It’s hard to remember, sometimes, given the amount of negative things that are happening, but there’s so much good too.
Blog
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September 11, 25 years later
Every time that the anniversary of a well-known terrorist atrocity rolls around once again, I think of the words of a woman whose son was killed in one such attack on UK soil and how she “broke the cycle” of hatred by forgiving the men who murdered her son.
Today, as we mark 25 years since a day in which time seemed to stand still, I shall be a little kinder than is necessary to the people around me and follow in her footsteps in breaking the cycle of hatred that it’s far too easy to get caught up in. I invite you to join me.
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Seek to understand before seeking to be understood
A few months ago, I came across the advice that forms the title of this note in one of the many books sat on my reading list for an extended period—The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey—and it’s stayed on my mind a lot ever since.
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Nyah’s ripples
A few days ago in a land far, far away, I had the fortune to visit a bench. Of course, I can now hear you asking “So what?”. “A bench?”, you might ask.
It’s a bench dedicated to Nyah Taryn James, a 14-year-old girl from Swansea, who died on 6 February 2017.
This is getting weirder by the minute, I know, but stay with me.
Nyah was a close friend of my other half—the sort who, in her words, was “loud, bubbly, and optimistic”—in her formative years. She directly shaped the person I love more than anyone in this world.
Of course, I will never meet this young girl who helped to make my partner who she’s become, so watching the world pass us by from a bench left in her memory is the next best thing that the world has to offer.
In us doing so, the ripples that Nyah left on this world continue on their way. To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, she won’t finally be dead until those ripples stop for the final time. We won’t let that happen.
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Imogens, are you out there?
Just randomly dawned on me that I haven’t met anyone called Imogen in many years.
Are any of you out there?
Do you still exist?
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Life lessons in the form of graffiti
Putting aside the political angle, which I try to stay relatively neutral on whilst writing here, this graffiti in Manchester city centre provides a remarkably solid foundation for living life more generally.
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Trust in the customer service space
As Andy Marsh, CEO of the College of Policing, said recently about the media’s trust in policing:
“Trust arrives on a tortoise and it leaves on a horse.”
I’ll be thinking about that as I serve customers at my day job today.
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AI is a paradox
For knowledge-based questions, it seems logical to assume that you’re more likely to ask an AI tool about things that you don’t know much—if anything—about than things you do.
That inherently means that you’re less likely to know whether what it’s telling you is correct or not, or how to check. We’ll call it the Altman Paradox.
Check your facts, kids.
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Why Is It Written In Pascal Case?
I was on a Northern Rail train recently and did what every autistic train nerd does best. That’s right—I became the first human in recorded history to read the safety poster.
My only question is “Why On Earth Is It Written In Pascal Case?”.
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The Toilet Roll (Minimum Ply) Bill 2026
Just stopped at a train station and used the toilet but the toilet paper was worse than the schools of the 1960s and 1970s… It should be a legal requirement that any toilet roll in public places must be a minimum of two-ply, if not more.