The busiest, most stressful week I’ve had in a long time. On Sunday evening I flew to Barcelona to attend the annual Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo. I’d booked the trip months ago, and at that time it was due to take place after our last major programme milestone of the year. But our timeline had slipped and that milestone moved to the Monday following the event. So I found myself at the conference while the project team navigated a variety of last-minute issues without me.

It was very difficult to focus and concentrate while things were happening back at home. At one point I left a session as I needed to make a phone call, and later squirmed in my seat as a keynote overran into time where I was due to be in a project meeting. Added to this was the drama of the US election; I went to bed on Tuesday night after watching CNN for a while, had a restless night, and then woke up to find that Trump had walked it. I’m still having random moments of shock, disbelief and despair peppering each day.

Last year I went to the conference by rail, but my need to get back to the office and my experience of trying to work on the train put me off doing the same thing again. The catastrophic weather system in Eastern Spain was persisting, which meant that we were kept on the ground for two hours after boarding our plane at Heathrow as they waited for the area around Barcelona to clear. The delay meant that the in-flight food cart was in high demand; it never made it to where was sitting at the rear of the plane before we started our final approach to land. I ended up at my hotel just before midnight, having to find something to eat from a little shop nearby.

The first keynote presentation of the week always has maximum attendance. Like last year, the main auditorium was full, so I ended up watching it in a second giant room via a live video feed.

Ten minutes in to the presentation, it sounded as though the fire alarms were going off. I wondered how the presenters would cope, but they just carried on. It turned out that the noise was the collective sound of thousands of smartphones, all of which had received a government alert that warned of torrential rain that was heading our way. As I sat in sessions throughout the morning, I could hear the thunder outside the conference centre. Later I learned that rain flooded the airport and roads around Barcelona, but we seemed to dodge the worst of the impact.

This year our subscription meant that I had access to the CIO Lunch on the first three days. These lunches are held in the giant overflow hall. You wander in and get directed to an empty seat by a small army of staff with illuminated marshalling wands, say hello to your immediate neighbours at your table and then tuck in. It was an incredible operation; setting this many places and switching people from their starters to their hot main courses was amazing to watch.

Each day, as people tucked into their desserts, we settled in to hear from a guest keynote speaker on the stage in the room. The first of these was Carla Harris, who ended up being my favourite speaker of the entire event. Her talk was called Lead to Win: How to Be an Impactful, Influential Leader in Today’s Environment, but the title didn’t really do it justice. She weaved a wonderful narrative about her time at Morgan Stanley, where she continues to work, and what she has learned about effective leadership.

Versions of talks from most keynote speakers are usually available on the Internet, and Harris is no exception. Here she is talking to an interviewer in December 2022 at the Wharton School:

Most of each day at the conference is filled with short presentations, in rooms of all shapes and sizes. Some of these were really valuable, such as Laurie Shotton’s presentation on a framework for evaluating emerging technologies, Tom Scholtz’s 3 Essential Tactics for Mastering Board-Level Cybersecurity Presentations and Kevin Smith’s How New CIOs Can Accelerate Their First-Year Impact and Value as an Executive and Functional Leader. Others, not so much.

Last year, ahead of my first Symposium, I spent ages agonising over which talks to sign up to in the Conference Navigator app, trying to avoid any timeline clashes. This year I took a completely different approach, adding everything that looked even remotely interesting to my personal agenda. Typically I would then have a choice of three or four sessions to attend at any given slot throughout the four days. I’d make a just-in-time decision based on downloading and skimming through a copy of the slides for each of the sessions in the app, making a call on what I thought would be most valuable one to go to.

I also had access to some ‘CIO Roundtable’ sessions, which were peer-based conversations led by a Gartner facilitator. These were valuable but too short, particularly one on the use of Generative AI in Banking which was just getting warmed up by the time we had to stop.

At a Roundtable session on AI Governance we were deep into a fascinating conversation about ethics when, ironically, I spotted that the CIO sitting next to me was recording the audio of the conversation on his phone. I spent the rest of the session wrestling whether to say something about the ethics of recording without people’s consent, versus the fact that anyone could be recording any of us at any time, and it being incumbent on us to not say anything that we wouldn’t be happy sharing in a public forum. I didn’t say anything at the time, and I’m not sure that was the right thing to do.

In another lunchtime keynote we heard from Martha Lane Fox on Strategic Leadership in the Digital Age: Driving Innovation, Inclusion and Impact. She told us that McKinsey had published a report on how long it will take for different industries to reach parity between the sexes. For technology, the answer was ‘never’ — we’re actually standing still or going backwards.

Some of the sessions felt as though they were there just for the ‘wow’ factor as opposed to being actually useful. It was amazing to be in the same room as Arnold Schwarzenegger (and to hear him quote lines from Kindergarten Cop), but I don’t think he offered any insights that I will take back to my day job. Gartner had originally announced that Jensen Huang would speak — which would have been great, and very relevant — but Schwarzenegger replaced him in the build-up to the event.

At Monday night’s drinks reception they brought Ruud Gullit in, simply for the purpose of having photos taken with him. I posed for a photo without us speaking a word to each other, and wondered if he even knew where he was.

I was excited to hear Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote talk, but a few days after the event I find it difficult to recall the key points.

Mick Ebeling gave an inspiring talk on the work that he has done to ‘make the impossible not impossible’, including 3D printing low-cost prosthetics in Sudan, enabling an artist with locked-in syndrome to paint again, and helping a jazz pianist with Parkinson’s disease to be able to play the piano.

The final keynote of the week was by digital anthropologist and author Rahaf Harfoush, talking about ‘wellbeing in a constantly connected world’. None of what she said was revelatory, but it was a good reminder to look after ourselves and our teams. As she discussed burnout, I was thinking about another blogger and weeknoter who has been writing about his own experience of this.

I spent most of Thursday working and in meetings instead of attending sessions. I’m hoping to catch up with the recordings of anything significant that I missed. (But I’m also hoping that I don’t encounter this song¹ again, which was played in the countdown to the start of each keynote.)

I’m glad I went, but it wasn’t as impactful as last year. I’m sure that there’s much more that Gartner can do to foster communication and collaboration between CIOs, which would be extremely valuable. They do provide a ‘Peer Community’ app and website, but from my experience most people just want to be in a WhatsApp or Signal group. You need to build trust and friendship, which isn’t easy to do. At dinner on Tuesday evening I spent time talking with an account executive about the WB-40 podcast Signal group and how invaluable it is to me, wondering what the special sauce is that makes it such a successful forum.

One last thought is that Gartner really should start sharing the secrets of their own technology. The conference looks and feels absolutely stunning, with incredible Wi-Fi, breathtaking audio/visual setups and apps that just work. I’d love to learn how they do it.

Aside from the Symposium, this was a week in which I:

• Contributed a written section to our quarterly board report.
• Updated a report for one of our next Governance Committee meetings.
• Prepped for the programme Steering Committee and ran the meeting.
• Fielded a variety of last-minute issues on the programme as we got ready for our go-live date.
• Prepared and rehearsed a short speech to make to our staff on Monday.
• Went for a run in Barcelona but quickly hit a problem with my calf again, the same one that caused me a problem when I ran a half marathon a few weeks back. I had to pull up after a couple of kilometres and ended up limping for the rest of the day.
• Was very proud of my eldest son who achieved a new 5k PB in Manchester:
  

• Got out with the bike club for the first time in weeks. It was lovely to see everyone again.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Your Undivided Attention have yet another important episode, this time covering how companies are offering AI chatbots as companionship, one of which led to the death of a teenager.
  

Most of the time when we talk about AI today, we talk about what it can do and not really so much about what it’s doing to us. And when people talk about the harm of AI, of course there are many harms that we talk about like misinformation or deception and many things, but the psychological harm of AI I think is a really, really important topic.

• 404 Media’s subscriber-only feed had a brilliant interview with Susanna Gibson of My Own Image, where she talked frankly about her experience of experiencing sexual violence through having an explicit video of her shared online. For people that have been a victim of this kind of abuse, it never ever goes away, and they never know when the trauma will re-surface afresh and impact them all over again.
  

Articles

• Ken White’s thoughts the day after the US election.
• Paul Graham’s post about the “writes and write-nots” struck a chord with me. “[W]riting is thinking.”
• There have been a few things this week that have got me concerned as to whether violence against women, and women’s rights in general, are taking steps backwards. And how technology will play a significant role in this. Heather Burns writes compellingly about this:
  

It pains me to report that yesterday the voting women of America, and many men too, adopted her as a role model as well, but not as a force for good. They have no intention of having other women’s backs. They want Savita as an exemplar of what can, and should, happen to women every day, everywhere.

They want more dead women, they are already getting them, and they are not going to stop until no one knows their names because there are too many to count.

• 404 Media also recently wrote about technology used by the US government that can track individual phones. They also covered this story on their podcast. Imagine this now being in the hands of Trump and the rest of the new administration.
  

Video

• This documentary from Channel 4 of the experience of women in Magaluf is simultaneously shocking and completely unsurprising. Coupled with the articles I read above, it left me feeling a little depressed about the normalisation of treating women so dreadfully.
  

• Continued to scratch my Tears for Fears itch with this timely release from Trash Theory:
  

Books

• Got about halfway through My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall by John Major. It feels as though a book is the wrong format to learn about these old music hall stars and their songs. A three-part documentary would probably be much more immersive and enjoyable.
  

Next week: Returning to the office, and getting to see Magdalena Bay again.

1. Don’t click this link, you’ll end up with a dreadful earworm. You have been warned. ↩

A tough, busy week. We’re now just a couple of weeks away from the final big project milestone of the year and things are ramping up. On Monday I felt as though I was being put through the wringer a little bit with a couple of difficult situations; things got significantly easier after that, but no less busy. We have everything and everyone in place to be successful, we now just need to get it over the line.

At long last, we finally got to the week of the budget announcement by the government here in the UK, almost four months after they won the general election. Their plans to borrow more, tax more and spend more on investment are things that need to be done given the state of the country. It has amazed me — but not surprised me — how little coverage there has been on Brexit as a root cause of some of the trouble we find ourselves in today. It has cost the economy £140bn so far.

I have my fingers crossed for Harris to win next week’s election in the US. The idea of Trump getting in for a second term is stomach-turning.

This was a week in which I:

• Triaged a couple of issues that have come up late in our project, agreeing on how we will test and assess solutions.
• Joined the project completion meeting with our construction vendor, reviewing the outcome of the mechanical and engineering work that they have done on one of our sites.
• Briefly met with our furniture vendor who was visiting our site to discuss fabric finishes and our plans for new boardroom tables.
• Took part in a risk assessment meeting for our plans to open a new office in a new location.
• Reviewed the latest design presentation for a shared space in one of our offices. Gave feedback on a couple of concerns that we have with the plans.
• Had an introductory meeting with a new joiner at our sister company.
• Submitted a narrative and photos to our regional internal newsletter about the opening of a new office that we completed in October.
• Started year-end appraisals for my team. I’ve not had ‘permanent’ staff reporting to me for a decade or so. I’m already looking forward to the conversations and objective setting.
• Took my team through the overview presentation that I put together a while ago that describes our function: the services and capabilities we offer, the products we own, and the current initiatives that we’re working on. Gathered lots of feedback on how we can change and improve the document.
• Had a follow-up conversation with a new recruitment vendor, giving an overview of our company and what I’m looking for in a candidate to fill my vacancy.
• Had a genuine ‘water cooler moment’ with a colleague that has led to a meeting being set up between a technical expert in our team and one of our business units. It’s exciting to have the opportunity to leverage the skills of our team in a broader way.
• Picked up a new iPad Mini which I plan to try out as a dedicated reading device. I love my old Kindle, but it would be better if I could also read articles and PDFs that I’ve saved to Readwise Reader. At the moment I end up saving maybe 20 or 30 articles for every one that I read. I’ll see how it goes.
• Ran our monthly Lean Coffee session with the team. It felt a bit flatter than usual, so we decided to wrap things up a little early.
• Took Friday off in order to drive up to Mansfield with my eldest son as he was taking part in a cross-country relay race on Saturday. We were booked into a Premier Inn with a Beefeater restaurant attached to it; I’d not been to either of these in years. The Beefeater was full for dinner, so we booked ourselves a table across the road at The Nuthall. I tried deep-fried corn ribs for the first time. When they arrived, they looked to me just like halloumi fries. My son laughed at me as I tried to eat them whole, not realising the ‘rib’ part. I’m not sure my digestive system was expecting to have to deal with a corn husk. The race itself was good, with my son running a superb time in his leg, and the team doing themselves proud despite the first leg runner being tripped up by someone who fell in front of him.
• Rode the cycle club ride a day early, the second time in as many weeks that I’ve tackled it solo. Being in Mansfield on Saturday morning meant I would miss out, so I assumed which route we’d be riding and pedalled it on Friday.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Nick Robinson’s interview with Matt Goodwin got me thinking about how cultural integration of immigrants is always presented as a one-way street, i.e. the immigrants need to change their ways to fit in with the country. Wouldn’t we all end up culturally richer if it was two-way?
  

Video

• Started watching Rivals on — surprisingly — Disney+. We’re really enjoying it. It’s bubblegum, but the casting is inspired. I never thought I’d be watching a moving performance from Danny Dyer.
  

Web

• The Earth is spinning faster, bucking the trend from previous years. Fascinating and slightly concerning?
• Started a paid subscription to 404 Media after finding myself being sent there more and more from various sources. They do great work, and seem to be the kind of organisation that I should be supporting.
• Great resource showing technology apprenticeship jobs in the UK.
• AI-generated listings resulted in hundreds of people turning up in Dublin for a non-existent Halloween parade.
  

Books

• Continued reading My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall by John Major. I’m about a fifth of the way through, and not finding it a gripping read so far.
  

Next week: Symposium, and final checks before project go-live.

A typically busy week. On a couple of days I finished work and felt good about all of the things that I’d completed. This was short-lived as I then took a look at the still giant ‘to do’ pile.

Our clocks went back by an hour over the weekend. Half of our meetings are scheduled from London-based diaries and the other half from those in Johannesburg. As only one of us changes our clocks, I’m expecting the usual diary bumps for a few days.

This was a week in which I:

• Wondered if other countries have as much train-related drama as we do. For two days, my regular train approached us at the station, on time … and then whistled straight past as it was half its usual size. No explanation given.
• Finished writing the script for our presentation at our quarterly Technology town hall meeting, and delivered it in the session. It was a wonderfully collective effort on the part of many members of our management team, knitting together some important strategic narratives for our company along with the day-to-day work that the team has been doing. I delivered the speech again at our all-team meeting on Friday. I quite enjoy being ‘on stage’, particularly when it’s from the comfort of my desk in my home office.
• Prepped for and ran our programme Steering Committee meeting. We’re a couple of weeks away from our second big milestone of the year, so attention is already turning to the things that will happen after that.
• Joined a Finance meeting to hear about the future technical treatment of specific types of costs.
• Completed my annual self-appraisal.
• Had an introductory call with a new account manager at one of our technology and staffing vendors.
• On recommendation, met another recruitment vendor who might be able to help with the vacancy in my team.
• Had a call with an ex-colleague who has declared that they are ‘#OpenToWork’ on LinkedIn to see if they would be interested in putting themself forward for the role.
• Raised a ticket with QNAP as the cloud backup process that runs on my NAS drive has suddenly started to report a problem. I’d deleted a whole bunch of music files that I’m never going to listen to and the Hybrid Backup Sync process now aborts every night with a 404 ‘file not found’ error.
• Went with my youngest son to a small careers fair at his school. There was a diverse mix of companies on show, from the military to small local startups. It was lovely to spend some dedicated time discussing his future with him.
• Joined my son’s parents’ evening sessions online from my office. I couldn’t leave work early enough to join my wife and son at home for the first appointment, so stayed at work and dialled in from there. For me, online parents’ evenings is one of the best things to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Took an after-work trip to a cinema in Leicester Square to see Tears for Fears Live (A Tipping Point Film) (2023). I’m always swapping recommendations for music films and documentaries with the friend who came with me, so it was good to sit and watch something together for once. The concert was beautiful and the band sounded great; Roland Orzabal’s voice continues to stun even as he moves through his 60s. I’ve not heard much of their new music and now feel like I do need to check it out.

• Had some pre-cinema food at Gordon Ramsay’s Street Burger on Charing Cross Road. Grim and expensive. Would not recommend.
• Went to pump up my bike tyres on Friday evening ahead of the club ride on Saturday morning. As I unscrewed the dust cap on the rear wheel, the valve shot out like a missile and the whole thing rapidly deflated. I had no idea that the valve was a detachable part. I’d been meaning to replace my bike tyres but didn’t have the energy to start after a long week at work. Approaching the job on Saturday afternoon, I found that I couldn’t get the rear wheel off. One bent multitool, a visit to a friend down the road and a trip to the bike shop later and I was finally in business. (Embarrassingly, I think I was turning the bolt the wrong way.) At some point I’m going to tackle changing the disc brake pads which the Internet tells me is simultaneously “easy” and “quite tricky”.
  

• Took advantage of Sunday’s extra hour in bed by getting up early to go and ride the route I missed the day before. It was a glorious sunny autumn morning, the kind that fills your heart and makes you glad to be alive.
• Had a lovely afternoon walking around Virginia Water with our friends, followed by a late lunch at The Wheatsheaf.
• Didn’t expect to love the F1 Mexican Grand Prix as much as I did. Typically it’s a relatively boring race but this one was all action.
  

Media

Podcasts

• I’m drowning in podcasts at the moment. I’m hoping that it’s just a ramped-up schedule of the imminent US election, UK budget and the fact that the F1 season has restarted again after a second break. If not, I’m going to have to start trimming my subscriptions.
  

Articles

• Ian Dunt’s writing is consistently excellent. His thoughts on the upcoming US election are a chilling read. His review of Aftersun, which I saw back in August, is also spot on.

Watched this as I waited for a flight a few weeks back and finished it as we took off. Turned me into a snotty, crying mess with no tissues, and no ability to get up and find any as we went skyward. Incredible film.bsky.app/profile/iand…

— Andrew Doran (@andrewdoran.uk) 2024-10-21T16:36:59.713Z

Video

• Watched One Day In October on Channel 4, about the attack on Kibbutz Be’eri in 2023. I knew the subject matter would be tough, but I wasn’t quite prepared to see people getting killed on screen. What happened there is beyond dreadful. What’s happening all over the region is also beyond dreadful. There doesn’t seem to be a beginning or a feasible end to the whole thing.
  

Audio

• Spent a little time tidying up my home music library. Years ago I worked for a lovely man who used to pass classical music CDs on to me from his extensive collection, ones that he didn’t want anymore. Having these tracks in my library has caused me more problems than the joy they have brought, with the odd random movement being included in some of the auto-generated Plexamp ‘radio’ playlists. I’ve decided that if I ever, in my remaining years, get into a new piece of classical music, I can check out whether I own it already and then add it to my collection at that point.
  

Web

• Stopped paying for Substack newsletters after seeing what they hosted on the Hope Not Hate documentary.
  

Books

• Finished reading Kimberly Williams-Paisley’s Where The Light Gets In and started John Major’s My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall
  

Next week: A four-day week and a short trip.

I spent the first half of the week walking around like an old man, tentatively tackling stairs and taking an age to move between sitting and standing positions. It’s been a while since I’ve had delayed onset muscle soreness from running and I wasn’t really expecting it after the half marathon. This was me:

I was grateful for an early morning meeting on Monday that meant I would be working from home; I’m not convinced that I could have tackled the walk to the train station as well as all of the stairs at the tube stations.

By Thursday the stiffness had passed except in the calf muscle that caused me the problems during the run. I get the feeling that there’s something else going on in there as it still feels very tight and sore when I move any faster than walking pace. I decided to skip running this weekend and give it a bit more time to sort itself out.

This was a week in which I:

• Gave my presentation on An Introduction to Large Language Models and Generative AI to the board of directors of one of our African companies. It had been a few months since I last presented on the topic, but I found that I didn’t need to make many updates to my slides. It’s amazing how much content is still valid 18 months on from the first draft.
• Met with our external legal team to review a vendor contract for some minor works that we need to finish off in one of our office spaces.
• Collaborated with my colleagues to write a speech that we are due to give at a ‘town hall’-style meeting on Tuesday. We’ve seamlessly knitted our own narrative with key internal content from the past few weeks. I’m very pleased with the results. Most of the attendees will be in the room in Johannesburg, but I’m grateful to be stuck in my home office as it will allow me to read from the document instead of clutching paperwork in my hand.
• Caught up with the project team for opening a new office for the first time in a while. Things will get busy again soon.
• Had my first monthly meeting with our technology advisory consultancy.
• Heard from two different vendors that a key person from each of their teams is leaving. Agreed an approach for how we will mitigate one of these changes for the next few weeks.
• Made a couple of visits to our vacated office with a colleague to work out where our new meeting room artwork should go.
• Visited a corporate furniture vendor to look at new meeting room furniture. I loved the analogy that buying a boardroom table is like a car; it comes with a basic chassis and you can upgrade various components that are factory-fitted before delivery.
• Joined the first part of a follow-up workshop on sustainable careers.
• Had a useful meeting with my team, primarily focused on our upcoming Microsoft Copilot trial.
• Met an online friend for a chat about the vacancy in my team. It was lovely to meet them in ‘high fidelity’ after having just been talking in a Signal group for so long.
• Attended the Thoughtworks Technology Radar preview. I asked a question in the Q&A about where the company had seen Generative AI deployed with a massive impact as I am increasingly skeptical about it having ‘breakout’ value, but didn’t get much of an answer.
• Fixed a problem with my laptop. I had rebooted and then suddenly the desktop and Office applications on my external monitor were VERY LARGE. After tentatively exploring some simple causes for a few days I ended up going for the full driver uninstall and re-download from the Lenovo website. The fix didn’t even ask for a reboot.
• Bumped into a friend and enjoyed a lovely morning commute with him. He has been a Chief Financial Officer for many different companies. I felt like an information vacuum as he answered the many questions that I bombarded him with about his current business.
• Went to a special event at school with my wife and youngest son to learn about the subjects he might take for A-Levels in the Sixth Form. Just like the last time I went to this event, I was jealous of the learning adventure he has ahead of him. He’s quite sure about what he wants to do, but we made full use of the time by checking out some other subjects that were on his long list.
• Had our main bathroom repainted. This now seems to need doing on a roughly annual basis as (a) some people in the house like to drain the whole tank of hot water and (b) possibly these same people are reluctant or forgetful in opening the window. As a consequence, the bathroom regularly resembles the aftermath of particularly packed, jaunty evening at the legendary Cavern Club. We probably need to get an extractor fan in there, but I’m not sure they make one powerful enough.
• Enjoyed two Album Club evenings, both with albums I’d never heard before. Talk Talk are definitely on my ‘to explore’ list.
• Found a couple of gems at our local Oxfam Books and Music store.

My latest haul from our local Oxfam Books and Music store

Media

Podcasts

• Fascinating episode of Quiet Riot where host Naomi Smith talks to Gareth Dennis about Britain’s railways. I loved the sentiment that successive governments have “lost a diamond whilst chasing the glitter” with their focus on FM (f’ing magic) as opposed to AM (actual machines). There’s lots that I learned here, including how intensively used Britain’s railways are, which makes maintaining and fixing them more expensive as it has to be done more intensively in a shorter timeframe. Electric vehicles are important, but the ‘embodied carbon’ in their manufacture and usage versus the train means that they can’t be the only vision of the future.
• The regular Thursday episode of Quiet Riot left me open-mouthed with its description of the Single Justice Procedure, and how “anyone can end up with a criminal conviction after a magistrate looks at a case for 45 seconds, behind closed doors, with no scrutiny or reasoning.” Magistrates themselves have asked for reform.

Video

• Finished watching Kaos on Netflix. Loved it. Can’t believe it’s been cancelled.

Web

• Continued to read some of the posts about Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, WP Engine and various other things in this space. There’s so much going on.
• Found myself again sharing this article that explains why USB-C is a specifically-shaped connector, not a standard.
• “It turns out I’m still excited about the web.” Love this.
• Molly White has written about writing on your own site and then syndicating the content everywhere else, something that I’ve done for the past few years.
• This Sketchplanation about ‘leading from any chair’ touched a nerve with me. I think that this is one of the keys to a mature, high performing team.
• Interesting viewpoint on capitalism and gig workers.

Books

• Finished my book. Crippled with indecisiveness about what to read next and the commitment involved after picking one, I started wondering how I could make better decisions. Over time, I’ve built up a backlog of around 1,400 unread books and have their information in a list I keep in Obsidian. It feels a bit like I can no longer see the wood for the (mainly electronic) trees. So, I used Claude.AI to help me to put together some Python code to take a title (and author, where available) and use the Google Books API to fetch additional data. After an hour or two I got everything working and now have descriptions, genres and other metadata about my books in a spreadsheet. I now need to work out how to get better ratings information as this seems to be very sparsely populated in the Google data. I’m hoping that once I finish a book and am deciding what to read next, I can use the metadata to narrow things down. For example, I should be able to filter the list by biographies or fiction and pick something from the smaller selection.

Next week: Starting the annual review cycle, joining a conference from my chair and heading to the cinema with a friend.

An exhausting week. Despite getting a big sleep on Saturday night, it took me a couple of days to get over the jet lag from my New York trip. I found myself barely able to keep myself awake on the trains home. I hadn’t planned to spend four long days in the office, but as the week unfolded it was clear that I wouldn’t be able to work from home. Our divisional CIO came to town for a couple of days and then our new regional CEO hosted a welcome event with drinks afterwards. Friday was a very busy day, but it was good to work from home again for the first time in three weeks.

On Sunday I ran the Royal Parks Half Marathon. This was my first competitive half marathon event and only the second time that I’ve run this distance. A friend had an entry but could no longer make it, so he kindly offered me his place. The entries aren’t officially transferable this late in the day, so I raced without a name on my race number and he ended up getting the text message with ‘his’ official time. I was in the first wave and got sucked along with the crowd at a fast pace. This was fine until around the five mile mark, when my right calf started complaining and feeling stiff. I adjusted my style so that I didn’t put too much pressure on it and managed to hobble my way through the remaining eight miles. It’s now very sore and I’m hobbling around, but I’m hoping it will pass in a day or two.

This was a week in which I:

• Formally agreed to close the project for our New York office move. We still have a few items on the snagging list, but they will be picked up as ‘business as usual’ items. It’s a big success.
• Refocused on the remaining work for the final big project of the year. We only have four weeks to go until the bulk of the delivery is complete. There are a lot of moving parts, with many companies and people involved, making it a complex beast. I’m now quietly excited about the changes that it will bring for our staff.
• Took our divisional CIO for a site visit to show him how things are shaping up.
• Had our regular programme and project meetings.
• Prepped for and chaired our programme Steering Committee meeting.
• Received an update on works that will be going on in one of our buildings for a number of years and started to plan for how we will manage this for our staff.
• Took part in the monthly payment valuation meeting for the work done so far by our main construction project vendor.
• Attended an internal data-focused webinar with a guest speaker on the now perennial topic of AI. As with so much stuff that I read and hear about AI, I found myself thinking about how problematic the words in this space are. ‘Understanding’, ‘learning’ etc. should always be in quote marks in the context of AI.
• Met with colleagues to discuss our approach to running an experimental Generative AI forum, focused on Microsoft Copilot. Whilst I think that the technology has many problems, I’m interested in how our staff can use it in interesting ways. The focus will be on ‘15% solutions’ as opposed to transformational change.
• Took part in our monthly operational risk review meeting.
• Had the quarterly meeting with our account manager from our technology advisory firm.
• Had a ‘random coffee’ with a colleague who has recently joined the company, her first time working at a financial services firm. It was fascinating to hear about her career journey so far and to explain a bit how I understand a typical investment bank works.
• Met with an ex-colleague and heard about his new role at a consultancy firm.
• Had a catch-up with a friend who used to work in our team. Since she left we’ve kept a regular diary date that often gets moved around, but we eventually find time to meet up. It’s always lovely to find out what’s been happening with her.
• Had a video call with another ex-colleague to talk through what she’d been doing since she left us and the potential next steps in her career. It was so lovely to have a check-in.
• Learned that I take for granted how easy it is to find and attend a meetup in the western world. In other countries, people can be nervous about going to events; they need to make sure that they are the right kind of events and their attendance won’t get them into trouble down the line.
• Had an evening out at the local tennis and squash club for a charity Rock and Roll Bingo evening in aid of Teenage Cancer Trust and Sarcoma UK. It’s a simple concept, with everyone getting bingo cards with songs on them instead of numbers, crossing them off as the songs are played. A fun night.
• Had an impromptu drink at The Electric Bar at The Ned. I haven’t quite got my head around how The Ned operates, with its centrally located musicians and various bars and restaurants scattered around a gigantic room. We turned up early enough to get a nice table to ourselves and enjoyed a couple of drinks and snacks.
  

• For the first time in what felt like forever, we had friends over for dinner at our house. We are well out of practice due to the pandemic and busy, structured weekends (my brother often jokes “Where is it you live now?”), but have resolved to try and entertain a bit more.
• My eldest son passed his driving test on his first try. I’m so pleased for him. He was more than ready and I’m glad it all went well. We’ve now moved into a different phase of worrying about him as he’s off driving himself here, there and everywhere. The change to our car insurance was a surprisingly low £200 which was an unexpected surprise.
  

Media

Articles

• Back in January I wrote about Matt Mullenweg that “I use loads of his products — WordPress, Jetpack, Pocket Casts — and I’m so pleased that he’s successful. He seems like one of the good guys with a good philosophy.” Reading blog posts like this one over the past week, I really hope that my words remain true.¹ I remember thinking about the words as I wrote them as so many people have let me (us?) down over the years.
  

Video

• Continued enjoying Kaos on Netflix. Disappointed to hear that they have already cancelled the show only a few weeks after season one was released.
  

Books

• Continued reading Taming Silicon Valley: How to Protect Our Jobs, Safety, and Society in the Age of AI by Gary Marcus, ahead of my presentation on Generative AI to one of our company boards on Monday.
  

Next week: Recovering from my run, giving my AI presentation to a board of directors, and relaxing at a couple of Album Clubs.

1. There’s a summary of the situation at CNBC. ↩

A double-helping of weeknotes. I spent the last two weeks in New York City, working with our team to open our new office in Midtown Manhattan. This was the culmination of years of work that started with the search for new premises as we approached the end of our previous lease. On my first day in New York, I had a one-day handover with another colleague from London who had been leading our team on the technical fit-out, working on the physical and logical setup of the equipment. They had made massive progress, with the office at that point already meeting the minimum standard that we required to allow our colleagues to come in and work.

It was wonderful to see our planning and preparation pay off in such a big way. On 1 October, our New York team walked through the door for the first time, found their desks and set themselves up for work. It was seamless. We’ve moved from an office that we shared with another company that had inadequate space and technology, to one that gives our staff a wide variety of types of places to work depending on what they are doing and who they happen to be working with. The day had a ribbon-cutting, breakfast and drinks, a team lunch and an evening cocktail reception.

There are still many things on the snagging list, but all of the major items were dealt with. It feels great to get one of this year’s big projects over the finish line. My focus will now turn back to another of our offices that is undergoing major renovation. By mid-November this project should be largely complete as well. I have my fingers crossed that it will be just as smooth.

This was a week in which I:

• Started to feel ill before I left for my flight to the US. I had been boasting about how many people I had hugged and kissed at my parents’ 50th anniversary without catching anything, but spoke too soon. A scratchy throat developed into a full-on head cold, which required tissues, Tylenol¹ and lozenges. I tried to ignore it, going for a run in Central Park on Monday morning, but it made the first few days exhausting.
• Stayed at the CitizenM hotel just off of Times Square. The UN General Assembly meeting in the first week meant that hotel rooms were hard to come by and expensive, which meant that I was relegated to staying much further from the office than usual. One of the photos on their website shows the hotel being right next door to the ‘Bare Essentials gentlemans club and lounge’ and the ‘Mixed Emotions adult video store’, remnants of the Times Square of decades ago and both of which were thankfully closed. The hotel turned out to be fine, with very small but clean rooms. Upon arrival I found out that there were no ironing boards in the rooms, but I was “welcome to use Ironing Heaven on the second floor.” I found that Ironing Heaven seemed to be overplaying its hand a bit when it turned out to be a small room with a single ironing board. The rooftop bar was lovely, with great illuminated views over New York.
• Spent Sunday working in the office, getting a bunch of things off of my plate in the knowledge that the following week would be difficult to get any focused work done with so many staff and visitors in the office for the opening.
• Tried out all of the meeting rooms in anticipation of them being used by our staff on day one. The team have done brilliantly in designing and equipping a wonderful variety of spaces for staff to use.
• Met with the building contractor and landlord’s project manager to go through our snagging list. As the week went on we refined the list down to a more manageable set of critical things in order to increase our chances of getting them done before we opened.
• Prepped for and ran the programme Steering Committee meeting.
• Drafted a narrative for the New York CEO to use as input into his opening speech. I discovered that 2024 marks the start of our fourth decade in the city, and our fourth address, after the return of our company to the US post-apartheid in 1994.
• Created a communication for our staff to help them get started with using the features of the new office, such as our Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Interviewed another candidate for the Digital Solutions Developer role in my team.
• Met with my executive partner at our industry analyst firm for a reflective conversation about my career and where I want to go.
• Discussed our plans and approach for getting a Microsoft Copilot working group up and running. We now have a small number of licences that we will deploy with the most enthusiastic members of staff that are ‘pulling’ on us to get started.
• Had the regular programme and project meetings.
• Watched half of the vice presidential debate from the Work Café at our new office. I called it a day and headed back to my hotel halfway through, catching up in the morning with what the media thought Alex Andreou on the Quiet Riot podcast.
• Attended the book launch for The Tech Coup by Marietje Schaake, hosted by Esther Dyson with Alondra Nelson. Chatting with Esther Dyson at the post-panel drinks, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look at me with such incredulity as when I casually asked her where Princeton is. (I’d heard of it, but being from the UK I had no idea.) From her dad’s Wikipedia entry:
  

In December 1952, Oppenheimer, the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, offered Dyson a lifetime appointment at the institute, “for proving me wrong”, in Oppenheimer’s words. Dyson remained at the Institute until the end of his career.

• Ate a couple of times at PS Kitchen, a good vegan restaurant a couple of blocks away from my hotel that gives all of its profits to charity. Their winter walnut soup was just the thing I needed when I was feeling under the weather. When I returned for the second evening I found a GIGANTIC fearless rat roaming around the tables outside, so I quickly opted for indoor dining.
  

• Out for dinner one evening, got randomly chatting to the mum of Brighid Fry from the band Housewife who is currently touring the UK.
• Ate at some lovely restaurants including Spicy Moon (delicious vegan Szechuan), Benoit (upscale French for a pre-go-live team dinner), Cafe Luce (lovely pasta in a cosy Italian), Salinas (delicious Spanish tapas), Simò (pizza for one), Bill’s Bar and Burger, Naya (falafel salad), Toasties (eggplant Parmesan sandwiches with wonderful marinara sauce) and the Carnegie Diner (Sunday morning waffles made with organic eggs, with fruit and granola). I didn’t starve.
  

• Enjoyed lots of morning runs around Central Park, sometimes just as far as a loop around Stephanie and Fred Shuman Running Track at the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir and other times covering a full loop of the road track. I had two good runs with my friend and colleague Paul who has offered me his place at the Royal Parks Half Marathon next week as he can no longer make it. I’ve only ever run one half marathon distance before, but I’m hoping it should be achievable.
  

• Signed up to the London-Wales-London Audax ride scheduled for the start of May next year. It will be by far the longest ride I’ve ever done in one stint. We start at 6am and have 27 hours to complete the route.
• Enjoyed a lovely stroll around Central Park with a colleague. You would think that running the whole length of the park would give you a sense of scale, but it was actually wandering around the insides of the park and stumbling across its various delights that makes you realise how big it is.
• Had a fabulous night out at Union Pool in Brooklyn to see Katie Von Schleicher. It was brilliant to finally get to see her play some of her own songs after having previously seen her as part of Julie Byrne’s band in London last year. As we had a drink in the bar, we heard music drifting in and thought that the gig had started; we stumbled into the back room and watched her and her band run through their sound check, only realising our mistake when we went to order a drink and were told that they weren’t open yet. The next two artists, Sima Cunningham and Adeline Hotel, were both launching their new albums that evening, the latter of which was produced by Katie Von Schleicher. Sima Cunningham’s drummer Dan Knishkowy morphed into the lead singer of Adeline Hotel. The net result was that the whole event gave the impression of a big musical love-in. The venue was brilliant. After the gig finished it filled up with very cool young Brooklyn hipsters, leaving me feeling a little old and out of place.
  

• Tried Sweetarts and Lemonheads again, both of which made my tongue sore.
• Managed to catch the Formula One race on my flight over, paying £18.99 for streaming from the moment I sat in my seat. It wasn’t perfect — I had to restart the stream a bunch of times — but it blows my mind that I can do this as I cross the Atlantic.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Love the concept of “employer engagement” mentioned on the WB-40 podcast. Perhaps we should measure that alongside employee engagement.
  

Articles

• I still keep coming back to, and sharing, Molly White’s blog post on Generative AI. The technology has uses, but is it worth it?
  

Video

• Went to the cinema to see the theatrical release of McCartney’s One Hand Clapping. Although we could only get seats right at the front of the theatre, it was a total joy from start to finish.

• Watched the Netflix series on wrestling promoter Vince McMahon, which started life before the sexual assault and sex trafficking allegations. The series gives an interesting history of the development of professional wrestling and ‘sports entertainment’ in the US. My brothers and I used to watch WWF wrestling on TV when we were kids; it turns out that this ‘Golden Era’ ended soon after we drifted away from it. I found the footage from the ‘Attitude’ and ‘Ruthless Aggression’ eras to be genuinely shocking, with ridiculous and highly offensive storylines. McMahon may be an excellent businessman but he seems like a dreadful person.
• Caught up with the latest couple of episodes of Slow Horses on AppleTV+. It was weird to see the last scene of episode 5 as it appears to have been filmed right outside my office.
• Re-watched Rocky V (1990) for the first time since I saw it in the cinema when it was originally released. It’s genuinely terrible.
  

Audio

• Katie von Schleicher’s Tiny Desk Concert is an absolute delight.

Web

• I love that there is a Japanese word for something we’ve talked about at work for years: Nemawashi.
  

Nemawashi (根回し) is a Japanese business informal process of laying the foundation for some proposed change or project by talking to the people concerned and gathering support and feedback before a formal announcement.

Books

• Finished reading Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer. A superbly readable book on a fascinating topic.
• Picked up Taming Silicon Valley: How to Protect Our Jobs, Safety, and Society in the Age of AI by Gary Marcus. I’ve been reading his blog posts for a while. I’m giving another talk to a Board of Directors on the topic of AI in a week’s time so I figured this would be a useful update that will help me to hone my thinking.
  

Next week: Getting over jet lag and getting re-focused on the final big project of the year.

1. I spent some time in a pharmacy looking for paracetamol. When I asked an employee for help, she said “I don’t think we have that brand”. I later learned that what we call paracetamol, the Americans know as acetaminophen. ↩

On Saturday night we had a wonderful time celebrating my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. They had hired a room in a hotel, booked a DJ and a band, and invited friends and family from all over. I spent most of the evening saying hello to people — particularly those I hadn’t seen in a very long time — and don’t think I managed to get around the whole room by the time it all wrapped up.

It got me looking back at photos of mum and dad’s 25th anniversary party. I’m trying to reconcile myself with the fact that I’m now older than they were in the pictures; they seemed so much more grown up than I feel today. On that night in 1999 we had a really fun evening which finished with a few of us heading on to a local nightclub for drinking and dancing until the early hours. I never would have imagined that 25 years later I would be celebrating my own 20th anniversary and have two children who are both taller than me already.

I know my mum and dad read these weeknotes. Love you both! Congratulations and I hope you had a wonderful evening. 😘

This was a week in which I:

• Had a visit from a Virgin Media engineer to get us back online at home. The lightning strike had done much more damage than we first thought. As well as a dead TV and Internet router, we also lost our TiVo box and had to have all of the internal wiring replaced for our cable service.
• Took delivery of a new TV. The old one was just outside of its five year warranty window. It cost about £400 to replace it with a like-for-like model, less than half of the £899 that we spent back in 2019.
• Was disappointed to hear that a candidate we were looking to onboard into my team had decided to take a different job. One of the reasons cited was that the other role is fully remote; I wonder how much of a factor that will be in our search. Back to the drawing board.
• Prepared for and ran the programme Steering Committee meeting, the first one for three weeks.
• Conducted a thorough review of the costs for one of our real estate projects.
• Reviewed costs for a construction project as part of a regular monthly valuation session, agreeing how much we should pay versus what we were being asked to pay.
• Attended an ad-hoc Architecture Governance Authority meeting, jointly presenting on our planned office environmental monitoring platform.
• Played a small part in helping get one of our new offices online, configuring two of our digital signage players to work with our 3,840 x 600 pixel monitors. The technical infrastructure team are making excellent progress, despite some of the equipment being damaged in transit.
• Took part in our information risk steering group and non-financial risk review meetings.
• Reviewed a colleague’s presentation that summarises some project work done to date and frames the next steps.
• Enjoyed an informative Learning Hour meeting on PingCastle reports and how to use them to improve an organisation’s security profile.
• Had a software demo of a SaaS platform for managing Health and Safety assessments and incidents.
• Met with a new colleague in Johannesburg to welcome him into the team and give him an overview of my function.
• Enjoyed the latest Teams Fireside Chat, this time led by Ron Pessner on the topic of Microsoft Loop. I use the product regularly, creating collaborative documents in-line in Teams chats where we need to quickly agree on some content together. Although the session wasn’t AI free, it made a lovely change that the focus was on the core features of the product and the discussion about Copilot was minimal.
• Had to wrap up warm for Saturday morning’s bike ride. It was 5°C when I set out from my house, requiring bib tights and full-finger gloves. Things started to warm up the next day just in time for my now regular Sunday run. Just as I got back into town from my long loop, my wife called to ask whether I wanted to pop out for a coffee and a pastry, which made for a lovely unexpected end to the route.
  

Media

Video

• Media consumption seemed to slow down this week, probably as a function of how busy the week was. We did manage to start and finish Beef on Netflix, a brilliant story that stems from a random road rage incident that veers off in all sorts of unexpected directions. We also started the new season of Slow Horses on AppleTV+, which continues to be excellent.
  

Books

• Just one chapter of The McCartney Legacy Volume 1: 1969-73 to go. Could this be the week I finish it?
  

Next week: Saying hello to a new face, saying goodbye to an old one, and enjoying an online Album Club.

Early on Sunday morning we had an incredible thunderstorm, with a lightning strike that fried the routers for a swathe of people in our street. It also killed at least two TVs, including ours. Thunderstorms typically don’t scare me, but when the sound hits your ears before you see the lightning, it is terrifying.

I’ve captured footage from the two closest strikes that hit us about a minute apart, each from two different angles. It’s the second one that does all the damage. Unfortunately, the camera that probably had the best view was temporarily taken offline by the second strike.

One thing the lightning did highlight is the need for us to sweep the cobwebs away from the front of our house.

The earliest I can get an appointment with an engineer from our Internet Service Provider is next Saturday. So I’m now assuming that I’m going to be in the office all week next week.

This was a week in which I:

• Suffered from jet lag following the previous week’s trip to New York. My eyes were falling out of my head on Monday and it was difficult to catch up with sleep as the week went on.
• Had the regular programme and project meetings.
• Spent a lot of the week reviewing and discussing the detailed cost breakdown of one of our projects. It’s going to be top priority for next week too.
• Met with vendors to discuss acoustic panelling, decorating and signage in one of our offices.
• Agreed how we would move forward with the proposed cost model for one of our shared spaces.
• Reviewed the draft technical architecture for the new smart environmental sensors that will be installed in one of our offices, ahead of next week’s architecture governance authority meeting.
• Continued with interviews for the role in my team. I’m hopeful that we will conclude the process next week.
• Joined the interim design meeting for the shared space in one of our offices. When we start getting into fabrics and textures and there are already half a dozen different views and opinions in the room, I tend to conserve my energy and let everyone else make the choices.
• Agreed on a solution for getting TV feeds onto the screens in a new office.
• Reviewed the pricing of Microsoft Copilot and Teams Premium. As much as I think there is way too much hype about — and inappropriate uses of — AI, there is definitely some value in the technology. We are going to look and see if we can find some of it.
• Completed our final review of our annual operational risk self-assessment.
• Caught up with our audio/visual design vendor for the first time in a few weeks.
• Had lunch with a colleague and friend who has been out of the office for an extended period. It’s great to see him and start to work with him again.
• Attended our weekly Learning Hour meeting, with our host presenting on the topic of being a drone pilot in the UK.
• Got struck in the face by a MacBook Air. A colleague and I had a one-on-one meeting; as we got up from our seats, he fumbled his laptop and it ended up skidding into my head, just above my right eye. The rim of a MacBook’s screen is sharp. It was painful — there was blood and bruising — but my pain was at least equalled by how mortified he looked.
• Am still regretting being missold two pairs of shoes six years ago. The fact that they are so uncomfortable, and were completely unused during the period of the pandemic where I worked from home, means that they are still going strong.
• Had a lovely meal out with my brothers and parents for our mum’s 70th birthday.
• Deleted my Telegram account. The news coverage of Pavel Durov’s arrest has been an education in how the platform works versus those that are end-to-end encrypted. I don’t need it in my life, so it’s time to say goodbye.
• Had another enjoyable Album Club evening, with brilliant hosting. I wasn’t keen on the album, but that’s okay.
• Added Gabriel Birnbaum’s latest album to Discogs. I’d lazily waited a few weeks to see if anyone did the hard work of adding it before I stepped in and did it myself.
• Enjoyed my first outdoor bike ride with the club for a few weeks. It was lovely to get out riding again. The weather has turned just enough so that I doubted my clothing choice for the first five minutes, but it soon warmed up once we got going. I’m going to try and keep my running going as well. I ran in the rain on Sunday and it was actually good not to be melting to death when I finished.
• Had a look at potential new carpets for the stairs in our house. The current carpet was laid almost 20 years ago and is starting to look threadbare.
  

Media

Podcasts

• WB-40’s episode on rebooting hiring came at a good time, as I’ve been interviewing for a role in my team. “Recruiting for the human skills” struck a chord with me.
  

Articles

• I had never considered that ‘estimated reading time’ could be ableist. I don’t disagree with any of the points made, but I know that for me — an able bodied reader, typically reading via one or two different ebook or ‘read later’ apps — it has been very useful to see this before diving in to read something. Maybe I’d get used to a different measure such as number of words?
• ”AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information, government trial finds”. This has often been my experience too, so I’m not surprised.
  

Video

• Finished watching Lady In The Lake. It took us three episodes to get into it; just as we started to enjoy it, the show went overboard with one crazy long dream sequence too many. I’d worked out the plot twist before the final episode and the end was quite unsatisfying.
  

Audio

• Two great songs that have popped up in various contexts this week have been Pushin’ Too Hard by The Seeds and Hangin’ On A String (Contemplating) by Loose Ends. Both gigantic earworms.
  

Web

• What’s halfway between two places?
• Lovely to find searchmysite.net, a search engine that focuses on the small, independent web.
  

Books

• Reached two-thirds of the way through The McCartney Legacy Volume 1: 1969-73.
  

Next week: A special celebration.

Holidays go too fast. But so do weekends. And regular working weeks. All of it. Everything’s getting faster with every passing year.

I spent most of this week feeling worn out. Vocalising how worn out I was (not that I needed to — I’m sure I looked tired) made me feel a little guilty. I guessed that my colleagues would be thinking “But you’ve just had a week off! How can you be tired?”, although they didn’t say it. I know that a week isn’t really sufficient to detach and unwind from work, but there’s too much going on to take more time out right now. By mid-November, all of this year’s big, time-sensitive milestones will be behind me, so I’m aiming to take some more time away from the keyboard at that point.

Our street WhatsApp Group has been incensed by the news that one of our neighbour’s cats has been shot with an air rifle. It’s the same gorgeous fellow that comes over to visit, and even sometimes makes himself at home in my office. Here he is, checking us out through our patio door, early the same day that he got shot. How could anyone do this to him?

Someone in the neighbourhood must have a clue as to who has an air rifle. Posters have gone up in nearby streets but I’m guessing that the perpetrator won’t be found.

This was a week in which I:

• Resolved to try and cut down on snacking post-holiday so that the tiny middle-aged spread that I’ve been cultivating through eating all of the thingsdoesn’t get out of hand. I’m giving myself two out of five stars for the week. Will keep trying.
• Not unrelated, decided to chance walking to my office from Euston on Monday morning. It turns out that 15°C is too warm by the end of the walk, even when it’s cloudy.
• Paid the latest irregular instalment of the ‘idiot tax’ through leaving my umbrella on the train again. I must have lost ten umbrellas in this way over the years. I realised just as I was leaving Euston station and decided to run back to try and recover it. By the time I’d got back to where I had been sitting, it had already disappeared. Given the rain forecast for later on in the week, it’s times like these that I appreciate us having an Amazon Prime account with same-day delivery. But I could have done without the reminder of how many times I’d been in this situation.
  

• Had the regular programme and project meetings.
• Caught up with all of the new emails and Teams messages from the past week.
• Wrote my section of our quarterly report to the board, and edited the rest of the document.
• Chaired the latest programme Steering Committee. What I thought was going to be a relatively quiet period is proving to be much busier, in a good way.
• Met with a working group to try and shape the remaining scope for one of our projects. The work sits at a cross-section of technology, facilities/real estate and aesthetics, which means that a wide variety of colleagues and vendors need to be brought together to scope, price and plan the work.
• Visited one of our sites which is in the middle of the mechanical and engineering phase of the work we are doing. Took some photos and shared them in a Teams post to all of the staff in our part of the organisation. I’m not sure how exciting it is for people, but it’s not every day that they will get to see their office ‘naked’ with all of the infrastructure exposed.
• Met with the vendor for the smart sensors that we are installing in one of our offices to discuss the next steps for the IT side of the setup.
• Had the final weekly construction meeting for another of our offices, which has now hit the ‘substantial completion’ milestone.
• Worked with our Infrastructure and Operations team to resolve an issue with the placement of a cabinet for the audio processing equipment in a new office.
• Agreed the scope of our plans for opening a new office. The work has been brought forward a few months but the plans have been simplified, so it shouldn’t be a problem to fit it in.
• Reviewed CVs for a role within my team and started to set up some interviews.
• Met with our Operational Risk team to continue the review our annual self-assessment.
• Booked some business travel for later this year.
• Had a brief check-in with our sister company who are also involved in an upcoming office move.
• Reported an AgilePlace defect to Planview which broke a couple of our Kanban boards. They’re making lots of aesthetic changes to the application at the moment. Despite their regular and detailed engagement with the user community, I’m not convinced that all of the changes are going in the right direction.
• Attended a What’s New in AgilePlace webinar. Their 13-Minute Thursdays is a great format which always covers a lot of ground in a short space of time.
• Moved into the main seat with our technology industry analyst vendor, giving me access to an executive partner.
• Had a great conversation about organising information and using atomic notes, collecting and connecting ideas as they come up. I’m now using Obsidian as my main note-taking and information organising app, but I know that I’m not yet taking full advantage of what’s possible.
• Enjoyed listening to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Ghosteen for the first time at the WB-40 album club. I’ve now heard a couple of Nick Cave albums through these clubs and I understand why people like his work. I’m not fully on-board yet.
• Had an opportunity to get out on my bike on Saturday morning for the first time in a few weeks, but decided to stay in due to the forecast of all-day rain. Perhaps I’d be more of an all-weather rider if I didn’t have the ability to jump on the indoor bike trainer.
  

Media

Podcasts

• AVTalk’s episode on the crash of VoePass 2283 includes an excellent explainer from Steve Giordano of the basic principles of flight, as well as stalling and icing.
• Your Undivided Attention have an excellent check-in on the state of AI. It’s 18 months since they released their talk on The A.I. Dilemma, which had a profound impact on me. My views about AI — specifically Generative AI — has become less panicked since then. But I still feel myself looking on whilst everyone races to add the technology into literally everything, without anywhere near as much thought about what the downsides might be.
• It was interesting to hear Paul Ford land on the same conclusion that I’ve read from Baldur Bjarnason in that generative AI is good for ‘translation’ tasks, moving between one ’language’ and another:
  

Paul: I can translate a plain-language statement into a big SQL query that then asks a database for something and gives me a result. I can take my language and I can say, “Can you please translate this into the language of a middle-school essay?” That is less about it being a thing that is reacting to you when you ask it questions, and more about moving from like one mental domain to another. And the reason I’m saying this is I’m starting to think about how to be more creative and thoughtful with these tools.

• Was shocked to hear that Alex Andreou has left the Oh God, What Now? podcast line-up. It was announced by Dorian Lynskey in such a casual way, a footnote to the fact that there will be a change to the line-up of an upcoming live event. I’ve listened to the podcast since the early days of Remaniacs, with the weekly shows (and odd ‘emergency’ episodes) being a wonderful balm for the Brexit madness of the times. I listened to the spin-off podcast The Bunker for a couple of years, but found that it was just too much to consume it all every week. With Naomi Smith and Ian Dunt having left already, it was only Alex, Dorian, Ros Taylor and Andrew Harrison that remained from the original crew. I’ve been slowly falling out of love with the podcast for a while and think it might be time to switch over to Quiet Riot, hosted by Naomi and Alex. I’ll see how it goes.
  

Articles

• I’ve had a lot of conversations about AI this week, triggering ideas which I might work through in a separate post. It’s interesting to read that Google are combining search indexing with a requirement to use the content for AI-generated results.
• I wonder whether Procreate’s decision to make the lack of AI a selling point will catch on?
• I’ve saved this extensive report on the Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers to read later. When I joined Mastodon I signed up to indieweb.social. I was interested in the IndieWeb as a concept and figured that there would be good, interesting local conversations. Having since learned more about the work of the administrator of the instance, Tim Chambers, I feel very lucky to have landed there.
• I still can’t believe the pickle Sonos have got themselves into.
• I love this, from an article shared with me by a friend as we discussed the inside voice that we hear (or don’t hear) as we read:
  

‘Or as American philosopher William James put it in 1890: “The attempt at introspective analysis… is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.’

Video

• We started — and then gave up on — Loot. There was just not enough of a purpose to keep watching.
• Somehow found myself watching The Many Faces of Les Dawson, a documentary from 2011. He seemed like a thoroughly great guy. I don’t think I properly appreciated him when I was a kid.
• Daley Thompson: Olympic Superstar is another excellent sporting documentary from the BBC. An incredible athlete from a difficult background with his own flaws. The t-shirt he wore after winning the decathlon at the 1984 Olympics is completely shocking when viewed through a 2024 lens.
• Brian May: The Badgers, the Farmers and Me was excellent, but left me wondering how long the new government will let the current situation continue. The solution to the spread of bovine TB looks like it has next to nothing to do with badgers, and everything to do with unreliable testing and spreading contaminated faeces all over the place.
• Finally got around to re-watching Threads (1984), a few months after I finished reading Attack Warning Red! How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War. I knew that the film is extremely bleak, but I’d forgotten just how brutally graphic it is. Watching the second part of the film on my iPad in a public place, I found myself having to switch it off as it wasn’t suitable for anyone who happened to be passing.
  

Audio

• Loved intently listening to Free’s Fire And Water played very loud as I found myself with an hour to spare near the swimming pool last week.
• A friend and I reminisced about how good Hits 6 was. I remember being on holiday in 1987 and the double cassette accompanying us everywhere.
• Found myself digging back into a Joe Cocker greatest hits album from 1992. It’s the less well-known songs that pulled me back in: Fun Time, Talking Back To The Night and his incredible version of The Box Tops’ The Letter. I really need to spend some time with his albums.
  

Web

• Fascinated to read that Santander are adding British Sign Language (BSL) interpretations of their content into their website using Signly. I had never considered that deaf people may find it difficult to read. I guess that if you’ve been deaf since birth, how would you know what a word ‘sounds’ like?
  

Books

• Continued with The McCartney Legacy Volume 1: 1969-73. I’m up to the release of Wild Life, a lovely album that I discovered relatively recently. It’s been cool to listen along to the music as I’ve been reading the book.
  

Next week: Checking in on a major project.

This week was spent on holiday in Zakynthos, Greece, with four of our oldest friends and their families. We’ve been on many brilliant holidays together over the past few years and we were excited to do it all again.

It started with an alarm at 2:45am on Saturday morning, waking us up in time for our taxi to the airport. Most of the group had managed a few hours of sleep, with one person not bothering to go to bed.

Once we got on board the plane, we shuffled our 12 seats so that the children could sit together. I ended up in the middle of a block of three seats. A woman in a purple tracksuit was one of the last people to board, making her way to the vacant seat next to me and sitting down with a bump. She lowered her table, pulled out a bottle of Budweiser and started glugging it, before letting out a mild groan and scrabbling around in the seat pocket to find the vomit bag. It was barely 6:30am. As the cabin crew wandered down the aisle to check our seatbelts they saw the beer and asked the woman to put it away. She responded with a slurred, unfocused “ok”. Shortly after, a more senior member of the cabin crew popped by to tell her that she couldn’t travel as she had consumed too much alcohol and wasn’t safe to fly. The woman refused to get off the plane and started swearing at the staff, so the police were called to remove her. Despite being at an airport where I assume police are plentiful, it took a while for three officers to reach us and get on board. It was fascinating to watch them being firm but fair with her in trying to persuade her to leave; they were empathetic but didn’t tolerate abuse. Eventually she saw that there was only going to be one way out and decided to get up and leave. We were delayed, but I was so grateful that I wouldn’t be spending the next three or four hours wondering whether I was going to be puked on.

Zakynthos was hot, with blue sunny skies for the whole week. It’s difficult to tell exactly how hot, as our different weather apps gave very different readings and we didn’t see an old school thermometer anywhere. For most of the week, Apple Weather was telling us that the warmest part of the day was about 31°C whereas BBC Weather suggested it was at least 38°C. Based on how it felt — if we sat doing nothing it felt as though we were slowly melting — I’m inclined to believe the latter.

We stayed at the Villa Ionio Beach House, a restaurant that was recently converted into a seven-bedroom villa with a pool. Situated in Vasilikos on the east of the island, it was perfect for us. The rooms were kept cool with air conditioning and the communal space by the pool never felt crowded, even when all 12 of us were out there. A restaurant and bar were a few steps below us and the beach was a few steps beyond that. We had a small supermarket ten minutes away by foot as well as many different Greek restaurants scattered all around. It was lovely to have a holiday where we didn’t need to hire a car.

Someone brought along a Soundcore 3 speaker for the trip which performed superbly. We had a constant stream of music as we sat around the pool. As well as lots of greaIt was lovely to have the time to sit and listen

On the first morning I got up early to head out with my eldest son for a 10km run. I asked Strava to plot us a route, just as I had done many times before in many different places. My understanding is that Strava routes are based on the popularity of the roads taken by runners that have been there before us, so I had no hesitation in following the directions. The confidence we felt started to evaporate as soon as the route told us to leave the road and head through a field. Halfway across the field we were met by a ditch, wide enough to require us to take a run up in order to jump it. A few kilometres later, we found ourselves blocked by a locked gate with no easy way around it.

We backtracked and tried to take a different route to get us where we wanted to go. At home this faffing around would be no problem, but I had started to struggle in the heat. When we came across our second locked gate, we decided to call it a day. But then trouble hit. For some reason I couldn’t quite work out our return route. After stopping for the fifth or sixth time to look at the map, I realised my clothes were completely soaked with sweat and I had shivers and goosebumps, which didn’t seem right given how hot it was. So we ended up heading towards the sea to try and run along the beach, taking the shortest — and surest — path home.

Across the week I got out for a few more runs, but limited them to a much more manageable 5–8km, which was more than enough in the heat.

The pool area of the villa had an outdoor feature of some glass windows that look like they have been recovered from another building, which you can see in the distance in the main photo on their website. They seemed to be problematic for the local birds, who kept flying into them. The first time it happened I was sitting on my own on the porch, tapping out some weeknotes, when there was a massive thud on the glass. I wasn’t sure whether the bird was going to live or die; it just sat there, opening and closing its beak. I tried to help it with a little water in the lid from a plastic bottle, but it wasn’t interested. After half an hour or so, it suddenly gathered itself and flew off into the trees.

We ate well, and a lot. On a couple of evenings we stayed in for some simple pasta, pitta bread, halloumi and salad but for the rest of the time we dined out for lunch, dinner and the occasional breakfast. The nearby restaurants — Ionio Beach Bar & Restaurant, Vasilikos Garden, Giovanni and Kostas Brother — were lovely and all had very similar food. Bowls of tahini, bread, baked or fried aubergine and courgettes, feta pies, feta covered in honey, baked feta, feta many other ways, Greek salads, spaghetti, more feta, plus all kinds of meat. One evening we ventured to Nikos Beach Bar, which was beautifully set in the neighbouring bay, but it wasn’t worth the extortionate ten minute €50 taxi ride to get there, and another €50 to get back. Sit and Share was excellent for a cooked breakfast, with the kids enjoying chocolate-drenched pancakes. On our last night we went to Skartsofoli which was probably the best food we ate, but also the most expensive. Typically a dinner for 12 of us cost around €230 and included generous starters and main courses, lots of bottled water, a little wine, and a few other drinks too.

Before we started the trip, one of our friends pointed us at the Splid app, which proved to be brilliant. We all downloaded the app, set up a ‘group’ for our trip and added three ‘persons’, each one representing one of the families on the trip. Every time we paid for something on behalf of the group — meals out, groceries from the supermarket, sunbeds — we added it to the app, logging how much it cost (and in what currency), who benefitted from it and who paid. It kept track throughout the trip and then at the end told us how to settle up so that we had all paid the same amount in an equitable way. I think I’ll be using it for any group travel in the future. It’s incredible that it’s free.

Looking out across the sea from the villa you would always spot at least two or three activities happening at once — parasailing, riding on a banana boat or ‘bouncy sea sofa’ thing, or riding a jet ski. They all set off from a spot ten minutes’ walk away along the beach.

I’d never seen a Flyfish before. You either sit on the inflatable parts or lie down in between them and then cling on for dear life as a boat tows you along, with the inflatable leaping into the air. Our boys thought it was amazing.

On a couple of days we booked some private trips through Nefis Travel. The first one started in the late afternoon, taking us by minibus to a beach where we left our shoes and waded out in the shallow water to a glass-bottomed boat. Zakynthos is famous for its sea turtle population and it only took a few minutes before we spotted one, coming up for air before diving down again a couple of times, before considerately swimming directly under our boat. They are indescribably beautiful to see in real life.

On the beach closest to our villa we found one or two simple wooden protection cages for the turtle nests. People seemed to be respectful of the nests and gave them a wide berth.

Our boat stopped at Marathonisi, an island full of turtles that is itself shaped like a turtle. Tourists can hop off their boats and swim in the busy water or grab a drink, ice cream or hot dog from the floating vendor boats. It felt very crowded and a little inappropriate to be so close to the nesting ground of an endangered species, particularly when the children found that the snorkelling area was filled with litter.

After a little time on the island, we got back on the boat to speed around some nearby caves, swim in the water and watch the sunset, which was beautiful. The limestone rock that makes up the cliffs around Zakynthos is stunning, with clear layers of sediment visible in every cross-section.

Later in the week we took another minibus and boat trip, this time to take in the other ‘must see’ parts of the island. Our first stop was the small and busy Northern Xigia Beach, reached by some steep steps and a slope. It is famous for the water being fed from sulphurous springs in a nearby cave which apparently are also rich with natural collagen.

Despite only having a handful of sunbeds and umbrellas, the beach was staffed by someone who radioed food and drink orders to the cafe at the top of the cliff. They then used an ingenious method to get the order down to the beach.

After an hour or so and a stop for lunch, we went on our way to find our boat.

Nearly all of the children thought that this part of the trip was their favourite. We hopped on board and then powered our way across the sea, landing with a series of massive thuds as we hopped one wave crest after another. Our captain was a skilled driver, taking the boat through ridiculous turns as we sped past rocky outcrops and coves. It was like being on a fairground ride without any rails.

We sped on to the cove containing the wreck of the Panagiotis, a ship that was beached and abandoned in a storm on 2 October 1980. People are no longer allowed onto the beach, giving the ship a little more life as a major tourist attraction. Compared to the images that I had seen online, the ship was in an advanced state of decay. Our tour guide told us that his father had worked for the coastguard at the time of the sinking and confirmed stories that the ship was carrying a vast amount of cigarettes, most of which were taken by the people that arrived first on the scene. Apparently, cigarette sales were down on the island for quite some time after the wreck took place.

The colour of the water around the coves in this area was stunning. The eroded limestone cliffs produce a fine white sand which turns the sea a brilliant blue. It was incredible to look at, and to swim in. Fish darted all around.

In the middle of the week, my fabulous wife and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary. Our August wedding date means that we’ve been making a habit of celebrating on various summer holidays over the years. It was lovely to be with our family and friends for the evening.

And just like that, it was all over so quickly. Thankfully our trip home was uneventful and didn’t require any police intervention. England seems to have suddenly turned autumnal while we’ve been away. I’m not quite ready to put the flip-flops and shorts away yet.

Next week: Back to work.

The final week of June saw increased pressure on my projects. In just a few weeks’ time, the work we have been discussing for the past half a year will get put into action. People have started to understand that it will impact them. Understandably, there are requests for even more communication; while being the right thing to do, it will add to the workload for the team.

Fears that my phone and its apps are listening to me were compounded when I got this alert from Amazon, accurately describing a big chunk of the scope of the work we are doing:

This was a week in which I:

• Had the regular programme and project meetings.
• Met with a sister company to review and agree on the proposed technical design for a set of meeting rooms that we share.
• Reviewed the draft operating model for this shared space.
• Had a separate meeting to review the financial model for building and operating this space.
• Reviewed the high-level budget for a construction project that has reached the end of a formal stage.
• Reviewed a draft request for quotes for some new office equipment.
• Attended a workshop to review and revise a set of principles for an office improvement project.
• Participated in a planning meeting to coordinate office reconfiguration activities across a diverse set of vendors.
• Reviewed a proposal from one of our landlords for work they plan to do in their part of the building and coordinated the feedback and response to the proposal from our company.
• Kicked off the vendor on-boarding process for a building contractor in one of our offices.
• Met with colleagues to discuss how their platform and tools could be used to build a capability and meet a need within our division of the company.
• Interviewed candidates for a technical role we have in our Johannesburg team.
• Enjoyed an excellent Lean Coffee session which covered a couple of very interesting, meaty topics.
• Resubscribed to Spotify. My gung-ho approach to cancelling it was a bit premature. The main users in the house don’t yet have enough regular disposable income to afford to pay for their own subscriptions and they weren’t ready to switch over to something else. My subscription didn’t lapse…but then it did, with consequences. When I went to resubscribe, my current month was still active. I was delighted to find that Spotify offered a ‘Family Basic’ plan for £17.99 a month instead of the £19.99 ‘Family Premium’ plan, which excluded audiobook listening. So I switched to it. On renewal day, I received an email to say that my credit card had expired — for some reason it had reverted to an old card as opposed to the one I’ve been using for the past few months. I logged in to update the details and found that Family Basic is no longer available to me. After spending hours in chats with the Spotify support team who told me that there was no way of moving me onto the cheaper plan, I’m now wondering whether this forced bundling is something the UK, EU or US regulators would be concerned about. It’s made me want to put some more effort into getting off of their platform, but that’s going to involve services to copy and recreate playlists on another service.
• Enjoyed a night out at Album Club, listening to a CD that made me think about what a creative time the early 1990s was, before the Britpop explosion. There were so many bands that were playing little venues, sounding quite like this:

• Went out for a drive with my son who’s hoping to pass his test this year. He’s been practicing every chance he gets and it shows.
• Had a lovely evening at a 50th birthday party with lots of old faces that I haven’t seen in years.
• Enjoyed a gloriously sunny club bike ride. Five minutes from home, I had yet another spoke break on my rear wheel. The bike shop repaired the wheel and got it back to me the same day. I had my last bike for a decade, rode over 30,000km and didn’t break a spoke once. My new bike has suffered three breaks in quick succession.
• Spent Sunday afternoon watching two football matches and the Austrian Grand Prix. I’m not quite sure where the next race is…
  

Media

Web

• To no great surprise, Vote Compass plotted me as a leftie progressive. I’ve voted Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green in the past. This year I’ve gone for the Liberal Democrats as the candidate in my constituency is the most likely person to beat their Conservative opponent. I am so excited to be saying goodbye to this government on Friday, the complete opposite of how I felt back in 2019.
  

Books

• I’ve been working my way through Troy Hunt’s Pwned, made up largely of a hand-picked selection of his blog posts, blog comments and additional commentary. I admire him very much. His work makes me wish I had a similar flag to plant that I could focus my career around as opposed to being a generalist.
  

Next week: Election.