You’re the smartest bear I know

Both my mother and partner still refer to having failed the 11 plus. Decades long impact to self esteem.

We live in an area with the 11 plus and I can’t see much alternative to paying for the tutoring.

A wonderful example of shitty service design and making things worse by adding technology.

If they’d just left the plastic devices there and had this as an additional service that would have been *fine*.

A data screen from Decathlons new frustrating way to measure foot size. After multiple steps you get a data screen that still doesn’t share the key bit of info, your shoe size.

Local Decathlon branch has taken away the half dozen plastic shoe sizing devices and replaced them with an over engineered foot scanning machine.

After multiple steps, including email capture 🤯, you get a data screen that doesn’t tell you the fucking shoe size of the person being measured.

Colonel Mustard is the OG.

It needs to survive 4 months and I break even on what I was paying g for the lease car!

Key fob doesn’t work 😅. Battery is soldered to a circuit board, breaking out the soldering iron tomorrow.

Even at 20 years old, this falls under ‘new fangled modern engines’ for me.

A silver Mini Cooper car on a driveway. It is a cabriolet, which is an excellent choice for about 30 days a year.

Handing back a lease car and rolled the dice on a £1000 20 year old mini as our second car for the school run and partners local commute. What could possible go wrong?

A short video, so you can all see what kind of person I am.

Printed letter on car windscreen. It reads: “What sort of person parks like this - creating a chicane in a narrow road?? What if a large van wanted to get up the road? Or, God forbid, an emergency vehicle? No 6.”

Excellent note left on my windscreen while visiting the parents for lunch. Bonus points for: printing, double question marks, imagined scenarios, invoking higher beings and the confidence to attribute to No. 6 ✍️.

Google AI summary of repeated sales approaches from the same person, noting my continued non response

Excellent AI summary of 90% of my inbox… and my approach to ‘five touch’ sales engagement.

Glad they know what’s going on! Put your energy into getting better ❤️‍🩹

Heating oil time series price chart showing move from 60p litre to 125p litre in last month

My heating oil is running low. 6 months worth usually costs me around £400. Now it’s going to be £800

9 year old just described my Fortnite play as ‘sweaty’. No higher form of praise.

The faster you run up the hills, the quicker you get to the top 👍

Massive shortage of sonographers in the news. My partner has been looking at qualifying… there are exactly 0 trainee or apprenticeship positions on NHS Jobs 🤷‍♂️.

A 9 year old boy in a black adidas tracksuit with white stripes, worn by the iconic nu metal band KoЯn. He has straggly long blond hair and is glaring through his fringe. He has the ‘fuck you’ attitude of a metal band

My boy has strong KoЯn tribute act vibes today. We shall be listening to Blind on the way to cricket practice 🏏 🤘

Keep us all posted.

I may be guilty of a 1+1 =3 with a simple coincidence. Nonetheless, open data does lead to innovation and iteration of stuff we use every day.

Screen shot of the Zoopla app showing filters for a house search that include a new floor area option

Open data innovation still a thing. Gov releases EPC data in machine readable format and Zoopla has a shiny new ‘search by floor area’. get-energy-performance-data.communities.gov.uk

The accompanying blog post shows that Dan and colleagues followed responsible disclosure process before publishing.

Bought this for my tee total mum at Christmas. It’s great, can make lots of drinks that are not sickly sweet like most AF stuff

For sure. In Buckinghamshire we live streamed show and tells on YouTube, published discovery outputs on GitHub etc.. open on as may things as we could

Permission from leadership (me for a few years) and then making it an expectation of peoples roles. I made it clear I expected people to work in the open.

Doing other things in the open, like an intranet intranet.essex.gov.uk was another way of signalling the change we wanted to see.

Aligns with user research my teams have done over the years. Having single accounts to manage often very different interactions just isn’t a thing people care that much about.

UK households that use heating oil face ‘frightening’ surge in bills over Iran war Chancellor raises prospect of help after prices almost treble since start of conflict

www.theguardian.com/money/2026/m... very much feeling this right now. I didn’t pay any attention to having an oil boiler when we moved. This is the second massive price shock we’ve had since moving to a rural area in 2018.

It's the morning of IWD, and I've had 92 nominations so far, from 9 countries.

I've replied to each of the 24 that have posted about IWD. eg: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Keeping an eye on the others. Keep the nominations coming. Keep an eye on the comments.

I am sure this will deliver excellent services for users.

Sure, but parkrun bought it… so it’s theirs… so it’s the official app.

Screenshot of the new official parkrun app, showing my details. Mostly as a humblebrag at my impressive collection of 262 parkruns at 105 locations and the pretty quick PB from 15 years ago when I wasn’t fat.

Excellent update on the official #parkrun app. Brings in all the excellent statistics and features from the unofficial 5km app they recently aquired.