Notes for February 23rd 2024

Song of the week:

• I'm currently in a hiring sprint. Luckily, the end is in sight on some roles, which is fantastic. But it's been a weird market. In the US, one role garnered over 600 applicants. Mostly decent profiles, but there's always some wobbly stuff in there. I've been fairly ruthless to screen most rubbish out, but it's still difficult. But what's really been strange is the sheer volume of folks trying to engage 1:1 with me on LinkedIn, Slack or elsewhere. It's actually really stressful, and a huge mental weight to try to carry. I don't want to let folks down, or tell them to outright piss off. But being polite while pushing back on how downright pushy and salesy someone is can be a tough balancing act. For what it's worth, absolutely everyone who did this did not pass my sniff test anyway and are out of the process. Which makes those 1:1 communications even more difficult to navigate.
• I was solo with the kids last weekend while my wife was at Berlinale, and it was great fun. Not least because they love mucking around with music stuff. As do I. And in my pursuit of making 1 song per month this year with friends of mine, I landed on some cool little demo things on my OP-1. None of which really went anywhere, but I learned new tricks (including routing my guitar via peddle directly into the OP-1 to sample).
  • On a similar note, of all the things that make fun sounds that I own, the Arturia Microfreak is just gorgeous.
• I started watching the latest edition of The Grand Tour. And while I do yearn for the old days, which were more spontaneous, less scripted and more fun, this seems to be good. The problem is, as Grand Tour adventure shows go, it feels very deja-vu because the team literally did a cross-the-desert type of thing years ago. And we've all watched that one. Multiple times!

• Local elections are coming up soon. And we've got plenty of leaflets & door-to-door folks canvassing on behalf of candidates. Two such weird instances worth noting:
  • A weird right-wing candidate who hates immigration but loves "the Irish" had two young girls leafletting for him. I can only assume it's his kids and their mates, who've no idea that he's a lunatic. But on our Ring camera, it picked up a very odd line from one of the girls, in her thick Dublin accent, "look at that letter box, it's pure posh." I laughed so hard because to get to the letterbox she had to pass a dozen red brick houses with nice cars, including my own Tesla. The letterbox is the posh bit, apparently!
  • A FF canvasser knocked to my wife opening the door. When asked if we'd vote FF she said "no, thanks." A man who was trying his hand next door shouted "well, that's nice." Which in my view is voter intimidation. Anyone else that we've said no to has been lovely, and simply asked for a second or third preference.
• There has been noticeably more cycling happening this week, presumably because the weather is less terrible. Though the paint-as-infrastructure thing really doesn’t work. I had no less than 5 incidents where a car ignored the signage and the bikes on Tuesday morning during my 15 minute commute.
• People are so starved for the new Murakami book (not yet translated to English) that they’re passing the Japanese text into GPT and reading that. I can only imagine the madness of that text compared to an actual author’s writing.
• Remember when UI's were mad? Or even better, customisable? The clean aesthetic that we all have to share can be a little dull at times. Sure, some apps have customisation for icons, layouts or colours. But where's the true madness of the late 90s or early 00s?