• Met up with old friends I've not seen in a while. I love these kind of catch-ups. Everyone was so happy to see each other and eager to share news and laugh lots.
• Mostly been studying this week for a couple of interviews. Yep, still looking! I've been taking the time to think about how I've applied theoretical frameworks to work situations and reinforce my understanding. It's helping me to frame interview answers better.
• I watched Three Thousand Years of Longing. I really enjoyed it. And I've started watching an Australian comedy called Colin from Account. Recommend.
• I'm in the next Zoe phase. Previously I've tested my biology by doing a blood sugar challenge, eating muffins to measure my blood fat response, and had my gut microbiome analysed. I've just completed Reset Your Gut and Get To Know Your Scores phases. The app incrementally teaches you how to make the most of it and has micro-lessons everyday to build help build new habits. Now I'm on to Fundamental Foods phase, which is about becoming acquainted with foods that my body responds well too. Zoe scores each food, which is a combination of how a food affects my blood sugar response, blood fat response and how good the food is for my gut.
• K's brother came to visit. It's probably the last time we'll see him in a while. He'll be working in Bali for a year. Later K and her housemate made the best roast dinner!
• E went with friends to watch the new Mario film at the cinema.

• E spent a couple of days at Herne Hill velodrome learning track cycling. Good practice for his upcoming junior triathlon.
• Met up with an old colleague, taking in a few pubs on the River Thames between Rotherhithe and Bermondsey.
• I went to the most easterly point in England over Easter weekend, Lowestoft. We went via Framlingham Castle, where we met up with K's uncle and cousin's family.
• We did the Lowestoft Parkrun. E wasn't feeling up to it so we mostly walked it. The previous week's sporty holiday clubs had finally caught up with him.
• We hired a boat to explore Oulton Broad. It was perfect weather. So peaceful, except for the very loud engine.
• On our way home we went to a very foggy Southwold. There's a brilliant arcade full of homemade, quirky machines. Well worth a visit. The fog cleared up, played a quick game of chess in the fisherman's reading room (E beat me for the first time), then we drove to Aldeburgh and finally home.

• My previous employer overpaid me in the final month and now they want it back. After some investigation it turns out they didn't process my claim for the unused holiday. This should cancel things out. Not as easy as it sounds though. You'll know what I mean if you've ever had to deal with SSCL, a services company who provided HR, payroll, etc to many government agencies.

• Spent a 6 days in Pembrokeshire, dogsitting for K's parents. Ran my fastest parkrun to date at Haverfordwest, plus a few other slower runs around where we were staying. Went on a brilliant coastal walk. It starts from the house, takes about 20 minutes to get to a beach. This first section is excellent for a wide array of flora. There must have been about 30 different types of wild spring flowers. We ate great food, went to the pub a few times, half solved crosswords and watched TV including The Last Of Us.
• I was a volunteer on E's school trip visit to Hampton Court. There was lots of stopping, starting, counting children, waiting around, ushering. Unfortunately we didn't get to lose the kids in the maze.

MONDAY - Started off the morning strong with a 5k run. I went down a running science rabbit hole and learnt I probably should concentrate on increasing my aerobic capacity if I want to run without muscle burn. Aerobic capacity is the amount of oxygen you can distribute around your body and you use fat as a source of energy. The higher the better. I think, because I'm running an intensity level to get close to a 30 minute 5k, I quickly end up in an anaerobic zone, which means my muscles are demanding more oxygen than I can supply, lactic acid builds up and my muscles get more fatigued, and I'm running in pain and I'm not using carbohydrates as fuel. This video explains the science of it.

TUESDAY - As well as continuing on with job search, I've been working out my intensity zones for treadmill running. At the mo I think they are as follows but likely to be very inaccurate (I guess this is why people end up getting fancy watches with heart rate monitors in).

Most of running should be in zone 1. Overtime my aerobic capacity will increase so what is zone 2 above will become my zone 1 in a few months. There's this whole go slow to go fast theory in endurance running which Floris brings alive in his video.

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY So I drove son to school on the way to the gym and we could both smell burning. I also could hear an unhealthy sound from the front right wheel area. I put off going to mechanic until the afternoon so I could get the gym session in. I shouldn't have. On the way to mechanic the tyre blew - it was a very loud bang. I was 2 minutes from the mechanic. I phoned Luke up and he came and helped me change the tyre. Turned out the suspension spring had broken and was digging into the tyre. This must have happened a few weeks before as I could hear something was not quite right but kind of ignored it and hoped it'd go away.

FRIDAY I completed my first run trying to keep in zone 1 intensity. I needed to slow my pace from about 6.5 min per km to 7.17 min per km. Still my average heart rate was too fast. I hovered between zone 2 and 3 mostly. If I go any slower I'll be walking.

SATURDAY Trip to Newhaven Fort where my nephew was hanging out for his 8th birthday. My son's friend came along too and unfortunately was car sick. I almost cleaned the car in the morning - luckily enough I was too lazy to do so. That's now tomorrow's job.

SUNDAY Morning trip down to the local hardware shop for white vinegar and a scrubbing brush - £8.50. I walked past Savers, a Superdrug kind of shop and checked if they had the same items. They did - £2.20. Walked back and got a refund from hardware shop. Since I've not been working I've become more thrifty. I also reduced my gym bill from £65 to £36 - I really don't need access to all gyms in the UK, just my local one. Spent an hour cleaning the car - time will tell if I've got rid of the vomit smell. A couple of friends and their nearly 2 year old came round for a cuppa which gave me a break from cleaning. And I managed to cook a roast chicken dinner!

Over the last twenty years I have started many a blogging website. Here's the ones I can remember.

Short-lived university blogs

https://prjxml.blogspot.com/ - I think one of my projects in my masters involved exploiting the famed XMLHTTPRequest function in JavaScript, which led to a splurge of websites loading content without refreshing the page. I think I built software to analyse all of Bob Dylan's lyrics using Wordnet and put an Ajax front-end on it, which meant the page updated dynamically as the user typed by fetching content from a backed server. It seemed like magic back in 2005. I think all this blog did was let me record a bunch of links related to XMLHTTPRequest. Should have just used bookmarks but I guess I was fascinated by putting things online instead of opting for the simple way.

https://studenttakeaways.blogspot.com/ - One of the modules in my masters was called Enterprise and distributed systems. Basically it was a group project about business. My idea was about taking the takeaway restaurant sector online, hosting menus and other services that we take for granted these days. This blog was for members of the group to discuss ideas and post interesting links. My group received a pretty good mark for the plan and its presentation to a scary bunch of business gurus and we entered the plan into a business competition run by the universities in the north east. We made the final but had to drop out because people were either too busy with other coursework or were not fully committed to the idea.

https://sewwebproj.blogspot.com/ - Another uni project, this time about the Semantic Web.

Personal blogs

https://allsorts.blogspot.com/ - This lasted for 2 months in late 2003, 7 blog posts in total.

https://landofthelongwhitecloud.blogspot.com/ - I travelled for about 9 months in Australia and New Zealand. I arrived just before Christmas 2003 in Sydney and went all over Australia. In the last few months I was in New Zealand and blogged a bit of it. I wish I blogged the whole trip as I had some great adventures. I have lots of photos to remember it by.

https://salohcin.wordpress.com/ - Nicholas spelt backwards! A mixture of diary type blog posts covering my time in Durham and Edinburgh.

https://entrewhat.blogspot.com/ - a blog about starting a business in Edinburgh based on the idea of bringing takeaway businesses online (inspired by my business module during my masters). Our name was chewchew.co.uk, we didn't know what we were doing, we were a few years too early - Hungry House was on Dragon's Den a few years later after web and mobile web was a bit more prevalent. The nail in the coffin was when another company called ChewChew sent us a letter from their lawyer saying we were infringing their brand. We hired a patent lawyer and negotiated to sell the domain name and make a name change for £2,500 then called it a day.

https://stagdo.blogspot.com/ - I'd been on a couple of stag dos and thought there isn't enough content dedicated to stag dos. I can imagine my intention was to create lots of content, get eyeballs to the site and get rich from adverts. This blog lasted 2 posts!

https://rowlando.wordpress.com/ - personal blog between 2008 to 2011. Mainly pics.

MONDAY: Went to Gym, did calthnetics. Upgraded to Eleventy 2. Made spag bol.

TUESDAY: Ran 5k in Dulwich Park. Added h-feed, h-entry and h-card microformats to markup of posts to start on my journey towards the indieweb. Waiting to hear whether I am successful

WEDNESDAY: Bad news, I didn't get the job I had 3 interviews and a code test for. Later on, I achieved something - was part of the winning pub quiz team. We've won each of the 3 times we've turned up.

I bought a book called Unmasking Autism by Dr Devon Price, a music stand so the boy can practice the homework from the piano book he's working through.

THURSDAY: Another teacher strike day, another morning spent playing footie down the local rec.

FRIDAY: World Book Day. My son went in as Auggie from the book Wonder. Whilst I'm not working I've attending Parents Into Reading on Friday mornings which means I go into my son's classroom for 30 minutes and read with him and any other kids who are interested in the book he's reading.

SATURDAY: Went for a 5k walk around in Bletchingley with K and her godparents. Great walk despite bits of it being right next to the M23.

SUNDAY: Gym, roast at the pub with friends, picked up son from the 2nd birthday party of the weekend and watched the latest episode of The Apprentice to keep up my shouting at the TV weekly target.

Job hunting and interviewing can be so stressful—the anxiety and social pressures of that experience is often compounded even more for those that are neurodivergent. What advice would you give someone with ADHD that is job hunting, interviewing, etc?

ADHD Jesse

MONDAY: Inset Day which these days means assembling my 9 year old son and bunch of his mates and playing football in the rec. There's a purpose built 5-a-side pitch freely available with a gritty, hard surface, perfect for slicing your hands up when you fall.

TUESDAY: I did a bit of prep for a technical interview. I needed to draw a simple architectural diagram of application / system I was familiar with to use as a visual aid for a discussion. My last job was not in a delivery team, it was a mixture of strategic, leadership and managerial responsibilities from an engineering perspective. So digging into detail about any one of the 75 systems (at last count) is a bit of a memory game, plus scouring the Github repos, which gladly are open.

I ran about 4k

WEDNESDAY: Aforementioned technical interview went okay. From an interview perspective, I'm finding it's challenging to give examples of technical detail of projects because most of my work in the past 4 years was about building teams, strategy, growing engineering capability... I wasn't in the detail as much as I would have liked. My strategy with these types of interviews is to try my best and say when I don't know the detail.

In the afternoon I walked over to the library to find and read a random book. I read The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami. Turns out the tastier brains are the ones with more knowledge. Ask the old man.

THURSDAY: Gym session plus spent some time preparing for behavioural questions. I scanned the company's Glassdoor interview section for an idea of questions asked and wrote up some answers.

FRIDAY: I had the final interview. A good number of the questions I found on Glassdoor came up. I do wish they gave you interview questions ahead of time so you can give your best answers. I find this mirrors the a lot of works these days anyway, plus I need time to recall and take the mess in my brain and turn out a coherent structure. When I have been a hiring manager, I have experimented with this, giving out the questions 10 to 15 minutes before the interview on piece of paper so the candidate has time to make notes, know how much time to dedicate to each question, etc... Having a question written down in front of you also allows you to re-read it as many times as you need to whilst answering to make sure you have given a full answer. This relies upon having a standard set of questions, which is current best practice. It obviously doesn't apply to more open-ended technical discussions.

Booked a hotel in Inverness as part of travel plans to Skye later this year for the wedding of the century. I'm one of the ten bridesmen and I have a speech to prepare.

Saturday: K and I ran Parkrun. It was K's first time. I managed my fastest time 32:01. Very pleased with my time given I started training for a 5k at the start of January. I thank Podrunner.

Dropped the boy off at rugby whilst we had a full-english to replenish our energy.

Sunday: K needed to use up a spa voucher she'd received for Christmas. So I joined her. Only right given my run the day before. Afterwards we walked across Hyde Park lit by the low sun.

What I'm listening to

🎧 Cracker Island by Gorillaz

🎧 Breaking the balls of history by Quasi

What has resonated with me

• https://devsnap.me/css-animation-examples - It's amazing what CSS is capable these days. I'm old enough to remember back to the days where most of my time was spent dealing with browser quirks and using bugs as features. CSS looks like a joy to use these days.
• https://subset.so/ a really interesting take on the spreadsheet. You use resizable blocks instead of worksheets and there's an infinite canvas.
• https://www.twitch.tv/atheneaiheroes - 24/7 AI generated livestream of celebrities answering questions posted by people in the chat.

My boss put me forward to participate in a course called Be The Leader You Can Be, which is run by the folks at https://www.futureengagedeliver.com/. Our trainer introduced us to the concept of FED:

• Future - where are you going?
• Engage - Are you taking people with you?
• Deliver - delivering through people and helping them grow

Growing your leadership covered three things:

• Notice your energy
• Conscious practice
• Actively build your support team

John shared a Peter Drucker quote:

Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.

The group discussed the quote and keywords and phrases that came up were authenticity, honesty, ernegy is contagious, channel your energy, consider where your energy is sourced, e.g. home, social, work. John broadened the definition of energy by describing 4 types of energy and to consider these energies when making change:

• physical
  • positive leaning: presence, action, pace, drive, getting things done
  • negative leaning: aggresive, chaotic, exhausting, distracting
• intellectual
  • positive leaning: expertise, innovation, analysis, logic, challenge
  • negative leaning: paralysis, patronising, slow, unclear
• emotional
  • positive leaning: empathy, caring, connection, vulnerability, passion
  • negative leaning: intrusive, indulgent, manipulative, emotive
• spiritual
  • positive leaning: values, belief, ambition, purpose, cause, meaning
  • negative leaning: dogmatic, idealistic, idealogical, irrational

A group member made the point that depending on the context, it doesn't hold true that the energies can be easily categorised into positive or negative. E.g. in a prison context, you do not want to show your vulnerable side to prisoners.

We also talked about how an energy can dominate an organisation to its detriment. Leadership is required to create a space to introduce other energies.

Then we switched to 3 modes and discussed the differences between the modes:

• leader mode
  • Focused on the "why"
  • Keywords: long-term, vision, hope, purpose, growing others, culture, relationships, inspiration, responsibility, context
• operator mode
  • Focused on the "what"
  • Keywords: executing, taking directions, task focused, actions, short-term, repetitive, tangible, autopilot
• manager mode
  • Focused on the "how"
  • Keywords: delegating, prioritising, planning, analysing, efficiency, directing, controlling, supervising

First jobs tend to be operator mode. Mine was a paper boy. I had well-bounded responsibility, knew exactly what I needed to do and when, performance was easy to measure.