I’ve been struggling with my motivation for writing weeknotes recently - hence there being a few missing ones. I should try to keep up the habit though. I’m going to try bullet-points instead this time - hopefully easier to write and easier to read too. * I managed to convert one of my summer interns to a permanent hire and extend the other’s internship 6 months so that he can go back to uni next summer. * Started antenatel classes with NCT. We paid for a block of lessons about birth and early development. The other couples in attendance seem nice and we’re hoping some of them will become friends while Amy is on mat leave. * Had an electrician install some new plug sockets in our house so that we can reorganise our rooms ready for baby. * Went to see Mary Poppins musical at the Mayflower theatre on Thursday evening. It was really well done and some of the stage stunts were great (Bert went for a tap-dance on the roof during “Step in Time”). * **reading** : * Murderbot Book 7 - Systems Collapse I’m about 1/3 into the book so far and I’m enjoying it so far * Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff - it’s taking me a while to get through because I’m taking copious notes and I’ve not been picking it up that often. * Cribsheet by Emily Oster - a methodically researched book of parenting tips. It debunks a lot of wives tales but also some old “scientific studies”. For example, it talks about breast-feeding is strongly correlated with income in the US so there may be some underlying effect (rich parents more likely to breast feed, richer children more likely to succeed => breast fed children more likely to succeed?) * **playing** Control - I sunk a few hours into Control a couple of years ago but it’s great to be back in The Oldest House. I really want to spend more time in the paranormal/government agency style universe. It’s probably time for a reread of there is no antimimetics division again soon too. Not to mention Antimemetics, a non-fiction book by Nadia Asparrouhova inspired by the aforementioned story by qntm. * **listening** to 90s jam bands which for me is part of the autumn experience. The contemporary jazz will be here soon too. We have another packed week coming up with hospital appointments, car services and a dinner out with a friend who moved to Australia and is visiting the UK.

It’s been a little while since I blogged and my weeknotes have been a little bit inconsistent over the last few weeks. Today, instead of a weeknote, I have a personal update which is slightly different to my usual musings about software development or the scifi books I’m reading. It turns out that Mrs R and I have a fairly big lifestyle change coming up in the sense that we’re expecting our first child. We’re at week 27/28 of pregnancy with the baby due in November. I’ve sat on the news for a few months because early pregnancy is fraught with risks and we’ve had a few health scares. I think we’re both particularly sensitive to these risks since we had to go down the IVF route and that was a bit of an ordeal in itself. I won’t write about the nitty gritty but it’s been quite tough on our mental health and our decision to go down that route was a large contributor to my choice to move on from my previous, much higher stress role. I’ve also been reluctant to share too much information because, since my 2010s-facebook-oversharing phase, I’m a little bit more careful about what I put on the internet. I’ve seen a lot of other bloggers tastefully write about family members, referring to them with “Baby ” or their first initial and I think this is a reasonable compromise. We won’t be sharing any photos of the child in any public online spaces. I’m currently somewhere between over-the-moon and terrified. As far as I understand, this is “par for the course” for first time parents so I’m glad to be on track. My fears range from the basic practicalities of “how will I manage on very limited sleep?” all the way to “is it ok to bring a child into the world when things are so unstable?” On that latter point, I see a lot of doom and gloom about the general state of things in the world that feed my worries. My parents helped me to put things in perspective. My mum talked about having similar concerns when I was “on my way” under the thread of thermo-nuclear annihilation in the late 80s and early 90s as the cold war and soviet union petered out. In 2025 we have an awful lot of amazing technology and medical treatments that wasn’t around when I was young. Mrs R and I are in a privileged position and we can hopefully afford to give the child a reasonably good life. On the lack of sleep, I’ve just been told “you’ll manage” which sounds a bit ominous but I am trying to take it at face value. Anyway, enough with the worrying part. I cannot overstate how excited I am too. I am looking forward to taking on the responsibility of teaching and raising them. I’m excited to watch their personality develop. I’m incredibly aware that it will be challenging and test my patience and resilience too. I imagine I’ll be walking them up and down the nearby beach to try and get them to sleep. I’m hoping that the child will give us an excuse to get out and do more together as a family - particularly in the early years. Mrs R and I previously joked about borrowing someone else’s child so that we can go and see Legoland without looking like two strange adults in a kids’ theme park. I’ll try to resist the usual cliched stuff to the extent that I can (that’s what writing in my personal diary is for). My parents and in-laws are all excited too.

A selection of my projects and works. ## FreshRSS FlareSolverr Plugin Plugin for FreshRSS that uses FlareSolverr to bypass captcha and Cloudflare challenges for RSS feeds. RSS feeds are generally meant for automated consumption and sometimes people misconfigure their bot protections, preventing FreshRSS from collecting new posts from feeds. This plugin helps in those situatons. It should be used responsibly with a low refresh rate. ## Turbopilot A weekend experiment where I attempted to use GGML quantized tensors to run a state-of-the-art code completion model on commodity hardware including laptops, desktops, ARM machines like Macbooks and even Raspberry Pis. The project became obsolete when llama.cpp moved to the GGUF spec which supports arbitrary model architectures out of the box. ## Partridge Website | A scientific paper indexing system that uses machine learning to enrich papers in order to make them more easy to search and filter. Originally written in Python 2 with xml-rpc worker processes and recently updated to use Python 3 and dramatiq for concurrency. ## Sapienta Website | Live Instance | An NLP pipeline for processing and enriching scientific papers with sentence-level information about their core scientific concepts (CoreSCs). This is a Python 3 implementation of Prof Maria Liakata’s 2010 paper. We provide a free web service for low volume requests and a simple to use docker configuration for those who want to run the software over a larger number of papers. ## CDCRTool A tool for annotating co-references of entities that occur in linked news paper article/scientific paper pairings. Some ‘sharp’ code but this was my first venture into ‘full stack’ using ReactJS on the frontend and Flask on the backend. The repository also contains the final corpus which we made available as part of our EACL21 publication. ## TimeTrack A small command-line tool I wrote for monitoring my time spent on projects - it has API integration with the popular SaaS timesheet tool Harvest ## Academic Publications Below are links to my various publishing profiles in case you prefer to follow me on an external site/silo: * ORCID * Google Scholar Profile * Semantic Scholar ### 2022 * Maufe, M., **Ravenscroft, J.** , Procter, R., & Liakata, M. (2022, December). A Pipeline for Generating, Annotating and Employing Synthetic Data for Real World Question Answering. In Proceedings of the The 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations (pp. 80-97). ### 2021 * **Ravenscroft J.** , Cattan A., Clare A., Dagan I., Liakata M. CD2CR: Co-reference Resolution Across Documents and Domains In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume (pp. 270-280). ### 2019 * Steffens A,, Campello A., **Ravenscroft J.** , Clark A., Hagras H. Deep Segmentation: using Deep Convolutional Networks for Coral Reef pixel-wise Parsing _technical notes_ ### 2018 * **Ravenscroft, J.** , Clare, A., & Liakata, M. HarriGT: Linking news articles to scientific literature. In Proceedings of ACL 2018, System Demonstrations (pp. 19-24). ### 2017 * **Ravenscroft, J.** , Clare, A., Duma, D., Liakata, M. Measuring scientific impact beyond academia: An assessment of existing impact metrics and proposed improvements PloS one, 12(3), e0173152. ### 2016 * **Ravenscroft J.** , Oellrich A., Saha S., & Liakata M. Multi-label Annotation in Scientific Articles - The Multi-label Cancer Risk Assessment Corpus * Duma D., Liakata M., Clare A., **Ravenscroft J.** , & Klein E. Applying Core Scientific Concepts to Context-Based Citation Recommendation * Duma D., Liakata M., Clare A., **Ravenscroft J.** , & Klein E. Rhetorical Classification of Anchor Text for Citation Recommendation ### 2013 * **Ravenscroft, J.** , Liakata, M., & Clare, A. Partridge: An Effective System for the Automatic Classification of the Types of Academic Papers

We had quite a busy week last week. On Tuesday, I woke up, to London and got to go to the BBC proms at the Royal Albert Hall where I watched Anoushka Shankar play with an orchestra. It was nice to see something a bit different and the music was great. Expressive, melancholy and at points, rich and heavy. At some points it left me reminiscent of a heavy metal band. I stayed at the Holiday Inn Kensington and on Weds I was able to take advantage of their swimming pool which was a welcome way to wake up and start my day. _**The pool at the hotel was quite nice and pretty much empty when I got there at 6:45 on Wednesday morning.**_ On Thursday it was our 4th wedding anniversary and to celebrate we went out for dinner at Koh Thai in port Solent which is one of our favorite eateries nearby. It was a beautiful and warm evening and lots of other families were out and about due to A-level results day. _**The food atKoh Thai is always brilliant. I highly rate them**_ I’ve been enjoying swimming for fitness which I started doing a couple of weeks ago. After complaining that I found exercise boring, I got myself a cheap set of bone-conducting headphones off amazon and it allows me to get into a meditative state quite easily, and just swim up and down listening to instrumental music. I’ve shaved about 30s off my 100m personal best from 3:27 down to 2:57. I’m still slowly making my way through the Murderbot novels and novellas at the moment. Last week I spent a lot of time on my phone on Lemmy and Mastodon so I’m making a conscious effort to stop that and try to read more when idle. I also did a little bit of open source stuff this week pushing a small PR to AudioMuse-AI to unlock GPU support for the track analysis models. I was able to process my whole Jellyfin library very just (5 hours) with that change in place. This week we have some time off and we are combining tasks around the house with fun stuff like going to the cinema to see Naked Gun. It’s the last week off we have together before christmas and we managed to tie it in to the late August bank holiday so we get 10 consecutive days off which is nice. We might look at last minute deals on local hotels in the New Forest and see if we can find somewhere with a spa and a pool to spend a night. I am planning to work more on PenParse this week and get it to a closed beta if possible.

Today I have been playing a lot with a plugin for Jellyfin called AudioMuse AI. It’s a tool that uses the actual audio features of your music library, including things like tempo, tone and timbre to profile your music library. It uses this information to make recommendations about similar tracks, genres and styles. It seems to be a pretty powerful tool and so far I’ve been quite impressed even though I’ve only had time to play with it a little bit. ## Speeding Up The Analysis Step When you first start the system, it runs a sonic analysis over all of your library to capture information about the songs in a database. I noticed that it was taking a very long time to analyze my music library. When I read the logs I saw that it was running TensorFlow models to provide analysis of the music, but was not making use of my GPU. I spent a couple of hours adding GPU support to the docker images so that I could speed up the processing time. I managed to get it working with my GPU in the end and I sent a pull request to the project. The analysis step is still running and it’s taking a while but songs are processed in about 4s instead of 30s. ## Generating Smart Playlists AudioMute AI is still fairly young software. It currently has its own standalone web UI that allows you to generate playlists and send them back to Jellyfin. There are a few different modes that you can generate playlists in. ### Chat Playlists In this mode, you ask the system for a particular style or theme using written English and it uses a language model to convert your question into an SQL query for the database. You can use local models running on your own system rather than having to send your query off to OpenAI or Google. I found that it works quite well with Olama and Mistral Small 3.2. I did try it with some of the smaller llama models but I found that they were less able to generate sensible SQL queries. ### Similar Tracks Another way to generate playlists is to find sonically similar tracks. You start by entering a song you like into the form and the system finds songs with a similar sound. I was quite pleased and impressed by the results of this approach. ### Other Modes You can create a ‘sonic fingerprint’ which takes your listening history and tries to find other tracks in your library that are “similar”. I believe this is based on the centroid vector of all the songs that you’ve listened to before. There’s also a musical “path” feature which allows you to build a playlist that transitions between two songs. I guess you could start with something easy going and end up with something quite intense and fast (or vice versa). I haven’t worked out how to make this work yet, it just gives me errors. ## Jellyfin Integration At the moment integration is minimal. There is a plugin that allows Jellyfin to ping your AudioMuse AI server and refresh the index periodically but currently no direct integration of the playlist generation stuff. I guess it will get better over time. ## Conclusion I’ve had a fun afternoon messing with this stuff and some of the playlists it’s generated are really good. I’m looking forward to experimenting with the “chat” playlists more and seeing how the software develops over time.

I've spent a bit of time today updating my FreshRSS plugin that integrates with FlareSolverr to bypass CloudFlare challenges. ### Why Generally an rss feed is supposed to be machine/bot readable so hiding one behind Cloudflare is a bit of a strange thing to do. The idea of this plugin is to grant access to RSS feeds that are being over-zealously protected by cloudflare. ### What's New Previously I was doing some janky stuff with FreshRSS, copying files around and adding new endpoints to support my plugin. This was causing issues for people who wanted to install the plugin in the official Docker container because it was giving a permissions error which had to be bypassed by chmodding a directory inside the container while it was running. The FreshRSS maintainers recently added a new api_misc hook that means I no longer have to do things the janky way. That makes things a bit easier. While I was in there I also did some tidying up and added some more troubleshooting hints to the README. ### What Next The plugin is still a bit fiddly to use. You have to manually add a prefix to all affected feed URLS. I guess it would be nice to add automatic support for that and maybe also support fetching article full text through this mechanism too (someone has already requested this).

A short note this week due to an acute lack of motivation. On Monday Mrs R and I had the day off and spent the day entertaining my mum and her partner who came down from the midlands to visit us. My mum is a bit of a history buff so we took her to nearby Portchester Castle. I was able to climb all the way to the top of the tower and take some photos looking across the bay. The rest of the party weren’t interested in the windy stairs. My legs are mostly recovered from my shin splints now, so I’ve also been doing lunchtime walks as part of my exercise regime. **The view from the top of Portchester Castle. It’s a great spot for keeping an eye on the surrounding estuary if you are a cunning norman king.** Work continues to be busy at the moment and, I’ve been juggling a few different projects. I’ve also had a cold this week, so I’ve done minimal travelling to/from London again this week while I recover and to avoid spreading it. After work, I’ve been mainly napping or reading. We are also continuing to watch Here We Go which I’m still enjoying except for the occasional cringe. We’re still in the middle of our big cleanout at the moment and I’ve been giving away a lot of stuff. I reshuffled my office yesterday and then got distracted setting up pihole on an old 2nd generation Pi B+. I’m pretty impressed by how lightweight pihole is. It barely uses any CPU or RAM and so far it’s blocked several thousand requests to domains that look a bit… suspect… Next week I will try to get into London a couple of times and continue on the house clearout. I’m feeling pretty exhausted at the moment but we’ve got a week off coming up soon so I just need to hold off until then.

Publishing last week’s weeknote a bit later than usual due to having my parents visiting this weekend. Last weekend I recognised a regular pattern in my thoughts: it was time for my annual caffeine detox. I first noticed that caffeine makes me really anxious around this time last year. I tend to inadvertantly increase my consumption of caffeine in the summer months via iced lattes and diet cola. On monday I decided to go cold turkey and… ouch! By monday afternoon (about 24 hours since my last caffeinated drink) I was hit with a massive headache and lethargy. I had to take a nap. The headache lasted until Thursday, peaking at it’s most intense on Wednesday. That tracks with NIH guidace which suggests headaches normally peak 20-51 hours after cessation. I was also feeling a quite depressed. I eventually started feeling like my normal self again by Friday and I’ve since moved back to 1 caffeinated coffee a day and decaf thereafter. On Monday we went out to a restaurant that we don’t visit very often for my mother-in-law’s birthday. It was a lovely change from Nandos and chain restaurants. This weekend my mum and her partner have been visiting from Shropshire and Mrs R and I have today off to show them around the local area. We’re going to visit Portchester Castle and have lunch in the nearby, highly rated Cormorant pub. We’ve also been having a bit of a clear out of the house this week. I’ve given away lots of odd bits and bobs like laundry baskets and biscuit tins via the Olio app which has been hasse free for the most part. I like the fact tht they have a rating system to help police time wasters a little bit and you can also share food on there - like that bag of protein powder we bought for an overnight oats recipe and never touched again. Work continues to plod along. We’re still working on our project due in november and I’ve also been working my way through all my six month reviews with my team this week. I’m really proud of the work that they’re doing and it’s nice to have the opportunity to tell them how much I appreciate them. On Tuesday I met up with a university friend on my way into london which was great. When I’ve not been working this week, I’ve barely sat in front of a computer which has been nice. I’ve spent a lot of time reading the Murderbot novellas. I’m on to book 5 now (although they’re only short so it’s not like I’ve read 5 Brandon Sanderson books…) I watched Mountain head on the train back from london and I can’t say I was crazy about it. It felt a little too “easy” to make a film about uncontroversial things “billionaires bad, misinformation bad”. The last two acts of the film were better though. Mrs R and I have also been watching Here We Go which is a sitcom about the trials and tribulations of a rather inept british family. It has some heavyweight cast members and is occasionally laugh out loud funny but it can also be very cringy to watch. The father in the family is usually the butt of the jokes which brings to mind a recent study about how boys and young men are suffering a mental health epidemic with very few positive male rolemodels in the media. Thinking about sitcoms, I can’t think of many that paint leading men in a good light… Maybe Ted Lasso? I did briefly look at my FreshRSS FlareSolverr API extension on github this week as a new feature in FreshRSS should make it easier for me to make my extension stay enabled betwen upgrades. I’m going to try and find some time to make that change now that my caffeine headaches have subsided. I’m looking forward to a shorter work week due to the aforementioned visit from my mum. I’ll be trying to continue to build my swimming habit and also getting back into my walking regime now that my shin splints are basically healed. I’m also hoping to meet up with another friend for lunch on Thursday.

An article in Raspberry Pi magazine about building a self-leveling robot reminded me of a project that I undertook as a teenager. When I was in sixth form, we built a self-leveling platform in order to earn an engineering crest award. These days solid state semiconductor accelerometers are now commonplace and very cheap due to their ubiquity in smartphones and similar tech. In the mid 2000s, these were still quite expensive and we had a very limited budget so we came up with a very cheap but geeky solution.... We started looking at spirit levels. If the bubble in the spirit level moves that's a reasonable sign that the platform has started to tilt slightly. We started to think about an optical solution. Can we shine an LED through the spirit level and trigger a light sensor when the bubble moves in front of the light? If the bubble was in the spirit level segment to either side of the centre, we could wire up a stepper motor to start moving the platform in the opposite direction. Initially, it didn't work particularly well since found that the light was visible to the sensor even when the bubble wasn't present and we couldn't reliably calibrate the sensor on the other side. At the time we were studying our A-Levels and in A-Level Physics we studied the phenomenon of absorption spectroscopy. Simply put: different coloured materials and fluids absorb certain colours of light. You'll notice this if you put a red filter over a light and shine it on blue or green objects. They will appear black or brown. For any given material you can find out what wavelength of light it will typically absorb. We found out that the dye that is normally put into spirit levels is a chemical called flourescein. We also found out that flourescein absorbs light with a wavelength somewhere between 520-620nm. Then we used our paltry budget to purchase some LEDs that produce light in that wavelength. Sure enough, when we attached them to our model, it worked! The flourescein in the spirit level absorbed most of the light and when the bubble was in front of the LED, it let most of the light through. It was much easier to calibrate our sensor to these much larger thresholds between "off" and "on". Baby James (Left) with two fellow students at our booth. The self-righting platform on a block of wood in the middle We took our model to a big expo event in Birmingham where other colleges were showcasing their projects. Some of the inner city colleges had big prestigious sponsorships from companies like Jaguar Land Rover and Qinetiq so the little self-levelling platform made on a budget by country bumpkins looked quite out of place but the competition judges said told us our solution was probably the most cleverly engineered on display at the expo.

This week was an absolute scorcher with some respite over the weekend and more hot weather expected next week. I’ve been busy working with my science manager counterpart on some product scoping work. We’ve got an ambitious deadline in November which when we work backwards, doesn’t give us much time at all. I’m also running an intuitive round local/small models which I’m pretty excited about. _**Rupert the cat has not been impressed by the weather**_ Earlier in the week I did some updates on my digital garden that added information cards for books and TV series so that the bits of metadata stored in Obsidian get pulled through. I also finally installed Anubis in front of my Forgejo instance after I noticed have CPU usage and traffic spikes from scrapers. So far it has been doing a great job. I took my first sick day since changing jobs on Thursday as I had some kind of stomach upset. Sadly that meant I missed the event at the Alan Turing Institute that I was planning to attend in person. I’ve been spending time this week reading Seveneves and playing Oblivion Remastered on my Steam Deck. I’m really enjoying getting back into Oblivion. It’s an immersive if charmingly janky environment. On Saturday we went to the Beaulieu Estate and saw some old cars in the national motor museum which is on the estate grounds. They also had some pretty gardens, the ruins of an abbey that was demolished by Henry VIII and, we got to go on a Monorail. We had a nice lunch too. I didn’t realise that there was a WW2 spy finishing school at Beaulieu. Apparently German intelligence knew all about it and, they even knew the name of Lord Montagu (the owner)’s dog. _**I love a monorail**_ I’ve managed to give myself a shin splint somehow which is surprising since the only exercise I tend to do at the moment is walking. I tend to find exercise is boring. I’ve bought myself some new prescription swimming goggles to help with not being able to read signs or recognise people in the pool. Hopefully I can get to the swimming pool soon and, it won’t aggravate my leg. This week we are braced for more warm weather and I have a busy week of meetings and house projects. Hopefully, I can keep my brain operating in these temperatures.

I was reflecting on the fact that I’ve put on a little weight recently. Nothing crazy but I’m feeling a bit “round” and some of my favourite clothes are feeling a little tight. So I need to eat a little better and do more exercise. The problem is that exercise bores me a lot. ## I Don’t Like Sport I can’t stand competitive team sports like football, surely they have decided who who has won the football by now. It just doesn’t interest me and I couldn’t say why. I guess it’s just the way I’m wired. I’m not really into one-on-one sports like tennis either. I’ve tried a few and the closest I came to enjoying something was badminton at high school. I have terrible coordination thanks to my dyspraxia. I am a bit of an introvert so ideally I’m looking for an activity that I can do alone after a day full of meetings at work and recharge some of that social battery. The gym feels incredibly pointless to me. Instead of moving around outside we’ve invented this artificial sterile environment and we burn fossil fuels to power these machines that allow us to move around on the spot inside. I tried running and not only is it not fun at all, I’m awful at it and it’s really bad on your joints. I’m in my 30s and with any luck I’ve got another 50 years left in me. I’m not looking to do my knees in just yet… I have a HIIT app that I start using every few months, decide is too much like torture and then ignore for another few months. ## What Could I Do Then? I used to enjoy dancing but I haven’t done that for a long time. Maybe I could pick it up again, it’s a great workout. I think the commitment to going multiple evenings a week may be difficult. I’m usually the most energetic and have the most free time first thing in the morning… I don’t hate swimming but it is a bit dull swimming up and down in an artificial pool. I was considering buying a set of waterproof bone conducting headphones so that I could listen to podcasts. I can get access to my local swimming pool through work as a perk. Might be worth a go. I actually really enjoyed cycling. From 2014 to 2015 I went through a phase of cycling to work from my flat in Eastleigh to IBM Hursley. Since then I’ve moved jobs and houses and the roads around where I live now are quite scary (I’m pretty sure drivers have gotten more careless since COVID too). Maybe if I can find some dedicated cycle paths and quiet roads I could get out on the bike… I also quite like walking. I just put an audiobook or podcast on and walk. It doesn’t burn loads of calories but if you do enough of it, it can make a big difference. To maximise my chances of actually sticking to this exercise, it needs to form a seamless part of my routine. I’m sure that was why I got quite good at cycling to work back in the day… Because I had to get to work anyway, might as well cycle and just shower when I get to the office instead of at home… Eurgh, I don’t know….any ideas reader?

This week I’ve been catching up with work after my trip to Norway. I was able to get up to London a couple of times. I got the opportunity to meet my new intern in person for the first time and we had a good chat about what I’m hoping to get him to help me with during his time in my team. I’m also continuing to work with the product team on a big strategic pivot which was triggered by the outcome of a hackathon I organised in may. We’ve been doing lots of whiteboarding and brainstorming sessions about how to do the new thing. I’ve had a fairly busy week at home too. On Thursday we went to see a play called Ghost Stories which was pretty scary but really enjoyable. They had some really impressive set pieces and the thrills and frights were interspersed with comic relief. We also went to see M3GAN 2.0 which was also great fun. There was quite a lot of similarity in how the plot evolved between M3GAN and it’s sequal and between Terminator 1 and 2. In the first film M3GAN is evil and “the villain” and in the second one she’s helping the heroes to defeat a new bigger baddie. In less fun news, I’ve noticed I’m getting headaches and ear ache a lot at the moment and struggling to hear a fair bit. On friday I went to an ear specialist to have a check up. After they did micro-suction to remove some wax build up, they said I have glue ear. I thought that was something children get but apparently it’s a condition that can affect adults too. I’ve got some breathing exercises which should help to unblock my eustachian tubes over a few weeks. If that doesn’t work, there are some surgical interventions that can be done. I’m reading SevenEves by Neal Stephenson which I started on holiday and am about 2/3 of the way through. As I mentioned on Mastodon the other day, my head canon is that President Julia Bliss Flaherty looks and sounds like Mary McDonnell in her Battlestar Galactica role. I’m also continuing to listen to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan audiobook. The weather in the UK is scorching this week. It’s been high 20s celcius for the last few days and its predicted to be 31 tomorrow and 34 in london on Tuesday. South Western Railway already have a notice up on their website predicting delays and the tubes are likely to be truly vile in this weather. I might give the office a miss on Tuesday and go up later in the week. I’ve been invited to an event at the Alan Turing Institute on Thursday by my PhD supervisor, so I’m looking forward to that. The weather is supposed to have cooled off a little bit by then too.

I've recently noticed and zeroed-in on something that I've been doing for years. I'm a very verbose writer. More specifically, I write with a lot of asides and footnotes which makes the structure of my sentences overly complex. I also write long documents when short ones will do. I offer a lot of surplus explanation and exposition where it probably isn't required. My writing style is such because I like to "show my working" when it comes to my thought processes. I do this to try to clarify my intent and second-guess possible critiques of my writing in advance. I'll typically do this if I'm talking to someone that I'm worried will be critical of my writing. Essentially I'm over-thinking but in writing... Unfortunately this often has the opposite effect of making my writing harder to read and confusing my intent. Two recent examples come to mind: * I needed to schedule a 30 minute meeting with a colleague and we both have busy calendars. I over-shared and over-thought putting in an early-for-me call: "I don't mind starting early, I have a medical appointment later so I need to make the time up anyway..." We are on good terms socially but I still don't imagine my colleague doesn't care about why I'm happy to start early. * I wanted to share an event with a group that someone else at work owns. I could have asked them "do you mind if I share X event with the group?" Instead, I sent a long rambling email about how I didn't want to tread on any toes and I'd already checked in with Y person and the event is on Z date and..." you get the picture. In both of these examples, I undermined the clarity of my messages by overthinking the reader's reaction and trying to account for possible negative reactions. Sometimes context is necessary but nobody should have to read multiple paragraphs of overthinking answer a simple yes/no question. Not a good look... I've been told by a lot of people that I write well but I look at the amazing work of people like Keenan and Annie who are able to concisely and clearly write about emotive topics and I realise that I could do a lot better. A lot of my blog posts end up being unnecessarily long. I plan to practice writing more clearly and concisely starting with this post.