Weeknote 26/2022

I’m reading Umberto Eco’s final novel, Numero Zero, at the moment. In it, one of the characters talks about his difficulties in buying a car. He explains that some are too long, too wide, too slow, etc.

“And so I don’t know which way to turn. I’m busy thinking about the investigation, but I wake up at night comparing cars.”

“And you know everything by heart?”

“I’ve drawn up charts. The trouble is, I’ve memorized them, but it becomes unbearable. I think cars have been designed so I can’t buy them.”

My version of this at the moment is laptops. I want a fast, lightweight, quiet, metal unibody laptop with a high-resolution screen. The obvious choice is a MacBook Air on which I could perhaps get away with installing Asahi Linux. But I’ve also been tempted by the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga. I’m actually typing this on one of the best laptops I’ve ever owned, a Google Pixelbook from 2017. It’s just getting a bit slow, and ChromeOS has its limitations, despite its ability to run Linux apps in a sandbox.

This has been a pretty regular week. Client work and exercise have both gone like clockwork; I wrote a post about us kicking off work with Sport England-affiliated organisations, and about domains I’m letting expire. I even posted a few times to Thought Shrapnel.

• The future has been foreclosed and the present is intolerable
• Recalling generative and liberating uses of technology
• The corrosive nature of captalism
• Frozen baby woolly mammoth discovered in Yukon gold fields
• Crypto clowns
• Counting the cost of Brexit
• Making adulthood more desirable

About 30 mins after pressing publish on this, Hannah and I are heading for a night away to celebrate 20 years since we got engaged on Prince Edward Island in Canada. Tomorrow will also be a year since Hannah’s mum passed away, so aim of the trip is also to take her mind off that as much as possible.

Other than that, next week will be more of the usual. We’ve three weeks left until the school summer holidays, during which I’m travelling most weeks — to Sheffield for the women’s Euros semi-final and an early celebration of my sister’s 40th birthday, to Colorado for The Badge Summit, to Devon as my father-in-law is getting remarried, and then driving to France for a family holiday. I’ll have a few days afterwards before getting back to work…

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Photo of trees and a telegraph poll taken near my house last week.