A run of live gigs in my diary started this week with Marika Hackman playing at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The last time I saw her was back in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic was in its initial acceleration phase. The two friends who came with me to this week’s gig are the same two that accompanied me back then. It was strange to recall the underlying feeling of stress and foreboding from back then, wondering at the time whether we should even be there. It was so good to see her live again; apart from a Covers album that was released during the pandemic she has been very quiet. Her new songs sounded fantastic and her old ones gave me goosebumps, despite the whole room sweltering in sauna-level heat. Her new album will be an insta-buy.

This was a week in which I:

• Saw everyone else in the family head back to school for the start of a new year.
• Met with a vendor for another review of a draft contract that we are trying to get in place.
• Had a couple of excellent conversations about team retrospectives, specifically on whether metaphors are useful or a distraction. I came at the question from a cynical position but the feedback was overwhelmingly that metaphors help. You have to pick the right one for the audience and also think about neurodiversity.
• Met with colleagues in China as part of our programme to change the way that we manage unstructured data.
• Was given an education about data mesh architecture and how it differs from traditional approaches.
• Met with the project team planning our technology-focused town hall event in November.
• Reviewed a whole host of material that I have gathered about the future of the office, capturing the relevant content into a mind map. iThoughts is so good in that it is intuitive and frictionless, but I do wish that it could be used for real-time collaboration.
• Met with colleagues and our People and Culture team on our ‘sustainable careers’ framework. Most of us being in the same physical space for the meeting felt like old times.
• Had some excellent conversations with colleagues about how to build specific relationships within our team.
• Met with the vendor that we are working with to deliver ‘clear writing’ training to our team later this year.
• Heard about a couple of new projects that will soon be added to an already long list.
• Met with our real estate vendor who are helping us with an office move in one of our locations over the next year.
• Took part in our monthly non-financial risk review meeting.
• Gave my presentation on large language models and generative AI to our office in China. It was interesting to think about how to reframe some of the messages given that access to ChatGPT and similar tools is restricted for people living there. It was interesting to read up on China’s new laws on generative AI, whose guidance seems eminently sensible to me.
• Had some conversations following my blog post on how generative AI gets riskier as it improves. People pointed out that humans make mistakes too, so they may mess up when they create summaries or minutes of meetings. This is, of course, correct. But the instincts of a human as to what is or isn’t important, or what should be ‘left on the cutting room floor’ will be far better than a large language model that is summarising a meeting transcript. I use the screenshot below from this YouTube video to make a point — these tools don’t ‘understand’ what’s relevant and what isn’t.

• Started coming to the conclusion that despite the issues, it is less risky to use a large language model to process and ‘translate’ your own data than it is to get it to generate something new for you. This seems counterintuitive, but the real risks lie in it making things up, which is exactly what it is designed to do.
• Joined an internal webinar about a ‘hackathon’ that we run annually with Stellenbosch University, learning about how a winning team approached a data science problem.
• Had a lovely random coffee with a colleague in New York and talked about their upcoming trip to Africa.
• Turned another random coffee into a random lunch as my coffee partner and I were in the same office.
• Stumbled across a PETA demonstration against Jet2’s sale of tickets to marine parks, outside their annual general meeting on Cheapside.

• Continued to suffer from what I now think was a horsefly bite. At the start of the week, I thought about strapping my wrists to my desk to stop me from scratching it. It’s largely faded now, but gets worryingly visible whenever I exercise.

• Loved the Saturday morning cycle club ride. A lot of the usual riders were away on a cycling weekend so there were some new faces that joined the group this week. The route, already long, was extended by some HS2-related roadworks that we couldn’t navigate our way through. It was super fast and super fun. I tried getting on the trainer on Sunday morning but struggled mentally and physically to get anything decent done; my legs were tired and it was so hot.
• Went to a friend’s 50th birthday party. The birthday boy is a fellow Album Club member, so we decided a few weeks ago to buy him a vinyl box set as a treat. I was so relieved when it finally turned up the day before the party; someone had misinterpreted my post code which meant that the parcel had been on quite a journey around the country. The party was brilliant, with the weather being warm enough that people could be outside in the garden all night.
• Enjoyed a lovely random Sunday afternoon barbecue at with lots of parents of our younger son’s friends. It was great to get to know them a little bit.
• Started watching the TV series Barry after reading a review from earlier in the year. It’s exactly what we were looking for.

Next week: A gig, an Album Club and an eye operation.

Four days at work this week, but it felt like five. My mission on Sunday night/Monday morning was to get to Reading in order to pick up my eldest son and three of his friends from the festival. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a car journey where Waze has rerouted me so many times. The closer I got to Reading, the more cars joined me in a convoy to the town centre. Things ground to a half a couple of roads away from the pickup point. The wonders of modern technology were put to good use where my son could see exactly where I was stuck in traffic; it was much easier for him to walk to me than it was for me to get to him. They all had a great time. We chuckled as we dropped them off one by one at their respective houses and watched each of them shuffle, slightly broken from the raving, to their doors.

We had lots of people out of the office at work this week, but it still felt very busy. Holiday season hasn’t quite come to an end yet.

This was a week in which I:

• Completed vendor on-boarding for a technology company we are hoping to work with. We now just have the statement of work to agree.
• Did some research into the state of Generative AI and Large Language Models in China ahead of a presentation I will be giving to our office there on Monday morning.
• Met with a colleague in the Non-Financial Risk team to discuss our team’s approach to Large Language Models and Generative AI.
• Took part in the steering committee for an important cybersecurity initiative that we are involved with.
• Met with colleagues for our quarterly architecture governance meeting. Had a long discussion about the need for a bill of materials and bill of behaviours for any software product we use, and how far we are from this being a reality in the software industry.
• Spent time with my team to review all of the ‘task’ cards on our Kanban board. As well as discarding a bunch of items, we decided that our research-focused cards would be better focused as topics for future Learning Hour sessions.
• Stocked the Kanban board with a number of strategic tasks that are aligned to our team’s roadmap.
• Set up a webhook-based interface between AgilePlace and Microsoft teams to alert us when new cards are created on our Kanban board.
• Joined the monthly Architecture Community of Practice meeting.
• Fixed a defect with the world clock webpage that we display on our digital signage players in our office. For some reason, requests for the JavaScript libraries hosted on CloudFlare had started either being rejected or timing out. It was trivial to download the libraries, repackage them as part of the widget and reference them locally. It probably saves on bandwidth too.
• Took part in our monthly Lean Coffee session.
• Recorded a video pitch for how I think we can improve our regular weekly office lunch and sent it off to our head of Marketing and Communications. I’d been thinking about it for a while and decided that a long email wasn’t going to cut it.
• Ran our weekly team meeting. We have an amazing bunch of people that are not afraid to speak up and share personal things with the rest of the team.
• Met with a vendor who provide ‘team building’ activities in both London and Johannesburg. (What’s a better phrase than ‘team building’? It has such negative connotations based on what people have experienced in the past.)
• Pondered when it is best not to reply to a group email and take the high ground, and when a reply is needed to make sure that everyone is aligned.
• Met with Mark Wilson for a random coffee. WB-40 podcast host Matt Ballantine set up the coffees as an off-shoot of his 100 Coffees project, specifically for members of the podcast community. I consider Mark to be my ‘Internet twin’ given how many times we find ourselves talking about things we have in common. It was lovely to chew the fat with him.
• Hit the milestone of 5,000 ‘random coffee’ pairings for our team at work since we started the initiative in May 2020. We still have new people joining on a regular basis, typically people that have just started with us and want to get to know more of their colleagues. At some point I need to off-load the work to a system as it is still a manual process right now.
• Had a short discussion with a technology consultancy vendor on what I look for in a technology partner. A friend of mine works for the company and was keen to get input from a broad swathe of people across IT.
• Heard from a friend that he is selling his dream home that he has poured a lot of his life into over the past few years. He already knows that when his fixed rate mortgage deal ends he won’t be able to afford it, so is taking preemptive action. Given how the UK interest base rate has risen from 0.1% to 5.25% in less than two years, I wonder how many other households are in the same situation?
• Met with UK Power Networks to discuss the project to remove our house from our neighbour’s electricity connection. Hopefully they’ll be able to connect us directly to the street without digging up the full length of our driveway.
• Had a lovely brunch with my wife at Jester, a new cafe in Berkhamsted. The coffee is large and the honey and fruit granola is plentiful.
• Kicked off the new season of Learned League with four wins in a row, taking me to the top of the table, dropping to fifth when I lost the last match of the week. This is comical, given that I finished both of the past two seasons in the bottom third. I haven’t suddenly got that much smarter in a few weeks.
• Struggled to find a new TV series to watch with my wife. We’ve tried a few things but have lost interest quickly. Even the latest series of Only Murders In The Building seems a bit tedious. We’ve started watching Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland which seems to be an incredible piece of filmmaking; we weren’t looking for a documentary but it has us hooked.
• Finally watched Judy (2019). It’s not the greatest biopic that I’ve ever seen, but Renée Zellweger’s performance was superb and the ending broke me. I don’t think anyone would claim that Judy Garland has the best voice of all time, but there is something about the emotion in her performances that makes them so compelling to me. Years ago I was commuting to work, listening to Tony Bennett on Desert Island Discs, when he picked Judy Garland singing Last Night When We Were Young. I’d never heard it before; it literally stopped me dead in my tracks. It is absolutely beautiful.

• Got bitten or stung by some kind of insect on the Saturday morning club ride. I was descending a hill at the time so have no idea exactly what it was, other than that it was painful. At first I thought a stone had pinged up to my leg, but then the pain kept coming. To say it is itchy today would be a massive understatement.

Next week: More AI, the welcome live return of Marika Hackman and an online Album Club.

Back to work. My main thought when I landed at my desk on Monday morning was how lucky I am that being in front of my keyboard is my happy place. Well, at least one of my happy places, anyway. It was good to be back.

It was one of those weeks where I felt that I put my seatbelt on and rode the rollercoaster all the way to Friday afternoon. The week was filled with catching up with Teams messages, emails and meeting recordings, with lots of new meetings to go to as well. But I did enjoy it.

This was a week in which I:

• Started playing with a trial of Teams Premium. It’s a strange bundle of enhancements. The feature I am most interested in is the AI-generated summaries and suggested actions for recorded meetings. Having used it for a week, it has got me thinking deeply about the potential disillusionment ahead for these kinds of tools. The marketing hype has been so loud that there is no way that it can meet the expectations that have been created.
• Completed updates for our quarterly report to the company board.
• Chased up documentation for on-boarding an external vendor as well as the next draft of the contract.
• Attended the steering committee for a real estate programme.
• Joined a conversation about tweaks to the design of one of our office spaces.
• Met with the project team for the move of one of our offices planned for next year.
• Continued team-by-team conversations for our unstructured data management initiative.
• Attended a half-day hybrid workshop between colleagues across our company and a well-known IT consulting vendor to discuss artificial intelligence. Separately, it seems that not a week goes by without some kind of AI-focused webinar being in the diary; they rarely have anything significantly new or interesting to say.
• Reviewed our team’s approach to Microsoft software updates across our endpoint estate and agreed next steps.
• Had a number of conversations about a set of technical issues that the team have been dealing with for the past few weeks. Suggested that we go right back to where we started to see if there are different approaches to getting us to where we want to be as opposed to trying to fix a number of components of the current solution.
• Caught up on the plans for an event that our team are hosting at the end of November.
• Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour, where our development team took us through the architecture of a system that they have built.
• Had a great conversation with my team on the implicit assumptions that we make and when they can be harmful.
• Took part in a number of conversations about mental health and how someone can be going through something that is completely invisible to everyone around them.
• Had a meeting with a young man who joined us in the office for a day’s work experience. There’s nothing like talking to someone who is 17 to make you realise how long ago it was that you were in his shoes.
• Recommenced a review of my team’s Kanban board, looking at all of the tasks/features. The cleanup is going to take a few sessions but it is so worthwhile; we’ve ditched a number of tasks, have made sure we all understand the cards that are left and have decided that the ‘do some research on this new thing and decide’ cards should really be Learning Hour talks. More to come next week.
• Heard that Verizon are sunsetting the BlueJeans platform after having acquired it three years ago. BlueJeans was my first regular everyday videoconferencing tool back in 2017 but its desktop application seemed to be stuck in the past. The technology was great for bridging between modern platforms such as Teams with legacy IP-based videoconference rooms; if a company has a need for this I’m not sure what tools will do it as easily.
• Thought about how children are inadvertently brought into the workplace through people now working at home, which means that we need to watch our language in meetings.
• Met with a colleague to talk through some ‘team building’ ideas. (What’s a better phrase for ‘team building’ that doesn’t have all of the negative baggage?)
• Went to a colleague’s leaving celebration at a pub near the office, another sign of post-pandemic normality. Had a great long conversation with a colleague who humoured me as I geeked out with questions about how her day is structured and how she goes about her work. I have, and have always had, so many meetings every week and it was interesting to hear how she has very few.
• Watched Hijack on Apple TV+ as recommended by a friend. It was cheesy in places but enjoyable enough to keep me coming back for the next episode. I wonder if I’m doing something wrong with the Apple TV+ interface in that we always have to remember ourselves what the last episode was of something we are watching; there seems to be no way of just jumping back in where you left off.
• Was pleased that my eldest boy got the results he needed in his GCSEs to take on the A-Levels that he wants to do. Only one week of the school holidays to go.
• Took one for the team by picking up my son and three of his pals from Reading Festival on Sunday night/Monday morning. We didn’t make it back until 2am; it was amusing to see each of them get out of the car and shuffle towards their respective front doors, slightly broken from a couple of days of raving. They all seemed to have had a brilliant time.
• Tried to complete the deletion of all of the tweets and likes on my Twitter account, using Tweeteraser. I’ve got rid of most of the 30,000 tweets but 409 ‘ghost’ tweets remain, none of which I can see from the web interface. Deleting likes doesn’t seem to work using the tool, but I can’t see myself removing nearly 5,000 of them manually. I’ve sent an email to the support team, but given that it’s surprising that the tool works at all following the restrictions that Twitter has imposed on its API, I don’t hold out much hope.

• Had a belated anniversary dinner out with my wife at Tabure in Berkhamsted, which didn’t disappoint. The food is fantastic.
• Met up with lots of friends for a late lunch/early dinner. They were incredible hosts and it was so lovely to get together with so many friends all in one place.
• Booked some business travel for the first time in a while.

Next week: Only four days at work, with hopefully a bit more time outside of meetings to get things done.

The first ‘double helping’ of weeknotes for a very long time. This year our summer holiday started and finished on consecutive Wednesdays, which made it difficult to grab the few weekend hours that I need to be able to cobble these notes together. On reflection, this is probably a good thing as it makes more sense to cover the whole holiday in one post.

Our destination was the small Balkan country of Montenegro, part of the former Yugoslavia. With a population of only 602,000 people, it’s a relatively tiny place. The country isn’t (yet) part of the European Union but they use the Euro, a consequence of hyperinflation of their former official currency.

We travelled with our close friends, the same ones that we holidayed with last year. The journey started with a 5am taxi from home to Gatwick Airport, which despite being ‘just around the M25’, always feels like it gets further away every time I go there. We’d booked a local taxi to take the eight of the 12 of us that live in Berkhamsted as it seemed like a bargain. I felt like an idiot when it turned out that I had misheard the cost on the phone.

Each family had booked a package trip with British Airways, flying into Dubrovnik in Croatia and then being driven across the border into Montenegro. We had read that the border crossing could take up to six hours at the busiest times; thankfully we hardly had to wait at all before we got to the other side. We were staying at the all-inclusive Iberostar Herceg Novi, named after the local municipality as well as the town facing us across the bay.

The hotel itself was good. It bills itself as ‘four star’, but star ratings are often dubious and I thought this was being a little generous. One of the reasons we booked was the relatively low cost compared to neighbouring destinations; it was definitely good value for money.

The location is incredible; photos of the beautiful, mountainous landscape around where we stayed will never do it justice. We got very used to wandering up and down the stairs between the facilities and our hotel rooms. The hotel had everything you would expect, with a decent swimming pool, a ‘beach’ area with sun loungers and private area for sea swimming, a buffet restaurant, a small number of bars — including a beautifully-situated rooftop bar that was ideal for looking over the bay at night — and a coffee house. But the drinks were quite lacklustre, with odd-tasting cola, and wine dispensed through red, white and rose taps. Towards the end of the holiday we started going to the little shop located outside of the hotel to buy decent beer, with and without alcohol.

One of our first challenges was trying to get the shower to work. We could get the water flowing out of the tap into the bath, but couldn’t see how to divert it to the shower head. After both my wife and I puzzled over it for twenty minutes or so, our friend popped into see if he could work it out. But the mystery remained. The only option left was to call the front desk to see if they could get someone to come and fix it. Ten minutes later, a maintenance guy showed up. He walked into the room, saw the tap and said “Ah yes! Everyone calls about this. It’s the only one in the hotel like it.” And then he showed us how to use it. It seems that our holiday brains were not equipped for the lateral thinking that was required:

Across the week, our children didn’t spend any time in the pool, instead opting for the swimming area in the bay. We hired a paddle board for €50 a day which the kids loved playing with, ferrying each other to and from the diving platform at the far edge of the safe zone.

Everyone thought that the food at the hotel was good, although by the end of the week it felt a bit repetitive. Unlike other all-inclusive hotels that we have stayed at, there were no on-site restaurants to book alternatives to the buffet. My options were a little limited as I don’t eat meat and try to avoid fish, so most evenings I found myself having a good salad course followed by a ‘kids course’ of pizza and a few chips. The restaurant itself was quite functional and had the feeling of a brightly lit cafe.

One evening we took the taxi boat from the hotel to the town of Herceg Novi to eat in a local restaurant, the amusingly-named Konoba Feral¹. It was great to have a change of scenery. The food was really good, but it all came out too quickly — the mains appeared before we’d made much progress with our starters, which left us feeling a bit rushed.

The hotel’s evening entertainment was unwaveringly awful. Towards the end of the trip we lost hope that it would improve and stopped wandering down the steps to the beach bar to see what was on. At the swimming pool bar there were a variety of singers with guitars across the week. The best of them played towards the start of the week, but the lasting memory of the evening was a random guest getting up on stage to sing The Cranberries’ Zombie, which is my musical kryptonite even in its original form. It was traumatic.

On our first full day we took the taxi boat over to Herceg Novi. Billed as ‘the Town of 100,001 Steps’, it lived up to its reputation. A wander through the old town area mainly involved ascending and descending lots and lots of stairs. It’s a very cool place, with lots of little alleyways and shops to see as you explore.

Halfway up we came across the Church of Saint Michael the Archangel in a beautiful little square. There was a constant trickle of people going in and out of the tiny church, stepping backwards and crossing themselves as they left.

At the top of all of the stairs is the Kanli Kula Fortress, which translates from Turkish to ‘bloody tower’. It’s an interesting place which is now used as an amphitheater, with spectacular views.

Herceg Novi also introduced us to Montenegrin street food. An incredibly reasonably-priced bakery sold us some spinach, potato and onion-filled burek which tasted so good. (They looked just like these ones.) Others in our group found a street-facing serving hatch off the side of a restaurant that sold bread pockets of various meat fillings with self-serve sauces. It was also our first encounter with Moritz Eis, manufacturers of wonderful, delicious ice cream. We kept finding their shops in different places that we visited throughout our stay. Wandering around Herceg Novi was one of my highlights of the trip.

We hadn’t planned to hire cars when we were there. Getting around mainly consisted of speaking to Bobana, the representative of Petar Boats at our hotel, about trips that we could do. We booked ourselves in for a half-day private boat for a trip to the ‘Blue Cave’, which made economic sense for 12 of us, as well as trip to Kotor — which we were told was a must-see — on a large shared boat.

Our Blue Cave trip was fantastic. We quickly passed Mamula Island, a former concentration camp that is now surprisingly a luxury hotel, and powered our way towards the cave.

The cave didn’t let us down. Our skipper navigated us through the narrow entrance before hooking the boat to the cave wall. Inside it was beautiful — the water really did glow iridescent blue. We were told that it was safe to dive in the water as long as we stayed close to the boat, as lots of other boats would be coming and going. I didn’t need asking twice. Swimming in the cave was so much fun.

On our way back from the cave we entered a tunnel that was used by the Yugoslav navy to hide submarines during the Cold War. It was interesting to see, but the fumes from our boat were overpowering in the enclosed space and I’m glad we didn’t stay long.

Our second boat trip felt like a bit of a let-down compared to the fun we had on the first one. It was a very long, very hot day, and we were on a strict time schedule. After breakfast, we grabbed the taxi boat across to Herceg Novi in order to board the larger tour boat that would be our home for the day. We were told to find some seats and make sure that we kept to the same ones throughout the trip — not as comfortable as being able to move around with a breeze blowing at you. The places we stopped at were extraordinarily beautiful — the Church of Our Lady of The Rocks, Perast with its incredible number of churches for a population of just 269, and the pretty Donji Stoliv with its luxury hotel — but we were too hot, too thirsty and too worried about missing the time to get back onto the boat to explore very far.

Kotor was what we had really come to see. It’s a UNESCO world heritage site, founded in the 5th century BC and surrounded by fortifications originally built in the Middle Ages. The old town is one of narrow alleys which I thought would be like wandering around Herceg Novi. We had just under two hours to look around, but spend the first half of the allocated time trying to find somewhere that would serve us some quick street food; we didn’t want to use our whole time there sitting down for a meal. We resorted to a pizza joined staffed with gruff, grumpy people after exhausting all other options.

By the time we were done we had to start to make our way back to the boat again. The town was much, much busier than any other place we went to and I know we just scratched the surface. The gigantic staircase up into the mountains and distant mountainside chairlift gave us some of idea of what we were missing. I’d love to go back.

During our stay I was pleased to get a few runs in. Getting to the taxi boat jetty at the other side of the bay and back was about 11km, so running was a great way of offsetting the endless portions of food available throughout the day.

The weather was superb all week. On our last day, one of my friends said that a storm was due to roll in, which felt impossible given the clear blue sky. And then we saw it come over the mountains behind Herceg Novi.

Once the lightning started to strike, it seemed as though the whole population of the hotel retreated from the beach and the pool back to their rooms. I spent my time on our balcony, trying to capture some slo-mo footage of the spectacular lightning strikes.

Our journey home was eventful. We passed the time in the airport buying overpriced food and watching the England vs Australia World Cup match on our mobile phones. Our BA EuroFlyer service, provided by Avion Express (no, me neither), upgraded our family to the front of the plane. Despite the improved leg room, this may have been a poisoned chalice. The food was dreadful, with three sandwich ‘fingers’, a scone, an incredibly bizarre blue cake and some very stewed, bitter tea. I was the only one of the four of us to eat the sandwiches; that night and throughout the next day I was ill at home with what I can only assume was food poisoning.

We made great time towards Gatwick. As we descended, our captain came onto the intercom to tell us the airport had suddenly shut for emergency repairs. We circled a few times before the decision was made to divert to Stansted in order to refuel. The cabin crew were visibly distraught at the news. Once we landed, people started asking questions about whether they could get out and the head of the cabin crew said something along the lines of “due to European law, the only way you can leave is in an ambulance.” True to his word, the only people let off the aircraft was a mother and her son, the latter of which had been having a panic attack.

At this point, everyone on the plane seemed to need (a) a glass of water and (b) to use the toilet. The captain then announced that the earliest landing slot at Gatwick would be around five hours later, so we had to scramble to get in contact with our waiting taxi drivers to work out what the best plan would be. The head of the cabin crew told off one of his colleagues for being at the front of the plane when she should be at the back; she had wandered to the front as she “couldn’t stand the sound of the toilet constantly flushing.” Fortunately, the refuelling didn’t take long — the captain announced that Gatwick had given us the go-ahead to leave and we would soon be on our way again. In what seemed to be the aviation equivalent of “if you’re only driving round the corner you don’t need your seat belt”, the cabin crew didn’t walk through the plane to check everyone was ready to go and instead spent the entire take-off procedure showing each other funny videos on their phones. Stansted to Gatwick is a short journey on an A320, so it wasn’t long before we were on the ground again.

Holidaying for a week always feels quite rushed. If we had spent more time in Montenegro I would have liked to have travelled around to see more of the country, as the little we saw was unbelievably beautiful. But an all-inclusive hotel takes a lot of the stress out of a trip when travelling with children, especially when you are in a large group. I’m so grateful that we got to spend time there with our friends.

Aside from our trip, in the past two weeks I also:

• Was shocked to learn of the passing of yet another person that I went to school with. I know it is inevitable, but we still seem so young for so many of us to not be here anymore.
• Watched England progress through the World Cup before ultimately losing to Spain in the final. Spain were definitely the better team on the day.
• Enjoyed Album Club #150. I can’t believe we’re halfway to our next century already.
• Cleared the gutters in our back garden in an attempt to stop a small waterfall from appearing above the patio doors when we get anything more than a small rain shower. It then rained, and the problem seems to be worse. Further investigation required.
• Finally got someone to come back and look at our leaking toilet for the second time, two and a half months after the first visit. Apparently a part is definitely on order now.
• Had a visit from a Virgin Media installer to upgrade our home hub to the latest model. We’re now on a plan where we can get 1Gbps downloads. I haven’t noticed the difference with anything except upload speeds, which now exceed 100Mbps.
• Watched Right to Fight (2023), an incredible documentary about the early days of female boxing in the USA. The early pioneers of the sport were amazing in so many ways, pushing for recognition but being met with sexism and hate.
• Had a rare trip to the cinema with my wife — without the children — to watch Oppenheimer (2023). I am so glad that we opted for the IMAX screen, for the sound as much as the picture. The film is SO LOUD and shakes you in the chest, but it never felt inappropriate. It’s a masterclass in storytelling, with wonderful actors and performances throughout.

Next week: Back to work!

My lovely dad (who I know reads these weeknotes — hello dad 👋) turned 70 this week. On Saturday we headed to my aunt’s house — she also hit 70 this year — for a double birthday celebration. The weather on our drive down was atrocious with torrential storms and flooded roads, a big worry for a party that was due to take place outside. But soon after we arrived and the band started to play, the rain stopped.

We had such a lovely time. It’s wonderful to get together with lots of family and friends like this, particularly after the COVID years. As the sun went down, the party continued indoors with some impromptu microphone-free YouTube-powered karaoke. It’s going to take a couple of days for my shredded vocal chords to recover.

Our birthday present to dad is a long weekend trip for him, my two brothers and I to Berlin later in the year. After our brilliant holiday with all of our families last year, I realise how much the best gift is just being able to spend some quality time together.

This was a week in which I:

• Appeared as a panellist at an internal event, discussing large language models and generative AI. The whole event was excellent, with an impressive keynote speaker in the form of Mushambi Mutuma and a good, diverse panel.
• Continued work to on-board a vendor and get a contract in place for delivery of an interesting new capability for our firm.
• Agreed a contract with an external vendor to deliver ‘clear writing’ training to our department towards the end of the year. The content needs some customisation, but if it can be anywhere near as good as the training I attended some years ago it will be well worth the effort.
• Had a walkthrough of our software development team’s proposed strategy for delivering against one of our strategic objectives.
• Joined colleagues in meetings with individual representatives for our programme on unstructured data management.
• In response to feedback from the team in that we aren’t having as many fun, inclusive events anymore, I prepped and ran our team meeting with a couple of exercises. In the first one, each team member had one minute to try and sell a bizarre object to the rest of the attendees, before nominating who would go next. We also played a variation of the game You Think You Know Me which translated quite well to an online format.
• Watched an excellent Learning Hour session, led by a colleague who gave us an update on our CRM system and a conference that she recently attended.
• Attended a security programme steering committee in place of our CIO.
• Took part in our monthly risk review meeting.
• Had my mid-year review and completed a half-year self appraisal on the system.
• Tentatively agreed to presenting at a town hall event towards the end of the year.
• Attended a webinar on The CIO’s Evolving Role in Supporting Digital Products.
• Joined a Gartner meeting on the topic of ‘the future of the office’.
• Went for a rare dinner with some of my colleagues from work. We had such a lovely evening, with great conversation and lots of humour. We don’t do it enough.
• Had a lovely Sunday lunch out with my wife.
• Didn’t get out on my bike over the weekend, due to the rain, social commitments and being generally knackered (in that order).

Next week: A couple of weeks off work for the summer. I’m trying not to make too many mental commitments of all the things I’ll get done during this time, so that I don’t end up disappointed with myself.

Another super busy week at work, coupled with four nights out¹ in a row. The week seemed to accelerate as it went, leaving me with a feeling of not having enough time to catch up by the time we hit Friday. But it was fun.

This was a week in which I:

• Had a chat with the team about when we move our password manager rollout into ‘business as usual’ now that we have signed up 90% of our staff. We’re nearly done.
• Sat with one of our executives to talk through and answer questions about his specific workflow when using the password manager.
• Wrote a memo about the coming AI tools and what we need to do to prepare our organisation for them.
• Attended the steering committee for our real estate programme, part of which I am due to pick up and run over the next 18 months or so.
• Caught up with an external consultant who we last worked with four years ago when we remodelled our office. It was interesting to discuss what we’re thinking about, and to get his input on what other companies are doing with their offices from a technology perspective.
• Met with colleagues to continue planning for an office move in the US.
• Had a couple of meetings with an external vendor as we work towards getting a contract in place for their services.
• Gave my presentation on Large Language Models and Generative AI to our Generative AI working group. It seemed to be well-received, even by this audience who are more involved with the technology than anyone else I have presented to.
• Met with fellow panellists ahead of an online event at work on Monday to go through the kinds of topics and questions that will be asked. I’m a little nervous as I’ve never been on a panel before, but the conversation we had allayed some of my fears. Hopefully my appearance won’t be legendary for all the wrong reasons.
• Had an introductory meeting with the representatives from a technology consultancy that we are working with.
• Met with colleagues to discuss progress towards the end of year ‘town hall’ event that we are hosting.
• Spent time cleaning up the ‘drop lane’ on our Kanban board, fleshing out an amazing number of placeholder cards that I had created over the past couple of months. We continued our sessions to clean up the board and get aligned on what we’ve decided to keep.
• Attended the monthly Architecture Community of Practice meeting.
• Had our monthly team Lean Coffee session. I think we need to extend this to 90 minutes in future as we often don’t get through that many topics.
• Attended a presentation on the view of our organisation from the perspective of one of the major cloud infrastructure vendors.
• Found that our Monday all-office lunch is on hiatus for the summer, so had lunch and a chat with the team instead. It’s been a while since we got together like this.
• Had a long, impromptu meeting at the end of the day with a couple of colleagues, covering a vast array of topics about life, the universe and everything.
• Managed to drop a glass ramekin in the kitchen five minutes before I was due to be in a meeting. When dropped they seem to split into individual atoms, requiring a ‘three pass vacuum’ across a wide area to ensure that every last piece has been safely removed found.
• Enjoyed the third instalment of the WB-40 Album Club. Our host had chosen to take us back to the mid-1990s when he spent time in Russia, choosing Несчастный Случай’s (Neschastny Sluchai’s) Mein Lieber Tanz from 1995. He had kindly and painstakingly translated the lyrics to the album, which revealed it to be quite bonkers. I love an Album Club — when on earth would I ever have listened to this otherwise?

• Loved going to see Julie Byrne and Juni Habel on Wednesday night, and getting to meet Katie Von Schleicher in person.

• Had a great time at the in-person Album Club on Thursday, listening to an album that was best described as ‘experimental’. I need to give it another listen. I can’t believe that our next monthly meetup will be number 150.
• Went out for a birthday dinner with my brothers and sister-in-laws. We have such a laugh when we get together.

• Enjoyed this week’s cycling club ride. I hadn’t managed to fit much cycling in this week but felt very strong as we took on a relatively long and hilly route.
• Put my running shoes on for the first time in months, joining my wife while her usual running partner is away. Every time I run I love it, but I don’t ever seem to build it into my exercise routine as I love the bike even more.
• Took a rare family trip to the cinema to see the latest Mission: Impossible film. It was…fine. Super formulaic and forgettable, but I didn’t really expect anything else. We thought about going to see Oppenheimer but apparently cinemas are now very strict about verifying children’s ages. Our 14 year old may not have got in to a 15 and we didn’t want to take the chance.
• Did the ‘renewal dance’ with Virgin Media after our 18 month contract ended. It looks like we’re going to end up with much more stuff for slightly less than what we were paying.

Next week: Trying to get as much done as possible before a couple of weeks off.

Another week where I’ve felt exhausted for most of it. I’ve resolved to try and get some more sleep, scaling back the day so that I head up the wooden hill thirty minutes earlier than usual. The first day I tried it I immediately felt better, so I’m going to try and keep it up. Since the pandemic hit I’ve been very good at making sure I prioritise exercise as often as I can; sleep feels like the next puzzle to solve. It can be difficult now that we have teenagers in the house who, if left unchecked, will tend to a completely nocturnal lifestyle. We find ourselves picking them up at late hours or chasing them up to bed when we should already be asleep.

When I’ve been this tired in the past, I’ve found that I end up oversleeping when I should be leaping out of bed. I dismiss my alarm, think about gathering the strength to peel back the duvet and roll onto the carpet, and all of a sudden an hour has passed. It happened again on Saturday. I’d planned to go out with my usual cycling group but was never going to make it on time, so ended up in a group of three that left half an hour later. We had a no-nonsense, speedy ride around the route until being foiled by a puncture about a kilometre from the end.

This was a week in which I:

• Delighted in seeing the signup figures for our password manager rollout climb to over 90%. We now have follow-up meetings in the diary with almost everyone who has yet to sign up, or is yet to start using the software across all of their devices. By any measure, it feels like the team has made a real success of it. I had a coffee with one of my colleagues who was concerned about signing up and I think I put her fears to bed.
• Gave my final scheduled introductory presentation on Large Language Models and Generative AI. There are couple of teams that I am still yet to get booked in, but the focus now needs to shift to what comes next.
• Met with an external vendor to discuss where we are in the on-boarding and contractual agreement process.
• Had a meeting to review two of our real estate/facilities programmes and agree how we would structure the work now that we are clear on the scope.
• Met to review a compliance report and agree proposed remedial actions.
• Continued preparation for a meeting on how we manage unstructured data. Met with colleagues to agree how we will take this forward.
• Met with colleagues to discuss the global Technology town hall meeting that we are hosting in November.
• Hosted our weekly Learning Hour session. Two members of the team gave us an update on some software we are using to gather telemetry across our end-user equipment, helping us to proactively respond to potential issues instead of waiting for failures to happen.
• Had an introductory meeting with the team at Gartner as I am now taking up one of our ‘seats’ for the next year. I am hoping that their research and consultation can help me further shape the Digital Literacy initiative that I’m leading.
• Attended a Microsoft demo where they showed us the capabilities of Teams Premium and Copilot. That these are two products seems to be an accident of timing, at least with regard to the ‘meeting catch-up’ features of Teams Premium.
• Worked with my team to clean up our Kanban board, getting rid of a bunch of items that we are never likely to progress. We’re not quite done yet.
• Reviewed a short slide deck giving an update and recommendations for a change in approach for one of our teams.
• Was excited for the children at the school behind our house when a helicopter landed in their field as an end-of-term treat. Helicopters are still rare enough to be a talking point, particularly when they land a few hundred metres away from you.
• Met one of our two next door neighbours and was delighted to find out that we have a lot of common interests. They are renovating their house and have discovered that our mains electricity supply is looped via their property instead of being attached directly to the street. I can see our driveway being dug up at some point in the near future.
• Went on a family trip to the Diamond League athletics meet at the London Stadium. I’d never been to that part of London before. It has a very modern vibe with lots of modern shops and apartments but there’s still lots of construction taking place. Like many sports, I think I prefer watching it on the TV than seeing it in person. With the running, pole vault, discus, shot put, high jump and long jump all overlapping with each other it was difficult to keep track of who was where. But you can’t beat the vibe of everyone in a stadium reacting to something at the same time. If we do go again, we’ll take our own refreshments; four soft drinks were £19.60 and two hot dogs came to £18.

• Have been spending a lot of time thinking about the climate emergency. I’m seeing more and more protestors in the streets near my office as well as hearing about their impact at sporting events. On Wednesday night I caught the BBC news report on what’s happening in the northern hemisphere this summer, with record temperatures and wildfires all over the place. On my commute to work the next day I came across some Just Stop Oil protestors who were doing a slow walk in front of traffic on the A40. It takes some serious guts to put yourself at risk like this for something you believe in. Some of the passing drivers on the other side of the road shouted abuse as they passed. A driver behind the protestors nudged their legs and knocked them with their wing mirrors as they tried to squeeze past.

• With the protests in mind, opted to book train tickets for business travel to Barcelona later in the year. You can leave London just after 10am and be in Barcelona less than 12 hours later. It’ll take me longer, but it seems like the right thing to do.
• Informed the school governing board that I will be stepping down from my role at the end of the summer. I’ve been a governor for 10 years, with most of that time as either Chair or Vice Chair. We have a new Headteacher joining the school in September and it will be great for someone new to build a good working relationship with her. School governance has been a very big, rewarding part of my life over the past decade and I would like to come back to it in the future.
• Had a sad end to the week when my wife popped in to feed our neighbour’s cat but found that it couldn’t get up. After a few phone calls, we found ourselves heading to the vet where they recommended euthanasia. The cat had been fine in the morning, bouncing around as usual, so hopefully it hadn’t been in that condition for too long. It didn’t seem to be in any pain.
• Wrote a feature for the Berkhamsted Town Council newsletter on our Album Club, which is still on an unbroken run of monthly meet-ups since February 2011.
• Managed to close my eldest son’s GoHenry account now that he has a ‘proper’ bank account of his own. It seemed impossible to do this from their website so I had to chat to a human to get it done.
• Finished season 11 of Grange Hill. The 25 minute episodes have been perfect mindless TV for when I’ve just wanted to switch off from everything. I’m now at the point where I’d stopped watching the show regularly the first time around and it definitely feels as though it has passed its zenith.

Next week: Music front and centre, with two album clubs and a gig to go to, and a meal out with my brothers for their birthday.

This week felt stressful. For the first time in a long while, I cancelled my attendance at an after work in-person event as I felt that I had too much on my plate. At the weekend, my wife told me that she’d noticed that I’d been a bit snappy. It was good to reach the weekend and catch up with a couple of extra hours of sleep.

This was a week in which I:

• Worked with the team on a couple of rare production issues with one of our desktop applications. There is no substitute to going through the problems forensically, step-by-step, and writing down something that people can either challenge or agree with. Specificity of language is so important. We have a temporary fix in place for now.
• Continued coordinating the one-to-one appointments to on-board staff to our password manager. We are reaching the tail end of the initial rollout and need to turn our attention to those people that signed up to create an account but haven’t fully adopted it yet.
• Made progress with a vendor on-boarding process. Created the outline of a draft contract for the work we hope to get started with this year.
• Met with a colleague to discuss next week’s working group meeting for a project that we are running. Spent a few hours on Sunday getting some diagrams out of my head and onto something that we can use in the meeting.
• Discussed plans for technology changes to three of our internal meeting rooms. The work will simplify the technology setup as well as give a better end-user experience.
• Met with the cross-functional team working on one of our pioneering client-facing projects to check where we are and agree next steps.
• Continued work with my team on moving us towards getting a roadmap in place.
• Had the bi-monthly Information Risk Steering Group meeting.
• Hosted our weekly Learning Hour with guest speakers from our Foreign Exchange Technology team.
• Attended two Generative AI working group meetings.
• Had one-on-one meetings with a couple of members of our team that I don’t usually speak to day-to-day.
• Continued to plan the facilitation of an online team social event next week.
• At my team’s ‘standup’ meeting on Friday morning, I asked them “what is the one thing that you’re committing to finishing today?” It felt like a simple but powerful question. We’ll check in on Monday to see how we did.
• Met with our school Chair of Governors along with colleagues at HFL Education to talk about school governance in general.
• Caught up with our school’s incoming Headteacher who is due to start in September.
• Completed formal interviews for two potential school governors, one of whom is looking to come back to the board after a 20 year absence.
• Worked on end-of-term draft letters to staff and parents.
• Bowed out of the Saturday morning cycling club ride due to the threatened rainmaggeddon. I love going out with the club, but I was secretly relieved that I wouldn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn for a sixth day in a row. Despite the threat of bad weather cancelling sporting events such as the Goodwood Festival of Speed, all of the cyclists reported that their ride was dry and “not too windy”.
• Ate out at Per Tutti in Berkhamsted to celebrate our youngest boy turning 14. Delicious as always. I remember being that age and talking to my mum about how birthdays didn’t feel as magical as they did in the past.
• Got the car serviced and MOT tested. (I had to check that sentence as I assumed the ‘T’ meant test and I didn’t want to commit a ‘RAS syndrome’ error. The acronym actually stands for ‘Ministry of Transport’, a defunct government department. Who knew?)
• Dismantled an old chest of drawers that we had bought from Ikea years ago. As I took it apart I found some forgotten temporary fixes that I’d made years before. Taking the furniture apart in a structured way is almost as laborious as putting it together.
• Booked an airport taxi for our summer holiday. It made me realise that I’ve not travelled much this year. I’m fine with that.

Next week: More of the same.

A super busy week from start to finish. There are so many initiatives on the go as well as new ones starting up.

This was a week in which I:

• Gave my introductory presentation on large language models and generative AI to four more departments. It’s amazing how fast things are moving, resulting in me tweaking the presentation as I go. I guess that in a small way this is what it must feel like to take a presentation on the road to a bunch of conferences. Only three more to go over the next couple of weeks.
• Got agreement in principle for a senior colleague to sponsor a new initiative we have planned with an external vendor. Met with the vendor to discuss the status and agree next actions to move forward.
• Picked up two new initiatives relating to our physical office space which need to be quickly fleshed out.
• Co-ran a workshop on how we manage ‘unstructured data’ within our organisation. We had a fantastic turnout with lots of engagement. Now we need to start to develop some proposals.
• Reviewed the material gathered so far on a case study of how some of the work from our department had direct positive outcomes in the form of new leads with our clients.
• Set up one-on-one sessions with our support team and all staff in our London office who have not yet signed up to our password manager. We should be all done in the next couple of weeks.
• Presented at two Technology-wide culture workshops on the work that has been done so far in writing down our culture and values.
• Agreed to be a part of a panel discussion for an event being run by our company’s Data team.
• Ran our weekly Learning Hour, hosting the Business Manager for our part of the organisation as he spoke to our team about our company strategy.
• Joined our monthly risk review meeting.
• Met with colleagues to continue planning an internal event we will be hosting at the end of November.
• Took part in a workshop to understand the client on-boarding experience across our global organisation.
• Pitched a one-minute idea to our CEO about how we can make our weekly ’everyone in the office’ day more engaging. We’re planning to try it out from September.
• Updated a number of Teams, Teams chats and recurring meeting invites to reflect the new name of our department.
• Had a lovely impromptu lunch with a colleague in one of our client-facing teams.
• Enjoyed a ‘random coffee’ with an executive in our Telecoms, Media and Technology client team.
• Learned about PowerPoint Karaoke as I was looking for some online team games that we could play. It didn’t meet the brief as it is definitely not for everyone, but I am very intrigued by the idea.
• Wandered up to my son’s school for his prom. I have no idea when this concept came in here in the UK; when I was his age we might have had a school disco, but nothing like this. The kids turned up in their fabulous outfits in a variety of exotic cars, vans and trucks, getting out at the red-carpeted entrance. My son and his friends wandered in via the same route with one of them being pushed in a kitted-out wheelbarrow.
• Was delighted to bump into an old friend at the station on my morning commute. There’s always so much to catch up on and chat about. Very different to how things were 15 years ago.
• Met with a fellow school governor to discuss and hand over the school IT infrastructure work that I have been involved in.
• Said goodbye to a brilliant rider from our cycling club who is moving abroad. She was the strongest rider in our group. I’m going to miss trying in vain to keep up with her.
• Enjoyed a fabulously fast ride on Saturday morning, on a route as flat as we are likely to find around these parts. The heavens opened about 20km from the end, leaving me with water-filled shoes to carry me home. We skipped the post-ride coffee in favour of getting home to get cleaned-up.
• Had an impromptu late night chatting to Google Bard. It feels like ChatGPT without the rough edges having been dialled out of the system. It didn’t take long before it started talking about itself in a confused way, on the one hand saying that it is just a computer program and on the other saying how it felt when people were mean to it. I think this technology is over-hyped but it’s still fascinating.

• Enjoyed watching Wham! (2023). I find the band fascinating in that their songwriting and performance talents were so good and yet they — both together and individually — seemed to get dismissed as trivial pop.
• Had a lovely Sunday afternoon barbecue at my mum and dad’s house along with my brothers and their families. Food, drink, kids, banter, cricket and Formula One.

Next week: Trying to fit the work around another packed diary.

The week felt too short for the amount of things I was trying to cram in. Something had to give this weekend, so the lawns are going to go unmowed for another few days. Feeding them a couple of weeks back seems to have made no discernible difference, with the hardy weeds giving me a look of defiance every time I pass them. We may be reaching the stage where professional lawn help is required.

This was a week in which I:

• Continued with the Digital Literacy presentation roadshow on Large Language Models and Generative AI. This week I covered three more departments as well as our company’s Executive Committee. Just a few more to go before we start to move forward with next steps.
• Met with our CEO, CFO and CIO to agree a way forward for an experimental initiative, working with an external vendor.
• Met with a colleague to prepare for a workshop next week. We are rebooting an initiative that we started in 2020 and first want to check in on how things have been working since.
• Worked with my team on our objectives for the remainder of this year. Our next step is to plot them onto our roadmap.
• Took part in our quarterly Architecture Governance meeting.
• Attended the first company-wide Generative AI working group.
• Continued to spend time time helping colleagues get set up with our password manager. Next week, we’re planning to change tack slightly to try and accelerate the process.
• Met with a second potential vendor for clear writing training.
• Hosted our Head of Loan Syndication and Distribution at our weekly Learning Hour session. It was fascinating to get an insight into this part of our business.
• Helped a colleague with a difficult email, giving feedback to another team.
• Attended our monthly Architecture Community of Practice meeting.
• Bought Emily Webber’s Team Onion book. Emily has one of those websites where I just want to read all of the content.
• Reviewed the materials for, and Attended, the final school Full Governing Board meeting of the year.
• Watched my eldest boy compete in the 1500m at the English Schools Athletics Association Track and Field Championships in Birmingham. In his heat race on Friday he was tripped by another runner, but managed to get through to Saturday’s final on appeal. He was a bit disappointed with his result in the final, but it was a tough race with an extremely competitive field. We’re so proud of him.

• Rearranged my eldest son’s bedroom while he was away. He’d been asking for a major change in where everything was. We’d been putting it off as it looked as though it was going to be like Austin Powers trying to turn a car around in a corridor. In the end it turned out to be a few hours work. A nice surprise for him when he got back from the athletics.

• Enjoyed a friend’s 50th birthday party at The Lounge by Graze Life in Berkhamsted.
• Said goodbye to one of our next door neighbours who is moving house next week. He’s lived in the house since the late 1960s, so it must be a massive change for him. We’re looking forward to meeting whoever moves in.
• Had a doctor’s appointment for a random injury that doesn’t seem to be going away by itself.
• Booked the car in for a service and MOT with only a few days to spare before it runs out. I have so many ‘little jobs’ that need doing, but I struggle to get them ticked off the list when there are bigger things going on.
• Enjoyed two weekend bike rides, out early with the club on Saturday and then solo at a more civilised hour on Sunday.
• Watched Gods of Tennis on BBC iPlayer. Just like Gods of Snooker before it, this is an absolutely superb series. The first episode, on Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe, was unexpectedly emotional. What incredible people.
• Was insulted by Amazon.co.uk:

Next week: Presentations and workshops.

An incredibly busy and enjoyable week. There was so much going on, but I felt as though I was in my element. On occasion it felt like a bit of an endurance test; Tuesday was a 7:30am to 8pm session at my desk, but it didn’t feel that hard. Because of the early starts and days in the office, I didn’t manage to get on my bike trainer all week. I really felt it when Saturday’s club ride rolled around.

It’s been so hot here. On Tuesday morning we had a crazy intense thunderstorm with plenty of thunder and lightning. As soon as it passed, everything got warm and muggy again. It looks like things are changing this week; we’ll still have summer but it will be a few degrees cooler.

This was a week in which I:

• Gave the presentation on Large Language Models and Generative AI six times, to seven different audiences. This is the second presentation under our Digital Literacy initiative that I’ve delivered in this way. Every session is also a rehearsal for the next one. It’s absolutely true that practice makes perfect; I feel as though I am nailing the delivery of the key messages and it seems to be landing well. One person even came along twice as they found it so engaging that they wanted to have another run-through! I’m about halfway through covering all of the teams in our part of the organisation and am starting to think about what comes next in this space.
• Have been invited to an internal working group on AI technology.
• Met with a contact from the London CTOs Meetup group who was keen to talk to other attendees from the recent AI-focused sessions.
• Continued one-on-one sessions for on-boarding colleagues onto our password manager. There are still a few weeks to go in order to get the percentage where I want it to be. I’ve updated the tools we are using to track the data so that we also get a view of those people that have signed up but are not using it yet, as they may also need some help.
• Met a colleague in Johannesburg who had heard about our Digital Literacy initiative and wanted to learn more.
• Quickly pulled together a ‘one pager’ for an initiative that we are trying to get off the ground, ahead of a meeting with a key decision maker.
• Met with a colleague that I am working with on an initiative to change how we manage ‘unstructured data’. We’re planning a kick-off session with a working group to take place in a couple of weeks.
• Discussed the work we have done to agree a minimum standard for internal interfaces.
• Spoke to a vendor in New Zealand about their ‘clear writing for busy readers’ training. We all had to take some pain on the call; 7am in Berkhamsted is 6pm in Auckland, which seemed like a good compromise. We’ve been talking about this initiative for a long time but it feels like we now have some momentum.
• Attended a full-day quarterly hybrid meeting to check in on the technology work across the whole of our division. A couple of our team members took part in a ‘fireside chat’ format discussion and did us proud.
• Ran our monthly Lean Coffee meeting.
• Represented our team at a fortnightly steering committee meeting for a security initiative.
• Ran our team meeting and ‘wins’ session.
• Caught up with a colleague in our team in New York who is back at work after having had a baby. It’s lovely to hear his anecdotes and see that his whole family are doing well.
• Had lunch with an old colleague that I worked with 15 years ago. It was so great to see him. In an hour we barely scratched the surface of all the things we wanted to talk about.
• Attended the half-termly HFL Chairs’ Strategic Information Briefing. It’s interesting to learn that there is a push to have a Governor in a ‘link role’ for digital technology, doing things such as making sure the web filtering is tested and monitored correctly.
• Had two Album Club nights to go to, back-to-back. Both featured debut albums. At the WB-40 Album Club we heard the first Sea Power record, The Decline of British Sea Power. This was followed up with the Housemartins debut, London 0 Hull 4 at the original Album Club.
• Met up with some of my oldest and greatest friends at a pub in Chertsey. Another night where it feels as though there isn’t enough time. We’ve started planning a long weekend away together for next year.
• Struggled again on Saturday’s club ride. Somehow over the past 18 months I’ve gone from being one of the first riders up the hills to bringing up the rear. I’m now trying to cut down on snacks — or ideally, eliminate them — as I know I’m a teeny bit heavier than I was. On Sunday I decided to go out for a second ride, this time solo so that I could go at my own pace. It was one of the hottest rides I’ve ever been on; by the end of it I was completely covered in salt. The route took me past the ruins of Old Gorhambury House, which I had never heard of.

Next week: The second 50th birthday party of the season and the final school governor meeting of the year.

Hot. So hot that I’ve had to give up on my 40 minute morning walk from the station to the office in favour of the tube.¹ I love getting the exercise, but I can’t face being a sweaty mess when I get to work.

On Monday I missed an ‘end of days’ level deluge in Berkhamsted which flooded the streets and shops. By the time I got back from London it had largely dried up, but the humidity made it smell and feel like Singapore in the late afternoon.

In the summer, it’s lovely to work at home in shorts and flip-flops (that nobody can see on video calls), but the lack of air conditioning can make it uncomfortable as the afternoon heats up. I’m grateful that I have a balance between the two places to work.

This was a week in which I:

• Felt like a space cadet on Monday morning, struggling to get myself into gear. I’m guessing it was from the cycling over the weekend — both days were very sweaty and I’m not sure if I managed to get all of the electrolytes back into my system. I’m not quite Roger Daltrey (in more ways than one) but I remember him writing about this in his book:

• Continued the roadshow on Large Language Models and Generative AI, presenting to two more teams as well as our CEO.
• Worked with our Compliance team to respond to an industry survey on AI.
• Met with a prospective vendor to check in on the status of a proposed piece of work. Cold-called an internal contact that is already working with them to find out more about how things have been working. They couldn’t have been more helpful. It’s so great to work for a company where people are happy to pick up the phone and assist you. Prima donnas are very hard to come by; it really makes a big difference.
• Enjoyed some more one-to-one enrolments of staff onto our password management platform. It’s such a delight when someone ‘gets it’ and becomes enthusiastic about how it will make their lives easier. Hybrid working makes scheduling and keeping these enrolment appointments much more difficult, but we’re still making good progress.
• Met with a colleague to agree the next steps for an initiative to change how we manage unstructured data. I’ve put some draft slides together for a kick-off in the next week or two.
• Spent time looking at how to move us towards a department roadmap again.
• Joined a couple of meetings to prepare for an all-day workshop next week.
• Hosted our weekly Learning Hour with a guest speaker, a colleague who is focused on building out an internal AI platform.
• Got on top of my main work to-do list. Writing down my process inspired me to plough through it, closing out old items and getting the others to where they need to be.
• Met with the school IT service provider to talk through the results of their hardware survey and agree next steps.
• Had a check-in meeting with our District School Effectiveness Adviser and our Chair of Governors.
• Attended the latest Hertfordshire Headteacher Update webinar.
• Cheered my eldest son finishing his last GCSE exam. He’s got himself a job over the summer which will be great experience for him, and also put some money in his pocket.
• Enjoyed a fast Saturday morning cycling club ride in an excellent group of ten riders. Hilly terrain where I had to work hard to keep up. One downhill was interrupted by a fallen tree. We also had a mildly terrifying moment when we found a patch of road completely covered in gravel from the recent rains, with no time to slow down or stop. I held on and hoped that I would roll straight over it.

• Had a fun Saturday night at a friend’s place, taking it in turns to play music that we love, riffing off of each others’ tunes. We’ve had these evenings on and off over the past thirty years, but these days I don’t need to cycle over to his house with a rucksack full of CDs. Like last time, I’ll try and put together the tracks we played into a post.
• Booked tickets to many, many gigs. Between how and the end of September I’m going to see Julie Byrne (including Katie Von Schleicher), PJ Harvey, Grant Lee Phillips, Marika Hackman and the Smoke Fairies. I seem to spend my all of my pocket money on gig tickets and physical music at the moment. And I love it.

Next week: A week of early morning meetings, and — count them — two album club evenings.

A great week that seemed to cover all bases. It was great to be back in the office again for a couple of days after two weeks weeks of being at home.

This was a week in which I:

• Set up a series of meetings with the different teams in our organisation to present our primer on large language models and generative AI.
• Had an impromptu office chat with one of our CEOs about this same topic as Monday came to a close. I shared my small write-up on trying to understand how ChatGPT works which he then passed on, which ultimately resulted in some more conversations and connections later in the week with people I wouldn’t usually have spoken to. Working out loud and sharing definitely brings rewards — as does going to the office and taking the time to have a random conversation.
• Spent time in a couple of meetings talking about the work we are doing for a new product to help provide insights to and for our clients. Doing things for the first time brings a new set of challenges and things to think about.
• Met to discuss an initiative we are trying to get off the ground with an external vendor.
• Used a Microsoft Loop component shared in a Teams chat channel to gather information from across the department in response to a request from Compliance. The technology is useful and impressive, but not many people seem to know about it. It helped to be able to pin the component to the chat and see updates in real time without having to navigate off to another application or browser tab.
• Continued one-to-one on-boarding sessions for our password manager. We’re making steady progress every day. I really enjoy the teaching and learning aspect of this work. It’s fascinating to see what parts of our internal marketing campaign had landed and what had passed people by. Made a mental note to book some contingency time in as some of the meetings overran.
• As a counterpoint, had some feedback that the internal marketing campaign has been very ‘aggressive’. I was pleased that it had been noticed. We’ll tone it down once we reach a critical mass of people that have been on-boarded.
• Prepped for and attended an all-day culture workshop for our IT division, a virtual version of an in-person session that took place in South Africa earlier in the year. There is a lot of value in getting people together, even if it’s online. It was useful to reflect on the difference that one or two colleagues make when we have hybrid events, making a deliberate effort to empathise with attendees online and bridge the gap between those people in the room and those of us dialled in remotely. The 7:30am start took its toll later in the week.
• Met with colleagues to discuss the clear writing course for our team that I have been trying to get off the ground for many months. It feels like we’re getting some momentum around this now.
• Received the final version of a video interview with our Chief Information Security Officer, with manually-edited subtitles now burned in correctly. We’ve added it to the carousel of information displayed on our main digital signage screen in our collaboration space.
• Caught up with a colleague who had raised a request with our team a few months ago. It was useful to show him ‘into the kitchen’ to see where it is on the backlog and give context to all of the other things that have taken priority.
• Enjoyed an internal presentation of a case study on how we go about doing service design within our company.
• Attended the latest Thoughtworks Technology Radar webinar. It’s useful to spend an hour every few months geeking out on the latest tools, techniques, platforms, languages and frameworks.
• Joined this month’s Teams Fireside Chat with Adam Curry and Kevin Peters of Microsoft. It was interesting to hear about the what the differences will be between Teams Premium and Copilot when working with meeting summaries.
• Met with some colleagues to talk about our personal information workflows. I’ve recently written mine up. It was interesting to hear such a broad range of approaches, from someone who gets by just with OneNote and ToDo, to someone who uses so many tools that they think their whole setup is now working against them. I’m still thinking that it is less about the tools and more about the practices of looking at them on a regular basis. The meeting was set up over Christmas but had been bumped through the calendar a number of times as other things cropped up.
• Enjoyed a lovely all-team meeting where we focused on checking how people are doing. We don’t do this nearly as often as we did during the pandemic and need to remember to do it more.
• Completed all of my mandatory online training courses and attestations for the year. We were assigned them at the start of the week and are given months to complete them, but Friday afternoon seemed as good a time as any to smash through them all so I never need to think about them again.
• Attended a mandatory training session on our gifts and entertainment process.
• Had a plumber come to try and fix two of the three toilets in our house. One of them had a leaking flexible connector and the other has a leak from the flush mechanism. Of course, only one could be fixed and we’re now on hold, waiting to hear when the correct part has been received for the other one.
• Had an extremely hot cycling club ride on Saturday morning, despite our early start. Most of us usually only take one bottle of water with me on a club ride, but quite a few of us ran out before we got to the end. Next Saturday looks even warmer. Despite Strava telling me that I’m getting fitter, I feel like I’m falling a bit behind most of the other riders in our usual group. I probably need to work on my nutrition in addition to the indoor and outdoor rides.
• Popped to my mum and dad’s house to fix their Wi-Fi. They’ve recently had super fast fibre broadband installed, but only seemed to get decent speeds when sitting close to the router. It took next to no time to put in a Ubiquiti Amplifi HD mesh system which has increased both the speed and coverage. I have Ubiquiti components in my own house; they are rare technology products in that they seem to be so much better than when I first bought them thanks to the various firmware updates over time.

• Enjoyed a friend’s 50th birthday celebration at her house. Barbecued burgers, a night of karaoke and lots of old friends.
• Said a very early morning goodbye to our youngest boy who has headed off on a school trip to Belgium. The children his age missed out on events like this due to the pandemic, so the school are making an extra effort to do something for them.
• Continued watching Poker Face, Natasha Lyonne’s latest TV series. It’s fun in places — enough to keep us watching — but there’s something about the fact that there is very little jeopardy for the main character that makes us wonder whether to give up on it. The series is heavily styled on 1970s TV murder mysteries, which is fun to begin with, but I can’t help wonder whether there is a reason that these fell out of fashion.
• Have fallen down a gigantic Kinks rabbit hole. I’ve been listening to a lot of Lola Vs Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, from 1970, which gets better every time I hear it. The strength of the songs reveal themselves over time. When I get in this zone with new music (new to me at least) I always find myself obsessively looking up cover versions on YouTube and am rarely disappointed.

Next week: The final week of our eldest boy’s GCSEs; we have our fingers firmly crossed.

For the second week in a row I unexpectedly found myself at home every day. Very early morning meetings coupled with a train strike put paid to any ideas of heading into London. It’s been good to be at home but I’m looking forward to going into the office again.

The boys have been off school for the half-term holiday. Our eldest son is midway through his exams, with two weeks to go before he gets to have eleven weeks of summer holidays. The lucky thing.

This was a week in which I:

• Completed a final review of a draft lean business case for an important piece of work we are looking to do with an external vendor. We met with the vendor at the end of the week for an update on where we are.
• Watched a playback of an important internal product that our team have been working on.
• Attended a town hall meeting for our global IT division. It reminded me again of how difficult hybrid events are, but that this is now what we’ve come to expect. Encountered keynote speaker Bruce Whitfield for the first time; he’s very well-known in South Africa but was completely new to me.
• Joined a meeting to start to plan for the equivalent town hall meeting to be held at the end of the year. Our department will be ‘hosting’ the event, so it’s up to us to plan the format and content.
• Went to a briefing on an all-day online culture workshop due to take place next week. I have a very small part to play in presenting on the day.
• Attended a workshop on The Art of Storytelling. I’m not a seasoned presenter, so deliberately following a story arc seems like a level up from where I am now.
• Joined a workshop to start to discuss our organisational design across our technology division.
• Attended the monthly Architecture Community of Practice meeting.
• Had our monthly departmental risk review meeting.
• Met with colleagues to discuss an upcoming move for one of our offices.
• Ran our monthly Lean Coffee session. Found myself getting the hang of InVision Freehand.
• Had a lovely catch-up with a colleague that runs our API practice.
• Spent time trying to understand my personal information workflow. Just the act of writing it down has helped me to tweak things a little. I’ve now started to annotate where the pain points are so that I can look to improve and simplify it. There are little tweaks around the edges; I managed to manually remove all of my spurious tags in Remember The Milk that had been hanging around in the tool unused for about a decade.
• Hosted the first round of a new Album Club group that I’ve found myself in. Being the first ever comes with a little bit of pressure in that I didn’t want to put everyone off. I treated them all to Siren by Roxy Music. It blew all of our minds that the album is 48 years old.

• Decided to deal with the problem of my home office TV being unreadable unless I’m sitting with the blinds down, cave-like. Bought a new heavy-duty cantilever bracket and fitted it at the weekend. Like all my DIY projects, there was a little bit of drama, and the bracket doesn’t seem to be level to the naked eye despite the spirit level telling me that everything is fine. But the problem I started with is solved. I’ll make some minor adjustments when I’m at home this week.

• Bowed out of the Saturday cycling club ride in order to cycle to Oxford and back. My eldest son was competing in a race there, so this was a good way of combining a longer distance with seeing him compete. It’s the longest — and hottest — ride I’ve done for a while, so I was feeling a little jaded for the rest of the weekend.

• Enjoyed — I think? — the finale of Succession. What horrible people. But what compelling viewing.

Next week: Back to a regular schedule again.

My plans to go into the office this week were hampered when I caught a cold. I sounded worse than I felt — I was in full Barry White mode — but a quick straw poll of friends informed me that heading into work is a no-no in this post-pandemic world.

It’s taken me a while, but recently I’ve been enjoying a mix of working from the office and working from home. Two or three days seems to be the sweet spot for me.

This was a week in which I:

• Finished the first version of a presentation on large language models and generative AI. By the end of the week my boss and I had delivered it three times to various groups of people, refining the message as we went. It seems to be landing well.
• Continued work on getting more of our colleagues signed up to our password manager. Colleagues in the deskside support team covered the one-on-one sessions that I had scheduled for the week as I couldn’t be in the office. Getting people set up remotely is just too difficult, with the mixture of devices that they have to use.
• Completed the setup of single sign-on for our digital signage platform.
• Had a couple of conversations about the architecture of interfaces that we have built with upstream systems and what we need to do to improve them.
• Represented our team at the steering committee for a Group-level cybersecurity programme as well as the lower-level working group later in the week.
• Met with a consultancy that we work with to discuss how we can upskill our department in the art of storytelling.
• Attended an online internal People and Culture-hosted summit.
• Had a brief pre-meeting with colleagues that are running an organisational design workshop next week.
• Met with a researcher who is organising a follow-up to the London CTOs chat on Leveraging GenerativeAI (including ChatGPT) in Business and Organisations.
• Enjoyed a Random Coffee with a colleague I hadn’t spoken to in some time.
• Joined an online Microsoft event entitled Optimising the Employee Experience in the Age of AI. The speakers, Bruce Daisley and Alexia Cambon, were both engaging and interesting. I keyed in a question about the role Microsoft should be playing with regard to the negative aspects of these new AI tools, but it didn’t get picked up.
• Briefly joined a meetup for people who are taking the Center for Humane Technology’s course on the Foundations of Humane Technology. I signed up to this a few weeks ago but haven’t managed to start it yet. The meetup was very welcoming but not quite what I thought it would be; it felt a bit like a therapy group.
• Spent some time thinking about my personal workflow and the apps I use. I started to draw it out and can already see why it feels like there is so much friction. I’m not quite done with the ‘as is’ diagram yet; once I have it down I’ll start to look at how I can simplify things.

• Attended our school Full Governing Board meeting, the first with our new interim headteacher. We sadly said goodbye to another governor, a colleague from the local community that we recruited through a letter drop, who has been with us for many years.
• Had a checkup at the dentist. No need to go back until early 2024!
• Failed to finish my first difficult workout of the week. It’s such a strange thing when this happens; I’m determined not to give up, but then suddenly find that I’ve stopped. I used up the rest of the time with an easier workout.

• Found myself with a broken spoke 10km into the Saturday cycling club ride. Nobody likes to be the guy that holds everyone else up and I figured the problem might be terminal, so I told the group to carry on without me. I managed to secure the spoke around a couple of the other ones so that it wasn’t rattling around and then figured that I’d carry on. It turned out that someone had another mechanical; I managed to catch up with the group at the top of Bison Hill. It is a beautiful time of year to be out cycling. I popped my bike into Lovelo in town who fixed the problem in no time.
• Hoovered up all of the beech catkins and remaining piles of leaves in the garden. There’s still a bit to do to prep it so that we can enjoy sitting outside this summer.

Next week: Yet another four-day work week, and the start of another Album Club.

This week I spent four days in the office in a row, as if I was single-handedly trying to bring 2019 back into fashion. Going out after work in London is fun, but getting home just in time to go to bed and then doing it all again six hours later, not so much. It was lovely to get back to my home office on Friday.

Being in the office was useful as the week was peppered with people who needed a helping hand in getting set up with our password manager. It’s such a lovely feeling to walk away from someone’s desk after they’ve realised how much easier it will be to use the software instead of whatever they have been doing up to that point.

This was a week in which I:

• Spent most of the week in between meetings working on a presentation about large language models and generative artificial intelligence for a general audience, which I hope will help our staff to get up to speed. It still needs a bit of work, but the first run through with a group of people close to the topic has been booked in for Monday.
• Continued conversations about the team that I run and where our focus lies. It feels like we need to increase the amount of time we are spending on the ‘portfolio management’ part of what we do, but it’s difficult to see how we can reduce the effort in other things.
• Drafted some rough criteria for when a piece of work should have some involvement from my team.
• Set up a tracking spreadsheet for all of our staff and where they are in the process of getting set up with our chosen corporate password manager. Recruited our Helpdesk team to join me in tackling the remaining staff one by one.
• Sat with three members of staff to get them up and running with the password manager, and lined up some more appointments for next week.
• Attended the formal Governance Committee for one of our regional entities to give a brief IT update.
• Reviewed the recommendation to procure some IT services.
• Caught up with one of my colleagues to review the ‘brands, products and objectives’ for the function that they run.
• Briefly tried out Google Bard. The interface is interesting when compared with GPT-4 in that all of the response text appears at once. I’m not sure if I prefer the text to slowly appear as if it is being typed, or I am just used to it. The quality of the responses didn’t seem to be as good, so haven’t yet gone back.
• Attended our Diversity and Inclusion forum.
• Enjoyed a Learning Hour talk from a colleague in our Finance team on Why Banks Fail. We have quite a few guests speakers lined up in the coming weeks which is quite exciting.
• Had a few conversations which got me wondering whether someone’s viewpoints and values of cultural issues depend on the time horizon that they think about and whether their concerns go beyond the span of their own lifetime.
• Joined the first part of TechSmith’s Level Up, but left soon after when I figured I would be able to watch the key presentations at a later date. Their products are great and I think we could be doing a lot more to get better use out of them as part of our Digital Literacy initiative.
• Wandered along to Interesting, a couple of hours with nine splendid presentations on various topics. It was lovely to bump into Paul again; we carried on with our chat all the way back to Berkhamsted. I also said “hi” to Alice as an admirer of her blog, and thanked her for recommending it in her weeknotes. It’s lovely to go to something so random. Stef Posavec’s name was familiar; a quick search of my own blog revealed that I’d taken one of her evening classes at The Guardian back in 2018. (Thank you, external brain!) Hilary Nightingale’s talk on the shopping lists that she has found and collected over the years made me chuckle. Sarah Drummond’s talk about the Don’t Say Gay film she is making, all about Section 28 (a series of laws across Britain that prohibited the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by local authorities), got me thinking about how things can fade into obscurity if people don’t keep them alive in our collective consciousness. And Jeffre Jackson’s talk about misophonia was superb. I always feel like a bit of an outsider at these events as everyone seems to know everyone else, but I’m not sure how true that is.

• Caught up with our school’s IT provider and our Office Manager to talk through where we are with our various IT infrastructure projects.
• Reviewed material for next week’s Full Governing Board meeting. Created a version of the budget that allows us to compare the figures to our year-end actual spend figures for the same categories.
• Met up for a drink with a raft of colleagues that I first met when I started work in 1999. One of the group now lives in Australia and is the catalyst for getting everyone together when he’s back here. They are lovely people and it was great to see them again. I was so lucky to start my career in that team.
• Bought and set up another pi-hole as a secondary DNS server. I previously had my router pointing to a single pi-hole for its primary DNS and to OpenDNS for secondary, in order to avoid my whole family shouting at me if the pi-hole went down. But some of the clients on the network seemed to always query OpenDNS, so the advert blocking wasn’t as comprehensive as it should be. Adding a second pi-hole solves the problem. For now, they are configured completely independently and are both running the default block list. But the pi-hole remote app allows me to see a consolidated set of data.

• Finally took delivery of a mini hard drive interface that I ordered from Amazon US over a month ago which enabled me to wipe two more old hard disks.
• After almost a week off of my bike, the Saturday club ride was brilliant. It was a chilly start but soon warmed up; I’m going to have to take the plunge and ditch my full finger gloves for next week. We covered some very different territory from our usual roads. I had my first puncture in a while and realised that the time to try to learn how to use my CO2 pump isn’t when I have 11 other cyclists waiting for me to get going again.

• Finished watching series two of Slow Horses. AppleTV+ does have some excellent shows at the moment.

Next week: Presenting about AI, a school governor meeting, and meeting an old friend.

Another four-day week that felt like five. For some reason — or multiple, I’m not sure — I’ve been sleeping badly again. It feels as though there’s a lot going on.

Things have started to warm up so we decided to make the switch to the summer duvet. I think we’ve called the switchover point just about right. I can’t believe that for so many years we just had one duvet that we used all year round, waking up late on a summer weekend feeling like two strips of beef jerky in a desert cowboy’s saddlebag.

Our eldest son finished his last day of school this week, with his exams starting in earnest from Monday. We have our fingers crossed for him. In five weeks’ time he’ll be all done, with a long summer stretching out ahead.

This was a week in which I:

• Realised that the feeling I have had over the past week or so since watching The A.I. Dilemma has been similar to how I felt in the second quarter of 2020 while the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing. In both cases I have had to try to concentrate on my work, which felt trivial in the context of the ever-growing threat outside the door. I don’t like to think of myself as an anxious person (does anyone?) but I’ve started to question this a little bit.
• Watched the recording of a discussion on the issues raised by The A.I. Dilemma that was hosted by the Center for Humane Technology. The concept of a multi-polar trap is useful; it feels like a good encapsulation of the arms race currently in progress. The video and the slides from the session are available.

• Discussed how getting our staff up the A.I. knowledge curve in a short space of time is an imperative for my Digital Literacy initiative and started to discuss ways that we can approach this.
• Finished the draft of the breakdown of brands, products and objectives for our team. In our fortnightly department team meeting I presented an update on the structure and function of our team, touching on these brands and products. We had an excellent discussion, with some challenging questions from colleagues that have given me things to think about.
• Attended the monthly Information Risk Steering Group meeting. There are a lot of initiatives that I am involved with or running right now that feed back into this forum.
• Ran a training session for ten colleagues on our new password manager. It was an interesting hour. Everyone came out of the session further along the journey of signing up, importing passwords, setting it up on their devices and using it in their day-to-day life, but it felt a bit chaotic with everyone getting stuck at different steps. I don’t think this format is well-suited to the topic and won’t be doing it again. There are other tacks for us to try on the journey to getting as many people on-board as possible.
• Joined the fortnightly working group meeting for a cybersecurity project.
• Attended our monthly departmental risk review meeting.
• Met with colleagues to discuss how we can move forward with training courses on clear writing for our department, personal development planning, and Microsoft Copilot.
• Made some quick updates to the list of applications and IT systems used by our part of the organisation.
• Talked about why you would want to bring the work to the people and not the people to the work.
• Enjoyed a Learning Hour session on a recent trip taken by some colleagues to the offices of one of our technology vendors in the Republic of Ireland.
• Joined Matt Ballantine for a chat as part of his 100 Coffees project. We had an hour together and covered a lot of ground.
• Attended an interesting Thoughtworks webinar hosted by Martin ter Horst and Rebecca Parsons on The State of Responsible Technology. They recently sponsored a report published by the MIT Technology Review which I’ve now added to my reading queue.
• Made the first half of this month’s Teams Fireside Chat, which always gives me some interesting insights.
• Joined an internal webinar on the South African banking sector.
• Attended a Better Value Sooner Safer Happier meetup with Mike Burrows on the topic of Between spaces, scopes and scales: What the scaling frameworks don’t tell you. The session left me feeling a bit baffled, as if my brain wasn’t competent enough to really grasp the topic properly.

• Hosted a relatively informal school governor get-together at my house to discuss roles and responsibilities for next year.
• Joined/set up a third Album Club, this time with some friends from the WB-40 podcast community. Our first online meetup is towards the end of this month and everyone is busy pondering what they will play when it’s their turn.
• Loved this week’s cycling club ride. The shorts came out, although I hedged my bets by sticking to full-finger gloves. The route was pretty flat and it felt like we smashed it.
• Signed up to go to Interesting next Wednesday evening. Looks…interesting. Alice Bartlett’s weaknotes told me about it.
• Thought that our cats were making friends with a beautiful big black cat that has been appearing at our back door. Then they had a fight and we haven’t seen it since.

Next week: Four days in the office, meeting up with old friends and attending something Interesting.

A four-day week of two distinct halves. Work felt quiet with so many people in the team out of the office. I love it when there are big chunks of empty space in the diary that I can use to get things done.

On Wednesday afternoon I joined the London CTOs group for a virtual meetup on the topic of Leveraging Generative AI (including ChatGPT) in Business and Organisations. It fascinated me that most of the conversation focused on the rate of change and the ethical considerations rather than specific business problems that were being addressed through the technology. James Conroy-Finn suggested taking a look at The A.I. Dilemma, the recent video from the Center for Humane Technology. After a long day, I settled down to watch — and afterwards couldn’t stop thinking about it. It left me in a funk that I carried into the office the next day and all the way through to Saturday when I got it out of my system.

When something starts to interest or bug me, I get the urge to work out my feelings through writing about it. Getting the words down feels like wrestling, but it’s so satisfying when it’s done; it feels as though my brain is freed-up again. Clicking the ‘post’ button this week was a big weight off — for now, at least, as I know I’m barely scratching the surface on the topic. I also figure that I will never be a writer, as getting out a blog post that takes just eight minutes to read can be a four or five hour effort spread across commutes, evenings and weekends.

This was a week in which I:

• Completed a thorough review of a lean business case for a new initiative at work.
• Spent more time with my immediate team, refining our ideas for the ‘brands and products’ that we provide to the rest of the organisation.
• Revised and refined the text for our quarterly report to the company board.
• Met with a new joiner in our team to welcome him and introduce him to my corner of the world.
• Was given a fantastic idea by our Marketing and Communications team for how we can try to drive further adoption of the new password manager that we have introduced at work.
• Attended a presentation on cloud security given to our internal Technology Architecture community. The talk got me thinking about how complex the cloud platforms have become, wondering how people can possibly keep up with all of the concepts and facilities available to them. I guess that there a need for some kind of automated ‘reconciliation’ of a cloud configuration back to a blueprint or spec. I also guess that this exists already.
• Joined a meeting to hear feedback from two senior Architecture forums that took place in the past month.
• Met with colleagues to look at the processes around our Information Asset Register and the impact or overlap to some work we have planned for this year.
• Enjoyed a Learning Hour session with our Head of Tax as our guest speaker. Getting people to talk about what they know is fascinating. We have a healthy pipeline of talks to take us to the end of May.
• Prepared for, and chaired, our school Finance, Premises and Personnel Committee meeting at school. It was great to spend time with our new interim Headteacher.
• Was very proud of my eldest son who ran a personal best of 4m02s in a 1500m track race. His time means that he is in with a good shot for representing our county at national level.

• Did some much-needed housekeeping on my wife’s laptop, upgrading the operating system and making sure that her Time Machine backups were working.
• Had a fabulous Friday night out with friends, taking full advantage of their home karaoke setup to sing songs ranging from Young MC, Omar, Billy Bragg and Elvis Presley. All bases covered.
• Met up with my family for a barbecue for my niece’s birthday. We found ourselves together on a beautiful sunny afternoon sandwiched between days of rain. Getting together for an afternoon is always too short, especially after we were spoiled by a whole week together last year.
• Started watching Silo on AppleTV+. So far, so good. I love a dystopian drama, especially at the end of a week of thinking about AI.

Next week: Another four-day week, with a busy diary again.

A strange week, with a busy start and a quiet end. The quiet was exacerbated by being in the office on a Friday with just half a dozen other people.

This year’s Freedom Day in South Africa landed on a Thursday; combined with another public holiday on Monday, most people decided to take Friday off in order to make it a very long weekend. Here in the UK we have two four-day weeks coming up which inevitably make things a little fragmented.

This was a week in which I:

• Spent time with some of our senior executives, bringing them along on the journey to getting set up with our new password manager. A couple of them had missed out on the Don’t Get Hacked presentation where I had framed the need for the tool, so I took the time to bring them up to speed. I also sat with some of them throughout the week to clarify a few points and help them optimise their setup. It’s labour intensive, but a good investment considering that the help is a pull rather than a push. I’m hoping that they will champion the tool within their teams. Adoption is creeping up globally, but not as quickly as I would like.
• Got booked in to run a workshop in a couple of weeks’ time for one of our departments to help them get up and running with the password manager.
• Fed back to my team about last week’s ‘brands, products and vision’ discussion and debated the best way to take it forward. We need to give this some focus to get it nailed down next week.
• Discussed where we are with a significant initiative that our team wants to drive forward, which may lead to a number of business opportunities.
• Had a catch-up with an external advisor on where we are with our overall strategic journey for our team.
• Reviewed the progress of a proof-of-concept for reorganising our department’s unstructured data.
• Had a Lean Coffee session with the team during our weekly Learning Hour slot.
• Joined the monthly Architecture Community of Practice meeting. Enjoyed a fascinating discussion about the problems caused by inconsistencies between periods/full-stops and commas as delimiters in currencies. Computers are hard.
• Confirmed that we definitely have foxes living under our garden building. As I sat there working I could hear them scrabbling around, at one point just below my feet. I’m pretty sure that the building has deep enough foundations — giant screws — so that it won’t be impacted by any burrowing. I quite like having them there.

• Was disproportionately elated by a free lunch at Island Poké in Bow Lane. I’d never been in before as there is always a queue. Being in the office on a Friday does have its advantages — the city is dead, so there was hardly anyone around and the poké queue was non-existent. It was the end of a long week and I couldn’t quite make up my mind about what to have. I apologised for changing my mind halfway through the order and also mentioned that I’d never been in before. The next thing I know, it was on the house. Delicious.
• Enjoyed another great Album Club night, listening to something that I would never have picked up on my own. I’m hosting the one in May which is only a week away, so I spent time at the weekend stocking up on supplies. I think I’ve chosen an album too.
• Finally got to see Aldous Harding at the Barbican after a COVID-19-related delay of a year or so. I had two tickets but my original date had pulled out, so I roped in Nick from Album Club to join me. The seats weren’t great but it didn’t matter that much; the music was absolutely class from start to finish. She is an incredible performer. Chrissie Hynde agrees. I’d bought her latest album, Warm Chris, when it came out last year but had only played it through once. Hearing the songs live I realise that I’ve been missing out.

• Enjoyed this week’s cycle club ride. We managed a great average speed despite it being a pretty hilly route.
• Finally — FINALLY! — got my home NAS drive to where I want it to be. I upgraded the hardware a few years ago as the old device went ‘end of life’. At the same time I added two more disks, going from two to four, with the intention of adding resiliency as well as ensuring that the data is encrypted. I couldn’t work out how to easily move from an old ‘legacy’ unencrypted volume to a new encrypted one, and never seemed to find enough time to dive into the problem. This week I bit the bullet and dived in. The whole process has taken days, with migrations of data between volumes, changes to the RAID array, and cleaning up and moving files that no longer make sense to keep there. I’ve also taken the time for a fresh cloud backup to Backblaze B2 which itself now has more features which can only be used on a new backup container. NAS drives are brilliant things, but they don’t feel like they are for the casual user.

Next week: A four-day week and hosting an Album Club.