The website of Alice Bartlett | Weaknotes

Week 397: Misadventures in book binding

2026-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

This week Lachie has taken the kids away for the easter hols. I’ve 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 feel’s a little masc to me.
Hey, by the way, I now work in a place where everybody wasn’t brutally humiliated for saying “guys” 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 “Everything is free, just pay for shipping”. I didn’t 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 - it’s because this sweet little old lady is closing her business!
I guess the scam is that the items never arrive so you’ve 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? I’ve 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 it’s not wrong!). But because I’ve never fallen for said scam, I have no idea what happens when you do.
On Tuesday I got a “your items have shipped!” 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, that’s all of the applications migrated. I also made some stickers that say things like “I was very brave for my Cloud Migration”.
I was a bit nervous about this foray into silly business because I’m so bloody new and I do think it’s important to pair this kind of frivolity with a deep level of competence or else people think you’re 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 I’m working on the cloud migration’s 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 - that’s just simple human psychology.
“Why didn’t we have this for the first wave of the cloud migration? :((((“ - Because I didn’t 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 didn’t explain how I had made my first trial book for 2018-2019 weaknotes but it worked as follows:
1. Create a print stylesheet that lies the pages out like it’s a book - display:none the sidebars and whatever.
2. Go through every week of that first year (manually - lol) and ⌘p each page to a PDF.
3. Use some PDF software to collate those pages into a single PDF
4. 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 didn’t have page numbers, and i’d 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 wouldn’t 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
- ⌘p’d 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 £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 couldn’t see properly through both eyes but it seemed to be on my right more than my left. “Cool! I thought, an aura, I’m having a migraine”. I’ve had one of these before, when I was working at GDS, so 15 years ago, It was a lot more alarming then because I didn’t 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 (i’m not typing this from hospital) but just like… something’s going on up here.

Week 396: When the seagulls follow the trawler

2026-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

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 can’t tell when he’s got it on inside out so I’m going to have to put a label in it for him.
“When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea” - 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 wasn’t warm enough.
On Thursday night I went for a mezze platter and 1.5 beers with my 2x work best friend Edds. Can’t beat a work bestie.

Week 395: Bird ladies

2026-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

Good day my beauties.
Sometimes you’re 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 I’m 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. You’re 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 isn’t it?
I’ve been collecting envelope privacy patterns for the last 5 years. Rarely find a new one these days but if you’re 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 I’ve 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 I’m going to print and then book bind my weaknotes. I’ve sent the first year to a printers for a trial (it cost me £13.43), and if it doesn’t suck then I’ll print them all.
“These people have not consented to be bit-players in my self indulgent psychodrama” - Stuart Lee talking about why he doesn’t 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.

Week 394: Beautiful schlopp

2026-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

Rise and shine.
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.
Today’s 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 “Via Microsoft Co-pilot” this week. That’s one way to make a first impression I guess!
Can’t 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.
- I’ve 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 I’ll often find her lying fully flat on her back reading her Tom Gates book in the sun.
- I’ve finished knitting Lachie’s storm sweater. It took me 2 months to knit - I had predicted 3, so not bad!
- I’ve started brewing kombucha after my brother-in-law gave me some a few weeks ago and I liked it.
- On Saturday the whole fam went for a bike ride into town and then along the sea front to a café for lunch. Cycling in the sunshine with the kids is absolutely the perfect way to spend time. Then I went on to a paper marbling class in Shoreham-by-sea, which was extremely relaxing, although I’d venture to say it would have been even more relaxing if the other people in the class hadn’t kept saying “oooh isn’t this relaxing” every 5 seconds.
- The peas and beetroots have germinated, today I will plant the tomatoes.

Week 393: Aristocrapts

2026-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

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 don’t know. It’s the future! Take it!
John Allsopp on AI and the paradigm shift.
Mark Ridley on a year of using agents
Matt Jones on clocks and AI
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 it’s 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 🐟
On Wednesday I went to Hackney Wick and enjoyed Russell’s 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] I’ve 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 “smiley bags” as the kids call them. One of the themes for outfits is “Aristocrat”, although he pronounces it “Aristocrapt”. He doesn’t know what an aristocrat is so he keeps telling me facts about them that don’t 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 is… “important”

Week 392: Good naturedly

2026-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

I feel rancid. For about a month I’ve 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 “no thanks” and he said “what? you don’t like squares?” and I said “no I think it’s undignified when grown-ups eat children’s foods. I made fun of my colleague today for eating Squares actually” and he said “well hold on a sec, sounds like you were yucking on his yum. You can’t yuck on someone’s yum”.
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.

Week 391: Proper tea

2026-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

So warm on Wednesday! 18 degrees! March is here!
The mugs at Rightmove all say “I’m a proper-tea expert” which is quite a good pun.
The frogs have spawned. I’m 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 2023’s 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 “can you put my socks on?” without fail I say “I don’t think they’ll fit me”. They absolutely hate it!!!!
Did you know that the petite knit woman has 5 children. And the world’s 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 I’m 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? “Get any closer and I’ll kick you in the bum!!!”

(I think the punchline is probably meant to be “Get any closer and I’ll kick Uranus!”?)

Week 390: 🌷🥾

2026-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Week 390.
E came home from school and told me she had been annoying the boy she sits next to in class by saying “… as only a true poet could say” after everything he said. I love it when the shy guys find their inner troll.
She got this phrase from a book called “Children’s Miscellany - Useless information that’s essential to know”. It was under a section called something like “How to annoy people” which also included “stare at someone’s knees for a long time, and then quietly say ‘Cheese knees, hmm, interesting’” which has become a family favourite.
What is a Spring Boot. 🌷🥾
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 wasn’t 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!

Week 389: Cool bean

2026-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Sometimes when I hug one of the kids I imagine a rip in time that connects every hug I’ve ever given them sequentially to every hug I will ever give them. And that hug is just in the middle of this long chain of hugs. The kids DO NOT find this interesting when I tell them about it. lol.
The winter olympics always remind me of the big one being born because she was just a few weeks old when they started so we watched a lot of them while gazing into the face of our strange new family member.
“Mam I never want to drink fizzy water because it feels like my mouth is being electroputed when I drink fizzy water”. I love the feeling of having my mouth electroputed, but it is not for everyone.
I don’t think I am a particularly spoilt baby but the way I feel about my new workplace not having a fizzy water tap…
“Mam, I’m a cool bean, E is a clever cookie, you’re a good egg, and daddy is a big cheese”. Personally, I think I am the big cheese but it’s nice to know Chaz simply views me as a good egg.
A poem about my children:

I’m not a toilet flusher, I’m a toilet flusher’s son
I’m not going to flush the toilet, I’ll just leave that to my mum,
I’m not a toilet flusher, I’m a toilet flusher’s daughter,
I’m not going to flush the toilet, I don’t want to waste the water

I do think there is a line of art for toilets in the above. Could go along with the other thing I often think about with is a little card that says “We don’t pee in your pool so please don’t swim in our toilet!”
Feeling a bit February this week. Fantasizing about being completely flat to the point of disappearing as I fall asleep.

Week 388: Future people

2026-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

I realised this week that in the future people won’t be writing code to make websites they’ll be managing agents to make websites and it was a very depressing realisation.
So, I downloaded cursor. I don’t do lot of coding in my free time, I have too much knitting to do. Knitting is the future of coding. Nobody knits because they want a quick or cheap jumper, they knit because they love the craft. This is the future of writing code by hand. You will do it because you find it satisfying but it will be neither the cheapest or quickest way to write software.
Anyway, I do have this silly little blog so I used cursor to do some advanced spell checking. The results were quite good. It found some very cringe spelling errors. It also introduced some very strange ones. Feel free to enjoy those here on Github. I’m sure I could have gotten it not to do these things and be more powerful and whatever. I’m not actually dunking on cursor here, it’s about as good as I expected and this is definitely not a very hard problem to solve and I’m sure it can do more.
Every morning this week Chaz has come into my room, and woken me up with the cheerful phrase “Good morning good old lady”
This week I went to a two day off-site. I can’t say much about it probably but it was very fun, in particular hanging out with one of the sales leads for the North of England, who couldn’t play one of the team building games because it required making facial expressions she couldn’t do because of all of her botox. I want to go on some sales calls with her. Absolute hun. Great craic.