If you enjoyed the first exciting instalment of this series on Nintex workflows in SharePoint failing to run after security patching and were sad that that was seemingly the end of it, then DON’T WORRY! BECAUSE IT’S BACK.

That’s right, just when you thought all was fine and hunky-dory in the world, your friendly IT service providers once again went ahead and did some more server patching and once again went ahead and managed to knacker Nintex workflows. Specifically workflows using the state machine activity with the behaviour being that workflows simply would never reinflate after switching state.

I cancelled my Audible subscription for actual reasons. With a tangent via my eminent theory of rational materiality.

I’ve been reluctant to subscribe to streaming entertainment services for a long time. There’s something fleeting about the nature of them that makes me undervalue them.

We subscribe to Amazon Prime - but only because of the delivery service. We subscribe to Apple One - but only because of the wider stuff it gives in terms of kids content, storage and so on. So far the only thing we’ve watched on AppleTV+ is The Bear (which is excellent, for the record) but clearly not making the most of our subscription.

An enquiry into values

My magnum opus. For now, at least.

“What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. Although it’s not very factual on Zen Buddhism. Or Tiny Workshops either.”

Vid

It is inspired by the great 1974 work of philosophical examination by Robert Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Well the title is, anyway.

Explainer to follow.

I’ve just subscribed to YouTube Premium but for all the wrong reasons.

In some ways, I should have seen this coming. The enshittification of literally everything has gathered steam over the last 18 months with every last damn good thing about the internet slowly being turned in to complete shite. Nobody would be surprised that Google / Alphabet is nuts-deep in this movement but somehow, in amongst all the evil shit they get up to, they seemed to have somewhat left alone the one Google thing I really like - YouTube.

Following the success of building my home office, I doubled down and using about the only space remaining, built a workshop.

There is some backstory to it all - I used to have a workshop in the garage - the details of which I may cover in a later post.

The shed was far less sophisticated than the office, though - it is bascially a large shed, but it’s been done up to make it feel as un-shedlike as possible.

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!) but for this to work you would need the full precise list of countries in the correct order… except you couldn’t extract this list from the spreadsheet since the entire workbook was locked down - locked cells and then password protected. No dice.

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.'

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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. They asked me back in 2024 to give an update.

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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.

Learning from last year’s main takeaway, the key change this year was 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.