Weeknotes #29: regatta hats

Week commencing Monday, 7 August 2023

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand 5/7; Exercise 3/7 and Move 4/7. (57%, way down). Morning walks: 0/5 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 0/5. Total steps: 59,454

Life

  • According to The Internet, “In the decades after the war, it was the done thing to wear a silly hat to the regatta“. So, Sandown has a hat parade.
  • I wrote a lot of documentation this week, both customer-facing and internal ticket-based stuff. I spent an afternoon wrangling Jira tickets into a useful order so that whoever has to deal with them next stands a chance of understanding my proposed sequencing.
  • I didn’t wrangle the other system that’s arrived to mange the product work. I thought it hypocritical of us to insist one side of the company used Jira (“because it’s the source of truth”) for us not to do that ourselves. Why does it matter to me? Because I think we should work in the open and multiple, disconnected systems that rely on layers of manual updating do not facilitate that approach.
  • And then, this, which is so accurate: “Communicating agile development to people outside of the organisation is difficult and leads to frustration on their part. There’s an expectation of things being clear from the outset and delivered as a whole, rather than an incremental evolution of a product, subject to change iteration. They also struggle to ‘see’ a project overall …” Neil Lawrence.
  • Monday, towels bulk washed in the laundrette where they can dry much better. Gave me time to sit and read. It’s relaxing but £1 doesn’t buy much drying time. I’m only reading this book because of the title. And the time spend reading paid off as I kept picking up the book all week and ended up finishing it on Friday.
  • Related, I started that book as I’d stalled reading Sara Cox’s first when it became too farm-y, but the brief interlude with a French mystery, and I was back enjoying the adventures of Sara in Korea.
  • Monday, 10pm, “Mrs Overall, that macaroon you just choked on, I’m going to send the recipe to the Weekly News”. Victoria Wood’s comedy still makes me laugh.
  • Wednesday, was that a sarcastic comment from one of our developers about “people sticking around to see it through”? I wasn’t sure about it but, maybe, I should have commented. Also, still not sure if they’re winding me up about CC or not.
  • Another “their life, my life moment”. It’s clear in 2023 but back then we all thought differently: “It took me a little while to accept that having my email and web presence completely beholden to my employer was perhaps not the greatest plan. That is obvious to you now, but it was the 90s, we were like little children”. jwz.
  • Good news, I think, for public transport in the Capital. Ian Visits notes that London’s off-peak travel has recovered to pre-pandemic levels and exceeded them at times. Commuter traffic is still down.

Media

Archive

To save the links getting lost in the future I checked the Internet Archive to see what they had saved for the posts linked here. If the original source above no longer works, these should.