Well October ended up mainly being an unexpected extension of my Autumn break. I knew I was going to be off in September but had expected to be back to work this month. In the end though apart from a fun couple of afternoons helping friends at Delib out with some stuff I’ve mainly been sitting on my hands or answering emails / filling out forms / sending evidence in an effort to get to a place where I can start work with at least one of my clients. Serendipitously Si has written a bit about what these hoops look like this very week. My tendency to bounce around and go from in-house Civil Servant, to inside IR35 ‘contingent labour’, to outside IR35 indie, to in-house consultant means my data is a MESS (not to mention my tax 😬) so it is always a bit of a struggle. Anyway it looks like I’ve got everything sorted to start with one of the organisations next week which will be good – then fingers crossed the other one will land in the near future 🤞.

I was so sure I was starting this week though I cancelled my trip to Barcelona and the Mozilla Festival. So that was sub-optimal.

I wrote a couple of blogposts – the first one about the fact my book idea has died on the vine and I won’t be moving forward with it but I am going to do another year of the jobs newsletter – albeit with fewer editions (I am hoping to get a sponsor maybe as well).

The other post has proven to be quite popular (mainly due to a mention in Pavel’s very popular newsletter). This was about my latest misadventures with AI where Claude helped me build a Bluesky bot to post my street art photo archive…but I decided not to make it live as I was having too much fun doing it manually. In fact I have published a different picture a day every day this month (and tomorrow is selected) on Instagram and Bluesky. I am not sure whether I’ll continue – it hasn’t been popular with anyone but me really 😂but it has been an enjoyable experience. Also in a rare ‘AI is useful’ moment a combo of Gemini and Claude has been really good at identifying the artists of my photos. It will end up having included photos from 31 different artists in 26 different cities (if you treat the NYC Boroughs as discreet) and eight countries (or 11 if I split up the UK).

I read Blockers by Michael Lewis – which was an enjoyable tribute to the (previously) unheralded workers in various corners of the US Federal Government as they tried (and mainly failed) to defend their work from the Musk’s little evil elves.

In less work adjacent activities I also read a lot of comics –

…and all three of the Ana & Din ‘bio-punk’ novels from Robert Jackson Bennett. Which I loved. I’ve not actually been reading a lot this year* – especially since my little hospital stay – but I burned through this trilogy in a week.

(*hasn’t stopped me buying or starting books though. Some quick sums suggest I have purchased 35 books this year. Started 23 of them. Finished 14 so far.)

Might be the only person to have really enjoyed Streetfighter at the cinema…and also a rare person who didn’t much care for Tony.

Lanterns is my show of the year so far but I also really had fun with The Westies, Below, the latest season of Slow Horses and Vision Quest.

Oh and I had a little brush with Covid – just for old times sake. Not terrible but did wipe me out for a few days.

As ever I did a little bit of graffiti exploring –