2025 Weeknote 10 : The worst thing you can do is nothing

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

March 3 – 9

I am updating the format a little this week, separating out professional notes from personal notes, in case folks are only here for one or the other.

This week in professional #weeknotes

Hiring leads to onboarding (duh). We have 2 new staff joining our teams on March 17, and one of the new folks will be reporting to me for a while, so I’m getting involved in the onboarding very directly. This is the first hire reporting directly to me in a while, so I’ve been able to avoid all the work that goes along with that (paperwork, setting up transition meetings, etc.). Looking forward to having some additional help, but wow… I did not need this additional workload. 😆

Season 7 Finale with the GX Foundry: Check. I took notes on the teams’ accomplishments and want to post the results over on the GX Foundry blog, but man… with the onboarding, a national award application I’m helping write, doing my taxes, and so forth, I’m concerned I won’t get to it.

Another work management model revision. Since I took the helm of our Delivery Services team last year, we’ve been working on what feels like a nonstop series of revisions to how work gets into our teams, how it’s documented, how it’s reported out, and so forth. This has been a complex overhaul and we’re not done yet. This week solidified another notable change in how we will prioritize work, lead our customer, analysis, and project management teams, and report out / get buy-in from our executive team. I often wonder whether I should write all this up into a published model, for others to see (or steal), but then I wonder whether anyone else has the problems we have.

Cow town baseball is coming back. Speaking of Huntington Park, I’ve booked tickets for games spanning the 2025 Columbus Clippers schedule this year. It’s become a tradition to drag folks from the office out to our awesome minor league park to watch some baseball and eat overpriced terrible food. I have 5 games booked so far, with 3 more to go.

Getting ready for #CfASummit 2025. With our 2025 training plans more or less locked down now, I can confirm I’ll be attending the Code for America Summit in Washington, DC at the end of May. And I’ll be taking 3 folks with me for the 2-day event. We’re all wondering whether air travel will deteriorate over the next couple months, forcing us to drive down, but we hope not.

Moving fully to macOS for work. I’ve been working on a cheap MacBook Air (first-gen M1 bottom-of-the-line edition) for the past few years, and it’s been great. I also have Macs at home, not to mention iPads, iPhone, and all the Apple gear to complete the ecosystem. It’s a great experience—it’s fast and reliable even on low-end hardware. By contrast, my Windows laptop at work—with a perfectly reasonable processor and 32GB of RAM—performs poorly and my colleagues are suffering through repeated performance and reliability issues. We don’t know if it’s janky hardware or the pile of over-engineering security software installed on the machines (or both), but everyone’s pretty unhappy. So I’m renouncing the Windows ecosystem permanently at work, except for a virtual server I access when absolutely necessary to run horrible (but required) software. I just don’t have the time or patience for the bad software, the freezes and glitches, and I can get so much more done when all my tools sync up and share data (iPhone, iPad, Mac), all backed with M365 and other cloud apps. I’m doing it even if it means I have to buy my own hardware for work. It’s the important to my sanity.

This week in personal #weeknotes

I’ll take fake spring, if that’s all I can get. This winter in central Ohio has been one of the coldest and seemingly longest in the last 10 years or so. Normally you have a few “fake spring” weather events along the way as temps pop up into the 50s, 60s, and even 70s, but those have been extremely rare this year. But it’s looking like this week may start to change that. I’m ready to put the top down and head back to Huntington Park.

Tax filing revealed a withholding error. I did my taxes this weekend (yay), and I’ve got one helluva tax refund coming this year. I have owed money to the IRS every year for years now, so I filed a new W-4 last year to fix it. But I obviously went overboard. Time to try again.

Heading back into Ketosis. Back at the end of 2019 and into the first 2/3 of 2020 I did what seemed impossible at the time: I dropped from about 240 pounds to about 180 in less than 9 months. I did it with calorie tracking / limits + intermittent fasting + a keto-oriented (low carbohydrate) diet. Since that success, I fell off the keto diet and the controls on calories (like so many do) and my weight crept back up over the years. Well, I’ve had it with my stupidity once again and I’m going back on my program. I’m not starting from 240 this time, I’m starting from just under 220, but this time I’m headed lower than before. The goal is 164 or less. This week started the journey once more. If you’re interested in not just the keto concepts but other dietary ideas that are just now getting out there into the world, check out Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind, or see the author in this (lengthy) YouTube interview.

The week in (video) links

I continue to research AI tools and technologies, in anticipation of bringing more of the tech into my professional world—but with a keen eye on what is reasonable rather than hyped-up nonsense. I still believe there are “AI” tools and tech we can incorporate into various processes and systems over time, but they will end up being about as transformational as the word processor and desktop publishing were in the 80’s and 90’s. That is to say they will be transformational, just not as broadly and deeply as the hype masters would have you believe. Reinforcing my optimistic pessimism is the following new video. It has a great introduction to (a) how LLM-based AI platforms work, and (b) why they have already hit their limits:

And now a feel-good video about an organization doing positive things in the world—one you can support in a variety of ways, including volunteering with them—if you’re adventurous enough (and can afford to go without a paycheck for a while). Hosted by the disarmingly relatable Emma from “Emma Cruises“, this look at Mercy Ships was inspiring. And if you are indeed ready for an international adventure, check out ways to volunteer, or even check out their regular jobs.

Bluesky funnies this week

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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