BERGās last weeknote was 432. Really makes u think.
Tuesday I went for a 4k run at 6:30am and it was quite pleasant and had minimal impact on my family. Will probably do it again next week.
On Thursday I had a cosy breakfast with Russell at Bar Bruno, then lunch with Anna and Sarah at Tonkotsu, and then dinner with Debbie and Dimitar in Borough Market.
Local news from whatsapp - there is a new cat on the block. Heās white. Heās been breaking into peopleās houses, going into their bedrooms while they are asleep, eating their cat food, terrorising their cats, vets bills are through the roof. I love cat drama because, as I have said before, ACAB. The black cat who smashed up my greenhouse has now shredded all of the gro-bags in there. Everybody thinks their cat is the victim but do you know who the real victims are? Birds, frogs, my greenhouse.
One of the silly little things I do is collect envelope privacy patterns. I donāt know what Iām going to use them for but one day I will do something with them. Recently Vinted has started advertising me old stamps, Iām not sure why, I donāt collect stamps. Ha ha Iām not some sad loser! God! Imagine! Envelope privacy patterns are way cooler. But it did occur to me though that old stamps are attached toā¦ old envelopes. So when I saw 200 old stamps (on old envelopes!!!) going for Ā£8 I thought in this economy thatās about the most fun you can have for Ā£8 plus postage.
On Saturday I got a box of old envelopes. The postage marks are all Hull, and appear to have been sent to several different clumps of locations. Loads to Petersfield, loads to Norfolk, and loads to the David Cassidy fan club. The dates range from 1957 to 1976. Hereās what I am confused aboutā¦ all these different destinations, all the same singular sending location, and yet these envelopes have all come back together as a set? How has this happened? Whatās going on?
HULL - THE GATEWAY TO EUROPE.
Of course what youāre all dying to know is, did I get any new privacy patterns to add to my collection? Oh yeah. Loads. What a haul.
I now have quite a lot of old envelopes (that have plain internals) to do something with tooā¦ š¤
The new batch of Kombucha has brewed and itās very fizzy this time, probably because itās been warmer in the kitchen. I think Iām going to do a second ginger brew next.
The peas are in the ground and looking good. Tomatoes, lettuce, beetroots, and squash have all germinated and are chilling in the conservatory. Massive pink blossom tree is doing its annual thing.
I read this thing about all the cyber attacks that have happened in the last 4 months. Both fascinating and terrifying in equal measure LINK. Absolutely love living through a paradigm shift!!!!
On Wednesday my previous ride-or-die WBF (work best friend) Debbie visited the RM offices for NOW/NEXT/PRODUCT and blew everyoneās socks off with what sheās been up to at Loveholidays. Then we went to Forza Wine and had a cocktail and some soft-serve. Then I got very stuck getting home because, as happens about 50% of the time when Iām getting a late train, the trains were wrecked by some unknown problem on the line. Did bump into Chetan though soā¦ not all bad.
Please enjoy the Gnomes in the background of that photo of Debbie - when people have worked at RM for 10 years they get a āGnomifiedā and put on that shelf.
Alex and Graham finally unsubscribed me from STATUSPAGE updates about the FT :((((
I still hate driving but this weekend I had to use the car to do a local errand and it made what would have been quite hard (getting the kids between play-dates and birthday parties) very easy, and I didnāt feel completely out-of-body anxious while I was at the party knowing I had to get back into the car to drive home.
[Book binding] The printed book pages arrived but I had gotten the page orientation wrong meaning they were completely useless. >:( Since I had to print them all again anyway I decided make some more adjustments.
Include some photos from Instagram at the corresponding weeks
Make it 100 weeks per book instead of one per year
Adjust margins so the side near the spine is wider
Render the PDF automatically, and do a conversion direct from Markdown to PDF instead of HTML to PDF.
Extract links to a list of references at the end of the week so they donāt clutter up the body text.
Resize and optimise images for black and white printing.
Swap out the emojis for a black and white version, which I hope will fix the fact that they didnāt print at all in the last print out.
This delay also gave me the opportunity to re-bind the very knackered Meera Sodha Fresh India that was falling apart as a practice.
]]>Week 397: Misadventures in book binding2026-04-11T00:00:00+00:002026-04-11T00:00:00+00:00https://alicebartlett.co.uk/blog/weaknotes-397
This week Lachie has taken the kids away for the easter hols. Iāve gotten a lot of fun stuff done. Knitting, book binding, planting seeds, making kombucha. But my sleep has been wrecked. Work stress (fully to do with me having been there for 4 months, and not because it is actually all that stressful)) combined with not having the usual family around me ruined several nights of sleep for me and I was feeling very frayed by the end of Friday.
Alice Bartlett has been the victim of a fraud. Not me, one of my namefellows.
Is fellow gender neutral? It feels a little masc to me.
Hey, by the way, I now work in a place where everybody wasnāt brutally humiliated for saying āguysā on slack in 2016. In 2016 I worked somewhere where one of the teams decided the collective noun for themselves should be penguins. And they were very serious about it!
Back to the fraud. On Easter Monday I woke to six emails from a jewellery website in the US thanking me for my order and reminding me that āEverything is free, just pay for shippingā. I didnāt make an order but there are a handful of Alice Bartletts who think they have my email address. The jewellery, I will say, was pretty hideous. Interesting I thought, I wonder how that works then. So I went and had a look at the website. Sure enough. Everything is free. And look - itās because this sweet little old lady is closing her business!
I guess the scam is that the items never arrive so youāve paid for the shipping only? Or is it that the items do arrive but they are worth so much less than the shipping that there is still a profit? Iāve seen these posts before (usually about some old grampa selling his hand made knife business, because this is what the algo thinks I am interested in, and itās not wrong!). But because Iāve never fallen for said scam, I have no idea what happens when you do.
On Tuesday I got a āyour items have shipped!ā email where the sender is in China.
Checking on Saturday, the items have made it to Virginia (where Alice Bartlett prime lives).
I will keep you posted.
Last week I installed a physical tracker to help the engineering team see and celebrate the progress they were making migrating their applications from the Data Centres into Google Cloud Platform. The tracker is a 2m piece of transparent bendy pipe and 48 brightly coloured ping pong balls. When you migrate your application, you get to write the app name on the ping-pong ball and put it in the tube. When the tube is full, thatās all of the applications migrated. I also made some stickers that say things like āI was very brave for my Cloud Migrationā.
I was a bit nervous about this foray into silly business because Iām so bloody new and I do think itās important to pair this kind of frivolity with a deep level of competence or else people think youāre simply a sort of facile clowning idiot. Have I managed to earn the trust of the team that alongside pastel ping-pong balls and hand painted clouds, I also am a credible and reliable person? Probably not in all quarters. But Iām working on the cloud migrationās timeline, not my own, so at 8am on Tuesday I took my glue gun and a bunch of zip ties into the office and got to work.
People love putting balls in tubes - thatās just simple human psychology.
āWhy didnāt we have this for the first wave of the cloud migration? :((((ā - Because I didnāt work here when you started that my dude.
On Thursday I had a beer in the Cittie of Yorke with Alex. How amazing is it, honestly, to be able to move through jobs and retain friends who you can work with again and again. Alex and I met when we were the only two CompSci students at the University of York using Twitter back in 2007. Then we worked together at GDS, and then the FT, and I seriously hope we will manage to orchestrate further opportunities to be colleagues in the future.
[Misadventure into book binding] I didnāt explain how I had made my first trial book for 2018-2019 weaknotes but it worked as follows:
Create a print stylesheet that lies the pages out like itās a book - display:none the sidebars and whatever.
Go through every week of that first year (manually - lol) and āp each page to a PDF.
Use some PDF software to collate those pages into a single PDF
Send it to Doczoo to print
[Misadventure into book binding] When that book showed up, it was fine. Exactly as advertised. But I felt like the text was a bit small, and it didnāt have page numbers, and iād left some horizontal lines in under the titles, but when two titles were next to each other on opposite pages, it showed that they were not perfectly aligned which wouldnāt have been noticeable had they not been there. I had also not expanded the hyperlinks which I thought might be useful at some point in the future to know what the link was actually pointing at, should you want to painstakingly type it in only to probably find the site has been taken offline.
[Misadventure into book binding] When the printed weaknotes arrived I quickly and roughly threw all of that into a book cover that I made following this instructables article. But the (perfect bound) binding method made the book hard to open and keep open, and I was worried I was going to break it, or deform it in such a way that it would not close again properly. The solution to this appears to be to sew the pages into folios and then bind those. IE the classic and proper way to bind a book.
[Misadventure into book binding] So now I have
Adjusted my CSS to address all of the issues with the first version
Gotten Claude to write me a script that builds 1 single HTML page per year of my weaknotes, including the year note at the end
āpād 6 (instead of 382) pages of blog posts
Used this extremely handy book lay out library https://momijizukamori.github.io/bookbinder-js/ to arrange all of those pages into a PDF that I can then print and arrange into folios and then sew together myself.
Sent the first of these to the printer to check that I actually can book bind them (they arrived back, it was fine), I decided I needed bigger margins.
Fixed the margins and sent everything to the printers for the final time. Because I am binding these myself the printing cost for everything is Ā£23.28
Anyway - enough about book binding. On friday evening after a long day of creating shareholder value, I sat down [to watch a video about book binding] and I realised that I couldnāt see properly through both eyes but it seemed to be on my right more than my left. āCool! I thought, an aura, Iām having a migraineā. Iāve had one of these before, when I was working at GDS, so 15 years ago, It was a lot more alarming then because I didnāt know what was happening. Last time I barfed in the GDS loos and went home, but the headache I was expecting never came. This time, again, aura but no headache. I went to bed very early, and woke up the next day feeling weird and brain foggy. For example I walked to the shop and paid with the wrong card and then on the way back I misjudged the speed of a van coming towards me as I was crossing. It was fine of course (iām not typing this from hospital) but just likeā¦ somethingās going on up here.
]]>Week 396: When the seagulls follow the trawler2026-04-05T00:00:00+00:002026-04-05T00:00:00+00:00https://alicebartlett.co.uk/blog/weaknotes-396
Lachie has been wearing the jumper that I knitted. It looks great on him. Per my plan I now get to hang out with a handsome guy in good knitwear. The dream. Unfortunately he canāt tell when heās got it on inside out so Iām going to have to put a label in it for him.
āWhen the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the seaā - Eric Cantona. E asked me for a famous quote this week and that was the first one I could think of.
On Saturday we went to the top three things in nearby Newhaven: Newhaven Fort, Mamoosh, and the coastguard station.
If you go to the coastguard station and knock at the door they will give you a tour. Two nice men called Colin and Les showed us round the tower and talked us through their radios and let the kids look through their very powerful binoculars.
I have lovingly tipped my kombucha into the compost as it went mouldy. Internet reckons it wasnāt warm enough.
On Thursday night I went for a mezze platter and 1.5 beers with my 2x work best friend Edds. Canāt beat a work bestie.
Sometimes youāre on top of things, and sometimes they are on top of you.
Friday night Lachie spent the night being violently sick. Seems like food poisoning, only we both ate the same thing all day, so hard to see why Iām fine. [Because my immune system is so tonks perhaps? All that kombucha maybe?]
My first brew of kombucha is done, bottled and ready to carbonate. Lachie says it smells of vinegar and he does not like it. All the more booch for me baby! And every person that comes to my house. Youāre all going to be forced to try it.
Went to Ye Olde Mitre on Weds with a former colleague and it was very theraputic. Lots of deep laughs. Some very good advice which I executed the next day. Wednesday night was the night the temperature plummeted so we were shivering like frail little bird ladies by the end. Ye Olde Mitre is a funky little place isnāt it?
Iāve been collecting envelope privacy patterns for the last 5 years. Rarely find a new one these days but if youāre sat on any ancient envelopes, we here at alicebartlett.co.uk would love to take them off your hands! What is my plan for these many many pieces of patterned paper? your guess is as good as mine.
Last week I marbled a load of paper. One of the traditional uses for marbled paper is book binding. Separately Iāve been thinking about how to handle these (now eight) years of weaknotes, maybe take them off of the internet and put them somewhere else?
Anyway, these two ideas bumped into each other (to quote Matt Webb) and so now I think Iām going to print and then book bind my weaknotes. Iāve sent the first year to a printers for a trial (it cost me Ā£13.43), and if it doesnāt suck then Iāll print them all.
āThese people have not consented to be bit-players in my self indulgent psychodramaā - Stuart Lee talking about why he doesnāt talk about his family on stage/during press, but also a good thing to consider when writing weeknotes - although I will admit Stuart Lee has a slightly larger following than alicebartlett.co.uk.
I am still feeling a bit under the weather from the virus I caught 2 weeks ago. Sleeping a lot, continual sinus pressure, phlegm. Lachie was away in Switzerland this week so every night after the kids went to sleep at about 8:30 I took myself directly to bed too.
Todayās best drawing: Aristocrapts snake party. The snakes have top hats and monocles, and surround a multi-tiered birthday cake.
The good thing about this blog is that, OK yeah I did use some Cursor to create a sidebar, for science, the body text is always gonna be 100% meat-made. Is it going to be well written? Useful? Interesting? Absolutely not, but at least you know these anodyne thoughts are coming to you by me painstakingly typing them out.
Someone sent me an introduction meeting invite āVia Microsoft Co-pilotā this week. Thatās one way to make a first impression I guess!
Canāt believe some people choose to spend their singular wild and precious life posting to LinkedIn.
Schlopp schlopp, beautiful schlopp, beautiful schlopp with a cherry on top.
This weekend is going to be a 10/10.
Iāve spent the last month making the space under the window in out bedroom into a reading nook. This has mainly involved making a padded foam seat for the bench and some cushions. Now E has discovered it and Iāll often find her lying fully flat on her back reading her Tom Gates book in the sun.
Iāve finished knitting Lachieās storm sweater. It took me 2 months to knit - I had predicted 3, so not bad!
Iāve started brewing kombucha after my brother-in-law gave me some a few weeks ago and I liked it.
I used cursor to give this blog a side-bar. It took about 20 minutes to get it how I liked which is definitely less time that it would have taken me to push the problem through my grey matter. I donāt know. Itās the future! Take it!
I was ill at the beginning of the week so I watched a whole 3ish hour Tony Blair documentary in one sitting. I guess this is what itās like to be middle aged.
I turned 39 this week and to my great pleasure I have a birthday twin in the office, so we bought a massive cake for everyone š
On Wednesday I went to Hackney Wick and enjoyed Russellās birthday. Phil and I got there early and had a timely pizza and a good chat before the wait for pizzas stretched to an hour and the room got a bit too noisy for a good chat.
I took Thursday off so I could avoid the brutal home by midnight back out again at 7 that the double office day requires. I also took Friday off because I am really self-indulgent.
[SLEB SPOTTING] Iāve seen a lot of famous people in the last few months. Louis Theroux in thr dark on a bike with no lights, Maisie Adam strolling through Soho, Helena Bonham Carter in our office building, and this weekend, Katie Price outside my kids swimming lesson.
Wee man has been playing a lot of Mariokart and he keeps unlocking new outfits for his characters through picking up āsmiley bagsā as the kids call them. One of the themes for outfits is āAristocratā, although he pronounces it āAristocraptā. He doesnāt know what an aristocrat is so he keeps telling me facts about them that donāt make any sense:
Aristocrapts like to have meetings(?)
Aristocrapts like to look at you very closely through one eye [because they have monocles]
Aristocrapts make me think of a word in my head and that word isā¦ āimportantā
]]>Week 392: Good naturedly2026-03-08T00:00:00+00:002026-03-08T00:00:00+00:00https://alicebartlett.co.uk/blog/weaknotes-392
I feel rancid. For about a month Iāve felt vaguely ill, like I might be about to be ill but then somehow never quite getting sick. That flirtation with sickness has now turned into an actual cold.
Last week I was on the train home from London after some drinks and a guy behind me offered me some crisps and they were Squares. And I said āno thanksā and he said āwhat? you donāt like squares?ā and I said āno I think itās undignified when grown-ups eat childrenās foods. I made fun of my colleague today for eating Squares actuallyā and he said āwell hold on a sec, sounds like you were yucking on his yum. You canāt yuck on someoneās yumā.
The next day I apologised to my colleague for yucking on his yum, and told him in the future he can enjoy his yums without me yucking on them. And now every time I see him at lunch eating his tesco meal-deal I ask him if he is enjoying his yums and he tells me (in one way or another) to leave him alone.
The square-eating-lads-on-the-train went on to good naturedly share with me their worst opinions (mostly about obesity), and I was left trying to recall what terrible opinions I held in my 20s.
The mugs at Rightmove all say āIām a proper-tea expertā which is quite a good pun.
The frogs have spawned. Iām disappointed to have not caught the frog-fest on camera, as I did last year, but never mind, at least there has not been a repeat of 2023ās bucket of dead frogs situation. Though I note that happened a week later in the year. So, plenty of time for a froggy massacre.
Whenever my kids say ācan you put my socks on?ā without fail I say āI donāt think theyāll fit meā. They absolutely hate it!!!!
Did you know that the petite knit woman has 5 children. And the worldās most successful indie knitting pattern business.
Had a bunch of rellys down to either spectate or participate in the Brighton Half Marathon this weekend. It meant I was able to get out in the garden and hack away at the many Firethorn bushes that dominate the garden and block out the light for the plants Iām trying to grow. I completely despise this plant. No common garden plant should be this spiky or grow this fast.
Wee man told me a good joke the other day:
What did Jupiter say to Neptune? āGet any closer and Iāll kick you in the bum!!!ā
(I think the punchline is probably meant to be āGet any closer and Iāll kick Uranus!ā?)
E came home from school and told me she had been annoying the boy she sits next to in class by saying āā¦ as only a true poet could sayā after everything he said. I love it when the shy guys find their inner troll.
She got this phrase from a book called āChildrenās Miscellany - Useless information thatās essential to knowā. It was under a section called something like āHow to annoy peopleā which also included āstare at someoneās knees for a long time, and then quietly say āCheese knees, hmm, interestingāā which has become a family favourite.
What is a Spring Boot. š·š„¾
How does the python interpret the egg. Fifteen years since Joe bravely asked the question and we are still no closer to the answers we deserve.
I went to see Wuthering Heights this week at the cinema with Kirsty and Kyle. Being an artless dummy who knows nothing, I have not read wuthering heights, and so I wasnāt burdened with opinions about what it should be like. I thought it was good, if a bit silly, and I could have done without all of the close-ups and loud sounds of slimy things.
Would absolutely love for it to stop raining now tbqh. No worries if not! thx!
