like a shared understanding among the people that created it.
• Assisted with the work to decide on a long-term location in a city where we have just opened an office, outlining the time it would take from making a decision to fitting out and equipping each of the shortlisted spaces.
• Met with a colleague from Internal Audit as part of their kick-off work for an audit taking place over the next few months.
• Took part in our development team’s review of the items on their backlog.
• Stepped in for my boss at one of our legal entity governance committees.
• Met with our sister company for a financial review of the service agreement between our two organisations, and to agree the shape of the budget for 2026.
• Had the quarterly review of the performance of these same services.
• Learned that from the start of next year, feminine hygiene products will be available for free in the ladies’ toilets in our office. I’ve been asking about this for years, as it has always baffled me why this wasn’t the case.
• Caught up with colleagues to discuss a project that they conceived but that is now being run by another team.
• Met one-to-one with our two latest new joiners to the team, learning a bit more about their backgrounds and lives outside of work.
• Put together a slide on key achievements of the team this year for my boss to keep handy in an end-of-year review meeting.
• Met with the Technology Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum.
• Dialled into the end-of-year celebration for our broader Technology department, hosted in South Africa. There is always so much singing and dancing at these events. It looked impressive on the other end of a Teams meeting, so it must have been amazing to see and hear it live.
• Enjoyed the Microsoft 365 Change Community Round Up meeting, organised by Empowering.Cloud. At the session, Tom Arbuthnot, Darrell Webster and Daniel Glenn go through significant updates to the Microsoft 365 platform. Generally, the Empowering.Cloud events are excellent and are well worth signing up for if you work in this space.
• Wished good luck to a colleague and friend who will be out of the office for a few weeks to recover from surgery. She’s already missed, and we’re looking forward to having her back with us.
• Ran our fortnightly management team meeting in her absence.
• Took a colleague through the basics of using the YNAB app and following their process. My wife and I have been using it for nearly 15 years. Although the annual cost of about £80 feels like a lot, I’ve saved that money many times over through knowing exactly where I am financially at all times.
• Reported a bug to the team behind the Ulysses text editor. Selecting text caused the window to rapidly scroll up or down, with no fine-grained control. The issue was confirmed and fixed with an app update later in the week. An impressive turnaround.
• Helped our youngest son with preparation for a cycle touring holiday that he and his friends want to do next year. He’s not a cyclist, so the first step was buying a helmet, and the second step was finding a bike. The cycling club WhatsApp group came to our rescue, with two people wanting to sell their retired steeds for very good prices. After inspecting and picking one up, we spent a bunch of time over the weekend buying and fitting pedals and shoe cleats, as well as de-gunking previously tubeless tyres and installing a set of inner tubes.
• Went out for dinner in Berkhamsted with some lovely friends who we hadn’t seen in a long time. It was great to catch up.
• Had two Album Club nights, one online and the other in person. Usually I take a photo at the latter and post it to my blog, but I couldn’t face doing it with that album cover. Albertine Sarges’ Girl Missing was fantastic.
• Updated the About page on this website for the first time in a few years. I also added both a Now page and a statement about my use of AI.
• Opted to skip the Saturday morning ride with the cycling club and jumped on the indoor trainer instead. The weather has been pretty bad over the past few weeks and I’m not one for heading out when it’s raining. On Sunday I went for a run with my wife which ended with a coffee and pastry; these are the best kind of runs.
• Had my popcorn out to watch the F1 Qatar Grand Prix. Next weekend’s finale has all the ingredients of a very memorable afternoon.
  

Media

Articles

• Jamil Zaki suggests that Every Team Needs a Super-Facilitator in the Harvard Business Review.
• Will Larson says that “Good engineering management” is a fad. (via Simon Willison). He talks about management paradigms of the past 25 years, why things changed, and the core skills that persist across time. I need to come back and explore his site as it looks like there is gold there.
• I really like the work that HOPE not hate are doing to investigate Reform UK and hold them to account. Their fortnightly Reform Watch newsletter is excellent, with links to posts such as a profile of Kevin Byrne, Reform’s small business champion.
• The Press Gazette has a report about how ChatGPT gave an answer with paywalled content and then said it couldn’t have done it. I love this paragraph that neatly says why LLMs are bad at telling you how they work and what they’ve done:
  

Guardian head of editorial innovation and AI Chris Moran said: “Given the probabilistic nature of LLMs, asking them to explain themselves simply isn’t a thing. Anything from the moment you asked it to explain itself is simply not the truth – it’s a kind of ersatz apology or explanation constructed one token at a time in reaction to the previous context.”

• In stark contrast, I winced when I heard Michael Morton from MoffettNathanson say this on his Stratechery interview with Ben Thompson:
  

Michael Morton: So in conversational commerce, why it’s better and why it’s so fun to research this evolving subject is go ask the models. So I sat down, I asked ChatGPT, I asked Gemini, I asked all the different models, “Hey, when I ask you what’s the best running shoe, what do you do?”, and they’ll tell you, “We go read all the expert websites”. That’s what Mike did, they go look at the product build materials, they go read reviews like on Amazon and Zappos, that’s a whole other fight that’s going on. And so Google is looking at this more formulaic. Who’s bidding? What’s the conversion rate? Where’s the information? The models look at all the knowledge behind that.

• He reiterates this again later in the interview. Thompson does push back, albeit gently:
  

Michael Morton: Again, why I like searching this subject so much, and thinking about it is, ask the models. So, we ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and all the different models, “For an e-commerce query, what do you weight in your decision-making process?”, and from most important to least important. And the top three, number one is price, number two is trustworthiness, and number three is speed. Price, speed, trustworthiness, you start to see where this is going and then I asked them, “Okay, of these weightings, who does the best job at delivering?”, every single model, Amazon is number one, Walmart is number two and you go down the list, Target, Best Buy, eBay-

Ben Thompson: They could be making stuff up, though.

Michael Morton: They could, they could.

• Benedict Evans released his latest slide deck, called AI eats the world. The content is so informative, even without hearing Evans deliver the presentation.
  

Video

• Finished watching The Beast In Me on Netflix, an excellent thriller. We loved this.
• Started watching the 2025 remastered Beatles Anthology on Disney+. I’m really looking forward to Elliot Roberts’ review of this version. Apparently some of the episodes are shorter than the original 1995 release, and there have been lots of ‘enhancements’ through the use of AI.
  

Web

• Microsoft hosted a ‘European Digital Commitment Day’ in Vienna, Austria. It was interesting to see this pop into my inbox given the narrative about digital sovereignty at the recent Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo. I assume this is a response to the growing number of companies that must be looking at their core technology dependence on a major US company such as Microsoft.
• I loved looking through Alice Bartlett’s collection of photos from her 10 years of working at the Financial Times. I’m not sure what she’s doing next, but I suspect she’ll be great at it.
  

Books

• Trying to make time to continue to read Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy. I smiled when I read this — being at home as a child on a weekday at an unusual time absolutely felt strange and unfamiliar:
  

Next week: Out with the WB-40 gang for our seasonal meetup, and dinner with old friends.

A regular week, back in the office after last week’s trip to Barcelona. Things have suddenly turned very cold here in the UK. It’s feeling dark and wintry.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the weekly call with our audio-visual design company and agreed the design change to swap the digital signal processor for a different model.
• Met for a short debrief of the ‘Microsoft Copilot Week’ we held a couple of weeks ago.
• Joined our Copilot working group meeting. We had a brilliant demonstration from one of our colleagues in the front office on how she is using the tools. For years, in our Technology team, we have discussed the concept of people becoming ‘citizen developers’. We saw this as largely positive, as long as it is visible to us; we want to avoid the age-old situation of someone turning up at Technology’s doorstep with a critical Microsoft Access database that is now running some core part of the firm, but the person responsible for it has left. It seems that the motivation to experiment with Copilot is enough to get many people interested in going further. We talked about when it would be appropriate for someone outside of the Technology team to reach for Copilot Studio. I’m not sure where the boundaries lie or what needs to be in place to make sure that this work is done in a safe way, but we’ll need to think about it.
• Met with colleagues to discuss real-time audio translation in Teams meetings using Microsoft Copilot Interpreter, and the process we would need to follow to get it reviewed and approved for use within the organisation.
• Took part in our development team’s retrospective and sprint planning meeting.
• Spent time with our project manager to review the backlog of items on our Kanban board.
• Joined the kickoff meeting for an internal audit that is focused on our front office colleagues, but touches our technology space.
• Met with colleagues in our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team to agree the message and content for an upcoming ‘fireside chat’ on disability rights.
• Had my monthly call with my executive partner at our technology research consultancy vendor. It was good to catch up after last week’s conference.
• Met with our contract staff supplier to discuss their planned system replacement and its potential impact on us.
• Sat in on a briefing from the Economist Intelligence Unit where they shared a global and regional outlook, with particular focus on Africa.
• Had a conversation about how we manage people data throughout our organisation, and took an action to follow up with the core team that owns the technology.
• Joined the third ‘open house’ meeting of the Society of Hopeful Technologists. There are so many wonderful people involved with this initiative, doing excellent work to build on the meetings and discussions that we’ve had so far. Meeting interesting folk in the breakout room during one of these discussions is a joy.
• Had my first ever GitHub pull request accepted. My code is now part of the Feedbin connector for Tapestry.
• With some help from ChatGPT, managed to find a solution for publishing to this website and getting the posts picked up by micro.blog without having to disable and re-enable Cloudflare every time.
• Delighted in having our stairs carpet replaced. Our last carpet had 20 years of service and it was in a bit of a sorry state, with the bottom step becoming threadbare. It’s amazing how soft and bouncy the stairs are now. We’re still squealing with delight every time we use them.
• Met a couple of friends for a lovely dinner at Zaza in Berkhamsted, who we met through our children’s running club. We both now have one of our boys at university in the USA, so it was interesting to compare notes on how they are getting on.
• Had a follow-up with the gastroenterologist after my colonoscopy a few weeks ago. He found absolutely nothing wrong, so now wants to do a couple more tests in the next few weeks.
• Went to a great talk hosted by the Internet Archive about Cory Doctorow’s new book, Enshittification. He spoke for half an hour or so and then the excellent hosts did a great job of fielding questions from the chat. Internet Archive have some excellent events lined up which are worth checking out.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Caught up with this good 404 Media interview with Joshua Aaron, creator of the ICEBlock app. There is no justification for removing this app from the iOS App Store.
• It was fascinating to hear Troy Hunt talk about the challenges of sending large bursts of email on his weekly update. The nature of his data breach notification service at Have I Been Pwned means that when he loads a large breach, he suddenly has to send out lots of notification emails to subscribers. These can get throttled or marked as spam by the recipient mail servers, so he’s had to implement an outbound mail queue for popular domains to try and solve the problem.
  

Articles

• One day my journey between London Euston and Berkhamsted won’t be like travelling through a series of Faraday cages. I’m honestly not sure if that’s a good thing or not. Sometimes being disconnected is a feature, and forces you to do disconnected things.
• Heather Burns writes about how we should be concerned about Christian Nationalist rhetoric appearing at a public inquiry.
• Michael Tsai talks about ‘needy software’, and how it’s now impractical to live with auto updates turned off. It’s more about the development team’s needs than those of the end users. I think about that every week when Microsoft Office demands an update that forces all of my documents to close and reopen, with no noticeable feature changes when it happens.
  

Video

• BBC Archive posted another fascinating video from their technology archives, this time from 1979. Will Computers Revolutionise Education?
  

• I found myself going down a YouTube rabbit hole of watching people react to hearing Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights for the first time. Finnish vocal coach Anna Vaskelainen’s reaction is a joy, and I also loved Elizabeth Zharoff’s too.
• Bumbling about YouTube looking at these videos led me to Hue and Cry’s live cover version of Bush’s The Man With The Child In His Eyes from 1989. Superb.
  

• Finished watching Girlbands Forever on iPlayer. I didn’t follow the girl bands through the late 1990s and early 2000s. Although I recognised the big hits, most of the content and the personalities were new to me. Like its male counterpart, it’s an excellent slice of pop culture history.
  

Books

• Still reading Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy. I’ve loved discovering Pilvi Takala’s performance art, particularly The Trainee, where she starts doing weird things in the office at work and seeing what the impact is on the social cohesion of everyone around her. Sitting there “doing thought work” is the new staring out the window.
  

Next week: Two Album Clubs, and the start of the deployment phase for one of our key projects.

Most of this week was spent in Barcelona at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo. It’s the third time I’ve been¹, and I now feel I know exactly how to get the most out of my time there.

A few weeks before the event I scroll through the full schedule of the literally hundreds of sessions on offer at the conference, adding anything that looks remotely interesting to my agenda. This sometimes results in having five different things to go to at the same time, but on each day of the conference I will download the slides of each session in order to decide which one would be most valuable to attend. The ones that I missed are available in the Gartner Conference Navigator app and on their website for a little while after the event if there is anything I really want to catch up with.

As one of the largest financial services companies in Africa, our firm was well-represented with attendees from very different parts of the organisation. On Monday a few of us went out for dinner; it was great to catch up with old friends and make new ones.

I spent a lot of time at the Xpo, talking to various vendors about their products and thinking about whether they solved any problems that we have. By far the most interesting was the Island web browser. The product looks excellent and the staff were excellent at explaining and demonstrating its capabilities. I also had fun with the Chrome Enterprise team, showing them this Skeleton Claw sketch as we discussed what their offering was all about.

On Tuesday night we went out for dinner organised by Gartner with other delegates from financial services organisations in the UK. I got chatting to someone from a brokerage firm in London. Our conversation turned to cycling. Although neither of us could remember meeting, it turned out that we are members of the same cycling club, riding in the same speed group, and I already follow him on Strava. It was one of those moments where I wondered ‘what are the chances?’ But then, after thinking about it a bit more, I figured that for two people working in finance in London, living in a nice suburban town, they are probably quite high.

Our conversation at dinner turned to the topic of Chocolate Bath Olivers, which a fellow guest declared to be the pinnacle of biscuits. This is serious stuff. My scouring of the web has shown that these are almost mythical, with small production runs and nothing in stock anywhere. I’ve made a mental note and will continue to try and get my hands on some.

The conference is always a gastronomic treat and this time was no exception. As well as the seemingly endless stream of snacks and drinks, on Wednesday night I revisited Blu, a vegan restaurant that served me a black pizza a couple of years ago. This time the waiter recommended the veggie burger, which may be the best I have ever had in my life. I took one bite and then stopped to take a photo as I wanted to remember it.

The food intake was offset by morning runs. I managed to get out for a run along the coastline on three of the four mornings that I was there. The weather was perfect, not too hot or too cold, and I took in some beautiful sunrises.

Here’s a summary of the sessions I attended:

Keynote: Walking the Golden Path to Value with Rob O’Donohue and Gabriela Vogel

• I first encountered Rob O’Donohue at the 2023 Symposium. He gave a fascinating presentation on neurodiversity, but unfortunately it was scheduled late on Thursday afternoon, when most delegates had already left the conference. We’ve subsequently had him come and present to our whole team on the same topic. It was great to see that he’d been asked to give the opening keynote, which must be a career highlight for any Gartner analyst.
• I always have mixed feelings about the keynote. It’s a presentation that tries to resonate with 6,500 conference delegates from different countries and industries, each with different roles. The presentation is impeccable, but the content is often quite bland and generic. This one was about a ‘Golden Path’, which is the middle ground between AI skepticism and AI hype.
• They spoke about ‘AI Readiness’ and ‘Human Readiness’ on an X/Y axis as a ‘Gartner Positioning System’, and mapping your AI initiatives to it to see how ready you are for them.
• Enshittification got a mention, so it has clearly broken through into wider consciousness.
• The presentation seemed to assume that AI has massive value just waiting to be unlocked, but throughout the week there still seemed to be a dearth of actual case studies and use cases that were presented.
• Anthropomorphism was off the charts in the slide deck, with ghostly human-like figures made of networks of glowing dots representing AI.
• “People are discovering [with AI] what they can do, not being trained on what they should do.”
• 71% of CIOs surveyed by Gartner say that their people are not ready for AI.
• There are lots of hidden costs with AI, and companies can accidentally end up implementing projects that have negative value.
• It was interesting to see OVH, Atos and Hetzner mentioned as EMEA-based companies looking to rival the big infrastructure platforms. Data sovereignty — and, in this presentation, AI sovereignty — was a theme throughout the week. There are EMEA AI startups, but the presenters said that they are not enterprise-ready yet.
• It was interesting to hear about a Gartner study that looked at job loss data for the first six months of this year. Only 1% of those job losses were directly attributed to AI. They warned the audience about making redundancies, as Gartner still think there will not be enough skilled staff to do the work. ”Reskilling and upskilling are not perks, they are survival.” You can’t let your security and critical thinking skills atrophy; who will be happy when there’s nobody left in the organisation who knows how to code?
• I liked the term ‘behavioural byproducts’ to describe some of the effects of deploying AI tools in an organisation. It’s important to understand what people will do, and are doing, with the tools and what it means for the company.
• Resourcefulness without experience has limits and risks.
• They floated the concept of training ‘an AI’ on someone’s data — their emails, meeting recordings, code reviews etc. — where they have been with the company a while and are near to retirement. This would allow them to ‘live on’ within the organisation beyond their leaving date. It’s a fascinating idea which leads to questions of compensation and what you’re actually signing when you agree an employment contract. It completely horrifies me.
  

Develop Your Digital Sovereignty Strategy to Survive in a Global Market Full of Uncertainties with René Büst

• A really interesting look at geopolitical risks and what some organisations are doing about digital sovereignty. Given the move towards fascism in the US, people are now asking more questions about the risks of where their infrastructure and data is hosted, and who is managing it. As the presenter said, the trigger for looking at this in 2025 is geopolitical tensions and economic warfare. If you’re Denmark, and another country has publicly expressed a desire to annex part of your territory, you might not want to host all of your digital assets with a company located in that hostile regime.
• Getting on a sanctions list can suddenly take away your ability to use cloud services, potentially ruining your business.
• There are no guarantees that data will stay where you think it is.
• “Convenience is your enemy.” Nobody will protect your digital sovereignty. You must do it.
• Don’t confuse security or compliance with sovereignty — they are not the same things.
• Saying “no” and going your own way can be powerful in the long term. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Finland offered its old analogue telephone exchange system to Estonia for free. Estonia declined the offer and built its own digital system. It has a very strong technology culture.
• There were lots of more recent examples, with government entities all across Europe moving from Windows to Linux, from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice or OnlyOffice, and Nextcloud.
• It got me wondering about what the UK government is doing in this space. The main things I’ve seen in the technology space with recent UK governments have focused on them wanting to get in on the AI action through cosying up to the existing, mainly US-based, companies. I really hope there’s a better strategy than this.
• Actions:
  
  1. Define your sovereignty requirements
  2. Specify and mitigate your sovereignty risks
  3. Identify areas for immediate action
  4. Decrease your dependencies
  5. Re(-design) for portability and focus on open standards
     

Lunch presentation with Jo Malone on Leading with Creativity

• Jo Malone is an extraordinary individual, growing up in a council house, having severe dyslexia, and leaving school at 13 to look after her mother, who had a stroke. She went on to become one of the world’s leading perfumers, founding multiple businesses. Her story of her battle with cancer, and how the pioneering treatment robbed her of her sense of smell for a long period of time, was amazing.
• My main issue with ‘celebrity’ sessions like these is that they don’t seem to fit into the theme of the conference very well. They feel like a bolt-on, without much to take away and ponder. There is something about seeing a famous name that I am sure lots of delegates enjoy, but they are not for me.
  

The CIO Cybersecurity Playbook for 2026 with Paul Proctor

• This was a dense presentation, with lots of material in the slides to review after the session.
• CISOs have their top priority as ‘don’t get hacked’, followed by everything else. CIOs have a top priority of ‘IT service delivery’, followed by everything else — including not getting hacked.
• The session covered the cybersecurity operating model, including whether the CIO is a cybersecurity lead or cybersecurity peer, and common areas of conflict between CIOs and CISOs.
• Gartner have a ‘Cybersecurity Business Value Benchmark’, which covers lots of the operational metrics that it would be useful to see when looking at cybersecurity performance and risks.
• Cyber risk should be positioned as a business decision and not a cybersecurity one, balancing the value of protection against the needs of running the business. It’s a choice about what we spend and the corresponding reduction in risk, but we don’t tend to treat it like one.
• A protection-level agreement can be made that balances cost versus performance, for example how often patching takes place. However, even if you had an infinite amount of money you wouldn’t necessarily patch everything within zero days as this doesn’t make sense.
• Gartner have a new tool for assessing third-party cybersecurity risk that looks useful.
  

Your Culture Is Shaped by the Worst Behaviours You Tolerate with Mary Mesaglio

• I picked this session primarily because of the speaker. Mary Mesaglio delivered a great presentation on How AI is Changing Human Behavior and What To Do About It at the CIO Leadership Forum in March, so I was really looking forward to hearing from her again.
• On reflection, the title of this one felt a bit clickbaity.
• It focused on three points: inspiration (new behaviours we should start seeing), inhibition (old behaviours we should stop seeing) and preservation (behaviours we should protect). I’ve always known this as ‘start, stop, continue’.
• In addition, she added two dimensions across these three points — big, department-wide messages and small, day-to-day ones. Leaders tend to overuse the big change messages and underuse the smaller signals.
• Some of the suggested example messages were uncomfortable, such as “You are not allowed to ask for approval”. I get the intent in that in this case the employee is meant to make decisions themselves with the delegated power to do so, but this isn’t the same thing as saying “you are not allowed”.
• Mesaglio highlighted the concept of ‘AI shame’ in the workplace, where people may feel that they have missed the window and are afraid to speak up. It’s part of the leader’s job to make this okay and to help equip them with the skills for the future.
  

AI in Action — Value, Governance and Leadership Insights with Margrethe Vestager, interviewed by Nader Henein

• This was an interview rather than a keynote speech to start the day at the conference.
• I’m not sure ‘AI in Action’ was required in the title, as this really wasn’t what the session was about.
• It was interesting to hear from a politician that had been involved in so much European litigation and legislation in relation to the big technology firms.
• She told us that she keeps a statue of a raised middle finger in her office. It was given to her by a Danish trade union when she was deputy prime minister and pushing through welfare cuts. She keeps it to remind her that her decisions will always upset some people.
  

Maximise Value of AI in Banking with Sophia Palmstedt

• I found this session too broad and hand-wavy, with suggestions such as “Don’t bolt AI onto broken banking processes. Instead, use AI to reinvent the process itself.”
  

Keynote: Supercommunicators with Charles Duhigg

• This was an excellent keynote by a superb presenter, based around his book Supercommunicators. I love sessions like this, as they give you a lot to think about and are immediately practical.
• He spoke about three types of conversations: practical, social and emotional. I immediately made the link to hearing Merlin Mann say “Do you want to be helped, heard or hugged?” on The Talk Show podcast. Duhigg went on to say exactly that, so now I’m not sure who came up with it. Either way, the advice is very good. When someone is telling you about a problem, or how they feel, it’s useful to check in on what they need. This is called the ‘matching principle’.
• He suggests asking deeper questions than ones that just elicit facts. If someone says “I’m a doctor”, don’t ask “Oh, what hospital do you work at?” Instead, ask something like “Oh, what made you decide to go to medical school?”
• Questions like these feel good to us as we are asking someone to be vulnerable.
• Vulnerability is a neural cascade that happens when I tell you something that you might judge me for.
• Duhigg gave an example of Dr Behfar Ehdaie, urologic surgeon and prostate cancer specialist, who for some patients was recommending active surveillance instead of an immediate operation. In many cases, surgery carries more risk than keeping an eye on the cancer. However, most people still opted for surgery. He found that he had to talk to the patients on an emotional level, asking “What does this cancer diagnosis mean to you?” Only then could he move on to a practical conversation about what the patient may want to do. Since he started taking this different approach, the number of patients that have opted for active surveillance has gone up by 70%.
• Duhigg asked us to talk to the person sitting next to us — in my case, a stranger — and ask the question “When was the last time you cried in front of another person?” Duhigg’s experience is that people don’t like the idea of doing this, but having done it they generally have a very positive experience and connection with the person they are talking to. He asked us to ponder what an equivalent question might be for us in the workplace.
• This question is number 30 out of 36 in the ‘fast friends procedure’. This is a set of 36 questions which have been shown to create intimate connections between people.
• Proving we are listening shows that we want to connect. To do this, remember the ‘loop for understanding’:
  
  1. Ask (preferably deep) questions
  2. Summarise what you heard
  3. Ask if you got it right
• Step three is important: if you acknowledge that I was listening to you, you are 20% more likely to listen to me.
  

Keynote: Never Give Up with Bear Grylls

• I was deeply sceptical about attending this keynote that started day three of the conference. I’ve never been convinced by Grylls, and his involvement in baptising Russell Brand in the River Thames less than a year after a Channel 4 documentary covered allegations of sexual assault against Brand was too much for me.
• A keynote is the only thing going on at the conference first thing in the morning, so I wandered into one of the overspill rooms to watch this one. The presentation was as trite as I thought it would be. Never give up!
  

How Best-In-Class Organizations Defend AI Risks with Marissa Schmidt

• This was effectively a presentation on a process to determine and mitigate risks in general, with a sprinkling of AI in there too. That isn’t to say it was bad, but there wasn’t much new to me here. You could reuse most of the content and apply it to other technologies too.
  

Leadership Greatest Hits — 2025 Edition: A Playlist of Actions for CIOs to Lead Better with Rob O’Donohue

• A second helping of Rob O’Donohue after the opening keynote. He is an excellent presenter, and this was a jam-packed presentation.
• The presentation used the concept of ‘Gartner’s Leadership Compass’, which shows that a leader needs to look up (at senior management and the board), down (at the people that work for them), across (the organisation), out (beyond their company) and within (at themselves). Each one of these was tackled in turn.
• He presented a smorgasbord of tactics, along with pointers to additional ones in the appendix that he didn’t have the time to go through in the time available.
• I wasn’t sure about the advice to be more aggressive in vendor negotiations, playing games such as turning up late and leaving early from meetings.
• Since 2007, the number of CIO job descriptions mentioning a requirement for social skills has increased by nearly 30%. Over this same period, the number of CIO job descriptions mentioning strength in managing financial and material resources has reduced by almost 40%. Social skills matter.
• There was a callback to Charles Duhigg’s keynote from the previous day with ‘the understanding loop’. When repeating what someone said back to them in your own words, ask “Did I get that right?”
• O’Donohue suggested putting together a ‘failure résumé’ in order to normalise failure for your people. Be honest and authentic. Don’t overthink it or dwell on negativity.
• You don’t need to be on an aeroplane to put your phone in airplane mode, getting rid of unwanted notifications for a while.
  

From Disruption to Direction: CIO Strategies for Leading the Workforce Through Major Change with Matt Hancocks

• That’s Matt Hancocks, not Matt Hancock, Google search engine.
• He was a good, clear presenter but I found myself sceptical of the content.
• Hancocks took us through three case studies of organisations that have navigated major change.
• The first was the Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Pacific, part of the US Navy. They were trying to reignite employee engagement and came up with something called ‘The Ghostcutter Chronicles’, a fictional, serialised short story experience. They used staff interaction with this series as a way to crowdsource ideas. I have to admit that I got a bit lost with this example as it seemed overly complex and convoluted.
• The second example was of AAA Banking, who wanted to move from a legacy branch platform with brick-and-mortar locations to a 100% digital platform with only one physical branch. This would involve both a staff reduction and movement of staff to new locations. The way the company tackled this — and I stared in disbelief at the slides — was through the invention of a weird fuzzy character called ‘Spot’ who would be “the voice of change”, sending bi-weekly emails to employees where he answered questions, shared updates and addressed issues. ‘He’ had an inbox to receive anonymous questions and concerns, and included a ‘banking “dad joke” in every communication’. If I was going through a potential layoff, my feeling is that this would just generate anger and frustration, thinking that the leadership of the organisation was completely tone-deaf. I mean, just look at him:
  

• The third example was of an airline that took a more conventional approach to layoffs as they moved their systems to the cloud. They had a weekly all-hands meeting along with smaller, focused monthly ‘connect’ sessions with 10–15 people in the organisation, as well as general upskilling training for everyone. This all sounded sensible, but wasn’t revolutionary.
  

Keynote: Re-Wiring For The Future with Dr Michelle Dickinson

• Dr Michelle Dickinson is a nanotechnologist and materials engineer who has worked with Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Richard Branson.
• She moved to New Zealand and created Australasia’s biggest nanotechnology lab.
• Dickinson was a good presenter and an incredible individual, but I didn’t find much to take away from the keynote that stayed with me afterwards.
  

The CIO Role: Navigate Evolving CIO Leadership Accountabilities with Daniel Sanchez Reina

• This was a really interesting presentation that examined the various technology-related roles that you find in organisations — the Chief Information Officer, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief AI Officer, Chief Digital Marketing Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Chief Transformation Officer, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, and the Chief Digital and Information Officer, for example — and looks at how to manage the messiness caused by overlapping roles.
• “Technology leadership is distributed and ambiguous. Even in a team sport, you need clear responsibilities.”
• You need to work with other people. Leadership is about harmony, not about how loud you can be.
• He presented the concept of the ‘Technology Leadership Accountabilities Grid’, with Run/Grow/Transform on the Y-axis and Internal (back office and core operations)/External (front office and products/services) on the X-axis. You can use this to talk about where the boundaries and accountability lie between different roles.
• Things get much blurrier when more than one person is involved. Examples:
  
  • If the CDO needs infrastructure, how will that work?
  • Who looks after cybersecurity?
• These need to be written down and agreed.
• Complexity explodes with each additional technology executive. Especially when they have no budget or headcount, but responsibility for outcomes.
• Team members will need the map to see exactly where their responsibilities are.
• Tech accountability is not and will not be the same in all organisations. Value will only be achieved through the constant renegotiation of responsibilities with other tech domains.
• 65% of technology leaders want to do more transformational, client-facing things. To do this you must be good enough at your current scope and also be able to exploit your sources of influence.
  

What You Need to Know About China’s AI Innovations with Tong Zhang

• A lot of this content was familiar to me, probably as a long-time listener to Stratechery, Sharp China and Sharp Tech.
• It was interesting to see that consumer usage of Generative AI went from 8% in June 2024 — over 18 months after ChatGPT was released — to 43% in May 2025. This was attributed to the release of Deepseek.
• WPS is a product similar to Microsoft Office in China; it has over 600 million Office AI users.
• The presentation had lots of narrative about ‘open source’ models (but I am not sure if these should be more accurately referred to as ‘open weight’?)
  

Aside from attending the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, this was a week in which I:

• Had to manage a couple of calls and keep up with a few email threads at work throughout the week.
• Met with the company who are building our new boardroom table to give them feedback on the latest detailed design and answer their questions. The sales rep booked a meeting in my diary for Friday afternoon using the link in my email signature. This creates a diary entry with a Teams dial-in, so I was caught off guard when our office reception called me to say that I had a visitor. Everyone who was joining the meeting was working from home. We managed to quickly book a room and get him into our office so that we could all get onto the call together.
• Had the weekly meeting with our sister company about their office refurbishment project, as well as the work being done by the landlord.
• Met with our audio-visual design consultants to work through an issue related to the digital signal processor that was part of the original design. We’ve found an incompatibility between some of the components, so need to implement something slightly more complex than we had hoped.
• Made progress with my team’s annual appraisals.
• Took part in the second Society for Hopeful Technologists online event, leading one of the breakout groups through an exercise skilfully organised by some of the members of the group.
• Submitted my first-ever pull request on GitHub. I’ve recently been using the Tapestry app on my phone, iPad and Mac to have a single merged view of social media posts from Bluesky, Mastodon and micro.blog. Manfred Lizner-Scherf created a plugin that reads posts from Feedbin and incorporates them into the timeline. Unfortunately this didn’t work for me as it kept producing errors. Using a combination of the Tapestry Loom app on my Mac and ChatGPT, I managed to debug it. After testing the small fix, I submitted it back to the developer. I was a hands-on geek once, and this gave me a small taste of what life might have been like if I’d stuck with coding.
  

Media

Video

• Watched Human In The Loop (2024) on the recommendation of someone in the Society of Hopeful Technologists Signal group. It’s a short film that makes important points about the hidden world of the low-wage people involved in training AI systems, but some of the other elements of the story felt a bit distracting. I’d love to see a full deep-dive documentary on this topic.
• Gave up watching Being Eddie on Netflix after getting about halfway through. Eddie Murphy was a childhood favourite of mine, but this documentary is so incredibly boring. Given his significant involvement in the project, I guess it was always going to be.
• Also gave up watching All Her Fault on NOW TV after an episode and a half. The storyline is silly and the acting is super-hammy. I really struggle with watching something that is meant to be realistic but requires a massive suspension of disbelief.
  

Audio

• Took a trip to Deco Audio to browse their second-hand CDs, picking up four new ones for my collection.
• Cantilever looks interesting. It’s similar to how MUBI used to work for films, making a feature out of scarcity, with a new title being added and one dropping off each day.
  

Web

• Got this site added to powRSS. There are lots of tools now available for discovering blogs and blog content. I like the feature of this one where you can get sent to a random post from any time in the past on any of the blogs in the database.
  

Books

• Have been enjoying Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy. It’s super well-written and rewards longer reading sessions.
  

Next week: Back in the office, and a couple more online meetups.

1. See my previous write-ups from 2023 and 2024. ↩

After starving myself for over twenty-four hours last week ahead of a colonoscopy, this week I once again found myself going without food for a whole day. Unfortunately, this time it wasn’t planned. We’re not sure whether it was food poisoning from the prawn-based dish we cooked on Sunday night or some kind of stomach bug, but it whacked both me and my wife from the early hours of Monday morning.

I was up at 4am feeling horrible, with a stomach ache and the shivers. When my alarm went off, I went into my morning routine of having a shave and jumping into the shower, but as the water cascaded over me I realised that I couldn’t face being stuck on a train, feeling like I might be sick. Reluctantly, I climbed back into bed and only got out again two hours later.

One of my colleagues had come over to London from Johannesburg for the week, and I had planned to spend a lot of time with him. He was running a hybrid workshop first thing, which I managed to dial into, but halfway through I had to run away from my desk in order to vomit. Somehow I managed to get through quite a few things in the first half of the day. As the afternoon rolled in, I found myself struggling to keep my eyes open as I read a document at my desk, so I gave in and moved to the sofa for a nap. I hadn’t realised that my wife had also been suffering badly until she came in from work and told me that she’d only eaten a small rice cake all day. I cooked our son’s dinner and we both left him to it as we headed up for a very early bedtime.

I made it into the office for the rest of the week but was only really feeling myself again from Thursday. I was suffering from a bit of brain fog, and seemed to oscillate from feeling fine one minute to having the shivers again the next. Most of the week was spent sipping cold soft drinks, taking paracetamol and nibbling at bland food, as I had no appetite for anything even remotely fancy. (Thank goodness for cheese and Marmite mini ciabattas from Starbucks — they certainly have their place.) I wondered whether the process of flushing my system the previous week had left me with weakened gastro-based defences against whatever this illness was.

This was a week in which I:

• Attended a few of the Microsoft Copilot-themed workshops that a colleague had organised for our region of the organisation. We worked with a vendor who secured the services of a trainer who is also a Microsoft MVP. He had an excellent delivery style, and undoubtedly helped to move everyone who participated along in their learning from wherever they had started the week. I resisted the urge to be a pedant about some of the things he said, such as when he anthropomorphised the AI, as it felt as though this would do a disservice to the people in the room. It’s better that they get their heads around the technology first; we can then start to examine some of the problematic aspects of it when they are on the bus.
• Learned that you can enable an ‘Excel Labs’ add-in, which then allows the AI to make direct changes to your spreadsheets. I’m not sure why this is still in ‘labs’ mode, given that files saved to Microsoft 365 include automatic version history.
• Had a good meeting with colleagues who have been working on and sponsoring a data-based initiative that we have been running. We heard some good ideas on what we should look at next, which could be extremely useful in supporting our business strategy.
• Had the weekly meeting with our audio-visual designer on the progress of our project to implement technology in the shared meeting room space in our building. The integrator is going to make a minor tweak to the aesthetics of a small component of the setup, as we requested. They have also raised a technical issue that we’ll need to address quite quickly.
• Joined a call with colleagues to talk through the booking process for the meeting rooms in this shared space once the floor reopens. There shouldn’t be any major changes to how it previously worked, but everyone is a little rusty as the floor has been closed for most of this year.
• Prepared a slide for, and attended, the Steering Committee meeting for our sister company’s office refurbishment project. We’ve got the go-ahead to proceed with our installations a few weeks ahead of the building company vacating the shared spaces.
• Met with our sister company’s Head of Workplace Services to go through a list of topics relating to the office refit and the reopening of our shared spaces. It always amazes me how many details there are that I hadn’t previously considered.
• Met with colleagues to discuss the status of a planned security change.
• Did some preparation with a colleague for a go/no-go meeting that was planned for the end of the week. The meeting itself was superb, with a well-crafted pack and excellent narrative that meant everyone seemed to have context and understanding ahead of a discussion and decision. Strategically, we asked for questions to be held back until the end of the slide deck and this worked well; our team are always very engaged, but there was a risk that we would have got stuck on an early slide. We’ve come up with an approach that everyone around the table has bought into and have a clear way forward for the project.
• Wrote my submission for the next governance committee meetings for one of our legal entities.
• Had a catch-up with an old colleague who I worked with many years ago, who left our sister firm in the pandemic and has returned. It was great to see him and hear about what he’d been up to.
• Enjoyed a lovely lunch in the office with two members of my team. Our newest member had offered to bring in homemade food for our colleague visiting from Johannesburg. I had a little bit of the vegetarian part of the meal, which was delicious. One of the best things about working for our organisation is how diverse the culture is, which offers no end of things to talk about as we break bread together.
• Met with someone from our technology research and advisory firm to talk about their product that brings together CIOs for discussions and networking in more intimate settings than the forums I’ve been to so far. I am so lucky to have been involved in the WB-40 podcast community for many years, developing real and valued friendships with technically-minded senior leaders. I think that this is the company’s way of trying something that might end up achieving similar things.
• Joined a webinar organised by BIE on The need for Transformational Leadership in 2026. Their webinars that I’ve attended in the past have been superb, particularly the one which explored the lived experience of two transgender members of the British Armed Forces. Unfortunately, after 15 minutes it felt as though this session wasn’t a good use of time — the panel were discussing high-level topics in very broad terms — so I abandoned it.
• Pondered whether the drinking water tap in our office is sentient. Half an hour after arranging the date of its annual service visit, it suddenly died. It may have been listening to us. We’ve once again had to put alternative arrangements in place for water until it gets fixed next week.
• Joined my youngest son’s parents’ evening online. He’s nearly through his first term of sixth form already. Time continues to accelerate.
• Took part in the first ‘open house’ event of the nascent Society of Hopeful Technologists. We had about 25 people attend, giving their input on the draft charter and exploring what things might look like in 2030 if the Society is doing a good job. It’s always so lovely to get in a room with people who are willing to give up their time, even for that meeting, in order to try and make a difference.
  

Media

Podcasts

• I caught up with Your Undivided Attention’s episode on Neil Postman, ‘the man who predicted the downfall of thinking’. I know a podcast episode is good when I pause it to write down a quote or two. They discuss Postman’s idea of ‘media ecology’, the study of media as environments. Modern democracies were created by a typographic media environment; long-form texts lend themselves to deep thought, reasoning and discussion. When the telegraph came along it sped things up, giving people less time for considered thought and reflection. Then television became the dominant mode of communication, emphasising appearance and personality. (I remember when I was younger people talking about John F Kennedy as having had a great face for television, and this continued to be important.) Social media is now dominant and it is tuned to fight for attention, so people who grab that attention win. Politicians have gone from needing to be attractive and likeable to holding attention, including through outrage. I thought the conclusion was really striking (which I have lightly edited here from what I assume is an automatically generated transcript):
  

Tristan Harris: So a thought I’d like to leave you with, there’s a quote from the introduction of Amusing Ourselves to Death that has always stuck with me, where Postman compares two dystopian visions for the future. The first presented by George Orwell in 1984 of surveillance, of Big Brother, and the other presented by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. Postman wrote: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books, while Huxley feared that there would be no reason to ban a book for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us, while Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture, while Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.” As Huxley remarked: “The civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” And it was Postman’s fear that it would be Huxley, not Orwell, whose prediction would come true.

• Alex Andreou makes a good case for the narrative about offenders being wrongly released from prison in the UK as a moral panic, according to sociologist Stanley Cohen’s definition. The paper-based system in the UK has contributed to prisoners being wrongly released for years, but a narrative has now suddenly sprung up about it.
  

Articles

• ”South Africans in financial distress are turning to gambling in their millions”. I often wonder when we will start to treat gambling like smoking. Here in the UK, I see gambling adverts everywhere, with a token nod to the person the ad is aimed at to ‘gamble responsibly’ or stop ‘when the fun stops’. I doubt these messages will make any difference to someone with an addiction.
  

Video

• Continued to enjoy Platonic. I’m glad one of the minor characters pointed out that Rose Byrne’s character is Australian as I was worried that she was just bad at an American accent.
• Along with seemingly everyone else, I watched the final episode of The Celebrity Traitors. I’d only started watching a couple of weeks ago and it pulled me in. The winner was superb.
  

Web

• Prompted by a post on social media, re-read Merlin’s Wisdom Project. There’s something for everyone.
  

Books

• Continued enjoying the nuggets of wisdom in Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals:
  

Next week: Symposium.

Without beating around the bush, the major event of this week was a colonoscopy. This year I decided to follow up with a couple of minor medical issues that I’ve experienced in the recent past, figuring that there would be no harm in getting them checked out by the experts. This specific procedure was recommended by one of the consultants as a precautionary measure, given my reported symptoms, my age, and what I believed to be my family history (but later found out wasn’t quite correct.) I’d never had a colonoscopy before, but I happily agreed. I’m generally not squeamish about medical things, particularly when the alternative to a procedure or examination would be to ignore a potentially bigger problem.

Researching the process on the Internet was confusing. In the USA, they typically administer a general anaesthetic before the procedure. In the UK, they usually give you drugs such as fentanyl, but not enough to completely knock you out. Both of these approaches seemed to point to it being painful. But there was also a narrative about how it doesn’t really hurt at all; it can just get slightly uncomfortable as they pump air into your intestine so in order to have a good look.

A couple of days before the procedure, I had a call from a friendly person at the hospital who talked me through what to expect and the choices I had. I hadn’t realised that if you have an anaesthetic, you aren’t insured to drive for 24 hours. This was the clincher for me. My colonoscopy was booked for Monday, and my wife had her own post-op check-up at another hospital the next morning which I needed to drive her to. I planned to opt out of the drugs.

From Saturday morning I had to go on a diet which was made up of things that I’ve always understood as less healthy. White bread, white rice, cheese — absolutely nothing with fibre or seeds in it, such as brown bread, fruit or vegetables. We had lunch at a cafe with my wife’s parents; ordering a plain white bread cheese toasted sandwich made me feel like a toddler. On Sunday morning I had my final meal around 10am, a few crumpets topped with butter and slices of cheese. I wasn’t allowed to eat anything again until after the procedure on Monday afternoon.

The worst part of the whole event was the prep on Sunday evening. At 6pm I had to prepare and drink a pint of Plenvu laxative. They advised drinking it through a straw, and I can see why — it was meant to be mango flavour, which sounded like lots of fun, but it tasted like a puree of highlighter pens. I couldn’t imagine taking big gulps of it. I then had to follow it up with a pint of water, which after the laxative felt like nectar from heaven. It didn’t take too long before my insides were grumbling as the mixture did its thing. The worst news was that three hours after the first dose, I had to do it all again. This time the drink was ‘fruit punch’ flavour, and incredibly it was even worse than the first. I finally got to bed just before midnight, feeling thoroughly cleansed from consuming this human Drano. I’m not sure of the science of how the Plenvu mixture works, but I woke up around 4am with a major thirst. From this point I was only allowed to drink ‘clear’ liquids, which included tea and coffee without milk, finally stopping intake of everything a couple of hours before the procedure.

London Bridge Hospital was unlike any other that I’ve been to. After a short wait in reception, I was escorted to a private room that had everything you could need: a private bathroom with shower, a big TV, a safe for valuables and a room service menu. It was more like a hotel. It reinforced how privileged I am to get private healthcare through my employer, being able to get seen so quickly and to be treated so well.

As the procedure time approached, I changed out of my clothes and into the ‘dignity pants’, along with a medical gown and robe. The consultant paid me a flying visit, talking me through my sedation options; I chose to go with just gas-and-air, avoiding anything that would make me drowsy, and he seemed to think that was just fine. After signing a consent form, that in retrospect I had little time or inclination to read, we were ready to go.

A porter collected me and we wandered down the corridors until we came to the procedure room, where I was asked to hop up onto the examination bed. There are lots of people involved — a gastroenterologist to work the endoscope, another to take notes on what happened, and a third to monitor the patient and generally check that they are ok. This third person put a heart rate monitor onto the end of my finger, showed me how to take deep breaths from the gas-and-air mouthpiece, and told me to lie on my side with my knees up to my chest. Before I had time to gather my thoughts, it started.

The gastroenterologist seemed highly skilled, and worked at speed. It really wasn’t painful at all, just uncomfortable or slightly awkward at certain points. Either side of the bed there was a large, high-definition screen showing a view from the camera and it was fascinating. It reminded me of being a kid, sitting watching a science programme on TV with my dad, except this time the body we were looking inside was my own. The endoscope they used was an incredible tool; as well as a high-definition camera and light, it also had the ability to spray water so that the medical team could get a clean look at different parts of the bowel, as well as an implement with crocodile-clip-type jaws that could be used to take small biopsies. Every time they went to take a sample, the gastroenterologist said “open….”, to signify that the crocodile jaws were extended, and then a firm “closed” when they snapped shut and took their sample. His colleague made a note each time this happened, presumably so that the samples and their source locations could be correlated afterwards. Each one was completely painless. They can also use the endoscope to remove ‘polyps’ that grow in the colon which have the risk of becoming cancerous in the future, but there were none to be found.

A couple of times during the process they asked me to move onto my other side to help with manoeuvring the endoscope. This was a bit awkward, with the scope inside me, a heart rate monitor on my finger, and my other hand clutching the gas-and-air, but they quickly got me into the right place and carried on.

I felt a little surprise and much relief when one of the team told me that they had reached the end of the colon. I knew then that it wouldn’t be any worse than it had been up to that point, and I was feeling very pleased with myself for not needing any other medication. The gastroenterologist continued to look at things as the camera was navigated back to the surface, but didn’t spot any issues. I felt weirdly proud when he complimented me on how well my bowel preparation had gone, as it meant that they could get a clear view of everything they needed to.

And, as quickly as it started, it was all done.

After saying my goodbyes to the team, they wheeled me into a recovery ward where another nurse monitored me for ten minutes or so before they pushed me back to my room. A few minutes later, room service turned up with the egg sandwich on granary bread that I’d ordered earlier, as well as a cup of tea. Later that day, after more than making up for not having eaten for twenty-four hours, I had some mildly painful stomach cramps, but they went away very quickly.

My overwhelming feeling after the procedure was how amazing it was to have been able to have such a fascinating glimpse at parts of me that I had never seen before, and to have been in such good care for the whole process. If I have to have another in the future, it won’t worry me at all.

Aside from my medical adventure which took up most of Monday, this was a week in which I:

• Continued to make preparations for a colleague’s visit next week. We met with two of our group’s existing vendors to see whether they could help us to get some Microsoft Copilot expertise into our office. Our internal team quickly put together a schedule, communication plan and a vendor contract; all of a sudden we had a ‘Copilot Week’ available for our staff.
• Joined the project meeting for the opening our new entity in a new country.
• Attended our Infrastructure Architecture Governance Authority meeting where we reviewed a tool we are using to capture detailed data on our IT infrastructure.
• Met with colleagues from our Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Forum to discuss the disability aspect of our portfolio, what we want to achieve, and how we might approach it.
• Had the weekly meeting for our sister company’s refurbishment of their office and our shared working spaces. We’re getting close to the next busy period on the project, so the work is now to align the detailed plans and keep making good decisions in order to keep the overall end date on track.
• Completed the review of the first draft of a revised services agreement between another company and ourselves, after working with a colleague to reconcile the costs that need to go into the document.
• Met with colleagues to discuss our approach for prioritising and staffing work on one of our key initiatives from next year.
• At the request of a colleague in Eswatini, had an introductory meeting with one of the UK’s leading IT infrastructure and service providers.
• Met with our team for our monthly Lean Coffee session. It fascinates me to observe which topics spark broad participation; it’s not always the ones I expect.
• Completed no less than six surveys, including psychometric tests and details of my career history and aspirations, as part of a ‘development journey’ process organised by my employer. This was followed up with an interview with an industrial psychologist. During the interview, she administered a ‘Complexity Navigation Test’, which used a series of online card games to explore how I approached problem-solving challenges in ambiguous situations.
• Had lunch with my account manager from our technology research and consulting vendor.
• Took my wife to the hospital for a check-up on her eye, a couple of weeks after her operation. It’s all looking good and she was given the all-clear to start driving again.
• Deleted my Flickr account. It was fun back in the day, but over the past few years it had become a regular nag to upgrade before they ‘really, really, really’ were going to delete anything that didn’t fit into the free allowance (but never did), as well as the occasional notification that someone had favourited a picture in a slightly unnerving way. I’m sure that I’ve broken a few links, but I’m glad to let go of the mental overhead of thinking about it.
• Sold our 16-year-old broken Mini to webuyanycar for just shy of £300, 18 months or so after we bought it for £3,500 and then spent over £1,000 on an MOT and minor fixes over that time. We’d taken it to a local specialist garage for investigation and works, but after we got it back we had even more problems. Further examination by the garage found that it was actually uneconomical to repair. The good news is that after some badgering, the garage offered to refund the fee we paid for the initial diagnostics and we got a £500 refund on our car insurance after removing the car (and our young driver) from the policy. We can live without the second car for a bit as our eldest son is at university and our youngest isn’t yet 17. When the time comes, I think we’ll look at the cost of leasing a cheap, new car; I’m guessing that the cost will be slightly higher, but it will be more predictable from a maintenance perspective.
• Went into London on a Saturday afternoon with my friend Mat to see Anna Calvi at EartH. It’s always fun to wander into Dalston as there are so many interesting one-off places to eat. We found ourselves looking at the menu for Mersin Tantuni, right next to the venue. The owner wandered out and asked whether we were there because we’d read Yotam Ottolenghi’s mention of the restaurant in today’s Guardian. We hadn’t, but it was good enough reason to wander in anyway. As we sat down, the owner very proudly passed us a copy of The Guardian’s magazine, opened at the page with the article. The food was great, leaving us both stuffed. The venue itself was quite something to look at; a beautiful Art Deco theatre with a massive stage but uncomfortable tiered seating, made bearable through hiring cushions from the back of the room. Dear Pariah opened the show with her solo alternative folk, in stark contrast to Anna Calvi’s gigantic band that included multiple percussionists, a string section and a series of guest singers peppered throughout the evening. The music was excellent and we had a great time.
  

Media

Podcasts

• I’ve fallen weeks behind on podcasts, both because of not having been able to exercise as much as I’d like (which is usually quality podcast listening time), and my regular shows seeming to think that more and more output is a good thing. At some point I end up declaring bankruptcy for a particular feed and opt out of it. Podcasters, be warned!
• In October, Microsoft ceased mainstream support for Windows 10, despite it being the version of Windows used by 42% of the install base. Due to the requirements of Windows 11, many of the computers running Windows 10 are likely to be scrapped. 404 Media have a deep dive into what they say is an “e-waste disaster in the making”.
• On the Aboard Podcast, Rich Ziade makes an excellent point about AI-generated ‘slop’ videos such as those in OpenAI’s Sora and Meta’s Vibes apps:
  

Here’s my take on it. If you have unlimited inventory, nothing is interesting. […] You gotta kinda constantly reach for the stimuli hit, right? And I think my problem isn’t the output. Because look, it’s kind of crazy that these videos are being produced so quickly and they’re big and colorful and interesting, but if you give me an endless supply of them, then you’ve commoditized everything and nothing can be interesting, because my brain can only ingest so much at a given point in time.

• This is an interesting counterpoint to the narrative that I’ve heard from Ben Thompson at Stratechery, who sees the AI tools enabling more people to be creative. There will be a lot of rubbish, but there is likely to also be a group of people able to create great, compelling art where they might not have been able to before. I guess both things could be true at the same time.
• The WB-40 podcast conversation with Tris Oaten on writing tools is excellent. He mentions Typst, an open-source replacement for LaTeX, which I haven’t come into contact with since I left university but I assume is still widely used. Oaten also quotes Bill Condon:
  

No piece of writing is ever finished, it’s just due.

Articles

• An incredible story of Dave Richards, a cyclist who suffered a horrendous cycling accident at the hands of a driver who was both drunk and on his phone in the middle of the day. The NHS has provided him with a 3D face prosthetic to give him back some of his quality of life.
• I love, and agree, with the title of this 404 Media article: “Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human”. After Grokipedia’s launch, I went out of my way to up my monthly donation to the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia is something to cherish, not something to be crushed under the boot of the world’s richest man because he doesn’t like what it says about him. John Gruber also puts it well:
  

At launch, Grokipedia is to Wikipedia as a chewed piece of gum is to a fresh piece of gum still in its wrapper. And imagine that the gum was chewed by someone with a dipping tobacco habit.

• Baldur Bjarnason boils down how he sees software as a medium:
  

The best way to deal with software – making it, using it, dealing with it as a creative medium, coping with it as a maker of other creative media – is to understand it as it really is:

A creative medium driven by fashion that operates with limited regard for practicality or productivity.

• Ben Werdmuller has written an excellent post about how there’s no such thing as neutral technology.
• I had a conversation with a colleague at work about what I have learned is called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. This is the phenomenon where you read an article in a newspaper or magazine on a subject that you know a lot about, and spot all of the errors and flaws in what has been written. You might think it’s a bad article. Turning to another in the same publication on a topic that isn’t your speciality, you take what’s been written at face value. This translates directly into a world of LLM-generated content; you need to know enough about your subject to be able to detect when the thing that has been generated is incorrect, otherwise there is an assumption that the machine output is right.
  

Video

• Absolutely loved Riot Women. The writing and the characters are excellent, so much better than it looks like it is going to be from the picture. There’s a moment in the programme where we were laughing along with the characters at a silly moment, only for it to morph delicately into something tender and tragic. Superb.
• Was disappointed with the latest season of Slow Horses. The characters are still fun, but it felt like it was over before it got started. Nothing much seemed to happen.
• Loved Sophie Wilson talking about her memories of the early days of Acorn Computers, the Acorn Atom, the Proton/BBC Micro and the invention of the ARM microprocessor. The video is part of a series celebrating ARM’s 40th birthday.
• Watched the first episode of Girlbands Forever. So far, it’s another typically brilliant slice of cultural history that the BBC are so good at.
  

Web

• I’ve been using Microsoft Copilot Researcher quite extensively over the past few weeks. I’m looking forward to trying it out in a mode where it has access to a computer.
• Curb Your Enthusiasm had an amusing storyline about Larry David creating a ‘spite store’. This week I learned that spite houses are a thing.
• The Trump Action Tracker is doing a very structured, forensic job of keeping the receipts on the second Trump administration.
• Owls in Towels is a wonderful Mastodon account.
• Richard Littler posted a wonderful collection of Kids’ TV/horror movie mash-up posters.
• How about a $20k magic home robot that is actually remotely controlled by a human operator for all but the most basic tasks? AJ Sadauskas sees it as a backdoor way for people to employ low-wage servants.
• The International Criminal Court are looking to move off software platforms based out of the USA, such as those provided by Microsoft, due to the threat of sanctions from that same country.
  

Books

• Have been chomping my way through Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman after it was recommended by a friend. It has lots of snippets of wisdom. I need to heed his words about how to treat my reading pile, and also apply it to my podcast inbox too.
  

Next week: A full week in the office and a meet-up with some Hopeful Technologists.

There was something about Monday. You could just feel it. I got to the office, checked my diary, and for the first time in months I saw a meeting-free afternoon stretched out before me, full of possibility of all the productive things I might do. It wasn’t to be.

John Steinbeck described such a day in his novel Sweet Thursday:

Some days are born ugly. From the very first light they are no damn good whatever the weather, and everybody knows it. No one knows what causes this, but on such a day people resist getting out of bed and set their heels against the day. When they are finally forced out by hunger or job they find that the day is just as lousy as they knew it would be.

On such a day it is impossible to make a good cup of coffee, shoestrings break, cups leap from the shelf by themselves and shatter on the floor, children ordinarily honest tell lies, and children ordinarily good unscrew the tap handles of the gas range and lose the screws and have to be spanked. This is the day the cat chooses to have kittens and house-broken dogs wet on the parlor rug.

Oh, it’s awful on such a day! The postman brings overdue bills. If it’s a sunny day it is too damn sunny, and if it is dark who can stand it.

Half an hour in, one of our team members came over to report that we had a major leak from the sink in our coffee area that was spilling out onto the floor of our office. Our maintenance and cleaning teams quickly responded, but it eventually became clear that we had a major problem with the drain. A pump had failed, causing the build-up of wastewater, food, and drink that people had poured down the sink, presumably over many months. As the team investigated the problem, my colleague and I had to go on human traffic control duty, directing people away from the area and pointing them towards our drinks fridge. When it was clear that the drain wouldn’t return to service that day, the team put up a barrier and we got bottled water in place for staff. Working in a small office in a team that looks after both technology and facilities is nothing if not varied. But the disruption meant that I didn’t get to do the things I had planned with my free time.

Some people in the office seemed grumpy. People outside the office seemed grumpy. People on the WhatsApp group for our street were definitely grumpy. It was a grumpy kind of day, and it was good to see the back of it.

The pump was fixed and put back in place late on Tuesday afternoon, with the only impact being that for a couple of hours a chunk of our office smelled of dirty drain water again.

Aside from cosplaying as Mario, this was a week in which I:

• Had an impromptu meeting with a client-facing colleague who has been trying to get a project off the ground. It’s a small initiative that could turn into a bigger one. Before asking my team to dive in, we had a couple of meetings with colleagues in the Technology teams at our head office to see whether they were aware of the requirement, whether there was a suitable home for it, and what barriers there would be to prioritising it. The conclusion is that we will need to do the initial analysis ourselves.
• Was happy that our building contractor finally solved a long-outstanding issue with noisy airflow in one of our meeting rooms.
• Represented our Technology team at the Governance Committee for one of our legal entities.
• Spent more time talking through the proposal to make a change to our security setup, weighing up the risks versus the friction that it would impose on the organisation. One of my friends who I met via the WB-40 Podcast Signal group, a leader in cybersecurity, was extremely helpful in giving me more perspective on the problem and how we can approach it.
• Collaborated on some planning for a colleague’s visit to our office in a couple of weeks’ time. Part of his work involves leading our collaboration on Microsoft Copilot and other AI-related tools, so we are looking at how we can structure a week where people have the opportunity to get involved but we don’t bombard them with lots of meeting invites and updates.
• Caught up on my outstanding mandatory online training courses.
• Had a conversation with a colleague about approaches we could take to cleaning up and maintaining our regional intranet site.
• Met with our development team for their sprint retrospective and planning session.
• Had a random-coffee-esque meeting with one of my colleagues from our Technology Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum.
• Bumped into a colleague who used to be the CEO of our office in Beijing. I reminded him that early in 2020, when he was stuck in London, he gave a talk in our office about how COVID-19 would eventually impact everyone. I vividly remember what he said, as only a few weeks later we headed home for the best part of two years.
• Had my monthly call with my Executive Partner at our technology research and advisory firm. I always enjoy our calls.
• Attended a webinar on our performance management process, as we are about to enter the year-end review season again.
• Had a meeting with a colleague at our sister company to demonstrate our digital signage platform. It’s hands down one of the best value for money platforms that we’ve implemented over the past few years.
• Completed a batch of psychometric-style tests as part of a career development programme that I have been enrolled in.
• Started to think that we should be actively railing against anything that presents AI in a humanoid or robotic form, like the images below. It’s lazy, and plays into the hands of the companies that want us to believe that their systems are magic boxes. I’ve seen some people say that your text should be polite when you draft a prompt for a large language model. I think we should do the opposite. Be abrupt. Be rude if you like. Keep the distinction in your head between how you talk to people and how you address the machines.

• Joined a meet-up hosted by FDM on Fake News, Real Risks: AI, Deepfakes and the Battle for Truth. It was the third in a series of talks that they have run on the topic of AI. Chris Paterson’s section was particularly fascinating, as he took a deep dive into disinformation in the UK. I liked the framing that Brexit is the first example of a country putting sanctions on itself, given the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast of a 4% long-term reduction in productivity. If you (or, let’s say, Russia) had funded a disinformation campaign that led to the Brexit vote, it was probably a good investment to do that kind of damage to the country’s economy.
• Met with the medical consultant to review the results of the MRI scan on my shoulder. He recommended a steroid injection followed by physiotherapy. I had the injection on Thursday and it’s already feeling a bit better.
• Spent Saturday visiting my wife’s parents, taking them out for lunch and helping them with a few bits and pieces around the house.

Media

Articles

• Colleagues who have started interviewing at work gave me cause to dig out Joel Spolsky’s The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing. 25 years after it was first published, it still resonates with me.
• The European Broadcasting Union and the BBC released a report that says AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time, regardless of language or territory.
• I pay £20 a month for access to ChatGPT Plus as I get utility from it, but I’ve never felt good about it. Stories like this reinforce my view. I’m not sure how long I’ll continue to pay.
• Ian Dunt wrote the most beautiful piece on the melancholy of the changing seasons and of getting older:

I increasingly have the same feeling with foreign cities. When I was in my twenties, I used to look around Madrid or Paris with a sense of wonder and excitement, imagining what life would be like if you lived there. Today, I often feel a sense of slightly pathetic yearning, because I realise that this is unlikely. Not that it couldn’t happen – it could – but it is unlikely to happen, for all sorts of work and non-work related reasons. So now, when I see someone sweeping those lovely little Spanish balconies or sitting in those French cafes where the seats face the street as if it were a cinema screen, I feel I am at a tipping point, where my life is balanced between the possibilities which have not been adopted as much as those which still remain.

• Tim Urban is back with a typically entertaining take on having young children.

Video

• Elliot Roberts’ worst-to-best review of Ringo Starr’s solo work, with a whole bunch of side-quests to look at other aspects of his life, is an absolute masterpiece. Despite considering myself a very big Beatles fan, I’ve never heard a Ringo album before. I might just give one of the top four a go sometime. Boy, do I love a deep dive into pop culture. I can’t wait to find out what he chooses to work on next.

Web

• ChatGPT Atlas has just turned up, and my first thought is ‘privacy and security nightmare’. I can’t imagine using a web browser where my data is, more than likely, exposed to OpenAI on a constant basis. AI blogger Simon Willison agrees. David Gerard thinks it may help OpenAI to scrape hard-to-reach content. It’s fair to say that I won’t be using it.

Books

• Nearly finished with Jon Savage’s The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979).

Next week: Medical checks.

Two and a half years after it happened the first time, my wife developed another detached retina, this time in the other eye.

Late on Friday afternoon, my wife texted me to say that she felt as though it was happening again. She tried all of the opticians in town for an emergency eye examination; only Boots were able to fit her in, but not until the following day. The optician couldn’t see anything, but they were happy to refer my wife to the hospital for a closer inspection. On Sunday we arrived at an incredibly quiet Stoke Mandeville Hospital, where they confirmed that her retina had indeed suffered a slight detachment. They booked her in for emergency surgery at 7:30am the next day, told her to go home and minimise movement to avoid making it worse.

My wife is incredibly brave. The operation itself is simultaneously a miracle of modern science and the stuff of nightmares. Having people poke and prod at your eyeballs with needles and various instruments is very high on the list of medical procedures I hope I never to need. But she just went into practical mode, putting one foot in front of the other to get it done. Having been here before, we found it much less terrifying as we knew what needed to happen.

Her post-operative recovery is going much better than the first time around, mainly because they somehow — and I don’t understand how — managed to avoid putting stitches into her eyeball. This means that she doesn’t constantly feel as though she has grit in her eye. She’s putting in eye drops four times a day, waiting for the gas bubble to slowly dissipate as her eye refills with fluid.

When the NHS works, it is amazing. We’re so fortunate to have access to these incredible facilities that are free when we need to use them.

This was a week in which I:

• Was extremely grateful for the team’s well wishes and offers of help when I had to go to the hospital with my wife instead of going into work. People can be so kind.
• Reviewed progress on our document management initiative with the project team, and drew the rough outline of an approach to make a start with the changes.
• Got a purchase order in place with the integrator that will fit out the shared meeting spaces in our office with new audio/visual equipment. As soon as the document was issued, we got a meeting in the diary with our AV designer and the integrator team to review our timeline and agree next steps.
• Had calls with the project manager at our sister company about their office refit. We had some work done in our office a couple of weeks ago that turned out to be incorrect, so the construction company had worked on a plan to put it right. I also got to review the proposal for some thoughtful changes to the set-up of our company café which is due to reopen in a few months.
• Got the order placed for the new table, chairs and credenzas for our largest internal meeting room. They will be significant upgrades to what we have today. Hopefully we’ll be able to get them delivered and installed by the end of the year.
• Had an internal meeting followed by a meeting with Microsoft on how we can structure a Copilot-focused week in our London office.
• Reviewed a colleague’s plans for their long-distance trip to another of our offices this week.
• Updated slides for two of our regional governance committee meetings, including a summary of our position on AI-enabled voice recording and translation tools.
• Made updates to the project status deck for the opening of a new office. We’re now only a few weeks away from the launch event, but the project work will continue well beyond this date. I also consolidated the various threads on our approach to the technology in this office to try to ensure that everyone has the same understanding of what we’re doing.
• Joined our monthly operational risk review meeting.
• Listened to a colleague give a presentation about Agentic Banking in our weekly Learning Hour meeting.
• Had the absolute pleasure of seeing Grant-Lee Phillips at The Lower Third. I’d never been to the venue, so it was a very happy discovery to find a lovely underground room in the middle of Denmark Street. Having seen Phillips a couple of years ago, I knew what to expect, but this time his performance was even more delightful. My friend and I somehow found ourselves standing directly in front of him as he played. And I mean directly. He commented that it was unusual for him to play for a roomful of people on their feet, but I think it added something; lots of people around us in the crowd were getting into it by singing along and shouting out requests for their favourite songs. It was superb. Even the £25 for two Red Bull-sized cans of red wine didn’t spoil the evening.
  

• Enjoyed hearing Michelle Shocked for the first time at this week’s Album Club.
• Was so sorry to hear that another school friend, Michael Lilley, had passed. I wasn’t close to Michael but we bumped into each other at the University of Warwick — he went straight there from school while I took a year out, so he was in the year above me — and he seemed very happy. The messages on his tribute page are wonderful and show how loved he was.
  

Media

Articles

• Richard articulates the possible enshittification coming for Strava after its upcoming IPO.
• The headline of this article is clickbaity, but the sentiment that the number one priority at Microsoft seems to be driving Copilot adoption rings very true. I see this as part of the attempt to keep the bubble going, with people scratching their heads as they wonder where all of the productivity gains will really manifest.
• Anil Dash articulates how weird everyone is being about AI and wants to see it treated as a normal technology. I completely relate to this. Even if you think that the approach to AI should be to wait and observe, that’s not what people want to hear or what they expect of you as a technology leader. It’s the equivalent of looking at the financial markets in 2006, prior to the crash, thinking that there is something amiss, and trying to make the case for moving a bunch of your investments to cash. Nobody will reward you for that in the short term while everything is heading to the moon.
  

Perhaps the biggest cost of ignoring the voices of the reasonable majority of those in tech is how it has grossly limited the universe of possibilities for the future. If we were to simply listen to the smart voices of those who aren’t lost in the hype cycle, we might see that it is not inevitable that AI systems use content without the consent of creators, and it is not impossible to build AI systems that respect commitments to environmental sustainability. We can build AI that isn’t centralized under the control of a handful of giant companies. Or any other definition of “good AI” that people might aspire to. But instead, we end up with the worst, most anti-social approaches because the platforms that have introduced “AI” to the public imagination are run by authoritarian extremists with deeply destructive agendas.

• Baldur Bjarnason has come to an understanding that software is “A creative medium driven by fashion that operates with limited regard for practicality or productivity.” There’s so much to this.
  

Video

• Trash Theory has a great new video that showcases “The Most Bizarre UK No. 1s of the 1990s”. It’s an underrated, eclectic decade.
• Parlogram has a great review of the new John Lennon and Yoko Ono box set. There’s so much debate online about whether the lead song from their Some Time In New York City album should have been included, but I do understand why they didn’t. Perhaps it’s best to look at this as an adjacent work, and if you want to hear the original album as intended you can easily purchase or stream it.
• Started watching Elliot Roberts’s new and incredibly long video about Ringo Starr. The work he puts into these videos is unbelievable. It’s not generally available on YouTube yet, but it will be well worth the wait.
• Continued watching Slow Horses on Apple TV. This series seems particularly slow, with the episodes too short to be satisfying.
  

Next week: More medical things and an online Album Club.

My diary was back-to-back this week, with very little discretionary time to get anything done. I’m going to have to do something about it to stop it from becoming the norm.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been finding it increasingly difficult to get these weeknotes written. I still find the practice very useful, both in the moment when I’m writing them and for looking up things in the past, so I don’t want to stop. I’m going to think about how I can tweak the process a bit so that they feel fun and don’t become a chore.

This was a week in which I:

• Met with colleagues to review the strategic programme of work for our region and to start to investigate how I can help. I’ve got some reading to do.
• Was asked to step up more formally as a substitute for my manager in forums and as a decision-maker for our team.
• Met with my team, who were all at work on the same day for the first time in a while. We talked about how we can collaborate through learning together, and started a Loop note about the knowledge gaps we have with AI.
• Had a team discussion about our approach to some security changes that are being mandated by the broader Technology team in our company. There are some side effects of the change that I am not happy with, which we need to mitigate before we press go.
• Met with colleagues to discuss the business case for another security change, and agreed next steps to flesh out the risk and cost sides of the equation.
• Visited a bespoke furniture vendor’s showroom to review materials for a new set of meeting tables, credenzas and chairs for the largest room in our office. We managed to agree on a set of finishes and, after much back and forth, are finally ready to place an order.
• Took part in a discussion about our need for a technical architect, or technical architecture service, within our function.
• Met with colleagues at our sister company to discuss the requirements and feasibility of us providing a new service to them.
• Wondered what happened to cameras being on by default for online and hybrid meetings. It’s as if everyone has sunk to the lowest common denominator of engagement. I don’t just see this within our organisation but beyond it too. The Teams Fireside Chat sessions used to feel like a fun community, with participants trying out and showing off the latest Teams meeting advancements to each other, but all of a sudden it seems that everyone has decided to turn off their video feeds.
• Met with the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum for a conversation about disability, and how our company approaches the issue in a South African context. We also had our regular monthly forum meeting, hearing from a colleague in our People and Culture team about the recent focus of the broader forum and what its priorities are.
• Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour, where we welcomed an internal guest speaker to give us an overview of the current state of the generative AI tool landscape. Our guest doesn’t come from a technology background, so it was even more interesting to me how much these tools have piqued his interest. It felt as though we veered into dangerous territory when talking about AI’s propensity for ‘scheming’ and ‘deception’; this anthropomorphic language is so problematic when talking about a computer program. It got me thinking about Steinbeck’s description of the Hansen Sea-Cow, an outboard motor that he used during his trip to the Sea of Cortez. Maybe a bit of comparative humour like this would help make people realise that these AI models are not magic boxes with a conscience?
• Had another great Microsoft Copilot Working Group meeting with colleagues across our region. Although we only have a small slice of the possible audience joining each meeting, the people who do attend are really stepping up and sharing what they’ve learned.
• Discussed and agreed next steps for using Microsoft Copilot Interpreter, which gives real-time audio translation for Teams calls and meetings. Another step closer to technologies in Star Trek becoming reality.
• Enjoyed a British picnic-themed office-wide lunch.
• Had a video chat with a fellow member of the Society of Hopeful Technologists (SoHoT — oh yes) Signal group. It was lovely that she put it in the diary. It’s a bit daunting to join a new group where people around the virtual table have done lots of Important Things; I feel like a minnow.
• Took my shoulder for an MRI scan. It was my first time going into an MRI machine, but I kind of knew what to expect. The most anxiety-inducing part was mentally checking whether I’d completely got rid of everything metallic before they started scanning. I didn’t think my gold teeth would be a problem, but asked about them anyway, and was relieved when they said they were fine. I didn’t realise the machines got hot when they were in use; at one point I wondered if I was going to have to shift my position away from the wall of the machine as it started getting quite toasty. The headphones they give you as a distraction and noise suppressor are terrible; only when the machine stopped doing its thing did I realise that we were halfway through Mariah Carey’s Fantasy.
• Had a brief but thorough consultation with a dermatologist to check out a small, near-invisible mole on my hand. She quickly concluded that it is nothing to worry about.
• Was sad to learn that our second car, a 16-year-old Mini, is suddenly beyond economical repair. We bought it in May last year as a car that both our boys would be able to use as they learned to drive, but it’s been a bit of a money pit. Our local Mini garage investigated the latest issues and made some repairs, but within a few miles of driving, the engine light had come on and it had trouble starting. On Friday night, we drove it over to webuyanycar who had said it was worth around £750. After checking it over, and as a result of some problem with their system which seemed to deduct a random amount, they offered us £181. So we drove away. We’re going to see if we can find a way to get a little bit more for it than the cost of a pair of trainers, and then investigate leasing a small, as-cheap-as-possible car from the summer, when our eldest is back and our youngest turns 17.
• Enjoyed a fabulous dinner with friends on Friday night. Our hosts cooked a wonderful meal and we had great conversation all evening.
• Really enjoyed this weekend’s club ride. Towards the start of the ride I felt as though I was getting dropped by the main group; my heart rate was high and they seemed to be creating a gap between themselves and me at the back. But by the time we were three-quarters of the way round I was helping to pull some of the riders home and felt I could have gone longer. From next week we’ll be starting half an hour later, as the days get shorter and there’s a lack of light first thing in the morning. It’s been an excellent summer of cycling.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Lionel Richie seems like such a lovely guy. My respect for him went up massively when I saw The Greatest Night In Pop (2024) (an incredible thing — you should see it if you haven’t already), and only increased when I heard him this week on the SmartLess podcast. The anecdote about his dad bringing a random guy home, feeding him and then giving him one of his suits for a job interview is so great.
• The Teams Insider Podcast has a great episode with Simon Dudley about the Microsoft Teams Room device market.
  

Articles

• Wired has a good article by Steven Levy about the shift to the right in the politics of Silicon Valley:
  

“The people that are doing fabulously well, they’re really having a terrific time,” Hancock says. For everyone else in Silicon Valley, the wealth gap is getting more punishing, more absurd. When Apple had its IPO in 1980, Steve Jobs’ net worth topped an almost-unheard-of $100 million. Now Zuckerberg is reportedly offering AI researchers that much moolah for a single year’s labor. Hancock brings up the Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality that’s popular among the World Bank crowd. Since the ’90s, “we went from 30 on the Gini to 83,” he says. “Those are the conditions for the French Revolution.”

• This thread by the ‘depths of wikipedia’ account on Bluesky is a delight. Websites that were created for, and about, people with the same name.
• Ian Dunt on The Empty Horror of Robert Jenrick is much more than just an insult piece, but the insults are so good:
  

In Britain, we get Robert Jenrick, a man whose face is so forgettable you sometimes struggle to visualise it, despite him appearing in our newspapers almost every day. He is the human equivalent of beige wallpaper or mouldy curtains. He is at once banal and monstrous, an exercise in paradox.

• A tool used for “preserving TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports and video”, specifically about abuses by ICE in the US, has been removed from the Apple App Store. Without comment from Apple, it’s hard to tell how sinister this is.
• Euan Semple contemplates where tech compliance with authoritarian governments is heading as he buys a new iPhone, and wonders what the next purchases will be.
• I’m with Carlos Sainz in saying that the TV coverage of F1 drivers’ partners is excessive. There were so many reaction shots in the broadcast of the Singapore Grand Prix, and barely any of them showed any meaningful reaction anyway.
• The worst kind of link rot with a serious real-world impact. What are the new domain owners hoping for as an outcome from what they’ve done?
• The upcoming election for the presidency of the FIA is democratic in name only. What a joke.
• Strava are suing Garmin. Strava are also lining up for an IPO. I’ve used Strava and been a subscriber for many years, but who knows how long that will last. I suspect enshittification may be coming for Strava.
• “Parties are a public service, you’re doing people a favor by throwing them. Someone might meet their new best friend or future lover at your gathering. In the short term, lovely people may feel less lonely, and that’s thanks to you. In the long term, whole new children may ultimately exist in the world because you bothered to throw a party. Throwing parties is stressful for most people, but a great kindness to the community, so genuinely pat yourself on the back for doing this.” From 21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties.
  

Video

• It was interesting to hear Sacha Baron Cohen talking through some of his characters and roles. I didn’t realise how close he came to physical danger on multiple occasions.
• DIY SOS is back and the first episode has already had me in tears. As I watched, I thought about how much the community spirit is so much more the version of the UK that I know than the one that we see presented by the Reform Party and in the media. More of this sort of thing, please.
• Loved John Candy: I Like Me (2025). He just seems like a wonderful guy who would have been fun to be around. Macaulay Culkin’s memories of how Candy looked out for him as a child actor, as he realised Culkin may not have been in a good family situation, were very moving.
  

Web

• I found Scour through the referral logs for my website. It looks quite interesting in that you give it topics that you are interested in and it then surfaces links and articles from the web related to those interests. I haven’t spent that much time with it yet, but it looks like a useful tool for broadening horizons beyond the things I already follow and read on the web.
  

Books

• Reached the final part of Jon Savage’s The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979).
  

Next week: Grant-Lee Phillips.

A productive, balanced and enjoyable week.

This was a week in which I:

• Spent time reading through our business strategy documentation and trying to learn about global capital flows. I’ve been asked to pick up some additional projects that sit outside Technology. Despite 26 years of working in investment banks, there is so much I still need to learn. The team are going to need to be very patient with me as I ask lots of basic questions. But maybe that’s part of the point of getting me involved in the first place.
• Attended a pilot of an internal ‘prompt engineering masterclass’.
  • The content and the delivery were good, but it got me pondering how on the one hand AI is marketed as being magic — you tell it what you want and sit back in wonder as it does the rest — and on the other hand we’re loading people up with lots of detail on how to structure their inputs to get it to do what they want. I suggested that perhaps there is another way to guide people on the path, e.g. saying “You’ve already been doing things with Copilot and other AI tools, here are some ways in which to improve the quality of the output you get from the machine. You don’t need to remember all of this, but you can draw on aspects of it as you work, and gradually integrate this into what you do.”
  • A synonym for ‘prompt engineering’ is ‘learning to write clearly and formulate insightful questions’. In many ways, the skills for prompt engineering are the same as requirements engineering, which the software industry has been working on for decades. Andrew Stellman recently articulated this brilliantly.
  • Even people experienced with generative AI still fall into the trap of misunderstanding that the output of an LLM is “the most probable output for the input prompt.” At the end of the session, someone showed us how they built a pre-prompt into Copilot to always get it to explain what it will do before it does it. It cannot do this. Instead, it will give you an outline that is a reasonable response to the question. It is like someone asking how I’ll do a project: I’ll say I’ll do A, then B, then C — and then, when I execute, I do something else. For me, it is so critical that we get people to understand this. The systems are designed to make you fall into a trap of thinking they are more ‘intelligent’ than they are in reality.
  • I wondered whether the tools have already started to move on, de-emphasising the need for ‘prompt engineering’. The most success I have had in dialling down hallucinations and improving accuracy has been to use the ‘Thinking’ mode in ChatGPT and, where appropriate, the Deep Research tool which is now also available as a default Copilot Agent. These take orders of magnitude longer to return results, but the outputs are much higher quality. Giving people guidance as to when to use the ‘quick’ responses and when to use the ‘extended thinking’ tools would be very useful.
• Had a long discussion about a planned IT security change that was both fun and frustrating. Accuracy of language is so important when we’re trying to make sure that we all have the same understanding in each of our heads. A term such as ‘corporate devices’ is ambiguous and unconsciously confusing; are these devices that have been purchased by the company, devices that are enrolled in some form of mobile device management, something else, or some combination of more than one of these?
• Joined a couple of meetings relating to our sister company’s ongoing office refurbishment, including their steering committee meeting.
• Was given a ‘reverse 1:1’ by one of my direct reports, asking me about where I am in my career, what I want to do next and how I’m taking steps to get there. I really appreciated this.
• Wrote up some notes on how we can refine some of our team meetings and internal processes.
• Met with the project team for our planned new office in a new country. We now have an opening ceremony in the calendar.
• Spent time working with a colleague to refine our approach to a technical security change. After finishing the second meeting to scope the work, we sketched out a visual representation of where we are and the decision points ahead of us at which we will agree to continue or stop. There are lots of people involved, so I am hoping that this helps to get everyone to a common understanding of where we are and the work that remains.
• Met with the Technology Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum, reviewing the priorities and areas of focus.
• Had our weekly project meeting with our audio/visual design vendor.
• Took part in two all-team sessions to review our Team Charter. The sessions were kindly facilitated by my executive partner from our technology research and advisory firm and he did a great job of getting everyone involved in the process. I’m looking forward to seeing the new draft. We’re planning to pull it off the shelf much more regularly to check whether we’re living up to the things we agreed.
• Met with the project team who are trying to increase adoption and use of our corporate password manager. The technical changes we want to make are small; most of the work is focused on understanding the barriers to behavioural change and figuring out how to remove them.
• Caught up with a colleague in our Learning and Development team on the types of leadership education pathways that are offered by our company.
• Said goodbye to yet another colleague retiring from work, and enjoyed a delicious burrito lunch that the company put on as a celebration.
• Nominated three of my colleagues for a recognition award. This year our regional recognition programme includes a trip abroad, which looks like a lot of fun. All three of them deserve to be on the trip, but we’ll see how good a job I’ve done with my nominations when we move to the voting round.
• Got chatting in the Society for Hopeful Technologists Signal group. Many days I have multiple tabs open with links I’ve clicked through to long articles about things I am annoyed about in the technology world: exploitation of AI workers, the UK government once again asking Apple to create an encryption backdoor, a vulnerability discovered in Microsoft 365 a few weeks ago that would allow someone to traverse from tenant to tenant. I thought about sharing them in the Signal group, but stopped myself. I’m wondering whether I should instead be trying to actively seek out things that I’m for instead of what I’m against? It’s so much harder to look for the positives and make the case for them. Far fewer people listen. The responses to my pondering this out loud in the chat already give me hope. If you’re a technologist, you should sign up.
• Had two consultant follow-ups from my recent well-person health screen. The orthopaedic consultant took some x-rays of my shoulder and asked me to book in for an MRI scan. The gastroenterologist recommended some invasive investigations. If I were a software application, it feels like I’m carrying some minor technical debt, which I’m now taking the time to pay down.
• In a bid to save some money, started making my own sandwiches to take to work and stopped buying a morning coffee. I think I was probably spending around £15 a day just on food and drink, so this should save me £45 on an average week.
• Met up with our financial advisor to discuss my wife’s parents’ planned house move.
• Chose to stay indoors for a Saturday bike ride due to the winds from Storm Amy. I saw that a few people made it out for solo rides, but I was quite happy to spend a couple of hours on the trainer with my podcasts for company.
• Spent the weekend with a bath, and bathroom, full of Lego. Doing a deeper-than-usual clean of our house at the weekend, we found a tub of the stuff that had been kept without a lid and had subsequently gathered a gargantuan amount of dust. It was too good just to throw away, so my wife decided to wash it. All of it. It was the kind of job that you wish you had never started.

Media

Podcasts

• On this week’s Quiet Riot main show they asked why racists don’t like being called racist. I like their analogy:

“Racism is a little like political pornography. Its practitioners enjoy it privately or with groups of like-minded people. But if one were to start enjoying it in public, awkward questions will arise.”

• This episode of WB-40 is a very good one, with Lisa Riemers and Matisse Hamel-Nelis talking about their book on Accessible Communications. I’ve bought the book and can’t wait to read it.

Articles

• I mentioned Andrew Stellman’s article in the main weeknotes above, but it’s worth calling out twice. From Prompt Engineering is Requirements Engineering: “User stories intentionally focused the engineering work back on people and what’s in their heads. Whether it’s a requirements document in Word or a user story in Jira, the most important thing isn’t the piece of paper, ticket, or document we wrote. The most important thing is that what’s in my head matches what’s in your head and matches what’s in the heads of everyone else involved. The piece of paper is just a convenient way to help us figure out whether or not we agree.”
• Hacking a Brother KM950i knitting machine with a Raspberry Pi is exactly the feel-good technology story I needed.
• Zürich residents have voted to move to a system of car park charges linked to the weight of a vehicle. Heavier cars will pay more, with EVs paying less per kilogram. I like this thinking.
• Those silly-billies in the UK government are making a new attempt to access Apple cloud data. I really wish the government understood the implications of what they are asking for.
• People have been recording phone calls in order to sell the audio for AI training. One app that enables this, Neon, went offline after a security flaw left phone numbers, recordings and transcripts exposed. The Internet never stops surprising me with the ethically terrible things people will invent, and do, in order to make money.
• We may have hit ‘peak social media’. Everywhere except North America, that is. Global Web Index data shows that global usage peaked in 2022 and that younger age groups have reduced their time spent on social media the most.
• I enjoyed reading this interview between long-time collaborators Gabriel Birnbaum and Katie von Schleicher. They talk about mistakes they make in the recording process:

Katie: I love demos, and now I’m thinking, I should just release the demos. They’re done. And, I mean, I’m super into mistakes. It’s why I love microphonically recorded music and full takes and performances, because I love mistakes. They can change the amount of bars in a song. I would never be like, “And here’s a bar of three,” but I will fuck up and do a bar of three. You know?

Gabriel: Yeah, totally. You’re thinking about something else, drop a beat.

Katie: Yeah, exactly. And then that becomes the most precious thing.

• This reminded me of something I read in the first volume of The McCartney Legacy by Alan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair:

Unlike other artists and producers inclined to erase extraneous noises or accidental instrumental strikes on individual tracks, Paul would leave them as they were recorded, allowing the potential to “explore the accident, not fix the mistake” as Seiwell put it. Though aiding the creative process, for Alan Parsons this posed a problem. “You try to keep the tracks clean and try to avoid having to pull down faders every time if there is a noise or a talking voice or something,” he explained. “Whereas McCartney was notorious for never allowing engineers to wipe anything, so it always made the mix take twice as long.” […] One difference, Denny explained, was serendipity—a mistake that turned out well. “Paul was playing the drums and he forgot where to come in. So he stopped and then came in a bar later. And we thought, ‘Well, that’s unusual,’ and kept it in. All these little things that happened accidentally, suddenly became part of the song.”

• I’m on my second month of paying for Simon Willison’s newsletter, effectively an edited digest of his month as an alternative to reading all of his prolific blog posts. It’s excellent, and recommended if you want to keep up with the latest in the world of generative AI. He’s landed on a definition of what an ‘agent’ is in an AI context and has a bunch of other posts in September that are well worth reading.
• “Crypto has never been about innovation, but about getting away with things you would not otherwise be able to. And it’s not just the US: while Ireland has banned political crypto donations, Nigel Farage’s Reform party just became the first major UK party to accept them, opening the door to all sorts of actors exerting political influence. Crypto was built for this. Murky dealings aren’t the bug, they’re the whole point.” — Jemima Kelly in the Financial Times.
• I see that Matthew Syed has gone full radical Conservative. He gave an excellent, inspirational keynote at the 2015 Hertfordshire School Governors conference on having a growth mindset and why it is more important for success than innate talent. Peter Walker’s comment about Syed’s speech at the Conservative Party conference being “deeply odd […], seemingly from yet another person who spends a lot of time on X” got me thinking about how many people seem to be prone to radicalisation, with social media probably being a big cause. I wonder if one day we’ll view social media like smoking.

Video

• Started watching the latest season of Slow Horses and am already enjoying being back with the characters.
• Continued with The Studio, which is super farcical and occasionally brilliant.
• Watched The Rubber-Keyed Wonder (2024), ostensibly all about the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, but actually covering Sinclair home computers from start to finish. It’s an excellent overview of what made these so great and the cultural impact they had, with an indulgent amount of footage of the computer games of the era.
• I went out for dinner and a movie with my wife and youngest son on Friday night. It was lovely to do something together instead of stumbling into a quick meal together and a night in front of separate screens at home. We watched The Long Walk (2025), the latest in a long line of Stephen King stories adapted for the screen. We weren’t too far into the film when I started wondering whether we’d actually stumbled into an 18-rated picture; it was so violent and gory. I found myself flinching and turning my head away as I knew that they would be likely to show all of the detail of someone getting violently murdered. The story was unsatisfying and felt like it could have been so much more. The absence of detail in some aspects could be interpreted as arty, allowing the viewer to fill in the blanks, but to me it just came across as half-finished. Maybe I’m just old, and this film could be exactly the sort of ‘edgy’ thing that 15-year-olds want to see.

Audio

• Had a lovely time at our WB-40 Album Club, listening to Kae Tempest’s latest album, Self-Titled. I more admired the music than got into it with my heart; there’s something about this genre where there is a barrier to me believing that it can be mine. I feel the same way about artists such as Stormzy and The Streets. Still, it’s an extraordinary work. This song Know Yourself, where Kae is accompanied by a younger version of them is incredible.

• Bought tickets to see Anna Calvi in London in November.

Web

• Five female former journalists at The Observer and The Guardian have founded The Nerve, which is worth keeping an eye on.
• Gun Violence Archive, documenting incidents of gun violence in the US, is an incredible resource.
• Someone has founded another Berkhamsted Album Club. It’s not quite the same thing as getting together with friends and listening to an album at the same time in silence, but I applaud the effort to get people to touch grass through a common interest like this.

Books

• Continued to make my way through Jon Savage’s The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979).

Next week: Medical appointments, and starting to get involved in some new work.

I spent this week in France, the first half in Bordeaux followed by a couple of days in Paris. Every year, the division of the company that I work for gives a recognition award to around 50 staff, with the prize of a trip abroad along with our CEO, our Head of People & Culture, and a number of other CxOs as hosts. All of the award winners are allowed to bring someone with them on the trip. My wife had planned to come for the first half, even getting special dispensation from her school for a few days off work, but ultimately pulled out after our eldest son’s plans to go to college in the US rapidly accelerated in August. As much as I’m sure he would have coped, it didn’t feel right to leave our younger son at home on his own, managing his schoolwork, his meals and our pets. So I went solo.

This was the second time that I’ve won the award, four years after the first. Back then, we were in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, so a trip abroad was downscaled to a hamper and cash. As generous (and delicious) as that was, it wasn’t a patch on the experience of going away with everyone. I felt a little guilty about being singled out for the projects that we ran last year as their successes were a massive team effort from everyone involved. But I also felt humbled and grateful that colleagues felt that they wanted to put me forward for the award.

As soon as my wife decided that she wasn’t going to come, I took a closer look at the travel details. A 7:35am flight from Gatwick on Sunday would have involved waking up at 3am, so I decided to book myself a flight for the evening before, as well as one night in a hotel. I picked the Moxy, which was about the same price as a low-cost hotel chain, but looked a little funkier and was closer to where I would need to join the group the next day. Unfortunately, our flight was delayed, so I didn’t end up getting to the hotel until after 10pm.

Despite the late hour, I was keen to stretch my legs and explore. My Bordeaux adventure got off to an inauspicious start when, not more than 30 seconds’ walk away from the hotel, someone in a passing car threw a water bomb at my back, one that I later found had been fashioned from a half-eaten bag of chorizo bites. (At least, I hope it was water.) It took me a few moments to work out what had gone on, by which time the car had driven off into the distance. It put me in a bad mood as I now had to dry out my clothes and potentially pay to have them cleaned. Being soaked in an unknown liquid was a good signal to cut my losses and go to bed.

The next morning I woke up early and went in search of breakfast but couldn’t find anything. The Moxy hotel is in a ‘cool’ part of town, but not a place where street cafés are plentiful. I gave up and decided to head to the Mondrian Bordeaux Les Carmes hotel, where we would all be staying, to see if they would check me into my room early. As I waited for the room to be ready, I went for a wander, found a PAUL bakery and picked up a burnt pastry and rank coffee. Fortunately this prelude to the main trip was the low point, and everything got immeasurably better from here on in.

After checking into my room, I waited in the lobby and met a bunch of colleagues from Angola and Tanzania who had also arrived early. A small coach took us to our first venue, Château Kirwan. Before we had a chance to meet any of the other delegates, the staff whisked us off for a short visit to their fermentation room and cellar.

Everyone gathered back at the main building, where we were treated to a canapé lunch and drinks. People were doing well considering most of them had just stepped off overnight long-haul flights. I started chatting to various colleagues and their partners, learning a bit more about the people that I would be spending the week with.

After a long, leisurely lunch, we boarded coaches to take us back to the hotel so that people could check in and get freshened up before a cocktail dinner in the hotel restaurant. It was lovely to meet people and make new friends, as well as chat to people from other offices that I knew but hadn’t spoken to in years.

During the week, I managed to make it out early for some 10km runs — twice in Bordeaux and once in Paris — which helped offset all of the eating. The route in Bordeaux was pleasing in that doing a loop that crossed one bridge and then crossed back two bridges later came to just over 10km. There were so many runners by the riverside in Bordeaux, and there was a flow of them all day that was as constant as that of the river.

On Monday morning we split up into four groups, each of which had pre-selected a different activity. I was booked on a trip to visit Château Smith Haut Lafitte, a winery that planted its first grape vines in 1365. The place was stunningly beautiful, from the gorgeous buildings, to the neatly planted grape vines, to the large pieces of artwork that had been placed around the grounds. Owners Florence and Daniel Cathiard met when they were part of the French national ski team. After running chains of family-owned supermarkets and sporting goods shops, they sold the businesses and purchased the château in 1990. They have since invested in and developed the site, achieving organic certification in 2019, installing sculptures throughout the grounds and developing their wine tourism business. Everything about the château felt classy and well-loved.

After a leisurely and delicious lunch at the château, we took the coach back to our hotel. As I went to head back to my room, someone handed me a wristband for entry into La Cité du Vin, Bordeaux’s beautifully architected wine museum. The group that had headed there in the morning had been given a set of extra passes and a few members of the team were keen to go back. I was very tired, but I knew I’d regret just going back to my room to rest, so I joined them.

The museum itself was well-produced, but felt too digital. All visitors were given a headset and receiver, which triggered when you walked into a particular space or waved it in front of a panel. The exhibits were good, but they were all custom-made for the space; I didn’t see any historical examples of wine, corks or bottles, for example.

After our visit, we rolled back along the riverfront and met up with some other colleagues for a drink before going in search of somewhere for dinner. Gruppomimo was exactly what we were looking for; an Italian with plenty on the menu and a big round table that could seat everyone in our group.

On Tuesday morning there was nothing planned and I was keen to get a few hours to myself after all of the socialising. I love meeting and talking with people I don’t know, but I know the signs of when I need to recharge. I wandered from our hotel down to the river and along to the old town. I found a café, ordered a drink and caught up with some admin, including finishing off last week’s weeknotes, before going off to explore the record and CD shops of the old town.

Tuesday night was the main event, a formal awards dinner in the hall of the Palais de la Bourse. I found myself sitting next to the mother of one of the winners, who told me that she had never been abroad in her life. This is one of the big things that made the trip special, with so many people going outside of their country for the first time.

It was a late night followed by an early morning as we had to have our luggage ready for a van to take it to Paris. We took the train, speeding through the French countryside at over 300kmh.

Paris itself was a revelation for me. I’ve been through it many times in order to change trains on the way to somewhere else, but I’d never properly visited. Given its reputation as a capital city of romance, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I didn’t expect it to be quite so beautiful.

Our adventure started with a trip to the Eiffel Tower. This also surpassed my expectations. It’s an iconic historic monument, but to my mind has always had a temporary, half-finished look about it, almost like a wireframe prototype for something more permanent. Seeing it in real life changed my perception completely. It’s an incredible structure, and much bigger than I expected. At the base of the structure, which you get to after going through a security check, you see brown paint spattered all over the floor from where the metal beams were most recently decorated. The yawning void at the base of the structure is incredible in size, and the intricacy and decorative nature of the steelwork is stunning.

Getting up to the second floor was fun, ascending one of the legs of the structure via the large elevators that resembled a funicular railway. The views here were good, but they weren’t a patch on what we could see from the top level, which at 276m above ground is the highest public observation deck in the European Union.

Our visit was short, but it was long enough. The queue to get the elevators back down wound its way around the observation deck and it took quite a while before we were on our way. After getting back on our coach, we drove up the Champs-Élysées, past the Arc de Triomphe, and on to our next hotel.

We didn’t have long at the hotel before we had to get ready for an evening’s river cruise, with dinner, drinks and dancing as we travelled along the Seine. It was a wonderful evening, meeting and talking to people that I hadn’t yet spent much time with, and watching everyone let their hair down as the DJ played. Seeing the Eiffel Tower lit up at night was breathtaking, especially when it sparkled for five minutes at the start of a new hour. We finished the night with a final drink back at the hotel bar before heading to bed.

On Thursday we had our final group activity, with people going off in four different directions until lunchtime. I was booked on a guided tour of the Louvre. At first, it seemed that we wouldn’t make it inside the building as a result of the general strike that was taking place that day. Our tour guide suggested that instead we plan a different tour, taking in some of the streets and passageways in the surrounding area. We started outside by the Louvre Pyramid, took some photos and pondered our next move. Someone overheard that the museum might be opening soon, so we thought we’d take a chance and join one of the queues, giving ourselves a deadline for when we would give up and go and do something else. After 25 minutes or so, the doors opened, and after going through the airport-style security checks, we found ourselves in a wonderfully underpopulated museum.

Information poured out of our guide, giving us historical facts about the museum itself as we wandered around what used to be a moat of the old Louvre fortress. As we made our way through rooms of Roman statues, the museum started to fill up with people, until it got uncomfortably busy. We continued to learn from our guide, who explained what we were looking at, how we could identify the gods depicted in the statues and how some of the discoveries were made.

To find the Mona Lisa, we just had to move in the direction of the densest crowds, and eventually squeeze past some of them, through a tiny entrance to a large room. Seeing the painting in person was a fascinating experience, but not because of the painting itself; layers of people stood in front of the artwork, many — possibly most — with their phones and cameras out, taking pictures. It didn’t make any sense to me. High-definition digital versions of the painting are surely available online. While you are there in front of the painting, why not look at it with your own eyes, something you won’t be able to do as soon as you leave the room?

We wandered out of the museum and followed our guide to a nearby restaurant, where we met up with other colleagues and enjoyed a delicious and delicate French lunch.

In the afternoon I wandered around Paris, visiting more record and CD shops, before heading back to the hotel. Some of us met up for a final get-together, retiring to bed exhausted not long after midnight. The next day, everyone was on their way home.

It was an incredible experience, one that I feel very privileged to have been a part of. It was lovely to get to know new colleagues and friends, and to create these shared memories.

A few other things from this week:

Media

Podcasts

• Great to hear from Danny Dyer on Desert Island Discs. I don’t think I learned a great deal about him that I didn’t already know, but it was a fun listen.
  

Video

• Apropos of nothing, I re-watched Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) across a number of days. If you just go with the silly story, ridiculous over-acting and bizarre plot points, it’s a fun movie. And the songs are so catchy.
• Watched another couple of episodes of Australian show You Can’t Ask That on Netflix, one focusing on deaf people and another on those with Down’s Syndrome. It’s an incredible programme.
• Dived into the mad world of Charlie Sheen through the new two-part Netflix film. Given his central involvement in the documentary, I am sure that there is a certain amount of rose-tinting in the final output. But what was left in was shocking enough. The main impression I came away with is that he’s a very fortunate guy to have so many loving people around him.
  

Books

• Still making progress through Jon Savage’s The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979). I don’t think I’m quite halfway through this giant tome. It’s excellent.
  

Next week: Back to work, and hosting an Album Club.

At some point this week I remarked to a colleague that I feel ‘out of breath’ with the number of things going on at work. It’s been difficult to keep up with everything. This week I was only in the office for three days but journeyed into London four times, going in on Tuesday evening for a colleague’s retirement drinks. The Tube strike meant that I made a return to the 40-minute walks between Euston Station and my office, having paused them during the summer when it got too warm to be comfortable.

I also had fun using an e-bike for the first time. A quarter turn of the crank and it shot off like a rocket! They’re a bit too expensive to use regularly, and aren’t as healthy as walking, but it’s good to know that they are an option if I need to get somewhere fast.

This was a week in which I:

• Welcomed a new joiner to my team. It was quite a day to start, with the Tube strikes in full swing and not having made her way to the office at rush hour before. It’s already been great to have her on board. We also welcomed back a team member who had been away on a long holiday. I’m looking forward to the whole team humming along with our increased capacity.
• Took part in a workshop on how we might embrace Digital Literacy and Digital Dexterity across our organisation. We ended up leading with the material that I had previously created, and I think it has started to land with the other people involved. I’m not sure if what we’ll end up doing will be exactly what I came up with, but it looks promising.
• Had our Information Risk Steering Group meeting. As well as discussing the key topics, we agreed how we will change the format and frequency of the meetings going forward.
• Had an in-person meeting with the audio/visual vendor that we plan to use to fit out the client meeting room suite at our office that we share with our sister company. It feels good to be working with people that seem to understand what we’re trying to do and ask good questions.
• Had an introductory meeting with the second potential vendor who may help us to find a more permanent office in a new city where we are in the process of establishing a presence. We followed this up with a discussion about both vendors and what our next steps to engage with them will be.
• Took part in a meeting to review our annual risk control self-assessment, with our Head of Non-Financial Risk. We have a very mature process, and our colleague who collates and submits our return does an excellent job on behalf of the team.
• Met with a colleague in our Legal team to discuss correspondence we had received about licensing television and film content. We agreed our position and how to proceed, after which I got back in contact with the licensing body. ChatGPT in ‘thinking’ mode was very useful in quickly revealing the relevant documents that allowed us to understand our position and decide what we needed to do. I think this is a core strength of the tool: replacing the time that you would usually take in crafting web searches and gathering information on a topic.
• Listened to a strategy update from our regional CEO, who has recently agreed to take on an additional interim role. It feels like we have some interesting and exciting times ahead.
• Had a conversation with my boss and our COO about how they would like me to get more involved in managing programmes and projects across the organisation, not just those in our department. The variety of things I get to work on is part of the magic of working where I do. I’m not sure how I’ll make it happen given how busy I am already, but we’ll work it out.
• Met with colleagues to discuss a planned IT security change and what our approach needs to be in order to minimise impact on both our end users and our internal technology staff.
• Ran our weekly all-team meeting as one of my colleagues was off sick.
• Took a couple of my colleagues through the process to capture usage statistics of our corporate password manager. We are redoubling our efforts to drive adoption, so this data will help us to see how successful we are.
• Requested a quote for a new table for our large divisible meeting space. We now have agreement on the finish and want to try and get it manufactured, delivered and installed by the end of the year.
• Met with our sales representative at our technology research and advisory firm to discuss our account and other products that they offer besides the ones that we already purchase.
• Joined the monthly Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum. I’ve got some strong views about some of the definitions we use, which I’ll keep pushing on.
• Met with representatives from a very well-known big-tech firm for a walkthrough of their approach to ‘AI Security’. I’m not sure these types of sessions are that useful without a thorough exploration beforehand of what would be most useful to the audience.
• Joined our development team for their retrospective and sprint planning session.
• Caught up with an old friend, who runs one of our Group Technology functions. I was excited to hear that I’ll be meeting up with her on a business trip in a couple of months’ time.
• Loved seeing our colleague in Beijing give a presentation at our weekly Learning Hour meeting. He admitted he was nervous, but did an excellent job of educating us on the main holidays in the Chinese calendar. Part of the reason the meeting exists is to allow colleagues to practice giving presentations to a relatively safe audience, and it’s so satisfying to see this in action.
• Had a filling put in. Modern dentistry, and my dentist, are both marvellous. Even though I wish I didn’t need to have it, I love her work.

Media

Podcasts

• Paul Ford and Rich Ziade’s discussion with Matt Seitz about the impact of AI was fascinating. They made great points about how big companies (probably) overhired in the pandemic and then conveniently blamed their subsequent retrenchments on AI:

Paul Ford: And then, but they were like, “Wow, we’re seeing so many efficiencies.” Because you got to tell the market how this layoff isn’t because you were an idiot who over-hired, but is actually because of, like, fundamental changes that you’re on top of.

• I also loved Matt Seitz’s quote that “Vibe coding is like giving an 8-year-old a credit card.”

Articles

• Geoffrey Huntley ”ran Claude in a loop for three months, and it created a genz programming language called cursed”. via Simon Willison.
• I’m not sure I agree with the bleakness of what’s presented in ‘The death of the corporate job’ but it did make me get my highlighter out. “Nobody believes in the corporate role anymore, even while performing it perfectly. The belief is gone but the performance continues.”
• Interesting results from a UK government study that says that “Neurodiverse employees may be benefiting far more from chatbots than their neurotypical colleagues.”

Video

• Finished the last episode of What It Feels Like for a Girl on BBC iPlayer. What a brilliant series. The intensity of the first few episodes gives way to something much more profound and had me in tears by the end.
• I’m so excited to learn that there’s a new John Candy biopic, I Like Me, coming out in October. Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987) is still my favourite film, in no small part to his loveable comedic genius.

• Watched The Ballad of Wallis Island. Tim Key (aka ‘Sidekick Simon’ from Alan Partridge) completely makes the film. It’s a fun, gentle comedy with great characters.

Audio

• Discovered the YouTube channel Top 2000 a gogo and have been diving into their back catalogue of interviews and acoustic recordings. For example, this interview with Fish about Marillion’s Kayleigh is superb:

Web

• “An LLM is designed to generate statistically likely responses to the question ‘What would an answer to this query sound like?’ This is not the same thing as answering the question.”
• Gina Trapani has a new blog. Instant subscribe.

Books

• I’m really enjoying Jon Savage’s The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979).

Next week: France.

A busy, beavering kind of week. It’s still strange with just three of us at home. I’m grateful that both of the boys seem to be settling into their next thing, with our eldest seeming to be very happy in Texas and our youngest enjoying the start of sixth form. Things are good.

This was a week in which I:

• Met with two of the vendors that had responded to our request for quotes to fit out our shared meeting rooms with audio/visual equipment. The meetings were good in that they reconfirmed what we had already thought when we reviewed the submissions. After the calls we made an easy, unanimous decision about who we want to work with. Later in the week we had a kick-off meeting to agree our immediate next steps. We’ve got lots to do in a short time, with a deadline of the end of this year.
• Joined the first of a series of meetings with our sister company to discuss and plan how we will manage the operations of our shared meeting space when it reopens in January. Since we ran a proof-of-concept a few months ago we now have quite a few new faces in the team, so it felt a little bit like starting over.
• Had our weekly meeting with our audio/visual vendor as part of the work for the shared meeting spaces.
• Met with colleagues in our sister company for the weekly check-in on the progress of their construction project.
• Created a service agreement for the project manager role in my team. We got it circulated and signed off, so our new colleague starts on Monday.
• Had an initial meeting with a potential vendor to help us find a more permanent home in a city where we have opened a new office this year. Their knowledge of the geography and real estate market was very impressive. I also joined the project meeting for the ongoing setup of our office in this city.
• Reviewed the mandate for our Information Risk Steering Group.
• Joined a couple of preparation calls ahead of a workshop on our Digital Literacy/Digital Dexterity initiative next week.
• Met with the project team working on driving adoption of our corporate password manager. I also put together a data dashboard to track the outcome of the team’s efforts over time, and worked with Microsoft Copilot’s Researcher agent to create a document that we can use as the basis for further training.
• Used the Copilot Researcher agent on a completely separate topic, for something that I wouldn’t have been comfortable putting into a ChatGPT prompt. When it showed up a few weeks ago, I underestimated how useful it would be. I can see myself using this extensively for things that are confidential within our company.
• Caught up with the project manager and senior stakeholders on a data insights initiative. The team have taken a methodical, careful approach to rolling out the tools, which has been proven to be the correct way to go.
• Met with colleagues to discuss all of the AI-related initiatives that are in progress in our part of the organisation.
• Spent time with a colleague who is doing some data analysis in Excel for one of our projects. We did a deep dive into pattern matching and string manipulation in order to clean up our data.
• Enjoyed a pot-pourri version of our weekly Learning Hour meeting, where our CTO discussed the latest thinking on our guest Wi-Fi access in the office, as well as how to use the Linux command line to get things done.
• Joined a ‘fireside chat’-style meeting run by our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum on the topic of being an ally to women at work.
• Joined a couple of internal webinar-style meetings on the topics of social connections and psychological safety.
• Said hello to a colleague and her husband who are usually based in New York but were in London on holiday. She decided to pop in to meet some faces that she had only seen via Teams, and to take a look around the office. It was lovely to see them.
• Rearranged my travel plans for an upcoming work trip, and checked in with the organiser to apologise for my last-minute adjustments.
• Set up my eldest son with an eSIM that he can use while he’s in the US. We managed to get an ‘unlimited’ plan for a year on Mint Mobile for $180. Hopefully he’ll now avoid the O2 ‘fair use’ limits while he is over there.
• Had more investigations and repairs made to the 16-year-old Mini that we bought for our children to use. We expected the car to need a bit of investment and TLC, but not quite this much.
• Went out for a delicious dinner with my cousin and her husband at The Three Oaks in Gerrards Cross. It was so great to see them; the four of us hadn’t properly caught up for many years.
• Had the annual inspection of our gas boiler.
• Spent 90 minutes or so undergoing a thorough health check, something that my employer offers staff every year. It included checks of my height, weight and hearing, plus urine and blood samples, and my first ever prostate exam. I’m 48 and the doctor advised me that prostate checks now start from the age of 45. It was completely painless, just a little uncomfortable, and well worth it if they can detect major problems at an early stage. Since having a hernia operation at a delicate age as a teenager, I’ve never been concerned about medical interventions, offering myself up willingly for appropriate inspections.
• Enjoyed a cracking Saturday morning bike club ride, which was fast and fun. The weather has started to turn a bit, just enough that I went out with a base layer and a gilet for the first time since early spring. It’s been an excellent summer of cycling.
• Persuaded my wife to come out for a run on Saturday morning, finishing off with a pastry and a coffee in town. I’m not sure we did quite enough to justify the reward, but it was good to get out. At the end of the run, Strava notified me that I’d done 701km in my running shoes, so I popped into Berkhamsted Sports on the way home to pick up a new pair. The old ones had lasted me for four years, which makes me think that I need to get running a bit more.

Media

Articles

• I went in search of Ethan Mollick’s latest guide for Using AI Right Now. He has been writing good summaries every few months, aimed at non-technical people who want to understand the current AI landscape. His latest post is from mid-June, and it’s amazing how much has changed already. For example OpenAI have released their GPT 5 model which is now the default for all ChatGPT users. For stuff that is completely non-work related or only relates to information in the public domain, I am defaulting to using ChatGPT switched to ‘Thinking’ mode, paying $20/month for access. It takes a few minutes to return a result, but I think that the work going on behind the scenes is that it is running web searches, checking its own output etc., and generally I am getting useful responses. The better the tools get, the more important it is to be conscious of not falling into the trap of just using the information without checking — we all have a tendency to do this as we’re all too busy. Microsoft Copilot has really caught up and has lots of the paid ChatGPT-level facilities available to our staff at work who have a Copilot licence. I’ve been using the ‘Researcher’ agent this week and it has been excellent, saving me huge chunks of time that I could have spent searching the web, gathering my thoughts and turning it into something structured. I do find myself reading through the output as if one of my colleagues had written it and handed it to me, reviewing it with a critical eye, and editing it to make something that works. It’s been good to be able to use it with the knowledge that my chat conversation is kept within the virtual walls that we have agreed to define as ‘internal’ to our organisation, allowing me to ask work-related questions that I would never want to send directly to a free or consumer service.
• Received my first update from Simon Willison after subscribing to his service where he summarises the most important things from his previous month’s blog posts. His blog posts are great, but I’m not likely to read them all, so this is a superb idea.

Video

• Andrew at Parlogram is not very impressed with the upcoming ‘reissue’ (including a new volume) of The Beatles Anthology. It slightly blows my mind that we;re now as far from the 1995 Anthology release as that series was from the releases of Help! and Rubber Soul.
• Sticking with The Beatles, Elliot Roberts’ Patreon-only video about his least favourite quality about each member of the band is superb. All of his videos are superb. He really knows his subject, and turns what could have been a very negative rant into a sensitive dissection of the topic. If you have a passing interest in The Beatles, you really should subscribe.
• Finished watching Shifty on iPlayer. The main thing it has got me thinking about in the days since I finished it is how much control politicians really have over anything in the macro environment, and how much they just have to go with the flow of whatever’s happening.
• What It Feels Like for a Girl has got better and better. The wild and crazy ride in the first few episodes has slowly retreated to reveal the depth of the main characters. We’ve got two episodes to go and I’m going to feel a loss when it’s finished.

Audio

• Grant Lee Buffalo have been buzzing around my head this week. I realised that I didn’t own any of their music on CD, and decided to fix this issue with some second-hand purchases. Their song Sing Along from their second album has been playing on repeat on my internal stereo. I’m so looking forward to seeing Grant Lee Phillips in London in October.
• Alicia Clara’s new album Nothing Dazzled turned up on Friday and is lovely. Her music is yet another discovery I made while browsing through Bandcamp. I need to do more of that.

Web

• The concept of a ‘Citizens Advance’ is interesting. The proposal is that anyone who has been working for 10 years would have the opportunity to receive a cash sum equivalent of one year of their state pension, which in 2025 is £11,973. For people that don’t have access to ‘the bank of mum and dad’, receiving this money when you are 30-ish may be just what you need. People choosing to receive the advance could potentially pay the money back over the rest of their working life, or retire one year later.

Books

• I’m really enjoying Jon Savage’s The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979). Which is good, because there is plenty more reading of this enormous tome ahead.

Next week: A filling, a retirement party, and welcoming a new member of my team.

On Monday we had our last bank holiday before Christmas. My youngest boy arrived back in the house in the early hours, filthy and slightly broken, after his weekend at Reading Festival. Videos from the festival had me wondering whether it was a major health hazard, with dust from the dried grassy fields being kicked up by all of the revellers. All of his white clothes had turned shades of brown. I spent the day catching up with the washing and running a couple of errands while he caught up with some sleep.

My wife returned from dropping off our eldest son at university in Kingsville, Texas, on Tuesday afternoon and got straight back into the swing of things. We’ve spent a lot of this week adjusting to a new normal of having just the three of us in the house. It’s going to be a lot quieter. I guess this is practice for when both boys go off and do their own thing?

This was a week in which I:

• Cleared my diary in order to spend Tuesday reviewing responses to our request for quotes to kit out our shared meeting rooms with technology. I’m regularly fascinated by how varied the responses are to this type of exercise. The review team gathered towards the end of the day to compare notes and agree next steps.
• Had to manage the potential impact of building works on our office taking place over the weekend, liaising with our landlord and the building owner to try and minimise the issues.
• Completed the work with the team to get an affiliate agreement in place in order to use a supplier that we already work with in South Africa. Now we move on to the statement of work.
• Had a follow-up meeting on our Digital Literacy/Digital Dexterity initiative to agree how we will take it forward. There are a lot of people involved, which is a better situation than when I previously tried to get this off the ground a couple of years ago, but it also means that getting agreement and alignment on what we will do is much more difficult.
• Had the weekly project meeting with our audio/visual consultants on the project to refit our shared meeting room spaces.
• Joined the weekly project meeting for our sister company’s refurbishment project.
• Met with the Technology Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Forum for our first monthly meeting.
• Kicked off the refresh of our Team Charter. We haven’t updated it in a couple of years. My executive partner from our technology research and advisory vendor has volunteered to coordinate the process for us, which allows everyone to take part. His advice is to do the refresh, but then bring the document to the foreground more often for a check-in on how we’re doing.
• Met with colleagues to discuss the requirements for software to help track important external data that could have a meaningful impact on our business. People in the room were nodding at each other and seemed to be in agreement, but I felt that the requirements were vague. It’s impossible to tell whether the thing they have in their minds is an exact match and it’s just me that isn’t seeing it properly, or whether they think they agree but actually have two different views of what we discussed. We’ll need to do much more to flesh it out on paper so that we have something objective to look at that we can all see in the same way.
• Was handed a letter from an organisation that enquired about the media licensing that we have in place. ChatGPT 5 was superb at directing me to the relevant government web pages that detailed whether this was relevant to us or not, and even gave me direction on other things that I needed to check. I’m starting to use ChatGPT quite a lot for things like this, and have defaulted it to Thinking mode, which seems to yield more accurate responses.
• Enjoyed our monthly Lean Coffee meeting, covering a lot of topics in an hour.
• Moved back to using my old Poly/Plantronics 4210 headset in the office. I’ve had the headset since 2019 and love it. It’s single-ear, so I don’t feel self-conscious about raising my voice too much and can still process the sounds around me. For the past few months I’d been trialling a Logitech Zone Wireless 2, but I wasn’t getting on with it. Aside from looking ridiculous — I felt like Mickey Mouse when I had the cups on my ears — and the hoop being uncomfortable to wear, it kept needing to be restarted after I spent any substantial time away from my laptop. The phone would ring; I’d pick up my headset only to find that it had lost the connection. When my 4210 dies, I’ll look for something that is a more direct replacement.
• Bumped into some old friends in the high street. Despite living in the same town, I hadn’t seen them in years. Sadly, they had been through quite a lot over the past year or so, but were generally doing well. It was lovely to see them.
• Enjoyed a brilliant party in the garden at a friend’s house to celebrate all of their family birthdays — two 60ths, a 21st and an 18th. It rained all night, but they had planned it well, installing a series of pop-up gazebos under which there was food, drink and places to sit. There were so many of the regular faces there that I’ve come to know a little over the years. We had a lovely time.
• Rode the Saints and Sinners Audax, a 208km route from St Albans to Bury St Edmunds and back again. I was up at 5:30am to ride over to the start; this short route included an eerie experience of pedalling through Buncefield in the morning light. Of course I knew there was no chance of the whole thing blowing up again while I was there, but I didn’t hang about. The ride itself was superb. In hindsight, I should have used some sun cream as the first half was beautifully sunny and not too warm. We had a strong headwind on the way back and it started to rain about an hour and a half from the end. The volunteers running the ride were so lovely, and even handed my wife a bowl of ratatouille when she came to pick me up. The ride also included my first ever crash, at about 0.5mph, as a couple of other riders and I went to push off, but I suddenly found that I couldn’t move my pedals. I ended up slamming into the middle of the road. The other riders helped me up and a passing stranger was very kind in checking if I was ok. I’ve got a couple of minor bruises, but none of them bigger than the one to my ego.

• Heard the horrible news that our fellow rider and club chairman had a major accident on the weekly cycling club ride. He was heading down Whiteleaf Hill and hit another rider as the route took them off to the right. It wasn’t good to see photos of him with a recovery blanket and then going off to hospital in an ambulance. We’re all wishing him well for a quick recovery.
• Managed to get a doctor’s appointment after I had been told to ‘give it a week and see how you get on’ via the eConsult service the week before.
  

Media

Podcasts

• This episode of Darknet Diaries from 2018 on the anatomy of a nation-state hack is very well done.
• Paul Ford and Rich Ziade have a great conversation about ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI) as part of their AI Summer School series. It covers how we anthropomorphise everything, how Steve Jobs really wanted his stuff to belong to culture and for people to do things with it (with a reminder that the iPod ads had people dancing and connecting to the music), how blockchain is the world’s slowest database, and how LLMs are the world’s sloppiest databases (or lossy encyclopedias, as Simon Willison pointed out).
• Your Undivided Attention has a very important episode about Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who took his own life following discussions with ChatGPT. It is incredible to me that companies such as OpenAI can develop safeguards into their products so that people can’t use them to generate content based on copyrighted content, and yet they are unwilling to detect and stop conversations that are taking a very dark turn. Is it so difficult to monitor for cases where ChatGPT is mentioning suicide multiple times? The anthropomorphic nature of these tools means that they are ready-made to exploit our human need for connection. At best it is negligence.
  

Articles

• Current and former Microsoft employees staged a sit-in at one of their offices to protest the company’s support of the Israeli government.
• Troy Hunt’s write-up of how he uses Home Assistant with his Ubiquiti doorbells and some AI is awesome. I’ve been running Home Assistant for a few years but haven’t done much with it in ages. This makes me want to start digging into it again.
• I hadn’t realised that cycling hardware manufacturer Stages had been bought by a subsidiary of Giant. This is amazing news, as it means that my SB20 indoor trainer is at much less risk of becoming obsolete. I had started to worry that I would need to keep my current iPhone around just so that I could run the Stages app during a training session, but it now looks as though they are going to continue with its support and development.
  

Video

• Continued with Shifty, watching episode four on iPlayer. It’s very, very good.
• Started watching Hostage on Netflix, but gave up before the end of episode two due to the ridiculous storyline. There is no way that the Prime Minister’s daughter would have the unfettered, clumsy access to the spaces that she does in the series. I’m not able to suspend disbelief enough to enjoy it. It’s a shame, as the sets and the main actors were very good.
• Tried a couple of episodes of Better Off Ted on the recommendation of a friend. Found it to be too silly and not funny enough to continue with.
• Got a couple of episodes through What It Feels Like for a Girl on iPlayer. It’s very good but not what I would call an enjoyable watch; there’s so much tension that runs through each instalment that it feels like a relief when it’s over. We’ll persist with it.
  

Books

• Continued with Jon Savage’s The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979). It’s very readable.
  

Next week: The rest of the house gets back to school.