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.

The family emotional rollercoaster continued through this week. Everything seemed to move forward at an unexpected pace. On Tuesday night, my wife came home after a night out and told me that she’d just had confirmation that our son’s passport would be returned the next day, with his new US study visa pasted into it. There was no time to waste in getting flights booked; if they left on Thursday they would be able to get to the university campus on Friday, and would then be able to meet and talk to the staff before they left for the weekend. She’d worked out that the best and cheapest route from London to Corpus Christi was via British Airways to Houston followed by a local connecting flight, but that the best way to do it was to purchase Avios points to get a cheaper fare. As my son would be coming back months later than my wife, the tickets had to be booked individually, leading to a tense period where one seat was confirmed while she tried to book the next one.

On Wednesday, I was in the office when my wife sent me this heart-sinking update. The passport didn’t look like it would be arriving after all. This was a problem as they were due to leave for the airport just after 11am the next day.

She tried calling Royal Mail to see if there was any way to collect the parcel. After 30 minutes on the phone, the doorbell rang. Standing there with the package in her hand was the postwoman. Apparently she had tried to deliver someone else’s parcel but couldn’t, and then accidentally scanned the wrong barcode, which triggered the message. She was very apologetic, and had no idea of the panic that had ensued. Everything was back on track again.

On Wednesday night, I looked for discounts on rental cars while my wife packed the suitcases. Packing to go somewhere to stay is very different from packing for a short trip. She also got our youngest boy ready for his weekend adventure, picking up his GCSE results on Thursday morning and then heading straight off to Reading Festival with his friends.

After a restless night’s sleep, everyone got where they needed to be while I stayed home alone for the long weekend. The GCSE results were great — my youngest son can do the A-levels he wanted — and the long-distance travellers made it to Corpus Christi and on to Kingsville without a hitch. I’m really proud of both of the boys. I really hope our eldest son settles in well and that his adventure is everything he wants it to be.

Working from home on Friday, I felt as though some of the weights I had been carrying around had been lifted, and I was able to fully concentrate on work for the first time in a while. It was a lovely feeling that I carried into the weekend.

This was a week in which I:

• Showed a couple of colleagues the basics of automations in Planview AgilePlace and gave them access to be able to experiment and create their own. Their main goal is to automatically create new Kanban cards at a given frequency for repetitive tasks.
• Had various meetings about our document management project. We think we’re almost done with the data analysis, but there are some details that we need specialist help to clarify. A meeting with a colleague was useful in that we could try to map what she sees as an end user versus what the data is telling us she has access to.
• Met with the incoming head of our newest office, introducing myself and our team and taking him through our approach to technology in this new location.
• Had the weekly meeting with our audio/visual vendor on our project to fit out the shared meeting rooms in our office. We now have a good solution for USB-C power delivery to the meeting room tables.
• Took part in the monthly Steering Committee for our sister company’s office refurbishment project, and also had our regular weekly project meeting.
• Ran our monthly Real Estate Services meeting where we monitor the work going on in our building. Later in the week, I joined a couple of colleagues in a visit to one of the shared spaces currently undergoing refurbishment.
• Dug into our approach for provisioning mobile phones and corporate SIM cards across our various offices. Mobile phones now have one foot very much in the IT space, which makes decisions about data access and device ownership quite complicated.
• Had a couple of meetings with our executive partner at our technology analyst vendor. We discussed the approach to refreshing our Team Charter in September, and have asked him to facilitate this process so that everyone in the team can take part. We also reviewed the work I have done on Digital Literacy/Digital Dexterity, what other companies are doing and how it can be improved.
• Had the informal regular check-in with colleagues who are driving a client on-boarding improvement project.
• Watched a live presentation of our division’s half-year results. Our CEO was great on stage, keeping people’s interest with his relaxed delivery. I really love how relatable the senior leaders are in our company; from my various encounters over the years, I know that this is genuine. It’s a very different experience from the types of senior leaders that I came into contact with at the start of my career.
• Met with two young people who were visiting us for work experience. One was about to go to university and the other had just finished her first year of A-levels. Sometimes these conversations flow brilliantly, with us running out of time before we exhaust the topics, and sometimes they are a struggle. For people not used to being in an office all day every day, the week can be tough, and it takes its toll a few days in.
• Had an impromptu catch-up with the Head of Workplace Services at our sister company.
• Met with our sister company for the quarterly review of services that we buy from them in our building.
• Learned all about our new IT infrastructure inventory and network modelling platform in our weekly Learning Hour, hosted by members of our Infrastructure and Operations team.
• Met with our new account manager for the vendor that supplies us with our end-user password management tool. I gave him an overview of who we are and what we do before we discussed how we might leverage his resources and expertise to drive further adoption and usage across our organisation.
• Listened to the start of a training session on Sustainable Finance Frameworks. The net had been cast very wide in terms of invites to the meeting. Fortunately the presenters shared their slides in such a way that I could look ahead through the deck, checking whether it would be a good use of time to stay. It’s useful to know it exists, and I know where to go if I need to find the information.
• Renewed our home contract with Virgin Media, saving about £15 a month versus what we were paying before. The only premium service I want is Sky Sports so that we can watch the Formula 1, but the package is very expensive without any contracted discounts. I’ve made a note to get in contact with them a month before the new contract ends, otherwise I’m going to be paying a fortune.
• Got lots of little jobs done as I pottered about the house all weekend. Weeded the driveway and the patio, cleared out and cleaned the fridge and freezer, pulled down a vine that had started to make its way up our magnificent beech tree, and caught up with all of the washing, including the hideously dusty clothes that my son came back from Reading Festival in. It felt good to tick some things off the list.
  

• Loved hearing Gary Numan’s Living Ornaments ‘80 at Album Club. I can’t quite believe it was a decade ago that someone first picked a Gary Numan album. I’ve not explored the rest of his catalogue, but everything I hear from his early years is superb.
• Had a lovely catch-up with friends over a burger on Friday night. They were spending the weekend at the Silverstone Festival, but I wanted to use the time to catch up with stuff at home so I would be able to give my youngest son whatever attention he needed when he got back from his own festival.
• Enjoyed a lovely long cycling club ride in the sun. We’ve had an incredible run of dry and warm rides, but I think it may be coming to an end next week. I made it out for a run on Sunday, despite TrainerRoad telling me it should have been a rest day. I was pretty knackered, so decided to keep it as flat as I could, running along the canal path and back again to cover 10km.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Enjoyed hearing from Simon Willison on the Screaming in the Cloud podcast. His enthusiasm for all of the things he does and his advocacy for blogging are infectious.
  

Articles

• Detailed, but useful — Bird & Bird have created versions of the UK GDPR, Data Protection Act 2018 and Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) that show the changes brought in by the new Data (Use and Access) Act.
• Commonwealth Bank of Australia replaced workers with AI, and then un-replaced them.
• You can’t shortcut the learning process. I love this mini-comic by Nick Sousanis, a great statement as a new school year starts here in the UK.
  

Video

• Finished Billy Joel: And So It Goes. I love an epic popular music documentary and this was excellent. I didn’t know that much about Joel beforehand. This did a great job of putting his music and career in context, and made me want to dig into his catalogue.
• The BBC Archive YouTube account continues to be a source of random, ephemeral delight. This short programme from 1967 documenting voices and opinions of children on a day trip to France is lovely.
• Watched — but didn’t really enjoy — BlackBerry (2023). The characters seemed ridiculously exaggerated, both in how they looked and what they did, and yet the film lacked any light relief.
• Continued enjoying Adam Curtis’ Shifty on iPlayer.
  

Books

• Needing a change after finishing Apple in China, I picked up a discounted copy of The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979) by Jon Savage. It’s a massive book and will keep me going for a while.
  

Next week: My turn to host an online Album Club, and our first week with just the three of us in the house.

I started this week in Lisbon, getting back on Tuesday evening. It was strange to arrive back from a hot place straight into another hot place. We’ve barely mowed our garden lawns this summer and the grass looks drier than I can ever remember. I know it will come back when we get some decent rain, but it’s quite difficult to believe right now.

Only three days in the office again this week. I have to remember that when I feel like I’m not making as much progress with some projects as I would like to.

This was a week in which I:

• Found it a struggle to get back into the swing of things after my weekend away. I went right into a string of meetings which quickly sapped my post-holiday glow.
• Had the weekly project meeting with our audio/visual consultants, getting on the same page with our plans for the procurement process.
• Joined the weekly project meeting for our sister company’s office refurbishment.
• Walked around our office with the building contractor to discuss the work that they plan to do in our space over the next few weekends.
• Met with our building consultancy vendor to review our contract and agree the size and shape of the work for the rest of the year.
• Had a meeting with colleagues involved in driving further adoption of our corporate password manager. I’ve got some actions to get done over the next couple of weeks.
• Took part in our first monthly Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum.
• Met with colleagues to talk about our Digital Literacy/Digital Dexterity initiative. I presented the slides I put together last week, but I am not sure that they have yet had the impact that I would like to see.
• Sat on a panel to listen and give feedback on presentations by leaders in our Business Transformation and Strategy Enablement team. Each of them talked through their value proposition, purpose, vision, services and gaps. It was fascinating to learn more about what each of their teams does.
• Enjoyed this week’s Learning Hour meeting on a project to establish IPTV feeds in one of our regional offices.
• Joined this month’s Teams Fireside Chat for a wide-ranging conversation with Martin Boam and Tom Arbuthnot about all things Microsoft Teams (and Copilot)-related.
• Caught up with a meeting recording about a work trip I’m taking soon. Given the detail of the briefing, it seems that there may be a few people on the trip from across our organisation who have never been abroad before. I think I might be more excited for them than I am for myself to go on the trip.
• Bought an ‘early bird’ ticket for the Interesting conference in May 2026. I’ve been a couple of times in the past. I shared the link with my friends in the WB-40 podcast Signal group and a bunch of them have signed up too. I don’t mind going to things on my own, but it’ll be ace to have some friends there. You should come!
• Celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary. The years are short, and getting shorter.
• Was happy that my eldest son came out and joined our group on our Saturday morning cycling club ride. He did brilliantly to cover the distance and keep up. People at the club are so lovely; they were genuinely interested in what he plans to do next now that his schooling is over and wished him well.
• Felt for that same son of mine when he went for his interview at the US Embassy in London. He was on the receiving end of a typical grilling. The interview ended abruptly with the interviewer keeping his passport and handing him a piece of paper. As he walked away from the room, he saw that the text started with the devastating line “Your visa application has been refused under Section 221(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act…” Initially, all seemed lost. After a few hours of searching for information and trying to get our heads around it, we realised that this is standard procedure when they don’t issue a visa immediately, on the spot. (Do they ever?) But we didn’t know whether we would need to wait a day, a week, a month, or even longer for them to decide. Later that day, my wife checked the online application portal and found that it had been approved. A total rollercoaster of emotions. Hopefully he’ll get his passport and visa back soon so that he can get over to the US in time for the start of term.
• Enjoyed a sunny Sunday barbecue at my brother’s house. Our boys drove over earlier than my wife and I, so that they could head for a session at the driving range with their cousins, their uncle and their grandad. They are superb hosts. It was great that our eldest got to see them before he heads off on his big adventure.
• Loved hearing a record at Album Club that had been on my list for some time. Antmusic might be my favourite Adam Ant song.

Media

Podcasts

• Really good episode of the Aboard podcast that gives a simple explanation of how LLMs (don’t) think.
• I’ve not heard much about the European Accessibility Act, but it sounds like organisations have much to do in order to get ready for complying with it. Neil Milliken has a useful, broad discussion with Tom Arbuthnot about accessibility on the Microsoft Teams Insider podcast.
  

Articles

• Baldur Bjarnason’s post that we should “stop pretending that managers and executives care about productivity” is good, but depressing.
  

So a detailed analysis of how these tools could hypothetically play out is kind of pointless. The people who need to hear it won’t listen and the people who would listen are already opting out of the bubble.

• I wish it were a joke that the UK government was advising people to delete old emails to save water. I don’t even know where to start in terms of how ridiculous this is.
  

Next week: Another Album Club, and a full week at work.

Before I had the good fortune to spend four nights away on holiday, I had a three-day working week.

This was a short week in which I:

• Caught up with a colleague to get their feedback on their interview with the person I have found for the vacancy in my team.
• Had two ‘pre-interviews’ with alternative candidates. It’s unusual that the first person you interview is the one you want to join your team, so it was good to speak to another couple of people before making a decision.
• Met to discuss feedback from one of our regulators. We’ve agreed a follow-up approach with our Internal Audit team.
• Met with our sister company to present our plans for the technology for the meeting rooms that we share. We covered the technology and design for each room, the operating model, and the costs. We’d had the meeting planned for a very long time and it was great to finally agree a way forward. Off the back of this meeting, we kicked off a process to request quotes from vendors for the supply and installation of the meeting room equipment.
• Had the weekly meeting with our audio/visual consultants on our project for the shared meeting rooms. We also had separate meetings with the project manager from our sister company to cover off a few items that we needed to align on.
• Took a walk around the construction taking place in the shared spaces on two floors of our building. It was strange to be in familiar places that had been completely repurposed, such as a meeting room that had been set up as the construction team’s office.
• Reviewed the setup of our divisible meeting room to assess how we might test the functionality and performance of multiple table cameras.
• Spent some more time with a colleague working through a data analysis in Excel.
• Alongside a handful of colleagues from my department, had a ‘meet and greet’ session with our new regional CEO. It was good to learn a bit more about him.
• Had our regular project meeting for the setup of a brand new office in a new location.
• Reviewed an early draft of a business case for monitoring and managing signals for new client leads.
• Met with a global accounting and advisory firm that we are working with to give them an overview of our function and to answer some questions on our technology setup.
• Updated some slides I put together a couple of years ago on the topic of Digital Literacy and Digital Dexterity, aligning them to broader goals that have been communicated in our organisation this year.
• Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour, this time with a guest speaker who gave us an overview of FinOps and our approach to it within our company.
• Had a conversation with an analyst from Gartner about how companies are tackling the proliferation of meeting recording, particularly using AI bots. The feedback was that we’re a couple of steps ahead of current thinking. I need to chew this over and write more about it.
• Felt like I spent too much time in forums and meetings that had a poor return on investment of my attention. I’m going to be even more selective about these in the coming weeks.
• Felt sorry for my friends who were riding the insane challenge of London-Edinburgh-London. Storm Floris blew in and paused the ride, eventually cancelling it a few hours later. I know that so much preparation had gone into the ride. They still managed to cover over 900km each, so it’s still a great achievement. 2029, anyone?
  

Media

Podcasts

• Interesting to hear an interview with Dale Vince, a one-time homeless eco warrior who has become a renewable energy millionaire. I had never heard of him before.
  

Articles

• I love the concept of a ‘macroscope’, zooming out to see the bigger picture. “The man who cleans the urinals at an airport and says he’s ensuring 40 million people per year have a pleasant and safe trip, clearly is using a macroscope effectively.”
• “Didn’t Take Long To Reveal The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About”.
• Molly White has written a great introduction to using RSS feeds to have news from writers you like come to you. I’ve been using Feedbin since Google Reader was sent to the grave and have been very happy with it.
• People who write newsletters on Substack should leave Substack. There are so many more newsletters I would pay for if they weren’t hosted there.
• An Airbnb host tried to falsely claim damages from a guest by manipulating photos of furniture to make it look damaged. I can’t imagine even thinking of doing that to someone.
  

Audio

• I’ve invested in some more Wilder Maker, buying a vinyl and digital copy of their first album Year Of Endless Light as well as pre-ordering the vinyl version of their upcoming album The Streets Like Beds Still Warm from Juno. (Shipping on the new album from Bandcamp was crazy expensive, so it was slightly cheaper to buy a digital copy on Bandcamp and the record from a UK store.)
• Started watching the epic new Billy Joel documentary. I’m a total sucker for an in-depth examination of anyone from the pop canon, and this is excellent.
  

Web

• A friend recommended Muri as the best example of alcohol-free wine that he has tried. I don’t think I’ve had a good alcohol-free red wine, ever. If it wasn’t so expensive I would give it a go.
  

Next week: Another three-day working week after my short trip away.

I’m a little self-conscious that my weeknote preambles may often come across as grumbling as I look back across the previous seven days. But this week was another struggle. A tiredness has seeped into my bones that I’ve not been able to shake. Something has to change. On Friday night I went up very early as I knew I’d be getting up just after 6am for the weekly cycling club ride and it definitely made a difference. So my current plan is to try heading up to bed half an hour earlier than I’ve done for the past couple of decades to see if that changes anything. There will be less time to do things, including writing here, but I’m not sure what else to try.

This was a week in which I:

• Reviewed a proposal for what we will implement as our IT infrastructure stack in our first office in a new country. After some back and forth between a few of us we seem to have reached a consensus on what we’ll do and the approach we’ll take to get there.
• Met with colleagues, our construction firm and our landlord for a formal handover of the accessible door that we installed earlier in the year.
• Attended the Steering Committee for our sister company’s office refurbishment project, as well as the weekly project check-in meeting.
• Reviewed the final design proposal from our audio/visual technology vendor for the equipment to go into our shared meeting spaces later this year. We’ve now got a tender pack ready to go, as well as updated options for discussion for day-to-day support once we’re live.
• Interviewed the first candidate for the Project Manager / Agile Development Lead role in my team.
• Spent time working on some data analysis with a colleague. He taught me a bit more about PowerQuery, and in return I took him through how we can use Pivot Tables for the final steps.
• Had the fortnightly retrospective and sprint planning meeting with our development team.
• Joined the weekly project meeting for the refurbishment of one of our offices.
• Met with colleagues for a workshop on the risks presented by artificial intelligence tools. I dusted off a slide deck that I created a couple of years ago, largely based on material found in Baldur Bjarnason’s excellent book The Intelligence Illusion. If you work in a company considering using generative AI (and at this point, who isn’t?) it’s thoroughly recommended.
• Had our quarterly architecture governance authority meeting. We had a robust and useful debate about a proposal that had been submitted to the forum, arguing for the exploration of an alternative desktop software product for something that many people use across our organisation. We may end up with something that is cheaper, easier to use, has less risk of leaking data to the vendor and is more robust. Our small part of the organisation has a history of successful experimentation that we can then bring back as information for the wider group, and this will progress along the same lines.
• Met with colleagues to talk about how technology may be able to help us with client leads. The next step is to document our thinking to ensure we have agreed consensus on the problem before proposing what we’ll do next.
• Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour meeting where our CTO gave a talk on measuring and using data about our physical office spaces that he had previously given at a vendor event.
• Reviewed and signed off on the latest iteration of the CAD plan for our office.
• Had my mid-year review with my line manager.
• Reapplied for a postal vote, as I found out that requests to vote by post now expire after three years. The process to renew was super simple. I do wonder whether this was brought in to combat a real risk of fraud, or whether it’s just politics.
• Cancelled my MUBI subscription yet again. I really want the service to exist, but I just don’t watch enough movies to justify the subscription. I’ve not watched a film on the platform this year.
• Added a bunch of friends to Plex, giving them access to my digital music library. Using PlexAmp along with all of the server-side monitoring tools is a delight.
• Enjoyed a cracking WB-40 Album Club. New member Susi introduced us to Jean-Jaques Perrey’s Moog Indigo, one of the earliest records to make extensive use of sampling. Updating the WB-40 Album Club website with the album details was a challenge as the release date wasn’t easy to track down. It seemed like a perfect use case for ChatGPT Deep Research, which looked at lots of sources and came to a conclusion based on information on websites I doubt I would have found on my own.
• Had our oven repaired by an engineer from NEFF, replacing one of the two cooling fans. It’s a delight to be able to turn it on without feeling like it was going to take off. Fortunately it was still within warranty, so the work was done for free.
• Enjoyed a wonderful barbecue at our friends’ house on Saturday. At multiple points I felt like I was on holiday, lounging around on their ridiculously comfortable patio furniture, having long, expansive conversations with friends. They really know how to host.
• Journeyed to Ross-on-Wye on Sunday to spend a couple of days with my wife’s parents. It was my father-in-law’s birthday on Sunday, so we went for lunch at The Hen & Dot at Flanesford Priory, near Goodrich Castle. It was lovely to spend some time with them, as well as my brother-in-law, sister-in-law and their splendid three-year-old. We got a few jobs done for them while we were there and even found time for coffee and cake at Truffles Cafe.
  

• Loved Saturday morning’s cycling club ride, pushing hard up lots of local hills. My eldest boy decided to come out on a trial ride again after having been away from the club for a few years. He rode with a slightly slower speed group than me; we passed them with about 10km to go at which point he switched over and rode with us for the rest of the way. I had a terrifying near-off after falling into a long pothole in the road as we were chugging along at speed. My wheels dropped into the depression and scraped along the side of the tarmac, making a massive noise and unbalancing me on the bike. Somehow I managed to keep everything pointing in the right direction, and my wheels looked to be undamaged.
  

Media

Podcasts

• This week’s Politics Weekly UK podcast with John Harris focused on the UK riots that took place a year ago. I think that the discussion succinctly articulated something that makes sense to me:
  

The reason that hotels in Skegness were being used to house asylum seekers was that people aren’t going to Skegness for their holidays anymore. And you have a lot of hotels standing empty because it’s not a big tourist trap anymore. And its glory days are past it as a resort and all the rest of it. That’s why hotels are turning to signing contracts with the Home Office. And you see the same thing all over the country.

It’s places that are run down and that’s where you’ve got hotel rooms being sold off cheaply, whether it’s to house asylum seekers or to use as temporary accommodation for the homeless or whatever it is where the state suddenly needs to find spaces quickly.

Clearly to the local community, that feels like a kind of symbol of decline. It’s the hotel where your mum had a ruby wedding anniversary, your daughter had her 18th, and now it’s not a hotel anymore. It was the posh place in town and now it’s not and now the town doesn’t have any posh places and it’s your anger about that that becomes displaced onto what it’s now being used for.

• Stumbled across a delightful conversation between Kathryn Williams, a musician whose early work I loved when it came out at the tail end of the 1990s, and Kathryn Joseph, who I discovered in the past few years.
  

Articles

• A great Sketchplanation of The Trolley Problem.
• I’m not a big video game player but I have lots of friends that are. I enjoyed Matt Haughey’s reflections on his current favourite games.
• Michael Tsai’s collection of reflections on the UK Online Safety Act.
• Excellent interactive infographic on the evolution of the Tour de France. (Via the quantum of sollazzo newsletter.)
• An argument for retiring the word ‘technology’, which has become too vague to be useful.
• Jason Koebler and Matthew Gault offer sobering reflections on that Coldplay concert Jumbotron and the subsequent public shaming. It made me think about the Internet pile-on with the Star Wars Kid 20 years ago. Yes, it’s not exactly the same thing, but there are parallels. Everyone involved will have had their lives turned upside down. Well, except the members of Coldplay.
• Incredible that Microsoft was using support engineers based in China to assist the US military.
• News that The Samaritans plan to close 100 branches is devastating. Many years ago I used the service, driving to the branch in Coventry in a moment of desperation. The hours I spent there that night, talking with one of the volunteers, was life-changing for me. Peter Ormerod is right when he says that “We have tended to see the issue in terms of what is physically possible, rather than what is emotionally wise: the charity may be doing us an indirect favour by making us consider the importance of both.”
• Another reminder that nobody should be using Substack. There are so many newsletters out there that I would be prepared to pay for and subscribe to, but not while they are on the Substack platform.
  

Video

• Started watching the 1980s children’s TV show Star Fleet. I bought the DVD years ago but never got around to putting it on. I watched the show on TV when I was very little and found the aliens genuinely scary, but in an exciting way.
• Watched the second episode of Shifty.
  

Audio

• Have been listening a lot to Waiting, the incredible second album by the Fun Boy Three. Digging into Terry Hall’s discography, I came across this Mojo article where they revisit an interview with him in 2014.
  

Next week: Three days of work and a short break.

Another week where I’ve felt wiped out. Having a look at the Sleep Cycle app, I can see that I’m on a bit of a dip. I find this reassuring, despite not knowing what’s causing it. There’s a lot of stuff going on right now, from the smorgasbord of things at work, to family things, to the hideous things in the news. So perhaps it’s just all of these adding up. It’ll pass.

This was a week in which I:

• Met to discuss the preliminary outcome of a regulatory audit for one of our entities.
• Joined the rebooted project meeting for setting up an office in a new country. We suddenly have lots to do.
• Had the weekly project meeting with the team working on the project to refresh and refurbish another of our offices. Our vendor contracts are nearly all in place and the plan is taking shape.
• Met with colleagues in our sister company to review the status of their refurbishment project in our shared building. I spent some of Sunday evening putting together a slide for their project Steering Committee pack on our plans for the shared meeting space in our building.
• Had more conversations about consumer devices that record audio that can then be processed by AI, either for immediate language translation or to help with productivity in other ways. There is a massive digital literacy angle to this, but I get the feeling that in wider society, functionality and utility of the tools will trump any privacy concerns. People are going to be recording conversations and uploading them all over the place, with little regard for where those recordings may eventually end up. At work, we need to ensure that people are equipped to understand the difference between using approved, controlled and audited tools, versus a device that they can buy on the Internet.
• Met with colleagues ahead of one of our governance committee meetings to ensure that we were aligned on the messages relating to our actions.
• Reviewed the outcome of a software delivery that didn’t go as planned, and discussed what the teams involved in the management of the work can do about it.
• Had another reminder of how communication is hard when I watched an issue raised about a network connection go off track into a discussion about something very different.
• Met with our audio/visual consultants to refine our updated design for a divisible space that we will be fitting out towards the end of this year.
• Reviewed a proposal for support services from one of our hardware vendors.
• Met with the senior team at our most significant vendor to discuss the implications of the news that they had recently been acquired.
• Joined a meeting to review our progress with an initiative that gives our outward-facing staff more insight into their clients. We agreed how we would expand the initiative, covering more clients in specific sectors and geographies.
• Held a handover meeting between the construction company and our Facilities team for the accessible door installed in our office a few months ago. We still need to schedule regular servicing visits and a longer-term maintenance contract.
• Formally completed the small project to make microwave ovens available to our staff in our office.
• Reviewed a colleague’s progress with some data analysis work relating to how we store documentation relating to our clients. It was my first time seeing Power Query in Excel; I had no idea such a powerful tool had ended up in the application. In the early part of my career, anything that got slightly complex with combining different data sources led me to spinning up an Access database. If Power Query had been around, it might have kept me in the spreadsheet world instead.
• Had a conversation with a colleague about our nudges towards them using our corporate password manager. About a third of our staff are weekly active users. I don’t know how this compares to other organisations that have gone on the same journey, but I bet it’s not bad. Getting the other two thirds on board is going to be a fascinating exercise in digital literacy and change management. We met later in the week to review our plans for driving adoption and better security practices.
• Spent time thinking about how people ‘recruit’ others as champions for the things they care about. The corporate password manager is a good example; how do I take the fire in my belly about keeping ourselves, our clients and our organisation safe and make it a fire in your belly? Years ago I read Euan Semple saying that “Social media adoption happens one conversation at a time, and for their reasons not yours.” I actually think that this is generalisable beyond social media to the adoption of any technology, or the championing of any change project.
• Came up with an idea over lunch with a colleague for an experiment in engagement during our larger internal Teams meetings. We created three solid-colour backgrounds — green, amber and red — each denoting our level of engagement in the meeting. If a conversation is going off track or into too much detail and we find ourselves disengaging, we can flick our background to amber or red to signify this to the meeting chair. We tried it out in a couple of meetings towards the end of the week and other people took to it as well. There may be some legs in this.
• Joined colleagues across our divisional Technology department for a global town hall-style meeting. Participating remotely was challenging, but it is always better to be included than to be left out.
• Met with colleagues on our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum to talk about plans for National Women’s Day. At first I was confused as I thought we’d already had Women’s Day, back in March. It turns out that this was International Women’s Day, and South Africa has its own National Women’s Day too. One thing I’ve noted about South African public holidays is that they have such unassuming names, belying the seriousness of the events that led to their creation. For example, Youth Day isn’t just a celebration of all of the young people in the country, it actually commemorates the Soweto Uprising in 1976 where hundreds of students were killed by the police. National Women’s Day commemorates 20,000 women who marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to petition against the pass laws under apartheid. As a member of the DEI forum from outside of the country, it’s difficult to understand how people feel about these holidays now. In the UK, we don’t have any recently established recurring commemorative public holidays, and therefore we never have a conversation about them. From discussions I’ve had this week, it seems that although these South African holidays have important origins, people don’t tend to want to dredge up the past and generally just look forward to a day off. Perhaps it’s the role of government and leaders to mark the occasion in a more somber way. I’m learning so much.
• Lost half a day in trying to fix a keyboard and mouse issue with my laptop. On Thursday morning I got to the office and plugged in my computer, waking it from sleep. My mouse pointer felt jerky and the keyboard seemed sluggish, not responding and then repeatingggggg lots of charactersssssss. After 30 seconds of research, I decided to try updating the drivers directly from the AMD website. I’d done this a few times before and knew how easy it was; the software detects what system you have and usually handles the update without any fuss. Unfortunately, this time the installer got to the point where it removed what was already there but then failed with an ‘access denied’ error when trying to put new drivers in place. Worryingly, external displays had completely disappeared from Windows Device Manager. I tried running it again, but got the same result. I rebooted, and ran the installer before doing anything else. Again, no luck. A concerned cry for help via ChatGPT led me to the AMD ‘Cleanup Utility’ that removes drivers. I figured that running this may get me to a place where I could rerun the installer and it might work. The Cleanup Utility wanted me to reboot my computer in Safe Mode, where presumably it would have better luck at uninstalling files as less of them would be locked in use. This is where things got really hairy. Safe Mode left me in purgatory — I couldn’t use my PIN or my password to log in, and no other options were available. The journey continued through obtaining a 48-digit Bitlocker key (which I had to enter three or four times), using the command line in ‘recovery mode’ to manually edit the boot configuration, and using Display Driver Uninstaller to clean things up before trying to get the driver installed again. I ventured away from my desk for a while and when I returned I found that my monitor had finally sprung to life. I decided to connect my keyboard and mouse via Bluetooth instead of the dongle, which solved the original issue from three hours before. I’m not touching anything else.
• Met a young man who was with us in the office for a week’s work experience.
• Dived into my Kindle library to find — or rather, not find — a book that I had previously purchased. I’d been thinking about Euan Semple’s Organisations Don’t Tweet, People Do and wanted to go back to the original text to find something specific. But all I got was an option to purchase the book. It wasn’t that the book had disappeared from my device, it was as if I hadn’t purchased the book at all. I remembered reading about this happening to someone else, and their remedy was to get in contact with Amazon customer service. I used the button so that they called me, and a nice customer service lady immediately found ‘the problem’ and restored the book for me, along with 175 others. Why did they get removed from my library in the first place? You really have to keep track of what books you’ve purchased, otherwise you might find yourself buying the same thing all over again.
• Completed some health questionnaires ahead of a checkup that I’ve got booked for a few weeks’ time.
• Had a wonderful dinner with the beautiful people of WB-40. After a drink at The Dovetail (and a reminder that Sportzot is the best tasting alcohol-free beer), we went to a private room at the Bourne & Hollingsworth Buildings for a delicious meal. I’m so lucky to have made such lovely friends over the past few years, just through listening to a podcast and joining a chat group.
  

• Went with a friend to see The Ancient and Moderns play at The Hope and Anchor in Islington. I’d never been to the venue and was pleased to find a perfectly-sized small pub basement as our home for the evening. The band were amazing, making every song sound great. (Well, except for The Cranberries’ Zombie, which is my musical kryptonite. Nothing can save that song.)
  

• Loved watching the Women’s Euro 2025 tournament. It seemed to have a very low-key start, without much mainstream coverage, but built as England made progress. Chloe Kelly and Michele Agyemang were the clear stars of England’s tournament, getting us out of trouble in all of the knockout stages. Spain were the better team in the final, but sometimes it’s just not your night.
• Had a fun ride with the cycling club on Saturday morning, despite a few mechanical issues in the group. Years ago my dad taught me how to find a hole in an inner tube by using the sensitivity of your lips to detect the air coming out. I put this to good use, finding the tiniest of holes, and subsequently found the tiniest of flints embedded in my friend’s tyre. If you don’t find the cause, it’s so easy to fit a new inner tube only to immediately get another puncture when you start riding again.
  

• Enjoyed a Sunday morning bike ride with my eldest son, whose post-exams holiday viewing of the Tour de France has given him the cycling bug again. A friend very generously lent him a road bike and he already had a helmet, so he just needed to buy some shoes and cleats in order to get going.
• Had a visit from an engineer to investigate why our home oven is so noisy. Apparently it has two cooling fans, and based on what he heard he has made a plan to replace both of them.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Enjoyed the conversation with researcher and ex-OpenAI employee Daniel Kokotajlo on the Your Undivided Attention podcast. I’ve added his ‘AI 2027’ paper to my reading list. The conversation began to lose me when they spoke about AI cheating; these aren’t beings and therefore don’t ‘cheat’. At least, not in the sense that we understand it. The host said that “…AIs in that process become smart enough that they hide their motivations and pretend that they’re going to do what programmers train them to do or what customers want them to do, but we don’t pick up on the fact that that doesn’t happen until it’s too late.” The language we use about AI is filled with traps that we easily fall into, in this case “smart enough”, “their motivations” and “pretend” are all problematic.
  

Articles

• I love Ton Zijlstra’s reflections on needing professional peers for conversation and challenge.
• “A remarkable 40 per cent of Brits aged between 18 and 24 think it is acceptable to answer a phone call without any form of greeting, a YouGov poll found last year.”
• Arresting people for peacefully protesting is an absolute scandal. Despite all of this country’s recent problems, I used to proudly boast that someone could go wandering down the street shouting how much they hated the monarch or the Prime Minister and it was their right to do that. This is not the country I want us to be.
• I do feel sorry for people who have apostrophes in their names. The Internet is busy talking about AI taking over the world, but we haven’t yet solved basic problems like this.
• Randahl Fink’s cautionary tale of how a simple piece of technology can lead to unintended consequences and social media pile-ons.
• I’ve been thinking about Euan Semple’s work a lot this week. I found these three great blog posts as I scoured his archives for a specific quote:
  
  • How writing a blog can make you a better manager.
  • Defend your mess.
  • Why writing matters.
    

Books

• I’m still not reading as much as I would like. Continued with Apple In China, and I’m now at the point where they have launched the iPhone. The stories of the processes to bring the product to life and how successful it was in the early years are mindblowing.
  

Next week: The return of the WB-40 Album Club, fixing the oven, and getting together with old friends.

Another week with plenty going on. I’m still not sleeping that well, which led to me dozing off more than once in front of the TV in the evening before admitting defeat. Our heatwave came to a very welcome end, with rain finally falling again at the end of the week. I’m sure my memory is flawed, but I can’t recall such a hot, dry spell in June and July before.

This was a week in which I:

• Reviewed a proposal for how we should manage requests from our staff for second laptops. When we took ownership of our infrastructure in 2019 we had a verbal agreement on how this should work, but the reality has drifted since then. Our team has tried to give people what they asked for but that has led to a much bigger endpoint estate to manage than we would like. Writing a policy or procedure feels like the obvious next step.
• Created a description for a project manager/agile lead role in my team and reviewed it with some of my colleagues. It’s long, but I really try to capture the essence of what it feels like to work in our department, which is quite different — in many good ways — to other places that I have worked.
• Attended the second quarterly business review meeting of the year for our divisional technology senior leadership team. The highlights were guest speakers Siyabulela Xuza, who invented a new rocket fuel in his mum’s kitchen in Mthatha and went on to meet world leaders, and Jonathan Shapiro, CEO of LESCO, a manufacturing company that employs youth and “traditionally unemployable” staff. Both were inspirational.
• Met with our audio/visual vendor and the senior technical leaders in our team to review the latest draft of a design for one of the complex shared meeting room spaces in our office. The complexity comes from the need to incorporate roaming mics into the setup, where the room itself is divisible into three spaces. We’ve had a few of these meetings over the past couple of weeks and they have felt great, debating and puzzling over what the setup should be, making compromises with each other. We think we now have a good design.
• Enjoyed hearing from our Group CEO in a conversational town hall-style meeting during his visit to London. It was our first meeting since we upgraded the cameras in our ‘collaboration space’, adding a second camera that faces the audience in the room. Microsoft Teams allows remote participants to choose their view, showing the presenters, the audience, or both. It worked brilliantly.
• Updated a report for one of our country-based governance committee meetings.
• Had a lovely meeting with our new network engineer who joined the team at the start of the month. We’ve been together in meetings but hadn’t had a one-to-one catch-up before.
• Made a start on a new draft outline for our Digital Literacy/Dexterity initiative. I last explored this space in 2023, so it was useful to go back over what I’d done and bring it into line with the words now being used in our organisation’s strategy.
• Had conversations with our project manager on our initiative to tweak the way that we manage our client-related documents.
• Joined our fortnightly Microsoft Copilot working group. We looked at Prompt Buddy, an app that you can run in Microsoft Teams that allows staff to share generative AI prompts with each other. It’s a nice idea, but I think it may be a bit too hidden away for people to develop the habit of using it regularly.
• Had the monthly call with my executive partner at our technology advisory/research firm. Our conversations are always useful.
• Met with colleagues in our HR team for further discussions about their initiative to help with creating capacity in our teams.
• Had an introductory call with a resourcing and outsourcing vendor that we use in other parts of our group.
• Met with Internal Audit to give them an overview of our department, ahead of them planning their agenda for 2026.
• Caught up with the project manager running the initiative to set up an office in a new country for our organisation. After a long administrative process we are now switching into execution mode.
• Enjoyed this week’s Learning Hour meeting, hearing from a colleague in our Marketing and Communications department talk about his hobby of paramotoring, and his recent trip to paramotor his way around Namibia. I’d quite like to give it a go myself someday.
• Watched a fascinating webinar on the part that socio-economic background plays in how people find opportunities and make progress in the workplace. According to the research cited by the panel, socio-economic background has a greater impact on a person’s rate of progression than their gender or ethnicity. The strongest indicator of a person’s future outcomes in the workplace is what the main income earner did in their household when they were 14. Parents without experience of professional life aren’t as able to help their children with understanding social cues, what’s expected of them etc. It is important for senior leaders to be able to talk about the barriers that they have overcome, as well as what their background helps them to bring to the workplace. Like many BIE Executive webinars, it is well worth a watch.
  

• Ventured into Slack for the first time in years, in order to find out what happened to the Liberating Structures London meetup. I made it to an in-person event back in 2018 but that style of gathering very much feels like something from the before-times. I did go to a couple of online meetings during the pandemic and took an all-day virtual training course in 2021, but things went quiet after that. The thought to find out what the group had been up to was triggered by a meeting where I suggested that people use 1-2-4-All as a technique to find the good ideas in the room. The idea is that a question is posed from the front of the room, which you then think about on your own. You then join with someone else to discuss each other’s thoughts before joining up with another pair and then ultimately reporting back to the whole room. In this way, good ideas from quieter members of the group may get surfaced.
• Logged a pile of CDs into my Discogs collection that had been waiting around for too long.
• Dialled into the latest ‘ask us anything’ meetup for patrons of the Quiet Riot podcast. I put forward the point that I would love to pay a bit more for an ad-free version of the show. It is very heavy with ads; a lot of them are for Shopify, which I find problematic, particularly given the values of the lovely team behind the show. I hope I managed to raise the issue in a respectful and sensitive way, as I know that they aren’t making the podcast to make themselves rich.
• Signed up for a ‘well person’ health screening in a couple of months. It will be reassuring to get a full MOT.
• Had a lovely dinner with my eldest son at Faros restaurant on Gray’s Inn Road. He was in town around the time that I was thinking about heading home, and this was halfway between my office and Euston station. Eating out in the street always makes me feel as though I’m on holiday.
  

• Celebrated our youngest son’s 16th birthday with dinner out at Prime in Berkhamsted. They were very lovely to us, bringing out extra things to eat including a big dessert platter and a birthday ice cream. The kids are not kids for very long.
  

• Ate out at Lussmanns in Berkhamsted with my wife and two of our closest friends on Friday night. It’s definitely not the best restaurant in town, but it was good to go somewhere different. Mainly, it was all about the company.
• Enjoyed catching up with my cycling friends at Berkhamsted Cycling Club’s summer barbecue.
• Had our oven professionally cleaned. It’s amazing how much gunk builds up in an oven over the course of a year or so. It’s lovely to have it looking brand new again.
• Was excited to hear that Magdalena Bay are coming back to play at London’s Brixton Academy, but stopped short of buying a ticket when I saw how much it will cost. I’m so pleased that they are finding the success that they deserve, but at £50 a ticket I may just have to enjoy them on record from now on.
• Booked a long weekend away. We don’t have the funds for a big family holiday this year, and timing is a bit difficult with everything that everyone is doing. But a short break in a city is always fun. We’re fortunate enough to be able to do it and I’m sure we’ll make the most of it.
• Rode indoors on Saturday and Sunday as our weekly club ride was cancelled. An amber weather warning brought fears of gigantic lightning storms but they never came.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Enjoyed Nick Robinson’s interview with Josh Babarinde, who is — incredibly — the first black person elected to parliament as a Liberal Democrat.
  

Articles

• “Stephen Colbert’s Cancellation Is Exactly What It Looks Like”.
  

Video

• Watched the first episode of Shifty, Adam Curtis’s new programme on BBC iPlayer. I’m hooked already, and glad that there is so much more to watch. I love old ephemeral films, but when they get woven together into a narrative with a great soundtrack it is like catnip for me.
  

Audio

• Excited to learn that Wilder Maker will soon release the first of a trilogy of albums, called The Streets Like Beds Still Warm. I’ve recently been listening to Gabriel Birnbaum’s album Patron Saint of Tireless Losers that came out last year and am starting to really love his work on a much deeper level than before.
  

Books

• Continued with Apple in China by Patrick McGee. It’s so incredibly well-written. I’m making highlights like a madman.
  

Next week: Another town hall, dinner with wonderful friends and out to a gig.

At the start of 2019 I wrote down a colleague’s wise words that “the days are long but the years are short”. Six and a bit years later, it feels like the days are now also short. This is not a good development. I’ve got so many things to do at the moment that it is difficult to prioritise, and more than once this week I found that I got to 7pm each day without having ticked many of the top things off the list.

Memories aren’t reliable, but I don’t recall such a long heatwave at this time of the year in the UK as the one we’re experiencing. We had a little reprieve at the start of the week with some rain on Monday, but the temperatures are now right back up again. Out of necessity, we’ve got into a good routine of cooling the house down after dusk. Windows open, lights off. Despite this, I still don’t think that I’ve been sleeping that well as I’ve felt tired all week.

Lots of people have their summer holidays mapped out, but we’re in limbo. Our eldest son is planning to run and study abroad, but the process to get there doesn’t have much of a fixed schedule. We’re beholden to various forms turning up at the right time and the visa application process being open when it’s time to use it. The project manager in me isn’t comfortable with how opaque the milestones are, but there’s not much we can do.

This was a week in which I:

• Met with our external building consultant to take a look at the accessible door that we installed a couple of months ago, as well as to discuss a couple of outstanding items from our refurbishment project.
• Got agreement from our Information Risk Steering Group on continuing to nudge our staff towards using our approved password manager. Having our staff use the tool means that we have visibility into issues such as where passwords are being reused across multiple services, or where they have been compromised. We can then follow up with the impacted individuals to help them to update their passwords. Our next step will be to disable saving or updating passwords in web browsers, eventually eliminating these tools completely.
• Discovered that there are legal restrictions on Wi-Fi equipment in a country where we are in the process of setting up an office. We’re having to change our sourcing approach for laptops, but it has also kicked off a useful side discussion about how we can architect our systems in a different way.
• Had a couple of meetings with our audio/visual design partners. A missed requirement has resulted in some design rework for one of the important meeting rooms that we share with a sister company. We also reviewed the payment schedule for the work and agreed a couple of minor changes.
• Met with colleagues to discuss our procurement approach for the audio/visual equipment for our shared meeting spaces.
• Had a call with two colleagues who were looking for advice on how to introduce and roll out a major update to some internal management information reporting. I really enjoy consulting on this type of work. Changes land so much better when there has been a significant amount of pitch-rolling beforehand.
• Ran my fortnightly staff meeting, the last one to have everyone together for a couple of months as we soon enter holiday season.
• Had the weekly project meeting to cover the construction work taking place in our building.
• Met with a colleague who took me through a list of activities that he has gone through with his team in his staff meeting over the past few years, with the aim of improving team dynamics and building cohesion. There are lots of great ideas, which I may use in my own meeting once everyone is back from their holidays.
• Had our monthly operational risk management meeting, where we reviewed last year’s self-assessment report and discussed what would need to change for this year’s.
• Joined a Logitech webinar to hear about their latest firmware for their meeting room devices, which includes the ability to have two Sight table cameras in the same room. Their demonstration of their audio improvements was also very impressive. The webinar had a lovely, relaxed feel about it whilst still keeping on task, which isn’t always the case.
• Started the GoCodeGreen Tech Leaders learning pathway, completing the Digital Sustainability Foundation Course and the Decarbonising Digital — Introduction to Green Design module. I’m doing this with a group of technology leaders across the organisation. We all met at the start of the week for an introduction to the course and to get signed up for the training.
• Met with senior leaders in Technology and HR to look at how we can approach our digital dexterity initiative. The group are now looking at my manager and me to pull something together, which we’ll have to try and do over the next couple of weeks.
• Enjoyed this week’s Learning Hour session where a colleague took us through the beauty and utility of regular expressions.
• Had an introductory meeting with our Group Head of Audit for Technology, Platforms and Operations as the audit team start to plan their agenda for 2026.
• Took part in the development team retrospective and sprint planning meeting. The team members are both on holiday at separate times over the coming weeks, but we’re in a good place to keep getting the work done.
• As an experiment, posted a version of my weeknotes onto my Storyline at work. Storyline is Microsoft’s latest attempt to make an organisation ‘social’. Everyone in our company now has one where they can share updates that are tied just to them as opposed to any specific group or community. You can ‘follow’ your colleagues to get updates from them when they post. The day after I published, a colleague messaged me that she had seen it as it was surfaced in one of those ‘things you might have missed’ digest emails that Microsoft 365 sends out. It took me a few minutes of editing to add a more appropriate level of detail than what I usually post here, but it was basically reusing this content. I’m going to try and keep it up to see what happens.
• Had to deal with the aftermath of a spider bite on the palm of my hand. I was getting some washing off the line in the garden when I noticed a spider on the inside of the peg bag. Blowing him away with a puff of air backfired as he fell in amongst the pegs. I emptied them out onto the lawn, but he must have been clinging onto one of the pegs and decided to give me a nip. Only fair, I guess. Spider bites are seriously itchy.
• Had my first dentist visit in…way too long. Usually I go in for my appointment and then book the next one on the way out. For some reason they cancelled my last visit and either never got back to me or I forgot to follow up. It turned out that I hadn’t been there in 18 months. I had no idea.
• Went out for a lovely impromptu dinner with my wife on Friday night. It was a fine summer evening, and we decided to wander into town without any plans. Tabure sat us at the bar and fed us well, leaving me grateful to have a walk back home again.
• Had a great morning on our weekly club cycle ride, covering 82km up to the gardens of Woburn Abbey and back. I also managed to get out for a run on Sunday, despite feeling tired and not wanting to get out of bed.
• Went into London on a boiling hot Saturday afternoon to meet up with some friends. We had some drinks out in the open at Between the Bridges, dinner at Wahaca and then went to the South Bank Centre to see Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf. It was a pretty perfect evening out. But the sunshine does seem to bring out the worst in people. The first part of the show was spoiled a bit by a couple of drunk guys a few seats ahead of us who talked throughout the whole thing. I spoke to the security team at the interval but learned later that the men had decided themselves not to return. We had to stand in our sweaty train carriage on the way home, and were suddenly alarmed by a woman getting up and swearing at another woman whom she had been sat next to. It turned out that the person being sworn at had been texting rude comments to someone about their fellow passenger, and that fellow passenger had read the messages over her shoulder. I’ve not been on active bystander training, but my friend and I managed to de-escalate the situation by talking to the person who felt that they had been wronged. We moved to a cooler part of the carriage and tried to talk to her for as long as possible about her work, her life and anything else we could think of.
  

Media

Podcasts

• On this week’s episode of Quiet Riot, Alex Andreou educated me that the law changed in the year 1999 in a significant way. Prior to that year, the accuracy of computer records had to be proven in court. After the law was changed, the assumption was that the computer was correct. This has had a massive impact on the people implicated in the British Post Office scandal. BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, have said that this law should be reviewed to avoid future miscarriages of justice. Given how people are now using non-deterministic generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, I think that this law will be under an increasing amount of scrutiny in the future.
  

Alex Andreou: The second thing is the legal position.

And the legal position, PACE Act 1984, was that accuracy of computer records, it used to require a sort of basic threshold of proof that the system in question was operating properly and the record was accurate.

This was amended in 2000 to make that a rebuttable presumption.

What that means in legal terms is that anything produced by a computer system is presumed to be accurate, and the burden shifts on the potential defendant to show that it’s not, which without access to that system is nearly impossible.

Basically, an assumption was made, which was very much in keeping with the spirit of that period, that IT systems were foolproof.

I think it’s high time we reviewed that presumption that a computer system is always accurate.

Articles

• The FT’s Martin Wolf says that “The roots of the British malaise lie in a sick economy.” I was born in 1976. It’s amazing to see how the economic growth trajectory that dominated my life came to a sputtering halt around 10 years after I started work.
  

• Simon Willison reports on a macOS app built entirely by Claude Code.
• It was fascinating to read about a company adding a feature to an application because ChatGPT ‘hallucinated’ that it existed. In this case it’s probably a better use of time and effort than trying to push back, disappointing potential users. Talking about this article with some friends was insightful in that they suggested that “perhaps ChatGPT thought that…”, which led me to respond that ChatGPT didn’t think anything. I’m quickly becoming a pedant for the language we use to describe these systems.
• The Guardian reports that “almost a quarter of all foster places in England are now provided by private equity-backed companies making millions of pounds in profits. […] Placements for foster children are paid for by councils, who either provide the placements themselves or outsource them to IFAs, which now provide about half of all places, up from a third in 2016.” This seems like a massive failure; it shouldn’t be something that should require the existence of private for-profit companies to work properly.
• Fascinating experiment of adding a prompt injection to a LinkedIn profile.
• Simon Willison reveals that Grok is searching for Elon Musk’s stance on an issue before providing an answer to a question.
• Mark Wilson wrote an excellent post about his experience of enshittification through the lens of trying to get a taxi on holiday.
• “Graduates share their job-hunting woes amid the AI fallout.” I don’t think it’s just AI; modern tools make it too easy to apply for a role with a simple click. This is seriously disheartening. “Platforms use AI to search for key words. I have friends who have copied entire job descriptions, pasted them into the Word document, reduced the font, and turned the colour to white so AIs find the words they’re looking for. It feels dystopian.”
  

Video

• Took a trip with my family to see F1 (2025). Predictably, it annoyed me. I was ready to suspend disbelief and enjoy a good action movie. The first 20 minutes or so started great, but some of the choices that they made were so awful that I ended up checking my watch, wondering when it would be over. I’ve heard very mixed reviews; I won’t post any spoilers here as you may want to see it and might love it, but it felt like an insult to me.
• The Sky documentary about Damon Hill had me in tears. It’s a moving, beautiful film. He and his family seem lovely, and it’s so good that he followed in his father’s footsteps to become Formula One World Champion.
• Live Aid at 40 is everything I want from a documentary. Lots of detail across three hours, with honest appraisals from the people involved at the time.
  

Books

• Started reading Apple in China by Patrick McGee and it doesn’t disappoint. It’s masterfully written, with just enough detail and a fascinating narrative. I’m only about a fifth of the way through the book, but I can’t wait to read it every night.
  

Next week: A big birthday for our youngest boy.

It was so hot. Monday and Tuesday hit inferno-like temperatures. At night we ditched the duvet, but I couldn’t face even being under a sheet. So I just lay there on top of the bed, hoping to fall asleep. On Tuesday night my wife and I found ourselves home alone, so we decided to get out of our makeshift greenhouse of a home to have something to eat outside. When we returned and opened the door, the hot air hit us like a hundred hairdryers. We quickly opened all the windows, but it took 15 minutes or so for the temperature to reach liveable levels. I was so glad that the second half of the week was much cooler.

This was a week in which I:

• Felt like I was rehydrating for the best part of Monday and Tuesday after the weekend’s Audax ride.
• Enjoyed a fireside chat in the office between our CEO, one of our senior regional leaders as well as our Head of Legal. These types of meetings go into the diary anytime someone senior is passing through and they are so valuable. It was fascinating to hear their perspectives, especially about politics. It was also another reminder that there are lots of things going on around you in the office every day that you have no idea about. Knowledge work is invisible unless you deliberately make it visible.
• Had the sprint review and sprint planning meeting with our development team, a good way to start after a week off.
• Had a demo of Replit, a ‘vibe coding’ platform, in our AI working group. It was fascinating to see it working. One of my colleagues noticed that all of the code files it had generated were all sitting in one big folder, so he asked if the tool could organise the code into modules. It started running and by the time we left the meeting it was still chugging away.
• Completed a survey about my knowledge of climate-friendly IT practices ahead of taking a course in sustainable technology.
• Watched a meeting recording of personal statements from colleagues on our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum that took place while I was off, and then sent in my vote for Chair.
• Collaborated on a written submission for a recognition award for one of our colleagues.
• Took part in a group feedback and coaching session at the request of one of my colleagues. The session was part of a leadership/senior management course. She did well to sit and listen to honest and heartfelt feedback from us.
• Had the weekly meeting with our audio/visual design consultants. We are going to need to rework one part of the design to accommodate a requirement that we missed.
• Met with our HR team as preparation for a ‘people day’ meeting that my manager is taking part in next week.
• Met with colleagues to agree the next steps in our plans to increase adoption of our chosen password manager. We have a key meeting on Tuesday with a wider audience where we plan to cover this, so I spent a couple of hours on Sunday night putting some slides together for the discussion.
• Spoke with my executive partner at our information technology advisory firm about how we can approach refreshing our Team Charter this year. He’s going to help us with the process, which lets everyone have the opportunity to participate.
• Met with colleagues to review the first draft of a proposal for cross-charging costs between a sister company and ourselves.
• Had a couple of meetings with our sister company to better understand their support needs and expectations for a shared meeting space in our office once it reopens in January.
• Had the weekly project meeting for the refurbishment works being carried out by our sister company and the landlord.
• Found and tweaked a project management template in Excel which we can use for one of our office refurbishment projects.
• Completed mid-year reviews for all of my team.
• Enjoyed our monthly Lean Coffee meeting, superbly hosted by one of our team members who doesn’t usually take the role of the chair. He was a complete natural.
• Put together a response to a series of questions from one of our regulators. Microsoft Loop is super handy for these types of tasks, where you can share the same live document in multiple Teams chats and everyone can collaborate.
• Met to discuss our approach to finding a long-term office in a country where we have only just started to have a presence.
• Joined the check-in meeting for the project to reorganise our client documents.
• Took our main car for its MOT and service, and had to foot the bill for some new front suspension components, as well as brake pads and discs. The suspension was last ‘fixed’ a year ago, but I’m not convinced that they did a brilliant job with it. Unfortunately I just don’t know enough to be sure that there was a problem after we got the car back last time. Owning cars is expensive.
• Watched my youngest son arrive for his prom on my friend Mat’s Land Rover. It was so much fun to see the collection of random vehicles that dropped everybody off. We saw Rolls Royces, Bentleys, stretch limos, a Dodge Charger, vans, a Volkswagen Camper, motorbikes and a fire engine. They had a great evening, and didn’t finish at their after-party until 2am.
  

• Enjoyed an after-party of our own that night when one of the parents hosted us for a barbecue. I don’t know many of the other parents that well, so it was great to spend some time with them. And the food was delicious.
• Welcomed our eldest boy back from his holiday, the first time he’s gone away on a proper holiday without us. It’s good to have him back.
• Had the second barbecue in as many days when we were invited out on Friday night. For the past few years our eldest has been training with three other runners, and this was a chance for all of them to get together with their parents as well as their coach and his wife for a celebratory dinner. The amount of time that their coach has put into their development, completely voluntarily, is amazing. He would be at the track for training multiple times a week, going to their events and giving them consistent, dependable and honest feedback. We are so lucky to know him. The food was tasty and it was a great opportunity to spend some time with some lovely people.
• Went down to my uncle and aunt’s house in Romsey, on the outskirts of the New Forest, for a family get-together. It’s now establishing itself as an annual event. It was brilliant. They hired a mobile wood-fired pizza van to cater from their driveway, as well as a superb band, The Scallywags (of Feltham), to play for us in the garden. Big family gatherings are filled with snatched conversations as there are so many people to talk to, but it was great to spend some time seeing everyone and remarking on how much all the children had grown.
  

• Loved the British Grand Prix. It was everything you would want in a modern Formula One race. Sometimes the British weather is just what you need to spice things up.
  

Media

Articles

• I enjoyed Dries Buytaert’s thoughtful essay on “The web’s broken deal with AI companies.”
  

There is a reason this trend has taken hold: users love it. AI-generated answers provide instant, direct information without extra clicks. It makes traditional search engines look complicated by comparison.

But this improved user experience comes at a long-term cost. When value is extracted without supporting the websites and authors behind it, it threatens the sustainability of the content we all rely on.

• Wikipedia has a list of AI catchphrases to help identify machine-generated content.
• I’ve recently been thinking about how the Danish Government are in a tricky situation in that they are faced with the US wanting to take Greenland from them, but — probably — either use Microsoft or Google to host their email and documents. I was amazed to read that France’s police force have been using Linux as their main operating system for many years. Maybe using alternatives to the main ecosystems isn’t as much of a pipe dream as it seems.
• I have a corporate Microsoft Copilot licence, but for any generic non-sensitive queries I choose to use ChatGPT instead. I’m not alone.
  

Video

• Heston: My Life with Bipolar was very moving.
• I finally finished the final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The ending was a little cheesy, but a good reminder of all of the ridiculous laughs over the years.
  

Audio

• Bought a selection of CDs, including Aimee Mann’s 1993 debut solo album Whatever. Hearing it again made me realise that I must have played it more than I remember, as I knew all of the songs. I’d forgotten how Beatles-y it sounds. I Could Hurt You Now is my current favourite track from the record.
  

Books

• Picked up Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, after hearing Ben Thompson rave about it on Stratechery, Sharp Tech and Dithering.
  

Next week: Another heatwave, and another night with Stewart Lee.

A week off, using up my remaining days of leave that I would otherwise lose from my allowance at the end of June. It was one of those weeks where Friday evening turns up and you wonder what you’ve done, and how it all slipped through your fingers.

This was a week in which I:

• Turned on my laptop to write up the minutes from Friday’s Steering Committee meeting. I never like to have meeting notes hanging around for too many days after the meeting happened. There’s something good about working on a singular, focused task while everyone knows I’m on leave and I have my out of office notifications turned on, allowing me to ignore any chats or emails.
• Helped my eldest son pick out his first pair of glasses. My wife and I both wear them, and I’ve been short-sighted since the age of nine, so I think he’s done pretty well to get this far.
• Took my youngest son for a couple of routine medical and dental appointments.
• Went to see Gang of Four — at least, in their current incarnation — play their final London gig at the Kentish Town Forum. Just like the last time I saw them, their set was superb. As I was off work that day, I had the unusual luxury of sauntering into town in shorts and a t-shirt as opposed to whatever I would have been wearing in the office. We were treated to a complete run-through of their debut album, Entertainment!, followed by a collection of other great songs. At one point they were joined on stage by Kathy Valentine. A recording of their whole set from a gig this past April in Massachusetts is on YouTube; I think they played, sang and sounded even better in London. Support was from Heartworms, who I had never heard of; she owned the stage and dazzled us with her songs.
  

• Had a delicious pre-gig meal at Bonga, a little Korean restaurant a few metres from the Kentish Town Forum.
• Took a trip to The Record Shop in Amersham to browse their vinyl and CD racks. I picked up a few bargains, including this box set of George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 which was on sale for only £10.
  

• Joined other parents at school as we celebrated our 18-year-olds finishing their A-Levels before they went off to their prom. Our son and his friends had arranged to go on holiday straight afterwards, so after a quick 2am shower and change of clothes, they headed off to the airport. Those summers when you are in that liminal space between finishing exams and starting something new are lovely, and bring back good memories for me.
• Enjoyed the summer weather and lack of parental responsibilities by going out for drinks with my wife. After we said goodbye to the kids at school, we went back for a small garden party with friends. We also ventured out to the pub for an outdoor drink by the canal, and popped to the local cricket club on Sunday to see some more friends in the sunshine.
• After much prevarication, decided to take part in this year’s National 400 Audax event. I’d signed up a few days after finishing London-Wales-London, but as the date drew near I decided that I wouldn’t ride; there were too many logistical things to juggle and I wasn’t sure that I was mentally committed enough to resolve them. A midweek change of everyone else’s weekend plan at home brought on by my youngest boy fracturing his big toe meant that it suddenly became easier to go. After checking the weather and seeing that there was no chance of rain, with a decent tailwind for the first part of the ride, I decided to do it. Offering a lift to a fellow rider from our cycling club meant that I was properly committed. Despite getting stuck in standstill motorway traffic on the way there, which resulted in me and my three fellow riders setting off half an hour later than the other riders, it was a great day out. Unfortunately, I didn’t finish. It was so hot, and I have never sweated so much in my life. By the middle of the day my clothes were covered in salt patterns that drew reaction and comment from other cyclists. I felt as though I was managing to get enough fluids and electrolytes back into me as I rode, stopping to refill my water bottles each time I ran out, but perhaps it wasn’t enough. My feet, and particularly the toes on my left foot, started to hurt and burn. The pain was such that when we stopped to refuel in Walton-on-the-Naze, I took off my shoes and expected to see my socks covered in blood. Puzzlingly, they looked completely fine. The ride was structured with a long 275km loop on day one, taking us back to the start for food and rest before a shorter 125km loop on day two. As day turned to night and the pain continued to increase, I decided that I was going to stop when we got back. The temptation to get out of my cycling shoes, into my trainers, into the car, home for a shower, and into my bed far outweighed the possibility of cycling through the pain for another six or seven hours. I’m happy with the choice I made, and in awe of the rest of the team that kept pumping out the miles into Sunday. They are such great people to cycle with.
  

Media

Video

• Watched the six-part Canal+ documentary on the life of Alain Prost. A fascinating look at an important racing driver who was behind the wheel when I first started following F1. I had no idea about his backstory.
• Found an interesting interview with Andy Gill and Jon King from Gang of Four that was recorded in 2009, talking about their background and career.
• We watched Amol Rajan Goes to the Ganges following the glowing review in The Guardian but we didn’t find it as moving as the reviewer did. I loved seeing Rajan with his mother, and never seem to get bored of anything relating to India, but something about the documentary didn’t quite click with me.
• Started — and then stopped — watching Danny Dyer: How To Be A Man. It’s an important topic, but the approach taken by this show seemed to be a collection of vignettes with no real arc to the wider narrative. Dyer meets many interesting people and there are all the raw ingredients in place, but it feels like they are scattered on the floor instead of being assembled into a coherent whole.
  

Next week: Back to work, another prom, and a family reunion.

A busy, productive and enjoyable week. It has been super hot and humid in the UK. Our houses are built to keep the heat in, so sleeping can be a challenge, with the only solace being that it is generally a shared experience. You pass people in the street and in the office who, like you, are wandering around in a slight stupor, mildly hungover from the lack of sleep.

This was a week in which I:

• Met with colleagues to agree the steps for setting up an external vendor’s staff so that they can support us when we set up a new office. There’s nothing like getting around a whiteboard and drawing it out.
• Agreed the next steps for building out a technology stack for this new office.
• Started to work through some issues in our work which have divided the team. Despite the different opinions, there’s a good, constructive dialogue, with everyone listening to each other. We probably need to spend more time in this space where we can, as I think it’s where we make good progress.
• Worked with one of our local heads of Compliance to complete a survey by a regulator about our company’s use of artificial intelligence.
• Prepped for and ran our programme steering committee meeting. We agreed it would be our final session as only minor snagging items remain.
• Attended the steering committee for our sister company’s office refit project.
• Agreed the scope of a project to enhance another of our offices, tackling a bunch of items that will keep the space relevant for the next few years.
• Had my monthly catch-up with my executive partner at our information technology research and advisory firm. It’s always a useful conversation and this was no exception. The biggest problem is that I come away with too many things to think about, explore, and consider writing about.
• Caught up with our audio/visual design vendor. Our main focus is on the project to set up the shared meeting space in our office, but have a few smaller initiatives in progress too.
• Continued tweaking my new work laptop. I had to look up how to re-enable Query Builder in (the old) Microsoft Outlook so that my search folders worked correctly. Lack of support for search folders and advanced queries are the main barriers to me moving across to the new Outlook client. I should probably write up my Outlook setup in a blog post, but I’m not sure how useful this would be to the dwindling number of classic Outlook client users.
• Joined our fortnightly Microsoft Copilot working group. The session covered a lot of old ground, but it was interesting to see how engaged the audience is. Everyone is at a different stage of learning about and using generative AI, so going over things again is perhaps more valuable than it first seems.
• Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour on the topic of homeopathy. The range of views was fascinating, and the host managed to navigate the different opinions with skill, keeping the discussion cordial and constructive.
• Discovered that I haven’t been to the dentist in 18 months. I recently had what seemed like a random text from my dentist telling me that it is important to look after my teeth, which I didn’t consider to be news. I called them to ask when my next appointment was, only to discover that I didn’t have one and was in danger of falling off their register. Usually I book my next appointment when I pay for my current one, which I did last time. But apparently they then cancelled the appointment and never booked me in for another one.
• Had a conversation with a friend outside of the UK who has a family member that was admitted to hospital. He had a feeling that the hospital was keeping his family member in for longer than necessary, diagnosing them with things they don’t have. For all its faults, I assume that our NHS is much less likely to do this as it is not-for-profit. Another reason we are lucky to have the service.
• Thoroughly enjoyed the latest WB-40 Album Club, listening to a band that I had never heard of before. I love the eclectic variety that people bring to this group, and how honest everyone is in their feedback about what they hear.
• Booked our main car in for its MOT and service. Owning two cars turns out to be significantly more expensive than just owning one.
• Had a lovely relaxed Friday night dinner at a neighbours’ house.
• Enjoyed meeting some lovely new neighbours at our annual street party. There were fewer people than in previous years, probably as the tons of young children in our road are now growing up and have things to do and places to be.
• Sweated buckets on a very hot cycling club ride, which ended up with a pint of alcohol-free beer at the end instead of the usual coffee.

Media

Articles

• I didn’t realise that raffling your house has (had?) become a thing that lots of people tried to do.
• Cory Doctorow explaining “how ‘enshitiffication’ is coming for absolutely everything”.
• I’d love to see Formula One return to Africa. The possibility took a little step closer this week, but it’s still probably many years away.

Books

• Continued reading Richard Coles’s biography. I love a slice of pop history.

A tiring week, with four days in the office and not much sleep.

This was a week in which I:

• Started the process to get microwaves installed in our office, a temporary measure while our canteen is closed for the rest of the year.
• Wrote up and circulated my notes from our quarterly facilities governance meeting with our sister company.
• Took part in a valuation meeting for work that has been done in our office space. We have only one thing outstanding, which hopefully should be wrapped up shortly.
• Attended a webinar on our mid-year performance review process.
• Had a call with Microsoft and a member of our internal technical team to help me to get my laptop updated to Windows 11 24H2. The update was offered to me a few weeks ago but the installation failed as I ran out of disk space. After cleaning up a bunch of things, the update never appeared again. A few registry tweaks here and there resulted in a successful update. Unfortunately, Microsoft Office then stopped working and I couldn’t find any way to get it reinstalled, so I ended up switching to a brand new laptop.
• Sat in on a Q&A with our divisional CEO, hosted by our regional CEO. It was good to hear directly from someone so senior in the organisation.
• Enjoyed our divisional CIO being our guest speaker at our weekly Learning Hour session. It was good to spend some time with him in the same room.
• Joined the company-wide Technology town hall meeting.
• Took part in the final legal review of a proposed contract with one of our vendors.
• Participated in our monthly operational risk review meeting.
• Spoke to our technology research vendor about their request for me to appear on an interview panel at an upcoming event. I’m keen to get some more experience at public speaking, so this aligns quite well.
• Met with our development team for their regular backlog refinement session.
• Helped one of my colleagues get started with Microsoft Copilot, taking a document and getting it to compress the content down to a couple of pages.
• Had a discussion with colleagues in our Technology and Learning & Development teams about our approach to digital literacy. It got me thinking about a multi-layered framework that we could use to give everyone a base understanding of key concepts, but could also help individuals who want or need to go deeper.
• Said goodbye to one of our team members who had been with us for a long time.
• Found myself caught up in a rail shambles at Euston on Monday evening. The trains weren’t going anywhere due to a trespasser somewhere up the line. We sat on the train, waiting for news. Eventually they asked everyone to get off so that the train could be switched off and on again — to reboot it (no, really). After everyone got back on board and sat down, they announced that it would only be stopping at Hemel Hempstead and then coming straight back to Euston, presumably to try and stop the timetable being out of kilter for the rest of the day. Cue most people getting off again. Then they said that the train would additionally stop at Tring. A few minutes later, they told us it would no longer be stopping at Hemel Hempstead. As we eventually pulled away, our destination not entirely clear, I noticed that there was a bag sitting on the floor, not close to anyone. I asked people around me whether it belonged to anyone but nobody claimed it. One person decided to move out of the carriage altogether and I followed him, walking the whole length of the train in an ultimately futile attempt to find the guard or conductor. Having failed in my mission, I texted the British Transport Police to report it. After a bit of back and forth, answering questions on whether it appeared “a deliberate attempt had been made to HIDE the item”, whether the bag possessed “any OBVIOUSLY suspicious characteristics”, and whether the item is “TYPICAL of what you would expect to find in the given environment” they concluded that it would “be for rail staff to treat as lost property.”
• Was surprised to find the cost my tap-in/tap-out rail commute jumped from £19.35 to £29.80. I can’t work out whether the price has gone up, or it is just that we were previously benefitting from some kind of time-limited discounted rate. I think I’m going to switch back to buying books of eight flexi tickets via the London Northwestern app as they will work out cheaper.
• Tried to pay a small bill of $29 for a medical provider in the US. They have spent a significant chunk of this sending me paper bills by air mail over the past few months. When I got the first one, I gave them a call, explained that we were insured, and handed my insurance details over again. This seemed to have zero impact on the letters. Not wanting to have a ‘bad debt’ on my record, I decided to bite the bullet and pay it. The website on the bill didn’t work, it just showed a blank page. So I tried calling the bill pay hotline, but instead of getting through to someone they read out the address of a different website that I needed to go to. It took a few minutes to register and log in; when I did, I found that I had a balance of $0. So…I’m not sure what to do next. I feel like I’m recording this here for posterity in case this $29 comes back to get me.
• Wondered whether Lando Norris was visiting Berkhamsted over the weekend. My son spotted this car parked at a jaunty angle on the High Street, so we both wandered down to take a look. If you had enough money to buy the vehicle, would you buy this licence plate to go with it if your name wasn’t Lando?
  

• Walked across the valley to deliver a cycling top that I won at Tour de Ricky but doesn’t fit me. I offered it out to people in the cycling club to see if anyone could make use of it. My walk took me along a footpath that I never knew existed, despite having lived in Berkhamsted for over 20 years.
• Picked these up in the supermarket as I had never seen them before. I love an Eccles cake and apparently they are similar.
  

• Had a great time at Album Club, listening to a superb record that I’d never heard before.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Great episode of the Microsoft Teams Insider podcast, where Ritika Gupta, Microsoft Group Product Manager, talks about everything related to Teams recording and transcription. I hadn’t thought about how transcription isn’t sufficient to convey sarcasm, nor how words can mean something completely different in a local context which is difficult for an AI system to process. For example, my South African colleagues call traffic lights ‘robots’, which led to a confused look on my face the first time they dropped the word into conversation.
  

Articles

• Baldur Bjarnason on why trusting your own judgement on ‘AI’ is a huge risk.
• The High Court here in the UK issued a warning to lawyers using generative AI tools in their cases.
• New Department of Energy buildings in the US don’t need to meet accessibility standards as this would be “unnecessary and unduly burdensome”. What a backwards step.
  

Video

• We are in love with the new series of Faking It. Every episode is a joy, and we always find ourselves nervous for the consistently lovely people that are taking part.
• Race Across The World was superb. All of the contestants ended up being very likeable, to the point where it didn’t matter who won. Yes, I cried.
• Dept. Q was worth watching, despite the somewhat ridiculous plot.
• A friend pointed us to You Can’t Ask That. It’s an Australian show where every episode has a bunch of talking heads associated by a theme — e.g. firefighters, nudists, disaster survivors — who answer a series of questions about their identities and experiences. Once you get used to the style of rapidly cutting between each of the people it is extremely watchable. The episode featuring people who’ve killed someone had me in tears.
• I love how easily the modern world lets me explore films and shows from my past. Apropos of nothing, this week I sought out V, the TV series from the early 1980s where an alien race turns up on Earth claiming to come in peace but with other, hidden motives. Re-watching it this week made me realise that there are so many scenes that burrowed deep into my childhood brain and stayed there. It was a bit of a puzzle to find out how to watch it based on the episodes available online. There’s a two-part miniseries from 1983, followed by V: The Final Battle (a three-part miniseries from 1984) and then a 19-part TV series from 1984–1985 confusingly called V. I’ve made my way through the first of these and will watch the second, but reviews have set low expectations for the third. The scenes where scientists started to be persecuted because of their ‘conspiracy’ against the visitors are fascinating; it’s not hard to draw a parallel to recent narratives against experts, judges and scientists by the Conservatives in the UK and the Trump regime in the US.
  

Audio

• SomaFM is 25 years old. I’ve been listening to Groove Salad on and off since about 2001; I don’t think there’s a better radio station to work to.
• I’m enjoying hearing from Lauren Kinsella and Chris Hyson talk about Snowpoet on a new podcast. I have all of their albums, and still consider Thought You Knew as one of my favourite records.
  

• Delighted to find that there is a way of creating smart playlists in PlexAmp.
• Had an insatiable earworm of the opening track of Stevie Wonder’s 1995 live album Natural Wonder, a somewhat patchy album that I probably haven’t listened to for 25 years. I don’t think there is a studio version of Dancing To The Rhythm but if there is, I’d love to hear it. This song is so good. All of the musicians seem so dialled in and the percussion is incredible. I’ve always thought that the recording doesn’t match the quality of the music.
  

Books

• Tried using ChatGPT to recommend my next read to me based on my giant list of already-purchased books alongside even bigger wish list. The experiment failed dismally, with the LLM recommending books that were in neither of the lists — three times in succession — despite me telling it that I didn’t want this. Gemini seemed to fare better, and Claude did an ok job too. This seems like a basic thing that these tools should be able to do successfully, but I fear that I am myself falling into the trap of expecting too much from computer programs that just generate plausible text.
  

Next week: An online Album Club, and getting as much done as I can before another week off.

A week of two halves. Back at my desk after a week off, I felt a bit rudderless and unsure of myself. I’m very good at switching off when I’m not at work, but this means that there is lots to catch up on when I return. On Wednesday morning, I met with one of my colleagues to discuss our overall approach to the work that our teams need to do and I felt completely rejuvenated by the conversation. Suddenly my sense of purpose was back and it felt as though a number of things had slotted into place.

This was a week in which I:

• Was asked for guidance from multiple colleagues on how to deal with clients who are bringing their own AI recording tools into meetings. I gathered my thoughts on this and sent an email to some of our senior leaders to try and find out what we already have in place to help our staff. It would be useful if staff are able to point to a public-facing webpage about our approach to this.
• Had an interesting conversation with an AI developer/consultant, who shared that he is also completely overwhelmed by the announcements and pace of change from the big technology vendors.
• Took part in our development team’s sprint review and sprint planning sessions.
• Collaborated with a colleague on some analysis in Excel. I see Excel as a Swiss Army Knife for people working in technology, useful for all sorts of data analysis and even text manipulation. Showing someone little tips and tricks to achieve an outcome makes me realise how much stuff I’ve learned over the years.
• Met with colleagues working on the project to open a new office in a new location. Reviewed a document with options for the initial technical stack that we will use until we have found a more permanent home.
• Had the weekly meeting with colleagues in our sister company on their office refurbishment project.
• Reviewed the proposed submission of technical policy documents to one of our regulators.
• Joined our bi-weekly Microsoft Copilot working group. I think we are doing better than I expected in terms of people collaborating and sharing with each other, but there is always so much more that we could do. I’d love to spend some time exploring Emily Webber’s work on successful communities of practice.
• Met with colleagues in our Learning and Development team to discuss our approach to digital literacy, particularly in relation to AI and data.
• Joined our quarterly governance meeting to review services provided to us by a sister company.
• Had some interesting conversations about team dynamics, reflecting on how the world of hybrid work is the toughest place to exist. If everyone is in an office or everyone is working remotely, clear practices can be put in place to optimise how people work together. It’s the messy middle where things can go wrong.
• Attended diversity, equity and inclusion training, following my election onto the committee for our technology division. It was a fascinating discussion. There are aspects that relate specifically to the goals that the organisation is trying to meet in South Africa, but the concepts are universal. It felt refreshing to be involved with like-minded people where the dominant narrative in the news has been to roll back on DE&I initiatives, following the lead of the Trump administration in the US.
• Had fun at our office pub quiz. Our team got a respectable 75 points out of 114, but we still came fourth. The quiz host was excellent, bringing music questions to life by playing live piano, guitar and kazoo.
• Had one of the days in the office disrupted by a fire alarm.
• Enjoyed the free office snacks that we’ve put in place while our canteen is shut. I’m not sure how large I’m going to be by the time it reopens.
• Joined the rest of my colleagues for pizza and beer in our office, one of the things we are doing while so much disruptive office refurbishment is going on in the rest of the building.
• Subscribed to Allmusic for USD 16 for the year, getting rid of the insane amount of adverts and pop-ups on their site. I regularly use the site for looking at an artist’s entire discography, including ratings and reviews. This is particularly useful when looking for a way into listening to a well-established artist who has an extensive back catalogue.
• Had my bike serviced at the local bike shop. It’s done just over 6,000km and needed a new front brake disc rotor. Other than that, a light greasing was all that was required.
• Drove up to Birmingham on Saturday afternoon to get my son to his latest 1,500m race, this time in the British Milers Club Birmingham Uni Grand Prix.
  

Media

Podcasts

• I loved listening to Sherry Turkle talk about AI and human relationships on the latest episode of Your Undivided Attention. I’ve heard her on a couple of podcasts, which has made me want to explore more of her work. I also loved Daniel Barcay’s statement that “awareness creates choice”.
• Word In Your Ear have a wonderful interview with Rob Caiger, the producer behind the recent reissue of the Small Faces’ 1970 album The Autumn Stone. I bought this reissue on CD and it’s fabulous. Caiger tells some incredible stories, such as when Olympic Studios was taken over by Virgin Music in 1987. They decided to discard their vast library of master tapes into skips, with artists being given one week’s notice to collect them. And by ‘given one week’s notice’, I mean that a note was put into a newspaper.
• I’ve occasionally listened to episodes of the EconTalk podcast for many years, discovering it as we went through the 2008–2009 financial crisis. For no reason that I can recall, I was recently thinking about the show and discovered that it has just hit 1,000 episodes. I enjoyed Russ Roberts’ reflections on hosting for the past 20 years or so.
  

Articles

• ‘Vibe Coding’ might be the digital equivalent of DIY around the house, with all of the mistakes and trial-and-error that it entails. You’ll probably still need to call in the professionals to get the job done to a lasting high standard.
• Unsurprisingly, enterprises are ‘repatriating’ workloads from the cloud.
• It’s brilliant to learn that 20mph zones in urban areas really do reduce injuries and save lives. TfL’s study shows that looking at the three year periods surrounding each implementation of a 20mph zone introduced between 1989 and 2013 led to:
  

• A 40 per cent reduction in the number of people killed (from 15 to 9), compared against the background trend of 7 per cent fewer fatalities across borough roads.
• A 34 per cent reduction in the number of people killed or seriously injured (from 395 to 260), compared against the background trend of a 15 per cent fall in people killed or seriously injured across borough roads.
• A 75 per cent reduction in the number of children killed (from 4 to 1), compared with no change across the control group. Additionally, a 50% reduction in children’s casualties (from 517 to 280), against the background trend within the control group of 20%.
• A 35 per cent reduction in collisions and 36 per cent reduction in casualties on borough roads, against a background trend of 12 per cent fewer collisions and casualties across all borough roads.

Video

• We’ve made most of our way through Dept. Q, which is fun enough to see past the silly bits.
• We were surprised to find that we’d reached the final episode of season two of The Last of Us. There was a cliffhanger at the end, but it didn’t have a ‘final show of the season’ vibe.
• It’s great to see the B-52’s get featured on the latest Trash Theory video.
  

Audio

• Snowpoet’s Thought You Knew is a beautiful, delicate thing. I didn’t get as much into their last release, Wait For Me which (I can’t quite believe) came out four years ago. Their new album, Heartstrings, is lovely.

Books

• I’ve been playing with using ChatGPT to pick my next read, uploading my giant text file lists of books I’ve bought and what I have on my wish list. After discouraging it from putting together a complex spreadsheet with lots of attributes for my books, it is now giving me a range of options based on how I might be feeling, what my energy levels are, etc. I’m enjoying how it is narrowing my focus down to a few books from which to choose.
  

Next week: Four days in the office, and the next instalment of Album Club.

A welcome week off, although I do feel a little bit like this guy. The days came and went but despite not getting much home admin done, the time didn’t feel wasted. I’m feeling relaxed and happy about getting back to work.

This was a week in which I:

• Got on my indoor bike trainer almost every day, mainly focusing on recovery rides. I’m pretty sure that my knee pain was a result of putting too much power through it, standing up and trying to grind higher gears to propel myself up hills faster when I rode London Wales London. The joint is still complaining after a harder ride, but staying seated seems to keep it within tolerable levels.
• Cancelled my remaining physio sessions as I feel that my knee is on the mend. Who knows, I may surprise myself and start doing the strengthening exercises any day now.
• Got annoyed at our pet insurance renewal when M&S attempted to put the premium up by about 40% versus the previous year. After calling them we ended up cancelling our renewal and going back to their website to start a new policy, getting us back to a monthly fee that is just over what we’ve been paying for this past year. Things that renew annually and gratuitously increase in price are horrible, but I’m not sure what the alternative is; making the customer have to do something might result in the service lapsing, which would also be a bad outcome.
• Joined my eldest son for a drive over to my parents’ house. It was the first time that he had driven on the motorway and it could hardly have been more challenging — a super-busy M25 with lots of rain and spray. He did great. We met my dad at the local driving range and then had a lovely lunch back at their house.
• Had a lovely visit from my wife’s parents for the day. In order to make things a bit easier we picked them up and dropped them off at Burford Garden Centre, which is about halfway-ish between where we both live. It’s a beautiful place full of lovely things, especially the deli, but you pretty much need to remortgage your house if you want to buy anything.
• Met friends for dinner at Tabure, which was as delicious as ever.
• Took a trip to Deco Audio to rummage through their records and CDs. For £18 I picked up seven used CDs to add to my once again growing collection.
• Enjoyed two Album Clubs, one online with the WB-40 crew and another in person.
• Had some lovely breakfasts and lunches out in town with my wife. It’s an extravagance, but it was lovely to do it and made it feel as though we were on holiday properly, just a little bit.
  

• Cycled the Tour de Ricky, which when combined with getting to and from the start/finish resulted in a 250km ride from Rickmansworth to Silverstone and back. It was much shorter than London-Wales-London but felt hard in different ways; for some reason my toes and feet were in pain for a lot of the ride, and I have no idea why. It was also much warmer, which meant needing to remember to drink and to regularly refill our water bottles. We made it round as a group of four and had a lovely day out.
  

Media

Articles

• Fascinating insight from Ben Thompson on how ChatGPT is an enabler for ’human AI agents’:
  

In fact, this is so effective that I wonder if enterprises everywhere are thinking about AI all wrong, at least in the short-term. There is a lot of focus on one person having a lot of agents under their control, and the allure of that — both financially and in terms of productivity — are clear. It’s possible, however, that a lot of the productivity gains are available now. A team leader can direct people (1) who use the same tools as them with a similar effectiveness (2) in an auditable way (3) and seamlessly extend or augment their work while retaining context. That’s pretty powerful!

The reason why I think this is novel and worth writing about is because none of the chatbots support multi-user. Daman and I hacked this together using the “Share Chat” feature, but this would be better if multi-user chats were possible by default. And, more broadly, the real unlocks from AI are not going to come from working the way we do but better; it will come from changing the way we work, and here at Stratechery we have started doing exactly that.

• Microsoft are looking to manage updates to third-party applications on Windows.
• Martin Fowler shares a tip for proofreading. I used to sit next to someone in our Marketing and Communications team who proofread out loud in the office, and it seemed to work for her. I tend to get ChatGPT to proofread my posts using a prompt rooted in the one shared by Molly White.
• ‘Link gaslighting’ is a horrible phenomenon. It would be much better that a link is broken than redirected to something other than the original page.
  

Video

• Absolutely loved The Assembly, a show where famous people are asked questions by a group of autistic, neurodivergent and/or learning disabled interviewers. Danny Dyer is the first guest and comes across as very genuine, honest and funny. Each episode includes a musical performance, and I haven’t been able to get their rendition of Sunshine on Leith out of my head since I saw it.
  

• Finished watching Sirens, which was strangely compelling and worth watching, but ultimately unsatisfying.
• Saw the first two episodes of American Manhunt: Osama Bin Laden. One of our boys wanted to watch it as his friends had been talking about it. It was a weird feeling to be sitting there watching it and talking to the kids about events that happened before they were born that don’t seem that far in the past.
  

Audio

• The Beta Band’s Dry The Rain came back into my mind this week. KEXP have posted a great live version by Steve Mason on YouTube.
  

• It’s brilliant to learn that The Beatles in Mono is getting a vinyl reissue. Signing up to the mailing list gets you a 10% discount, bringing the price to around £387, but it’s still a lot of money.
  

Web

• This website reinforced to me what an embarrassing southerner I really am. (Hat tip to Lisa Riemers for sharing.)
  

Books

• Still slowly working my way through Code Dependent by Madhumita Murgia.
  

Next week: Back to work, and out for a pub quiz.

The start of this week felt very tough mentally. Sometimes all of the things going on out in the big wide world feel like they’re getting the better of me and I walk around feeling fragile, having a mild existential crisis. This was one of those weeks.

It was brought into sharp focus for me when someone at work posted a link on Teams to a video called Microsoft Build 2025 Keynote: Everything Revealed, in 14 Minutes. As I watched Satya Nadella running through all of his latest announcements, my main reaction was that the whole thing was completely exhausting. Who can keep up with all of this, let alone ask questions about how the technologies can be applied? As a kid, I got into computers because they were fun but now I find my whole approach to these big organisations is filled with suspicion and scepticism, questioning their ethics — or lack of them. A minute into the video, a Microsoft employee interrupts Nadella’s keynote by shouting protestations about the company’s cloud and AI contracts with the Israeli government. Later, Nadella announced that xAI’s Grok will be available in Azure — the same Grok AI that the week before had been replying to posters on X with narratives about ‘white genocide’ — and he then followed this up with an interview with Elon Musk.

This week, Google also had their I/O event, which was similarly summarised in a YouTube video. Developments like Veo 3 for video generation are stunning in the quality of the video they produce, but who are they for? What good do they add to the world? Google’s vision of AI as your constant companion also sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

At the weekend, I caught up with Ben Thompson’s interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, which left me wondering how Huang could say this with a straight face:

Jensen Huang: The President has a vision of what he wants to achieve, I support the President, I believe in the President, and I think that he’ll create a great outcome for America, and he’ll do it with respect and with an attitude of wanting to compete, but also looking for opportunities to cooperate. I sense that, I see all that. Obviously, I’m not in the White House and I don’t know exactly how they feel, but that’s what I sense.

I got into computers as a kid because they were fascinating and fun. Technological advancements are still incredible, but everything now seems tinged with disappointment at the people who are in the driving seat for wherever we’re going. I really hope Rachel Coldicutt’s idea for a Society of Hopeful Technologists takes off, because I feel that I need it.

This was a week in which I:

• Prepped for and ran our monthly programme steering committee meeting. Finances were the main focus of this month’s discussion as we were being asked to sign off on a significant spend projection for a shared project.
• Wrote up the minutes from the meeting at the weekend.
• Represented our team at one of our legal entity governance meetings in place of my boss. It was good to have a prep call the day before so that I could speak with confidence on the areas that I know less about.
• Attended the steering committee for our sister company’s office refurbishment project.
• Met with colleagues to review progress on the project to refit another of our offices.
• Attended a meeting with colleagues to discuss a project that our new CEO has asked people across our office to look at.
• Joined our quarterly Infrastructure Governance Authority meeting where we reviewed the architecture of our current printing solution.
• Met with our pilot users of Microsoft Copilot for a guided tour of Copilot Agents. The platform offers a simple interface that conceals a myriad of possibilities, but this whole space seems like it is moving too fast for people who don’t work in the technology field to keep up.
• Met with colleagues who are looking at producing newsletter-style content for internal staff and external clients.
• Had my monthly call with my executive partner at our technology advisory vendor.
• Joined a webinar from the same vendor on banking industry highlights for technologists, but left after a few minutes as the information was too generic to be useful.
• Enjoyed an all-staff social lunch at our office, the last one for a while as our in-house catering is due to temporarily close.
• Went out for lunch with one of my team members. We’ve worked together for years but haven’t eaten together much. We need to do it more often.
• Had an experience listening to Mika’s Life In Cartoon Motion at this month’s WB-40 Album Club. I love how different music can affect people in different ways; I would never have picked it up on my own and I’m not sure I’d listen again, but other people were visibly and vocally moved by it.
• Am still struggling with my knee, but it’s getting better. I’ve been predictably terrible at doing the short exercises prescribed by the physio, so I may as well cancel my remaining sessions. Low-intensity recovery rides on my indoor bike trainer are fine, but putting any kind of load through it seems to bring the pain back again. On Saturday I did a 75km ride which left it feeling sore, but the pain hasn’t lingered for days afterwards.
• Opted for a lie-in on Saturday morning instead of getting out for the bike club ride, which also meant that I avoided the predicted rain. I rode the same route a couple of hours later, solo. There was no rain, but a massive amount of road rubbish that ended up all over me.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Really enjoyed Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talking about how AI complicates parenting.
  

Paul Ford: And so where do I think this ends? I think this ends with the kids are going to use it no matter what. So you’d better, you better have a framework. They should understand how it works. And there should be context in places where, yeah, you’re right. They have to learn underlying principles. They have to go figure stuff out. And the people who are, in general, if you figure stuff out and you go and you learn how something works, you do tend to be more productive and smarter in life. Like, it’s a success strategy.

• I love the concept of ‘Canadian Devil Syndrome’ that came up on the Sharp Tech podcast. It’s “the cognitive dissonance within a company between their professed mission and how the business actually makes money.”
  

Articles

• One of my previous employers, UBS, is deploying AI analyst clones. Analysts are creating AI avatars of themselves which are then used to generate video of them reading their research. This makes a lot of sense given the propensity towards video as the main way that many people like to receive information.
• It’s worrying that someone can get onto a flight and reach their destination on someone else’s name. Unbelievable given the number of security steps that you have to go through between turning up at the airport and getting on the plane.
  

Video

• Abandoned watching Poker Face after the first few episodes of the new season. It seems to have jumped the shark and now has completely predictable storylines.
• Loved the first episode of the reboot of Faking It. My wife and I were jumping for joy by the end of it. What a wonderful contestant.
• Sirens has been strangely watchable, occasionally veering toward being completely over the top but staying compelling somehow.
• I watched in horror as Trump ambushed Ramaphosa in the Oval Office. Meeting with Trump is walking a fine line; it could have been a lot worse. Of course, it turns out that much of the video was taken completely out of context. I wonder whether Elon Musk really believes all of this stuff, or is there is some ulterior motive?
  

Audio

• Elton John’s The Ballad of Danny Bailey (1909–34) popped up on a random shuffle. It may be my favourite song on the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album. The song is superb, enhanced by the incredible arrangement and musicianship, as shown in this excerpt from an episode of Classic Albums:

• I’ve been listening to Marika Hackman’s I’m Not Your Man again. Good Intentions is a standout track for me at the moment.

Web

• “ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Map annually ranks 49 European countries on a scale between 0% (gross violations of human rights, discrimination) and 100% (respect of human rights, full equality) on the basis of laws and policies that have a direct impact on LGBTI people’s human rights.”
• As much as I have been very down on AI technology this week, Lalal.ai looks like it could be a lot of fun.
  

Books

• Making slow progress through Code Dependent by Madhumita Murgia. The book is very well-written, but the subject matter is tough at the end of a long day.
  

Next week: A week off, pottering around at home.