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

Dopamine Part 2...in which I talk about how I tried to find out the root cause of my attention span issue... I'm now on Substack so please go here to read (and subscribe as well, there's plenty more to come) substack.com/home/post/p-...

Last year my company shipped Power Query Lint to help you clean up your PQ code. Now we're launching PQL.Assert, a testing framework for semantic models powered by DAX UDFs. We'll be rolling out videos over the next month, but you can dive in now: 🔗 www.pqlint.com/pql-assert

The coffee machine is dead. This is going to be a long week…

My wife got me a new mug as we broke one. She knows me so well.

It’s alive. Alive I tell you. Now to dig my CD collection out.

I feel seen

There’s 70cm of snow on the ground in Tromso that will be there for another couple of months and they seem to be getting on with life. We’ve had some snow in the UK and everything is at a standstill or cancelled.

Today is a DIY day off work catching up with lots of jobs that need doing round the house. A bunch of stuff has arrived this week so various things can be fixed or replaced. The cat has however parked herself on me and gone to sleep. So not entirely going to plan…

That cat was very insistent that going outside was not negotiable. But her enthusiasm waned pretty quickly when she actually experienced the snow.

I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be in charge but sometimes Molly is pretty determined that fusses are due regardless of whatever I have planned.

It’s got to be Thursday by now right? It’s been a long assed week.

I want to spend more of 2026 like this

It’s a long read but totally nails it.

It’s 5:45 and the moonlight is bright enough to wake me. That is a very clear sky…

This is so me

New Year’s resolutions? Not doing another year like 2025 again. It’s a low bar but I’m not entirely convinced it’s achievable..

Teams is resolutely setting my status as offline for some reason. Feels like it’s reflecting my inner status even though I’m supposed to be working.

This is a public safety announcement. I just received this email on Christmas Eve minus one. Do not under any circumstances buy your other half a router for Christmas. Not if you wish to live and eat solid foods over the holiday period. That is all.

We thank you for joining us at our conferences in 2025 either speaking or attending. Register for the next event Saturday 31 January 2026. Register: bit.ly/DT2026-Regis... Have a Happy Holiday. #MicrosoftFabric #AI #Copilot #AIAgent #MicrosoftPurview #DataToboggan #PowerBI #datacommunity

I have definitely entered the cantankerous old engineer phase of my career. Some would tell you I’ve been here most of a decade. But I am definitely starting to stare at tech that’s less than 5 years old and wonder what’s the point of this new fangled crap.

I have started to realise that listening to my podcast shows at 1.2x speed is one of the reasons I have even less patience in my teams meetings…

It’s taken us a week to get the tree up (everyone was ill in every way imaginable) but it’s finally done. Even the churlish teenager has helped and been grooving along to various Christmas songs while we decorated it.

the HL7 connector for Azure #LogicApps Standard and Hybrid (Public Preview) by Harold Campos techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-int...