I feel my wife has prepared more effectively for the holiday

Well that’s pretty grim. Reform are clearing the board in our local council elections. 40-50% across all the wards. Labour pretty much wiped out. This does not bode well for the next GE

In a popular courtyard in Kyiv. I saw this little figure. The Voices of Children Foundation and the 🇺🇦 band Hyphen Dash launched a charity initiative to draw attention to children affected by the war and raise funds for them. I’ll share a link to read more and support the initiative.

Back home from #sqlbits. There are other Microsoft data conferences but, after 20 years of attending, none of the others have had anything like the same impact on my life and my career. This year it was better than ever. As always, thanks to the organisers, helpers, speakers and sponsors!

Thank to everyone involved in #SQLBits2026 another amazing event.

I had entirely forgotten about the predatory seagulls that patrol Cardiff city centre. Saw two food related muggings and was only walking around for a couple of hours in the sunshine.

Is it the first sunny week of the year? It must be #SQLBits2026 week…

Mrs Fool made the boy a birthday cake. I can only lay claim to helping with the washing up on this one. There are even some curly wurly bits on it. Looking forward to a slice later with a cuppa

After Gartner®, FABCON & MVP Summit, one thing is clear: The conversation has shifted. From dashboards ➡️ to risk, trust & scale. Join our executive briefings on Apr 15 & Jun 3 👉 Register: pbis.cc/eventbrite

The best bit of the day is sitting listening to a podcast savouring my first mug of coffee with the cat collecting the cat fuss tax that is due. I will have to turn the laptop on shortly but not right now.

Just watching last nights episode of The Assembly and been reminded that now and again some TV is still worth watching.

“And if you think you’ve somehow escaped, then you probably haven’t thought this one through. We are living in a world increasingly of Trump’s making. And it isn’t going to end well.” Many a true word said in jest www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Here’s this week’s Better Offline. I talk to @paulkedrosky.com about the large amount of speculative data center land purchases, the brittle NVIDIA GPU economy, and the economic realities of AI. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b... Linktr.ee/betteroffline

Molly is exhausted from all the extra napping involved in her long weekend. #caturday

I am genuinely sorry I kept posting constantly about new services and features all the time… www.serverlesssql.com/attention-sp...

Not sure my attempts to kill the raspberry canes have succeeded. They were being relocated.

I may be working on a Sunday evening but I am doing it with a certain amount of style now the complicated stuff is done.

A reminder to all my friends across the UK that British Summertime starts tonight at 1am so don’t forget to put your clocks forward an hour and get your snow shovels ready!

Today’s efforts will be powered by obscene quantities of coffee, excessive amounts of Apollo 440 and a smattering of B52s

That feeling when the reminder for your first meeting (of many) pops up in the middle of a run of great songs on your playlist and you know you’re never gonna get back into the flow and the next few songs are going to be chopped up into short bursts or possibly abandoned altogether. 😕

Documenting The Sentinel is really growing my collection of disassemblies at bbcelite.com Five projects: Elite, Aviator, Revs, Lander, The Sentinel 1,038,891 words of source code commentary 507,016 words of deep dives All Shakespeare's plays? 835,997 words #retrocomputing #bbcmicro #c64 #8bit

My new vlog is live. Recorded in the hospital, so not the usual camera and sound quality. But as long as I am able to create and share content, I will! sqlserverfast.com/blog/hugo/20...

Oh there are some people at work that are going to be in real trouble now…

Happy Friday! Today is probably a good day to patch your SQL Servers.

Yes, hello, is that God? Yeah, hi. I have a complaint. You gave me this brain that’s designed for finding berries and avoiding lions and now people are ‘just circling back’ to see if we can ‘move the needle’ on ‘key initiatives’? NONE of those things are berries.

My BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Iain M. Banks' The State of the Art can now be found and played here: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Waiting for my train home & a very sleek modern triplet of carriages pulls up. Is that for xxxxxx says the bloke next to me. The lass next to me sniggers “it can’t be cos it’s too posh”. 5 mins later 2 carriages at least 20 years older than the shiny ones pulls in. That’ll be our train then.

Well this is a grim read this morning. Your phone is not your friend. Entire generations have been scarred by unregulated social media. I do wonder what the internet will look like 20 years from now. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Having been away for four days Molly was definitely pleased to see me back. But I think there may be some residual separation anxiety as this is where she has parked herself after I went out to buy food today 😆

And now for cakes.

I’m definitely going to need a cake and a coffee by the time I get to the end of that.

I may have eaten too much carbonara. I need to sleep off all the carbs. I should be awake sometime on Friday. Hopefully in time to fly back

The view in the evenings is pretty good here too!

Ok. Naples isn’t winning any awards for being pretty, or clean, or having amazing architecture. But it does have some seriously good food and Pompei is just deliriously awesome.

So the quirky hotel is cringingly hip with a hint of seedy sex hotel. But the view this morning is pretty good.

Not at work. But not flying for another 7 hours. Wife is telling me I’m wandering around looking lost…

If this “resonates” with you, you absolutely have to seek professional help for your mental health. If you can’t see how this is a cult and destroying your ability to function as a human being, at least do it for your family.

This evening we’re playing who had the passports last?

NEW POST Fragments: the future of senior developers, junior developers, more on cognitive debt, DevEx versus AgentEx, the role of IDEs, consequences of task switching in supervisory programming martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

I was born and raised in Gorton and Denton, and I absolutely guarantee you Reform won't put it first. They won't even put Britain first. They'll put Russia first. We LITERALLY jailed one of them for doing that.

If my followers have been inspired by the fierce resistance the Twin Cities has put up to ICE, you should make it a point to take a trip here (April through October 😬), enjoy the wonderful things MN has to offer and support our small businesses. It continues to be a really tough time for them.

Every single advert on YouTube is for some quackery or other. The internet feels like it has reached peak drivel.

And my coffee machine is back and in full working order. Today has been a good day.

Edith Clarke, the first professional female electrical engineer in the US, was born #OTD in 1883. + Invented the Clarke calculator to solve electric power transmission problems faster + First woman to earn an MS in electrical engineering (EE) at MIT, 1919 + First woman EE professor, US #WomenInSTEM

Today’s output at work is brought to you thanks to a very loud playback of Jagged Little Pill and assorted other 90s anthems

Just Fancy That! Sam Altman on ads in ChatGPT. From the new Private Eye, out now.

This week's blog post: How I keep up with AI, and why you honestly shouldn’t www.sqlgene.com/2026/02/09/h...

So Frankenstein was pretty good.

Demanding an estimate guarantees the estimate will not be useful to the business and will always drive costs up. Software engineers all know that estimates are useless. 1/6