Take the free ride

Alright look. There are a lot of exciting new products out there which are essentially vibe-coded middleware for your other tools. Design, configure, deploy your workflows in natural language. Things like that. I’m sure they are great!

Despite the fact that I hate AI you’d be completely mad if you owned a software business and didn’t make use of the huge capability Claude does offer for virtually free. I’ve always got a couple of terminals open with Claude Code doing tasks for me.

On the other hand

Does every dog bark?

Not everyone loves this piece! My feeling is that this page of text is not exactly subtle use of imagery and makes it excessively clear there’s no literal cat or real sandwich and it’s about the way that information asymmetry is used to embed power imbalances in society. It’s okay to have feelings and sometimes those feelings might be uncomfortable.

Don’t ask me what I think about your pet. I am not interested. “Isn’t she a beautiful girl?” you say. I don’t know. You obviously feel that way. Do I have to agree with you?

The locals.

It’s not that I don’t like animals. We’re fortunate to live in an area that has lots of wildlife around the place. There’s deer, there’s various birds, I saw a hedgehog last night. What all of these things do when your dog comes crashing through is they scurry off and hide, so we don’t get to see them. Just see an endless string of identical Old English Sheepdogs or whatever the fashionable pet is.

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I keep myself to myself. Honestly the lockdown in 2020 was the time of my life.

Staring at your feet

Do you ever feel like the news cycle is sapping your sense of proportion? I heard a bloke walking around saying “Has anyone caught the news? Did they open the strait?” We were in a campsite in Kent, not helming a Kuwaiti tanker. Stare hard enough into the distance and you trip over your own feet.

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Getting older is what I hate. I don’t hate aging, my life is better every day than ever before. What I hate is mostly just the digits incrementing. The bullshit around it, messages from people just because it popped up in their calendar. Probably mostly it’s because I don’t have good relationships with my family.

I mention it because there was one such occasion which I’m still reeling from. It was my birthday and as is tradition my family had found a way to upset me. I don’t remember the details. It doesn’t matter now, because I took the right decision and cut that cancer right out.

Putting up walls, a tried and tested method.

Whatever it was, I put something vague and grouchy on the internet.

You did not get hired (but it is not your fault)

If you’re fed up of your job hunt, this is for you.

It’s tough out there. I think it’s mandatory to start any scribble about the job market with “it’s tough out there” but reading it a dozen times doesn’t make it less important to remember.

Some of my favourite CX sector writers have put out great stuff in this direction recently and so I would urge you to read Betts and Steph Lundberg for some great perspectives.

Job hunting is just work, work, work!

There are two ways this sort of writing goes from here. One option is the “don’t beat yourself up, keep going” type sentiment. The other is the “here’s how you hack it” where someone declares they have found the secret and that secret is some automated scattergun approach.

Here’s a third way.

Ferrari had three chances to win in Melbourne and took none of them

A couple of weeks ago I was in Maranello. As a kid I’d wanted to go and see the Ferrari factory but when my stepdad and I made the trip it turned out everything was closed for a public holiday. Life’s too short for unfinished business so on a recent Italian road trip I put that right with a visit to the Scuderia museum.

The museum itself is… fine. It’s nice to see the trophies, remember some of those races, see some properly great cars. But mostly it’s trying to put their recent stuff into the context of their historical greatness. There’s no universe in which a Purosangue deserves to be in a museum alongside Lauda trophies, Schumacher’s cars, or a 250 that won the Mille Miglia. I had a go at redesigning their new car a while back and offered my services but they haven’t called yet.

Maranello.

The real attraction in Maranello is Ristorante Montana. The walls are covered in amazing stuff and the pasta is great. We had been at the museum and then peeked over the wall into the Fiorano test circuit where a track car was doing some testing laps.

Fiorano.

Also spotted a heavily camouflaged road car on the streets, what I expect will end up being the run-out final edition of the current berlinetta model. And a camouflaged electric car! They’ve just announced the Lucce with the Jony Ive interior but no exterior shots yet, so this was a treat.

Oh, and the Ferrari boss himself, Fred Vasseur, was having lunch at Montana too.

If I’d had the chance I might have asked him about his strategy department. If you watched the race, you saw them just thrown away a win at the Australian Grand Prix. The numbers prove it!

Yes, I have been rollerblading a lot

now I’m going to talk about it

Rollerblading is a polarising thing to do. I can’t think of many other hobbies which draw so much comment from passers-by. If you like to keep a low profile, if you like to avoid talking to strangers, don’t do rollerblading.

By the sea.

I used to love rolling around as a kid. It was interrupted by injuries

2025 is over

wow that was a time wasn’t it

So yes today is the LAST DAY OF THE YEAR and so here are some thoughts which I have had on various topics. Do you agree? Do you disagree? That’s okay!

Top straight white guy jobs in '25

or How to unleash that secret talent you’re sure you have somewhere, big guy

Doing things is hard. Making new things requires understanding existing things. Skills take time to develop, tools need to be mastered, creativity requires imagination. Who can be arsed? Certainly not the straight white guys of the internet!

Here are some things they can fall upwards into, despite everything about them.

If it saves just one life

There’s talk about death and some might say I am insensitive here and if you don’t fancy that then please read something which will make you happy

I’ve heard this phrase come up a few times recently, I think mostly on Radio 4.

If it saves just one life, isn’t it worth doing?

For some reason the presenter didn’t dare give the correct answer to this question:

Releasing music for drecks

some decisions and why I made them

We have made a new album. Listen on Bandcamp, Tidal, Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Music.

The Fighting Mongooses — Instrumental Driving Music for Drecks.

We’ve pretty much used all the toys on this one.

Enjoy the interval

having a break from big dumb power chords

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut. We can all get happy staying in our comfort zones. I’ve been struggling to write music lately just because I haven’t been trying to do anything beyond the basics.

Criticise this!

or perhaps Learn to Shut Up

Everyone fancies themself as a critic. Everyone who can’t do a thing but reckons if they did do it then it would be better than you could do it. Music, film-making, art, whatever.

Art. Load of old rubbish.

It’s the premise of half the internet now. Imdb or Yelp or Glassdoor or wherever you go. What do you think? Feel important, share your feelings.

Rethinking product pricing.

or Why traditional SaaS pricing models fail and what I’m going to do about it

Selling stuff is super hard. You need people to take a punt on what you’ve made, usually by lowering the sense of risk for them. You need their feedback to improve your design and also to advocate for your item.

But then you need to make some actual cash so you hike the prices and don’t worry about letting your early advocates churn because new customers will make up for it. It’s rough

Meanwhile, in ancient Rome

We went to Pompeii and it was a lot.

Pompeii and Vesuvius

My partner and I are both reformed history geeks. We’re not so occupied with the past these days but I think either of us would have said that we were pretty knowledgable on Pompeii for people who hadn’t been there in person. We’d know to look in the hortus

In Bloom (or maybe Come As You Are)

I am not much of a gardener. Sometimes I will get out there and do some hacking and chopping and digging and pruning, but only for theraputic reasons. It feels nice to me when I can impress my will upon the hectic growth.

Nevertheless if I just left it to do what it wanted then the landlord and neighbours would be bothered by this. I feel like the garden and I have this unstable equilibrium where we gently push against each other until a reaction is provoked.

Where did the Nico logo design originate?

I put together a logo of my name soon after I chose my name itself. It looks like this:

This is my logo thing.

This is how I put it together.