A bit of an up-and-down week, to be honest. I’ve been doing a lot of organising and thinking about how I am going to focus on work and personal life over the coming years. Rather like last week, I have had a number of ups and downs, which seems to be par for the course for me.

My writing of the paper has come along a little with my thoughts and plan more crystallised. I hope to spend a bit more time breaking the back of the writing this week. It’ll be dreadful, but like Hemingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit”.

Despite writing a well-received article on cybersecurity and feeling that I had finally cracked it regarding writing and productivity, it all went to shit.

I took a break as several things have been, frankly, overwhelming.

Without going into personal territory, I seem to live between extremes, with very little in the middle zone. It’s either all excellent or all dreadful. There will be some changes to my working week that I’m looking forward to, but I’m not giving up on the dream of writing and producing great articles and even research papers. I’m finishing an essay for a tourism business school, and with some luck, I’ll finish it in the next couple of weeks.

I finally got around to finishing off the newsletter in between training sessions and the odd site visit for a client.

I’m pretty happy with the way it went. It was succinct despite being over 2500 words. I’d originally written it, or at least the basis of it, as a report for a project a year or so ago.

I decide to get it up to date and rewrite a few sections to consider changes in the region.

A brief look at the state of affairs and a few recommendations

Sorry for the hiatus. I *really* wanted to write more here, it just wasn’t possible.

To make it up, this one is a fairly long one, despite taking an axe to the original draft. 🤣 I hope you like it, and don’t hesitate to ping me if you want me to expand on any areas that I have deliberately kept brief.

I didn’t get around to documenting and writing what happened the week before last. And to be fair, it’s probably a good idea. It was a difficult week, to say the least. I’m not inclined to go into any detail here but suffice it to say, I was a little stressed about the happenings despite being totally on the right side of things. I have no idea how it will all play out, but it is behind me now, and I can move on.

I won’t dwell on it, but it will remain in my consciousness and influence how I deal with that person in the future. Sadly, in business, some are not very honest. This specimen falls in that category. I know I have been upfront and honest and haven’t screwed anyone out of money, and If I’ve made a mistake, I’ve done everything possible to correct it.

On to other matters.

Much like last week, the week started on a bank holiday. I know there are a lot of them in May in France. However, unlike in other countries, the bank holiday days are fixed to the calendar day of the month. That means in practice, if the bank holiday falls on a weekend, the day off is taken on that day, and it is not moved to the following Monday like in the U.K.

I’m trying to kickstart this mini-project to help me document and reflect on my life. So apologies from the outset if this is not interesting or even boring for you. In reality, it is more for me and complementary to a personal journal that is, for obvious reasons, private. So why put this out in public? I guess it’s like trying to have a personal coach or supervisor forcing me to write more.

There’s a number which is called Dunbar’s Number. It’s around 150 or so.

It’s a significant number in that it seems to indicate that, as humans, we are incapable of having a meaningful discussion and keeping personal links with other humans if we have to do that for a group larger than this number.

Think about how many friends you have, no not Instagram acquaintances, real friends? Now think about how many of them you can keep in touch with in a meaningful way. It’s probably much less than Robin Dunbar’s suggestion.

From Wired:

Unless you’ve been hiding, in a coma, or purposefully ignoring Social Media, you will have seen the explosion of the use of GPT-3 through a website called ChatGPT.

The above is a transcription of what transpired when the model was used for interactions of a health-related matter.