Looking back, I’d forgotten that Monday was a bank holiday. It certainly didn’t feel like a four-day week. We’ve known for months that the end of an era is approaching at work, but it still isn’t clear as to what comes next. So while there is plenty to do, and everyone is getting on with their initiatives, there is also a sense of treading water until we know what direction to swim in.

This was a week in which I:

• Continued cleaning up tasks from old meeting notes, getting on top of the backlog.
• Thought about ways in which we can improve resilience in our team, despite the challenges of the wide geographic area that we cover.
• Met with our executive committee to hear about the strategy for one of our regions.
• Had an excellent meeting to talk about the ‘ways of work’ in our team, and changes we can make to try and become even more effective. It was the kind of conversation that leaves you feeling motivated and optimistic.
• Met with colleagues to debrief on how we managed an infrastructure issue that showed up this week. It feels as though there is a lot of psychological safety in our team, with all of us stepping up to take accountability for the things that we can improve.
• Met with the team involved with our document management project to discuss the actions we need to take to finish the work and move us to a steady state.
• Looked at how we respond to a request for help with a strategic initiative from one of our regional offices, and our approach to managing similar requests in the future. We have a tiny software development team and need to be careful about how we commit our time.
• Joined a leadership talk with our regional CEOs to hear about the half-year performance of their offices, followed by a delicious burrito lunch.
• Heard that an old friend and colleague, one of the most self-motivated people I’ve ever met, has written a book on AI. I’m looking forward to reading it.
• Investigated a small damp patch on my son’s bedroom ceiling. I rummaged around in the room above to see if there could be anything causing it from inside the house, but couldn’t see a thing. So I wandered out to the garden and looked up at the roof to find that our neighbour has a whole tile missing. It’s just vanished without a trace. I’m now assuming that the water is coming in there and finding its way through the crevices and walls onto our side, which is an interesting problem to solve. My leak investigation morphed into an impromptu gutter clear-out, filling a bin bag with great globs of moss. On the positive side, the lawn has started to show a few green shoots again.
• Started a paid subscription with Letterboxd. I do try and pay for the things that I use on a regular basis, and realised this was a gap. I enjoy tracking what I watch there, and seeing what my friends have been viewing. I also get a lot of laughs out of the reviews, which are often hilarious.
• Went over to my brother’s house for an impromptu barbecue, getting together with lots of our family on what might be the last very warm and sunny afternoon of the summer. They are super hosts and we had a lovely catch-up. It was a shame that not everyone could be there.
• Finally committed to a plan for my 50th birthday at the end of this year. Improbably, a very local venue was free and happy to take a booking for a party. There’s lots to arrange and finalise, but it’s great to have it to look forward to.
• Was dazzled by Pierre Gasly’s maiden pole position and Kimi Antonelli’s incredible win from 19th on the grid in the Italian Grand Prix. It seems like it would take a monumental amount of misfortune for Antonelli to miss out on the drivers’ championship from here.
  

Media

Podcasts

• The Aboard Podcast has an excellent conversation with Tricia Wang, the co-founder and CEO of the Advanced AI Society. The Society is looking at how AI can be moved to a verification model, i.e. ‘did it do what it said it did?’ Her statement that “guardrails are just suggestions to AI” hits the nail on the head for the generative AI tools we are using today.
  

Video

• Finished watching Widow’s Bay on Apple TV. I loved the combination of horror and humour, but the ending felt unsatisfying. I would definitely tune in to a second season if it comes along.
• Ted Lasso is still fun, but I’m not sure that the writers completely hit the mark in terms of women’s sport and the stereotypes in how the players are portrayed on screen.
• Watched Williams & Mansell: Red 5 (2023) after an episode of The Race podcast turned up with a movie review. Mansell was driving in F1 around the time I got into the sport. It was interesting to get a brief overview of his career and to learn about all of his drivers’ championship near-misses. I remember him winning the championship in 1992 in that beast of a car and feeling very happy that he had done it. A good, albeit straightforward, documentary with just a few talking heads. And a lot of dislike for Nelson Piquet.
• Channel 4’s exposé alleging that Reform UK knowingly took money from foreign donors is shocking, but not surprising. I think if they ever got into government, they would implode under the weight of their own hubris and idiocy, but not before they had time to wreak havoc. I love that this feature was released just before their annual conference.
• I was disappointed to be on holiday when WHAM! 10 Days in China (2026) had a limited release in cinemas. Fortunately, it has quickly made its way to BBC iPlayer. I loved it. I always, naively, took at face value the idea that they went to China to bring their music to more people, but the documentary makes it clear that it was actually a vehicle to make them more famous in the West. It worked. Looking back, I’m also amazed at how compressed the timeline is; Wham! went to Beijing in 1985, got even bigger in America, split up in 1986 and then George Michael’s solo album Faith came out in 1987.
  

Books

• I’ve been using a random book selector in Obsidian to look through my list of books that I’ve already purchased and suggest something to read. I started reading London Folk Tales by Helen East but abandoned it after the first couple of stories; they were written in such a matter-of-fact way that I couldn’t get into the book at all.
• Started reading Pandæmonium 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers by Humphrey Jennings, another book suggested by my random selector. It looks like an intriguing read.
  

Next week: Hearing from Gordon Brown.

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Finished reading Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig. This was perfect to read just before bed to take my brain off to another time and place; undemanding but poignant. I love his writing.

August has been a strange month to work through. The office has been quieter than usual as people have been off for their summer holidays. Unintuitively, the emptier the office is, the harder it is to concentrate, as your ears tune in to individual conversations. I’m hoping that things will get bustling again as the calendar flips to September.

This was a week in which I:

• Got plugged into an AI forum and turned up with a bunch of questions on the status of various initiatives. It got me thinking about how AI is still not being treated as a normal technology, and what we need to be concerned with when an AI feature suddenly shows up in a SaaS application. With consumer tools such as Claude and ChatGPT, it isn’t sufficient to take them through a one-time approval process, as the applications, the models, and the terms and conditions of using each model change with no notice. Balancing plain old good technology governance with the pressure to get AI tools and products deployed as quickly as possible will continue to be a challenge for a long time.
• Did some research into the cloud processing rules for one of our entities, and the implications that those rules might have for how we run parts of our infrastructure.
• Posted a small graphic design project to PeoplePerHour for the first time. Within half an hour I had 19 responses, each one reading as if it had been written by the same AI. Each one was a sea of my words, mashed up and relayed back to me. Presumably people have agents that watch the site for new projects and then either automatically respond or ping the account owner with text they can copy and paste. At the end of the week I was up to 49 submissions. As I browsed the proposals, I found myself discounting the AI-flavoured ones in favour of those that were clearly written by humans, even if they didn’t completely answer all of the questions. It’s fascinating how AI is making each individual submission easier for people, but so much harder for the person on the receiving end, having to sort the wheat from the chaff. I’m guessing this whole process was better before November 2022, when ChatGPT showed up.
• Found my Microsoft Copilot consumption going through the roof. Usually it helps, but sometimes it gets in the way. It doesn’t help that the main M365 Copilot app is buggy, with fragments of chats getting lost in the ether.
• Was interested to see that in the latest Gartner CIO survey, cybersecurity still trumps AI as a priority. I’m sure the increased pace of the latter is also driving the former.
• Made some progress in clarifying the ways in which we can bring a fractional capability into our team.
• Continued our conversation about wearable technology and the need for clarity in our policies given that Ray-Ban Meta glasses are now appearing in the wild.
• Enjoyed a fascinating Learning Hour with a colleague who has been reimagining the ways in which we communicate with our clients. Using interactive digital media instead of print brings so many challenges, such as versioning and testing. Even if it is the equivalent of a static website, you have basically built a small application and need to bring all of the relevant technology disciplines to bear.
• Spent the end of my week tidying up a sprawling set of old tasks from meeting notes, with a determination to get on top of the items and to stop them from proliferating in the same way again. There’s more to do on this next week.
• Used ChatGPT to help diagnose and fix a weird network issue that developed at home over the weekend. It was as if I had no internet connectivity at all, but my iPhone didn’t complain and some small bits of network traffic such as messages were still getting through. We had a lightning storm a few days before, which I suspect was the root cause. It turned out that one of my wired access points was causing the network to go haywire when it was plugged in. An isolated reboot of the access point fixed it. I’m sure I would have got there in the end, but working through the issue with ChatGPT as a thinking tool meant I resolved the problem much more quickly, with a good understanding of what had happened.
• Had to contact my web host to alert them about a problem with my site, which meant it was down for about five hours. Jetpack sent me an alert that it was offline at roughly the same time that I discovered the problem with my home network, initially making me wonder whether there was a widespread internet problem. It’s interesting how I need to force my brain to separate problems into individual buckets and not conflate them when they happen at once. The hosting provider found a misconfiguration in their service that they were able to easily fix.
• Added a message and links to my site’s RSS feed, allowing readers to easily respond via email or go straight to the comment section of each post.
• Started thinking about my upcoming milestone birthday at the end of the year. I flip-flop on planning a celebration; it feels like an indulgence, but I also know that parties are a public service:
  

Parties are a public service, you’re doing people a favor by throwing them. Someone might meet their new best friend or future lover at your gathering. In the short term, lovely people may feel less lonely, and that’s thanks to you. In the long term, whole new children may ultimately exist in the world because you bothered to throw a party. Throwing parties is stressful for most people, but a great kindness to the community, so genuinely pat yourself on the back for doing this.

Media

Podcasts

• The 404 Media Podcast episode on how someone bought a load of location data is fascinating. I’m a decade late to the news, but I learnt that Grindr, “a location-based social networking and online hookup application for LGBTQ people”, had a 60% stake of their company bought by Kunlun Tech Co Ltd, a Chinese video game development firm. Ownership of the app comes with massive power and responsibility; the owner has its users’ location data, with the potential for that information to be used for blackmail. Three years later, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States caught up and informed Kunlun that having the app owned by a Chinese company posed a national security risk. Kunlun divested their stake a while afterwards.
• On the Sausage On A Fork podcast, George Wilson, who played Ziggy Greaves in Grange Hill, talked about his difficult journey of learning to live with bipolar disorder. A few years ago, he wrote an autobiography, which has now been published in an edited and expanded second edition.
  

Articles

• At work, I am a big advocate for ‘working out loud’, using the various media channels available to employees to let people know what they are doing. I’m well aware that my communications on the company’s systems are not private, and that teams within our firm could, if appropriate, take a look through my messages. What I hadn’t thought about is how all of these messages could be sold to a third party, which is exactly what is happening following the latest bankruptcy of Spirit Airlines. Google are looking to buy the data, presumably for training AI models. “Google won’t be receiving any personal information and the data will be ‘rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt,’ …” This isn’t simple work; PII isn’t just the obvious stuff like names, addresses, phone numbers, etc.
• I had no idea that creating holograms was a hobby you could pursue at home.
• The combination of a Starlink Mini and a UniFi Travel Router seems perfect for a family road trip. I particularly love the idea of sharing a Wi-Fi connection across a whole group using the router rather than everybody paying individually for expensive internet access.
• Ian Dunt’s perspective on vaping, how the activity has become the subject of a moral panic, and thinking about it in contrast to smoking, is a brilliant read.
  

Video

• Pop duo Magdalena Bay have posted an eight-hour video breakdown of their Imaginal Disk album to YouTube [part 1, part 2]. I’ve only started watching the first one so far, but my reaction was similar to this YouTube commenter’s:
  

• I broadly agree with this YouTuber’s take on Magdalena Bay’s music so far, which also gives you a concise overview of their career.
• The BBC Archive team posted another fascinating video, this time a documentary from 1980 about “The Microelectronics Revolution”. There’s a good explainer of how room-sized vacuum-tube computers got smaller with the invention of the transistor, and then even smaller with the move to silicon chips.
• Watched The Blues Brothers (1980) with a bunch of my mates, one of whom had, unbelievably, never seen it before. It was my third viewing, and it was great to notice little details that I hadn’t noticed before, such as Elwood stealing windscreen wipers from the gas station. I still think Dan Aykroyd is one of the most overrated actors of the 1980s, but the film itself is excellent. We finished off the evening being treated to a curry at Verandah by one of our friends. It might be the start of a ‘classic movies at least one of us hasn’t seen’ film club.
• Watched Goodfellas (1990) again, mainly because my youngest son hadn’t seen it. It’s filmmaking perfection.
  

Audio

• I had so much fun at two Album Clubs this week. At the WB-40 Album Club, I heard Hot Chip for the first time via their album A Bath Full of Ecstasy. Later in the week at the in-person Album Club, we heard Let It Be You by Joan As Police Woman and Benjamin Lazar Davis. What used to be the best night of the month has now firmly become two, and I love them both.
  

Books

• I’ve been enjoying Stefan Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories. These short novellas aren’t life-changing works of fiction, but they are a lovely escape at the end of a long day.
  

Next week: A bank holiday, and everyone getting back to work and school.

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The temperature dropped by about ten degrees, bringing clouds and even a little bit of rain. I went in search of a pair of jeans for the first time in a couple of months, putting away the shorts for a while. I promise I’ll never complain about regular old ‘mildly warm’ British weather ever again. It’s lovely right now.

Work-wise, this week was a challenge. There are some big changes happening that bring some uncertainty, and by the end of the week I felt that I was even further away from knowing what’s coming next than I was at the start. It’ll all get resolved soon.

My evenings and weekends feel a little gummed up. I’ve got lots of personal projects that I need to make progress with, but time seems to slip by. “Okay, I didn’t get it done tonight but it’s the weekend soon and I’ll do it then” quickly becomes “I ran out of time this weekend so I’ll have to try and get that done in the evenings after work”, and the cycle continues. When I was younger, my solution was to stay up very late on weeknights and compromise my sleep. But I’ve finally learned how much sleep I really need and I’ve been trying to get more of it. It’s not that nothing’s getting done on my personal projects; maybe I just have unrealistic expectations about what’s doable in the time available.

This was a week in which I:

• Fixed the homepage of my blog after an automated WordPress plugin update broke it. I’ve rolled it back to a previous version of the plugin until I can work out what I need to change to fix it properly.
• Reviewed some AI-generated minutes, with my inner voice grumbling that it feels like work someone else should have done before I got there. And the minutes generated by AI tools are so verbose, taking a paragraph when a bullet point would have been fine. Saving time for you shouldn’t mean more work for everyone else.
• Responded to a questionnaire from one of our regulators on current and planned use of AI.
• Went to a Gartner webinar about the EU AI Act and learned a bunch of things that I didn’t know.
• Caught up with an AI startup company that I first met a few months ago, hearing about their progress and where they are in terms of getting their first clients on board.
• Met with colleagues to review the formal proposals for furniture for one of our offices. We made a decision in principle, with the detail to be worked out once we’ve done some more work on the floor plans.
• Reviewed a draft proposal for tweaks to the ways of working within our department.
• Had a lovely long, impromptu conversation with my boss at the end of a day in the office, talking about the future.
• Met the account managers at one of our staffing vendors, who are stepping in whilst my usual contact is on maternity leave.
• Had a look around the facilities in the refurbished basement in our office to see how accessible they are.
• Was delighted to see our intern present at our weekly Learning Hour meeting. We’d agreed at the start of their time with us that they would present to the whole team before they left, and all of a sudden that time had arrived. It was lovely to hear about their time with the team through their eyes.
• Thought it was brilliant that the online broadcast of our division’s mid-year results included a live sign language interpreter. It’s at least the second meeting this year where we’ve had an interpreter join. I’m hopeful this becomes a standard feature of all of our mass-participation events.
• Reviewed the choices for replacement carpet for a shared space in our office. The recently laid carpet needs to be remediated; we had a faulty batch which is already looking tired and old despite having only been installed a few months ago.
• Decided that it’s time to replace my work shoes, which are looking very tired. Eight years ago I had a dreadful experience with buying two pairs from Loake, which left me so badly crippled after a day’s wear that when I got back to Berkhamsted Station, people were coming up to me, asking if I was ok and what had happened. That first night I had to get up the hill for a school meeting and couldn’t contemplate the 10-minute walk, so I had to get a cab. I remember paying over £350 at the time for two pairs of shoes and two sets of shoe trees, so when they told me I couldn’t return them I was reluctant to just throw them away. From a footwear perspective, the COVID-19 pandemic saved me in that I literally didn’t have to set foot in them for a couple of years. Despite being stretched out for months in their shop, they have always been painful to wear. My feet are throbbing as I type this, after having spent a day in the office. But I know they are quality shoes made to a high standard, so I thought I’d pop in again. Eight years on, I assumed that the person who sold me shoes that were at least one and a half sizes too small would have left, and the staff would be sympathetic to my previous experience. I was mistaken. Despite being helped by a different member of staff, their whole approach still seems to be to make you feel like an imbecile who has never bought or worn shoes properly in your life, looking at you like you’re a badly dressed clown who has dared to darken their doorstep. I tried on a pair that was my usual size, but they made it clear that I was going down the wrong path and didn’t know what I was doing. It seemed to be more important to them that the shoes didn’t get creased than that I was able to walk without pain. They still maintain that the shoes shouldn’t be worn for more than a small handful of hours a day. My comment of “But that’s not realistic!” was met with “It may not be realistic, but it is ideal.” It just doesn’t make any sense. The shoes are lovely, but I don’t understand the thinking behind how they sell them. I’ll get some new pairs elsewhere.
• Met up with friends for a lovely midweek dinner at The Swan Inn in Denham, a beautiful village that I’d never been to before. It was great to get together with them just a few weeks after our holiday. Talking to the owner, we found that they had just bought The Alford Arms in Frithsden, a place that we’ve been to many times as it’s not far from where we live.
• Unintentionally forfeited a match in LearnedLeague. I don’t do it often, but I always feel so bad when it happens, kicking myself for having forgotten. It tends to ruin the season as you lose a point, so you’re automatically at a disadvantage with anyone who has the same match record as you.
• Found that our energy supplier offers the ability to pay the bill in full every month, instead of the usual fixed amount that inevitably means that they sit with a chunk of our cash for most of the year. We are rigorous budgeters, so having a large ‘float’ with the company doesn’t make any sense. I’ve switched us over.
• Went to a friend’s 60th birthday party in the Greene Lounge at The Kings Arms in Berkhamsted. I caught up with some old friends that I hadn’t seen in a long time, and spent most of the evening talking to some people I’d never met before, covering a lot of bases. A really lovely evening.
• Went for a Sunday morning run with my wife. I’m the stand-in for when her regular running friends aren’t available. We tend to finish up in town for a coffee and croissant breakfast, which is a great start to the day.
• Felt so sorry for a friend who came off his bike on our club ride. We were just over halfway. I was in the lead and had gone down a short, potholed hill and up the other side. Looking round, I could only see one of the four others who were in our group. We stopped, waited for a minute or two, and then started to cycle back the way we came. We found the other riders at the side of the road, and one of the team with his clothes in pieces, road rash all up his arm and his bike in not great shape. He’d hit a tiny pothole which sent him off balance, tumbling to the ground and scraping along it. Remarkably, after gathering himself, he decided to ride the remaining 35 km or so of the route with us, taking it easy on the journey back to Berkhamsted.
  

• Loved the fact that F1’s summer break is over and that we had such a great race at Zandvoort. Superbly entertaining.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Enjoyed the WB-40 podcast episode on accessible events.
  

Articles

• I love reading about people’s experiments with creating their own software using generative AI. Matt Haughey created an application to help him with his routine in his home gym. If anyone has read about any other great examples, please do share.
• It was shocking to read about how insurance policies could be taken out on people in South Africa without their knowledge.
• Ian Dunt’s post about “The hellbound horror of GCSEs” is superbly written, as ever. It includes life lessons, such as “The big difference between a writer and all the people who say they want to be writers is that writers write. That’s really all there is to it.” I completely agree with his view that skills in drama or theatre studies aren’t promoted enough, despite being widely relevant in a variety of jobs today where you are required to ‘perform’, even if you don’t recognise those situations as such. He also says that learning something to pass an exam is completely different to learning something because you’re motivated by how fascinating it is. As Dunt says, “The good news is that, once GCSEs are over, a curtain rises on one of the great pleasures of a post-educational world. This is the pleasure we derive from finding out about things outside of our area of expertise.” I knew that I loved history from watching history programmes on TV with my dad, but having to learn about the kings and queens of England in detail at school was horrible. Years ago, I heard Dan Carlin say on a podcast that history should ideally be explored through a subject that a person is already interested in. His argument is one I subscribe to, but I also think it would be so difficult to implement when it comes to setting and passing exams:
  

Dan: Everybody loves history, and what I point out is the reason everybody loves history is because there’s a history of every thing. So whatever you’re interested in, fashion, motorcycles, sports, whatever, there’s a history and the history of that teaches you the same thing. You asked me what you would study to understand the life today. If you want to understand fashion today, you have to understand how it got that way.

So that’s how I would teach it, by the way, in the schools. I would find out what the students are interested in individually and I would tell them to learn the history of the thing that they’re already interested in. Because the facts, [like that] Columbus discovered America and all that stuff is a bunch of random stuff that people decided we should know. But what you really learn is how things go from A to B to C to D and you can learn that studying whatever you’re interested in.

• I started thinking about Magdalena Bay again, having not heard much from them for a while. I’d completely missed their interview with DIY Magazine back in February. They seem to have gotten big. Given that I’m not a fan of giant, expensive stadium gigs, I’m wondering if I’ll ever see them live again.
• It’s very disappointing to read about a publication moving back to posting on X again. But I also know that people draw their red lines in different places. Most of my friends have Facebook and Instagram accounts, but I haven’t had either for a decade or so. I want to be a Zuckervegan, but I still have a WhatsApp account and am some way off from feeling as though I can get rid of it. And this is without any commercial profit motive on my part to continue using it.
• “This new ‘AI’ chatbot is actually just one very tired guy” reads like a headline from The Onion.
  

Video

• Stopped watching My Brilliant Career after an episode and a half. It felt completely formulaic and didn’t seem like a good investment of time.
• You are (probably) playing Monopoly wrong, and it ruins the game. We, and everyone else I know, used to do the ‘collect all of the accumulated fines when you land on Free Parking’ thing when we were kids, but this has never been part of the rules. I learned about the property auction process from a software version of the game years ago and have always played it that way since; this definitely shortens the playing time.
• Watched the first three episodes of Widow’s Bay on Apple TV and have been loving it so far. A great mix of comedy and horror.
• Finally continued with another episode of The World at War, this time about the battles between the Allied merchant navy convoys and the German U-boat fleets in the North Atlantic.
  

Books

• Started reading Stefan Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories. I love Zweig’s writing, and Anthea Bell’s translations. I still think Beware of Pity is the best work of fiction I have ever read.
  

Next week: Welcoming back a colleague from a long holiday, plus two Album Club nights.

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Finished reading Steve Marriott: All Too Beautiful by Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier. I’ve been a big Small Faces fan since I was a teenager in the 1990s. I knew the basic story arc of Steve Marriott’s life, but this filled in lots of the detail. The book makes the point that if Marriott had survived a few more years beyond his horrible death in 1991, he would surely have had a big renaissance through the Britpop crowd. An informative read, but I found the writing style really grating in places.

I’ve been thinking more about these weeknotes, pondering whether it’s time to explore a different format. Six years ago, I made a note that I was inspired by Ton Zijlstra’s format, and it’s served me well. But I’ve stopped looking forward to documenting my week as much as I used to.

Part of my reluctance to change is that I feel like I have less time than I did before, and that writing more freely will take more of it. Somehow — and I don’t know how — I used to sit down to write, edit and publish on a Sunday night, whereas my routine is now to try and write on my commutes at the start of the following week. Sometimes I don’t finish things off until Thursday. I want to keep up the practice as I enjoy writing; a weeknotes routine forces the discipline of putting sentences together and exercising the writing muscles, and I suspect that my writing is better elsewhere because of it. I look back on my old weeknotes regularly, and know that some friends and family read them. But maybe the old format has become stale. I’m also conscious of trying not to drift too much into oversharing about work whilst still saying just enough for these to be useful for me to look back on, and to create the odd connection with people — like you — out there on the Internet. I’m only ten weeks away from a big weeknotes milestone, so maybe I’ll shake things up when I get there.

Summer feels like it is going by so fast, probably in part because we had our family holiday already. It’s been another very hot week. Everywhere, the grass and plants are hay-coloured, and the ground is hard, dusty and broken due to the lack of water. I’ve been looking at the trees around us and can’t tell whether the yellow leaves are an early sign of autumn or water stress. On Sunday night it was interesting to watch the national and local weather forecasts on TV, as the presenters reflected what now seems to be the national mood: that it would be brilliant if it rained at some point soon. It’s not often that you’ll find people in the UK longing for rain.

This was a week in which I:

• Enjoyed an almost meeting-free day on Monday, partly driven by a public holiday in South Africa. After moving our team meetings to Thursdays, Fridays are now relatively quiet as well. I’m liking this new shape to the week.
• Thought about how quick the process is from a new — typically AI-related — thing being invented to it turning up in a governance meeting as a proposal. In all the time I’ve been working, I’ve never seen things move this fast.
• Started having a new weekly catch-up with one of my executive colleagues, as there is always so much for us to talk about and stay aligned on at the moment.
• Had two short meetings with people in our office on work experience. We’ve already reached the stage where the work experience students were born at the end of the first decade of the 2000s. I always find these conversations interesting.
• Caught up with one of the CIOs in our division who I haven’t previously spent much time with.
• Discussed email analytics platforms and how people might track metrics such as open rates and clicks for internal communications.
• Raised some new operational risks for our team to tackle.
• Helped to highlight and resolve a problem in our technology infrastructure environment caused by us being downstream of an external change.
• Joined one of our community of practice meetings to see a colleague present on the approach our team took to rolling out Microsoft Copilot and the lessons we learned along the way.
• Reviewed last year’s risk control self-assessment, looked at the progress we have made on our action plans, and discussed changes to the remaining work.
• Caught up with the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team for the first time in a few weeks. I’d missed some meetings and events due to clashes, including with my time off.
• Met up with a colleague in learning and development to talk about what the next steps might be for me to fill in some gaps in my skills.
• Had a good catch-up with my HR business partner.
• Enjoyed a Lean Coffee meeting with our team.
• Did a lot of work relating to a planned expansion of one of our offices. I’ve brought our CTO into the project team and reviewed their extensive list of technology-related things that we need to consider. I also reviewed the floor plan and gave some thoughts on where we can optimise the design.
• Enjoyed our all-team meeting, the second one in a row where almost everyone in the call was on site in one of our offices. Moving from everyone being individually online to being in the same room isn’t easy, but it’s getting more fun. I’m glad we’ve made the change as it gives people a good reason to be together in the office that day.
• Set up an auto-forward to my wife for multi-factor authentication codes that get emailed to me every time she tries to log into a specific account we share.
• Celebrated our 22nd anniversary with a meal out at Tabure. For a long time, this was my favourite restaurant in Berkhamsted, but I was so disappointed with the food. The kitchen seemed to have gone mad with their salt cellar, spoiling dishes that were usually very good. It’s a beautiful place to eat, but the food has made me think twice about coming back.
• Met up with friends in the middle of the week for dinner at Per Tutti, which has now taken the crown as my favourite local restaurant.
  

Media

Articles

• My friend Matt Ballantine mentioned the garbage can model of organisational choice in a group chat, and it has haunted my thinking ever since. I need to think more about it and turn it into its own post. Allan Kelly gave it some thought earlier this year.
• Stories relating to both AI and the legal profession seem to continue to crop up all the time. Jason Koebler at 404 Media reports on how someone hid a prompt using small, white ‘invisible’ text in a legal filing, telling AI to side with them.
  

Video

• Really enjoyed Pamela: A Love Story (2023), a documentary about Pamela Anderson. Compared to the slew of similar films made in conjunction with their subjects in recent years, this one feels authentic. She comes across as having had some major ups and downs, but is now in control of her life and what comes next. It is also a great case study in how women come off worse when there is a sex scandal; the man is seen as a lovable rogue, but the woman is publicly shamed and humiliated.
• I showed my wife one of Mr Gosling’s compiled music reaction videos, and she, like me, was hooked.
• On the recommendation of a bunch of friends, we started and finished Legends. I loved the early ‘90s soundtrack, but got annoyed when one of the main characters started using a flip phone out at sea. I mean, this is the era when to make a phone call you first had to look around for a picture of a rabbit.
  

Audio

• I’ve had songs from Gene Clark’s No Other album spinning in my head again all week. I remembered discovering Erin Rae through her cover of Clark’s Some Misunderstanding (which, seven years in, still has a criminally low number of views on YouTube) and figured I would return the love through buying her album Lighten Up.

Books

• Nearly done with Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier’s biography of Steve Marriott. I’m not loving the writing style and will be glad to move on to something else.
  

Next week: Dinner with friends, and the return of F1.

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Back to work after being out of the office for a couple of weeks. I’d left myself a reminder to go to the right location, as we’d had a seating shuffle while I’d been away. We had an extraordinary number of people saying that they were cold at their new desks, but, weirdly, the complaints were distributed across the whole office. From the data, we could see that it had been gradually getting colder everywhere in our space over the past few weeks. I’m not sure what the opposite of ‘boiling frogs’ is (‘freezing frogs’?) but the desk move seemed to be the psychological trigger for people to notice the temperature dip.

A lot of my week was spent catching up with the team, meeting with senior colleagues about various strands of work we need to do, and developing ideas on how we can do things differently and more effectively.

On Wednesday night I said goodbye to my eldest son, who was getting up early the next day for his trip to Texas. Unbelievably, he’s now already in his second¹ year. He took a road bike with him so that he can get some general fitness miles in. I suspect that the flat roads, heat and headwinds of South Texas will be brutal for road cycling. I’ll miss him, but not as much as I’ll be happy that he’s getting on and doing his thing.

This was a week in which I:

• Said a sad goodbye to a colleague that I worked with at our sister company for eight years or so, who has decided to retire. At the moment it feels like everyone in the ‘work generation’ above me is retiring. There are more retirement celebrations to come this year too. I’m now nearly 30 years into my career, and it feels strange to be moving into the role of being one of the elders.
• Joined a couple of technical meetings hosted by a colleague who gave us an overview of the technology stack for one of our departments, as well as his views on thin and thick client computing.
• Caught up with one of our department heads to swap notes on conversations we have separately been having about using AI to enhance and refine their business processes.
• Gave an overview of our department to colleagues from a central function who are new to understanding who we are and what we do. I’ve got a slide deck that I use at the start of every interview in order to give people a basic idea of the size and shape of our team and where we fit in. It also comes in handy in situations like these.
• Met with the Chief Digital Officer of a private equity/venture capital firm to learn about one of the technology platforms that they are developing.
• Met up for a coffee with a project manager from our sister company to hear about what she’s doing after she moved on from working with us earlier in the year.
• Had lunch with the Head of Financial Services at one of our staffing vendors. We’ve known each other for 20 years and it was great to catch up.
• Caught up with the project teams for our office fit-out projects.
• Met with our landlord and the vendor for a fit-out project that we largely completed in 2024 but isn’t yet fully closed out. It feels as though we have a plan to get to the end so that we can finally put it to bed.
• Made a big change to the scheduling of our fortnightly all-team and management team meetings, moving them to a day of the week when most of us should be in one of our offices. Pre-pandemic, we were in the office five days a week and had these meetings in person on Fridays, but for the past five and a half years they have been fully remote. Our initial experience of the rescheduled meetings is that they worked pretty well, but it takes a slightly different set of skills to chair a hybrid meeting. It’s not as easy to know who has their hand up and who raised it first. We’ll see whether we stick to it, but at the moment it feels good to have shaken things up.
• Had a big clear-out of our garden shed. Once more, we are able to get to things stored at the back without having to take each step like we are crossing a river using stepping stones. Along with two carloads of stuff that we took to the recycling centre, we found good homes for a Micro scooter, cricket gear, a skateboard and the boys’ old mountain bikes.
• Went to remove the Thule bike carrier racks from our car but couldn’t find the keys. I’m reasonably convinced that I left the keys on the car roof when we got back from our trip to the Isle of Wight and they have now tumbled into a street somewhere. Having the carriers on the car means that the boot doesn’t fully open. As I was searching for the keys, I smashed the top of my head on the metal of the open boot, shouting an expletive and laying myself out on our driveway clutching my scalp. It hurt so much. I have a small cut and a Beano comic-style bruise, and mildly wince with pain every time I raise my eyebrows. Please don’t surprise me with anything for a few days.
• Ordered replacement keys for the bike carriers.
• Had a wonderful trip to the Barbican with some colleagues to see Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica. It’s the second time this year that we’ve made a visit to an art gallery and I’m rediscovering how much I enjoy it. I think this exhibition was a little less accessible than the last; I found myself having to re-read some of the introductory paragraphs to each room to try and process the words, and when I finished, I still wasn’t quite sure I understood. The most striking work for me was Albino (1986), an oil-on-canvas portrait by South African-born artist Marlene Dumas. It got me thinking about how complex identity is, and made me remember Patrick Rhone’s post on being different. I also made a note to check out the work of Miriam Makeba, and was pleased to find some of her music available on Bandcamp.
  

• Was pleasantly surprised to see a walkway open between Euston Station and Drummond Street. I am not sure how many years this route was been closed while they worked on HS2, but it’s a lot.
  

• Got my fill of exercise at the weekend. On Saturday we enjoyed an 83 km bike club ride, heading out across relatively flat terrain and working together as a group to draft on any long stretches of road that we found. On Sunday morning I went out for a run. I intended to go a bit longer, taking advantage of my running fitness off the back of my holiday. I’d been doing 10 km runs and figured I would do 15–16 km. But then I had the thought that it would only be a few more kilometres to make it up to 21, which is effectively a half marathon. It turns out that the extra distance isn’t just a small add-on, and I had to stop to get some refreshment at a petrol station towards the end. But it felt good to get back home and have the rest of my day knowing that I’d already achieved something that morning.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Catching up with the Sharp Tech episode from 19 June, I have to say that I agree with host Ben Thompson’s approach of always having a spare. I take spare glasses with me when I travel, and for lots of groceries and pantry items, the correct number of things to have in the cupboard is two, not one. If you only have one roll of aluminium foil, you don’t want to run out and end up with zero. Start using the spare and immediately order another one.
  

Articles

• The story of how executives at eBay targeted and harassed two people who owned a newsletter is incredible. How bad must the culture in a company be to allow that many people to do something so awful?
• I’m not keen on the AI-generated logos for Notes from the Circus, but this is an amazing article on the fragility of Larry Ellison’s empire and how the tide is moving against it.
  

On July 9, S&P Global cut Oracle’s credit rating from BBB to BBB-minus, one notch above junk, and conceded in the rating action that it had “misjudged the magnitude of the investments needed.” The agency named the concentration plainly: OpenAI accounts for roughly half of Oracle’s $638 billion backlog. Half the order book of one of America’s flagship enterprise-software companies now depends on a single money-losing startup honoring a $300 billion contract.

• “Don’t be a meat proxy.” In other words, don’t just copy and paste the output of a generative AI chatbot and send it to other people. Read the output yourself and add some value along the way. (Via Simon Willison).
• Sean Goedecke gives advice on how to keep thinking, through reading and writing. Trying to keep up my practice of writing these weeknotes is how I go about trying to do this; carving out time to write even more seems difficult at the moment.
  

Video

• We started watching Ann Droid after a bunch of people recommended it to me, but gave up during episode four. Sometimes these TV sitcoms are just so twee that I feel my life force draining from me as I watch.
• The latest Fletch movie, Confess, Fletch (2022), is poor. I watched it based on a recommendation from a friend who loves the original films and also enjoyed this. Chevy Chase’s comic timing was special, and Jon Hamm’s portrayal doesn’t get anywhere near this. The 1980s are never coming back.
• Without having recently rewatched it, I have a memory that the previous season of Ted Lasso wrapped everything up and put a bow on it. So I was surprised to hear that a new season was coming. Of course we watched the first episode, and it was good. I’m not sure whether all of the characters from the previous seasons will be in it, but I’m looking forward to finding out.
• My wife and I had a rare Sunday afternoon at the local IMAX theatre to watch The Odyssey (2026). It was so good. And so LOUD. Going to the IMAX is expensive, but I always feel as though I’ve got my money’s worth when I’ve been thoroughly immersed and entertained for a few hours.
  

Audio

• I love a music reaction video. It’s like the TV show Gogglebox, but tailored directly for me. When I get obsessive about a song I find myself looking up these videos to see other people discovering and enjoying the song too. This week, I discovered Mr Gosling’s YouTube channel and got sucked into what he’s done with the genre. His videos are a collage of all of the best reactions to well-known songs, showing six or more on the screen at the same time. His video for The Who’s live Shepperton Studios version of Won’t Get Fooled Again was the first one I found. Watching so many people hear and react to The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter at the same time is magical. But the two that really got me were the reactions to Bread’s Everything I Own and Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U — both had me in tears. This channel is fantastic.
  

Books

• Plugging away with Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier’s biography of Steve Marriott. I’m now into the Humble Pie years, a period that I know very little about.
  

Next week: Anniversary.

1. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to saying the word ‘sophomore’.

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I was about to use the word ‘proscribed‘ in an email. Something made me pause to double check what it means. It turns out that it means literally the complete opposite of what I thought.

We spent this week on holiday in Tuscany, Italy, with eight of our friends. Our summer break was planned to be early this year as our eldest son heads back to university next week. This holiday came and went in a flash, as they always do. Our home for the week was Il Gelsomino Bianco, a villa in the Brancoli hills, north of Lucca. A stone in the wall of the guest house was marked with the year 1729, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the whole villa was at least that old.

The journey to our destination started out great. We had flights booked at a reasonable hour from Heathrow which didn’t involve us getting up earlier than the crack of dawn to be there. I looked out of my bedroom window as my family were getting ready and spotted our next-door-but-one neighbours getting into a taxi along with their suitcases. It turned out that, incredibly, they were booked on exactly the same flights as us.

When we got to Pisa airport, despite pre-booking our car with Budget and thinking that we had covered all bases, there was — as there always is — something that they wanted to upsell us on. This time it was windscreen cover “which for some reason is not offered on the website”. They also wanted more for an automatic car, which I declined. When we got to the vehicle, we found it to be very tired, very dirty, and smaller than we had asked for, so much so that we were unable to get our cases in. It was about 36°C out and I was feeling tired and stressed from the queuing and upsell efforts. This precipitated a minor meltdown, with me grumpily asking everyone to get out of the car while I took the hot walk back to the desk to complain. The seemingly unsurprised sales rep barely said a word as he quickly updated my booking and gave me the keys to a much better, bigger, roomier, cleaner automatic car. It was almost as if he had expected me to come back.

Our week was primarily filled with days by the pool and evenings in the courtyard, talking, playing games and listening to music. Being on holiday with people you love is the best way to spend time with them. Whenever we get together for the odd afternoon or evening, there’s always a sense that you’ve barely had time to get into good conversation, particularly when there are lots of you there. With a holiday together there are plenty of chances to talk, covering things beyond a superficial level.

The biggest downside to the villa was the incessant mosquitoes that made a meal of every one of us. We were bitten within minutes of sitting in the garden. Soon, we were in the routine of slapping on repellent and lighting citronella candles and coils in order to keep them away. The best defence seemed to be Smidge, a brand that was new to me, but the one bottle that we had soon ran out. Who knows if any of the rest of it worked? By the end of the holiday, we all still looked as though we had been attacked with an itching pox.

I managed to get out for a few 10 km runs across the week we were there. Some of the runs were on the mountain roads around the villa, which seemed to get steeper the closer I got to the top of each one. At one point I was feeling good and thought I might run down one mountain path to the main road at the foot of the hill and then back up the road to our villa. But I was foiled as I reached the end, with roadworks blocking the path. Although I was going back up to the same point, retracing my steps felt harder and less motivating. We did a couple of early-morning trips to Lucca to run the 4.2 km circumference of the city walls, which gave beautiful views of the towers within the city and the architecture beyond it.

Lucca itself was lovely, but the heat and lack of breeze meant that spending time walking around felt like a bit of an endurance test. On the first full day of our holiday we did a three-and-a-half-hour guided walk, which gave us some insight into the city, but it felt as though there were too many people in the group, and I was too hot and tired to take it in. We did learn that the city is the birthplace of Giacomo Puccini, and that the taller your building, the greater your status.

Lucca is home to the Mixi Gastropub, which is really a restaurant that serves excellent burgers, including a great selection of vegetarian ones made with Beyond Meat. They opened up a whole section of the restaurant for us, and the food was so good that we came back a couple of days later.

For our last meal, we ate at Buca di Sant’Antonio in Lucca with the hope that we would get a special, authentic dinner to celebrate our holiday. Choosing to eat outside was a mistake; even at night the heat was super-oppressive, with barely any breeze under the big sun umbrellas that seemed to trap the air. The food was expensive and far from great, leaving me feeling a little disappointed. But it was probably the only bad meal that we had.

My favourite dinner was at Molin della Volpe. We sat out in the beautiful modern courtyard and enjoyed some contemporary Italian food, including a vegetarian risotto with curry sauce. I was very pleased with myself when I used a translation tool to work out how to say “I am vegetarian; can you please recommend first and second courses for me that the chef likes to cook?” in Italian and was understood. (Or, at least, the waitress was very sympathetic despite my dreadful attempt.)

In the middle of the week we took a long drive to Diacceroni to take part in a pasta-making course. On the way, we found that almost no Italian drivers observe the speed limits for any given road, probably because the limits generally feel as though they are set too low. We found ourselves doing 50 km/h along a long, straight road, with a queue of traffic behind us. Sometimes, vehicles would pull out and overtake three or four cars before zooming on up the street. It didn’t fluster me, but it did feel weird to be staying within the speed limit while everyone else was seemingly goading me to go much faster.

Diacceroni is located in a beautiful valley, but again it was so hot. Our instructor for the morning was a Scottish lady who had made her home in Italy and was an expert in pasta-making. She showed us how to make ravioli and tagliatelle and told us to keep the off-cuts, all of which were cooked for our lunch. We dined al fresco, but really it was a bit too hot to be outside.

We made a couple of trips to Ponte a Moriano, the nearest town to our villa, which was on the way to Lucca. We discovered Gelateria Sauro, an excellent ice cream shop that had lovely gelato flavours served in the usual cones or cups, as well as a big selection of delicious-looking arctic rolls that were sold by weight.

The nearby Caffetteria Graziella was great for a quick local coffee. Outside the cafe was a vending machine selling ‘Italian Brainrot’ figures. All of the youngsters with us seemed to know exactly what these were — weird, AI-generated chimeras with funny names — having seen them on TikTok.

We took a late-afternoon trip to Viareggio with the intent of sitting on the beach to enjoy a drink and a meal. But it was spoiled by the fact that almost all of the sand was divided up into private sections, linked to the cafes, bars and spas that were facing the street. Even though we turned up after 5pm, long after most of the beachgoers had left for the day, the different bars wanted to charge us a small fortune to use their chairs, umbrellas and loungers. As far as we could see, there was a sole patch of sand that we could sit on for free, in front of a small Ferris wheel. We gave up and went for a drink before heading back for a burger at Mixi in Lucca.

The week was over far too quickly. It’s good to be away from the mosquitoes, but I’m already missing the days lounging around with my friends. We’ll need to book up our trip for next year; any ideas would be very welcome.

When I wasn’t socialising, playing in the pool, or sitting around listening to music, I continued to read Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier’s biography of Steve Marriott. I’m very much not in love with the writing style, which comes across as clichéd and twee at times, but I’m still enjoying it.

I also read a few interesting articles, including:

• Simon Willison’s overview of OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face.
• Sean Goedecke’s post about giving and taking credit in big tech companies.
• A post about the horrible way in which some LG monitors have been installing McAfee adware via Windows Update.
  

Next week: Back to work, and a cultural outing to the Barbican Centre.

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We only have another couple of weeks together as a family before our eldest heads back to start his sophomore year at college in Texas. Our youngest finished school last week, so my wife suggested that I take the week off and do something with both of the boys. Now that they are both into road cycling, the obvious ‘something’ was to plan a big bike ride. I wanted a distance that would be achievable for everyone, but significant enough to justify getting away somewhere. So I dug into the archives and decided to recreate the Berkhamsted Cycling Club Isle of Wight trip of 2022.

After packing our bags and putting the bike carriers on the car on Sunday, we set off early on Monday morning for a drive to Winchester. We got there just before 11am, found a pleasingly not-too-busy park-and-ride car park and unloaded the bikes. Our plan was to ride 53 km before stopping for lunch at The Bush Inn in Ovington.

The route took us through some winding alleys before heading onto lovely country lanes. The weather was perfect — hot, but not crazy hot — and we soon found ourselves wheeling into Ovington and the welcoming, beautiful pub garden. I introduced my youngest son to a mud, a 50:50 mix of orange juice and Diet Coke, which is a hundred times better than it sounds and is a finely-tuned refreshment for a summer’s ride. After lunch, we made our way back to the car park, got the bikes back on the roof and headed off to Portsmouth.

We stayed at the Holiday Inn Express in Gunwharf Quays, which is ideally situated next to a smart shopping centre with lots of choices of places to eat, albeit the same high-street names that you find everywhere. The hotel staff had no problem with us bringing our bikes in and leaving them in our rooms. I had to leave the boys with all of our unloaded bikes and bags before I drove off into the underground car park, finding a different route to get back to them. We found somewhere outdoors where we could sit and have a pizza. Afterwards, the boys wanted to go back to their room and relax. I did the same; I attempted to catch up with some Patreon videos, but fell asleep after about twenty minutes and decided to go to bed. Given that we were planning to get up just after 6am the next day, this turned out to be a great idea.

After an early breakfast and a check that everyone was feeling fit, we cycled the short distance to the Wightlink ferry terminal. I knew that our planned 110 km loop from Fishbourne, clockwise around the island, was a little daunting for both of the boys. It was to be the longest ride my eldest son had tackled, and my youngest hadn’t ridden this kind of distance since Easter. But we were all looking forward to it.

The route was spot-on. There were plenty of hills, most of which the boys sprinted up, then waited at the top for me to catch them up. We made a pit stop about 38 km into the ride at Ventnor Botanic Garden for a cold drink and a cake, which came at just the right time. The garden is at the bottom of a street called Zig Zag Road, which indicated a rapid descent as well as a difficult climb back out.

The next section of the ride was my favourite, zipping along the main road with big climbs and stunning views of the white cliffs at the south-west edge of the island. At some point one of the boys made me smile when they said, “I’m really enjoying this.” Me too.

Our planned lunch stop was 73 km in, at Off The Rails in Yarmouth. I had great memories of the food from when we did the trip with the bike club four years ago and had been excited for the boys to experience it too. We arrived hungry, parked our bikes up — and then our hearts sank as we found that it is only open from Wednesday to Sunday. We figured that we would go back up to the main road that we had just turned off, to look for somewhere else to eat. After exploring a couple of pubs and finding that they weren’t happy for us to bring our bikes through to the gardens, we settled on The Gossips Café. They had a gigantic menu and bench-style seating adjacent to the street, which allowed us to prop up our bikes against a fence and keep them within arm’s reach while we ate.

Tackling the last part of the ride was tough, with so much distance and climbing in our legs already. We had an enforced stop at Cowes Floating Bridge as we waited for the chain ferry to reach us. After that, it wasn’t long before we were rolling down the hill to catch the return ferry from Fishbourne.

A couple of weeks ago, on a Saturday morning club ride, I was introducing myself to someone in our group who I hadn’t ridden with before. I pointed out that my son was just ahead in our group, and she exclaimed “Wow, that’s the dream!” I think it took her pointing it out to me to realise that she’s absolutely right — it’s great that the boys are into something that I love, and we get to do it together. I feel so lucky to have been able to make some memories with both of the boys for a couple of days. We drove home happy.

The rest of the week was filled with a few chores such as getting our oven professionally cleaned and dropping off a replacement rim and a set of spokes at the bike shop so that they could build me a new wheel to replace the cracked one that they had pointed out to me when I last visited. I also took the time to get out of the house on my own, wandering to The Rex to see the matinee showing of The Invite (2026), which was just as funny as I had hoped it would be. Superb casting and excellent dialogue. I had such a good time that later that evening I decided to watch another film: Shithouse (2020), which was showing as a suggestion on MUBI. Despite the movie being about the experience of someone in their first year at college, I couldn’t tempt my eldest son to join me in watching it. I rounded off the day by sitting down and finishing my book. A day like this gives me hope that I’ll be just fine when it’s time to retire.

Media

Podcasts

• Quiet Riot’s ‘B-side’ episode on Nigel Farage and Reform UK is excellent. There are a bunch of people who will vote for the party whatever happens, but solid investigative journalism of the kind that the episode’s guest, Josiah Mortimer, gets on with, will surely go some way to changing the minds of a few.
  

Articles

• I keep thinking about Alice Bartlett’s message in her weeknotes from a few weeks ago:
  

Please don’t “use AI to polish” your blog posts. It makes them sound like every other blog post on the internet and therefore makes them very boring to read. I like your idiosyncratic little voice ok? Your silly little grammars. You’re the only you there is.

• I use both ChatGPT and Claude to review my posts before I publish them. I do trap grammatical and other errors, but I don’t make every correction that they suggest, and do try to keep the posts in my own voice. I’m not sure if I’m getting the balance right.
• It was interesting to read about a tribunal case where asking someone to turn on their camera for meetings was ruled to be disability discrimination.
• Working with colleagues from all over the world, I know that my UK passport gives me the privilege of travelling to lots of places at very short notice, without the hassle of having to go through a lengthy and costly visa procedure. It’s interesting to see how privileged this is in relation to people with passports from other countries.
  

Video

• Aside from seeing The Invite (2026) and Shithouse (2020), I also rewatched Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) after seeing a staged version last week. The play made me appreciate the film even more; it is a masterpiece.
• The BBC Archive YouTube channel consistently publishes fascinating videos. I loved this one from 1958 on the state of Britain’s roads, the same year that the first motorway in the country — the Preston bypass — was completed.
  

• Watched The Non-Actor (2025) on MUBI, an 18-minute film about a woman in the process of losing her hearing, who meets up with her ex-boyfriend’s new partner. It got me wondering how you go about rating movies like this on services such as IMDb and Letterboxd. Giving it a mark out of 10 seems strange when you look at ‘feature-length’ movies that have similar scores.
• Finished watching the Kylie documentary on Netflix. She’s a remarkable person, but I always feel that these documentaries that are made with extensive involvement of the subject tend to fall short. There generally isn’t enough critique, leaving me feeling like I’ve not got the full story.
  

Books

• Continued with Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier’s biography of Steve Marriott. The style of writing is still grating at times, but it is fun to learn about his early years.
  

Next week: A change of scenery.

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