February 17 – 23
My “weeknotes” capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work. Learn more about the weeknotes concept here.
My report for Elon Musk
I guess we’re all sending weekly 5-accomplishment reports to Elon now, huh? And I’m sure he doesn’t want full-blown weeknotes, so I’ll keep it short for him and “Big Balls”…
- Bite
- My
- Shiny
- Metal
- Ass
This week in #weeknotes
Now let’s move on with some proper weeknotes…
Hiring work (probably) done for now. We started a search for an IT Project Coordinator around January 10. More than a month later, we hope we’ve got it done. We made an offer on Friday (2/21) and as I write this, we’re waiting for a decision from the candidate. Along the way, we lost a candidate after we made an offer and we separately redirected another finalist into a different position that popped open unexpectedly. For those interested in the stats, I’ve included a high-level view of the candidate flow below.
The Unconference goes wide. I’ve hosted a periodic engineering-focused “unconference” for a few years now, but next week we’re taking it organization-wide, opening up the doors to all staff and all topics desired by the staff. We don’t really have town halls or all-staff meetings very often, so this will more or less take the place of such meetings. I’m hoping more staff bring forward more topics for everyone’s benefit.
The Thin Mint Frosty has arrived. I posted about this on LinkedIn, but the gist is that Wendy’s launched a new seasonal Frosty flavor this week, celebrating the most popular Girl Scouts cookie flavor. The wife and I got one on launch day to try it. It’s… fine. The minty chocolate sauce with the embedded cookie dust is delightful, but it gets diluted with the melty Frosty solution too quickly.
AI note-taking is either amazing or ridiculous
After seeing an intro / review video on the Bee wearable recording device and AI summarization platform, I was intrigued.
I’m in meetings all day, every day, so maybe getting summaries could be a good thing. Or what if I could do a daily “captain’s log,” Star Trek-style, each day and get a transcript or a summary, for use months or even years later?
Well, it turns out you can get the Bee AI app for free and use an Apple Watch to record audio if you don’t want to spend $50 for the device and wait until they can ship it. So I tried it out.
The recording app on the Apple Watch burns the battery pretty quickly, but it seemed to pick up a lot of ambient audio while I was at home, talking to my wife and watching some TV. Indeed, it was remarkably good at tracking what was discussed in a Deep Space Nine episode I had on in the background. But of course the app on the phone—which does the transcription and the summarization—is not aware of the differences between real life and TV shows, so my day looked like this to the app:
I can’t imagine what would happen to my “life notes” collection over the years if this device were listening to literally everything around me and couldn’t distinguish between fact and fiction.
Meanwhile, in a business context, here’s an example of one meeting getting summarized for me—the only one I recorded, just as a test—and it’s quite accurate, although everything was listed as if each topic were equally weighted (boldface added):
John started his day with a productive team meeting where they discussed staffing updates, including the hiring of a new Business Analyst, ——–. The team also discussed the upcoming all-staff meeting and the importance of having cameras turned on. John addressed concerns about the project prioritization spreadsheet and its scoring system, agreeing to revisit it with the team. The meeting concluded with a brief discussion about the delayed whiteboard installation and the process for requesting modifications.
The Bee app, using LLM processing, can create task recommendations and even do a rudimentary sentiment analysis for the “vibe” of meetings and discussions.
I’ve ordered the $50 audio recorder dohickey and will do more experiments once it arrives. Would I find daily logs / notes useful? Maybe? I guess we’ll see.
Meanwhile, I remain very concerned about Bajoran society as it recovers from the Cardassian occupation. It’s all I think about.
Nobody calls the plumber when the toilet flushes
I’ve used that phrase above for years because for most of my career I’ve worked in IT infrastructure services, and infrastructure either works or it doesn’t, from the perspective of users. Government is the infrastructure of our society. No one complains when it works. Nor do people say “thank you” for government services. Hopefully America is waking up to the risky reality of continuing without a functional government. The toilets are already starting to backup.
The week in links
- In the wake of the DOGE attack on our government and the loyal federal workers that serve us all, a new website is coming together to tell the stories of the displaced staff and decimated agencies: We are the builders. Thanks to Kate Green on LinkedIn for sharing it this week.
- ICMA had their annual conference this week, and I saw this nice resource out there, ready to download: Breaking into Local Government: A Guidebook for Career Transitions. I keep saying our federal friends need to look at State and local options. It’s harder to find the jobs because job postings are not universally gathered, but hey, look around where you are—you never know what you mind find.
- The nonpartisan nonprofit Partnership for Public Service has started a hashtag campaign called #ISupportFeds and they are asking for stories from both federal workers and folks that have directly benefited from interactions with federal workers.
- Also related to the ICMA conference this week, Will Hampton released a long-ish post on his Good Government Files site about the value of communications folks in government—especially these days. More Than Messengers: The Essential Role of Government Communicators.
- Finally, here’s a nice Medium post by Erie Meyer, one of the founders of Code for America and most recently the chief technologist for CFPB discussing what you can do in the wake of the DOGE purge. So you (still) want to serve your country: How to stay connected after leaving federal government.
You just have to laugh
In a time of social collapse it’s all too easy to get angry, depressed, or withdrawn. That’s when we need humor the most. For that I turn to The Onion (which now has a newsprint edition they mail to your home for a subscription fee) and Bluesky (where lots of funny Twitter ex-pats share their jokes freely). This Onion headline had me rolling:
Meanwhile, for an assortment of my favorite quips, puns, double-entendres, and hilarious off-axis observations over the past week, check out my latest Bluesky funnies collection.
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