August 2018 Diary

The heat really did take it out of me. I took a week off after the weather cooled down, and in the few days up to the break, I could feel the gears in my head grinding. I was making mistakes at work that I would never normally make. I could not think straight. It was so bad I woke up at 08:00 for three days during the week off.

I read Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany by Norman Ohler; John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Start-Up; The Secret Barrister; The Panama Papers by Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier; G K Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday; Alan Furst’s A Hero In France; and John Lange (aka Micheal Crichton) The Venom Business and Drug of Choice; and Olga Sviblova's book on Rodchenko

I saw no films and finished S7 of House. I watched Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City, and both the Jack Reacher films on DVD.

Sis and I dined at Delamina, off Wigmore Street. I lunched at The Botanist on Sloane Square because the District Line was up the creek and it was a way to sit it out. I had supper at Blanchette in Soho as well.

I decided it was time to knock working from home on the head. I lost a day of walking - I do 10,000+ steps a day with the commute and other walking - and I was not making the best use of the time. ‘Working from home’ is good when, instead of chatting with others in the office networking with my colleagues, I can do some light housework. With the hot weather, I hadn’t been doing that.

I took my Bose cans into work - I use the in-ear QC20’s for the commute - and that experiment worked: the cans are more comfortable and provide a bit more physical sound exclusion. And I went back to sitting on all sorts of seats around the office, because I’d let myself slip into sitting into a tolerable chair that is still distracting enough that I can’t work fluently in it. Hey, given a choice between reducing property costs per employee and decreasing productivity per employee, there’s really no choice, right?

The white tee-shirts under the blue work shirt came back as well. I’d let the previous lot get too old and scratchy, and of course they shrank in the wash *cough* and became uncomfortable, so as an experiment I stopped wearing them. Finding: wear tee-shirts under the work shirt, and renew the tee-shirts every year or so.

The Great iTunes Album Art project got completed, and only those who have done it will appreciate what that means.

I took some photographs. I know everyone does that all the time, but I had stopped. The Rodchenko book made me think about what taking photographs is about. I don’t have any profound answers, but it shifted how I saw some of the things around me. Made me want to take photographs again.