Week commencing Monday, 6 April, 2026
Quantified Self
- This week: Stand 6/7; Exercise 5/7 and Move 5/7. (81%). Morning walks: 0/3. Office days: 1/4. Total steps: 55,303. 10 hours in meetings.
Life
- The engineering works meant that trains returning from Shrewsbury were very busy. I am glad that I got to Moor Street early, as that enabled me to secure a seat. I would not have been able to sit in the aisle all the way to London, as some people did.
- Tuesday, an after-work dash to the Co-op for a pizza for dinner because I had my first volunteer training session for the ITTF World Team Table Tennis Championships Finals, which come to London later this month.
- Then, on Saturday, to the Copper Box Arena in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park for more volunteer training. We got a tour of the venue with some of the championship organisers; it was impressive how much detail they had already worked through—where walls would go up, how people would move around—and it was fascinating to hear.
- Almost five years ago, in my second-ever weeknote, I wrote that I had a website that broke my rules about sustainable URL schemas. Somewhere around 2009, I’d upgraded musak.org and, in the process, broken most of the links within the site. I fixed this 17-year-old task on Friday, with guidance from ChatGPT. The task was simply waiting for the right moment to be resolved, and that moment needed AI to balance effort and output.
- Related, this dead link,
http://www.musak.org/entries/2003/07/another_russian_birthday.shtml, will now resolve to the right place. - My dentist now recommends Netflix shows as part of the service. Will I ever watch Younger or Jane the Virgin?
- Sunday, for a “trio of meats” lunch: gammon, turkey and beef, Yorkshire pudding with stuffing. Delicious.
Media
- The new Race Across the World has started, but it’s too early to have picked my winners.
- I watched the first episode of The Newsreader, a critically acclaimed Australian drama set in a commercial television newsroom. It took me a while to get into the rhythm, but the major news event of the first episode is the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in January 1986. Using that real event as its backdrop made the tension feel believable.
- On Channel 5, Jane McDonald went to Nashville across two evenings, where she dives into the world of country music—without the cruise ship, for once. Part of the premise is that she’s in a Nashville studio recording tracks for her new album, Living the Dream, claiming she’s always been a bit country because her songs tell stories. It’s arguably one long advert for the album, but fun.