Week commencing Monday, 18 July 2022

Two chimneys from Battersea Power Station — The redeveloped Battersea Power Station

I’d like to start recording my weekly exercise goals here. I use the Apple Watch and will measure completed rings. This week: Stand 5/7; Exercise 3/7 and Move 1/7. Only 43%. Not good.
The heatwave arrived at the start of the week. My team had planned to work in the office on Monday. As some people ended up being out of London and would not have attended anyway, the rest of us took TFL’s advice and stayed at home.
The outside thermometer at my house did record over 40 degrees Celsius on Monday – and more on Tuesday – but that was in the direct sun and I don’t think that recording is accurate. Meanwhile, military officials said the runway at the country’s largest air base ‘melted’.
Turns out, from watching one of the Slack channels at work that quite a few people have Netatmo.
According to The Week, “Numerous studies have linked hot weather to reduced cognitive function leading to decreased productivity [and] errors of judgement.” Let’s hope all the decisions I made at work still stand!
There were wildfires in the UK which is not a phrase I think I’ve heard here before.
I finished Giles Turnbull’s The Agile Comms Handbook. My takeaway is to continue to write more. I think the more you write – here and elsewhere – the easier it is. But also that I want to adopt some of the strategies at work: maybe too late for this job but not for the next. Also, the first draft is always bad. Recommended if you care about communicating your work.
We walked to New Malden to find panko breadcrumbs. I’m pleased we were successful finding them as they are really useful to have around. Is it a bit lazy to have them in the cupboard?
Sunday to the Battersea Power Station complex. Since we were last there they have removed lots of hoardings and you can now walked all around the Power Station. It’s very impressive. We visited the shell of the building in 2006 and it would be fascinating to see it’s new life.
We were there to see a performance in the world premiere run of A-Typical Rainbow. It’s a play by autistic writer JJ Green. The theatre blurb says the play asks: “could a kinder, more joyful world lie at the end of the rainbow?” It was very good.
I do not subscribe to the view that the public has any kind of right, just because it’s mid-term, to view the internal machinations of the Conservative Party’s leadership contest. The candidates have not behaved as one would expect Leaders to behave. And now we likely have months of mud slinging between the remaining two. I feel like this and I am now a news-avoider. I wonder if people who actually watch the news feel this is good?

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.

—
Originally posted at curnow.org and archived at The Wayback Machine

Week commencing Monday, 11 July 2022

I decided that I must not get too frustrated with myself when my weeknotes are published late. The important thing is the habit. But I will backdate the post so that they appear in the right week. This week, though, I am on track.
At lunch on Tuesday I went and sat outside. It was much hotter outside than inside and I came in after a short while. In the end the fan came on for the afternoon.
It’s been a week of heat and it looks like it will continue into next week. This was great news for Mum and Dad’s party on Saturday: although the room used for the event was a conservatory and did get quite warm. As we were near the canal, there was some very pleasant outdoor space and it was nice for people to be able to sit outside.
The party was wonderful. Lots of family got together to celebrate Mum & Dad’s milestone birthdays. The choir that Dad sings in performed and I gave a speech that turned out quite well in the end. We don’t get both sides of the family together that much anymore so this was a real treat.
I never know how to put together the kind of speech needed at these family events. Fortunately, PY kicked it off with a draft a 10 days ago. In the end we changed quite a bit but it’s so useful to have something to get started. I was quite worried about nerves getting the better of me as, unlike work presentations, there’s an expectation that it would be amusing. Thankfully, people laughed in all the right places.
When is a ‘story’ a ‘task’? Just one of the questions raised at work this week. I was quite glad that I only worked a 4-day week.
On Thursday afternoon I picked up a rental car and we drove to Shropshire ahead of the aforementioned party. It was a small Renault Clio but was quite lovely to drive with a nice big screen to utilise CarPlay so I had music and maps with no issues. I’ve rented more cars in the last couple of years than we have done in years. I’m going to check the spreadsheet but I am sure it’ll still be a lot cheaper than owning one.
Friday I pottered around Mum & Dad’s house and spent some time with my niece and nephew in a skate park. Afterwards, we drove to the location of the big party. We also had dinner together, which was lovely, but PY and I did not get there in time to see the pool and spa. We managed to rectify that before we left on Sunday afternoon.

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.

—
Originally posted at curnow.org and archived at The Wayback Machine

Weeknotes #10

I’ve been telling people I bounced for the entire day.

Week commencing Monday, 4 July 2022

First week back at Tai Chi after a couple of weeks and it was lovely. Practice was outside and, somehow, that makes it feel much more relaxed.
I took a quiz thing at work to discover how comfortable I am with digital transformation: “When it comes to digital, you’re interested in what technology can do, while remaining keen to make sure it doesn’t take over your life. You’ll generally be a quick adopter with an open mindset, but will strip away anything that doesn’t add value in those early phases of adoption”. Seems like a reasonable position to me.
The UK Government kind of imploded this week. Law and policy commentator, David Allen Green, had a fascinating piece on the constitutional consequences if Boris Johnson refuses to resign?. Basically, get the Queen on the phone.
In a fast moving week in British politics, almost by the time I’d read the article Boris has resigned.
But, most depressingly of all was was the video circulating on Twitter of Andrea Jenkyn, the new Education Minister, greeting the public with the finger. What’s happened to the people who run the country that they have such contempt for the rest of us who they are supposed to work for?
Mainly, however this week will be remembered for Bananarama at Kew The Music. It’s not the first concert I have been to post-pandemic but it’s the one where I just felt non-stop joy. I’ve been telling people I bounced for the entire day.
Just before Bananarama started performing, PY inflated some blow-up bananas. I thought lots of people would have them. They didn’t. I was a bit sheepish waving them around. And then other people started enjoying them and having their photos with them. And it was even more joyous. And I ran towards the stage and waved them some more.
Also, happy birthday James. Sunday’s birthday dinner was a lot of fun too.

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.

Week commencing Monday, 27 June 2022

I keep reading that writing is good for you. Even though my last attempt at weeknotes lasted only 8 entries I continue to read other people’s notes; although not always at the point they were written. Alice Bartlett inspired me this time around. Let’s see how long it lasts.
After a week of staying in the house, Monday I tested negative for COVID and had full plans to head to the office on Tuesday. The next day, before heading out, I tested positive again and stayed at home. A little bit frustrating. All clear by Thursday.
I made it into the office on Thursday. Later in the day the Pride network had drinks. It was nice to socialise in the building again.
On Friday it was announced that Steve Wright is leaving his afternoon show on BBC Radio 2. One commenter quoted that it’s not often changes to radio station line-ups make the evening news.

Not often a radio show changing presenter makes the main evening news! Includes a Wogan House doorstep with the Big Show host himself! pic.twitter.com/rJHhG6Fj09— Stuart Clarkson (@stuartclarkson) July 1, 2022

Nobody in that BBC piece talked about the period from 1993 to 1999 when Steve didn’t present the afternoon show. My memory recalls that, for a while, he had a networked commercial radio show before coming back to the BBC. I can’t remember if the company I worked for distributed it or not. The UK Radio groups of Facebook were full of split opinions, which I guess is only natural after somebody has been doing a popular thing for 40 or so years.
On Friday evening I headed into town for drinks with a colleague and was reasonably surprised how early some of the places along the Southbank closed. That seems to have changed in the post-lockdown reopening.

Elsewhere: World Radio Day

When I was growing up, I thought radio was the most exciting medium in the world. I wrote something to celebrate World Radio Day,

The Elsewhere category on this site seems to be home for things I have posted on Facebook; and this is no exception. In 2012 the United Nations General Assembly agreed that World Radio Day was a real International Day and, thus, February 13 became WRD. My little contribution to the spirit of the days was posted on Facebook (and a version on Instagram because, if you don’t do all the social media channels, what’s the point?)

Apparently, we are almost at the end of #worldradioday.
When I was younger all I ever cared about was the magic of radio. It was my private world: in my childhood bedroom there was a whole universe created by the Piccadilly presenters and it was all in my head. When I was ten years old, visiting the original Piccadilly studios in central in Manchester was so important in my life I called it ‘my happiest memory’.
Although many people thought it was, it was never about being on the radio but it was all about the world radio created for those who listened and how that world was put together.
For a small part of my life I was lucky enough to be part of the magic: in the late 80s if you called The BBC in Shropshire you may have spoken to me or in the early 90s, if you listened to the Network Chart Show, I often pressed some buttons to make sure it got to your local radio station (or at least I was there in case the satellite that sent it to you ever fell out of the sky: it never did). If you ever heard a Shoe Express ad, chances are I spent all night getting that 30s of audio to your local station (and if, like me, you heard a version, or two, for every town in Britain you’ll guess why shoes are not my thing).
But, most importantly for me, the people who made that magic pointed my career in the direction it’s taken and, although there are too many to mention, I will forever be grateful to them all.
So, thank you radio: we may be listening to audio in ways we never imagined but there’s still some magic in the voices that come out of the ether. Tomorrow morning, why not ‘turn up the feel good’ with ‘more of the songs you love’ that are probably ‘the biggest hits and the biggest throwbacks’ on the ‘UK’s No.1 Hit Music Station’ or, my current choice, ‘The UK’s Country Station’.
Tune in and rip the knob off!
Originally posted on Facebook

Let’s hang out in the blogosphere

On January 2nd this year, Matt Mullenweg encouraged people to get blogging,

Write for a single person. Share something cool you found. Summarize your year. Set a blogging goal with reminders. Get a Gutenberg-native theme and play around with building richer posts. Start a nom de plume. Answer daily prompts on Day One. Forget the metaverse, let’s hang out in the blogosphere. Get your own domain!

Reading that reminded me that I haven’t written on curnow.org for some time. I used to ‘summarise my year’ pretty regularly – albeit in different ways – on here. In 2021 I tried the weeknotes format but it didn’t really work for me. In December 2020 I posted a 10 Year Instagram retrospective and, earlier that year, looked back on the handful of tweets I posted in 2019.

I wrote 2018’s Annual Report at the start of 2019 and took a moment to look back on my 2017 Reading Challenge the year before. Previous annual(ish) reviews were photography based, the last one of those was My 15 for 2015 posted at the end of December 2015.

In the spirit of ‘hanging out in the blogosphere’ and because I have previous writing to point to, on January 4th this year I gave myself 27 days to compose something to summarise 2021. Clearly, I missed my own deadline but these are the words I’ve put together since then.

2021

2021 was an odd year. Like many others I began the year back in a London COVID-19 lockdown dreaming of freedom in spring. I took part in a virtual escape room in March which was fun but not as much as the real thing. And nowhere near as fun as the summer of normality which followed a few months later.

I got my first vaccine shot in the early part of the year but it took until April 15th to be able to go out and see people. I met some friends for an outside meal. I have two memories of that evening: that it was fun to be able to talk to people across a table but it was cold. I bought a jacket with an in-built, battery-powered, heating element to get me through that – and a couple of similar – evenings.

This year I continued a trend from the first months of lockdown in 2020: going on local history walks. On one of them, we tried to find the site of the Craig Telescope but I am not convinced we ever did.

The year opened up from June and I was able to get to the Isle of Wight for a holiday and there was a family trip to The Lake District. Later in the summer I got to see AFC Wimbledon’s new Plough Lane stadium which was fun and I hope to see a few more games this year. By the time the weather was getting colder again there was a trip on the Caledonian Sleeper to Fort William which was wonderful but my overriding memory is of rain.

All the socials

I didn’t really tweet much in 2021. I think I was trying to avoid doom-scrolling about the pandemic. I appear to have enjoyed The Masked Singer last year (as I am in this year). I also noted that I, finally, killed off a couple of experiments I had been running for ten years on local tweeting. The local engagement was fun but it was time-consuming and when I moved house I gave up and a couple of accounts just became automatic re-tweeters. I don’t think it’s a good use of Twitter. I had always planned to write more about those experiments but I think their time has been and gone. Still, it was a fun side project for several years but I am glad it’s been put to sleep.

It's time to say goodbye to @CommonIdeas. In 2009 I set up a Twitter account for the area near where I lived as a way of sharing local news. It's been running from an automated search for local news for a couple of years since.
— Jon Curnow (@curns) August 6, 2021

I ended 2021 tweeting about Stretchy Pants which is a much more relevant topic for this time of year.

On Instagram there were 16 grid pictures vs 104 stories. So I guess the story format wins. Yet again the algorithm chose my Top Nine but I got to pick my story highlights.

If I had to pick my favourite photographs, I’m not sure what I would pick, but I do like these three night shots; although my favourite photo didn’t get to Instagram.

I tried quite hard to complete a full year’s photo journal with Blipfoto. It’s an excellent and, I think, unknown photo sharing site that I briefly used many years ago but came back to during the pandemic. I started 2021 strongly but my continuous burst really ended in September. I’m not sure what killed it off but I am back trying again in 2022.

As a result of working at home I probably listened to more music than I have done in previous years. Last.fm says there were 9,456 scrobbles. Contemporary country music is the genre I am listening to most at the moment. It’s interesting to see what the various services say about my top artists:

Last FM says Miranda Lambert was my top artist of 2021 while Famous Friends, Chris Young & Kane Brown, was my top track. They also say that 59% of my listening was new tracks which I found surprising.
On Spotify, I apparently played more Luke Combs while If I Didn’t Love You was the most played 3 and a half minutes.
Apple Music agrees that Famous Friends is my most played song but makes it way too hard to figure out who my most played artist was for me to bother with for this post.

My 2021 Media Diet only included three films. I can’t choose between them because they were all perfectly passable ways to spend a couple of hours. So, in the order that I saw them (with a short review):

In the Heights (Good, but I preferred the stage show)
Free Guy (Good, but felt a bit familiar)
No Time To Die (Good, but some of the action scenes went on for too long)

Of the films watched on a TV screen I am finding it hard to pick a favourite. Perhaps honourable mentions for The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Wonder Woman, My Octopus Teacher and Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary.

I went to theatre five times but two visits were to see things I’d seen before. I saw Declan Bennett twice; once in his one man show, Boy Out of the City and once in Carousel at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in August. Both were excellent.

I did write about my failure to meet my GoodReads Reading Challenge as an end of year post to Blipfoto. I read two books, 767 pages and listened to five audiobooks. I’m pretty disappointed with that and I aim to do better this year.

This year, I started listening to the Strangerville story-telling podcast. There are over a hundred episodes to catch-up on. It’s really great.

Out and about

Swarm, by Foursquare, doesn’t give me stats anymore about the number of check-ins. I’m guessing it’s way down because of the pandemic but I’d be interested in comparisons with previous years if anybody knows of simple tools to query my data let me know. On the other hand Google tells me that the total amount of travel in 2021 was equivalent to 19% around the world. I find that quite a surprisingly high number (or, perhaps, my sense of the distance around the world is skewed). Mind you Google says I walked a total of 783 miles this year while Apple thinks that was 1008 miles. The lesson here might be to not trust the trackers.

The pandemic has changed the ways a lot of us have been working. In November we tried an experiment and spent a month working from an Airbnb on the Isle of Wight to see how well that would work (turned out pretty well, really). I hope to do that again this year.

Weeknotes #8

Week commencing Monday, 17 May 2021

I had to visit a hospital at the beginning of the week. It was nothing major but it was very controlled and unlike any other time I have had the need to be an outpatient: arrive, alone, no more than five minutes in advance, for example. As a result it seemed remarkably efficient. It would be nice if this kind of thing is retained as we move into a post-pandemic world.
I got caught in a torrential downpour on the walk back from the hospital. I was equal distance between two bus stops and, by the time I had sheltered from the enormous hailstones and arrived at the next stop, the sun was out. I decided to walk home in order to dry my clothes. This is very strange weather for May.
Helping PY’s company move offices on Saturday necessitated travel in central London. As I was on the edge of The City, it wasn’t overly busy but it is definitely noticeable that people are out and about again.
After the office move we had out first restaurant meal that was inside since December last year. It felt remarkably normal. The place was well ventilated and people were reasonably separated so we didn’t have any concerns.
Being out of the house meant I had a couple of deliveries diverted to a local pick-up point which was the first time I’d had need to do that since lockdown began. But one item was delivered to the doorstep, and subsequently stolen. It’s all on camera so can be reported. However, it did occur to me that the move away from everybody being home all the time is going to change the way deliveries work for the second time in eighteen months: few retailers have solved the problem of the last few metres of the delivery chain when they find nobody in.
Being out of the house also meant that we did not watch any of the Eurovision Song Contest performances from Rotterdam. We were back in time for the results. Disappointing for the UK. Congratulations to Italy (who last won in 1990). The main question on Sunday seemed to be did he, or didn’t he?

Weeknotes #7

Week commencing Monday, 10 May 2021

Personal

The interesting, interconnected world in which we live has been highlighted for me on my quest to buy a new jar of Marmite. Don’t judge me for my love of the yeasty spread. Apparently, our inability to buy beer in pubs had an impact on yeast supplies to Unilever which, in turn, had an impact on the amount of Marmite that can be produced. I found a big pot on Amazon which saved the day but, please, as the local pub opens go and buy some beer!
I finished Dolly Parton’s America podcast. I fear some people may be put off by the title. Sure, Dolly is the thread that connects all the episodes but it deals with so many big issues for today. Give it a listen. My favourite Dolly line, “I don’t know that I believe in reincarnation. And I didn’t believe in it when I lived before”.
I went to the gym 3 times. Rather pleased that I managed that.
Walked around part of central London on Sunday which was most enjoyable. Took a picture of Tower Bridge with the clouds that I thought was quite good.

Weeknotes #6

Week commencing Monday, 3 May 2021

London is in my blood – it’s the absolute honour of my life to serve the city I love for another three years.
My mission over the next three years is to put the dark days of the pandemic behind us and deliver a brighter future for all Londoners.
@SadiqKhan

Personal

I don’t know why house maintenance issues always worry me. At the start of the week there were issues with next door’s plumbing and it looks like they might want to lift some of our decking to try to find the problem. In the end, they didn’t. Still, need to keep an eye on this. At the end of week a plumber came to fix the bathroom leak but ended up leaving claiming it was a bigger job than the time allotted and promised a quote which still hasn’t materialised.
Bank holidays are always nice and we did a lovely long local history walk back to Earlsfield and up to Wandsworth Common in search of The Craig Telescope and it made for a lovely day. I also managed to grab a few snaps of the changing high street in Earlsfield. It’s a subject the fascinates me but I don’t have the time to document more. Yesterday evening I came across an office block where I once worked that’s being redeveloped. It’s the relentless march of progress.
Thursday was polling day in the Mayoral year-delayed elections. Sadiq Khan was selected. Disappointedly, the turnout was only 42%; but that maybe typical. The BBC reported that a Record number of mayoral votes rejected because of the supplementary vote system and says that the government is considering moving the vote to a First Past the Post system. I wonder if that favours them?
I made the gym three times this week. Quite happy with that although I realise it’s all about the continued momentum.
I wholly recommend My Octopus Teacher on Netflix – an Oscar winning documentary that was feel-good.

Weeknotes #5

Week commencing Monday, 26 April 2021

It turns out, however, that setting and then chasing after goals can often backfire in horrible ways. There is a good case to be made that many of us, and many of the organizations for which we work, would do better to spend less time on goalsetting, and, more generally, to focus with less intensity on planning for how we would like the future to turn out.
Oliver Burkeman quoted in I’ve Never Had a Goal, by Jason Kottke

Personal

Turns out today is day 412 of lockdown. I had been on a long weekend before we were told not to go to work so it’s been a little longer since I worked in an office building. SO much has changed.
I had to write my annual objectives last week and I’ve been thinking a lot about them since. Everybody I have ever worked for has some variant on goal-setting. I understand the process but the output rarely ranks as my number one way to think about the work I do. This week I discovered Jason Kottke’s 2016 piece, I’ve Never Had a Goal which resonated and also linked to Jason Fried’s similar piece (“I want to make progress, I want to make things better …). If you find goal-setting as difficult as I do then these are reassuring words.
I am really enjoying reading blogs via NetNewsWire, it feels like a proper uncluttered RSS reader and reminds me of the original Bloglines or Google Reader. Tom Stuart writes weeknotes and he’s in my feed. A line in Weeknotes 68 struck a chord, “When I was a CTO I was the most senior technical decision-maker in the company; now I’m a nobody”. I was never a CTO nor do I have much desire for people management but the idea that I had a prioritised voice and now I just have a job made me stop and think about what I want in my career.
I’m starting to see people out and about again. On Friday we had a small team social at work for those of us who live in South West London (a pub garden in Teddington) and on Saturday a trip to see my parents who did a barbecue in the garden. It’s the first time I’ve seen them since last summer and it was lovely to be out and about.

Weeknotes #4

Week commencing Monday, 19 April 2021

Beautiful weekend weather lead to much sitting in the sun. I may be a bit sunburnt. Taking a train to Southampton to see family on Sunday seemed very normal (even though I haven’t done it for over a year). The train disruption on the return journey also seemed remarkably normal and predictable.
The question I can’t get out of my head this week: at any given moment, how many people are saying the word “Alexa”?
We’re starting to plan what our ‘return to the office’ will look like. According to the BBC, HSBC plans to shrink its office space by 40% in a post-pandemic shake-up which, I suspect, is like a lot of other companies.
We had a team meeting to discuss our individual thoughts on the back-to-the-office. Generally, the return to the over-crowded commute was unwelcome. But, also, the idea of turning up to an office space to don headphones and video conference the people who are not in on that day. This is more than a change of ‘where’; it will be a change of ‘how’.
For a random reason I saw a statement on a Spotify job spec and I love this sentence, “You are welcome at Spotify for who you are, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or what’s playing in your headphones.”
Reminded this week about Troubled Diva’s ‘The 40 in 40 Days Project’ which you can still read via The Wayback Machine.
I feel asleep while watching The Spy Who Loved Me on Saturday night which must have been as a result of the wine I drink in the sunshine and the large Indian takeaway that we had.
Spent more time listening to Podcasts than I have done for while. The Chaos and collapse: European football’s not-so-super league episode of The Guardian’s Today in Focus was an interesting discussion about the launch and collapse of the Super League this week. Also recommend for the remote working conversations, Stephen Wolfram on 28 Years of Remote Work an episode of ‘Distributed, with Matt Mullenweg’ that’s from 2019 but interesting in light of this week’s conversations.

Weeknotes #3

Week commencing Monday, 12 April 2021

Blood test this week; hopefully nothing important; a text from the Doctor and a follow-up consultation in a couple of weeks suggests nothing urgent was found.
First night out with friends in Streatham. £28.56 for bottle of wine is much more expensive that the ones in the fridge but it was nice – if cold – to be outside.
The heated Gillet that I bought kind of worked: it kept my back very warm but made me realise how cold my arms and legs were.
Initial planning for an evening out with with former colleagues. It would be the first time I have been into Central London this year – which isn’t surprising but still feels odd to write.
We’re trying The Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney+ but I am struggling with the new Captain America. To be fair, we are only on Episode 2.
The weather was lovely at the weekend so, on Saturday, we sat outside at the front of the house which gets the late afternoon soon. Met some street-neighbours who we’ve never said hello to before. Quite lovely.
Sunday we walked to Merton Abbey for some lunch and a walk around the shops. All the craft stalls were back and it was also great to be outside in the sunshine.

Weeknote #2

Week commencing Monday, 5 April 2021

In my entire life I have never seen this BBC ident before pic.twitter.com/QN4HR4bnSz
— Scott Bryan (@scottygb) April 9, 2021

Prince Philip has died aged 99: “Prince Philip was an extraordinary man who lived an extraordinary life; a life intimately connected with the sweeping changes of our turbulent 20th Century, a life of fascinating contrast and contradiction, of service and some degree of solitude. A complex, clever, eternally restless man.” BBC News
As Diamond Geezer said, “Few events are as well planned for as the death of a major royal” but I thought the decision to take BBC Four off air seemed odd. I wonder how much streaming services were up this weekend?
COVID passports are in the news. There’s a feeling the people don’t want a 2-tier system that would exclude some people from whatever the new normal is. The BBC reported there was strong public support for their use in some situations. I’d happily have one if to means things can open up more quickly.
I had some fun with Google search console trying to figure out why I need a separate property for http v https. In the end I went down the domain verification path. It seems every few years I have to verify the ownership of domains I have had for years with them.
Working with my domains made me wonder when I first registered them, so I looked it up: curnow.org (14th-May-1999) and musak.org (17th-Feb-2003)
I am not sure I learnt much from Kara Swisher’s interview with Tim Cook but it was an interesting listen.
Too many radio station Wikipedia entries seem to focus on the station today and radio history is lost. I added some links to The BBC Radio Shropshire wiki entry. I wonder how long they will stay around?
I Tweeted about some links I cleaned up on a Listen to Musak entry and how many of the URLs have gone or changed. I’m a bit of a hypocrite because Listen to Musak’s URL schema broke when I moved it to WordPress and 12 years later I haven’t really fixed it but I am, gradually, repairing the site so the links work.
I also installed an RSS reader. Yes, I really am recreated the web of 2004. But Net News Wire is nice and the team behind it appear half way through enabling iCloud sync (it works on desktop but not to the mobile app yet).

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.

Weeknote #1

Week commencing Monday, 29 March 2021

… and who need a little bit of reminding, in chaotic times, of what it was like to telnet into a blank screen which contained the entire world.
Why Generation X will save the web, Heather Burns

There’s an excellent article by Heather Burns entitled “Why Generation X will save the web” which you should read. It was written in January but I was only pointed to it this week. Back in the glory days of blogging we’d all have been quoting that within a hour of it being published.

Heather’s comparison that “We – the GenXers – think of the internet as the open web” and “Today’s policy facilitators – the millennials – think of the internet as MySpace and Facebook. The closed web” is wonderful insight into the way the web has changed since I built my first sites and since my first blog entry.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the evolution of the web and how it’s not as we foresaw. I think it’s something to do with celebrating a significant birthday last year and an urge to document what I’ve written here on the web over the years. It may also be do do with the fact that I’ve spent more time lately away from social media platforms and more time exploring the web as it used to be. I’ve been discovering how many of the blogs of old are still in existence and how many are being updated.

I still read Phil Gyford. His ‘Half Century Notes‘ is a lovely piece of writing about his version of that significant birthday.

Several of the bloggers I used to read, including Phil, have morphed into the Weeknotes format. So, as there’s a passing bandwagon, I thought’d I jump on it.

Weeknotes

the clocks went forward last weekend and we have lighter evenings now. I decided to try Couch-to-5k again and did the first session over 2.43 miles. That’s all I managed this week – but next week can bring another beginning, can’t it?
the highlight of the week is the gradual reduction in the lockdown rules. We can now meet outside – which includes the garden. This inspired a B&Q trip and some planting in the pots on Good Friday and visitors on Saturday. Also a visit to a garden on Easter Sunday for a lovely outdoor lunch. It’s cold out of the sun but pleasant while the skies are blue.
thinking of this weekly format reminded me of the 10-part newsletter I penned in 2010: Last Week in Digital Advertising. I looked at the first one and discovered about half the links no longer existed. I managed to find alternative sources for some but many will forever 404. That’s inspired me to check all links here for entries in the Internet Archive.
new guttering week and, just like every repair to this house, it ends up more because some shoddy previous work is uncovered but, after a brief worry about some missing roof tiles, all seems well.

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.

200

Two directions at once

A New Year’s Day walk to Wimbledon Common. Taking a minor diversion along Copse Hill you come to this bus stop (and there will be a similar one on the other side of the road). This bus stop is an oddity – although I imagine there are other examples elsewhere. – because this stop is going in two directions at once. It’s not an indicator to get on a bus in the opposite direction across the road, no, you can board here but you must get on the correct 200 because, for this little leg, buses going in both directions pass this stop. The Copse Hill and Atkinson Close stops are part of a loop that buses in both direction take. I don’t know why but I imagine it is to do with serving the expensive new apartments on Wimbledon Park Hill. Still, if you get on here, make sure you get on the one going to Raynes Park or Mitcham because in about 5 minutes from this point you could be going in the wrong directions.

The ladies who bus did this route back in 2009 and when they passed The Collier’s Wood Tower (once deemed the ugliest building in London) which they said looked like it was “about to be demolished” but turned out to be mid-regeneration becoming Britannia Point by about 2017. Also, the Waitrose at Raynes Park had just opened when they rode the 200 – the place that became a lifeline to so many this past year and I am very glad was opened.