People Who Changed the World

Theme this week seemed to be returning to the analog. The joy of jigsaws, reading physical books, visiting physical places for work and experiencing the challenges of keeping physical infrastructure running.

Spent a good portion of the Christmas break on the dining table working through a 1000-piece jigsaw: People Who Changed the World from Original Jigsaw. It’s a dense piece of work featuring everyone from Turing to Curie a nice analog change of pace from the usual screen-based watching or games. Do need to sort out better lighting though for this kind of work! Alongside the puzzle, I’ve been reading AppleWriter II by Tamsin Shopsin. I can’t remember who / what led me to this book but I really enjoyed the nostalgia of reading about the inner working of Tekserve in the 90’s. Lovely book website as well.

laserwriter ii

The lido pool heating system has been struggling this week. It has resulted in a few “invigorating” swims, I am not very good when the temperature drops below 19. Goal for this year is to swim 150,000m so these cold days are making it harder to keep up with the 3km a week target!

Cold Swim

Back to work properly this week with a site visit to the London Stadium to scope out a potential new project with Andy. It’s a fascinating space from an infrastructure perspective and the control room on match day was absolutely packed. About 50 or so medics, police, security staff all watching screens from cameras around the stadium. While there, we managed to catch the first half of the West Ham v Nottingham Forest match, great view from Section 111, Row 6.

London Stadium

IMG_6626

Changing up room layout since we are at max room capacity this term. When you can’t scale vertically, you have to optimize the footprint. It’s a bit of physical Tetris to make sure there is still a clear path around the room.

Setting up lab to max out number of seats.

Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week: