Short week this week: In part because of last week it started on Tuesday morning, and in another part because my weekend got capped. :(

This week in numbers:

• 🌿 Plant-based dinners: 3/6
• 🎚️ Missed buttdials from DJs: 2
• 💉 Cannulas worn: 2

Last week’s terrible eating and drinking led me this week to notch up my New Health Century. I ate mostly vegetables this week. Tim Spector would be proud.

I thought I had a week for the assignment I got last week, it turns out that no, I had until EOP Tuesday. I'd already set-up a meeting with the most important peer to bounce ideas off, so I put together a scratch document with a lot of messy notes outlining exactly which technical problems underpinned the challenge we'd been set, and transposed them into some much clearer bullet-points in the shared, working document. Got a spot edit, with very minor corrections, and some good feedback about it the following day so I'm pretty chuffed with that.

Our CTO hosted a remote-first "senior technology staff get-together" this week which brought many of us together informally to chat about various topics. I actually loved the chance to connect with colleagues I hadn't properly spoken to before, or hadn't worked with/seen in ages. Real highlight of the week - and better yet she has encouraged us to use the format if we like it.

A lot of my time on during the week went into spelunking into some data pipelines to make some operational improvements and recommendations. They’re different languages, so I’m focussing on the critical path (in Python) at the moment and I’m excited about low-effort, high-return changes to improve observability using only the native logging library.

Got an email with some exciting news requiring a lot more work on Thursday.

Said goodbye to SC on Thursday, who left the FT for an exciting new machine-learning gig. Popped by The Bolter afterwards and saw a few oldies, but wasn’t really feeling it.

Saw my GP for a routine appointment after work on Friday afternoon. Got some good news, and mentioned some headaches I’ve been having - and because of the event last year I was referred to A&E for some precautionary scans. 11 hours later, after some doctor politicking that made Succession look like childsplay, I was given a clean bill of health and discharged.

6 hours later, I woke up to a phone-call inviting me back whilst some doctors argued about exactly how clean the bill actually was. 6 hours later I was unceremoniously discharged. Verdict? Yeah, they were (probably) right the first time.

The nurses were incredibly sweet though.

People-watching in an A&E department is something else. I never really understood the fascination with “a day in the life of” shows about airports or hospitals, but now I kind of do.

The title of this note describes the state of my poor arms now.

Spent the rest of Saturday with Nick who lives nearby and happened to be in, and finally met his dog Rosie (who is adorable and so well behaved for a puppy!). He made dinner under M’s watchful eye and it absolutely slapped. I got to brown some sausages, and there’s probably a funny joke in there but it’s up to the reader to make it.

M has potentially convinced me to get back into bullet-journalling proper. I actually really do miss it: My week/notes and Things 3 workflows are the best analogues but it’s easy to lose things and paper feels great to write on.

I’m planning a new side-project to change my relationship with audible media: I want to listen to more and more varied music, and to more varied radio shows & podcasts. Unfortunately I spend a lot of time curating these things resulting in analysis paralysis and as a result listen the same few sets and shows in a rotation.

Above thing seems like a good thing to put on some kind of side-project tracker, huh.

Did some EQ tuning on my headphones and enjoying it quite a lot! There's a serious negative gain on them now, so I have to make everything louder - but that's OK because there's more range in everything. SoundSource does the global EQ, and I can't believe it took me so long to discover it! (I use Audio Hijack, by the same company, all the time). On the docket for next week is repairing/restoring these headphones.

It's been a long weekend and I'm donezo, cya!