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By Tom Watson in weeknote —

Weeknote 49

A disaster of a week where I got ill.

Well that was a disaster

A pretty awful week really. Monday I felt a bit off, but I'd spent a few days away trail running in Girona, and had finished with a few beers Saturday night in the city. Useless with hangovers, so that's probably it right? Wrong.

Tuesday I spent all day, apart from the school run in bed. I watched a few hours of TV. I never do that. I did watch a bit of The Dark Wizard about Dean Potter (climbing). It's an interesting watch. Sure I'll be better by tomorrow....

Wednesday managed a bit of work, but took it easy. Was feel better and then worse in waves. Due to be facilitating two days on the LBF Resilience programme Thursday and Friday. Thought I could power through.

Thursday came. I had nothing. I could function, but I felt rubbish, and my mind, oh my mind was just not working. I think that one of the things I'm good* at is the ability to take lots of information, from various sources, read people and pull it all together in the moment, and do something useful, pulling on all my various bits of knowledge and approaches. I had none of that. I just couldn't. Thankfully to me, Liz was there to absolutely bail me out and take over. I'm so grateful. Thank you liz.

Friday I tried again. A bit better. Brain still not functioning. Liz bailed me out again.

It's sunday, I'm getting better. But still no where near 100%. I think I picked up something from the rivers I was swimming in. I might need to go to the doctors. But I no longer feel like death and do have some brain capacity.

*good is subjective - occasionally not terrible is more accurate.

What else apart from dying you ask?

I was very cheered up by The Data Place putting my "Pastry Index" in their newsletter as Data Viz of the month. It was a rather ridiculous and over the top bit of data fun while I was on holiday, and I'm glad people took it with humour and recognised the stupid lengths I went to.

I was also included in Public Digital newsletter, for a much less fun, but hopefully useful reason as they linked to my piece about the end of grant of applications. This is twice I've been in that newsletter which means they should probably give me a job right?

Today I felt well enough (and it was rainy enough) to spend a bit of time on some things I've been meaning to do since I got my new mac mini. I migrated this here blog and llmstxt.social away from digital ocean over to self hosting and deployed my own Etherpad instance. Small #TechFreedom wins.

Speaking of llmstxt.social - during one of my lucid waves on Wednesday I spoke to someone on a random chat. They were really interested in the tools I've been making, and thought llmstxt.social could be really useful for organisations they work with. They have a digital hub and would love to have tools like that available to groups. My response? "Cool, steal it! And if you need help stealing it, let me know!" - now obviously it's not stealing, it's open source, MIT license. But the point is, I want people to have these things, make use of them, help. So hopefully it will be helping more people soon!

Things I thought about

While I was reading Dougs post on "My Tech Disclaimer" I began thinking about updating mine again. But I also wondered not just about the big tech that I use, but also how I am(or am not) used by big (or small) tech. I advise a lot of organisations around lots of things to do with their tech. I am very clear with any client that I am not, nor have I ever been paid, or sponsored by a tech firm to promote their product. I've turned down on multiple occasions potential referral fees, ambassador programmes, partnerships. But I wondered how many organisations that give advice can actually say that? Shouldn't we have some form of transparency?

I mean, if you were an organisation working on climate change or the environment, wouldn't you expect to know if an advisor had taken sponsorship from BP? But tech seems to be taken much more lightly on this type of stuff.

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