Matthew Cain

Djinns by Fatma Aydemir

Just finished another recommendation from @mrbsemporium.bsky.social. Cleverly constructed, rich characters and a big ending

A low % of calls answered will typically inflate the total call volume, as the same person tries a second or third time to get their call connected

Is this causation or correlation?

There are good reasons to spell out acronyms

It’s a really helpful list. FWIW I think it’s valuable to distinguish between different types of service. The user needs to pay the Dartford Crossing vs finding a school place vs getting temporary accommodation aren’t well suited to one-size-fits-all

+1

As a young kid listening to cricket on the radio it amazed me that London had the space for two cricket grounds. Now, seeing the price of properties in London it ….

Amazon is famously frugal as a Leadership Principle but today I discovered two things we didn’t get at the MOJ. Not only do you get a towel in the shower, there’s also a nozzle on the hairdryer

Gmail extracts order tracking information from emails to provide a status summary

Enjoying this new feature from Gmail. It’d be churlish to wonder how long it’s been since the previous update

The (coincidental) intersection of reading Prophet Song, visiting Derry and seeing the exhibition @nationalportraitgallery of people affected by the Troubles made for a moving 24 hours

I can see why they would be tempting targets for hackers

Reading Platformland prompted me to wonder whether driving licences were still the most effective way of ensuring basic driving standards compared to, say, the sort of in car device that tracks actual performance

A well known scam where your ‘child’ needs money

I’ve reached that stage of not being at work where I’m trying to engineer banter with a scammer

Playlist in a Bottle by Spotify The only playlist you can't hear for a year.

Spotify has correctly judged I’d bring Mendelssohn’s Octet on a desert island open.spotify.com/site/playlis...

I don’t think the farmer’s wife was pursuing the blind mice to turn them over to the local animal sanctuary in the English version either, tbf

Joan of Arc in the foreground with the north window in the background

Moving experience to visit Notre Dame cathedral. If St
Paul’s had been destroyed in 2019, would the bat survey have been completed? Or would the construction tender been awarded yet?

That’s a really smart way to put it

I’d be fascinated in anything you can share about case management in particular

Between Dog and Wolf by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

Thanks to @mrbsemporium.bsky.social I got to read this stunning book this week. Memorable experience

I’m also confused about how some Tupperware enables poor kids in Venezuela to become top orchestral performers

I asked to help with registration because I thought it would be a great way to connect with lots of people (whilst keeping the line moving of course)

Am sharing what I read on holiday in case it helps anyone prioritise their reading. In order of usefulness and beauty, they were:
1. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
2. A history of the world in 47 borders by John Elledge
3. Supremacy by Palmy Olson
4. Expectation by Anna Hope

Two pictures of the northern lights in Finland

Got to see this last night. It’s spectacular but found I needed to check myself when it didn’t look as dramatic as the classic Insta shots

I had a moment earlier this week where I thought: my younger self would’ve been delighted to be doing this. That I was on my own. half cut in a Soho pub reading a book whilst waiting for my daughter to finish a dance class, meant it was important not to get lost in the details of the moment!

Thanks - that’s really helpful to see.

Indeed. Which surely you’re aware of at the point of writing them in a public display book, no? Feels like sometimes companies interpret GDPR paternalistically unless I’ve misunderstood

How would writing your own details, which surely constitutes consent, breach GDPR?

It could - clearly. Or it’s similarly possible ex local gov folk will be lost for 12 months and either assimilate or leave, much as happens to people from business and other industries

Not sure. Whilst the concept is great in my narrow experience the institutions are significantly different and need different approaches to succeed

Cool. I think it’s super hard to actually be outcome-driven because all the governance, funding and accountability is geared to outputs