Current podcast listen list

I always love people’s podcast lists, as its a good way of getting new listens, so here are my recommended ones for 2024.

Current Active Podcasts:

When It hits the fan – One of the most amazing reveals on what is ACTUALLY going on in the world and media, every episode is full of “So THAT is why!!” , moments.

Daily Tech News Show – My daily newspaper for the tech world I live in.

Last Week in AI – A solid, non-hysterical way of keeping up to date with the world of Artificial Intelligence

Politics Weekly UK  / Politics Weekly America – A 2 for 1 here, while the Guardian is one of the most left-leaning of the UK newspapers, the coverage is well done, and I find the left newspapers are far more balanced and less ranty than the right-wing ones, and there are often right-wing guests to give balance.

Today in Focus / The Audio Long read – Another 2 for 1, full long read articles on subjects that often don’t make the headlines.

The Valentyne Heresy – I know RPG podcasts are all the rage, but this one is a good one and not embarrassing to listen too.

Archived Podcasts, but worth listening to:

The Brand Plan – A podcast on marketing by an old flatmate, a surprisingly fascinating listen, and I await their second season.

The Magnus Archives – One of the greatest original content stories done in podcast form. If you have not listened, then please do, especially if you live in London, UK.

Corporate term: “To Gargoyle”

Definition:

To Gargoyle: The act of going to someone’s desk when you want them to do something and simply refusing to move until they do it. 1

Explanation:

The corporate term “To Gargoyle” isn’t something that has been used an awful lot in the last couple of years due to the pandemic home working, but is now on the rise again due to companies starting to pull people back into the office; essentially, it is going to the desk of someone who you want to do something for you and simply refusing to move until they do. However two points differentiate between being a gargoyle and just being a pain in the arse:


1) You can’t just need something or want something immediately and then just go to someone’s desk and demand it, they will just tell you to get knotted, they’re busy, they’ve got important stuff to do, etc etc. you have to have a right to be there, you have to have raised the correct forms and requests and attempted to follow up on them, you have to have followed the rules of the system; and the reason you are standing there now is that you have been driven to it because another part of the company has not done its job.


2) You can’t actively stop someone from continuing to do their current work; if they are on a call you sit next to their desk and continue to work on your phone, near to them, but not actually intrusive. It has to be clear that you are going to just be there until they do their thing for you. but in a passive aggressive way.

Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.

FootNotes
  1. This is very different from the urban dictionary term “Gargoyling[]

2023 in review and goals for 2024 : Work edition

Well, this has been a really odd work year. The first part of this year wasn’t massively productive from a value of delivery point of view, although good from a personnel management stand point, with new lessons on how to deal with high stress and how to minimise impact to your team caused by changes in other areas, but from a pure enjoyment point of view not one of the greatest, and I’ve been always one of the very, lucky people who have always enjoyed their work. Thankfully its an old lesson, to always value the joy in your work first so I decided that, going back to full time consulting, rather than a permanent role was where the fun was, I DID however, make a huge ton of good friends, and as a number of them left after me the network of good people I now know has grown.

The latter half of this year has been far more enjoyable. It’s been challenging, but fun. It has been filled with enthusiastic techs rather than political battles. It has been totally delivery orientated. It’s just been everything I’ve always loved In a job, and people that know me have noted that I am back to my old bounce, The new set of clients I have been working with have also squared the circle for me in improving my CV.

The next part is I have for my day to day work moved even further into the management role. Away from technical and that is simply down to discovering that it was the place I could do the most good. As a tech, there is a limit to what I can fix, but as a manager that represents the interest of delivery and technical people and tries to actually help them reach their goals, that’s a big thing and the sheer volume of good, if you can call it that, that such a view point can provide in a corporate environment is huge. It’s been very, very rewarding. And I’m going to be a little bit egotistical and say It’s actually made a few people’s lives and work better, and who could ask for more.

But if I look at the three basic areas that I normally review:

Management: I am still treating this as a growth thing, and something that I have noted with quite a few of my management colleagues at various different clients over the years. Managers do not treat their personal growth in the same way as techs and business people treat theirs. They think in terms of their growth, rising through an organisation, getting more powerful, but not in terms of their skill set, and I’m finding that that is a really wonderful thing to try for, can you be a better manager, not simply a more powerful manager, so that is where I’m going at the moment. its my main focus which means I’m not looking at getting any formal certifications as you would if this was a business or a technical position.

The old management certifications aren’t worth what they used to be and Agile while it is nearly the only game in town nowadays. It is being treated more as a religion than a faith. I’ll expand on this more on a separate blog post. To me Agile has been for the last 20 odd years merely the simplest way of getting a lot of deliveries done while keeping track of them. Now as always these things have grown into far more of a religion. There are people with silly titles. There’s people who do silly ceremonies that don’t actually bring you closer to your delivery and just chew up time and frustrate your team. I found that going a little bit old school on this and trying to just focus on things that help deliver is making my management style work much better. I’m getting good feedback from both the people I work with and the people I work for. one of this years challenges will be to try and better explain it as a process.

Technical: As always, I might do management as a role but what I am is a Tech, and I still fiddle with it constantly. The two technical areas I’m mainly working on both last year and the coming year is making sure that my Azure is as good as my AWS. and ensuring that I keep up to date on Salesforce. And while you might be expecting me to do AI, I am not learning it in the normal way. The large language model side. Everyone’s getting excited about that, but I like to dig under the covers, and particularly how vector databases are working and growing and how they work in terms of security are my big things that I have both been learning and am continuing to learn. thank fully I have a smaller client that has had me working on a challenging little problem on this very subject, and this is hitting all my geek buttons.

Business: My business knowledge is growing at the same pace as management. Because my new set of clients, even though they’re in the same field as my old ones, they are dealing with wildly different things. Unfortunately, I haven’t made as much progress as I wanted with my CII certification. That is still on my hard to do list and it’s getting more and more important this year.

2023 in review and goals for 2024 : Fitness edition

This year has been an excellent year fitness wise, firstly we continue the never ending grizzle with the Sarcoidosis. and I was invited to participate in a long study on it, as apparently it has a very high suicide rate, 1. I was then subjected to a mass battery of tests, far more than I’d had previously and ended up in a meeting room with four consultants in which they said you’ve still got Sarcoidosis, We can still see all your lymph nodes inflamed and going for the burn, but all your scar tissue has gone from your Lungs and you are no longer showing any of the debilitating symptoms that are normal. And I said, Yes, that’s because I cough it all up, I have an amazing PT and Spin teacher who run me into the floor for 8 hours a week.
Then for the first time, the NHS sat down and asked me what I was doing and how I was doing it. After explaining the weekly schedule, the targeted exercises and the mental support I get from so many people, they went “Oh, do you want to swap chairs? You can sit where we are.” We all laughed and they said, “Just keep doing what you’re doing, your are an outlier on the study and don’t need the help, We’ll see you in four years.” So the way we are handling it seems to be just right 2, But it does, however, require constant maintenance. And as my weekly lung test shows I would be a fool to ever take anything for granted.
But moving on to less serious updates:

 

1) I am now actively using a 40kg kettlebell and my arms have not been ripped out of their sockets, and I can strict press a 36kg 3

2) Thanks to the house move and a bill that made me squeak, I have purchased an I.C.G. home bike, which means, thanks to Louise I do spin twice a week at a level now that is topping at 1,200 calories per 55-minute session. Really good progress.

3) I’m back to fencing. Again, thanks to the house move I have run out of excuses and am now back to Haverstock fencing club, it is still as amazing as ever and alas my old bad habits are still there, but I am determined to get there each week and have fun while my knees last.

Goals

1) Lose some sodding weight. While both Sam and Louise constantly try to steer me to a realm of healthy eating, I still eat garbage, but its a bit silly now. I’m currently at 114 kilos; I need to get that down to 100 kilos. Thankfully,  Louise herself is changing diets this new year so we can be miserable together while I finally listen to what I have been told.

2) Get to at least 1 fencing competition. I have been told that its a serious game now and not the fun we used to have and to take part in the seniors instead, but I don’t care, I’m just going to go and have a fight.

3) Get the heat problems under control. one downside I discovered this year is I have been controlling the heat of my exercises a little bit too much, as I personally overheat easily as well as the lung thing does not like heat much, this resulted in me thinking I was better than I am in a real world situation both in fencing and when on a spin bike in a real class. To solve this I will be artificially jacking up the heat at home spin to rediscover what it’s like to actually do it in a class. as well as in general P.T., the simplest solution is to wear my fencing jacket for none fencing fitness, I did that on the last spin before Christmas and it took my watts per kilo from a slightly unbelievable 3.0 to a far more sane 2.8 which makes a lot more sense.

4) Get back to Turkish get ups. They were something I really liked as a challenge, but because my elbow hated me 4. We had to stop doing it, I really want to get that back and get to a solid 36kg.

FootNotes
  1. The no cure nature of it plus daily fatigue and the fecking cough can get a certain type of person down after a while[]
  2. and for that, I can never thank Sam and Louise enough []
  3. Only once each side, but I don’t care, up is up[]
  4. ,I popped a nerve out and am not looking after it enough to fix it properly[]

Oladance Pro: The Perfect headphones for work

I have been an extremely long-time headphone user. I was very very lucky to get one of the very first Walkman’s when they were a gigantic thing that ate batteries, and I’ve worn headphones ever since.

Everything from audio books through concentration music through to terrible, terrible choices in music, I am very, very audio-based.

However, it has only been fairly recently that headphones have been allowed in the majority of office workplaces. Before that, you had to be working in certain areas or with a certain type of person, and even then, if you failed to communicate normally, it would be frowned on and headphones would be blamed.

Now the world has moved on, and most people use them at work to help with concentration and for the never-ending video calls. and they come in lots of different styles and feature sets, but none seem to be totally perfect for the work environment.

But with the Oladance Pro, I think there is a set that actually match and deal with all of the problems of an office environment.

Problem 1: You can’t hear what’s going on in an office with a pair of headphones on.

Any decent pair of headphones will block out your hearing. Recently, there have been bone-conducting headphones, but their audio quality has always been dreadful when I’ve tried them. These ones don’t do that. They seemingly fire the audio in using part of the top of your ear rather than blocking the ear canal. Which means that your actual ear canals are open. Not only does this mean that you can hear everything around you, But it’s obvious that your ears are not plugged or covered, so your work colleagues know they can talk to you and stuff like that.

Problem 2: Small ear buds never have a proper full day of battery 1

These have a true full-day battery life; they last for 16 hours, and they do mean 16 hours. So you can put them on in the morning. Go to work with them. Have them on all day. Go home, take them out, and you won’t have any problems. They also have a nice slim battery case, which makes them easy to carry around and charge.

Problem 3: Bluetooth range and behaviour is very dependent on the chipset in the headphones; poor range and poor connectivity issues still plague headphones after all these years.

These ones have solved the main issues that drive me wild:

  • Range – The range away from audio sources for these are solid, as good as any of the big over-ear headphones, although at extreme range they can get a tiny bit out of sync with each other till you come back closer.
  • Multi Source and Connectivity – being able to connect to 2 sources at once is mandatory in my opinion, especially in a work environment. As well as the ability to swap and recover said connectivity, the Oladance Pro have been improved over the Oladance 2 as they can connect to 2 sources at once, and handle switching between them simply and automatically 2, lastly, they auto-reconnect to the sources when you go fully out of range, which is nice.

Downsides

  • No serious noise isolation: You can’t really use them on a subway, they are much better than any other open headphones and they have a noise cancelling “Zone” mode which does help 3 but it gets overloaded in massively loud places 4.
  • You lose your “Do Not Disturb” mode: because they’re so obviously not in your ears. at work you cannot use them to pretend you can’t hear or are deeply engrossed in something; you have to interact with more humans than you are used too.

And finally, a bit of a big one

  • Don’t throw away the box. This first release is suffering from some serious hardware failure issues. I’m on my 4th pair, with the previous 3 being returned for a variety of reasons, from refusing to charge to a bright red light that means one side won’t talk to another. The company refunded and replaced them with no problem so it’s not a huge issue but I hope they fix it on the second production run.

None work Upside

This one has little to do with work but was too important to not include. A female friend started using the version 2 earphones and pointed out that it meant she could now listen to music when walking her dog at night; normally she can’t as she can’t take the risk of not hearing an attacker approaching, but headphones like these don’t suffer from that problem, a valuable feature.

Conclusion

All of this together means that other than the very occasional use where I need to block out all external noise, these are now my main and only headphones and rarely leave my ears 5 , its an overused phrase and only applies to this latest version but they really are a game changer, if only they can get the reliability up to the same level as the version 2 headphones.

FootNotes
  1. and I mean a proper full day, 8-10 hours plus 2-4 hours commute, don’t give me that “30 hours if you keep charging them with a case” rubbish []
  2. they do it fast and without loud beeps and notifications[]
  3. Heaven knows how[]
  4. This downside is a bit unfair as it is part and parcel of their positive side[]
  5. I have even forgotten to take them off for a couple of showers and am very grateful they are splash proof[]