WeekNotes 2026-44

A quieter week, with a holiday at Disneyland Paris, a date night with Chris Ramsey and HF347 going out on Friday.

Disneyland Paris #

This was a quieter week, as we went on holiday to Disneyland Paris with friends and family, so all the updates have been around that.

It was a lovely time away, and I really enjoyed seeing the little ones (and the big ones) enjoy themselves. We also managed to hack the system with four rides in the final 40 minutes of the day, while everyone else was getting ready for the (mediocre) fireworks and lights display.

Date night with Chris Ramsey #

On Saturday night we went to see Chris Ramsey live at De Montfort Hall in Leicester. It was 26 years since our first kiss, so it was a date out.

He was very funny. He shared stories he can't share on Shagged Married Annoyed (one of our favourite podcasts), and I can't even share them here, for potential libel. Needless to say, he tapped a nerve with parenting privileged kids, Ofsted and a probable autism condition, with a hat tip to Rightmove and a deep love for his soul mate.

Here's a photo of that first kiss, with a little ChatGPT restoration from the original faded print.

House Finesse #

HF347 with Sarah Jae went out on Friday, a set made up entirely of tunes released this year. Crazy P's "Pawa" vocal dub sets the tone, Rocco Universal's "Space Chakra" and "Mutiny on the Sex Raft" get weird in the best way, and Purple Disco Machine's "Disco Cherry" lands right on time. It runs to 1h 2m. Sarah Jae is playing Fabric in London on 21 November for the Fump 15th anniversary.

On the site side, I added a Buffer posting script so social posts for each episode can be scheduled straight from Claude, and updated the Buffer channel IDs after a tidy-up of the connected channels on Saturday.

Listen to HF347 Join the VIP Club

PETALS #

A quiet week on the PETALS side. The marketing site got some mobile fixes: the cookie banner has no big gap above its buttons any more, and the mobile menu now opens from the right with a readable Get Started button. There was no Dev Time because of the holiday, just async chat on the #dev-team Slack channel.

On this site #

• Micro is now extended. It's my attempt to POSSE (publish on my own site, syndicate elsewhere) the micro thoughts I'd typically share on socials like Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky, and less so LinkedIn. It's all hooked up to a Claude skill, so I can quickly write a thought down in Claude and it's automatically added to sijobling.com/micro.
• Buffer automation. I've been playing around with Buffer automation directly in Claude across multiple accounts, using the API keys and Claude Code environments. It's working on House Finesse and on this site, and PETALS is still to do.
• More content with Dispatch. I'll look at getting more content into the site using Dispatch, now including YouTube content.

Read the micro posts

Exercise #

A much quieter week, with just four sessions logged: two short walks, a run and a swim.

Week-on-week compares 26 October to 1 November with 19 to 25 October. The Strava log's last entry is Friday 30 October (the sheet was last updated that morning), so anything on Saturday or Sunday isn't in yet and these numbers may be an undercount. Last week's total time includes a 30-minute elliptical session on the Tuesday, which adds time but no distance.

• Walking: a 0.7km evening walk on Monday and a 2.2km morning walk on Thursday.
• Running: a 3.8km morning run on Friday in about 25 minutes.
• Swimming: 750m on Friday morning, straight after the run.

Habits #

MapTap: five wins and two losses this week, against three wins, three losses and a draw the week before. The average dropped to 734 from 815, though, and Gary's was 742 (786 last week), so he edged the averages even though I won more days. Tuesday's 913 was the best score of the week, and Sunday's 555 and Monday's 592 were the worst. Thursday's 618 lost to Gary's 897, my heaviest defeat of the week.

Sudoku: seven days logged against six, averaging 3:39 against 3:47. Monday's 2:50 was the fastest and Wednesday's 4:41 the slowest. Last week's range was 3:09 to 4:58.

Solitaire and Duolingo: both logs are behind. The last entry in each is Saturday 17 October, so there's nothing to compare for the past two weeks. I need to tidy these up, and they'll be done before this goes live.

Entertainment #

Watching: the only thing on the TV box this week was the Celebrity Traitors finale.

Listening:

The dashboard has a new "New artists" panel this week, listing the artists I played for the first time, newest first. Jamie Cullum was the most played with 9 plays, and Saturday was the big day with 31.

More soon.