This year I have learned…
The joy of an electric bike…
I’m fairly sure that my partner thought that getting an electric bike was a mid-life crisis. She might well be right, but I occasionally think about the neighbour in the house opposite who is rebuilding a 1980s Porsche and think “No, that’s a mid-life crisis”.
Anyway, 1,100 miles later (that’s London to Madrid, by the way) and I’m loving it. Sure, if it’s raining I don’t do the 30-mile round trip into the office, but otherwise it’s not much different to the time it takes to commute to work by public transport, but without the train. Or the bus.
The cycle network in London is really well developed and almost all of my journey is on either separated sections of cycle path, shared pavements or quiet roads. And whilst my journey is electrically assisted, my watch tells me that I’m using about 500 calories each way.
The power of having coffee…
At the end of 2022 I started the experiment in being intentionally unintentional. 134 coffee conversations later, and it’s been a wonderful new part of my usual working practice.
My last coffee companion of the year asked me what I had learned from the experience. At an individual conversation level, loads. At a macro level how important it is to find ways to make time to have conversations without an agenda, and how strong the emotional pull of the Protestant Work Ethic still is in making such time so difficult to justify for so many.
Going for coffee is real work in a way that jockeying spreadsheets really isn’t.
To give up Twitter…
Sparky Car Man broke it. At first, I was in denial. And then it started to just not be very useful or engaging. Conversations dried up. The ads got weirder and more prolific. The direct messages stopped.
And so I just don’t really use it any more. Some of the conversations have moved elsewhere – LinkedIn or WhatsApp or Signal groups. Some of the conversations have stopped. Coffee Rorschach is no more.
I miss it, but not enough to invest in one of the many Twitter clones. It’s time for new things not tribute acts.
To explore AI…
When I got my head around the idea that generative AI is like a drum machine recently I suddenly started to get excited. It’s like a drum machine in the way I’ve used drum machines since my youth. A machine for creativity.
No doubt all the hype in business will be about automation, but harnessing these new tools as creative tools is exhilarating.
To settle into my role…
I’m no longer the new boy at Equal Experts. But from early on it felt like I had found my tribe and this year has further bolstered that feeling.
We’re not perfect by any stretch. But we have the humility to know that and constantly ask questions about how we might do things better. It’s the most adult place I’ve ever worked. And I’m thoroughly enjoying myself.
To find new interfaces…
I’ve never really got on with the piano keyboard, but it’s the QWERTY of music. I’ve never really got on with it because I learned it late, and my hands were trained to move in unison.
This year with a couple of new devices I have pretty much stopped using a piano-style keyboard in the music I make. The first device is an EMEO saxophone. It’s the body of a saxophone, and its complex mechanical mechanism, but with an Arduino stuffed inside and a USB C connector in its base. It is so much like playing the real thing as to be uncanny. But I can make it play any noise my computer can create. It’s wonderful.
The second device is a throwback to my 20s when the centre of my music-making world was an Akai MPC-2000, a big-buttoned sampling device that was designed by the Godfather of Drum Machines, Roger Linn. I worked out the workflow and it made sense to me.
The MPC Studio is a box with buttons that plugs into a PC and recreates the old MPC experience in a very modern way. Again, it can play any noise my computer can make, and again it is wonderful.
The joy of making things
So I got the PlayCards out this year, after many years of research and planning. That was a huge sense of achievement.
The next project is well underway…
To make some changes…
This is for next year. The podcast, the thing that I’m probably most proud of in recent years, is going to change a bit. For the better. More on that in 2024.
That’s it for the year. Enjoy the break if you’re getting one!
The year in photos:
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