This is the monthly round up of the things I’ve written. A quieter month of writing than July because it’s been the school summer holidays and it’s a wonderful dividend from not yet being back in full time work to continue being fully available for them.
As well as writing these posts I was also asked for my opinions by PublicTechnology.net following on from my blog post in July about the move of CDDO, GDS and i.AI.
Notes from our holidays
We actually have a dedicated, but very irregular, blog for writing about our travels. The summer began with the intention of retelling the story of last year’s excellent trip to Scandinavia. We got five days into it (covering Copenhagen and our first day in Gothenburg) before we ran out of steam. We’ll get there eventually.
The first piece of the month was a grumble about Historic Royal Palaces and the mismatch between a family’s experience in person compared to their experience online. I’ve updated the post to include some of the response I received from HRP’s Commercial Director. It hasn’t mollified me.
Part way through the month the restart of the football season meant a long drive up the M1 gave me the chance to reminisce about Numberplate Cricket. Though it’s quite likely it’s now less playable with every new registration from now until next March being a wicket-taking 74 plate.
And finally, also tapping into nostalgia, we had some fun with ChatGPT trying to place a catchphrase belonging to two Lancastrians who recently announced a reunion tour (no, not those brothers). Which led to me channeling Jane Austen and declaring that: “It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of a question must be in want of a chatbot. Yet, one must also remember, that a chatbot, no matter how clever, is not always in possession of the truth.”
- Historic Royal Palaces membership: A cautionary tale from our family’s visit
- The Return of Numberplate Cricket: A Road Trip Revival
- No Neeeeed to trust ChatGPT, especially for your nostalgia
Updating ULEZ (for the last time…for a while)
The only other thing I managed to publish last month was a further update to my series of posts measuring the number of cars actually impacted by ULEZ. This is probably going to be the last time I do this until a) the goalposts for ULEZ move or b) we hit the next milestone.
This month the total number of ULEZ non-compliant vehicles in London dropped below 300,000 for the first time. By way of a reminder, there were 552,198 of them when I first did this in March 2022.