2024 Weeknote 52

December 23 – 29

My “weeknotes” capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work. Learn more about the weeknotes concept here.

With the holidays in full fury right now, things are going slowly at work and at home. I don’t have a ton to report, but I will share a few items.

• Office Move. I ended up moving my office this week from one corner of the building to another. It’s my third office in 5.5 years and this one is a bit bittersweet. I’m freeing up my old office to be a much-needed additional conference room, but I’m moving away from most of my teams, making me physically more isolated. The impact is a bit muted just because so many people are remote so much of the time. Still, it’s a big change and it only happens rarely. I’ll be “settling in” for months, I suppose.
• Mad Men. I picked up the entire Mad Men series for $20 over the holiday and I’ve started to watch. I’m about 4 episodes in. Very well done (of course), but I’m thinking big questions about the historical accuracy of the misogyny, then anti-semitism and racism, the antipathy toward mental health, and so forth. The start of Season 1 is in 1963, but it feels more like 1953 to me. My favorite bits, though, are the actual advertising projects. Looking forward to chewing through this in the months ahead.
• Politics and Government. Last week and this week we’ve had meetings with staff and consultants for an incoming elected official who wants to overhaul their web presence, which has been weak tea for years. This newly-elected person wants to make a name for themselves, though, by shaking things up in their agency and making plenty of public noise about it. This will probably be the first time I’m having to carefully walk a line between helping promote the work of an agency (legal) and helping to burnish the public image of a politician (illegal). I’m probably over-thinking it, but… the concern is real. Gonna be interesting to see how this plays out.
• Family Time. With the holidays here, I’ve got some time with family this week, just a month after another gathering. But what used to be a joyous event is now… challenging. We’re faced with concerns about how to gracefully handle matters of dementia and elder care, typically from a distance, since none of the children live in the same city with our parents. Naturally, I don’t want to share a lot of details here, but the concerns are real and, honestly, depressing.
• Digitizing. I’ve been rearranging my office at home lately, with a new M4 Pro Mac mini, an upgraded scanner, and a new desk to expand my workspace a bit. All this is in service of digitizing two sets of assets I want to push to the cloud and dump from my physical assets: photos and music. I am re-ripping my 1,200-CD collection into a lossless format and storing things on hard drives and cloud backup. Then I’m dumping the CDs. I’m also scanning printed photos and trying my hand at scanning negatives as well. After that, the photos, negatives, and albums all go. This is a ton of work—mostly when I have to apply the metadata. The scans and rips are fast. Getting the dates, titles, and other info accurate takes a lot of time.
• NPR’s Y2K. So the Y2K crossover (1999 to 2000) was 25 years ago and it looks like NPR put a child on the story who lazily assembled a pastiche of dumb takes. Bluesky erupted over this piece, with tons of folks taking NPR to task for doing such a poor job of covering the story, especially repeating the logical fallacy of “this was no big deal” when in fact millions worked tirelessly to prevent it and that’s why it wasn’t a big deal. I was one of those people. I worked for months on PCs, servers, and even Lotus Notes applications, remediating and testing. Hard to believe it’s been 25 years. Harder to believe NPR borked this story.

I think that’s it for this week. And that’s it for the 2024 weeknote series! I’ll be back with Week 1 of 2025 next week.