Irregular Weeknotes 003

It’s irregular weeknote 003, still regular although this one might be briefer.

A week really of things taking much longer than they should so felt a little overwhelmed with everything. But started HRT (let’s talk openly right?) so emotions maybe playing havoc this week. Totally mind boggled by tiny silver patches and hormones, and how they literally control your body. Anyway…

School of Good Services

We start the planning for the next year about three months out now so we can plan our public course dates. This time we’re incorporating a USA / Oz / Canada schedule in there so it has been slightly more complex to work out. What we do know, is we’ll be USA/Canada east coast early February. Still, we didn’t finish planning and will finish it this week, so public courses should be out for 2025 in a week or so.

What we didn’t do was record our podcast again. Too much in the way, too much on, but recording resumes next week.

Topic this time is luxury. We did however finish our show notes for this one this week.

I got my dates and invites out for everyone joining my Agile Service Design course in November. Psyched again, I do it three times a year and I love teaching so much.

Editing footage from my summer project

I took lots of observational footage of the project I did over the summer exploring participatory music making for world-building at various music festivals over the summer.

I wasn’t commissioned to film, but I’m a big believer in capturing where/if you can so the client asked me to turn it into a short film. I spent the week editing/aligning audio (without time codes, someone save me from myself) and figuring out a creative way to pull together lots of ok footage and different time signatures of songs that were created.

A series of coloured boxes on an editing suite with a person in a white outfit at the top singing into a microphone

I remembered (again), I really enjoy editing, I’m at peace, there is no Zoom meeting involved and I can be creative moving boxes around. It’s slightly panic inducing when you realise parts of it take longer than you imagined, but that’s in the learning and building more experience up.

I provided some guidance this week on building core new functions into an app to test a digital version of the experience. I flagged there might be alternative ways to test the overall concept, and/or multiple ways to deliver the intended outcomes of scale.

I’m always keen to remind ourselves, are we testing the user flow/UI of a thing, or is it the overall concept and outcomes, and if it’s the latter, are there cheaper and quicker ways to explore that, and multiple ways in which to test that, rather than all the eggs in the app basket. We wait and see what we will prefer to do.

Film

Caught up with my 2nd DOP/Camera friend in Exeter. Had a good catch up, talked more about the big doc and some ideas. Bubbling the crew up again and starting to chat dates for more filming.

Spoke to a librarian who’s happy to talk on camera about censorship of LGBTQ+ materials on book shelve and what she has witnessed.

Renovating

If you don’t know, we’re renovating a farm, and some barns. It’s become a HUGE task, and at times slightly overwhelming. We chipped away this week at tidying up a barn, which feels annoyingly a lack of progress but, we needed to clear up from the last big sprint of renovating last year so I do feel my head is clearer now. We finally commissioned some help and have painters joining us to do the basics across the house in November, so a good step forward.

Listened:

Returned to Grace by Jeff Buckley. Lover you should’ve come over is perhaps my favourite song of all time.

“She’s the tear that hangs inside my soul forever” – A lyric that never fails to not touch me

Watched and read:

I edited so much, I am a literature desert but I did graze Adam Curtis: The Map No Longer Matches the Terrain

“AI can’t imagine anything that hasn’t happened yet, and good, optimistic, progressive politics imagines something that doesn’t yet exist”

Moved:
2 runs, 1 swim. Up to 5k, second 5k didn’t stop once so that felt like progress. Still, to up the running to 3 a week would be ideal. Weather been a blocker.