You might think that being freed from the time pressures of work would give me plenty of free time to write my weeknotes, but no. I have a long list of things to do and I’ve been working my way through the list steadily, and so these are late as usual.

I spent the first couple of days of the week trying to tie off loose ends, ensuring that I wasn’t the only admin on anything, and writing up everything I could think of that people might need to know in the future. I even managed to get some programming done on Tuesday and implemented a small feature, which was a nice way to round off the job.

Wednesday was my last day working for the Department for Education and it was a good way to end it. We had an all-day workshop in London, and almost everyone I had worked with was there: some from London; others from Leeds, Manchester, and other further-off places. About half the team are moving on for a variety of reasons – contracts, budgets, new jobs, or, in my case, just because I want a break – so we did a kind of retrospective of the past twelve months.

It was a largely excellent group of people. I enjoyed working with them, even if I found the organisation itself difficult. The trouble with a big organisation is the lack of power to make changes and get things done, even when you know what is needed. The trouble with government specifically is all the above plus politics.

It was easy to build software, but very hard to deploy it, because they spent a lot of money with Microsoft and so all you get is “here’s Azure, it’s so locked down you will struggle to get anything done, there’s no help, good luck.” I got them to hire in someone to untangle that, but by the time I left they were still struggling with the security policies and the support ticket system where you scream into the void and wait for an echo.

There used to be an easier solution – the GOV.UK PaaS – but that was scrapped a few years ago. (Despite the claims in that post, I’ve heard it was decommissioned because of ideology. The Tory government felt that it interfered in the free market – you know, the one that brought such successes as water privatisation, railway privatisation, electricity privatisation, a complete lack of affordable and habitable accommodation, etc.)

I feel as if I’ve had enough of remote working. I would love to go back to working with people whose company I enjoy, in the same place. There’s plenty of the old world of work that I wouldn’t bring back, but there’s some baby left in that bathwater. Seeing people in person, having all those pointless, phatic, enjoyable chats while getting a cup of tea, going for a beer afterwards – working in an office wasn’t all bad, you know.

I acquired a new instrument on Thursday, when the man from FedEx turned up with a parcel from Japan, containing a taishōgoto (also known as a Nagoya harp). It all started when I saw a video of Ustad Noor Bakhsh playing a benju, wondered what it was, looked it up and saw that it was a variation on an early 20th century Japanese invention, and that they’re cheap and readily available.

A taishōgoto and its case on a bed, under terrible indoor lighting

My new taishōgoto and its accompanying vinyl case

£44 + VAT and a week later, and I had one at my door. It’s fairly simple to play, but I think a bit of fettling of the action could make it much easier. First, I need some new strings. In principle, I can just use guitar strings, but finding the best gauge is a bit tricky. The sets of strings sold for the purpose in Japan give no indication of the actual string properties, but I know the scale length (51 cm, around 3rd–4th fret on a guitar) and the pitch (G2, G3, and G4), so by comparison to standard guitar tuning I should be able to work something out.

I’d also like to fit a magnetic pickup, because something tells me it could be amazing through some effects. Some of them come with a pickup, but mine is purely acoustic. For now.

I’ve only done a small amount of noodling on it so far, but it’s inspired some new ideas.

This often feels like a profoundly unintellectual country, but there are occasional glimmers of light in the darkness, such as when a former footballer understands and explains the semiotics of flags better than anyone in the government or the mainstream media:

[N]o one put a Union Jack flag up in the last 15-20 years so why do you need to put one up now? Because quite clearly it’s sending a message to everybody that there is something you don’t like.

Links of the week:

  • Musica Secreta unearth and perform music written for and by women from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century.
  • keyd is a key remapping daemon for Linux that brings some of the features of custom keyboard firmware to the keyboard you already have.
  • The most insane sound design tool nobody’s heard of (is free). Video about SoundThread and Composers Desktop Project.
  • Composers Desktop Project is “a mature and wide-ranging suite of sound-manipulation programs” intended for musique concrète.
  • SoundThread is a graphical user interface for the powerful but hard to use Composers Desktop Project.
  • DHH Is Way Worse Than I Thought. “Personally, I don’t think the label matters. I’ve been calling these people ‘far right’ because it’s convenient and accurate, not because I’m invested in that particular term. Shit by any other name would smell as foul, and David and his friends are extremely pungent.”