Day: 16 March 2025

Weeknotes #112: Design Museum and surprises

London walks, birthday surprises, and AI made a memorable week.

Week commencing Monday, 10 March 2025

This image shows a gallery installation from "The World of Tim Burton" exhibition at London's Design Museum, taken in March 2025. The scene is bathed in distinctive blue and purple lighting that creates a dramatic, atmospheric effect reminiscent of Burton's aesthetic. This scene is for materials fro the Batman movies.
The World of Tim Burton

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand 5/7; Exercise 4/7 and Move 4/7. (62%). Morning walks: 0/4 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 1/5 Total steps: 44,027

Life

  • I am often asked to produce my passport or my driving licence to use as identity, but I have not needed my birth certificate for a long time. Thankfully, I found it.
  • I asked Google Gemini to clean up a meeting transcript. It turned a forty-minute meeting into a ten-minute passage and then read it to me. That would have been a great time-saver if I hadn’t had to hear the entire meeting.
  • Related: nice though it was, I am glad I heard the original meeting because that allowed me to spot where Gemini had got it wrong. Unsurprisingly, people trust AI a little too much: Would a computer really go on the internet and lie? Well, yes.
  • Relatedly, related: Revealed: How the UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT for policy advice.
  • Thursday, to the office and met a former colleague in a lovely pub near St Paul’s Cathedral. I walked streets I’d never ventured down before. There are some interesting places in London.
  • On Saturday, for PY’s birthday, we saw The World of Tim Burton at London’s Design Museum. It was very busy, but it was really interesting to see the evolution of the Tim Burton look. Lots of films were covered in a small space, so the exhibition was very much focused on how the look evolved rather than on any particular show. Of course, I loved The Nightmare Before Christmas parts.
  • Related, the themed afternoon tea, rooftop cocktail bar with a view of St Paul’s Cathedral, and Argentinian steak dinner were all surprises. My timings all worked out, even with a delay on the Circle Line.
  • Friends of Sunday Lunch, PY has planned individual beef Wellingtons. After the Argentinian, that was a lot of steak in one weekend.
  • This resonated: How Much Do I Really Need to Know?

Media

Florida, USA – First Impressions Count

My first impressions of Florida – warm and wet with long security queues, big cars and slower drivers that at home. And lots and lots of food.

Well, PY and I arrived in Florida yesterday afternoon. Security at Orlando International Airport was quite strict: they re-scan your baggage on the way into the country, and you must walk through the metal detectors again. I find this really odd (it happened to me in Raleigh last December), and it’s so time-consuming. Don’t the American border guards trust the security measures at Gatwick? It took nearly two hours to get through the airport, and I don’t want to mention the bizarre situation where you pick your bags up and then place them on another conveyor belt to appear elsewhere in the airport sometime later.

One of the things that had been concerning me was the drive. I have never driven in the US, and I have never driven an automatic car. And with less than 24 hours since I picked up the car, I am a convert to the automatic, but not to this side of the road. Don’t you people know that the left is the only decent side to drive on? We didn’t pick up a fancy car (because I wanted something small, but the Avis guy’s idea of small and mine are very different – this is a big car), but it seems to drive well (the ABS may be a little over the top), and I like this whole one-foot approach. We got a little lost (by which I know we took the wrong road, but – somehow – that meant we missed the toll roads, so it worked out well). But it poured down with rain. It was torrential. I was quite shocked by the power of the rain, and it might have put me off the drive, but it was OK because everybody drives so slowly here (even though they’re all breaking the speed limit). I have been quite amazed by that little fact. Six wide lanes and everybody popping along at sixty miles an hour. Of course, I shouldn’t complain because it’s safer, but what must American drivers think of the M6 (when it’s running)?

So far, we’ve been pretty lazy: shopping, the pool, and eating. Tomorrow, I will visit my first Disney theme park in the US. We’re off to Epcot, and I am quite excited. One thing has become very obvious, though – Gym Buddy isn’t going to be happy with me. There’s so much cheap food here (a great deal of it fried), and I want to eat most of it. Oh dear.

My first impressions of Florida – warm and wet with long security queues, big cars and slower drivers than at home. And lots and lots of food.