I recently helped a client with a lovely annual return to our friendly local regulator. It required some numbers (from a SQL query) to be put in some boxes (yep, in Excel 🤐) against a list of 251 countries. The row heights had been shrunken and the column widths strangely embiggened so that a manual cross-referencing-and-copying into the spreadsheet was a time-consuming and error-prone task. You could copy & paste into the relevant column (indeed the guidance encouraged it!

Note to self: You have to begin. Go, do it badly at first with sweaty palms and shaking limbs and gaps in what you know. You have to start, and perhaps you won’t feel ready or like you’ve fully prepared. Perhaps you’ll feel too late, too small, too scared. But it’s okay that you did not appear on Earth with all the skills and information. It’s okay that there are things you’ll have to learn, It’s okay you won’t be perfect overnight and people might see you try and that getting where you want will take some time.

Much of the fear surrounding the growth of AI, is the potential (and perceived) threat of machines replacing humans. This is intuitively not an unreasonable fear to hold (despite there being little in the way of evidence to support it1.) In August 2024, around the time of the Olympics, Google were forced to pull an advert for Gemini that depicted a child writing a fan letter to their sports hero. The public backlash was brutal. “This is not what AI is for” was the general sentiment.

The Association of Guernsey Charities hold an annual conference for the members where they meet and discuss all sorts within the charitable sector in Guernsey. This includes a series of talks, workshops and focus groups. I was asked to present in 2023 on the topic of AI - specifically how charities can start using AI to help them. I elected to broaden the talk to also cover the effective use of SaaS as well as AI.

No need for a conspicuous intro - last year we introduced a summertime 4-day work week with mixed success. This year we did it again, a little differently. With mixed success. The key change this year was learning from last year’s main takeaway - trying to smash a normal week’s hours into 4 days ultimately led to people getting tired and fed up. It didn’t really live up to the dream of freeing up time for people to work on some geek projects and instead left people wanting time to rest.

It’s been a while1 since I’ve had to debug obscure SharePoint issues but hey ho, my life remains a rollercoaster of excitement. A client environment recently had the following updates and cumulative updates applied, which including their SharePoint 2016 Enterprise infrastructure. KB5043051 - 2024-09 CU KB5043124 - 2024-09 Servicing Stack Update KB5002624 - Security Update for MS Sharepoint Enterprise Server 2016 (Description of the security update for SharePoint Enterprise Server 2016: September 10, 2024 (KB5002624) - Microsoft Support) KB500264 comes with ‘known issues’ that it might knacker workflows:

Yes. OK. I admit it. When ChatGPT burst in to the scene 18 months ago I was amazed as anyone else. The speed at which it could produce words! And words that vaguely seemed to make some sort of believable sense! Incredible. We all got excited by the prospect; washed adrift in the hype and excitement of it all. It’s no wonder the seismic shift it created in the public consciousness. Within a short while of ChatGPT being generally available, all channels - social, blog, online, offline and further were awash with LLM-generated content.

This was today: Back in 2021, I completed Guernsey’s answer to a (half-)IronMan - the GraniteMan - a 70.3 style triathlon in Guernsey. I harboured ambitions of completing a full distance proper Ironman event - 3.8km swim, 180km bike, 42.2km run - but unfortunately, ’the plan’ never worked because 2022 went to shit. And 2023 wasn’t a lot better. Towards the end of 2023, though, I managed to start training again and decided to have another go at the plan… 2024 would be a trial year (marathon, triathlon, no injuries) with a view to Ironman in 2025.

Warning: this is an Apple-centric post. If you don’t care about Apple, then please do move along. A major new-parent-in-the-21st-century concern is that of screen time, online services, and giving your kids access to stuff that you as a parent never had. YouTube is a great example - was literally not a thing when I was growing up and yet I’ve had to ban it in my household because my young kids were losing days and brain cells to it.

I love words. And puzzles. And logic. And so Wordle is right up there for me. Not in a ‘posting it on Twitter’ sort of a way, though. Something about the simplicity of the gameplay and the English language (and the success story of a simple viral app, of course) is just cool. Right? But it only recently occurred to me - what it would be like to write a solver for it1? How hard would it be?