October 2024

The saga is over! Three months since it started we have a finished kitchen... and other tales from October.

The Vibe

I think I'm reeling from how quickly 31 days have passed! The big news — the kitchen is finished. It started the day after my birthday, on July 22nd, and all the jobs were finished on October 22nd. It has been an absolute saga - but it is now done! Everything works. We have a full suite of appliances and plumbing up and running. In between tradies we got motivated and painted the kitchen a new shade of white, so it's looking fresh! I am happy with the result... I just could have done without all of the drama.

While it's been a bit of a month at home, it's felt busy. I've spent a fair amount of time trying to clean up the garden - facing down a mountain of weeds. The sun is back and warm so there's been a few days to get out and enjoy the surroundings with a few nice long walks in Belair National Park and along the coast.

Work has been getting on. My team seem to be doing well, a couple are getting higher duties recently, and a couple have gone for other roles and got them as well. So, the team is going to change a bit. That's OK with me - we're not working as we once did, and to be honest, I expected this to happen.

I am struggling with this "new" way of working. I've gone from leading all aspects of a major project for the last three years to answering emails and helping people fill in paperwork. It's a real letdown, but it is what the job is, not what I am. I've made peace with that this month and started to give less of a fuck the job itself. At the same time, I've got really good feedback from a range of areas of my work - running workshops and working with academics on developing a new curriculum. I've enjoyed aspects of it - but at the same time I feel like I'm stuck in low gear.

The changes with my team have been weird but also a sign of the times. I've been lucky to have a high-performing team and have worked to create that and a collaborative culture, which means my guys are all in demand and capable of stepping up into new roles. There is absolutely no recognition from anyone about what the effort took or how it was created - but we're not a learning organisation.

I finally got the OK to get some videos up on the official university YouTube channel - which I'll share in a different post - and while I had very little to do with them, they capture the team effort we've put into Open Universities Australia programs the last few years.

In other efforts - I've been trying to get my shit together. As usual, at this time of year, everything feels like absolute chaos, but I feel like I've been trying to get my head around everything. I've tried a few things and failed, but I am learning what works. I still feel I am missing an actual routine and something I am in control of, but it's hard to balance all the things in play at once. I am flagging it now as a family task - and for us a unit to work on life in a more structured way, so we'll see how that goes.

Events

Key events that I had nothing to do with were the increase in our clan size with two babies landing in October - Finley and Ellsie. Excited to meet these two humans in the near future!

Mrs K and I went and saw the pre-tour TISM show that was a lunch time gig here in Adelaide. For anyone outside of Australia This Is Serious Mum are legends of the 90s indie scene bridging genres and taking massive hilarious swipes at everyone and every cultural phenomenon in the zeitgeist. In trying to explain them to my daughter it was definitely a feeling of “you had to be there” but I absolutely love them. Worth checking out Old Man River, Whatareya, 5 Yards and this video to get a sense of the band!

Photos

2024

Consumed

I have absolutely smashed the audiobooks from the Expanse Universe - Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War, Abaddon's Gate and Cibola Burn all done and dusted in the month. I do love the style of these, and they seem made for audiobooks and TV. I've gone back to the show now with that extra bit of knowledge of the characters and plot and have been enjoying it. The casting is great in the show, but some of the changes to the plot I'm not such a big fan of.

There is a recent special series of Tech Won’t Save Us that I do want to call out - Data Vampires. This series is a super engaging look at the growth and impact of hyperscale data centres and their effects on the communities, resources and environments around them. This is hugely relevant given the demands by AI for these systems, and how this contradicts the exact actions we need to be taking to avoid climate collapse.

Probably more interesting was the last episode that introduced me to Nicolas Bostrom’s influential theories fever dreams have completely distorted the discussions possible about AI and technology. In one of those serendipitous events I was also catching up on some saved articles after being forced out of Omnivore and switching things to Readwise. Superintelligenceg from Maciej Cegłowski not only does a great job explaining Bostrom’s thesis, but dismantling it with a simple set of counter arguments. Worth a read.