Tag: weeknote

I’m so glad I picked up a ticket for The Thinking Digital conference! It really was excellent, and the vibe was almost the exact opposite to that of 2022 which had left me so cold. As Heraclitus said, we can’t step into the same river twice. Not only does it change, but also we change.

Speaking of philosophy, the first talk at the conference was from Tom Chatfield, thinker and author, and a contributor to one of my favourite magazines, New Philosopher. He’s pictured above, and although some people I spoke to afterwards said they struggled with the lack of concrete takeaways, the point of philosophy is to provoke thought. I appreciated his three points:

1. We’re entering a world of infinite, instant answers (but we still need to decide which questions are worth asking
2. Some things are all about final destinations (but plenty are also about taking part
3. We are nothing like Artificial Intelligence (and it’s nothing like us) (and that’s okay)

There were also sessions on origami and how it relates to engineering, the importance of storytelling in science communication, the history of the competition between OpenAI and Deepmind, the story behind the ‘Unsilence the Crowd‘ tactile Newcastle United shirts, and more.

I went to the pre-conference workshop run by Chris Thompson and Fay Cooper from Northumberland County Council, and met lots of interesting people, who I continued to talk with along with others, old and new, during the conference itself. The conference dinner was great, as were the other social occasions. An absolute triumph and I’ll definitely be back again next year!

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Other than that, I’ve been trying to squeeze in work for WAO and on my MSc module. We haven’t got loads on client-wise, and I’m a bit behind on my studying. Laura and Anne were away, cycling in Ireland, so I caught up with John a bit, and did some work on our DCC project, as well as some bizdev.

Our daughter had two football presentations in the past week. The first was for the league winners at a hotel in Newcastle, and the second was Whitley Bay Sporting Club’s. Their goal difference after 20 games in the league was +164 and they were playing a year up. I think that tells you pretty much everything you need to know. I think this is the first season she hasn’t won either manager’s player or player’s player, but to be honest they’re all superstars.

Our son has had exams this week and has, by the sound of it, absolutely smashed them. I marked his practice exam papers and he was getting 90% on them for both Sport and Maths, so he’s doing really well. His seasons for basketball and football have finished now, so I’ve been threatening him with pre-season training 😉

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What else? I got my postal vote sorted out after the Head of Elections at Northumberland County Council reached out to me personally, and oversaw everything to ensure that I’m registered to vote by post for the General Election. I think there must have been a mix-up because I moved twice within six months.

I published a few things at Thought Shrapnel, as well as an overview of Season 9 of The Tao of WAO. Matt Jukes started a new blog about bloggers and put a shout out for contributions. I filled in his form, and my response is now live on the site.

On Friday afternoon I went along to Dave Grey’s School of the Possible campfire which was a fantastic experience. I’ve known of Dave for over 15 years through his company (which he’s now sold) called XPLANE. He’s a great facilitator, and I met and talked with some really interesting people. The calls are free to attend, and he’s building an “experimental learning community, focused on exploring the adjacent possible.” I’m definitely going to return and perhaps even upgrade to get more access.

Finally, I’ve been painting. We’ve now lived in our new place a month and the downstairs is almost done. There’s a couple more walls to do, and of course our teenagers’ bedrooms were done first of all. I’ve put a lot of paint on walls over the past few weeks! There’s so much to do when you move house; I think we’ll still be sorting things out over the summer. And then, once that’s done, we need to decide what work we’re going to do to the house, because my office is not staying in the utility room long-term…

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Next week, Laura and Anne will be back on Tuesday after the public holiday in Germany. I’m looking forward to doing some co-working. I’ve got a couple of calls with interesting people, as I did last week. (A reminder that you can book an online ‘coffee’ session with me if you fancy a chat about, well, anything really!

I held off posting this weeknote because I thought I’d be accompanying it with an amazing photo of my own of the aurora borealis. We didn’t stay up on Friday night because, living in the north east of England, we’ve been burned too many times with news that the northern lights “may be visible tonight”.

There was some talk of another display being visible on Saturday, so we spent from 22:30 to 00:30 driving around the Northumberland trying to hunt down a place without cloud cover. We failed, just like the legions of people sitting in the dark in their cars in car parks up and down the coast.

Anyway, I’m happy to report that the photo above no longer represents our lounge. As I mentioned last week, the previous owners were fond of feature walls, including a blue one in the lounge. I’d like to get rid of that fireplace as well, but one thing at a time.

That bookcase in the corner also won’t last long. It’s all a work in progress. For work, I’m currently holed-up in the utility room, stuck between the garage and the kitchen. In terms of a home office, we haven’t decided between extending over the garage, dividing up the garage, a garden pod, or including an extra room when we extend out the back for a new kitchen.

This week, I have not been in the best of moods. I’m tired, partly from not having a chance to relax much after moving house, and partly because I haven’t got enough work on at the moment, which makes me feel less successful in life than I actually am. When it boils down to it, many things are about confidence and attitude; I can jump 105cm onto the plymometric boxes at the gym pretty easily, but sometimes I look at them and think “of course I can” and other times I think “I can’t”. And you know what, it always turns out that I’m correct.

On the positive side, I went to a great Systems Innovation Network open space session on Tuesday evening. It was the first one of its type that they’ve run and was, I would say, a success. Our breakout room focused on building a systems thinking consultancy and featured representatives from five continents! Then, on Wednesday, I had my first tutorial for the next module I’m doing as part of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. I’ve managed to do a bit of studying this week, but my routine hasn’t been as solid as usual.

The temperature has slowly crept up this week, until today was positively warm. Our new house seems to be extremely well-insulated, which is great given the amount we spent on heating in some of the places we’ve lived before. So of course, I’d booked the Nest Pro engineer to fit a Google Nest thermostat when we won’t need the heating at all for a few months. C’est la vie.

I had a couple of interesting chats with people this week, including John Willshire, who pointed me towards some useful resources relating to strategic design. I posted a few other things over at Thought Shrapnel, and also here for TB871, the MSc module I’m currently studying.

Feeling a little sad and lonely in my home office, and with Laura and Anne away, I saw that tickets for the Thinking Digital Conference next week were still available. So I bought one. This event, which is right on my doorstep, used to be one of my favourite. I didn’t have such a great time a couple of years ago, but perhaps it’s got its groove back. We’ll see.

Other than that, I’ve got some work for the DCC, business development to get done, and some MSc study. Routine is everything for me, so I’m going to try and ensure mine, conference notwithstanding, is as good as it can be.

This week has involved a lot of painting, with it taking two coats of primer and two coats of paint to cover the purple feature walls left by the previous owners of our house. It’s also been the first week of my second MSc module, and my wife has been in hospital for an operation that involved general anesthetic. She’s recovering well.

I tried to vote on Thursday in the local elections for the North of Tyne Mayor and the Police & Crime Commissioner. I usually vote by post, but hadn’t received a form, so went in person to County Hall. They turned me away: despite filling in all of the forms, apparently I wasn’t registered. I took this up with an elections officer, but they were having none of it. Given that we’ve had problems registering our son to vote, I suspect there’s a systemic issue, but at least the person in charge of elections in Northumberland has reached out to me on LinkedIn, promising to investigate.

Talking of our son, he had his first driving lesson with an instructor this week, who said that he drives quite quickly. Runs in the family, I suppose. He played really well in a basketball game yesterday, and has started training with a different local football team so that he can play a final year of junior football before going into the men’s leagues.

In terms of our daughter, after a game on Tuesday for her mixed team in which she hurt her other ankle, we’ve insisted that she has two weeks off football and running around in general. I didn’t count her assists, but in total she played 59 goals this season, scoring 62 goals. Given that she was playing a year up for her main team, and dropped back into midfield after Christmas, that’s pretty incredible.

Work-wise, we ran a workshop on Monday for the Toro Impact project with CSUDH. I was told that I have a nice voice, but I think that’s just because Americans tend to like English accents. I received some lovely personal feedback from someone new to the ORE community call on Tuesday, who said that I was a “warm and generous host” who obviously cared about each and every person on the call. I appreciated that, and it was apt given the recognition focus of that community call.

For the DCC, we did some of our ongoing work, but also helped them prepare their submission for the 1EdTech Learning Impact Awards. I quite enjoyed doing this, taking a narrative approach rather than a technical one. Anything that looks like design, though, I leave to Laura otherwise we end up with something like this:

I also helped workers.coop some technical stuff around Google OAuth. We could do with a more work at the moment, to be honest but I’m a bit reticent to use the ‘open to work’ badge on LinkedIn for various reasons. It’s heartening to know that we’re not the only ones looking at a quieter-than-usual May, but sadly that doesn’t pay the mortgage!

It’s the early Bank Holiday weekend in lieu of International Workers Day. The latter was on Wednesday and, as is our tradition Laura and John didn’t work. However, I had some DCC stuff to do after spending the morning studying in the library, so sneaked some in .May 1st also means that WAO is now eight years old! It’s been quite the ride.

Next week will be a shorter one, work-wise. I guess I’ll be doing some business development, which will continue while Laura and Anne are away cycling the west coast of Ireland. I’m taking a more pragmatic approach to my MSc modules, skipping some of the more basic activities. After all, I’m the one paying for it and I’m not doing it for anyone else’s benefit.

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Main image: wild garlic growing in Carlisle Park, Morpeth