Weeknote for week ending Friday 6 March 2020

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At the weekend I went to Middlesbrough for the son’s basketball game. This meant I couldn’t help with Bradford Coder Dojo, but priorities. The riverside area near Middlesbrough College is super interesting — and they’ve a dock tower. (Always the sign of the best places.)

The start of a new month meant a look back on the previous month’s running.

I published a small guide to criticism. I could have probably added more to it, but it felt brisk enough to get the bare bones down.

After my first visit to the diabetes nurse at my doctor’s surgery I published my first blog post about recently being diagnosed with diabetes, share the journey I am on for anyone who reads it. As I tap this it’s Friday, its 4:30pm, and I am supposed to have had a call about my tests results by now, so I am already off the planned happy path.

Wednesday evening I travelled to Edinburgh to be at the Thursday of Service Design in Government. The sessions I went to were at least each good, but I found the time spent with many good friends was what I got the most from. We chatted, we talked about so many things, from _I was going to be interviewed by you but it wasn’t you when I turned up!_ to the nitty gritty of running a business. From the inane and daft and bollocks to some pretty serious and heavy stuff. I needed that. It’s been quite… lonely the recent few months. I also managed to sneak in two runs! The view from the top of Arthur’s Seat was amazing. Well worth the huff and puff to get up there. And Sharon snapped a pic of me looking _not grumpy_.

I am still having conversations off the back of a piece I wrote about maps. I’ve been asked if there is a talk or workshop I could do around it. I see so many other talks, talks by others, I always wonder why would me doing it be that interesting? But sometimes doing a talk helps you get your thinking straight. You’re going to say it out loud — sometimes with slides too — is different to writing it out in a blog post.

I haven’t read much more of my current book, as I’ve been doing a lot of reading of articles and other things along with some writing. I’ll update Goodreads as I go along though.

Some of that writing is a good 3000 words on design stuff, which felt like a bit of a brain dump. Will I ever publish it? I dunno. Did typing it out help me think some stuff through? Sure did.

Anyway. Time for the weekend.

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