Weeknote 30/2019
I’m writing this in my lounge where, when I look up from my laptop screen, I can see a sky the colour of tupperware providing the kind of rain you expect to see in Autumn.
It’s been a strange old week, weather wise. We’ve had days in the high twenties celsius, followed by thunderstorms and now rain. A neighbour’s daughter is getting married today. It’s as if she’s being trolled by the weather.
The first of six summer holiday weeks has gone by as you’d expect with a 12 year-old and 8 year-old in the house. Or, not in the house as much as possible. They’ve been at an athletics camp and church holiday club, respectively, which has kept them busy. I’ve been working more in the house, mainly because my well-insulated home office turns into an oven at temperatures over 20°C.
This time next week we’ll be in the car, driving to Manchester airport to then fly to Boston, MA. This came about, as I’ve been telling people for the last few months, because of a wonderful app called Jack’s Flight Club. The rest of my family have never been to the US of A before, and so when an ‘error fare‘ appeared back in January, we jumped on it straight away! We’re also going to Iceland in December from Edinburgh airport ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Back to this week, and I’ve been doing a bunch of stuff, including in my four days for Moodle:
- Releasing the clickable prototype of MoodleNet’s UI 2.0 to the community for feedback.
- Contacting those who have volunteered (so far) for the federation testing programme.
- Facilitating an internal Moodle meeting at short notice, which included a (very) condensed version of the pre-mortem activity I’ve written about before.
- Grappling with Moodle Tracker. We’ve realised that sub-tasks get in the way of our workflow.
- Spent time thinking through an updated workflow for uploading openly-licensed resources to MoodleNet
- Reviewing a new Moodle ‘How We Do Things Around Here’ course from the People & Culture team.
- Updating the MoodleNet overview slide deck for July 2019.
- Doing some quick research into resource-sharing in ALT’s journal.
I’m a big fan of quotations, and perhaps I should start including one every week here. This week, I’ve been thinking about how the delicate act of being a Product Manager is such great practice for being a better human being:
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.
Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
I published my usual three posts for Thought Shrapnel which this week were:
- Friday fidgetings
- Microcast #068 – Book recommendations
- Neoliberalism in any guise is not the solution but the problem
I also changed the avatar on my social media profiles for summer, after reading a great section of Jonathan Crace’s book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep talking about ‘everyday life’.
After my move from Linux to ChromeOS (+Linux) at the start of the year, I explained how to get a Linux software centre on ChromeOS, and created a screencast demonstrating a useful search hack.
Next week is going to be successful if my wife and children remain happy, we manage to pack for our holiday without any drama, and MoodleNet remains on-track.
Photo taken by me on a family walk to The Plough at Mitford and back #nofilter
