hello! I've kept myself quite busy since the last update, but I'm back! welcome one and all. since February, I've been busy with

• organising the codebar Festival Fringe for the second year running
• personal trips to Southampton and Rutland
• planning conferences in Ghent (Newline) and London (LDX3)
• finishing up my book chapter for the University of Edinburgh, with the book due to be launched in June
• interviewing and hiring at work, which has taken up a surprising amount of time
• starting driving lessons
• house hunting in London

now I'm finally through the worst of it, I've got time to collect my thoughts, be more introspective and revive my weeknotes. it's good to be back.

I also signed up to to a 39 mile walk around Guernsey for charity on D-Day without realising. I'm (apparently) raising money for a bunch of incredible causes through the Saffery Rotary Walk, and I'd be grateful if you could support me. (after this, I think I’ve lost the right to be judgemental of anyone else's actions.)

miscellanea

• Global Tetrahedron hasn't completed their acquisition of InfoWars yet, but that hasn't stopped them putting out their first broadcast. I think this is a masterclass of "what are you going to do? sue me?", given I don't think they have any rights to use any InfoWars intellectual property
• the NHS is closing nearly all of its open source repos. I've signed a petition aiming to get them to reverse this decision.
• there's now a project between Civo and Locai Labs to produce British foundational LLMs, including models designed for edge compute. I'm a little sceptical of it all, given there isn't much detail available online, but I'm excited to see where it goes
• looks like TSB is now owned by Santander.

musings

• I need to get personal business cards because I keep meeting interesting people who want my details, but what would I even put on them?
• lost my Oyster card for this week and so travelled using my debit card. how is travel in London so expensive?
• I need to get around to doing more miscellaneous EMF prep, including figuring out what we want at our village
• I feel like I'm so forgetful I would literally not go on holiday if it wasn't with others, so thanks Ollie and thanks Shivani
• passive house hunting continues. I found a nice two-bed place in Brixton around my budget. it's great because house prices are coming down (from an increase in supply from landlords selling up because of the Renter’s Rights Act), but mortgages are up because interest rates up because war in Iran. we're so close yet so far
• I can't wait for the SpaceX IPO to absolutely break the stock market later this year! I have a gut feeling there isn't enough money in public markets for OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX to float this year.

misadventures

• finished up a holiday in Rutland with Ollie on Monday. we stayed at a rather nice hotel near Rutland Water, and it was quite an enjoyable experience. I uploaded my first benches to OpenBenches over the weekend, too!
• went into the office on Tuesday, ran an interview in the morning and had lunch at Where The Pancakes Are. caught up with some colleagues in the afternoon
• got up early on Wednesday for driving lessons, which I've been having for a few weeks now. they're quite stressful, but I'm married to the idea of learning manual. also, I still need to book my driving test!
• picked up some stickers for EMF I bought from muttrest on Wednesday. they're high quality, and turned out quite good. had lunch with Iris and gave her some of the stickers I'd promised. brought some into work and gave them to colleagues, too
• team day on Thursday went reasonably well. I've come away more inspired to work on my book about platform as the backbone of any modern technology-driven business.
• finalised my dotMeow Kickstarter pledge. I've been keeping up with the updates and it seems like things are going rather well
• went to Mercato Metropolitano at Elephant and Castle with some work people, and stumbled on rehearsals for Paul Marney & The Rascals at the Temple of Art and Music. borrowed their camera and took some photographs for them, I'm excited to see how they turn out. there was karaoke there afterwards, which I smashed (and managed to drag my colleagues into!)
  • TAM is also part of the Everywhere at Once music festival, where the National Lottery is helping a bunch of venues put on live music at the end of June. I'm excited!
• spent all day Saturday bed, got up in the evening and made tagliatelle and diced up some Polish pork belly. incredibly happy with how it turned out
• did some washing and folding clothes on Sunday. followed that up with a pub crawl for Jacob’s birthday, where we floundered at the fourth pub