Weeknote 19 of 2025

This week I have had a slightly shorter week thanks to a bank holiday on Monday and an employer provided mental health day on Friday. The three-day week was wonderful, although it did mean that the middle three days were jammed full of meetings that would have normally been spread across the full week. Work-wise, this week wasn’t anything particularly exciting to write home about. We are preparing for a team hackathon in a couple of weeks time, which meant that there was quite a lot of pre-work that I’ve been doing such as setting up the workspace that we’ll be using, making sure that everyone who will be involved has the right credentials and access, and providing some pre-reading material for the team. I’ve been onboarding an engineering intern who started at the end of last week in my team and is based in Switzerland. He does have a buddy on site with him but, I have line management responsibilities for him. I’ve been trying to make sure that he has everything he needs and that the experience isn’t too overwhelming for him. Our company is a big one. On Wednesday, I had a bit of a surprise when I received a text message informing me that the office was on fire on my way into work in the morning. Since my commute to London takes about two hours, and I received this message about an hour and 30 minutes into my journey, I was a little bit stuck. I couldn’t just turn around and go home there and then. When my train eventually pulled into London Waterloo, I texted some colleagues to confirm that the office was indeed still closed, bought myself a coffee and a croissant, and boarded the next available train back home. Both of the trains were also running slightly late, although just under the threshold at which I’m able to claim compensation for a delayed journey, obviously. The weather has taken a turn for the best yet again, which has made long sunny days and has meant that I’ve been able to get out and do lots of walking and get my step count up. I really enjoyed working from home on Thursday and being able to nip out at lunchtime for a cheeky wander around. Friday was also glorious and since it was my bonus bank holiday, we were able to get out for the day. We actually ended up going to Costco where we bought a year’s supply of tomato ketchup amongst other things. We took advantage of the £1.50 hot dog for lunch and, we also visited a couple of other shops and did some other chores. This weekend the weather has remained brilliant which has meant that I was able to get out and do some more jobs that I was doing in the garden like mowing the lawn and reseeding the bold patches from where I scarified the lawn earlier in the year. I’ve also had the opportunity to spend some time on PenParse, which is my side project for scanning and cataloguing my handwritten journal pages, so that the information can be integrated with my Obsidian notes. There have been some exciting new local model releases recently, including the addition of multimodal models to llama.cpp in the last few days. Finally, we can get handwriting recognition that is almost as good as that provided by the commercial model APIs, but which runs locally on my computer. I’ve been getting a bit carried away with the notepads, pens and ink this week and I decided to order myself a special edition Lamy Safari pen and a collection of new inks on Friday. Last weekend I finished When the Moon Hits Your Eyes by John Scalzi which was a laugh-a-minute. On Monday, I started reading The Book That Held Her Heart, which is the third part in the library trilogy by Mark Lawrence. So far I’m really enjoying it. The book has a really strong start and this particular book has links to the real world and offers some commentary on modern politics. I really enjoyed this quote: > Anne had often wondered at the contrast between the way mankind divided its books and the way they divided themselves. For the former, they looked beneath the cover and considered what was written there, finding shelves for histories, for romances, for biographies, and for mysteries. For people, each far more complex than even the most profound of books, the cover often served. They saw her hair, the shape of her face, and they knew exactly how she fitted into their lives, regardless of her character. This week is a normal five-day week which is slightly disappointing but, it should mean that I don’t have quite so many meetings concentrated into the middle of three days of the week. The weather is forecast to remain fine for the next few days and I should be working from home for three of the five days, which will allow me to get out on in the garden and outside and do some more chores. I’ve also been talking to Octopus Energy about having some solar panels fitted to our house and I have a call with one of their solar designers later in the week too which is exciting.