Weeknotes 1461
And we're back.
- And we're back[1]. It's my birthday today, and the end of any even semi-plausible claim I have to even be in my mid-20s. A good time to start again.
- I'm Adam—as that link will inform you, a consultant[2], writer[3], musician[4], podcaster[5] and activist[6]—and this is (by my count) my eleventh personal blog in fourteen years—the third of its url[7] and the second of its name[8].
- It's a self-hosted Ghost instance[9], since that seems to be the best compromise between something that looks nice, something I want to use, and something that lets me easily send things as newsletters (which seems to be a lot of people's preferred method of word delivery these days).
- The blog, much like my podcast—currently on hiatus but coming back for series 5 when it's safe again!—is about, as I put it many years ago, (sometimes) dangerous ideas, amateur socio-political theorising, and whatever else moves me in the moment.
- My heart is with the things that are in-between. One of my favourite types of music (to play and listen to!) is ragtime, which sits somewhere between classical and jazz. I have a fascination with transdisciplinary fields like cybernetics. I work in analytics, which lies at the intersection of statistics, computer science and operations research. I live in Brighton[10], between Downs and sea.
- I also have a fondness for footnotes, parentheticals, exclamation marks and removing the things I create from the internet[11].
- Most of the posts will be about specific things, but an idea I got from the old BERG blog was to do little weekly updates about where things are for me. Like an outward-facing diary, almost.
- A lot of folk I've followed online for a while have been doing them and they're some of my favourite things to read; little insights into the lives of people I don't know.
- At the beginning of this month, I left my job of seven years to start my own thing. I've currently got two contracts for a day a week each, leaving me with way more time than I had before. That's freed up time for a lot of things, and one of those things will be writing this!
- Please subscribe via RSS or email (which will be a weekly digest, as sending those out costs money). Tell your friends, if you think they'd be interested. I don't use social media any more, but I do post links semi-often on Pinboard. If you want to get in touch, please email me at this address, with the obviously fake part removed!
- Over and out.
I feel like I begin every new blog with that, in the same way that I end almost every blog with a post titled "It's the end, but the moment has been prepared for". ↩︎
in the field of analytics ↩︎
chiefly for myself, but occasionally for others ↩︎
pianist, accordionist, singer, occasionally tuba-ist ↩︎
several over the years but currently Memetic Hazard with my friend Josef ↩︎
chiefly for the Labour Party and Momentum but occasionally in other capacities ↩︎
The first two adamenglebright.coms (blogs #4 and #5) were Wordpress blogs; the first on Wordpress.com and the second on a woefully underpowered shared server (cheapest tier of Dreamhost, I think?) which fell over and broke all the time. ↩︎
The first of this name was blog #10, and I was able to sustain for a few months in 2020 before Lockdown Overwhelmed Me. The name is a personal motto derived from a hymn, about the importance of struggling through adversity ↩︎
The second time I've used Ghost, the first being blog #7 way back in the mid-2010s, when it was an open-source Medium rather than an open-source Substack, and its name made more sense. ↩︎
My favourite place in the world :) ↩︎
Evidently! ↩︎