I had another busy week, starting a new class and teaching Microsoft technologies to a new group. I have many years of experience with Microsoft products and services, and I hope to pass on some of that knowledge to get them up to speed over the coming weeks. The first class was good, and I got the students to research the beginnings of Windows Server and highlight the major features added in each subsequent release with a short explanation of what they add/do. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the students’ work in such a short time.

Next week is busy with a lot of teaching and test writing.

I’ve inherited a business-grade firewall, so I’ll be researching wireless access points to move off my already long-in-the-tooth router/Wi-Fi solution. It used to be so simple. Now, it’s more complicated than ordering a coffee at Starbucks in California!

Reading

I’ve been reading a lot of training notes last week, giving the novel reading a bit of a back seat. With a bit of luck this coming week, I’ll pick up from where I left off.

Of note

Maybe my cries for help to Apple actually did something —I doubt it— but I’ve had much more success in using the HomePod mini stereo pair in my office this week. I force-rebooted a couple of times. The result has been more stability. It is still not up to the initial rock-solid state it was a few months ago. I suspect my Internet has something to do with that, but that would be very hard to pin down, given that Apple gives you literally no way to see what is happening on the HomePod devices. They are truly a closed-off example of a closed device. It’s convenient when it works but a frustrating shit-show when it doesn’t.

I guess the week’s big news was the tropical storm of news Friday evening when Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI.

The fallout is still settling, and there have been literally hundreds of rumours surrounding what may have happened. The latest, as of writing, is that the board are now pleading with him to come back, apparently led by Satya Nadella of Microsoft, who apparently knew nothing of the ousting despite having 49% shares of the for-profit side of the structure.

That’s another thing that has come out of this, something that we probably all should have been more aware of, is that the Open AI business structure seems to be set up in a less than transparent way and gives the impression that it is a non-profit research organisation. Clearly, it is far from that, and Friday night events have only highlighted that.

The other big question is how Microsoft seems to have put all of its eggs (or at least a vast majority) in one basket… Open AI. That might come back to bite them in the future.

Lastly, I’ll just say that the name of Open AI is disingenuous. It is not open at all. More on that in the future if I get around to writing that up.

Have a good week.

I had another very busy week in the end. It wasn’t planned that way, but it ended up being so. I had two full days at the end of the week, giving training to the top managers of a local company on GenAI. It’s a course I have been teaching since around June, and it always incites a lot of philosophical discussion and even some question that reflects the fear people have about this technology.

I try to demystify it a little and give people help on how to use it effectively. However, I don’t shy away from the negative impacts of these products, notably the environmental effects and the digital colonialism that goes on in the background, something that absolutely none of the people I have trained had thought about.

I’ll continue teaching this because the technology is here. If we (or I) can get enough people to think about its use more equitably and sensibly, perhaps the platforms behind these products could do better. I grant you that it is a little naive, but I don’t see much option currently. This is moving so fast and out of control that reeling in from the point of view of a user is one of the strategies we can use to effect change.

Reading

I’m continuing my reading of the Asimov robot series and picking up where I left off on other books, as well as starting a new book. This is quite a departure from my usual reading, as I tend to read factual books or novels. I picked up Thurston Moore’s (of Sonic Youth) autobiography. I’ve only read a couple of chapters so far, and I’m a little indifferent about the person described in the book.

Sonic Youth is a group I have listened to a lot over the years and is probably the group of which I have the most albums. They were very prolific, which goes some way to explain that, but I always enjoyed their music. Not so much this autobiographical work, for the moment. I’ll give it a little more time and will probably get into it at some point.

Of note

It seems I spoke (wrote?) too fast. HomePod Amnesia is still a thing for my stereo pair. It’s so fucking tiring. It used to be that we could press play, and music would emanate from speakers without stuttering, losing place, flipping from left to right or losing a channel. Bad equipment notwithstanding. And I know I sound like Old Man Screaming at Clouds, but this is really basic stuff. There is no world where performance this shitty is acceptable. As I write this, the left channel has just clicked a couple of times for no reason other than to diminish my listening experience. Apple? Is that you? If it is, can you fix this crap, please, because it is beyond a joke now!

Have a good week.

If you follow along here, you’ll have noticed that I didn’t write anything last week. I didn’t really have the space to think about it, and the deadline, albeit self-imposed, passed. I’m forgiving myself for the lapse.

Which leads me to the point about how I, and others no doubt, think about writing, documenting, and sharing a few bits about our life online. I’m a private person, and I don’t post much on Social Media. In part for the same reasons I said above: lack of time and motivation. The other reason is that I consider it dangerous, from a cybersecurity perspective, to freely give out too many details about one’s life over a world-spanning network, where bad-faith actors can use that information against you or those around you in your life, which is why you’ll notice that I tend to anonymise much of the information.

Still, last week was rather busy, and I didn’t have a lot of time to myself to reflect on things. I’d accepted to complete a project with a very tight deadline, and despite travelling across to the west coast of the USA, I managed to fit in enough time to plan out the needed steps. Last week was filled with fleshing out that information and producing a 75-page PowerPoint presentation to support my discussion. I completed the project Friday afternoon after a final day mad rush to get it all in place, and then promptly crashed. I was drained and felt I needed a little time to relax, as I hadn’t been able to do so for quite some time. In between all of this, I managed to fit in ten hours of teaching.

If you haven’t taught before, it is such a rewarding experience, but one that takes a lot of energy and a lot of effort to keep a class interested and not to fall asleep. I took advantage of the time of year to give the class a few bits of history to explain the time of year, Halloween, Bonfire Night, etc. I thought it would be helpful for them to have this cultural background as they are training to work in hotels worldwide and will courtois clients from the UK, the USA, and other nations. I think it worked out ok.

This week, I have a less dense schedule, so I should be able to start thinking strategically about my work. It is something I need to do and haven’t had the time to do so.

Reading

This week, I finished Glyn Moody’s Walled Culture. It is an excellent overview and essay on the state of copyright on the Internet, amongst other things. I suggest you buy the paperback, but if you can’t (for whatever reason), Glyn has a free ebook available on the website.

Instead of starting one of the books listed here, I cracked and bought the second book in Asimov’s The Robot series, The Caves of Steel. I’m only a few pages in and totally into the novel. It’s a feeling I used to get in my late teens and early twenties. I’d always have a SciFi book with me, often a couple in case I finished one and wanted to read something new. I was living in London at the time and would frequently be on public transport, which is almost the perfect setting to read books… for me.

I’ll definitely start one of the other books today or tomorrow. I just need to choose one and get started. That, or pick up on one of the ones I’ve not finished yet.

Of note

I don’t know if I wrote about it here, but I had become very frustrated with the HomePod mini I use at my desk. I have a stereo pair on either side of my monitor, and they provide a good enough sound for me to enjoy my music while I’m working. But recently, and I can’t quite pin down the exact date, they started playing up. They would get out of sync, or one side would stop working and even refuse to play at all. Requiring a reboot to get started again was a little annoying, but not the end of the world. The worst thing for me was that they had developed amnesia. They would forget what was playing for no apparent reason.

I have had this setup since they were released in November 2020, according to MacTracker (a great little resource app), and I enjoyed stereo music at my desk independent of the monitor speakers —in my case, the Apple Studio Display— or speakers that could be plugged directly into my computer. The Studio Display speakers are good enough, and I would be OK using them, but I prefer the minis because they are an independent music source. If I use the monitor speakers, I have to have macOS sounds turned on, and I would likely be disturbed by all the bleeping and pinging of modern life. And if I reboot the computer for whatever reason, the music stops, which is less than optimal. The homepods solve this, and I can silence the computer when I need to, reboot it, or do whatever I like without affecting the music. Bliss.

Anyway, the amnesia got so bad that if I paused the music on the HomePod, quickly did something for more than a few seconds, re-tapping the top of the device didn’t restart the playing, it would start a whole new playlist, joyful announcing that it would play a list just for me. It got so annoying that I sometimes ended up controlling it from my phone in AirPlay mode.

I’m glad to say that this has been fixed. I don’t know when or what happened. I suspect it is the latest firmware, but I can’t tell for sure, as Apple is ridiculously quiet on such things. All I can say is that it is back to how it used to be. I can pause music by touching the top to pause, then return a day or more later for it to restart where it left off. Peace is restored in the Galaxy.

Have a good week.

Well, that was an interesting week!

A while back, I applied for a fellowship program with ARIN, the American Registry of Internet Numbers. I’d hoped to get picked but didn’t bet any money on being so. To my surprise, I was picked as one of the ARIN52 cohort of Fellows. I was invited to participate in the policy discussions and the general meeting in a virtual capacity. I was very happy to be selected as there are only a few places, and many people apply each year. I felt I had something to offer, and I felt that being “entre deux chaises” would give me a unique perspective coming from the French-speaking region and having deep knowledge of both the English-speaking and French-speaking Caribbean. That’s how I left it, and I was looking forward to the meeting.

However, that’s not quite how it turned out.

Due to a participant being unable to secure a travel visa in time, I was asked if I wanted to travel to San Diego to participate in person. I immediately said yes, but I had a couple of administrative things to take care of to ensure I could travel. Passport expiration and that sort of thing! I got the ESTA, sent off my details and received the flight and hotel bookings. This all happened in the couple of weeks preceding the week this post covers.

This week, it was travel and conference time. The journey was long, requiring two layovers, one overnight and the other in the middle of the USA. After a delay of 3 hours or so, I finally touched down in San Diego and grabbed an Uber to the hotel. I was greeted with an evening cocktail where I could meet some other Fellows and the ARIN representatives already onsite. To clarify, I had the opportunity to attend not only ARIN52 but NANOG89 (North American Network Operators Group).

NANOG was fascinating, and I met many people that I will keep in touch with. We discussed some of my research, and they kindly provided me with data and other contextual information. So valuable! One was a researcher from ICANN. It’s not every day you get to exchange with people like that, so despite my introverted tendencies, I tried to make the best of the opportunity, and I think I succeeded in that goal.

The ARIN meeting was very interesting, too. I think I’ll be spending a bit more time with them, trying to devote some time to internet governance and maybe even applying to be part of the Advisory Council. I’ll let you know.

Travel back was a little more interesting, shall we say! The overnight from San Diego to Miami was uneventful, and arrived a little ahead of schedule. Aside from being dog-tired, I felt fine and had a little breakfast at the Airport. Shout out to the super kind waitress who could see I was very tired. I don’t tend to sleep on aeroplanes; consequently, with an overnight flight, I’m not particularly rested when I arrive at the destination. That was only the start of the bad day I had. Hurricane season decided to develop a hurricane that ruined my chances of flying home on Saturday morning. The flight was delayed 24 hours, and I had to scramble to find a hotel for the night. Hotel found, and with one short Uber ride over, I was checking in. The flight home the day after was uneventful, and I was glad to be home. The evening granted me a lovely sunset, and I found it comforting and felt happy to be home.

A big thanks to the ARIN team, particularly Amanda. You all made me feel welcome and part of your team from the outset. That’s no trivial task, and you did it with flying colours!

Reading

I picked up a couple of The Internet Protocol Journal issues at the conference. If you’re interested in networks, this is a must-read.

I have nearly finished Walled Culture from Glyn Moody. He talks about the Internet, freedom, copyrights, content filtering and many other important subjects to understand if you will be using the Internet anytime soon. I have a couple of chapters left, and I suspect I’ll finish it this week.

If I do, I’ll start one of the other books I listed here.

Of note

Not technology-related, but I have been keeping up with the Cricket World Cup. What that means is more that I have been disappointed with England’s performance. Something is out of whack, and they can’t get it together to win matches that are, to be fair, seriously difficult. What stands out to me is the upcoming nations like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and the Netherlands have shown that they are progressing well and will be in the big leagues sooner than most anticipated. This is great for the sport.

One last prediction. In 5 to 10 years, I fully suspect the United States will put out a world-class cricket team, particularly in the T20 and One Day International series. Mark my words!

Have a great week.

I’m a little late with this as I’ve been travelling all weekend. Flight delays are always fun, but when mixed with 3 terminal changes, it just adds insult to injury! Oh well.

I had a hectic week trying to get some new teaching off to a good start. I’m enjoying it and find it very self-fulfilling, and the groups I have are really good. I try to have a laugh and a joke with them, all the while pushing forward with the education.

I will be swamped next and will write a little bit of what I’ve been doing then.

Reading

I wrote a book list that I published last week. I’ve continued a little with Cory Doctorow’s “The Internet Con”. It’s interesting and does dive into some of the things that have been on my mind recently as it concerns tech as a whole.

If I’m honest, and I think I’ve written before, I’m reevaluating tech and its overall worth to society. I’m still largely positive, but I’m trying to redefine and consider some downsides.

Of note

I’m following with great interest the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried in the collapse of FTX. So far, the defence has been making a pig’s ear of it, and witness after witness (called by the prosecution) has shown how he was more than a naive guy who got in too deep, as he tried to plead through his media tour a while ago. Instead, he seems to be a calculated and ruthless frauder on a hitherto not-seen scale.

The jury will decide, but so far, it’s not looking good for him.

Have a good week.