Weeknotes w/c 28 June

I'm not gonna lie, this week has been tough. But I'm not going to focus on the people and the things that made me blue, but on a few tidbits that inspired me and cheered me up between the bad bits.

Firstly my brilliant friend Ben Yeoh has a podcast where he chats to a whole range of interesting people. Some madden me with their worldview, but as Ben says, you've got to listen to all kinds of voices; but some provide insight and entertainment and I certainly found that in his podcast with C Thi Nguyen about games, philosophy and food. Lots of insights into what makes a game, and what happens when we intentionally/unintentionally gamify things. I won't spoil it too much, just have a listen.

Secondly, I made a really good dinner on Monday night that went down brilliantly with all the family. I hadn't made a coconut based curry for ages, and it came about by accident as I was feeling pretty uninspired and tired, but it turned into almost a Thai red curry of sorts, with the first courgettes from the garden, and, well, it was pretty good. It made me think about what Ben and CTN talked about, re food you cook a lot and food you don't, following recipes vs the constraints of cooking from limited resources. I'm actually quite bad at coming up with menu ideas when I could cook 'anything'. But if I have a random assortment of mis-matched foodstuffs, I am far more creative. Typically this is what's known as a Thursday night supper in our house, because we get our local CSA share on Fridays so by Thursday, it's a random kohlrabi, two limp carrots and half a pack of feta cheese...but because we cooked so much at the weekend, Monday night felt like a Thursday.

On food, I really enjoyed Ruby Tandoh on Essex's food culture. And crazy that she starts off with a food business right here in Colchester that I'd never even heard of...now we've got to try them! But she didn't mention the Gurkha Britannia which is our go-to for comfort food when I finally get too tired to cook, and Wednesday this week was that day. We love this place, the result of the Gurkha presence in the British army and our garrison town. 

The tough bits of my week got me reflecting in what this sudden shift to remote working is good and bad for. Although nasty people will always be  nasty, I think that what happened would certainly not have reached the level it did if we had all been meeting in person. Like the trolling on social media, the relationships across a Zoom or Teams interface simply don't allow people to read when someone gets uncomfortable, defensive, or even tearful (yes, that was me). It doesn't allow for taking a breath or a pause - everyone hates dead air and rushes to fill it. It encourages haranguing and lengthy monologues, and it's incredibly difficult to force someone to give up the mic without the nuclear 'mute' option.

On the positive side, we're finding design team meetings working well online. Particularly when we get to use Zoom with its whiteboard and annotation functions. It's quite fun, actually, and definitely time efficient. I'm also loving Miro more and more, and hope I get to my aim of displacing PowerPoint with Miro soon.

Lastly, we got fibre broadband at home, and the difference it makes, from having to use hotspots and constantly apologising for poor connectivity,  is just a joy. See, the week hasn't all been bad!