A new contract

My week was a little more stressful than I would have liked or anticipated. I teach at three different institutions, and at one of them, I had a difficult situation to manage with one of the students. This put a lot of stress on me and affected me to the point where I was unhappy with the situation that evening. I didn’t sleep well that night, and it took a few days to wind down fully. However, there was a positive outcome that will help going forward. As a teacher, I’m just trying to make a small positive difference in the lives of those I teach genuinely and sincerely. I strive to do that whenever I’m in front of a class or a group of professionals I train. Perhaps I’m a bit naïve.

I got a bonus day… because I forgot something

I had a full week and week that brought some surprises and a great opportunity. We submitted our proposal to Stanford on time and just have to wait now. I started blogging about the project and how we came around to our question, the process and how we’re working together. You can read about it and follow along as (if) the project progresses here. This will be the central repository for any research work I do in the future, too.

Internet governance training and being spied on by Meta

I started a new training course from the Virtual School of Internet Governance this week. Over the next ten weeks, I’ll read, watch and learn more about the Internet and the structures and people behind its governance. I already know a fair amount, some of it from the fact that I was on the internet very early through a university account in London around ’89/’90. We didn’t have direct access, and I had to log in to JANET (Joint Academic Network), hop to NIST (?) and then on to the Internet that was still identified as ARPANET on some systems I was connecting to. I’m looking forward to this course and have already completed the first evaluation.

Deadline approaching

I had another week of lots of things running simultaneously. I spent several hours teaching during the week, but I think the highlight for me was presenting a quick overview of tech’s role in the Caribbean creative industry. I’ve become an advisor and member of a collective called the Caribbean Creative Alliance to help foster collaboration of specialisations in the orange economy through technology. I’m looking forward to providing more information over the coming months. Keep an eye out.

After umming and ahhing for a couple of years this summer, I decided to apply for the ARIN Fellowship Program. I’m so glad I did! And now, I’m pleased to be able to share my experience with the process and how the ARIN 52 meeting proceeded. A note about my personality to remember as you read on: I’m generally introverted and discreet, tending not to open discussions with people I meet until I feel comfortable with them.

January updates

I don’t know about you, but I feel like the first two weeks of 2024 have rolled off at such a pace that I don’t seem to have seen the time pass 😱

I’ve spent the week tweaking the new site and adding a few things here and there. One is a mini consulting CV to give people a clearer idea of what I do and what types of projects I can work on. The list isn’t exhaustive and leaves out a few confidential projects I cannot discuss. I’ll take the time to keep this as up-to-date as possible when relevant. Hopefully, it can be a resource people can use to see if I could be a good fit for a project.

We can argue whether it is fifty, one hundred and fifty or a thousand. But we can’t argue that modern wall-gardened social media is overwhelming and gets overwhelmed as it gets bigger. Facebook is a nest of anti-vax, QAnon, and other senseless conspiracies (amongst the decent stuff). Twitter is… er Twitter. Instagram was a nice swimming pool but now has too many turds floating in it to be attractive, and the new lovechild of Mark Zuckerberg, Threads, is a train wreck waiting to happen, as it already has with Bluesky.

Kicking off the new year with a new site and a renewed profile

The first week after the new year is always an odd one. Only a little going on, but a lot of preparation and thinking about what to do this year. That’s not quite how it turned out for me.

Following the debacle at Substack, I needed to migrate my newsletter (link) to a new platform. I spent far too much time researching options and tried out WordPress. To cut a long story short, that was a mistake as it quickly dawned on me that their idea of a newsletter differed slightly from mine. I didn’t choose it mindlessly, and I’d even exchanged it with support to try to understand the system. But despite this, it didn’t work out for me. I found that I fought more with the interface during the design than I was prepared to do. It’s not for me.

2023 came to a close, and I’m pretty glad to see the back of it

I’m pretty happy that the year ended, if I’m honest. I went through a bit of a rough time with a couple of health-related things that, although expected, hit me harder than I thought they would.

I’ve been busy thinking about the following stages of my online presence and how I can consolidate a bunch of things into one more coherent structure. If you come here, you’ll notice things are quite different, as I’ve migrated from a clunky WordPress site to a small independent site called micro.blog. I was on the site’s beta many years ago and never took advantage of it as I should have. Despite being pretty connected, in internet terms, I’ve always been a little reticent and late to the blogging game. This is another attempt to change that and develop my professional image online.

I had a busy week finishing the teaching hours for the three institutions I work for. That took up a lot of time during the week and didn’t leave me much time for anything else.

I did participate in an early-stage meeting with a group of people around the Caribbean, but I can’t talk about that here now.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the strategy I would like to implement to develop my thoughts, work and ideas over the coming year. I’m not into resolutions, and I don’t think they are particularly useful, but a couple of structured thoughts can help develop a pathway to something different.