Weeknotes #295 — Big bad DOMS

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

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

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

This was a week in which I:

Gave my presentation on An Introduction to Large Language Models and Generative AI to the board of directors of one of our African companies. It had been a few months since I last presented on the topic, but I found that I didn’t need to make many updates to my slides. It’s amazing how much content is still valid 18 months on from the first draft.

Met with our external legal team to review a vendor contract for some minor works that we need to finish off in one of our office spaces.

Collaborated with my colleagues to write a speech that we are due to give at a ‘town hall’-style meeting on Tuesday. We’ve seamlessly knitted our own narrative with key internal content from the past few weeks. I’m very pleased with the results. Most of the attendees will be in the room in Johannesburg, but I’m grateful to be stuck in my home office as it will allow me to read from the document instead of clutching paperwork in my hand.

Caught up with the project team for opening a new office for the first time in a while. Things will get busy again soon.

Had my first monthly meeting with our technology advisory consultancy.

Heard from two different vendors that a key person from each of their teams is leaving. Agreed an approach for how we will mitigate one of these changes for the next few weeks.

Made a couple of visits to our vacated office with a colleague to work out where our new meeting room artwork should go.

Visited a corporate furniture vendor to look at new meeting room furniture. I loved the analogy that buying a boardroom table is like a car; it comes with a basic chassis and you can upgrade various components that are factory-fitted before delivery.

Joined the first part of a follow-up workshop on sustainable careers.

Had a useful meeting with my team, primarily focused on our upcoming Microsoft Copilot trial.

Met an online friend for a chat about the vacancy in my team. It was lovely to meet them in ‘high fidelity’ after having just been talking in a Signal group for so long.

Attended the Thoughtworks Technology Radar preview. I asked a question in the Q&A about where the company had seen Generative AI deployed with a massive impact as I am increasingly skeptical about it having ‘breakout’ value, but didn’t get much of an answer.

Fixed a problem with my laptop. I had rebooted and then suddenly the desktop and Office applications on my external monitor were VERY LARGE. After tentatively exploring some simple causes for a few days I ended up going for the full driver uninstall and re-download from the Lenovo website. The fix didn’t even ask for a reboot.

Bumped into a friend and enjoyed a lovely morning commute with him. He has been a Chief Financial Officer for many different companies. I felt like an information vacuum as he answered the many questions that I bombarded him with about his current business.

Went to a special event at school with my wife and youngest son to learn about the subjects he might take for A-Levels in the Sixth Form. Just like the last time I went to this event, I was jealous of the learning adventure he has ahead of him. He’s quite sure about what he wants to do, but we made full use of the time by checking out some other subjects that were on his long list.

Had our main bathroom repainted. This now seems to need doing on a roughly annual basis as (a) some people in the house like to drain the whole tank of hot water and (b) possibly these same people are reluctant or forgetful in opening the window. As a consequence, the bathroom regularly resembles the aftermath of particularly packed, jaunty evening at the legendary Cavern Club. We probably need to get an extractor fan in there, but I’m not sure they make one powerful enough.

Enjoyed two Album Club evenings, both with albums I’d never heard before. Talk Talk are definitely on my ‘to explore’ list.

Found a couple of gems at our local Oxfam Books and Music store.

My latest haul from our local Oxfam Books and Music store

Media

Podcasts

Fascinating episode of Quiet Riot where host Naomi Smith talks to Gareth Dennis about Britain’s railways. I loved the sentiment that successive governments have “lost a diamond whilst chasing the glitter” with their focus on FM (f’ing magic) as opposed to AM (actual machines). There’s lots that I learned here, including how intensively used Britain’s railways are, which makes maintaining and fixing them more expensive as it has to be done more intensively in a shorter timeframe. Electric vehicles are important, but the ‘embodied carbon’ in their manufacture and usage versus the train means that they can’t be the only vision of the future.

The regular Thursday episode of Quiet Riot left me open-mouthed with its description of the Single Justice Procedure, and how “anyone can end up with a criminal conviction after a magistrate looks at a case for 45 seconds, behind closed doors, with no scrutiny or reasoning.” Magistrates themselves have asked for reform.

Video

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

Web

Continued to read some of the posts about Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, WP Engine and various other things in this space. There’s so much going on.

Found myself again sharing this article that explains why USB-C is a specifically-shaped connector, not a standard.

“It turns out I’m still excited about the web.” Love this.

Molly White has written about writing on your own site and then syndicating the content everywhere else, something that I’ve done for the past few years.

This Sketchplanation about ‘leading from any chair’ touched a nerve with me. I think that this is one of the keys to a mature, high performing team.

Interesting viewpoint on capitalism and gig workers.

Books

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

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