Culture, musicals, cheese and travel made for a joyful week.
Week commencing Monday, 21 April 2025
Artisanal Italian cheese display at Lina Stores delicatessen
Quantified Self
This week: Stand 5/7; Exercise 5/7 and Move 5/7. (71%). Office days 1/4. Total steps: 56,504
Life
Lovely Monday morning in Shrewsbury, and a train home the long way around because of engineering works. The train from Moor Street was busy, but we secured a seat, and that’s all that is really needed.
A not-so-secret leaving drinks happened on Friday night. A colleague is going for the second time, so I didn’t want a big event—delightful time with nice people.
Friday, to a small theatre in Lower Marsh to see The Rise and Fall of Vinnie and Paul, a musical based on Paul Gauguin’s turbulent cohabitation with Vincent van Gogh in 1888. Van Gogh’s infamous breakdown and the severing of his ear ended the piece. A truly intimate, small show—really well done.
Our Saturday cheese adventure started at Fortnum and Mason and ended in Neal’s Yard. There was much delicious cheese and some fizz.
Another new musical on Sunday, Stiletto: set in 18th-century Italy, follows Marco, a castrato singer, and Gioia, a talented black woman, whose love story is challenged by a murder. I learned the non-show meaning of Stiletto as part of this experience. Also, brilliant and deserves wider recognition.
To the Actors Church in Covent Garden for Songs I’ll Never Sing, a charity concert featuring West End performers singing songs outside their typical range, in aid of Chicken Shed and The Brain Tumour Charity. Always great singers, but it does feel quite wrong drinking alcohol in a church pew.
Media
I started it at the weekend, and by Tuesday I’d finished Careless People, a memoir by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former New Zealand diplomat who joined Facebook and was there while I was. The book reveals a very different view of the company’s culture than I experienced, but the more I hear about things that happened around that time, I am beginning to think I was very sheltered.
Enjoying walks, family moments, reading, and fun outdoor activities.
Week commencing Monday, 14 April 2025
Eater at Colemere
Quantified Self
This week: Stand 3/7; Exercise 2/7 and Move 3/7. (38%). Morning walks: 0/4 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 1/5. Total steps: 37,770
Life
My quantified self metrics are some of the lowest I’ve had. This cough is affecting me more than I care to admit. I need to get out and about for some exercise.
The simplified version of the software, for speed, is far from simple, but we should continue to push for it.
I finally photographed my 2024 reading list. The books can now be rehomed, although some will remain by the bookshelf, waiting for a charity shop run.
I made the wrong call when the train was delayed. We should have taken the risk of the short interchange at Birmingham International, as we would have made it, and it would have arrived first. I’ll try the delay repay, but I bet they see this train still ran.
Attingham’s Easter egg trail was a lot of fun. I wore paper bunny ears all the way around. The lady who said to me that we have to do these things for our grandchildren did not make me feel young. The rest of the family laughed for the rest of the day.
My niece and nephew were braver on the climbing walls than I would have been. But I watched with a coffee and a flapjack and felt very safe.
Enjoyed sunshine, pub quiz, colleagues’ drinks, and homemade dumplings.
Week commencing Monday, 7 April 2025
The modern skyline of White City in London
Quantified Self
This week: Stand 4/7; Exercise 3/7 and Move 3/7. (48%). Morning walks: 0/4 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 1/5. Total steps: 36,322
Life
When I asked my doctor if I should try to use my private medical, she didn’t hesitate to recommend it. I found out the process, but didn’t jump to use it.
Pub quiz week: Joint 7th sounds poor but is, in fact, excellent—like winning. Our musical round was a let-down, and I missed the obvious Boney M song in the mix.
The Technical Design Authority review meeting missed a crucial piece of data, resulting in many extra meetings and work this week (and probably next).
The weather has been decent this week. On Thursday, we were able to eat lunch while sitting on the balcony, looking at the high-rise buildings being constructed around White City.
Drinks with commercial colleagues at the Exmouth Arms near Euston on Thursday evening. It’s a little hidden away and turned out not to be as rammed as some pubs we had walked past. We secured some seats inside and, later, a booth. A very impressive list of beers is available, so I am not sure why I went for the Madri: I guess it is a known quantity.
On Saturday, we attempted to make Chinese dumplings: it was much harder than it seemed, although the handmade ones were better than those made with a plastic crimping tool.
Media
Friday, I was a bit tired and had an evening to myself. I’ve been rewatching episodes of The Blacklist. I am now at the point, towards the end of series 2, where I stopped watching when it was initially on Sky. All the episodes will be new to me from now on, but I am glad I rewatched them as I’d forgotten the backstory. I thought I’d settle in and watch a couple of episodes before I made dinner. Instead, I binged on eight episodes back-to-back, something I doubt I would ever have been able to do before streaming.
Enjoyed friends, food, nature and family despite feeling a bit ill.
Week commencing Monday, 31 March 2025
Canon Hill Common
Quantified Self
This week: Stand 2/7; Exercise 2/7 and Move 2/7. (29%). Morning walks: 0/4 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 1/5. Total steps: 30,482
Life
Dad chased a missing birthday gift for PY that was dropped at a local shop. No luck. We’ll keep chasing.
I wrote something that reflected on Facebook/Meta’s high standards for product success, which was really reminiscing about the Meta Portal, an excellent photo frame and calling device.
Workwise, I attended a lengthy work session discussing apprenticeships, which was more interesting than I imagined.
Wednesday, I caught up with US tariff predictions and ended the day feeling low about the news.
Thursday was Thirsty Thursday again: an evening out at The White Horse where we tried to chat with ChatGPT about our personas.
Friday, I woke feeling ill with a persistent cough, so I cancelled next week’s Blood Donor session, but managed to get through the day.
Saturday: I enjoyed a lazy morning despite feeling under the weather. I called Mum and Dad about their anniversary flowers and booked train tickets for an Easter break trip to Shrewsbury.
Annoyingly, I discovered that AudioBoom no longer publicly hosts some radio clips I wanted to listen to. It’s time to see if I can recover them from AWS.
Saturday night, met up with friends in Balham for oysters, sharing plates and garlic prawns.
Took an afternoon walk on Cannon Hill Common, enjoying a moment watching local wildlife.
Facebook/Meta has always had a high bar for product success: when your potential audience is everybody in the world, products that seem successful to others are tiny to them. They’re not alone in that view; we used to joke that the Microsoft ad technology, shuttered while I worked on it, was a rounding error on a big Excel sheet somewhere, even though, by many standards, it made nice money. Big companies need a specific scale for their products to make working on them worthwhile. And, if the product is something you work on or value as a user, it’s always disappointing when you know it’s becoming obsolete and heading for the big technology graveyard.
And so, here’s a picture of a Meta (nee Facebook) Portal, IMO the best thing Facebook produced. It’s a device from which you can make Messenger/WhatsApp video calls. Three sizes were produced: this is the smallest. At the start of the pandemic, I bought the larger one for my parents and this model for my brother and myself. In 2020, we sat and ate Christmas dinner with my Mum and Dad using the device, as rules prevented us from partying in person. When you activate it, it makes calling somebody simple: just press their social media avatar. At some point, support was added for Zoom and other video calling services.
I don’t know what they did, but the speaker’s also superb. There’s a portal app for Spotify, and it’s also a Bluetooth speaker. There are still times when one of us inadvertently connects to the Portal speaker instead of the Sonos devices in our living room, and I think the Portal fills the space with sound much better.
It’s also a fantastic digital picture frame. As it’s from Meta, it has access to my Facebook and Instagram photos. A mobile app allowed device-only albums to be created. It offered fine-grained controls for which pictures should be displayed. While my use of Facebook and Instagram might have waned, the photos they hold are still memories, and this device convinced me that a digital photo frame is the best way to surface memories. I hope the product team behind Apple’s – rumoured – home device understands that. The Portal made my photo memories accessible, and lots of friends who visited often commented on the pictures shown.
Now, a device with a microphone and a camera from Facebook, launched in 2018, sometime around the Cambridge Analytica scandal, had its work cut out to convince people it’s not illicitly listening or recording. The pandemic may or may not have given it a chance. I thought it was an excellent device for relatives who found video calling on phones or computers too complex. ‘Just press my face’ was a line I used on more than one occasion.
This morning, I went to my Portal app to add photos from last weekend’s trip to Paris. The app told me it had been discontinued since January. While I love my Portal, it is telling that it’s more than three months since I last used the mobile app to manage the device (although I should say, it’s one of the most stable pieces of technology in my house; I am not sure I’ve ever seen it crash or need an unexpected reboot).
So, the device’s days are numbered. Many companies would have just shut down the service altogether. Kudos to Meta for not doing that. The support page says,
We’ll continue to provide customer support for Meta Portal owners as usual until February 2032 … You can still use your Meta Portal to call family and friends until late 2031.
While that is disappointing, it does mean I could get ten years of use from it. And that’s more than a lot of technology.
(I’m amused that I managed to snap the picture just as the screen showed an image of another piece of long-gone dead technology: Microsoft’s Zune music player. I never had one, but I once posted a picture to Facebook, which is why it appears on the device).
