A wordpress.com notification that the site I made 16 years ago has finally made 100 views.

Actually that’s not quite accurate, this is the wordpress.com version of the site that I made to house the posterous archive after that went kaput.

So this is a) newer than 16 years; and b) not really a site that I’d expect anyone to look at, certainly not a measure of how interesting the project was or y’know, my value as a human being.

Made me go “unf!” all the same though.

We’ve had the Gregorian version, the Lunar version, the meteorological first day of spring and in a couple of weeks we’ll have the astrological reboot at the equinox. But I haven’t written here (or very much anywhere else) since December 3rd 2025. That’s not a particularly long hiatus as this blog goes, but I feel in a very different space, a different world, a different me (or at least a rebooted me).

I’m a dad. I don’t just mean that in the sense that I’ve recently acquired a new offspring, although that’s true. What the last three months have helped me see is how the role is integral to my sense of self. I feel much more me now we’ve got a baby. Weird. More to say about this, I’m sure. But also, regarding the FAQs – he’s lovely, very chilled except when he isn’t, yes we’re knackered, but it’s getting better and we’re lucky that neither of us are obliged to jump back into “work” immediately – the fourth trimester is a thing and I’m hugely grateful to have been able to make up my own rules about paternity leave.

I’m not a fan of war. At all. Being a dad again hasn’t changed that. I’m especially not a fan of wars that trample on the 80-year-old UN Charter. And I think it’s despicable to attack any country when the majority of it’s population are observing a religious festival. I’m aware that neither of these are unique to the present ugliness. Just ugh!

The cliché worry is “what are we doing bringing a child into a world like this?” Well, my first time around, the Soviet Union was collapsing and the IRA was regularly bombing mainland Britain. I was born the year after the Cuban missile crisis. My parents were born either side of World War II. My grandparents were babies and children during World War I. So I guess the answer is “What are we supposed to do? Wait until it all gets better?”

In the meantime I’m enjoying Russell’s current video output. It’s very varied and equally good when he’s chatting with others as well as when talking to camera. Something to aspire to.

I especially liked (re)hearing this story about missions and goals.

Which reminds me, Interesting 2026 is on May 20th at Conway Hall (natch) – I don’t think I’ll be able to go, evenings out aren’t really a thing at the moment. But you should.

I’ve got something to tell you. It’ll probably be a surprise, but I think it’s a good surprise…

That’s pretty much the line I used when I broke the news to the rest of my family, a few months ago, that I’m going to be a dad again.

Yeah.

So anyway, we’re now into week 38 and so that means the answer to the most frequently asked question is: “any day now, but next Friday, 12th at the latest”.

I know.

I’ve found it quite difficult to know when to make an announcement here. I put it on Facebook to friends only a couple of weeks ago. But last time I did this was 1993 so I’m not really up to date with the etiquette. And now I just want to avoid turning up here at Christmas saying “so this thing happened”!

We’re very happy and excited. I’d get a strong wife punch if I said it had been plain-sailing from the start, but all is going really well.

Excuse me, while I put this crib together…

Write the date at the top of the page and then get on with the day.

Because I’m playing with feed readers, I subscribed to the Flickr feed for photos tagged with my name.  I thought I’d just subscribed to my photos, but I think I was also subscribed to new tags already.  Anyway.  A weird thing happens where I periodically get notifications of a few newly tagged photos, and sometimes I’m surprised to see that they’ve only just been tagged, because they are in a set with others that are all tagged too.  And I don’t think I have a way of checking whether it’s real (ie someone is actually paying attention to other people’s photos enough to be tagging me – which seems unlikely) or a “feature” of how Flickr construct the feed. 

Here’s an example:

(“putting the camp into GovCamp since 2012”)

PS I know I’m not the only Lloyd Davis in the world… as evidenced by my gmail.

It’s hard work being me, you know.

Blogging on the train like it’s 2008.

One of my favourite AA sayings is something like “people don’t fail at this programme because they’re too stupid, but some do fail because they’re too clever!” 

I find this “game of life” to be like that, whatever you’re playing at right now and whether it feels like it’s  finite or one of those infinite ones.  I think that lately, I mistook one particular infinite game I’ve been playing as finite. But then I’ve been drawn to say that there are no finite games, but you don’t learn that until one game you thought was finite comes to an end and here you are starting another one whether you like it or not. 

I’m on my way in for another Coffee Morning.  Whoever comes are the right people… etc.  Last month we heard at the beginning that they’d appointed Sarah Mullally to be Archbishop of Canterbury.  This week Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election in NYC.  So a pattern is kind of emerging 😀

In his newsletter Dave points to Duncan Brown talking about bookings as an example of what he calls “design by cliché”.  It’s an interesting idea, but in the case of bookings, I don’t think that being a ‘cliché’ is the problem.  

It’s more that the reason all these things are called bookings is that once upon a time, the record of the thing it’s describing went into a book, an actual book – it might have been called a ledger or a diary or something, but it’s a description of a technology being used rather than the thing itself.  And that’s why trying to treat all bookings as if they were the same is as meaningless now as saying “I need to make a computering”.  If anyone needs an old man shouting at clouds, I’m available.

There’s a lot of cruft in that link to Dave’s newsletter above, which may or may not be tracking you or me in some way, but I didn’t have the patience to work out which bits I could cut out.

My dear departed pal from New Orleans, Ray Nichols, did an interesting thing when he retired.  He would describe his voluntary work as ‘interning’.  So basically he’d appoint himself as intern with an organisation or collective (it didn’t matter what) as a kind of joke, but also pointing to the fact that he wanted to keep on learning and stay slightly humble.  I’m not retiring, but I’m attracted to being a self-appointed intern in a number of contexts, making tea, helping out, observing and learning, but also sharing stuff that I know but that you wouldn’t necessarily fully employ me for.  As Ray would have undoubtedly remarked, “Just Sayin’!”  

I also think of LLM chatbots as fast, eager-to-please interns that you can mercilessly exploit without the usual consequences, but who might also make catastrophic errors if you give them too much agency. 

Poor old interns.

I heard someone on a call the other day saying “I’ve just heard of this thing called Personal Knowledge Management or PKM” which reminded me that:

“Every day somebody’s born who’s never seen the Flintstones“

But seriously, it got me digging into when I first mentioned PKM on this blog.  And of course it was the very first post in September 2004 🙂 and then a couple of months later I went over to Amsterdam for KM Europe and took part in a PKM workshop hosted by Knowledge Board (so Ed Mitchell?) in a kind of open space form where I called a session on “trust vs suspicion, faith vs fear…aaaagh the feelings…” which definitely sounds like the sort of thing I would still do.

Ton Zijlstra was also there and he’s been one of my anchors for PKM thinking ever since, as well as being one of the stalwart bloggers who’ve kept my RSS reader alight through the quiet years (Thanks Ton!) and his post from the end of last year explaining how PKM is personal along three dimensions will form the basis of my response to my friends on that call, who are just embarking on the journey.

I don’t think I mentioned it here, but last week I completed the Couch to 5K programme again.  The goal is to be able to run for 30 mins or 5k three times a week and that’s what I did (30 mins but not quite 5k – I’ve never managed a 30 min 5k yet).  My plan from here is to keep building on that to get back to feeling comfortable running 5k again, no matter how slowly.  Today I did 3.6k and I’ll do that another two times in the next 7 days and then see whether I can stretch up to 4k.

It feels great to have re-established this rhythm.  When I first did it 7 years ago, it was straightforward for me to run every other day.  With the passing of time (and some accumulation of mass, especially on my waistline) just having one rest day between runs is pushing it.  Having two is ideal, I think, but three runs too much of a risk that I’ll fall out of the habit – three days off followed by a cold winter morning with torrential rain would too easily stretch to four and then…

I was encouraged though when I looked up how average pace declines with age, it’s not just that I’ve gotten out of shape, I’m also a few years older.  But it would be nice to be nearer the average pace for my age than I am at the moment.

I went down to Weymouth for a couple of days this week to see my mum.  On Tuesday we drove over to Lulworth Cove for a coffee, picnic lunch on the beach and an ice cream.

The first time (maybe) we went there was Easter 1973.  It was quieter than Autumn half-term 2025, the parking wasn’t as expensive (or managed via CCTV) there was a little less erosion and there were fewer ice-cream sellers.  But we did have a picnic on the beach.