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.

Tolerating intolerance is not a good strategy

When I started this newsletter, I deliberately chose a name that was both specific and generic at the same time. This choice might have felt anodyne then, and perhaps you didn’t even think about it. The title was there to express the feeling that I had about how digital technology was going to become further and further entrenched in our personal and professional lives. On that front, I was not wrong. And if I think about where we were at that time here in the Caribbean, we were only starting to think about these technologies and how they might be brought to reality in the region, but looking far afield at what had been taking place in the United States and Europe and trying to shoehorn procedures, products and services into the local context. However, the truth behind the generic title was that I chose it for a specific reason.

Like most weeks, I had a bit of teaching to do on various subjects. I teach a little AI, some pure IT stuff and a little English for speakers of a foreign language. It is a diverse set of teaching, and I enjoy it a lot. I have been very lucky so far in having students and training participants who are enthusiastic and willing to contribute. I try to foster an environment where there are no wrong answers. It sounds a little trite, but I find that putting in the effort to allow participants to feel part of the training gets the best out of them. I also give them practical work to do rather than chalk and talk.

My week was pretty busy with a few projects and a lot of teaching. I teach at a couple of local universities for a diverse set of subjects: English, Project Management and Microsoft Technologies. I have a lot of experience, and I am proud to share as much of it as possible. I get a real buzz from seeing a student understand something for the first time. I had a student understand IP addresses and netmasks. He’d been listening and using the techniques but didn’t really grasp the concepts thoroughly. I’d diverted off the teaching track, something I’m prone to do, and ended up giving a quick course on IPs and associated aspects of TCP/IP. Then suddenly, the student told me they had now understood the subject for the first time, despite following several weeks of routing and firewall courses during the same degree.

Where did the week go?

I had a few days to work on several projects but didn’t advance too well. I got distracted and ended up researching other topics that, while useful, were not related to the work I should have been doing. Specifically, I have been looking at changing my text editor.

For a few years now, I’ve been a user of the Ulysses app on my Mac. But earlier in the week iA (information Architects) released a new update to their text-based writing app. iA Writer V7. I’ve used it on and off for several years, and I’ve always been happy with it as an editor, even changing the defaults on macOS to open .txt files in the application for a while —that job has subsequently been taken on by BBEdit recently.

I’m sitting here on a Sunday evening, looking at the options for consolidation of some of my subscriptions. Do I really need them? Do they provide real value? Could I perhaps help a smaller operation rather than paying a big platform?

I think these are valid questions to ask oneself these days. Large platforms are trending towards the enshittification end of the scale, whereas smaller devs and suppliers are more in tune with what the users need and want. Sure, they’ll make some decisions that aren’t agreed upon by all, but they won’t deliberately trample over a whole bunch of payers to chase the next big thing or to skew things in their favour without regard to users’ privacy, etc.

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.

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.

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.

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.