weeknotes for w/c 10/03/25

what happened on the week beginning 10th march 2025?

this year is rolling by quickly. we've already completed the second full week of March! this week's gone well, although I'm a little worn down from several hours of architecture, strategy and infrastructure meetings at work. I'm glad I'm making a positive contribution, but good Lord is it tiring. these next two weeks are absolutely packed, as well.

just finished playing Split Fiction with Krystal this evening. she's tried to get me into it for ages, and I regret not doing it sooner!

  • been taking care of myself a bit this week, which I've desperately needed
    • did a pinprick blood test for some health stuff on Monday, can't wait for it to tell me how viscerally unhealthy I am. also, my bathroom now looks like a crime scene.
    • cooked a stirfry with chicken breast on Monday night. afterwards, I cleaned up the kitchen completely which was a rare sight to behold. I'm dreading my spring cleaning, coming in a week or two
    • booked a dental cleaning on Monday and got it done on Friday. my teethies are now clean
    • treated myself to an omelette and bacon roll with brown sauce from Greggs on Tuesday morning
    • I'm making a concerted effort to cut back on drinking, which seems to be going well
    • went to dinner with a friend to celebrate their birthday on Friday. they randomly picked a Japanese restaurant in Earl's Court, Kappa, and it was brilliant! I'm definitely going back
  • ran AV for AIDLE on Tuesday afternoon, after getting drafted in last minute by Hugh. it was a super fun experience.
    • met Lu Wilson, and turns out we roll in a bunch of similar circles. she's made it her goal to write a blog post on absolutely everything, and I'm a little jealous to be quite honest. I can only hope to build up as extensive an archive. her talk on using the canvas to interact with AI was also insanely cool.
    • enjoyed Sean Tracey's talk about using large vision models to build an alt-text bot for Bluesky and distributed compute orchestration using Bacalhau. I've had a few projects which this could be useful for, so it piqued my interest. it turns out he's also pretty good at magic!
    • drank Lucky Saint the entire evening! no alcohol options are great.
  • completed my first sprint at my new workplace on Wednesday! super happy with how things are going.
    • manager said he's happy with my output and my attitude, and happy with the initiative I've taken to meet people across the org and do technical excellence work. I feel I'm settling in nicely, too
    • dreading the infrastructure investigations I'll need need to take part in next week. got some time booked in for next Monday to tackle it
    • looking to build out a dashboard and some APIs over the next two weeks to complete a project. it's gonna be fun
  • went to Birmingham on Wednesday evening to see Jazz Emu's Knight Fever. I was supposed to see him in London a few weeks ago, but my back was in immense pain.
    • got to go with a few friends, including two I haven't seen in aaaaages. was a lovely show and a lovely evening
    • caught an Avanti West Coast train up. whenever I'm on the train, it feels like I'm trapped in an alternate universe where everything is much more expensive.
    • caught the slow London North Western Railway train back down, and eventually got home at 0240. I didn't get hungover the next morning because I only drank water. it felt amazing
  • had a solid nap on Thursday, sleeping from 6PM to 7AM on the Friday. started work nice and early, too.
  • went to KARG on Friday, where I discussed my talk proposal about personal knowledge arrangement and showed off my system. I'll write it up in a blog post sometime, probably after I've heard back about my CfP.
  • was blessed with an unholy amount of executive function on Saturday, and adopted a 'don’t put it off, just do it' mood
    • purchased State of the Browser tickets, so I'll see some of you there!
    • the Student Loans Company sent me a bunch of threatening emails and letters about updating my employment details. laid in bed on Saturday morning and completed the deeply irritating exercise.
      • I wasted five minutes of my life copying details from my HMRC personal tax portal to the SLC portal. I'm glad One Login will be rolled out across Government more widely soon-ish, to prevent absolute wastes of time like this.
      • an interesting piece by James O'Malley about the digitisation of Government is incredibly interesting here. one of the points concepts he discusses — Government as a Platform, or breaking the functions and activities of the state into 'components' which can be composed into new services — is awfully relevant here.
        • as well-intentioned as the creation of the Digital Centre of Government is, it feels a bit like trying to change the tyres on a lorry while it's barrelling down the motorway. there's a lot of pressure on the Government to maintain its existing momentum in the form of the services it provides to the public, while making fundamental changes to the way it provides those services. I hope they can pull it off.
        • I still haven't got around to reading Platformland, and I need to fix that.
    • did a big shop at the Body Shop, got plenty of nice-smelling soaps now
    • went to Rachel-Lee's games night. they're out of town and I was the only one who came around, so I had a lovely chat with their partner and gave him some film and television recommendations. managed to go on a lovely 1.5h walk after, before catching the tube home
    • God knows I'd be unstoppable if I felt like this every day
  • my homelabbing's been going decently well. I have accomplished a little, but I still have quite a bit on that to-do list
    • need to get my Mastodon instance working at some point
  • knocked quite a few things off my todo list (and in fact hit 65% of tasks complete this cycle, a new record!), and adopted a few more.
    • picked up my powder inhalers this week! I was incredibly excited to try them (yes, I get excited to try medication) and they surprisingly make me cough a lot less than my aerosol inhalers.
    • planning a panel of some sort on cloud stuff for Q3
    • spent some time drafting the companion blog post for my Queer in Tech talk next week, based on the transcript of my last talk. how do people have the energy to do their lives and consistently write up what they do?
    • need to get my hair cut next week, for all the events coming up
    • been walking a lot, so my feet hurt a bit. doesn't help I haven't done a 'big walk' for a few months and I'm planning the Wandle Trail next weekend and a guided walk in Islington at the end of March
    • planning a new approach to weeknotes, which involves drafting stuff in Ghost instead of Apple Notes. hoping it'll make things easier going forward
  • engaged with some good, high-quality media this week
    • been listening to a lot of Flume recently. I think Skin is a particularly good electronic album. it's more high-energy than TENDER's Modern Addiction, and phenomenal in its own right.
    • we live in a time of true televisual abundance. the Invincible finale and a new episode of Severance have aired in the same week. caught up with Severance on Sunday morning, but I'm yet to catch up with Invincible.
    • rewatched an episode of Criminal: UK. it's just as good as I remember.
    • watched Rachel-Lee Nabor's interview. their view on failure is interesting; they treat life like a video game. I've always struggled with the idea that one misstep could make me a complete fuck-up, but it was genuinely reassuring to hear from someone I admire that you can just 'reset' to your last save point if things aren't working out for you.

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