Beautiful blossom everywhere, and for once there’s no wind to rip it from the branches as soon as it appears
Our eldest son turned 18 this week. Our work here is done! He didn’t come with a manual, so we’ve been improvising all this time; this week I’ve learned that when a child reaches adulthood, you aren’t meant to drive them somewhere and release them back into the wild. So, I guess we’ll be keeping him. He’s a fine young man and we love him a lot. It’s a strange feeling to be the parent of another adult, especially as it feels like no time at all since we first met him.
At work, I had one of those weeks where I feel as though I’ve picked up lots of actions, started doing many things, and haven’t finished any of them. As much as I’m really enjoying a balance between being in the office and working from home, Thursday felt as though it had all of the distractions and none of the advantages. By the time I came to shut my laptop down, I hadn’t managed to finish any of the things I had aimed to complete that day. I get angsty when I’m not getting things ticked off the list.
This was a week in which I:
Had my fortnightly team meeting. I’ve been looking at how to add some more definition to this session, giving it more of a structure. I went back and relistened to the two Manager Tools podcasts on the topic, but they weren’t quite as insightful as I remembered. We’re in a small department that already meets regularly across the whole team, so that takes away some of the need for this smaller group of us to get together. But there’s still value in sharing updates as a group, and it also helps with understanding interpersonal dynamics.
Reviewed the status of our plans to open a new office and the process we will follow to procure the IT/AV infrastructure for the space.
Met with our AV consultants to agree next steps for testing the proposed configuration of our large meeting rooms that we share with a sister company. We now have an approach and design for how we will implement the cabling. We also collectively resolved questions about provisioning physical telephones in the rooms and implementing guest Wi-Fi.
Met with one of our senior executives to review the proposal, philosophy and expected fit-out and running costs for the AV equipment in our shared meeting rooms, ahead of presenting the proposal to a wider audience.
Reviewed our department finances, looking specifically at the items that are competing for discretionary spend.
Agreed the handover of the project to refurbish one of our offices to a colleague in our team.
Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour meeting where a colleague presented on the physical security aspects of a planned new office.
Joined the weekly project meeting for the setup of this new office.
Helped our Group CIO who was in town for the afternoon, getting him set up in a room for a series of meetings.
Wished a colleague a happy 40th birthday, celebrated with a huge cake in the office.
Had a fantastic meal at The Olive Tree in Berkhamsted for our eldest son’s 18th birthday. My parents joined us and it was great to celebrate with them.
Was meant to go out on Friday night for some drinks for a friend’s birthday, but I was completely drained from the week and ended up heading up to bed. I needed the reset.
Had my brothers and their families over for lunch on Sunday afternoon. We fired up the pizza oven and cooked a personal pizza for everyone. We’re still not back in the habit of having people over to our house since the pandemic, and it really feels like something we need to fix. It was a great forcing function for getting the house in shape, so all of Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning were spent cleaning. Our guests gravitated towards sitting on our decking at the top of the garden, which we’ve actually spent very little time on since it was installed. I’m not sure what the decking boards are made of, but they seem to defy the laws of physics, emitting twice as much heat as they absorb. It was a sunny spring day, and we sat there sweltering. It was so good to see everyone.
Had another cold but beautifully sunny bike ride with the club on Saturday morning. Only a month to go until London Wales London.
The Japanese Grand Prix was a snooze-fest. I’m glad I watched it on catch-up and didn’t set an alarm.
This obsession with goods is insane. The US is replicating the utterly muddle-headed conversation about goods over services which we had in the UK over Brexit.
Video
Continued watching The White Lotus, which this season feels like an excruciatingly slow burn.
Scooted through Last One Laughing after repeated recommendations from my brother. Jimmy Carr is not my thing but Bob Mortimer definitely is. It was like watching a hyper-compressed Big Brother with an emphasis on silliness.
Watched all four episodes of Adolescence. The rest of my family saw it while I was away a couple of weeks ago and told me how good it was. I agree with Tom Stuart’s thoughts on it. It’s a difficult watch with incredible performances, but I’m not sure I can draw any dots directly to many things that people — parents, governments etc. — should take action on as a result of it.
Watched the first few episodes of Alma’s Not Normal as recommended by a friend. A lovely comedy with great characters.
Next week: More visitors, and trying to get some things ticked off the list.
View from a bridge across the Thames, 29 March 2025
Back in London after my trip. I started the week a little tired and grumpy, but the feelings soon dissipated. The weather has taken a turn for the better and spring has taken root.
This was a week in which I:
Had an office-based jump scare when an old piece of kit decided to try and escape from behind one of the information screens in our office, right next to where I was sitting. The sticky side of the Velcro pad that had been keeping it prisoner for the past few years had failed.
Said goodbye to colleagues at one of our key vendors, and showed one of the new team members around our office space. Met with our sister company to discuss the handover and the remaining work on our joint project.
Presented the proposed approach and audio/visual technology costs for our shared meeting room space to our CIO.
Had a fascinating meeting on the topic of how to represent and present the value that our organisation provides beyond what is measured by the raw profit and loss numbers.
Sat down with our development team to review the roadmap for the next few quarters.
Met with our construction vendor to discuss the remaining few things we want to get done within our office space.
Requested laminate samples for a new piece of office furniture.
Reviewed the themes for our department from our annual employee engagement survey and agreed how we will follow up.
Had a very productive call with my executive partner at our technology advisory firm and agreed some specific things to follow up on. We’ve booked in a workshop together in a couple of weeks’ time.
Attended a fascinating briefing from the Centre for Risk Analysis on the political situation in South Africa.
Attended the first part of a Microsoft webinar on Purview. I’m coming to the conclusion that I don’t find the webinar format ideal for learning.
Took part in our monthly Lean Coffee session, where the team decided to spend time discussing the topic of digital literacy.
Started testing a Logitech Zone Wireless 2 headset. I’m usually a one-ear headset guy, but am making an exception for this as it oozes quality. It looks a bit strange on my head, but the sound quality is superb. I love that raising the microphone mutes my call automatically, unmuting when I lower it again. I’ve been happily using a one-ear Plantronics headset for the past five or six years, so this is a bit of a change.
Found myself unable to catch up with my podcast backlog after a week out of the country. Staying in a hotel right near to the office is disruptive to a listening routine. I may need to make some difficult choices about what shows to give up if I can’t get back on top of things.
Was delighted to find that using the new ‘touch in/out’ reader at my train station means that I’m ending up with lower commute costs. I was buying digital ‘books’ of eight flexi-season tickets, which worked out at about £22 a day, plus £2.80 for each tube ride I took when I got to London. Using the new system I’m now paying about £19.35 including a tube ride in the evening.
Saw the wonderful, incredibly talented Helena Deland again. She played an acoustic set at St Matthias Church, the same venue where I saw the Smoke Fairies in November 2023. The venue is stunning, but the wooden pews are not; next time I will try and remember to take something soft to sit on. Support was in the form of Olivia Kaplan, who also played some beautiful acoustic songs. Originally I was going to the gig on my own, but my friend Mat bought a last-minute ticket. We booked Corrochios, a Mexican restaurant close to the venue, and had an excellent meal.
Helena Deland at St Matthias Church, London, 26 March 2025
Had a lovely dinner on Friday night at Per Tutti in Berkhamsted, with lots of our local friends. I usually choose something vegetarian when we eat out, but this time I went for the sea bass, which turned out to be absolutely incredible.
Went into London on Saturday to meet my two brothers and my sisters-in-law for lunch at Ping Pong and an evening at the theatre. My Neighbour Totoro is a beautiful production that had us all smiling with delight. I watched the film with my boys many years ago and we all loved it. The fun is in the surreal parts of the plot; I found that the second half paled in comparison to the first, and the show came to an abrupt end.
Tried a Greggs Vegan Sausage Roll for the first time. I’m rating it 9/10. The ‘sausage’ is excellent, and the puff pastry is superbly crumbly, forcing you to brush down the front of your top after every bite. Why did nobody tell me about these before?
Scratched my head when lots of spam messages started appearing on Teams. I then realised that Microsoft have merged Skype into Teams, which brought a bunch of rubbish along with it.
Sigh.
Started thinking more about the 407km bike ride that I’m doing in just over a month. I bought a big expensive front light ahead of the 300km Audax ride I did in 2021, but I haven’t used it at all in the four years since then. I’m a bit concerned that the battery won’t hold up, and probably need to test how long it will last. To compensate, I’ve bought a special power pack that I think I can carry in a crossbar bag and plug in if things start getting dim. I’ve also bought a new rear light as the organiser of the ride is insistent on not having them in ‘flash’ mode, and I’m not sure how long my current light can last. I now need to contemplate changing my brake pads, and whether my bike needs any other kind of attention before the big ride.
Enjoyed a lovely bike club ride in the wonderful sunshine. Compulsory mudguards disappear next week so spring must be here.
Media
Articles
Apple’s AirPods Max nearly pulled me in with the news that they will allow lossless audio to be streamed from an iPhone. But it would involve (a) going back to using a cable and (b) using Apple Music (as far as I can tell). I’ll wait until there’s a wireless technology that will do the same thing.
We loved watching School Swap UK to USA. The kids on both sides did themselves proud. I’m not sure if it’s by design, but having a two-year gap between the filming and broadcasting of the film was probably a blessing in that it would minimise any blowback from their classmates.
Beautiful morning in Delta Park, Randburg, Johannesburg
On Saturday evening I flew to Johannesburg. I hadn’t spent any time in person with our team there in over two years, so a visit was long overdue. Everything was familiar, but so much had changed. I said hello to new team members that we’d recruited over the past couple of years; I’ve spent so much time with them on Teams calls, but nothing beats meeting up in person. Our office had been remodelled, with old cafes being swapped out for new ones, and new meeting rooms created with glass and metal partitions. Businesses around our office had changed, and even the hotel that I stayed at had a new owner and a new name.
Years ago I used to fly out on Sunday night, heading to the office via the hotel to arrive there late on Monday morning. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the flights end up getting in too late to make this work. I briefly toyed with getting up at 3:30am UK time in order to try and get the Wi-Fi working so that I could watch the first Formula 1 race of the year, but I needed to sleep. Once I got to the hotel, I tried to find out the time of the full replay on Sky Sports F1 without reading about who won, or anything else that happened in the race. This was a tricky feat that involved me squinting to try to block out any peripheral details as I searched the Internet for the information. It turned out that I had just over an hour to have a shower and grab some lunch before the coverage started again.
On Thursday’s flight home, I was woken by the captain announcing that we were 30 minutes away from landing at Gatwick. This was a surprise to everyone, as we were meant to be landing at Heathrow. An electrical substation was on fire which meant that Heathrow was without power. We landed and sat on the tarmac for an hour or so while buses were arranged to take us to the terminal. I found my bag, wandered out and found a taxi, feeling grateful that I hadn’t ended up in another random airport.
This was a week in which I:
Put together the pack for the programme Steering Committee and ran the meeting. I felt surprisingly articulate in the meeting despite having travelled back overnight from Johannesburg.
Spent a day in a town-hall/workshop event with other senior managers from our Investment Bank Technology team, discussing the climate emergency and how we can contribute to being part of the solution.
Learned that a lead consultant from one of our vendors is moving on at the end of next week. It’s always bittersweet when someone leaves — you’re pleased that they’ve found their next thing, but it’s sad not to be working with them anymore.
Had a good catch-up with our recently appointed Group Head of Non-Financial Risk, whom I’ve known for over a decade. He has a fascinating job.
Enjoyed a wonderful team dinner at Marble in Johannesburg. We had wonderful food and many laughs, a fitting end to the major works that we completed last year.
Attended our weekly Learning Hour hosted by the owners and curators of a Group Technology information repository.
Got onto a running treadmill for the first time in over a decade. I didn’t feel safe enough to go running around outside my hotel and didn’t fancy the typically terrible hotel gym bikes, so this was the next best thing. Years ago, the treadmill gave me shooting pains through my knees, but I think that cycling and general fitness have dialled this out, so I was able to complete a few runs.
Had a lovely morning run with a friend in Delta Park in Johannesburg. We had to get an Uber there and back, but it was worth it.
Did another long run on Sunday, upping my distance to 17km. With London Wales London coming up in just over a month, I probably need to shift my attention back to riding my bike.
Unbelievably, we’re five years on since the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK. Ian Dunt’s essay touched a nerve with me.
I promised myself when it was happening that I would never take these things for granted. I would never shake a man’s hand like it was nothing, I would never embrace a friend without remembering what a privilege it was. But of course I do take these things for granted. Those promises never last.
Video
Finished watching Severance. My annoyance with this second season dissipated with the final episode, which I loved, as it brought a lot of threads together. I suspect that by the time season three rolls around, I’m going to need an hour-long YouTube catch-up video to remind me of everything that’s happened.
Audio
Discovered the existence of the Original Album Classics series. Three to five CDs by a particular artist in one low-cost package.
Books
Continued reading Rainbow Diary: A journey in the new South Africa by John Malathronas. Despite having been there so many times, I’ve never really seen the country beyond business hotels, offices and taxis.
A view of Canary Wharf, over the river from Greenwich, on a cold Tuesday morning in March
Four days in London followed by Friday at home. The main event of the week was attending the Gartner CIO Leadership Forum on Tuesday and Wednesday, held in the Intercontinental Hotel, right next to The O2. I really enjoyed the event. It felt like less of a commitment than heading to Barcelona for the four days of the annual Symposium, and also benefited from being a smaller-scale event so that you kept seeing and bumping into the same people all the time. The content was also much more focused and relevant.
Being at the conference meant that I had to fit everything else into the remaining three days. It felt doable this week.
This was a week in which I:
Got lots out of the CIO Leadership Conference.
AI was, of course, the most prominent subject throughout the two days, although there seemed to be some acknowledgement that driving value out of AI investments seems to be trickier than people first thought. It was great to find out through Graham Waller’s opening keynote presentation, and a roundtable discussion later that day, that our approach of investing in literacy alongside licences seems to be the way to go.
Mary Mesaglio’s presentation on How AI is Changing Human Behavior and What To Do About It was a refreshing take. The big, generic takes of ‘AI will take all the jobs’ or ‘AI won’t take your job, people using AI will take your job’ are well known, but I don’t hear many people having the more nuanced discussions such as what AI will do to traditional career paths and talent pipelines. If an LLM is equivalent to having ‘an enthusiastic intern’, what does that mean for the pipeline of enthusiastic interns? Mesaglio’s presentation asked many provocative questions like this. Superb.
I attended two sessions hosted by Christie Struckman, the first on using social intelligence in ‘high-stakes’ moments, and the second on Making Culture Change Stick. She made a great point that we often denigrate people working in silos, but don’t often stop to look at how that group of people have been tasked with their role — sometimes it literally is to focus on something in a silo and ignore all of the other noise.
Christian Stephan gave me some good ideas in his presentation on 5 Ways to Innovate With Scarce Resources.
Erick Brethenoux gave a good overview of an AI Governance Playbook.
At the Gartner Symposium in 2023, Rob O’Donohue’s presentation on Neurodiversity was a personal highlight for me. At this conference he was talking about The Art and Science of Motivation.
Leo Brenner gave some guidelines on Navigating the Psychology of Organizational Change that included some useful models and things to think about.
I’m not sure about Nate Suda’s guidance on where to focus for maximum impact from generative AI. The model he presented seemed to be oversimplified.
We also had a keynote speech from Tim Harford on How To Make The World Add Up. Someone bought me a copy of his book a couple of years ago and it is sitting in my unread pile, so it was good to get a bit of an overview of what it is all about. I much prefer this type of keynote speaker, someone that has some relevancy to the topic of the conference, than the big star names such as Martina Navratilova and Arnold Schwarzenegger, no matter how amazing those individuals are.
I noticed how many people are now recording talks that they attend. Ten years ago, people sitting in the audience took photographs of key slides that they wanted to save. Nowadays it is easy to spot someone recording the talk on their phone, sometimes directly transcribing it via an AI-enabled app. I wonder how many times each day I am recorded without knowing about it? It all feels a little Black Mirror. I have Siri turned off on my devices and don’t have any voice assistants enabled in the house, but it feels futile when everyone else has their voice recognition on by default. And now Amazon will soon start processing all Alexa recordings in the cloud, because (of course) AI.
A vendor sales rep annoyed me by doing a ‘fly by’ scan of my badge in order to get me onto his company’s mailing list, without my consent. He looked sheepish when I told him that yes, I did mind if he scanned me. It’ll be interesting to see whether he deleted my details, or I start getting spam from his organisation.
We had a lovely Financial Services dinner hosted by the conference organisers, giving me an opportunity to meet CIOs from other companies.
There was a funny moment where two people I know emerged from one of the conference event rooms as I was going in. Gartner had paired them up as they have similar challenges in their roles. They both said hello to me at the same time and then turned to each other in surprise, not realising that the other person also knew me. One is a colleague I worked with 20 years ago and the other was a previous boss of mine at another company.
Tim Harford on stage at the Gartner CIO Leadership Forum in London, 11 March 2025
Wandered into a long impromptu end-of-day meeting in the office with a bunch of people from our department. It was the kind of meeting that wouldn’t have happened if everyone was working from home. As we talked, we pulled in other colleagues who were wandering by in order to ask them specific questions related to our discussion. It was very illuminating and gave us plenty to think about.
Met with our audio/visual vendor to continue to push forward with the design of our shared meeting room floor. We are narrowing down our options, and still have some testing and costing to do before we settle on a final design.
Had lunch with our CTO to agree how we could move forward with implementing our physical environment monitoring platform in our shared space.
Met with the organisations involved in our construction project to agree what work is outstanding, when it is likely to be completed and when we will pay for it.
Had our fortnightly Microsoft Copilot working group where a colleague gave an excellent presentation on how to construct better AI prompts.
Completed the annual review process with my team.
Caught up with the recording of the Information Risk Steering Group meeting that I missed as I was at the conference.
Met with the team that are working on our document management project. We’ve agreed next steps as well as how we will monitor the work.
Was told that I have won a major internal award for the work that I did last year. It’s an honour to be recognised, but the award is bittersweet. Although I was the face of our major programme, everything we achieved was a result of the work done by our brilliant team. The way the recognition programme works is that there are a number of individual winners and one team winner; it should probably be the other way around.
Had a conversation with a friend that reinforced to me how much people are living in their own confirmation-bias information bubbles. At the CIO Leadership Conference there was so much discussion about AI. I wonder whether it would be just as immediately useful for CIOs to have content about the impact of social media and information bubbles on their teams.
Fielded a request for AI-enabled earbuds that perform voice translation in real-time. I can see the massive Star Trek-like benefit, but they are probably a privacy bin fire.
Had an issue with Backblaze backup on my personal laptop where it suddenly told me it had stopped working. Apparently, my ‘bzfileids.dat’ file had gotten too large to process. This didn’t sound good. I dug around on the web and found a ridiculous solution written by Backblaze themselves where they suggest that you delete your backup and start all over again. There was no way I was about to do this, leaving me exposed without a cloud backup while the process ran from scratch. The problem seems to have been around for years. I decided to open a problem ticket. A support engineer got back to me promptly with this advice, which seemed to do the trick. (But that I had to email them to discover these details doesn’t seem right.)
Yesterday, Backblaze encountered an issue impacting a subset of our users running the Backblaze Client on MacOS. We’ve identified a remediation process that should only take 5-10 minutes to complete. Please follow these steps:
Restart the computer. Please DO NOT skip this step.
When the computer is up and running, open the installer and click install now.
Restart the computer one more time.
Open the Backblaze application on your computer by clicking on the Backblaze icon in the Menu Bar then selecting Backblaze Preferences from the top of the list
Hold down the option key on your keyboard and press the Restore Options button in the application
Let the process run for three to four hours
This process will resolve the issue that displayed the “Your bzfileids.dat is too large” error pop-up. Please let us know if you have any additional questions or if any of the above steps do not appear to work as expected and we’ll be glad to assist.
Skipped the weekly Saturday morning bike club ride as it was forecast to drop below 2°C overnight once again. I also had a lot to get done that day, so a shorter indoor ride seemed like the best idea.
Thoroughly enjoyed the first F1 race of the new season. The new crop of rookie drivers seem to be a real bunch of characters. They were thoroughly tested by the conditions; hopefully it will make them stronger.
Media
Podcasts
Keir Starmer is looking at cutting benefits for people deemed ‘unfit for work’. I hate the way that cutting benefits for the most vulnerable people in society is being presented as a ‘moral imperative’ to fund our planned increase in defence spending. I suspect that doing this kind of thing will drive people away from the Labour Party. Why vote for Labour if you are going to get some flavour of the Conservatives or Reform?
Heard the super fun Cansei de Ser Sexy by CSS for the first time at the WB-40 Album Club. Two people knew of them and had heard the album; the rest of us didn’t know they existed.
After much soul-searching, I picked Roxette’s Tourism when I hosted Album Club on Friday night. I first heard this album in 1994 when I bought a copy on tape on holiday in Bulgaria. It cost me less than £1. It didn’t take me long to fall in love with it. Roxette were best when they didn’t over-produce their music, and this is a lovely melancholy record that was made as they travelled the world on their Joyride tour in the early 1990s.
Hat tip to my friend Ray for this tour of London via old music videos.
A very busy week, but one where I enjoyed being myself again. I’m now pretty much illness-free.
This was a week in which I:
Unusually, worked from home on Monday. The main drain from our house was blocked, something we discovered last week after a couple of days of heavy rain. Dyno-Rod sent us Mick, the same guy who unblocked the same drain just over a year ago. (Weeknotes are brilliant for remembering when stuff happened.) It’s great to watch a person at work who is excellent at their job. We’ve lived here for 20 years and in that time have only had drain problems in the past year. I’m hoping that it doesn’t mean that we have a bigger issue.
Spent quite a bit of time with our audio/visual vendor, discussing and reviewing the latest designs for our client meeting rooms as well as our internal work cafe/presentation space. We also reviewed our financials and agreed how we will manage our contracts with them in 2025.
Continued work on the department roadmap, nudging the draft forward in between meetings.
Reviewed the draft scope and acceptance criteria for our document management project. Talked to the Project Manager about the next steps.
Met to agree next steps with our pilot of Microsoft Copilot. I’d like it to be BAU as soon as possible, but we agreed to review the finances before coming back with a revised proposal.
Participated in a workshop to look at how we can drive further adoption of good practices for password hygiene, with a focus on our password manager. Adoption has been good, but we always want it to be better.
Met with colleagues in Johannesburg and Dubai to review the projected costs of the next planned office refurbishment.
Met our furniture vendor and their partner consultant at our office to review finishes for a potential new boardroom table, and to discuss our plans to further enhance our office space.
Spent some time digging into an issue to assess whether we have a risk that we need to manage or not.
Continued with coordinating some on-boarding activities for our new team member.
Attended our weekly Learning Hour meeting to hear about an internal digital products catalogue.
Met with a colleague from another part of the Technology organisation who is looking to relaunch an internal resource and build some community discussion around it. I gave my feedback that for anything like this you always need a ‘community manager’ to keep nudging it forward in the right direction. There will always be 80% who don’t participate, 15% that occasionally do, and 5% who are enthusiastically involved. But you can’t assume that 5% and need to plan for having someone planted in there to keep things moving.
Joined the divisional technology ‘Connect’ town hall-style meeting, where we heard from our CIO as well as the Head of Transaction Banking. It’s still a lot harder to be a remote participant in these things, but it’s better than not being involved at all.
Attended my second business Executive Committee meeting, as a permanent stand-in for my boss.
Had friends over for dinner on Friday night. We still feel a bit rusty at hosting since we fell out of the habit of hosting through the pandemic. I love how much having people over is a forcing function for cleaning and tidying the house.
Enjoyed a glorious bike ride with the club on Saturday morning.
Went to a friend’s 60th birthday party on Saturday night at her beautiful house. She’s a member of Album Club, so we bought her a suitable gift in the form of Queen’s News Of The World 40th anniversary box set. She wore the replica ‘access all areas’ tour pass all night.
Agreed to join my eldest boy for his ‘long, slow-paced run’ on Sunday morning. Having not run since December, I’m not sure immediately tackling a 15km run was the best idea. I maxed myself out while he barely broke a sweat. I know that I’ll be walking around like John Wayne until at least the middle of the week.
Had a dreadful lunch at The Bridgewater Arms in Little Gaddesden. Someone in the kitchen doesn’t know how to use the deep fat fryer. We’d never seen squid so hard, or fish so cremated. Still, it was nice to sit outside in a pub garden in the sun for a little while.
Started using the new touch-in/touch-out facility at our local train station. I’m not sure how much it costs relative to buying tickets through the train company’s app. It’s convenient, but there’s a significant risk of forgetting to do one of the taps, which could end up as an expensive mess.
Large language models don’t learn, you learn how to use them better.
Removing ‘hallucinations’ removes their creativity.
Google monetised search in 2001/2, Facebook invented the feed in 2007, both many years after the web was opened to the public in 1993. So what does a similar timeline look like for Generative AI?
Tech is not going to connect you to other people, it will facilitate connections you make on your own. You still need to do the hard work of connecting.
Articles
Ethan Mollick always has excellent, readable summaries of the state of AI. This week I dug into these posts from the recent archives:
Continued watching the second season of Severance but I’m not enjoying it as much as the first one. The episodes are now going deep on different aspects of individual characters, so I’m continuing to worry that it’s turning into Lost. I’m not sure I’ve got the patience for it.
Audio
It’s been a week of trying to decide what to play when I host Album Club next week. I really wish we held our Album Club nights more frequently. There’s a lot of music to get through.
Web
Walkmanland is a wonderful resource. I used to own the beautiful Panasonic RQ-S25, which was barely larger than a cassette tape. It was matte black, made of metal, with a rectangular ‘gumstick’ rechargeable internal battery and a screw-on appendage which could hold a single AA battery for longer playing time. I loved it.
Zuck Off. (Hat tip to José Albornoz.) The only Zuckerberg property where I have an account is WhatsApp, and I’m looking to see how I can ditch it.
Books
Continuing to read both Fearless Speech by Mary Anne Franks and the second volume of The McCartney Legacy by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair. Both are excellent. I’m switching between them depending on my energy levels.
Next week: Two Album Club evenings and a two-day conference in London.
This week I was back on form and raring to go. I’m still not yet completely fine, but the brain fog lifted and I felt that I was in control again. I’m grateful that a bug like that doesn’t turn up too often.
This was a week in which I:
Welcomed a new member of my team after getting the contract and on-boarding work completed. By the end of the first day he had built his laptop via Microsoft Autopilot and Intune, got set up with his new account, and collected a new door access pass. We’re very good at getting people up and running when they join.
Met with the administrative contact at the vendor to agree how the timesheet and invoicing processes will work.
Put together the pack for the programme Steering Committee, ran the meeting and got the minutes published.
Met with colleagues and our audio/visual consultancy to agree the draft specs of the equipment we plan to install in spaces that we share with a sister company.
Had meetings with a colleague at our sister company on their planned refurbishment project.
Handed over details of the work to refurbish another of our offices, getting the project kicked off.
Met with colleagues to review a report on data quality for one of our core systems. It’s fascinating how the type of work that I did at the very start of my career appears over and over again.
Cancelled a workshop to give the team some more time for preparation. We had an impromptu conversation over lunch in the office on Thursday which was useful in clarifying the outcomes that we want from the workshop.
Attended a ‘town hall’ meeting hosted by our divisional CEO and the Chairman of our Board of Directors.
Took part in our regular Microsoft Copilot working group. I love it when people from outside of the Technology department show and share their work. We had an interesting discussion about the non-deterministic nature of large language models; even if you ask it to do something and it reports back that it has done it, it may be making it up.
Solved the SSL issue that I had with the WB-40 Album Club website. In the process, I learned what a DNS Certificate Authority Authorisation (CAA) is.
Enjoyed hearing The National at the latest WB-40 Album Club. My brother-in-law had recommended Boxer to me about 15 years ago but I didn’t like it. First Two Pages of Frankenstein seemed much more accessible.
Took Friday off work to spend with my wife for her birthday. We walked over to The Alford Arms in Frithsden for lunch and then finished off with a coffee and cake at Joan, a new cafe in Berkhamsted.
Got together with friends on Friday night at a pub in Sunningdale to surprise another of our friends on her birthday.
Rode my indoor bike on Saturday morning as the weekly cycling club ride was cancelled due to risk of ice. It’s been cold again for the past few days but it looks as though we’ve got proper spring weather ahead.
Media
Podcasts
Found this interview with Clay Shirky to be a great listen. He puts forward a great insight: we are not good at being able to predict the impact of new technology, so what we should focus instead on being flexible. I laughed when he recalled that it wasn’t too long ago that we were telling everyone to save their work at regular intervals. It took decades before autosave turned up.
On their latest episode, the hosts of the Risky Business podcast make a great point about the recent theft of USD 1.4bn of cryptocurrency from Bybit. If this happened using the non-crypto, traditional financial system, most of that money would be recovered. I still think that crypto has two primary uses — speculation and criminal activity — and there isn’t anything that blockchains do that isn’t better served by an alternative.
Articles
The Is This What We Want?campaign is very timely, given the UK’s proposal to let AI companies use copyrighted works for their systems and putting the onus on artists to opt out. It’s a shame that the album only seems to be on streaming services and there isn’t a physical product. Maybe it would have just been too expensive as only a few copies would sell. It feels like the UK is trying too hard to be liked by the cool kids at the AI party at the moment.
The government must now break its red lines on tax and borrowing. There is no way around this. There is no alternative to it. We must build an independent Europe that can guarantee its own security. It is not even a goal. It is simply the only option left behind when all alternatives have been eradicated.
All of this ignores the much more plausible explanation of what happened today: It was a setup. Trump and Vance appear to have entered the meeting with the intention of berating Zelensky and drawing him into an argument as a pretext for the diplomatic break. Why should anyone have expected anything different? Trump has been regurgitating Russian propaganda, not only regarding Ukraine, since before Zelensky even assumed office. He defended Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2018 (the year preceding Zelensky’s election), has repeatedly refused to acknowledge Russian guilt for various murders, and has even stuck to Russian talking points on such idiosyncratic topics as the Soviets’ supposedly defensive rationale for invading Afghanistan in 1979 and their fear that an “aggressive” Montenegro would attack Russia, dragging NATO into war.
An extraordinary story of a mother who is working with a man who killed her son with one punch in a pub.
Video
Finished watching the first season of A Thousand Blows. I loved this.
Watched Leon (1994) for the first time in 30 years or so. Gary Oldman is excellent in his role as an unhinged police officer, but other than that it hasn’t aged well. Reading the reviews on Letterboxd was shocking as they revealed that there were more intimate scenes that were cut, and that the director was himself involved with a child in real life. If I’d read the reviews or knew more about the director ahead of time, I wouldn’t have watched it again.
Books
I’m now over halfway through the second volume of The McCartney Legacy. It’s as engrossing a read as the first one.
Picked up Fearless Speech by Mary Anne Franks, which argues against First Amendment absolutism in the United States.
Next week: Birthday celebrations, and hoping that spring is finally here.
Another week of recovery. On Sunday my wife and I drove to her parents’ house, to catch up with them and give them a hand with a few bits and pieces. They live almost three hours away, so we had a lovely dinner out, stayed overnight and I took Monday off work.
I made it back into the office on Wednesday and Thursday, but it felt like a big push to be there. I’d been feeling better, but at the end of each of those days I was coughing again and exhausted. Occasionally I get the odd very mild migraine, perhaps three a year, with the worst bit being an aura before the headache which stops me from being able to see properly. This week I had two in two days, which felt very disconcerting.
There seem to be so many people that have been laid low with this bug or something similar. It’s a nasty one. It was only on Friday that I started to feel my brain fog finally lift and I was back on my game again, two weeks after it started. I’m hoping for much more of a normal week ahead.
This was a week in which I:
Continued the process to on-board a new team member. We’ve agreed the terms and conditions and now just need to sign the final versions of the documents.
Met with our sister company for the first governance meeting on the building and facilities services that they provide to us.
Visited a furniture showroom near Old Street to see examples of boardroom tables.
Got feedback from our AV partner on the latest design of our boardroom.
Reviewed and gave feedback on the latest proposal for an AV technology refresh of a shared space in our office.
Put together a presentation about the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo events that I’ve attended over the past couple of years, and delivered it at our weekly Learning Hour.
Had my monthly call with my executive partner at an IT analyst firm. The conversation came at the right time; it got me thinking about what success would look like this year and helped me to refocus on what we need to do.
Had a random chat with one of our group architects in South Africa who wanted to know more about our part of the organisation.
Attended our internal Generative AI working group, the first time in a while that I’ve been able to join the meeting.
Spent some time with my very clever friend who created the Album Club website. He had refactored the code so that I could replicate the site for the WB-40 Album Club. I spent time going through the 19 albums we have played so far and getting the detailed data into the correct format. He also showed me how to set it up so that it builds on Vercel every time a change is committed to GitHub.
Helped my father-in-law to get set up with YNAB for his personal finances. I’ve been using the app for 15 years or so and it has changed my life. I just wish I’d started using it, or a system like it, when I was much younger.
Enjoyed dinner at Avellino, Ross-on-Wye’s Italian restaurant.
Used some gap filler to plug a hole in our brickwork that last year served as a home for a family of blue tits. The cans of filler are so big; you could probably insulate all of your cavity walls with just one can. I needed a couple of squirts and now unfortunately need to take the rest to the recycling centre.
Got back exercising again, tentatively at the weekend and then ramping things up over the course of the week. I made it out for the Saturday morning club ride and managed to keep up, despite coughing my way through parts of the route. We had a comedy moment in trying to change a friend’s front tyre which ended up with me cutting myself and bleeding all over his wheel.
Clay: … People love this because it feels like learning. It’s not actually learning, but it feels like it. And so you think, “I have a problem, and I’m gonna think about the problem for a little bit, and then all of a sudden I have a great answer,” that feels like you learned something. But what you learned was, “This is how I asked ChatGPT about this problem.” Now, if what you need to be learning is just, “How do I use this tool effectively?” That’s okay.
…
Clay: There is a Reddit thread that we all went to town on about a month ago, month and a half ago, an NYU student said, “Help, I can’t stop using AI.” They were a school—
Rich: A cry for help.
Clay: They were a student enrolled, they said, in their senior year in our engineering school, saying, “I’m using this thing all the time. I recognize that in my own major I’m learning less than I would if I wasn’t using it. But I can’t stop.” It was that sense of addiction that really started to change—and make me more pessimistic, frankly, about the kind of progressive, like, we’ll just appeal to the student’s natural love of learning.
Rich: Mmm. Mmm.
Clay: It’s like, if this is a student who is in the part of her education where she’s only taking classes in her major and by her, you know, at least by what she said in the, in the Reddit thread was interested in them.
Rich: Yeah.
Clay: And then was saying, “I actually can’t stop using this thing that I recognize is interfering with what I’m learning.”
I loved Ben Thompson’s Stratechery interview with Bobby Healy, the CEO of Manna. It made me unashamedly excited about a technology again, something that I haven’t felt for a while. Manna provide drone-based delivery, currently only to Dublin 15 in Ireland and Pecan Square in Texas. The operation sounds incredible, and Healy’s case for his company is very convincing. They load the battery pack with the cargo so they don’t need to worry about drones being out of action for any length of time. Because Europe is so strict and has laid down such clear regulations, they knew what they had to build against. The drones have been designed and built in-house with multiple redundant safety features, as nothing was available off the shelf that met the specifications. However, looking at the YouTube videos of the operation from a Dublin McDonald’s car park, I’m not sure that it quite lives up to how Healy described it in the Interview:
Bobby Healy: But if you have a hot swap system, as we do, you get eight deliveries per hour throughput. But the person loading the cargo, one of our people will do between 25 and 30 deliveries per hour, that’s because we’ve about a 60-second turnaround time aircraft lands. It’s back in the air in less than 60 seconds.
I pass through Euston every day that I go into the office. This update from A London Inheritance reinforces the fact that very little seems to be happening there.
Watched a bit of the F1 75 launch event. Aside from the funny quips by the host, Jack Whitehall, it felt like an extended media event with little notable content. I love that F1 has been trying different things and has expanded the fan base, but I don’t think these kind of events are for me.
Continued with Severance, which seems to have slowed down. I’m hoping that it doesn’t turn into some kind of long drawn-out incoherent series like Lost.
Watched the first episode of the Jerry Springer documentary Fights, Camera, Action. What a hideous programme it was. It seemed to be more about the producers of the show than the presence of Springer himself.
Started watching A Thousand Blows. It’s had me captivated from the start.
Audio
Picked up an amazing vinyl copy of Floodland by The Sisters of Mercy. It’s great when a Discogs purchase turns up and exceeds expectations.
Was so pleased to finally get my copy of Nik Kershaw’s box set The MCA Years. I ordered it when it was announced back in May and the release date was pushed back a few times. It’s a lovely thing.
My attempt at working on Monday morning lasted about an hour. I ran two half hour meetings — very badly — before admitting defeat and going back to bed. On Tuesday I got up at my usual time, had breakfast and then fell asleep on the sofa for four hours. This illness has knocked me sideways. I can’t remember ever having taken a day off sick from work before, and now I find myself having taken two in a row.
I got back to my desk on Wednesday. Concentrating on topics was difficult as my brain had a fuzzy, foggy feel to it, and this persisted all the way through the rest of the week. So I picked my battles, using the time to catch up with administrative tasks as opposed to trying to tackle any big hairy problems.
My eldest son had been suffering with what I assume was the same illness, but he was a few days ahead of me. The doctors prescribed him antibiotics, so I gave them a call on Tuesday and explained my symptoms, explaining that if antibiotics were a necessary remedy, I didn’t want to delay getting on them. They prescribed me a course of amoxicillin without even seeing me in person. I’m not sure if it was necessary, but I was willing to take whatever help I could get. (It got me thinking — why is there no swab-like test that you can take at the doctors so that they can diagnose exactly what it is that you have and then treat you accordingly? Is this just too expensive and impractical? Maybe we need to move some research money from generative AI to trying to develop a tricorder.)
At the end of the weekend it feels as though I’ve got it under control. But the chesty cough, runny nose and lack of energy are still lingering, and feel as though they might hang around for some time yet.
This was a week in which I:
Continued work on the ‘definition of done’ for our document management project.
Reworked our real estate/facilities financial projections now that we have better assumptions to base our projected spend on.
Continued the on-boarding process for a new vendor, reviewing and amending the proposed contract.
Had a request to look at how deleted Teams, SharePoint sites and Groups can be restored.
Joined a workshop to start to look at how we can use AI to bring together informative data about our clients into a single pane of glass.
Joined the weekly standup meeting for developments on our internal chatbot.
Attended our weekly Learning Hour meeting about last year’s internal ITSM conference.
Had the weekly check-in with our sister company on their real estate/office improvement project.
Took one of our cars in for repair. We’ve had the engine light come on and it has repeatedly lost power. Unfortunately they couldn’t find anything wrong with it. The garage is amazing in that they charged us only £9 for a lightbulb that needed replacing.
Met with our personal financial advisor for our annual check-in.
Had a bizarre experience while lying around in a feverish stupor. I was sleeping and dreaming on the couch and in my dream, I found my way to a couch with some random big fluffy cat, fell asleep and started dreaming. I was having a dream within a dream. I realised I was dreaming and then ‘woke up’ only back as far as being asleep on a couch in my dream.
Smashed one of my toes against a leg of our bed in the middle of the night. We’ve been in the same room for ten years or so and I’ve never done it before. My toe has gone black and purple from the impact.
Watched the Everton vs Liverpool derby with my son, the last one to take place at Goodison Park before Everton move to a new home. What an incredible football match.
Media
Podcasts
Without a commute or time on my indoor bike trainer, I struggled to keep up with podcasts this week.
BBC4’s Tutankhamen in Colour was a fascinating look at the discovery of the pharaoh’s tomb, blended with technology that brought the black and white footage to life.
Discovered the Techmoan YouTube channel. From what I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of moaning, but there does seem to be a lot of brilliant videos digging into technology. Highlights that I’ve watched so far:
Finished watching Mo on Netflix. The last couple of episodes were incredibly moving. It feels like an antidote to all of the hateful rhetoric around immigration and asylum.
Watched The Substance (2024). We didn’t really know what we were letting ourselves in for. It’s … a lot. There’s potentially a great story in there, but the plot didn’t really make sense and it ended up as a gore-fest.
Audio
I’ve been digging the Sisters of Mercy’s Floodland album over the past couple of weeks. Another album where I’m wondering why it has taken so long for me to listen to the whole thing.
Web
A great resource that lists European alternatives to online services based elsewhere in the world (usually the USA). Being based in Europe is one thing, but it would be good to have the data cross-referenced with details on whether the people running each service are wrong-uns as well.
Books
Continued reading the second volume of The McCartney Legacy. It’s been just what I need right now.
Next week: A long weekend and getting back into the office.
A week dominated by illness. Early on Monday morning my wife collected our eldest son at the airport, back from his running trip to Boston University. He was quite ill with a horrible cough, sore throat and a high temperature, and ended up spending the whole week at home. A few days in, he didn’t seem to be making any improvement, so we decided to try and get him a doctor’s appointment. Not only was he seen that afternoon, but the doctor even gave us a follow-up call the next day to see how he was doing. Very impressive.
Lots of my colleagues have been off work with a similar illness. There are definitely some horrible bugs going around at the moment. On Friday afternoon, I started to get a little tickly cough which by Saturday morning turned into a full-blown illness. I’ve spent the entire weekend drinking lemon paracetamol drinks, alternating between being freezing cold and too hot. I’m going to work tomorrow, but I’ll be staying at home.
Continued to pick up more responsibilities from my boss. I’m now responsible for our governance committee and board reports, as well as attending an executive committee run by one of our front office teams.
Wrote and edited this quarter’s report to the board of directors.
Collaborated with our team on our annual submission to one of our regulators about our technology setup and dependencies.
Started to put together a portfolio roadmap for the work going on across our department.
Ran a short workshop in our work cafe/presentation space to assess how we want it to work in the future, and what potential changes we would need to make to get there.
Continued with the on-boarding process for a new vendor who will be providing us with a new contract staff member.
Met with the head of one of our IT functions to discuss aligning part of my team to his organisation.
Caught up with a colleague at our sister company on where they are with their office renovation project.
Held an overview presentation for our programme Steering Committee members on the technology we have installed to monitor the performance of our physical space. We have only been using it for a couple of months, but it has already revealed lots of insights.
Reviewed the proposal for implementing a data centre/network documentation and management tool.
Had our weekly call with our audio/visual consultancy.
Held my fortnightly team meeting. It feels like we are slowly getting into our stride as a group.
Caught up with writing and posting four weeks’ worth of wins.
Watched two Learning Hour sessions, catching up with the video of one that I missed on the topic of Infrastructure as Code, and another on the costs and benefits of space travel.
Had some discussions about the potential of ChatGPT Pro and its deep research feature, off the back of a Stratechery Update and the subsequent discussion on the Sharp Tech podcast.
Had my regular meeting with my friend and colleague, our Group Head of APIs.
Attended our company-wide Microsoft Copilot/Teams Premium working group. Last year I couldn’t make many of the sessions due to other work priorities. It feels good to have a little bit of bandwidth to attend again.
Fascinating discussion with Luke Jennings at Push Security on last week’s Risky Business podcast, all about ‘cross IDP impersonation’. (The link takes you directly to the start of the discussion on YouTube.) Users want to use OAuth buttons such as ‘sign in with Google’ to get into their corporate SaaS apps. There’s nothing to stop them from registering their corporate email address with an identity provider and verifying ownership of the email, allowing the button to work from that point onwards. The issue is that when their corporate account gets shut down, they would still have access to the SaaS app.
Sharp Tech’s discussion of ChatGPT Pro Deep Research was fascinating. If it’s as good as it is reported to be (for USD 200/mo for the Pro subscription), it may do the work of a junior analyst in terms of the quality of the report that it returns. The problems are that (a) it makes extensive use of searching the web and can’t go beyond this with novel insights or information that isn’t on the open Internet, and (b) if you need to be an experienced analyst who is able to think deeply and use novel insights of your own, what does the pipeline of analysts look like?
Articles
Baldur Bjarnason on ‘poisoning for propaganda’, how rising authoritarianism makes LLMs more dangerous. “The truth about modern AI is that there is that every major ‘AI’ company today is in bed with an authoritarian government. The ones that aren’t – such as the European ones – are distant runners up to the US or Chinese models.”
Google’s not part of the US government, but it wants to keep its government contracts, so it has ended its DEI hiring goals.
Watched Witches (2024), a very moving exploration of postpartum depression, linked to how women have been persecuted as witches over the centuries. Heavy-going, but brilliant.
Awesome Tapes From Africa had a Bandcamp sale on Friday. I picked up 11 digital albums for about £10.
Web
Went to look at an old mind map and found that toketaWare, maker of the iThoughts app, shut down last year. It’s a shame; iThoughts was one of the first apps I installed when I got my first iPad, and I’ve used it on and off since. I don’t use mind mapping that much, but I do have a bunch of old maps that I refer to occasionally. I’m going to need to find another home for them. Thesearticles have been quite helpful.
Finished reading Fascism by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. I’ve started to write up my thoughts about the book in a blog post, but being ill doesn’t lend itself to tackling this one very readily. Hopefully I’ll post about this in the next few days.
Picked up where I left off with volume two of The McCartney Legacy. I’ve just finished reading about the recording and mastering of Wings’ Venus and Mars. It’s not a perfect album, but I’ve always had lots of affection for it.
Next week: Working from home, at least for the start of the week, as I try to get over this bug.
Out on a short ramble on a beautifully sunny Sunday.
The first ‘normal’ week of the year, where I wasn’t having to prioritise some near-term objectives. Our offsite meeting was behind us, so it was time to get on with the work. I struggled to find my mojo this week. The big, important things got done but there are lots of lower-level things that didn’t get my attention.
This was a week in which I:
Was formally put into a standing deputy role for my boss. A mini promotion of sorts.
Held three more in-person interviews for the developer role within my team. We ended up with a good problem in that we liked more than one of the candidates. It was close, but ultimately our decision came down to team fit. It’ll be fun to have someone new join the team.
Took colleagues through a draft presentation on our company strategy at our department-wide team meeting.
Met with colleagues to get aligned on our mission for our document management project.
Had our regular project meeting for our plan to open a new office.
Reviewed the data and insights produced by our recently installed office environment monitoring system. Having quantitative data about our space — temperature, usage, CO2 levels, noise — is going to be invaluable in making decisions about how to improve the environment further over the next few years.
Checked in with our audio/visual consultants on the remaining work for this year. I have my fingers crossed that next week’s ISE conference will have the product announcements we are looking for.
Met with our vendor that supplies the mini PCs that run our meeting rooms to look at the next generation of this technology.
Met with our networking vendor to discuss our licence renewal and our plans for trialling additional products.
Met with our Microsoft Copilot pilot working group. (Why do Microsoft always name their products in such a way that referring to them becomes clunky and awkward?) We’ve continued to see a steady trickle of people who are interested in trying out the tools.
Attended the monthly Copilot Fireside Chat. What works so well for the Teams Fireside Chat seems to fall flat at the Copilot one. None of the attendees put their cameras on and the conversation at the session felt a little stilted.
Attended an internal webinar covering the political outlook for South Africa.
Took part in our first monthly Lean Coffee of the year. We have a completely open approach for agenda topics and it has served us well over the years. This week’s session left me wondering whether there should be a little bit of guidance for the topics. How have others managed this?
Had a good introductory meeting with a vendor that we work with extensively in South Africa but have not utilised in the UK.
Enjoyed a delicious free lunch at work to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
Discovered that someone has been spoofing my mobile number to make scam calls. For a couple of months I’ve been receiving calls from people who said that they were returning a missed call from my number. This week, a man with a Scottish accent called me and said that someone had been trying to scam him from my number. Other than changing my mobile number — which I don’t want to do as I’ve had it forever — I don’t know what I can do to prevent this. I called up my network provider but they were useless; it took 15 minutes for them to understand the issue, only to tell me that there was nothing they could do. I logged the problem with Action Fraud, but I don’t hold out any hope that they can do something either; the reporting tools on their website are geared towards people who have received the scam call, not the person whose number is being spoofed. I don’t know much about ‘calling line identity’, but I assume that it’s trivial to pretend to be someone else.
Met up with friends — ex-colleagues that I worked with 25 years ago — for a night in the pub. It’s always lovely to see them. It made me realise once again how lucky I was to have started my career in such a great department and team.
Dropped my eldest boy off at Heathrow Airport. He’d been invited to take part in the Boston University John Thomas Terrier Classic, an indoor track meet. A fantastic opportunity to try out being in a US university setting.
Caught up with some friends at The Perseverance pub in Wraysbury. We all had burgers, but didn’t eat the napkins.
Managed to get out on the Saturday morning cycling club ride again. The temperature was cold, but slightly higher than the week before which meant that there was no ice anywhere. Three of my cycling club friends have signed up to this year’s London Edinburgh London, a 1,530km ride to be tackled in one go, with a 128 hour time limit. A completely mad adventure. The closest I’ll ever come to it is watching this documentary, which had the effect of completely putting me off:
Enjoyed a sunny winter walk with my wife, following the footpaths across the fields at the back of our house. We live in such a beautiful place, but it has been years since I last wandered out there.
I’m not much of a computer game player, but Matthew Ball’s presentation on The State of Video Gaming in 2025, also surfaced via Stratechery, is a fascinating read.
Video
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story (2024) is a beautifully-made documentary about Reeve, his family and his friends. I was a teenager when he had his accident and remember reading all about it in the papers at the time, but I didn’t follow his life from that point. I had no idea how much pain the family went through, with his wife passing away shortly after him.
Started watching Mo on Netflix, a gentle comedy about a Palestinian asylum seeker and his family in Houston, Texas, who haven’t had their case resolved in over 20 years. We’ve already breezed through season one.
Bill Gates on Elon Musk: ‘“You want to promote the right wing but say Nigel Farage is not rightwing enough,” Gates told the Sunday Times. “I mean, this is insane shit.”’
Continued reading Fascism by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Somehow I don’t seem to be putting enough time aside for reading at the moment. It’s already February and I haven’t read much.
Next week: Welcoming my son home from his trip, and trying to knock the roadmap for the rest of the year into place.
The Monument, looking fabulous first thing in the morning
A very busy but fun week. Two of my colleagues flew in from Johannesburg to join our management team offsite meeting from Tuesday to Thursday. I’d put a lot of effort into planning these few days, and the week had finally arrived. Most of our management team have all been working together for seven or eight years and it feels like we’re a family, so it’s lovely when we can all be in the same place. Unfortunately, one of our local team members fell ill at the start of the week, so only joined one of our sessions remotely.
Going into London for a full five days was exhausting. By Friday night I was ready to drop.
This was a week in which I:
Interviewed two candidates for the vacancy in my team. One of the interviews was in person, which felt a little like a step back in time. But after having met two candidates online last year that seemed to be blatantly using generative AI to answer our questions, being in the same room has its benefits.
Had a couple of meetings on our document management project, clarifying the work done to date and agreeing on an approach for the next couple of weeks.
Spent day one of our offsite meeting with Hoopla!, working on our collaboration and storytelling skills using improvisation techniques. The workshop was pitched as ‘yoga for your soft skills’ and this felt right; by the end of the day we’d all had a good workout, sharing many laughs and insights along the way. The phrase “wise wise wise…” is now with us for good. Thoroughly recommended.
Had a fun night out at Electric Shuffle in London Bridge. It was just what we needed to unwind after an intense day of improv. The technology that runs the shuffleboard tables was very impressive, as was the range of games available to play.
Got through the agenda for our offsite, covering a team check-in, the latest reading of our corporate strategy and presentations and discussions led by each of the function heads.
Had a wonderful dinner to celebrate the success of last year’s major programmes with the extended team. The evening was perfect, with excellent food and a perfect ambience.
Got out on my bike for Saturday morning’s club ride, my first outdoor ride of the year. The weather has been bad, with clear skies being accompanied by freezing temperatures. I’m too scared to go out when there’s a risk of ice. I was signed up for Sunday’s postponed Westerley Winter Warmer, but pulled out when I saw the weather forecast of heavy rain from the halfway point and a ‘feels like’ temperature of -6°C.
Helped my son to dismantle his desk and replace it with a simple, inexpensive desk from Ikea. His friend has upgraded his gaming PC and has lent his old one to my son, but he didn’t have enough room to properly set it up.
Had a lovely dinner out with close friends on Friday night at Tabure in Berkhamsted.
Enjoyed a family lunch out in town on Sunday.
Media
Podcasts
The Strong Songs analysis of Annie Lennox’s Walking On Broken Glass is superb. I’ve heard this song so many times on the radio, but this highlights so many details that I’ve never heard before. It makes you realise that something that seems simple is anything but.
Picked up a copy of Rocky V: Music from and Inspired by the Motion Picture1 from eBay. This is not a great album, but this was one of the first three CDs that I ever bought2 and I wanted to hear it again. I recently noticed that my original copy has gone missing and I only had poor 128kbps mp3 rips of some of the tracks in my library. The highlight of the album is Joey B Ellis’s Go For It, which was effectively the theme tune for the film. 13-year old me loved this.
Video
Hearing Joey B Ellis again led me down a rabbit hole that culminated in watching Philly Boy: A Movie About MC Breeze (2002). It always feels strange to me to watch a historical documentary where the events being recounted are closer to when they made the film than they are to now. It’s not a great movie, and the quality of the YouTube upload is poor, but it was an intriguing bit of ephemera from the Philadelphia hip-hop scene. One of the talking heads was Funk Wizard Snow, the CEO/Editor of now defunct website phillyhiphop.com, who intrigued me as he had a copy of a FrontPage 2000 guidebook behind him. I couldn’t help looking up the archived pages from the website on the Wayback Machine.
Watched The Breakthrough on Netflix, a four-part Swedish drama of a double murder that went unsolved for 16 years. The acting is good, but with the series being so short it felt like we didn’t really get to know the characters. I found myself putting that aside and coming back to the realisation that they were reconstructing things that actually happened.
Books
Pressed pause on The McCartney Legacy Volume 2: 1974–80. I’m loving it, but it’s a big beast and I’m finding that there are too many other books that I feel that I need to get to right now…
…which includes Fascism by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey, a book that arose from their Origin Story podcast. I’m way behind on their main feed but noticed that their latest episode addressed Trump’s inauguration and Musk’s Nazi salute, and included an audiobook excerpt from this book. After having a debate with a friend this week on whether certain actions are fascist, this is the book I need.
Next week: Taking what we did on our offsite and getting on with the work.
The title of this album is weird, because the MC Hammer tracks were neither from the film, nor inspired by it — they are remixes of tracks that appeared on one of his earlier albums. But maybe that’s just being pedantic. ↩
Alongside George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice: Volume One and a CD single of Do The Bartman. Eclectic. ↩
A cold, frosty morning on my way to the train station
This week was a bit too much. Last week’s relatively slow start had lulled me into a false sense of security, so it felt as though reality hit me hard this week. There was so much going on both at work and at home. It felt as though I picked up more things than I put down.
This was a week in which I:
Wrestled with the trains. My usual morning train was cancelled until the final couple of days of the week due to a points failure somewhere on the line. The next one rolled into the station with a fraction of the carriages it normally has, so I had to run down the platform to catch it. We were standing, squeezed together from the start of the journey. After a quarter of a century of commuting I actually quite enjoy it — it’s where I write most of my weeknotes — but not when the service starts to fall apart.
Prepared for and ran our programme steering committee meeting. Preparing the pack was a useful exercise for me to get my head around where we are at after a flurry of activity at the end of last year. I spent a couple of hours at the weekend writing up the minutes as I know that there won’t be any time to do this next week and didn’t want it to be hanging over me.
Also finished off the preparation for next week’s management team offsite meeting over the weekend, confirming the final agenda and sending it out to my colleagues.
Met with the CEO and Office Manager for one of our regional offices for a review of the services provided by our department, and our plans for this year.
Bumped into another of our regional CEOs who was visiting our office ahead of an offsite meeting. We discussed the potential provision of a technology in his office and agreed a plan to gather some more information before making a decision.
Handed over background documentation for a document management project that we would like to make progress with this year.
Met with our audio/visual consultants following last week’s trial of demo equipment in one of our boardrooms. The Integrated Systems Europe conference is just around the corner, and we’re hoping for product announcements that will help us with our large shared meeting rooms. The solution that we tested may be more suited to another space that we’d like to improve.
Met with our real estate services consultancy firm to review their proposal to support us in 2025.
Caught up with our sister company on their revised draft schedule for their office renovation and maintenance.
Reviewed lots of CVs from recruiters for the vacancy in my team. I also hosted one of the recruiters when they came to visit our office. The CVs are getting closer to what we’re looking for and we have a couple of interviews lined up for next week.
Joined our architecture governance meeting and reviewed proposed changes to some of our technology infrastructure. The changes are deep in the weeds, but should result in a smoother experience for all of the staff working in our offices.
Had a career coaching session with my executive partner at a technology industry analyst firm. Thinking about what I would like to spend my time doing if there were no constraints was an interesting exercise. Very early in my career I fell into project management, but I’m a geek at heart and sometimes wish my role was more technical than it is.
Had my regular meeting with our account manager at the same technology industry analyst firm.
Discussed the needs of one of our departments that fields a large number of staff queries. What was initially pitched to me as a conversation about AI ended up with us deciding that a rule-based chatbot would be more suitable.
Met with the Product Owner of Planview AgilePlace for a demo of possible new features. We took the opportunity to give some extensive feedback on the tool. It’s been an excellent tool for us over the past few years and it’s so lovely to be able to give feedback directly to the person in charge. Another example of the magical Internet.
Spent many, many hours trying to find a suitable venue for dinner to celebrate our programme’s success and to thank our team. After a slow start to my search I soon realised that I had to cast a wide net. I spent time running around the City of London to look at venues that were in the running; this proved to be invaluable as I found rooms that looked great on the web were inaccessible or located next to the restaurant toilets. I now have both a venue as well as a newfound respect for our Marketing and Communications team who have to do this kind of work as part of their day job.
Enjoyed a wonderful Learning Hour meeting where our CTO talked to us about SpaceX, Starlink, and their status in Africa.
Hosted the latest WB-40Album Club. I’d struggled to make time to think about what to play, and picked Joe Jackson’s debut album Look Sharp! at the very last minute. I was very happy with my choice. There are so many great songs on there.
Had a frustrating experience at a stationery shop. My wife had ordered a few packs of coloured pencils to give as prizes to children in a school art contest. Her order was sent to the shop close to my office so that I could pick them up. When I got there and showed them the order on my phone, they asked for a physical copy of her ID, which I didn’t have. I asked whether I could just buy some more, but they said that the packs they have are put aside for my wife’s order. I asked whether I could call her and ask her to cancel her order, putting the packs of pencils back into stock. Apparently that wouldn’t work either, as the process takes a while. So, I walked out without the pencils.
Enjoyed this week’s in-person Album Club. I’d heard lots about Big Country over the years but had never knowingly heard any of their songs, so this was a great opportunity to listen intently. I’ve now tried it, and made up my mind that I didn’t like it.
The Standard Bank In-Market Insights podcast is excellent. The latest episode covers the relationship and geopolitics between China and Africa.
Articles
Local police forces are launching an initiative to tackle drivers who pass cyclists too closely. This article is from 2018, but the scheme is being rolled out in Hertfordshire soon. Lots of drivers don’t understand that when overtaking they need to use the whole of the other lane as if they were overtaking a car. A couple of months ago I was involved in an extremely narrow pass that just had a couple of centimetres between me and the car.
I had a conversation in the office last week about whether it’s better to read AI-generated summaries of books or to not read them at all. I don’t know what the answer is. This Bluesky post serendipitously turned up in my timeline.
Spent a baffled 45 minutes watching the first episode of season two of Severance. This recap of season one was exactly what we needed to remind ourselves of everything that happened. We’d forgotten nearly everything.
Started watching The Breakthrough, a drama about a double murder in Sweden that went unsolved for 16 years.
The first week of work for 2025 was a strange one. In many ways I hit the ground running, getting on with some important items that I need to complete early on this year. But it still felt very fragmented, with lots of little things pulling me in different directions.
I had a few conversations with colleagues that veered off in different directions, many of them fascinating. It brought into sharp relief one of my flaws in that I’m interested in ALL THE THINGS, and usually want the detail on each of the topics too. The structure of my week and my commitments don’t give me enough bandwidth to deeply indulge in the things I want to learn about.
Had a rainy, windy start to my first day back in the office. It broke my exercising streak as I chose to take the tube instead of walking to my office.
Tried to start the year by flushing all of the key priorities out of my head before getting mired in the detail of Teams messages and emails. On my first day I had a very useful impromptu catch-up with my boss which helped us to get aligned with each other at the start of the year.
Had lots of discussions about the ethics and use cases of large language models and generative AI, such as whether consuming potentially inaccurate AI-generated summaries of books is better or worse than not reading them at all.
Finished the annual appraisal process for my team. I haven’t managed a team of permanent staff in a while and I had forgotten how much I enjoy it.
Restarted the process of trying to recruit for a vacancy in my team. It was useful to re-review the role spec and tweak it a bit further. It’s out with quite a few recruitment companies and we’ve already started to get CVs back.
Had lunch with my contact at one of the recruitment firms, and had a call with another to get the process moving again.
Took part in tests of an advanced videoconferencing system in one of our large client meeting rooms. Getting the equipment set up on site was invaluable to see how it would perform in our space. The audio was incredible but the video experience started to struggle once we filled the room. One of our colleagues at our sister company in the building managed to bring along tons of ‘extras’ in the form of our cleaning, catering and maintenance staff so that we could fill the room with people.
Met with my counterpart at our sister company to catch up with what’s been happening with their major programme over the Christmas period.
Continued planning for our management team offsite in a couple of weeks’ time, firming up some of the agenda as well as a venue for dinner.
Gave feedback to our team for a couple of small tweaks to our office environment settings, which have already been implemented.
Helped a colleague to solve a problem with logging into their password manager.
Had a catch-up call with our consultant who is helping my eldest son to find a scholarship at a university in the US. The next few weeks seem critical to get solid offers nailed down.
Didn’t manage to get out on my bike, so did lots of indoor rides. The temperature has remained at or below freezing all week, making it too icy to attempt an outdoor cycle. The cycling club cancelled the Saturday morning ride, which is usual if the temperature isn’t high enough by the time we are due to set off.
Enjoyed a lovely Saturday afternoon lunch out in town with my wife. We’ve got into the habit of doing this regularly and I love it.
Went through my blog posts with the plan of creating a ‘highlights’ page, linking to posts that are important to me.
Discovered that a noisy pan on an induction hob is not a good thing. One layer of metal gave a cracking sound as it separated from another. We only discovered the problem when we found that the pan wasn’t heating up.
Nigel Farage, Elon Musk, Robert Jenrick, Tommy Robinson – when have you ever heard these people give a shit about women’s issues, let alone make a speech or put forward a policy dedicated to advancing them? Robinson very deliberately nearly collapsed a grooming trial, which would have put the victims through months and months of the horror of having to testify twice. People threaten to rape and kill women pretty much every second on Musk’s platform and nothing gets done about it – if I were him I’d be cleaning up my own streets. If he can’t manage it, maybe he should immediately call for himself to be imprisoned?
We finished watching season two of Shrinking on AppleTV+. The characters were fabulous and made me laugh out loud every episode. But who lives in a world where people just randomly pop into each other’s houses all the time? As fun as it looks to be a part of their gang, would anyone really like to live like that?
I’d never heard of the BBC TV programme Open Door before. It’s like an early precursor to YouTube, commissioned by David Attenborough.
Sky’s Dart Kings documentary offers a great slice of cultural history through three episodes, covering Eric Bristow, Jocky Wilson and Phil Taylor. I didn’t watch darts as a kid but everyone knew the names of the top players. I loved looking back at the old TV footage in this series; the venues, the crowd and the copious amounts of beer show a much simpler time.
Black Bird on AppleTV+ is an incredible drama, based on the real-life serial killer Larry Hall. We started watching it with no prior knowledge of the events or the subject matter and it blew us away. The main character, played by Taron Egerton, gets ever so slightly changed and impacted by events as the series progresses, and it’s only at the end that you see how much he has transformed from where the story began.
Audio
So excited to hear from Alicia Clara. Her music was one of my favourite things to listen to over the past year.
Finally finished my hobby project of cleaning up my digital music library and sorting out all of my Plex metadata. It took me days of work — I must have spent three or four hours just fixing the data for the 24-disc Mansun Closed For Business box set — but now it’s done. Albums have the correct covers, songs are where they should be, random old downloads were purged and everything now looks present and correct.
After getting back from our Mexican holiday on Monday, I spent most of this week pottering around. I managed to get out on my bike on New Year’s Eve just ahead of a storm, and since then it’s been too cold and yucky to ride outside. So my routine has been to wake up a little later than usual, go on the indoor bike trainer, and then fill my afternoon with either jobs that need doing or hobbies that I want to make some progress with. Work will soon be in the foreground again, but I’m hoping that I will go back on Monday feeling properly rested.
New Year’s Eve was also my 48th birthday. After my bike ride, I went out with my family for a late lunch at Here, where they serve the best all-day vegetarian cooked breakfast in town. We spent a very quiet but lovely evening with friends who had invited us over for dinner. At midnight we watched the fireworks on TV. Every year they always look exactly the same to me.
My family know me well
One of my friends gifted me a second-hand vinyl copy of The Hits Album 6, a compilation that we both had on cassette tape when we were kids. There are some great tracks on there as well as one or two quite questionable songs towards the end. But mainly, it’s a great excuse to hear Donna Allen’s Serious, an underrated gem.
Reunited with a copy of Hits 6
I spent a lot of time cleaning up my digital music collection, including two or three hours alone which went into fixing up Mansun’s 25-disc Closed For Business box set. Getting the data corrected and organised in the Music app (which in my head will forever be iTunes) doesn’t necessarily mean that Plex will use it. Tracks seemed to jump between the discs, which all needed to be manually corrected. Taking the time to fix up the data is worth it, as it is helping me to rediscover my own music collection. I started the work before Christmas and have made it up to artists with the letter ‘U’, which felt good until I realised that I still have ‘Various Artists’ to go.
The episode also got me thinking again about how Internet platforms are largely unregulated, allowing people to spread fake news and make dangerous accusations without any checks. The planned ban of TikTok in the US makes sense; the platform is controlled by a state adversarial to the US that has itself restricted and banned many US social media platforms. What will the UK’s response be to a foreign platform whose owner uses it to incite division and hatred? Media regulation in the Internet age fascinates me. I made a note to myself to find a book that covers the complex topic of ‘free speech’ in the modern world; later that day I read Heather Burns’ post on her best reads and listens of 2024 where she recommends just the thing.
Articles
Alex Tabarrok says that India has too few tourists. I last visited in 2006 and still maintain that it is the most incredible place I’ve ever visited for a holiday.
Video
Despite our jet lag on the day we came back from our holiday, the finale of Gavin & Stacey kept us going. It’s amazing to think that we’ve known the characters for 17 years. It’s cheesy, but I love it.
Elliot Roberts’ video review of the Beatles ‘64 film and the Beatles’ US Albums box set is superb as usual.1 I adore his YouTube content, and am happy to support his work through Patreon.
Books
Despite trying to vary what I read, I couldn’t help but pick up the second volume of The McCartney Legacy by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair, which was published last month. It covers the years 1974 to 1980 and is another whopper at 768 pages, but I’m here for every detail.
Next week: Getting back to work.
At the time of writing, the video is only available to Patreon supporters with early access. It should be on YouTube soon, if it isn’t already. ↩
View of the beach from The Fives Hotel, Playa del Carmen, Mexico
We’ve just come back from a wonderful holiday in Playa del Carmen, a short drive south of Cancún in Mexico. There were 14 of us — my two brothers and I, our families, plus our parents. Back in summer 2022 we went away on a big family trip to Turkey and had such a lovely time that we wanted to repeat it. After my lovely Nan passed away in January, my mum suggested that we plan another trip. We jumped at the idea.
The best thing about a big family holiday is how much time you all get to spend together. There’s no time pressure of having to fit in all of the conversations you want to have into a few snatched hours, as there usually is when you just get together for an afternoon. Of course, it helps if you like the members of your family. I feel very lucky to be part of such a great crew whose company I really enjoy. Spending quality time with my niece and nephews is a precious thing, and it was great to be able to get to know them better. When we get together, I always think of Tim Urban’s Wait But Why post on The Tail End:
I’ve been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I’ve probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time. 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood.
Being in their mid-60s, let’s continue to be super optimistic and say I’m one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the ten days a year thing holds, that’s 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years.
When you look at that reality, you realize that despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life.
[…]
It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
It’s a similar story with my two sisters. After living in a house with them for 10 and 13 years respectively, I now live across the country from both of them and spend maybe 15 days with each of them a year. Hopefully, that leaves us with about 15% of our total hangout time left.
My eldest son may be off to college in August this year. Given that he and his younger brother both have important exams in the summer, the only time we could plan our holiday for was the Christmas break. There were some nerves and reluctance about going away at this time of year as there is something special about being in the wind, rain, cold and snow, and enjoying everything Christmassy with the youngest children in our group. But there wasn’t any real alternative. For the first time that I can remember, I spent Christmas somewhere warm.
We woke up early to drive to Gatwick, dropping our car off and meeting everyone in the departure hall. Our flight was uneventful, but fun. I love a daytime flight going west, as it means that you just end up with a long day.
Vapour trail across the wing
Arriving at Cancun airport was a different story. As we came to the end of our long walk from the aircraft gate and descended into the immigration hall, we quickly realised that we had entered the gates of hell. The room was jam-packed and completely disorganised. People had little idea of where they needed to be, and no means of getting there even if they did. As we inched our way forward, people started shouting at each other for pushing in or somehow ending up in front of them in the pack. There was no queue, just one big scrum. We tried to make light of the situation, but any smiles were offset by the frayed tempers around us. A little panic set in when we realised that our airport transfer would only wait 45 minutes for us before leaving; I tried calling them but had no luck getting through.
This photo does not do justice to how disorganised the immigration hall was
Remarkably, by the time we got through immigration our bags had not yet turned up. After more waiting and a brief moment of panic that our suitcases weren’t with us, we finally left the airport and eventually found our transfer. Our driver didn’t have a clue where we were going, so I sat next to him in the front of the vehicle, holding up Waze on my iPhone to navigate us to the hotel. We were laughing as I relayed hazards reported by Waze to the driver and exclaimed “La Luna!” every time we found a pothole that hadn’t been logged.
Our home for the week was The Fives Beach Hotel and Residences, just north of the town of Playa del Carmen. It’s a strange mix of hotel and condominiums. Our rooms were superb, with separate kitchen and lounge areas, but they had no cutlery or other utensils for self-catering. The hotel is all-inclusive, so I doubt that guests would typically make use of any of the cooking facilities, but it was weird not to have a single implement in any of the drawers.
The rooms are spread out over a sprawling estate with plenty of amenities on site: a big variety of restaurants, a gym, multiple swimming pools, bars, a beach and small pier as well as wooden walkways through a lightly cultivated mangrove swamp. Monkeys, coatis and lizards roam around the complex, turning up unexpectedly as you pass.
Comedy footprints by reception. We have no idea what animal made these, or why its paws were so muddy.
A monkey on the wooden walkway. At one point my wife was busy pointing at a monkey in a tree, not realising that one was sitting about half a foot away from her. I’ve not seen her jump as high as when she spotted it.
One of the resident lizards
Coatis, making mincemeat of the lawn as they foraged for food
You can get around the site by chauffeured golf buggy, which you are introduced to when the staff first take you to your room. But it was much more efficient to get around by foot. The perimeter of the site is about 1.75km and makes for a perfectly usable running route. After a couple of mornings of sweating litres of water on the spin bikes in the humid gym, I couldn’t face doing it for a third time, so I tentatively tried running again. I was so pleased that my calf injury didn’t come back, so I switched to morning runs for the rest of my stay.
The main pool and beach area was lovely. You needed to get down there early to secure any sunbeds, as people got there early and left towels on them all day. I think that hotels like this one would benefit from having some proper rules in place, such as needing to have at least one member of your group present to keep hold of any sunbeds, and for each person to be able to ‘keep’ no more than four.
Early morning at the beach
View from the sunbeds, out to sea
Early on in our trip we saw an area of the beach turned into a wedding venue. It was beautiful, but strange that there were a bunch of strangers in swimwear milling around the smartly-dressed wedding attendees.
Wedding on the beach
The on-site restaurants were good, but getting a table was a pain. According to other guests that had visited the year before, the hotel had removed the ability for you to pre-book dinner at a certain time. You had to turn up at a restaurant, ask for a table and then wait around with a buzzer until one became available. If there were just two of us I think we would have been fine, but with such a large group we found ourselves eating quite late on a couple of evenings, with the youngest children falling asleep at the table. After some complaining and negotiating, we managed to secure a table for all 14 of us at the Thai restaurant on Christmas Day, which worked out brilliantly. My favourite restaurant was the Italian, which served some incredible butternut squash ravioli.
On the days where it was more difficult to secure a table, some of the group took advantage of the buffet restaurant or the pizzeria in the main plaza. These facilities made things a lot easier when we wanted a more relaxed, less formal evening.
A couple of days into the trip, my wife discovered a little frozen yoghurt shop that was slightly hidden away. It quickly became a daily staple for everyone, with many of us walking out of the shop with overflowing tubs that consisted of at least 50% toppings.
The hotel had a good programme of events for Christmas, which went a long way to keeping it special. Christmas Eve was so much fun. It started with a very good musical duo who were accompanied on stage by a snowy fireplace scene. (Is this as bizarre to people that live in the southern hemisphere as it is to me?) We then had an enactment of The Nutcracker followed by another band and plenty of drinking, dancing and having fun with the other guests around us. It was a blast.
Events at the hotel for Christmas 2024
There’s a cognitive dissonance of sitting in shorts and a light shirt in the early evening while the stage played a snowy scene complete with a roaring fireplace
The Nutcracker
The fun continued down on the beach the next day when The Grinch appeared, followed by Santa Claus who arrived — of course — by catamaran. Children and their parents queued up to go along the little pier to receive a gift from him.
The Grinch kicked things off before Santa Claus arrived by boat.
The hotel entertainment was pretty good quality throughout the week, with a programme of events each evening. I loved the enthusiastic mariachi band who played down by the beach, singing songs such as Guantanamera and La Bamba until the rain started.
I’ll never get used to the size of a guitarrón in a mariachi band
The weather was pretty good all week, reaching about 28°C most days. We had a little cloud, which stopped it from feeling too hot. There was one day of significant tropical rain, but given it was December, we couldn’t begrudge everything around us getting watered.
Looking out on a stormy evening
A couple of days into the trip we discovered the Lizzard Pool [sic], which made a gesture towards healthy living with regular water aerobics workouts and games of volleyball.
Volleyball in the Lizzard Pool
Aside from lounging around by the pool and the beach, we did a few activities. We took a taxi into the nearby town of Playa del Carmen for a look around. The main street in the town is amusingly called 5th Avenue, and is filled with lots of souvenir shops and quite sad-looking restaurants and tequila bars. I imagine that the venues come to life in the evening with the place taking on the persona of a typical resort town, with loud music and people drinking long into the night. It was a handy trip for us to pick up some flip-flops and cheap pairs of water shoes for our adventures later in the week.
Wandering around Playa del Carmen
One thing it did have was a fantastic ice cream shop called Aldo’s. The coffee ice cream was superb, and the boys both enjoyed a humongous ice cream sandwich.
Seriously good ice cream
A few of us had a very busy day out at Xplor, part of the Xcaret group of theme parks. We woke up early to catch the coach from our hotel, stopping to pick up additional passengers on the way. When you get in the park you are given a locker key and a helmet and then let loose on the various attractions. The zip lines were breathtaking — you finish one and then climb up to the start of the next one, covering fourteen different zip lines across two different routes, two of which end up in water at the finish.
As we waited on the steps to our second set of zip wires, we spotted a giant iguana in one of the treetops. We figured that it was a model that had been put there by the park to entertain people in the queue, but an unexpected giant yawn and shake of its head startled us into realising that it was real. We then noticed the iguanas all over the park, basking in the heat in the treetops as we slid overhead.
We then quickly made our way to the giant water slide, which you must tackle as groups of four. I’ve never been on a water slide with so many stages; it was epic. We spent the rest of the day navigating underground caves, swimming through some and using hand paddles to race and bump our way through others. The favourite activity turned out to be using the all-terrain vehicles to bump our way through two bumpy 5km tracks that included cave sections and massive water hazards. At one point my 17 year-old cried out that “It hurts so much but I love it!” Lunch took the form of an excellent buffet, better than the one at our hotel. The day out was expensive, but it didn’t feel that we had been ripped off. We were sad to leave, but satisfied with a brilliantly fun day out.
We were up early again the next day for an organised trip, this time with all 14 of us. Our first stop was the Mayan ruin of Tulum. Once you get past the souvenir and tat shops you find a well-preserved site in a beautiful setting, but surprisingly young at only 575–825 years old. (Berkhamsted Castle, located a short walk from our house, is approaching its 1,000th anniversary.) It was a super hot day and the site offered little shade, so by the time we had walked around we were happy to get back to somewhere where we could buy a drink.
The cove at the ruins of Tulum
Lizard at Tulum
Our next stop was a site where we could descend some steep steps to explore a cenote, a cave filled with groundwater that was formed by the erosion of the limestone bedrock. Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula has thousands of these, scattered all around. Cenote Caracol is located off of a long bumpy road in Tulum. Our trip included a swim in the cave, a walking tour through part of the cave network and a delicious lunch.
Steps into the cenote…
…and steps into the water
Swimming in Cenote Caracol
Walking through the caves, with strong Goonies vibes
The last stop of the day was Bahía de Akumal, a beach that is famous for being able to spot sea turtles as you swim your way around. I chose not to take part as I didn’t think the turtles needed to see me all that much. Everyone donned a life jacket and snorkel and were taken out as a group by a guide. While they were out at sea, a massive brawl broke out on the beach that resulted in soldiers from the National Guard turning up. As I sat chatting with my parents, we had no idea that this was going on a few yards down the beach from us. Our guide spotted it from where everyone was swimming and he first thought that the commotion was due to a shark or stingray being close to the shore. As everyone waded in at the end of their swim, one guy was sitting on the beach with a bag of ice held to his head. I have no idea what the commotion was all about.
Beach site for turtle spotting at Bahía de Akumal
One of the biggest highlights of our trip was an evening at La Casa De Rosa on-site at our hotel. This was a paid add-on to our stay where we gathered together in a little purpose-built kitchen and dining area to cook and eat a Mexican meal together. The evening started with introductions with our host, followed by a tasting journey through different tequilas and mezcals. Having had tequila before, and finding it difficult to believe that there could be a less appealing alcoholic drink, I politely declined to take part. But it was so funny to see the various faces that were pulled as people sipped from their shot glasses.
We were then each given a flashcard with a Spanish word on it which would become our names for the evening. Everyone had to learn everyone else’s name. The penalty for getting it wrong, or calling someone by their actual name, was either an additional shot of tequila, or a ‘shot’ of baked crickets. I kept my mouth shut.
Our table at La Casa De Rosa
The meal itself was delicious, and a real team effort. After we all made tortillas and gorditas that were then cooked on the comal, some people continued to make more while others prepared fish tamales, two of the children got busy making different types of salsa and others prepared a salad. There was mild panic in the eyes of our hosts when I told them I didn’t eat meat, which I tried to diffuse by saying that I would just eat the vegetarian things. But they insisted in rustling up a dish of roasted courgettes filled with corn, cheese and other delights. We ate so much — I haven’t been that full in a very long time. It was a lovely thing to do together.
Our last evening at the hotel was so much fun. They set up a silent disco in the plaza, with three DJs playing different music on different colour-coded stations. Most of our crew had never been to a silent disco before; their skepticism melted away as soon as they put their headsets on. We danced all night and everyone loved it.
Queuing for silent disco headsets
Cutting some shapes, tuned into the green channel
Travelling home overnight was always going to be tricky. My brother smooth talked his way into getting all of us access to the BA lounge. Once we had gotten through security we tried to locate it but couldn’t see it anywhere. A quick web search revealed that the BA lounge is located in the airport before you go through security. I find airports quite stressful places, so I found a seat in the terminal and donned my headphones to catch up with my podcast backlog.
Everyone seemed to snatch a small amount of poor-quality sleep on the way back. We then tried to keep ourselves awake all day in order to shorten our jet lag, but it will take a few days to recover.
We had a wonderful holiday. I feel so lucky to have been able to spend time together with my whole family in such a luxurious setting. We’ve made memories that will stick with us for a very long time, and I can’t wait for us to get together again.
Next week: Another week off before work begins again. And turning 48.
A week off work, largely spent pottering around at home. My wife and the boys were still going to school, so it didn’t feel quite right to spend the morning lounging around in bed while they dashed about as they got ready to leave the house.
Despite the early starts, it was lovely to not have anywhere that I needed to rush off to. On Monday I did a hard 100km ride out to Ampthill and back. It’s a loop that I had previously ridden a few times with my eldest son when he was enthusiastic about cycling. This time felt much harder as I was pushing myself, and I felt the effects of the ride for a few days afterwards.
The rest of the week was filled with domestic chores, catching up on the washing, and ironing all the things. I also managed to spend a whole morning at Deco Audio, thumbing my way through their entire collection of physical music and walking away with 19 new CDs for a fraction of what I would pay elsewhere.
I had dinner and drinks with a couple of close friends as one of them is working on a job nearby. I also had a lovely lunch and catch-up with Mat at Jester, over spicy avocado toast.
My final week of work of 2024. It’s our company policy that all staff need to take two weeks of consecutive leave each year. I’ve been so busy that I’m only able to do this now. Next week my wife is still working and my kids are still at school, so it feels a bit indulgent to be off.
At the start of the week I found myself getting annoyed with an issue at work and had to stop and think why. I’m just a bit worn out. By the time that Thursday arrived, I found myself pushing along low-value work as my energy was sapped. I’m looking forward to getting away from my work keyboard to rest and recharge.
This was a week in which I:
Discovered a bug with either Microsoft Teams or the software that we use for compliance recording. When recording is triggered, it displays people’s names in the ‘why this call needs to be recorded’ banner in Teams even if those people don’t meet the specific criteria for recording.
Made progress with our audio/visual technology plans for a shared area of one of our buildings. Early in the new year, we’re going to get test equipment on site to see whether it performs as well in our environment as it did in the demo.
Met with the team involved with our construction programme to go through the snagging list.
Continued my personal mission to try out as many of our updated meeting rooms as possible. I want to make sure I experience them for online or hybrid meetings myself and deal with any issues before our staff let us know about something that can be improved.
Met with two members of my team for their year-end appraisals. Prior to this year, I hadn’t managed any permanent members of staff for about a decade. I quite enjoy it.
Had my own year-end appraisal.
Added four more people to our Microsoft Copilot pilot and working group. Giving licences to people that come asking for them and involving them in a community may morph into our rollout approach, with some monitoring to see whether they continue to use it.
Had a conversation with an analyst about using Microsoft 365 and Copilot in some of our more remote locations.
Discussed the provision of coffee in the office and how we can ensure that there is a continual supply whilst the building’s coffee bar is out of action for refurbishment.
Met with our sister company to discuss options for staff catering for the period that our company cafe will be closed next year. I had to work from home on the day of the meeting, so I missed out on the free food samples.
Joined December’s Teams Fireside Chat where we heard lots about the features of Teams Premium from Mansoor Malik and Margi Desai.
Wrote-up the minutes from the final Steering Committee meeting of the year.
Came up with an impromptu format for our last all-team meeting of the year. I asked everyone to send me a song that meant a lot to them or reflected their current mood. I then put these together in a playlist and played them in the meeting, asking the team to guess the person who chose each song.
Got one of our cars fixed with a new water pump at the side of the road by an RAC Mobile Mechanic. £262 seemed pretty good for something that took about three and a half hours to fix.
Enjoyed some drinks at a neighbour’s house. We need to do a bit more hosting next year.
Had fun on Berkhamsted Cycling Club’s annual Mince Pie Ride where we were treated to a free mince pie along with a coffee or mulled wine at the end of the ride. I decided to ride dressed as a Christmas pudding. It turned out that I’d thought through whether I would be able to pedal and control my bike, but not how aerodynamic the costume would be. Everyone else in our group loved riding behind me as I acted as a massive windbreak for 60km or so.
Photos by me (selfie), Ian Biller (action shots) and Janice Bell (alongside Ian Taylor, who put an incredible amount of effort into decorating himself and his bike).
Media
Podcasts
I loved John Harris’s interview with a Syrian woman who came to the UK, settled in Yorkshire, built a business and had her children grow up here. It’s an excellent illustration of one human story behind the headlines about the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the future treatment of refugees.
The culture engendered by Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang of calling people out on stuff publicly and them responding to that by doing things better, even if it is ridiculously embarrassing for them and everyone else in earshot at the time.
The flipside of Huang rewarding people on the spot with bonuses or stock when they’ve done a great job on something.
The culture of everyone in Nvidia being a specialist and their ‘career progression’ being defined as them getting to be the best in their field. Then the CEO is the only, ultimate, generalist. This is great for a while, but what do you do about succession?
Articles
Ben Elton: “The dead person at a funeral is literally the last person who should get a vote in either the entertainment or the catering. So I have no song – all I want is to make sure I’m composted in an environmentally friendly way.”
Video
Finished season one of Shrinking on AppleTV+. It’s a little bit twee, but the characters are great and it gave me lots of laugh out loud moments. Jason Segel’s mannerisms remind me so much of what I loved about Chevy Chase during his mid-1980s movie period. He can speak volumes just with his eyes.
The Making of Do They Know It’s Christmas? (iPlayer) is essential viewing for a pop music documentary buff like myself. But it’s not a patch on The Greatest Night In Pop (2024) which documents the recording of We Are The World. The Band Aid film just consists of footage from the recording with very little context or narrative; an important artefact but without as much context or reflections as the American film.
On Tuesday my company had a party to celebrate both our 10th anniversary and the upcoming retirement of our CEO. Drinks and canapés were followed by a formal dinner and speeches. An incredible live band kicked in as desserts were served and the evening was rounded out with a great DJ. Time went by so fast; glancing at my watch I realised that I had already missed the train that would get me home by midnight. I didn’t get in until nearly 1am. Given how tired I felt for the rest of the week I can’t fathom how I used to drink at these events and still function. The organisation of the event was amazing as usual, and everyone seemed to have a brilliant time.
This was a week in which I:
Prepped for and ran our final programme steering committee meeting of the year.
Had calls with our audio/visual consultancy to talk through how we could improve the multi-function ‘collaboration space’ in our office. Our main consultant came on-site to continue the conversation and to review our newly-commissioned meeting rooms.
Joined an online technology demo of audio/visual equipment for larger meeting spaces. The equipment was impressive, picking up clear audio from everywhere in the room and doing a great job of the video feed.
Met with the company that provides us with our office smart sensors for a post-install handover and demonstration of the technology. It’s exciting to be able to have quantitative data about how the office is performing that we can use to further improve the space.
Met with a vendor to discuss how they can continue to support us over the next year with expertise that we don’t have internally.
Started to draft a structure for our offsite meeting in January. ChatGPT has helped me to source some companies to speak to that could help us with part of the event.
Got pulled into a conversation on provisioning of accounts and access to internal resources.
Had meetings with representatives from our sister company to discuss plans to mitigate disruption in the building over the coming months, as well as coordinate the work to improve one of our shared spaces.
Spent a couple of hours with our SD-WAN vendor to learn about their roadmap and to discuss how we can make better use of their technology.
Met to review our licensing requirements from a key software vendor for the coming year.
Had the final check-in of the year with our technology consultancy vendor.
Had an introductory meeting with the UK arm of a vendor used by colleagues in Johannesburg.
Continued writing the year-end performance reviews for my team members.
Joined the year-end celebratory meeting for our entire global Technology function. I picked up an award for ‘executing with excellence’. It’s lovely to have the recognition, but I felt quite uncomfortable with receiving an individual award given that it is our team as a whole that pulled together to make everything great this year.
Enjoyed our local year-end talk, hosted by our incoming CEO. This year has been a blur, so it was fun to look back at photos of everything that happened. We also got an excellent overview of one of our local offices from the Chief Executive there.
Spent some time curating and finessing my music collection, using a combination of Plex and the Music app on my Mac. Both of the tools are great at identifying and tagging most of my music, but I wanted to fix issues such as different versions of the same album looking identical in the user interface. I spent a few enjoyable hours doing the work and have got as far as artists beginning with D.
Didn’t get out on my bike. Storm Darragh resulted in the club cancelling the Saturday ride because the conditions were too dangerous. I’m very grateful to have the option of riding indoors available to me when I need it.
Took a trip to Stroud to meet up with my wife’s family for lunch. Our car was telling us it was 5°C but it felt like a minus sign could have been added to the front of it.
Enjoyed the last F1 race of the season. Given the recent form of the runners and the upcoming driver changes, I’m so intrigued by what 2025 might have in store.
I asked ChatGPT “Based on what you know about me, draw a picture what my current life is.” It came up with this:
Media
Podcasts
Useful update from Henry Levak, Head of Product at Logitech, about their plans for multi-camera and multi-stream setups in Microsoft Teams. I’m not sure whether the ability to control the camera streams from home is a good thing or whether it’s a little creepy. The intelligent auto booking and auto-releasing of meeting rooms sounds interesting, including a setting where all future room bookings get cancelled if someone doesn’t turn up in the room a preset number of times in a row, synchronised to Microsoft Exchange. I’m looking forward to us experimenting with this.
Watched Steve McQueen’s new World War II drama, Blitz (2024) on AppleTV+. I was expecting Great Things, but it somehow didn’t land like that.
Beatles ‘64 on Disney+ is a lovely addition to the myriad of films about the group. I’ve never seen the behind-the-scenes video footage of their first trip to the US and it’s lovely to see them laughing and joking around. I’m now very familiar with the area around the entrance to the Plaza Hotel in New York, which made it even more fascinating.
Audio
Getting access to my friends’ music collections via PlexAmp has sent me into an obsessive loop about the Faith No More songs Midlife Crisis and Epic. I vividly remember first hearing Epic on MTV as a kid when I was on holiday in the US; it stunned me as it was so different to everything that I’d heard before. There are so many videos on YouTube of people reacting to these videos, including vocal coaches who are dazzled by the range of sounds that Mike Patton makes on this appearance on the Jay Leno show. Just imagine seeing this on prime time TV.
Books
I’ve been struggling to get some focused reading time over the past week or two. How To Lose A Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship is denser than I expected. I’m halfway through. I find myself agreeing with paragraphs and sections of the book but I struggle to zoom out and understand exactly where I am in the narrative.
Next week: My final week of work for the year, a meetup with friends and two album clubs.
Maintaining our track record of misjudging quite how big a thing is before we get it home
The remnants of Storm Bert meant that I spent the entire week working from home. The River Nene had burst its banks, flooding Northampton station and resulting in most of the trains being cancelled. The odd train was still running, but it seemed ridiculous to try to catch one with no clear plan to be able to get back home again. Working at home for the week was great for productivity, but it reinforced to me how much I do like being in the office. Three days in and a couple at home is a pretty good balance.
This was a week in which I:
Had a great discussion with a colleague about how we use checklists in our department and how our practice could be improved. I haven’t yet read Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, but I can guess what it says, and why. An immensely experienced commercial airline pilot will still go through a checklist before a flight, not because they don’t know what they are doing, but because the checklist removes any residual human error from the procedure. In my Technology career I’ve seen many checklists, but they are often used as a rough guide as opposed to a document to be meticulously checked off. How do you change a culture when it isn’t safety-critical?
Asked some friends whether they considered document management within a team to be a solvable problem. For years, we’ve had an outstanding project on our backlog to consolidate a bunch of SharePoint sites together into one, but I wonder how much payback there will be for the amount of work that will be required. Filing things in the right place matters less now that search is so good. I also wonder whether it is inevitable that someone new coming into the team will decide to start filing things their own way, adding another repository to the situation. Being a team librarian and showing people the way is a lost art.
Continued to edge forward in agreeing a follow-on contract with our construction vendor. There are so many little moving parts and different parties involved.
Marvelled at our CTO as he gave an incredibly informative presentation to one of our client-facing teams about a prospective client in the technology sector.
Met with two of our client-facing teams to give them an overview of construction work that is taking place in our building over the next couple of years and to answer their questions.
Attended our Information Risk Steering Group meeting and spoke about how we plan to tackle a refresher of our document management standards across our division next year.
Reviewed and made some refinements to the slide deck that gives an overview of my team and the work we do.
Had a discussion on the principles of how we give contractors access to our computer systems and equipment.
Reviewed our approach to our Microsoft Copilot initiative. We heard an enthusiastic take from one of our colleagues who has been embracing it in his daily work to make himself much more productive.
Took our sister company through the latest design proposal for the audio/visual setup of our shared space.
Had our final Lean Coffee session of the year. One of the topics I proposed and we discussed was whether people felt that Lean Coffee meetings worked well and whether we should continue them. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
Spent some time cleaning up our team Kanban board, removing duplicates and things that we are never going to do.
Attended a BIE Executive webinar on Overcoming Prejudice in the Workplace.
Joined the inaugural Copilot Fireside Chat a monthly Teams meeting on the subject of Microsoft Copiot. Unlike the Teams Fireside Chat, I was the only attendee besides the presenters who kept my camera on for the whole meeting. I’m amazed at the difference in culture between the two calls. The topic of conversation went very deep, very fast, and made me realise how little I know of this space.
Got on top of my work emails, processing the 2,000 or so that were in my backlog. I now have a screenful of messages that I actually have to do something with.
Managed a nine-day streak on the bike, primarily as a result of working from home. TrainerRoad recommended a rest day on Sunday to prevent long-term fatigue. I didn’t argue. I’m feeling quite old at the moment, with a calf that won’t let me run, a painful shoulder when I raise my arm up too high and a bunch of bites on my leg that I presumably got when we stopped out on the club bike ride on Saturday. The club ride was eventful, with one of the crew getting two punctures on the same wheel, one of which was caused by hitting a massive pothole on a very fast descent.
‘Fixing’ puncture number two, wondering if the wheel rim would hold up after its collision with a pothole
Surprised myself by how much I enjoyed listening to Alanis Morissette at an online Album Club night.
Enjoyed a belated Thanksgiving dinner with friends old and new on Friday night. I don’t think I’d ever been invited for Thanksgiving dinner before. It was lovely to get out and meet a bunch of new random people.
Had another dinner out with friends on Saturday evening, eating an incredible chickpea and cauliflower curry with just the right amount of spice.
Bought our Christmas tree. We knew he was a big boy before we got him in the car, but we didn’t anticipate that he would be quite this huge.
Bought a new tuxedo ahead of the work celebration this week. Perhaps I’ll get a bit more use out of this one than the last one I had.
Enjoyed playing with Plexamp now that two of my friends are using Plex and have given me access to their music libraries. It’s so much more fun than browsing someone’s collection of Spotify playlists.
Media
Podcasts
Superb episode of The Guardian’s Politics Weekly UK on the topic of assisted dying, ahead of the vote that took place in parliament last week. It really is a topic where I can see both sides of the argument. Wouldn’t it be great if most parliament business was debated and decided on in a similar way as opposed to MPs being whipped to vote?
I love hearing arguments that make me change my views on things. In this episode of the Risky Business podcast, they talk about the use of facial recognition cameras in an Australian hardware store chain. Typically I would object to this technology being used anywhere, but the store released footage of the abuse that their staff have been subject to. They use the technology to detect and alert staff when someone on their list turns up at a store, and the data for anyone that is not a positive match is quickly deleted. This seems like a reasonable compromise.
Articles
London’s Smithfield meat market and Billingsgate fish market are both going to close after 850 years. What a shock that Brexit has something to do with it.
Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem is a superb documentary. I was 17 in 1994 when the first issue of Loaded appeared, and I remember devouring the magazine from cover to cover. It was interesting to see it in perspective as part of mid-90s culture here in the UK. Those first issues had long interviews with people who are now cultural icons that I knew very little about at the time, as well as documents of trips to extraordinary places and parties that felt like an adult world that I didn’t quite have access to yet. In my teenage years I spent a small fortune on magazines, somehow having the time to devour their contents. As the documentary notes, magazines were our Internet of that era. It is fascinating to look back and see how quickly the ‘lads mag’ concept degenerated into a race to the bottom. By the time I went to university in late 1996 I was just an occasional Loaded reader and soon stopped buying it.
A four-day working week. My brothers and I had all booked Friday off. We’d planned a surprise day in London for my mum to belatedly celebrate her 70th birthday. Last year we took my dad away to Berlin to celebrate his 70th, so we wanted to try and do something special with mum for hers.
We had such a lovely day. All my parents knew was that they had to meet us at Tottenham Court Road tube station at half past one in the afternoon. After a quick drink in a pub at Cambridge Circus, we wandered down to The Ivy in West Street for lunch. Our table wasn’t quite ready so they invited us to sit at the bar, which just added to the fun. As we sat there, I turned around and did a double-take as I came face to face with Rory Stewart, who was meeting his wife Shoshana for lunch. The atmosphere, food and service were all exceptional and we left with a lovely warm glow.
Lunch at The Ivy
Next stop was Archer Street in Soho, a beautiful cosy bar where the staff dazzle everyone as they burst into song every few minutes. We had a lovely couple of hours relaxing, laughing and enjoying the music.
We then wandered to the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand to see Back To The Future: The Musical. The production is a lot, with non-stop action all the way. The special effects were breathtaking, particularly at the climax of the story. I couldn’t understand why people around me were laughing so hard at some of the jokes that were lifted from the film. And then I realised that the movie is 39 years old, so it’s quite possible that for some people this might have been their first ever exposure to the storyline. I don’t think anyone is going to be buying the original soundtrack album from the production — it was no Hamilton — but it was a lot of fun.
Everyone went home feeling like they’d had a thoroughly great day out. It was so lovely to make some more memories together.
This was a week in which I:
Did a comprehensive review of our real estate/facilities financial forecast now that we have a better idea of the timing of future work.
Prepped for and ran the programme Steering Committee meeting.
Caught up with our audio/visual vendor on the latest design of the shared meeting space in our building. Reviewed the design with our CIO and COO ahead of a broader review with our sister company next week.
Started to look again at the software developer vacancy in my team.
Worked late in the office as new signage was installed, an illuminated company logo at one of our entrances. It was fascinating to watch it being put in with such skill. Connecting the illuminated letters to a transformer involved using fishing rod-like sticks to grab hold of the cables from inside the wall cavity. The whole job probably took six hours, spread over a couple of evenings.
Had to remind myself that “feedback is a gift” when someone grabbed me and reeled off a list of things that aren’t working for them in our refurbished office. You have to look past how it feels and listen to what’s being said.
Had our regular operational meeting with our Non-Financial Risk team.
Met up with our Group Head of Enterprise Architecture and our functional Enterprise Architect when they visited us in London. Talking to them made me realise that I feel as though technology has taken a back seat in my professional life this year, with my focus on our real estate projects. I’m looking forward to getting geeky again.
Had a final meeting with the key vendors from the work we did to build out a brand new office earlier in the year. The entire purpose of the meeting was to say thank you, and to reflect on what we’d achieved together. Sometimes you have to stop and look around.
Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour session where a colleague presented about company culture.
Joined the first part of a webinar on AI for Everyone, run by O’Reilly Media. The presentations were short and snappy but I didn’t feel like I got too much out of them.
Took part in the latest Teams Fireside Chat where the topic of the month was Microsoft Places. There’s a lot going on in this space and — of course — some licencing to get our heads around. I’ve signed up to the new monthly Copilot Fireside Chat and expect it to be just as engaging.
Helped out the neighbours with a couple of problems with their house while they were on holiday. Carbon monoxide monitors are LOUD. They sent us a lovely little hamper of goodies as a thank you, which was completely unnecessary.
Had a physio appointment to find out what’s going on with the calf that I injured when I ran a half marathon back in October. Apparently the problem is likely to be “a grade 2 strain of [my] medial gastrocnemius”. I’ve got some exercises to do, but it’s likely going to be some months before I’m back running again.
Attended the Annual General Meeting of our cycling club. It was the first one that I’ve made in the two and a bit years that I’ve been a member. I love being part of the club. It was great to look back on the events of the year and say thank you to the people that make it all run so smoothly. Unfortunately for the new ride coordinators, they had to cancel Saturday’s ride due to the predicted cold and stormy conditions.
Spent the weekend in a tired stupor as one of our blinds broke. Although the sun doesn’t rise particularly early this time of year it was still a bit disturbing, alongside storm Bert rattling our tiles and spraying water at the window.
Media
Podcasts
Enjoyed John Gruber and Merlin Mann’s ‘holiday party’ (post-USA election) episode of The Talk Show. Merlin’s advice of asking whether someone needs to be “helped, hugged or heard” is great. They also talked about how the old people we see around us today are not the same old people that we saw around us decades ago, even though it feels like they are. I often think about this when I see someone who is in the autumn of their years, wondering what they might have looked like 20 years ago, which to me feels like it was just yesterday. On that note, it was a shock to hear about John Prescott’s passing this week. I did a double-take when I read that he was 86 and had been suffering with Alzheimer’s. His famous punch was 23 years ago. Such a short time for so much to change.
Articles
Blown away by this chart. Peer-to-peer information now has so much more of a role than ever before. It’s a shame that for many people this means that they only consume small video soundbites from questionable publishers.
Unsurprising but still mindblowing chart www.washingtonpost.com/business/202…
Continued watching the new series of Bad Sisters on AppleTV+. I’m not convinced that it is as good as the first season, but we’re sticking with it for now.
We tried watching Loudermilk on Netflix as it was recommended to us, but we couldn’t get past the first episode. So corny.
So, we moved onto Shrinking, also on AppleTV+. Jason Segel is brilliant in the lead role — he comes across as a modern day Chevy Chase, in a good way.
