LeadDev week. As is tradition, I left feeling so incredibly tired. You could pour me into a bucket and tip me into the bog. Just flush me, let me travel through the sewage system and hang out with the fat bergs.
I gave a workshop on Engineering Strategy again. Gave myself a little thrill by discovering that my timers were all out by one minute in the 10 minutes before I was due to go on stage. There were about 100 people in the workshop which is a good turn-out but also gives me a sort of vertigo.
Iāve put all my envelope privacy patterns over here at https://alicebartlett.co.uk/envelopes. In some ways it is tempting to try to categorise them but when I look at other peopleās attempts at these I feel very unmoved, so other than noting the origin of the post mark Iāll leave it at that.
My dad has given me an envelope from a letter he got in 1990 from the USSR to add to my collection. He refuses to let me call it āfan mailā but it is, factually, a letter, from a person expressing admiration for his work. So youāll just have to decide if that counts as fan mail.
Cool thing I learnt from the Netfix Kylie doc is that Nick Cave convinced her to stop messing about and get back to pop music. Very cool Nick.
Made a sculpture of E as a baby. Weāve got this photo of her 1 month old looking at us with such contempt. I havenāt quite captured it in clay but I will probably keep trying.
On Tuesday, kid free, we took a walk on the South Downs. We walked from Devilās Dyke to a youth hostel 4k away and had some dinner. I love youth hostels. So wholesome and they remind me of being a kid.
I took some basic bitch sunset photos.
Still dunno what a Fulking Enscarpment in, and I donāt want to know,
Identified a goldcrest in the garden with the help of the Merlin Bird App. Then as I was sat by the pond convening with the frogs and the newts it flew down, perched on an unfurled lily and washed its face in the water.
I also noticed we have some nesting blackbirds in theā¦ wall plantā¦ I should really learn the name of it. Anyway, very cool but you can look right into the nest if you grab a chair.
On Wednesday, as I was walking out of convent garden feeling so overwhelmed by all the commotion that I had to put on my noise cancelling headphones, a woman stopped me to tell me she liked my outfit (green jumper and green polo from MHL) and jeans I sewed myself. Because of the overwhelm I just put my hands on my head and said thank you several times in a row.
I was on my way to compĆØre Interesting again. It was a really good line up this year and Russell does an incredible job of warming up the audience to be ready to take an interest in wherever the speaker takes them.
For the weekend the Posso family cane to stay. On Saturday we went to the beach and had a picnic. Please enjoy my novel way to stop people being confused about what is in the sandwiches. That is edible pen. I had a swim in the rather frigid sea. Then we got everyone back for a BBQ. On Sunday we went to the park and then to two of the gardens that are open for the Artistās Open Houses - Catās Creep, which has an amazing bird house and a pond full of newts, and the Avant Garden, where we sat and made some sculptures with silk clay.
This week, we progressed the slow running drama of my youngestās toof.
Avid readers of alicebartlett.co.uk/blog will recall when he got his first tooth (very early), and then the rest came in, and then when they started to fall out in a weird order about a year ago. Well, 6 months of waiting for the thing that pushed out that top tooth to emerge, it turned out it was a āsupernumerary toothā - ie one that isnāt supposed to be there, or anywhere in his mouth.
This week he went down to the specialist NHS childrenās dentist (where all the dentists have those jazzy hats on) to have it removed.
The way they do this, is you get a nose mask that pushes NO2 into your nose, and you have to breathe only through your nose, with your mouth wide open so the dentist can get to work. For a laugh, why donāt you try opening your mouth as wide as possible and then breathing only through your nose. Not easy! Not easy for a five year old!
My guy has been practicing this a lot over the last few weeks. I kept catching him trying it. He mostly kept telling me he couldnāt do it and would never be able to do it (although I could see he could sometimes do it).
Once youāve got some sweet sweet NO2 fuzzing your reality, they put some numbing cream on a spot in your mouth and then inject you with a local anaesthetic. Then they basically go at you with a pair of pliers.
When I asked the dentistā¦ do kids actually let you do this? She said it worked about 70% of the time, and the other 30% they had to reconvene at a later date to do the removal under general. But the wait time for that is 5 months longer. āIāll take those odds!ā I thought.
So on Monday, equipped with the promise of a Shy Guy plushie and a day off school if he went through with it, my guy went down to the dentist with his dad. Both of them were very brave, I think Lachie was more anxious than Chaz. Chaz, apparently, just seemed very calm and focussed on the task at hand and determined to get this done. Not a single flap from him.
The tooth they pulled out was mega. Strangle little stump then a huge long pointy root. The tooth fairy has it now, in her kingdom of teeth.
The presence of this super numerary tooth has, according to the x-ray, messed up his adult teeth a bit so this is probably not the end of the special dentist trips.
I have call screening very enabled on my phone. I get so many spam calls about software and networking dinners about SASS and I DO NOT WANT THEM. Anyway, this week one got through and let me tell you how.
I am, er, making friends, with the man I sit next to at work. Iāve been insisting on borrowing his charging cable because he always has one and I donāt bring mine in. He pretends he hates sharing it. Last week when I left the office I put a post it note on it that says āAlice and Sam shared charging cable <3ā. I got in this week and there was a new post-it that said āFuck right off!!ā and he had escalated the situation by raising a help desk ticket in my name requesting a charging cable for me.
Also, I need to be able to use the work printer because on the 2nd of June I am doing a workshop about creating an engineering strategy at LeadDevās Director+ track and I want to do a print-test of the worksheet before I sent them off. So that is help-desk ticket number two. I should simply be able to print, but it doesnāt work for me.
So then I got a call screened, it was Jim calling about some tickets. āBrilliant!ā I thought - the helpdesk man is calling me to fix my problems. I called him back. āAre you in soho?ā I asked immediately. āEr no, Iām not, this is-ā I cut him off āMilton Keynes? Can you help me print?ā. This man - Jim - is now very confused. āYouā¦ work for Rightmoveā¦? Youāre helping me with the helpdesk ticketsā¦?ā. Oh man. No this is just some random man who wants me to come to a round-table dinner to talk about Customer Experience with other nerds.
Bad news: still canāt print. Good news: Still legitimately allowed to share Samās cable. Follow-up: I did not take the man up on his dinner offer.
The other type of sales call I get is people working at US based companies that provide technology to scrape property websites, apparently not realising that we are the data. People want to scrape us.
Iāve bound the first weaknotes book. There are many stages to binding a book but I am choosing to do each book in serial because each stage requires a lot of precision and focus, and each gluing stage requires 12h in a makeshift book press, of which I only have one. Anyway, here are some pics of the first book, fresh out of the press. Every aspect of this is somewhat wonky, but it will do!
]]>Week 400: THEY KISS YOUR FACE2026-05-03T00:00:00+00:002026-05-03T00:00:00+00:00https://alicebartlett.co.uk/blog/weaknotes-400
Finally made it to week 400!
Cast on a jumper for E, chosen by her, and with the intention of making a mini version for her cousin so they can be matching.
This week I went to some leadership training at work. It was good - covered āsituational leadershipā which I hadnāt come across before. As per usual, my unquenchable desire to be the teacherās pet came through despite my knowing that this is not a likeable quality.
The session was compered by a comedian who had some jokes about RM that got a laugh out of me at least, and he was accompanied by a woman on a keyboard who played music throughout the break-out sessions where we discussed various situations and applicable styles.
My book-binding project continues. I did a(nother) test print of week 100, but when it arrived it was (a) too many pages imo and (b) the font size was too big, making it look a bit too much like a kids book. Both of these problems do not require a test print to determine, I could have just had a little think and realised that without wasting my own time and money. However - thatās not really how I roll so. Even though the book is not quite right, I used it as an opportunity to practice some book binding techniques that I will need later.
Since last week was week 399, I decided to wait until week 400 was published before sending everything to the printers in one go. In the waiting week I found a load more minor grievances with how the books were laid out, all of which I think Iāve now fixed. At this stage I might as well do it properly.
I finished a pair of socks. 68 sts cast on, my fave cuff (picot). Used yarn from daughter of a shepherd which I find a bit too itchy for anything other than socks, but I am a massive baby about itchy fibres so ymmv. The green is some leftovers from from the first pair of socks I ever made.
I also managed to get my fizziest kombucha yet. And I bunged a load of grated ginger in there too, which made it even more delicious.
On Saturday we went to see the childrenās parade, which is where children from all of the schools in the local area parade through the town with giant sculptures about a book chosen by the school. It was very impressive to see what the schools had built and as always I enjoyed watching the kids from Christās Hospital in their utterly bonkers 460 year old school uniform. (Breeches! Mustard yellow woolen knee socks! A frock coat! A cravat!)
After the parade we went to the beach. I spotted an area with not many people in it and headed there but on arrival saw that that was because it was strewn in litter. C and I sat at the edge of the large litter patch while we waited for Lachie and E to get ice creams. While I waited I observed loads of people comment on the litter patch as they walked through it or around it. Eventually it occurred to me that I could get a bin liner from one of the beach front bars and actually do something about all the mess. So I drove my San Miguel Zero into the pebbles and headed to the Fortune oā War bar. When I got back to the beach with my bin liner and started picking up all of the rubbish loads of other people started to join in, and after about 10 minutes I had fully filled the (very large!) bin liner, so I went back for a second. After about 20 minutes the beach area was looking pretty good and I was able to relax.
Lachie said it was a āthing of beautyā watching everybody jump up and start putting litter in the bag. He was sat with our stuff eating an ice cream of course so could only observe.
On Saturday I spent a relaxing evening sorting my collection of envelope privacy patterns. I used a scalloped cutter to take a sample of each envelope and laid them out in a pleasing arrangement. Iāll probably frame them? And then when people come over Iāll be able to say āyou must come and see my collection of envelope privacy patterns through hereā¦ youāve hardly touched your home brewed kombucha?ā
]]>Week 399: Silly little things2026-04-26T00:00:00+00:002026-04-26T00:00:00+00:00https://alicebartlett.co.uk/blog/weaknotes-399
Week three hundred and ninety nine!
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.
