Weeknote 45/2022
Historically, I haven’t enjoyed the month of November. In the last few years, however, I’ve come to be at peace with it, realising that I don’t have to be pushing things forward on every front all of the time. I get through November, and try to enjoy the autumnal colours and the remaining light.
This week, I’ve been working from home on various client projects as usual. Ironically, WAO now have two of the six projects we’re working on covered by NDAs, which means I can’t really talk about them. Both are important things to get done, however, just like the three I can talk about:
- CAST / Sport England — helping 21 National Governing Bodies work more openly
- LocalGov Drupal — advising on the community side of this open source project
- Participate — building a community around the slogan ‘Keep Badges Weird’
- Wellbeing Economy Alliance — user research round a digital integration project
We’ve had conversations during our monthly co-op day about rates for next year. It’s pretty crazy to be in a situation where we have to raise them at least 10% just to prevent giving ourselves a pay cut…
Other things we did on our co-op day:
- Created an FAQ page
- Planned for our IRL meetup in the Netherlands in January
- Talked about how we feel about the co-op (optimistic!)
- Agreed our new minimum day rate
- Talked about our availability until the end of the year / start of next
Here I published a post entitled On the importance of Fediverse server rules. Over at Thought Shrapnel, I posted:
- Mourning what we’ve lost
- Second-order effects of widespread AI
- Hyperbolic discounting applied to habit-formation
- The (surprising) oldest full sentence in the Canaanite language in Israel
- Rituals for moving jobs when working from home
- Decentralisation begins at decentring yourself
- Organisations are not just joining the Fediverse, they’re setting up their own instances
Our car went into the garage this week and, as predicted, it cost £1,844 to fix (clutch, flywheel, etc.) Still, it’s cheaper than laying out £25k on a newer car at the moment. We’ve only just bought a second car, a VW Up! which I’m actually enjoying in short bursts for driving around locally taking the kids to various sporting things.
Hannah went down to Devon to visit family and for a work thing yesterday, so I’m solo parenting for a few days. It’s pretty straightforward as we have strong routines during term time. I just need to keep things ticking over! She made the
During the week we burned the sock ‘guy’ that my daughter made at Scouts as she was under the weather last weekend. We used the fire pit in the garden after we’d made some ghetto s’mores with marshmallows and chocolate digestive biscuits.
Within the space of an hour on Wednesday I put up and then took down a Google Nest Cam by our back door which I figured we could use as a video door bell. My wife was not impressed, nor was one of our neighbours. On reflection, it’s fair enough.
Next week I’m in London for the day on Wednesday. I don’t like going there and back within 24 hours but, needs must. I’ll be braindead on Thursday, as I’m facilitating something reasonably tricky for the LocalGov Drupal project around their organisation and future.
Although I can’t count down the days yet, I can count down the weeks. After this one, four more weeks until I stop work for the year! While I enjoy what I do, I’m looking forward to eating mince pies, drinking whisky, and not looking so much at computer screens…
Photo of the fire pit I reference above.
This week in recent years:
