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Weeknotes #287 — Who is shooting our pets?

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

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

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

Louie at our back door. He’s as lovely as he looks.
Louie at our back door. He’s as lovely as he looks.

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

Poor Louie. Who would do something like this?
Poor Louie. Who would do something like this?

This was a week in which I:

  • Resolved to try and cut down on snacking post-holiday so that the tiny middle-aged spread that I’ve been cultivating through eating all of the thingsdoesn’t get out of hand. I’m giving myself two out of five stars for the week. Will keep trying.
  • Not unrelated, decided to chance walking to my office from Euston on Monday morning. It turns out that 15°C is too warm by the end of the walk, even when it’s cloudy.
  • Paid the latest irregular instalment of the ‘idiot tax’ through leaving my umbrella on the train again. I must have lost ten umbrellas in this way over the years. I realised just as I was leaving Euston station and decided to run back to try and recover it. By the time I’d got back to where I had been sitting, it had already disappeared. Given the rain forecast for later on in the week, it’s times like these that I appreciate us having an Amazon Prime account with same-day delivery. But I could have done without the reminder of how many times I’d been in this situation.
  • Had the regular programme and project meetings.
  • Caught up with all of the new emails and Teams messages from the past week.
  • Wrote my section of our quarterly report to the board, and edited the rest of the document.
  • Chaired the latest programme Steering Committee. What I thought was going to be a relatively quiet period is proving to be much busier, in a good way.
  • Met with a working group to try and shape the remaining scope for one of our projects. The work sits at a cross-section of technology, facilities/real estate and aesthetics, which means that a wide variety of colleagues and vendors need to be brought together to scope, price and plan the work.
  • Visited one of our sites which is in the middle of the mechanical and engineering phase of the work we are doing. Took some photos and shared them in a Teams post to all of the staff in our part of the organisation. I’m not sure how exciting it is for people, but it’s not every day that they will get to see their office ‘naked’ with all of the infrastructure exposed.
  • Met with the vendor for the smart sensors that we are installing in one of our offices to discuss the next steps for the IT side of the setup.
  • Had the final weekly construction meeting for another of our offices, which has now hit the ‘substantial completion’ milestone.
  • Worked with our Infrastructure and Operations team to resolve an issue with the placement of a cabinet for the audio processing equipment in a new office.
  • Agreed the scope of our plans for opening a new office. The work has been brought forward a few months but the plans have been simplified, so it shouldn’t be a problem to fit it in.
  • Reviewed CVs for a role within my team and started to set up some interviews.
  • Met with our Operational Risk team to continue the review our annual self-assessment.
  • Booked some business travel for later this year.
  • Had a brief check-in with our sister company who are also involved in an upcoming office move.
  • Reported an AgilePlace defect to Planview which broke a couple of our Kanban boards. They’re making lots of aesthetic changes to the application at the moment. Despite their regular and detailed engagement with the user community, I’m not convinced that all of the changes are going in the right direction.
  • Attended a What’s New in AgilePlace webinar. Their 13-Minute Thursdays is a great format which always covers a lot of ground in a short space of time.
  • Moved into the main seat with our technology industry analyst vendor, giving me access to an executive partner.
  • Had a great conversation about organising information and using atomic notes, collecting and connecting ideas as they come up. I’m now using Obsidian as my main note-taking and information organising app, but I know that I’m not yet taking full advantage of what’s possible.
  • Enjoyed listening to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Ghosteen for the first time at the WB-40 album club. I’ve now heard a couple of Nick Cave albums through these clubs and I understand why people like his work. I’m not fully on-board yet.
  • Had an opportunity to get out on my bike on Saturday morning for the first time in a few weeks, but decided to stay in due to the forecast of all-day rain. Perhaps I’d be more of an all-weather rider if I didn’t have the ability to jump on the indoor bike trainer.

Media

Podcasts

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

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

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

Articles

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

Video

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

Audio

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

Web

Books

Next week: Checking in on a major project.