Weeknote #69 (20260118-20260124)

meta

I spent a good chunk of the week down in the Bay Area, for a couple work meetings — managed to see pretty much exactly nothing other than the inside of a conference room and the inside of a hotel room, but I did get to meet my entire team for the first time, and we got a little bit of time Wednesday afternoon to have our first real in-person team hangout, which was cool.

Flew down Monday, came back Thursday, then took Friday off recover and to to hang out with Mx19 for a little bit before they headed back to college very early Saturday morning — managing to get in and get back to their dorm in advance of the foot of snow they were predicted to get on Sunday.

did

Honestly, other than the work travel and the kid farewelling mentioned above …not a whole lot else happened or got done. I managed to acquire a head cold on the trip, I think on the flight on the way home, so that’s kind of a bummer.

read

  • A couple long-time friends of mine, Chris and Mark Prather, have launched a new newsletter about agile practice, called “Agile is Anarchy”. I’ve been enjoying their back-and-forth dialogue so far (the newsletter is structured as letters back and forth between the two of them), and I recommend checking it out if you have any interest in large- or small-“a” agile stuff. I particularly enjoyed “Waiting Room” this week.

  • On the book tip, I finished Charlie Stross’s “A Conventional Boy” this week, and continued moving through both “Tiny Habits” and “The 4-Hour Chef”. I need to pick out a new fiction read from my backlog, and maybe also start a “professional” read — “Tiny Habits” is kinda in that “professional” category but not exactly. My goal (at least currently, we’ll see how long this lasts) is to rotate between a fiction book, a non-fiction book, a “professionally relevant” book, and a cookbook. I’ve got deep queues for all those categories; the main issue is finding the time (and remembering I need to find the time) to do the work

  • Speaking of doing the work, my “to read” bookmark queue is back up to 201

watched

  • Did you know that the Manic Street Preachers covered the theme from M*A*S*H, aka “Suicide is Painless”? Well, now you do!

  • TheWife and I continue to grind Criminal Minds; we’re into S14 as of this week

in memorium

I need to note for posterity that Saturday morning, unidentified masked agents of the federal government executed a legal observer in the streets of Minneapolis. He was disarmed, pepper sprayed, immobilized, and then murdered in cold blood. Rest in power, Alex Pretti, you deserved much better than this.