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.

This week felt difficult, in the sense that I never felt as though I was on top of things. Two late nights out in a row midweek also made things harder, and I’ve not been sleeping well. I need to find my mojo.

Last Friday’s indoor trainer ride and Saturday’s club ride left me with a very painful knee. On the way into work on Monday, I made an appointment at a physio and managed to be seen the same day. They diagnosed me with patellar tendinitis and recommended simple wall squats, which — of course — I’ve struggled to find time for or remember to do consistently. Someone also recommended Voltarol gel, which I’m slapping onto my knee twice a day. The pain came back again with this weekend’s club ride, although it doesn’t feel quite as bad as last week. I’m hoping it will fade as I really don’t want to spend time resting and not cycling.

This was a week in which I:

• Was happy to see the work started last weekend was largely completed over the following weekend, leaving our office in a good state.
• Joined a local office-wide meeting to hear about the upcoming construction works in our building, the expected impact on us, and what our plans are. I’d reviewed the script for the meeting beforehand.
• Reviewed the latest iteration of costs for improvements to space that we share with a sister company within our office.
• Took part in my development team’s sprint retrospective.
• Reviewed the output of analysis work undertaken as a response to a request for help from one of our business heads. Agreed with everyone involved so far how we would take it forward from here.
• Met with our Learning and Development team to review the material I put together for our Digital Literacy initiative a couple of years ago. We barely scratched the surface the first time around, largely because I was tackling it on my own and the need for AI education dominated everything else. It may turn into something yet.
• Attended a workshop for using internal tools for career and personal development planning.
• Remotely attended a divisional-wide event hosted by our senior leaders.
• Had our weekly project meeting with our audio/visual consultant.
• Attended our monthly operational risk review meeting.
• Realised that I’m never going to change the culture at work to being cameras-on. It’s a Sisyphean task.
• Went to this year’s Interesting conference, “a DIY conference of short presentations about things our speakers find interesting”. A lovely way to spend an evening. In no particular order, we heard from:
  
  • Rachel Coldicutt on The Society of Hopeful Technologists. I really hope this gets some traction.
  • Lisa Rajan on being unable to talk. Incredible bravery in getting up to speak to a room full of strangers.
  • Clare Reddington on toilets.
  • Daria Cybulska on the Polish concept of kombinowanie.
  • Rosa Loosemoore on the neurodiversity of cosplay.
  • Terry Stiastny on fake news and wartime propaganda.
  • Helen Gibbs on ‘postcards from a woman on the edge’.
  • Rebekah Ford on being an 80’s teenage robotic dancer.
  • Cate McLaurin on paving stones (which was actually about lovely little street gardens in the Netherlands.)
  • Zoe Scaman on fairytales as emergency survival manuals for civilisational collapse.
  • Anthony Dhanendran telling us that you should read the obituaries section of the papers.
  • Daniel John Jones on dispatches of the infraordinary, including a radio station that reads out the everyday, ordinary things that are happening around the world.
  • Lauren Beukes and Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nwalo on lessons in resistance from South African sci-fi.
    

• Went out with a couple of friends to The Cavendish Arms — a quite amazing pub venue, it turns out — to see a cheap gig. Hector Gannet kicked things off with his folksy songs on acoustic guitar and piano, followed by Scottish bands waverley. (sic) and headliner Day Sleeper. The venue was so small; waverley. seemed to have brought lots of their friends along who disappeared at the start of Day Sleeper’s set, giving it a strange atmosphere. The bands were running over, so when a couple of us ducked out in order to get the train home, the lead singer of Day Sleeper passive-aggressively followed us almost out of the door. Slightly unnerving.
  

Media

Articles

• Another week, another AI horrorshow. This time, Grok has been replying to people on X/Twitter and turning the conversation towards ‘white genocide’. It got me thinking about how many AI vendors say that they are ethical and yet nobody really knows what the system prompt is. I hope that awful stuff like this helps to move the conversation forward in that these things should be transparent…but it probably won’t.
  

Video

• Loved watching The Four Seasons on Netflix. It was light, funny and heartfelt.
• We’re once again enjoying Race Across The World. It’s so well done, with the contestant backstories and their motivations being revealed across a number of episodes. I do wonder whether behind the scenes they are each asked/forced to take a scenic route along their journey, though. If it was me, I wouldn’t be taking detours to see some of the wonders along the way, I’d just try and get to the end as fast as possible.
  

Audio

• I’m so happy that The Sundays’ Static & Silence is being re-released on vinyl. I haven’t seen it appear on any stores in the UK other than Rough Trade, so I’m not sure how much it will cost here.
  

Books

• Continued reading Code Dependent by Madhumita Murgia.
  

Next week: An online album club, watching my son in another race and getting ready for a week off.

The end of my streak of four-day weeks at work. After last weekend’s giant bike ride, Sunday was spent in an overtired stupor and Monday was restful, ahead of going back to work on Tuesday. All week I’ve had mild pain in my left knee, which I think was caused by trying to keep up with the rest of my group on the cycling climbs. They are better riders than me, so I found myself standing up and grinding out a higher gear than usual to keep up. I got on my indoor bike trainer on Friday and found that it irritated my knee; by the end of Saturday morning’s club ride I was in a lot of pain. I’m going to try and get it looked at next week so that I can minimise the time away from exercising.

This was a week in which I:

• Got a Teams message on my way into work on Tuesday from one of our senior execs about an issue in the office. We’d had some work done over the weekend but it hadn’t been left in an acceptable state. I spent my morning trying to get things to a place where the immediate issues were fixed as well as working with the team to ensure the next batch of work would be done to a higher standard.
• Caught up with colleagues who had been out on holiday. A late Easter and public holidays meant that quite a few people had taken advantage of booking an extended break.
• Had a sprint progress review meeting with our development team.
• Reviewed the latest iteration of a master services agreement with our heads of Procurement, Legal, and Governance and Control.
• Stepped in for my boss to represent our department at the Governance Committee meeting for one of our legal entities.
• Had further conversations with senior client-facing staff about the process of producing newsletters and insights.
• Reviewed the output and insights from one of my colleague’s recent business trips as we look to refurbish one of our offices.
• Joined the weekly project meeting for the refurbishment of our sister company’s space, as well as our shared areas. Reviewed the latest financial forecast for the shared works. We have a busy few weeks ahead.
• Met with colleagues who wanted advice on the next steps on a project, expanding the scope of a new tool or bolstering what has been put in place already.
• Attended our fortnightly Microsoft Copilot working group.
• Agreed our approach to purchasing more Microsoft Copilot licences as requests to use the tools come in.
• Had an update meeting on our document management project.
• Met with colleagues in our Learning and Development team to see how they can assist us with our Copilot journey as well as with some of our other projects that require substantial change management.
• Joined the first part of the monthly Teams Fireside Chat meeting.
• Attended an excellent Learning Hour, with Gartner’s Rob O’Donohue as a guest speaker. He gave a presentation on The Neurodiversity Advantage, the same one that I saw at the Gartner IT Symposium in 2023. It was just as fascinating the second time around, and sparked a lot of conversation within our team.
• Met a colleague in our Operations team to talk through his approach to measuring and tracking ongoing process improvements. It’s been a while since I thought about Six Sigma, which was once very much the flavour of the month.
• Was a little shocked when our car insurance renewal premium came through at £1,600. This is apparently only £100 more expensive than last year, but it doesn’t feel like it. In the past twelve months we gradually changed the scope of our insurance as my eldest son worked his way through his provisional licence and then passed his test. We’ve got used to paying a few hundred pounds just for my wife and I for one car, where we each have 30 years of driving history. Trying to find comparative quotes is difficult and time-consuming as you need to look at all cars and drivers on one policy versus different policies. It seems as though there isn’t much of a better deal around at the moment.
• Dropped our Mini in for a service and MOT, expecting it to be expensive as it is 15 years old and we know it has a few issues. And so it proved.
• Saw both of our boys finish school, our eldest for the final time. Our youngest one also had his first GCSE exam and is quickly in the thick of it. In a few weeks, the exams will be done and they can hopefully enjoy their summer.
• Enjoyed a beautifully sunny club bike ride on Saturday morning, but by the end of 70km I was struggling with pain in my left knee, which persisted throughout the weekend. I’m going to look at getting some help with it next week as I don’t want to be off my bike for any length of time.
• Signed up for The National 400 Audax ride on 28 June. It sets off at the civilised time of 10am, with a time limit of 1pm the next day. I’ve never ridden those roads before. I’m hoping I can get the logistics in place and my knee problem resolved so that I can ride it.
• Went with Matt to the National Film Theatre to see The Extraordinary Miss Flower (2024). Matt had played Emiliana Torrini’s Miss Flower album at our latest Album Club night and I was captivated. The film is a beautiful, hard to describe thing. After the passing of Torrini’s friend’s mum, Geraldine Flower, they discovered a suitcase full of letters that were written to her by various men throughout her life. Torrini used these as inspiration for her album as well as this film. We don’t really get to know much about Miss Flower, as there are very few letters from her, so you end up with an impression of what she was like. The film includes all of the wonderful songs from the album. The event finished with a live Q&A with Torrini, Caroline Catz (who plays Miss Flower in the film), and the directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, followed by a couple of live songs from Torrini. Sophie Ellis-Bextor sat a couple of rows behind us in the theatre. A lovely way to start the weekend.

Media

Podcasts

• Superb episode of WB-40 this week with Dr Nancy Doyle talking about neurodiversity and leadership. I thought that the things she raised are generally applicable and not just relevant to neurodiverse people. She says that popular models, such as being a ‘servant leader’, are targeted at the ‘historically bullying leader’ to make them “calm down and be a bit nicer”. I’m much more comfortable being in the ‘nice’ leader role, so having advice on how to hold boundaries and standing my ground would be much more useful than ‘servant leadership’ training. She also argues against the idea that neurodivergent characteristics are fixed “foibles” that others have “just got to accept” and that individuals shouldn’t be expected to change them.
  

Articles

• Interesting thoughts on Apple’s Pride wallpapers and watch band:
  

…considering the urgency felt by the LGBTQ+ community, Apple releasing Pride bands and wallpapers is simply not enough to compensate for its decision not to speak out against President Trump’s attacks on trans people. There are certainly risks to Apple if it were to do more to stand up for the LGBTQ+ community, but those risks pale in comparison to the increasing threats trans and other people in the LGBTQ+ community face in the U.S. and around the world every day.

• I’m sad to read that Ton Zijlstra’s weeknotes have come to an end, but understand the reasons why. The format he used was inspirational in that it meant that the whole weekend wasn’t taken up with writing something. I wonder how long mine will last for?
• Rob Skinner’s reflections on London-Wales-London from both this and last year are excellent. I read his 2024 notes before I set off on my own adventure and they were very worthwhile.
  

Video

• Subscribed to Paramount+ in order to watch Mobland but abandoned it after half an episode. It is so incredibly dreadful, almost like a parody of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Ridiculous London slang that the actors sometimes explain in the next sentence. Completely unwatchable.
• Reflections on Audax rides versus sportives through the eyes of someone who just finished their first 200km Audax.
  

Audio

• Alicia Clara has announced her new album, Nothing Dazzled, which for me was an instant buy.

• Bought a copy of Plum by Widowspeak. My friend Mat introduced me to them via a playlist he made for me last year. It’s not their latest and may not even be their greatest — I haven’t yet explored enough of their work — but it’s full of lush songs like this one:

• T’Pau’s Heart and Soul popped up on a random playlist at the weekend. I think this is an underrated masterpiece of songwriting, which I’ve loved since it came out in 1987. It’s so clever how the backing vocals take the lead for the verses before colliding with the lead vocal. This lyric video that someone put together illustrates the point; it’s almost impossible to read all of the lyrics in real time.

Books

• Continued reading Code Dependent by Madhumita Murgia. Superb writing so far.
  

Next week: The Interesting conference, and the WB-40 Album Club crew go to a gig.

My third four-day working week in a row, with one more to go. Work was busy, keeping my mind off of the big bike ride planned for the weekend. Many of my colleagues were on holiday, which meant things were both quieter and busier than usual. I took Friday off in order to relax and eat some carbs ahead of the early start on Saturday.

This was a week in which I:

• Refined the slide deck for the design of a space we share with a sister company and published it to the core team.
• Wrote up and published the minutes from last week’s programme Steering Committee meeting.
• Had more conversations about using AI for research purposes.
• Met with my development team to review and refine their work backlog.
• Had the weekly project call for the construction works taking place in our office this year.
• Had an interesting discussion about people recording calls and conversations for their personal AI transcription. No matter what the law says, I think that you now have to assume that you are being recorded anywhere, at any time. And that those recordings are going to be processed by third-party speech-to-text tools and large language models. And that the companies providing these services won’t have your best interests at heart.
• Had the thought that it’s imperative that Microsoft Copilot keeps pace with the tools that people use outside of work, to avoid people defaulting to using their favourite ‘bring your own AI’ and disclosing confidential information to these services.
• Found myself using ChatGPT Deep Research in a couple of different ways. It was interesting to see the types of responses it gave and where it was lacking.
• Met with a couple of senior colleagues to talk through their ideas on creating a new product for our clients.
• Was elected to the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee at work. Given recent events, it feels even more important to be involved than ever.
• Helped to set up a town hall-style talk with our CEO and one of our business heads. The event was followed by leaving drinks for one of our senior colleagues who is moving to another of our offices.
• Enjoyed the weekly Learning Hour session where a colleague presented on the FINRA Cybersecurity Conference that he attended last year.
• Met with an ex-colleague who left my team towards the end of last year. He’s moved himself and his family to the Isle of Man. Although I knew the island has a special status from a tax regime perspective, I hadn’t realised it is outside of the UK.
• Had a last-minute invite to a social event at work. We went to The Cube in Canary Wharf, which is apparently based on a TV show. We were put into teams of two and then used an app to turn up at different cubes to undertake physical challenges. Our team did great, somehow topping the daily points leaderboard. It felt like a long time since I’d been out with colleagues.
  

• Noticed that I had auto-renewal turned on for my NordVPN plan. They were going to charge me around £130 for another year from July. I cancelled the auto-renewal and then found that I could buy another two years of service for £77. It never feels right when companies make additional profit from auto-renewals.
• Dropped my bike into my local bike shop for a safety check, and to get my brake pads replaced. I’d bought new pads a while ago as I figured that after 5,000km of riding they would probably need changing. But I wasn’t confident enough to change them myself for the first time ahead of the big ride. Lovelo did a great job of checking things over, greasing a couple of things that needed it, and advising me that I’ll need to replace my disc rotors at some point soon. (It was also at this point that I discovered that disc rotors are consumable parts. I had no idea.)
• Looked at some lovely properties in Berkhamsted for some relatives who are thinking of moving house.
• Completed London Wales London! More on that to come in a separate post.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Great insights into compliance call recording in Microsoft Teams.
  

Articles

• I have multiple computers backed up to Backblaze but I’m now wondering if I need to look for an alternative. Arq looks good at first glance, but one of the commenters on that post suggests it gets very slow.
• The FT’s Martin Wolf on why the US will lose against China.
• Ian Dunt’s breakdown of Everything you need to know about the trans Supreme Court case is utterly brilliant. Such clear, lucid writing.
  

Next week: Four days of work and a trip to the cinema.

The second of a series of four four-day working weeks. My mind has started to turn to London Wales London, which is only six days away. I have a mild anxiety that has me thinking through the kit that I need to take and checking the weather forecast which has now come into view. Currently it looks as though the temperature is going to go from 6–7°C overnight to 21–23°C during the day, with one spot of light rain thrown in for good measure. So, clothing-wise, I’m going to need a little bit of everything. I’ve got my bike booked in for a check-up on Wednesday and have some new brake pads ready to be installed. I’m looking forward to the event but a little daunted too.

When I sat at my desk on Tuesday morning I didn’t feel ready for the week. I had too many open loops and couldn’t see how I was going to get on top of everything to make it through to Friday evening with any semblance of success. Sometimes, the only way out is through; I started picking up the big things one by one and working my way through them, and by Tuesday afternoon the week felt achievable.

This was a week in which I:

• Spent Easter Monday at my parents’ house, with my brothers and their families too, for a barbecue lunch. It was lovely to see everyone. The British weather oscillated from freezing cold to warm and sunny depending on whether a big cloud was passing by. I’d planned to cycle over to their place to get another long ride in, but the rain put me off; my front gear mechanism has been sticking a little bit after a wet ride and I didn’t want to exacerbate the problem ahead of the big adventure.
• Met with senior colleagues to review a draft slide that I put together to explain our approach to licensing and rolling out Microsoft Copilot within our region. It’s always great to get different views, and involving people helps to get alignment ahead of wider circulation.
• Completed the draft of our quarterly report to our Board of Directors and sent it for review.
• Prepared for and ran our monthly programme Steering Committee meeting.
• Had the fortnightly meeting with my development team, reviewing our roadmap and discussing how I can help without getting in the way.
• Made further updates to our proposal for how we will kit out and support a shared meeting area in one of our locations, following feedback from one of my colleagues. We reviewed the slides with the project team at our sister company, making more changes as a result of their thoughtful suggestions.
• Had our weekly meeting with our AV consultancy.
• Joined the project meeting for the opening of a new office.
• Met with colleagues to discuss our work so far on using AI tools for research and where we should go next.
• Had a very productive afternoon with my Executive Partner from our technology consultancy vendor. We explored good, challenging questions about my team, my role and my future career. I need to spend some time thinking about this.
• Joined the first part of our Lean Coffee meeting before I had to rush off.
• Had a good coffee and a catch up with a project manager that I’ve been closely working with at our sister company.
• Loved talking to a couple of colleagues who were both in the ‘stretch zone’ as they tackled work that was new to them.
• Am still struggling with the Office Timeline PowerPoint plugin. The software is superb, but I have an issue where PowerPoint hangs for ages when I’ve had the application open for a very long time and I select a slide containing a timeline. Restarting PowerPoint gets things moving again. I’ve previously emailed the company, who effectively told me that ‘it works on my machine’, and as nobody else has reported the issue they can’t (or won’t) look into it further.
• Finished adding all of the records and CDs that are on my Amazon Wish List to my Discogs wantlist. Inspired by Ton Zijlstra, I’m trying to move away from Amazon where I can. The big advantage of having everything in Discogs is that when I go shopping for something, the website will tell me that the seller ‘Has X more items I want’. This means that I can typically add more items into the order without dramatically increasing the postage charge.
• Finally managed to join a Quiet Riot podcast ‘Ask Us Anything’ session on Zoom.
• Booked our Mini in for its MOT and a service. We bought the car last year when it was already 15 years old, as something that our boys could drive. It’s been great, but there have been a series of little issues. Hopefully booking it into a Mini garage for the service will mean that they will be able to diagnose and fix whatever problems remain.
• Had a fun, fast bike club ride on Saturday morning. Probably my last until the big one next weekend.
• Enjoyed a weekend of pottering around at home with the odd potter into town. On Saturday my wife and I had a lovely lunch of avocado, cherry tomatoes and chilli flakes on sourdough toast at Jester. On Sunday the sun came out, so we strolled down the high street to find Altobells Gelato, picking up a scoop of banana, and another of chocolate orange that was made with real oranges.
  

Media

Podcasts

• A good discussion about the state of Teams Phone Mobile.
• A moving and informative interview with John Harris about how music has helped him to connect him with his autistic son.
  

Video

• The second episode of the new series of The Last of Us was…woah. Amazing television.
• Watched and very much enjoyed Conclave (2024), a drama about the process of picking a new Pope. It’s much more exciting than it sounds.
  

Web

• Reading Alexei Sayle’s Thatcher Stole My Trousers led me to reading about the performance art of Chris Burden, particularly the time he asked a friend to shoot him in the arm with a rifle.
  

Books

• Someone at work has scheduled an after-hours meetup to discuss the new book by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count. I’ve avoided book clubs in the past as I only get time to read the book club book and nothing else. But I do want to support the idea of getting colleagues together. I’ll make up my mind once I’ve finished my current book.
  

Next week: London to Wales and back again.

The first of a series of four-day working weeks. It’s lovely having time off, but it adds pressure to get things done during the remaining four days. This week felt quite productive, but I’m still picking up many more tasks than I’m completing, and feeling that I’m spread very thin.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the weekly meeting with our AV design consultants.
• Put together the first draft of some slides to present to our sister company on our proposed AV equipment, support and cost profile for our shared meeting rooms.
• Met with colleagues to review our mandatory compliance call and meeting recording setup for one of our offices.
• Had an excellent discussion about how to break down a problem and use generative AI tools as an accelerant, without compromising critical steps in the problem-solving process. It was refreshing to be in the room with someone who wasn’t taking an approach of just throwing AI at everything and seeing what happens.
• Updated the slides to be submitted to our next Governance Committee meeting, including an update on our approach to using Microsoft Copilot.
• Had my fortnightly staff meeting. It feels as though we are getting into our stride.
• Helped a colleague with an approach to the analysis work on one of our key projects.
• Met with the Head of Workplace Services at our sister company to discuss some of our shared amenities managed by our landlord and how they can be improved.
• Discussed the configuration of a planned new office and proposed equipment list with our CTO.
• Reviewed proposed changes to the master services agreement for a contract with one of our vendors. Met with colleagues and agreed next steps.
• Had an impromptu discussion with our cybersecurity team on a range of hot topics, including their roadmap.
• Met with colleagues to discuss the legal and operational risk aspects of a project that is about to reach a key milestone.
• Asked the vendor of our password management solution for a simple primer on passkeys. Troy Hunt has mentioned that he has a draft blog post on the topic and I can’t wait to read it. They are being pushed by an increasing number of websites but I haven’t managed to get my head around the nuances of how they work. I want to fix that before our staff start asking questions so that we can support them.
• Also asked them for some supporting material to help us with some changes that we plan to make to nudge even more people into using the tool.
• Did some research into the UK Government’s Access To Work scheme.
• Met with colleagues in our Learning and Development team to talk about our department’s training needs for this year. I’m trying to reframe our approach so that it is much more continuous and day-to-day, looking for opportunities for the learning experts to contribute more broadly with our Digital Literacy initiatives.
• Had a handover from a colleague who will be on holiday for the next two weeks.
• Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour session where one of our team members gave a presentation on British food. One reason we set up the weekly session is so that people can practice giving presentations in a relatively safe space, and it’s so good to see it paying off.
• Found my name on a list of nominees for our internal Diversity and Inclusion Committee after one of my team members put me forward for it.
• Got notified that I have a number of days’ leave to take before the end of June, otherwise I will forfeit them. Booked a couple of weeks off over the next two months.
• Tried to use my sit/stand desk in the office a little more, in the hope that standing up will gradually strengthen my lower back. I find that standing up for long periods, particularly at gigs, is horrible. I’m not sure it’s meant to be like this at 48.
• Took the plunge and bought a new MacBook Air as my home computer. I’ve been using a 2017 MacBook Pro, which is now very long in the tooth. It’s on its second battery, and once again has started to struggle with bizarre power issues. It reports that the battery is dead, but when I plug it in it already has a 70% charge. I’d been thinking about upgrading for some time, but was planning to wait until Apple stopped creating security patches and ended support for my current laptop. The recent market turmoil caused by Trump’s tariffs made me wonder whether prices will go up in the near future, so I decided to upgrade while I could. Although I’ve gone from a Pro to an Air, the new laptop is a significant upgrade in every way that matters. I opted to move my files and install my apps manually on the new laptop as the Migration Assistant tool wanted to bring across a gigantic ‘Library’ folder that I couldn’t deselect; this took me longer, but it seems to have saved hundreds of gigabytes of space. The biggest improvement between devices is the battery life. On a full charge, with all of my apps installed (including some that run constantly in the background) it reports that the battery will last for just under 20 hours.
• Enjoyed a random night out with my family, going for a couple of games of bowling and dinner. We’ve not been bowling for years. I was surprised to find that the pins now all have strings attached to their tops, allowing them to be re-racked much more quickly. It felt a bit cheap and nasty, as the only other time I’ve come across a setup like this was with a small single lane in an arcade on holiday. But a quick search of the web tells me that it looks like it’s the way that all lanes could be going, and I might have misjudged it. But it is controversial.
• Gave my home office a much overdue spring clean.
• Felt great on the weekly cycling club ride, despite having tackled a two hour indoor bike session the day before. It was a little confidence boost for the big ride coming up in a couple of weeks’ time. I’ve got my bike booked in for what I’m hoping is a minor safety check just before the ride and plan to ask them to install some new brake pads. (Now is not the moment to try and replace disc brake pads for the first time myself.) My bike isn’t indicating that it needs new pads, but I’ve done over 5,000km, so I assume they must be nearing the end of their life. I also tested my big front light by running it to see if it lasts; I’ve only ever used it in anger once about four years ago, so I was a bit worried about whether it would still hold a charge. I’ve bought a back-up battery for it just in case.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Interesting discussion with Matt Peers, COO of legal firm Pinsent Mason, about the use of Microsoft Copilot and AI in the legal sector.
• Quiet Riot published a sensitive and useful breakdown of the issues raised by the UK Supreme Court ruling about the definition of a woman as it pertains to the Equality Act. I learned so much from Alex Andreou and Naomi Smith’s discussion here.
  

Articles

• “ChatGPT can now remember and reference all of your previous chats”.
• Gary Marcus writing about “Sam Altman’s attitude problem” highlights why I am conflicted about giving money to OpenAI to use ChatGPT. The tool has so much utility, but like most of the useful AI tools out there, it has been built on the backs of other people without compensating them for their work. This isn’t news, but it is unresolved.
  

Video

• Started watching season two of The Last Of Us. Once again, a YouTube recap video of the first season came in so handy. We’ve learned to do this before we start watching the next season of something that hasn’t been on for a while.
• A brilliant summary of audio cassette tapes and just how good they can be.
• Watched the latest season of Black Mirror. The episodes were entertaining, but none of them left me with that weird hollow feeling that some of the earlier ones did.
  

Audio

• Had two Album Clubs, one online and another in person. Emiliana Torrini’s Miss Flower is a superb find and I didn’t hesitate to buy a copy. I’m also booked in to see the film with an Album Club friend.
  

Books

• Caught up with my backlog of blog posts on books I’ve read, including Fearless Speech: Breaking Free of the First Amendment by Mary Anne Franks.
• Started Alexei Sayle’s Thatcher Stole My Trousers.
  

Next week: Lunch with the family, and cramming everything into just four days.

Another week filled with meetings. Although I still feel that I’m spread very thin, I did manage to get some things completed which started to restore my sense of balance.

This was a week in which I:

• Watched a presentation from Microsoft on the legal aspects of their Copilot AI toolset. A couple of comments frustrated me, such as a general allusion that because Copilot cites sources, it doesn’t hallucinate. This is fundamentally not how this technology works. I wonder how many people are working with the tools without a basic understanding of what’s going on? Maybe that’s what the AI companies want. It was also interesting to hear that Microsoft has a ‘Customer Copyright Commitment’, where they will pay your legal bills if you are successfully sued for copyright infringement. It sounds good, but in practice, if you’ve ended up losing a case that has been tried in court, you’re likely to have issues beyond simply covering the plaintiff’s legal fees.
• Met with the project team for a status update and review of the scope of works for our document management initiative. Separately spent time reviewing and giving feedback on the project documents produced so far.
• Took part in the sprint planning session run by our development team, a reboot of a process that has been on hold while we were hiring.
• Assisted with the handover of an office refurbishment project between colleagues.
• Had lots of discussions about how we currently manage macOS and ‘bring your own device’ computers in our organisation, where we want to get to, and what we need to do to get there. In conversation, we zoomed out even further and reviewed our stance on devices of all types that could feasibly appear in our environment in some way.
• Caught up with the Corporate Services manager at a sister company to discuss our plans to manage the AV equipment in a space that we share.
• Met with our Head of Procurement to discuss our approach for sourcing the equipment we need for this shared space.
• Had a catch-up meeting with the CEO of our AV design vendor to discuss where we are and some details on how we want to continue to work in the future.
• Hosted our AV consultant who has recently joined our account. At my request, I asked him to come in and re-check all of our spaces to ensure that the equipment we plan to purchase will fit and meet our needs.
• Met with our sister company for an update on their office refurbishment work, and attended the steering committee for the project.
• Reviewed a draft communication to all of our staff on the next steps towards mandatory use of a password manager.
• Had our monthly operational risk review meeting and agreed some specific follow-up actions.
• Attended a Leadership Talk in our office with our CEO and two colleagues from Africa who had been visiting clients in Europe. The conversation was dominated by the impact of the tariffs in the US and subsequent market volatility.
• Saw scaffolding appear in our main office reception as the landlord prepares to improve the acoustics of the space.
• Was grateful for a random act of luncheon kindness where a colleague tapped their bank card at the till as I was getting my phone ready to pay.
• Helped a friend with reviewing their CV and their personal statements for a couple of job applications.
• Met my eldest boy for lunch as he was in town and close by to my office.
• Looked aghast at my pension funds as they plummeted over the past two weeks. It’ll be interesting to see how long they take to recover. Luckily I’m not planning on retiring any time soon.
• Had to leap into action on Tuesday night after our Ubiquiti Amplifi HD router finally died. I think it had started playing up after the lightning strike in September. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve had progressively more failures, each time needing us to power cycle the device. On Tuesday night, it stopped booting up. By a stroke of ridiculous good fortune and fortuitous timing, last week my parents returned the Amplifi HD system that we bought for them to fix their Wi-Fi coverage issues in their house. They recently changed their internet service provider, and the company provides a mesh network as standard. It took me a couple of hours to replace the router and rebuild the network — finding the two mesh wands that were paired to the failed router and swapping them out with the new ones, and re-pairing each of the other devices to the new router — but this is a much shorter time than having to buy new kit.
• Finally upgraded my Pi-hole network ad-blockers to version 6. This was somewhat forced by the network change that I made, as I had to re-issue the devices with new static IP addresses. I discovered that one of the Raspberry Pis was running Debian and the other Raspbian, for no reason whatsoever. It explained a lot why one of the devices had been behaving slightly differently to the other. On the second device I decided to re-flash the MicroSD card and start again. Somewhere during this process the card got damaged and went nuclear, burning my fingers as I removed it from the Raspberry Pi and later the card reader in my laptop. Fortunately I had a spare card, and both blockers are now both up and running.
• Once again, found my Weeknotes useful in remembering something important. When you configure a Pi-hole, you need to choose an upstream DNS service so that any DNS requests that aren’t blocked can be legitimately served. I used to use OpenDNS so that I could block certain categories of website, preventing my kids from seeing at least some of the inappropriate content on the Internet. I remembered that I had moved away from OpenDNS but had no idea what I’d picked instead. Searching my blog for ‘OpenDNS’ revealed that I’d picked 1.1.1.1 for Families in late 2023. Thank you, past self. 🙏
• Used ChatGPT to find out the meaning of this warning light on the dashboard of our Mini. It came back impressively fast with a correct diagnosis, that one or more of the tyre pressures was low. But I didn’t trust it when we asked follow-up questions on what the correct tyre pressures should be.
  

• Had my haircut, and saw solid proof fall into my lap that I’m finally going a little grey. It was a good innings.
• Used ChatGPT Deep Research for the first time, asking it to create a report on a topic important to me. My first response was deeply unimpressive; it chugged away for a quarter of an hour before producing a report where the only source it cited was Wikipedia. A second run of the same prompt wasn’t much better. Scratching my head, I wondered what could be wrong. My suspicion was that something had stopped working on the back-end and, given it was in the wee small hours on the west coast of the US, ƒit may get looked at and fixed when people went to work at OpenAI headquarters. I waited until just before midnight my time to run my query and, just as I thought, this time things were working well. It gave me a much lengthier, more detailed, and better researched report. Producing a substandard report and using up one of the 10 credits I get per month on the £20/mo Plus plan is a terrible failure mode. I’d rather it just said “Something’s not working right now, please try again later.”
• Enjoyed the most glorious sunshine-filled bike club ride. Things started a little chilly but soon warmed up. I felt very happy with my choice of clothes. Our route took us down The Lines between the villages of Aston Abbott and Weedon, which I think is the most beautiful descent in the whole area. You get an incredible panoramic view of the surrounding countryside as you accelerate down the hill.
• Had my wife’s parents come and stay with us for a night. It’s been years since we’ve called the pull-out bed into action, but it didn’t let us down. It was so lovely to see them.
  

Media

Articles

• ‘My van’s been trapped in a car park for two years’. “In total, I estimate we are currently about £40,000 out of pocket.”
• Martin Wolf on how “Trump’s tariffs will damage the world”.
• My exploration of ChatGPT Deep Research led me to this excellent article by Benedict Evans on what he calls ’The Deep Research problem’:
  

At this stage, the obvious response is to say that the models keep getting better, but this misses the point. Are you telling me that today’s model gets this table 85% right and the next version will get it 85.5 or 91% correct? That doesn’t help me. If there are mistakes in the table, it doesn’t matter how many there are – I can’t trust it. If, on the other hand, you think that these models will go to being 100% right, that would change everything, but that would also be a binary change in the nature of these systems, not a percentage change, and we don’t know if that’s even possible.

Video

• The BBC Archive YouTube account consistently publishes fascinating content linked to a current event. Microsoft celebrated its 50th birthday (only a couple of years older than me), so the BBC Archive team surfaced this bizarre 1992 ‘interview’ with Bill Gates from the Terry Wogan show. Gates doesn’t say much and it feels like a gigantic missed opportunity. But maybe that’s just me viewing it through a 2025 lens.
  

• Finished watching the third season of The White Lotus. It was nowhere near as good as the first two. Once again, my failing memory is grateful for a succinct story recap.
• Paid my first ever visit to the BFI IMAX cinema, the UK’s largest cinema screen. It’s hard to get your head around just how big the screen is until you’re in there. I’d booked tickets to see One To One: John & Yoko (2024), which I saw advertised on a billboard at Euston station at the start of the week. The film is brilliant, consisting of footage of Lennon’s only full length post-Beatles concert performances, interspersed with recordings of phone calls and ephemeral US television content from the early 1970s. I felt like I was getting educated and rocked at the same time. It also made me remember that there have always been a lot of eccentric and crazy people around; the difference in 2025 is that they can much more easily find each other and get organised.
  

• Re-watched Mannequin (1987) for the first time in years. Don’t ask me why. I can see why a film like this would have been a riot when I watched it as a child. It is ridiculous from start to finish, with everyone playing an extreme caricature and a flimsy plot that romps along seemingly of its own accord. That’s not to say it isn’t still enjoyable.
  

Next week: Two Album Clubs and a four-day week.