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Spent some time with Ratchet and Rivet, smashing things to bits and zapping other things with my various guns. I know the wacky weapons are one of the things people love about these games but... for me they're just weapons. I'm sorry... I'll hide myself in a dark corner, now...

The first time I read 'The Screwtape Letters', I thought it was just a light-hearted jaunt into the demonic mind. Not something to be taken seriously. Except the stuff about The Patient's mother and how greedy she is, but her own demon has hidden her greed inside self-denial and turned her into a tormenter for everyone else. Wherever she goes, when she's offered something to eat or drink she says, 'All I want is a slice of crisp, dry toast and a cup of tea - weak but not too weak.' - of course, nobody can make exactly what she wants because it's so vague. And, of course, she's always disappointed, and let's people see it. Anyway, having read more BY Lewis and ABOUT Lewis, I now see that this is a serious book hidden behind humour. Screwtape's first letter advises his nephew, Wormwood, not to allow The Patient to think deeply about anything, but to keep him fixed on the 'real world', ie, not to worry about heaven at all. I'm interested in my reactions to it as a much older person.

I rewatched the webinar from the other day, which is only available until Sunday. My take-away for our PMO - identify the success criteria at the start! It sounds so bloody obvious but how else do you know you've achieved what you set out to achieve?! I'm also coming round to the idea of having some kind of sizing but not to be too scientific about it - I think that's where we went wrong in the past. Of course, we're much more mature than we were then.

Another of my colleagues has managed to leave the gravitational pull of the uni! They're moving to the 'other' uni!! And there's a fair to middling chance they'll move back to us at some point :D I'm so pleased for them. There's just no real progression, nothing to test them here. For me, every project is a new adventure and there are the processes to tighten up - and the definitions, etc, etc. And the webinars from overseas :D

I'm not sure ChatGPT is really helping that much with shortening the time taken to create minutes. It does help with condensing everything down - but my notes already do that. If it could cope with a full transcript, it would be REALLY helpful.

I read in The Post yesterday that JD Sports are taking over the old M&S building, now that they've moved into the old Debenham's building. Now, Mike Ashley's business practices are not something I support but the article was hopeful that the streets either side AND Williamson Square would benefit from the move. And we really don't want an empty building of that size on our main shopping street! Only time will tell...

That'll do for tonight. I'm keen to get to bed at a fairly normal time tonight. I need my beauty sleep!
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Today would have been our niece's 36th birthday. Still takes me by surprise.

And so sad to hear Jurgen Klopp is moving on. He's been such a great leader for our great club.

You know those days when this morning feels like it happened a week ago but suddenly it's way past your bedtime and stuff - so MUCH stuff - has happened in between? I have a lot of those.

Today actually started with me sleeping through my alarm - or turning it off in my sleep, not sure which. But I guess I needed the sleep...? And since today was a WFH day AND mostly desk-based, it didn't matter too much. Got through some work and two loads of washing, feeding husband, son and myself at various points.

Then my chat buddy turned up an hour earlier than usual, which was nice because I had a meeting that lasted most of the afternoon and it gave me more time to chat with them before it started. The meeting was pretty productive but ChatGPT let me down again. It has a limit on the size of file you can give it and when you have a meeting that runs for 75 minutes with 4 people all talking a LOT (in the way I noted yesterday), you have a) too many words and b) almost no way of knowing how to chunk it up. Maybe it's because I'm using the free version? But there's no point upgrading because when we move to Windows 11 we'll get Copilot to play with, and that will be happening pretty soon. Anyway, by some miracle I remembered all (most?) of the actions and was able to check the transcript for bits I wasn't sure of, and got everything I remembered I needed to do boxed off before the end of my working day.

This evening, I wrapped grandson #2's presents and used up all the non-Christmas wrapping paper. I don't normally wrap presents - I've been using (and reusing!) gift bags and tissue paper for years. But the husband likes seeing small people rip things open, so we go with paper. But note to self - invest in some wrapping paper!

I did a bit more on my miniature tea shop. There's no real deadline on it but I do want to finish it! One of the items is a dresser with 6 shelves, none of which are straight or correctly spaced ROFL. I did my best but it is what it is. I'm now working out how to fit all the bags and tins of tea on it, when nothing can go where it's supposed to.

And we rounded the night off by watching the final of Traitors. It was sooo tense and... I can't say any more because SPOILERS but it was really good.

Right, time for bed. Night, DW!
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For Christmas, Grandson #2 got presents that require batteries, so I was determined to get birthday presents that don't. We have a tunnel for him to crawl through, a mat that you 'paint' on with water (so no cleaning up!), a book and jigsaw puzzle set, and those plastic blocks that are the cheap version of Duplo. Son has got him some farm animals and sea creatures. Now I just need to wrap everything.

ChatGPT came up trumps, today. The meeting was scheduled for an hour but lasted about 45 minutes. The first 30 minutes were taken up with a discussion about inputting fee data, I kid you not! I put the transcript for that part of the meeting into ChatGPT and asked it to summarise. It didn't do a perfect job because it listed the points as they were made rather, which led to a lot of repetition - yes, there was repetition in the conversation but for the minutes I only need to list each point once - but it did make it easier to sort out the important points. And I didn't bother giving it the rest of the meeting because that was really easy to type up.

A couple of observations. Firstly, when you listen to someone talk, it makes perfect sense. When you READ a transcript it's like trying to make sense of a foreign language. It's all 'umms', 'yeah, yeah, but', 'I, I think, I think', with broken sentences and poor grammar. I certainly couldn't write minutes myself from a transcript. Our brains are really amazing things, to make sense of all that nonsense!

The second thing is that, on the whole, my notes usually do capture the important points. I still make notes because it helps me to make sense of the meeting and, as I found yesterday, ChatGPT isn't fool proof!

Tonight we got the new telly on its new stand and brought the old one, plus a couple of old consoles, upstairs. Tomorrow, I'll swap the telly stand I have in here with the one I brought up tonight. I think I could fit the PS5, 4 AND 3 on it, as well as the Tivo box. The only thing is, I only want to play on the 5. Plus changing consoles means changing the wires. We'll add them to the 'for sale' pile, I think, because they all work.

I also want to finish off the shopping list and get a chicken for a roast dinner on Sunday. I don't feel the husband has had a decent meal since Christmas.

It occurred to me that new baby is going to be a dragon, like their mother. That's going to be interesting...

And that was my Thursday.
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However did I manage FIVE days in the office? I think I'm just suffering from BTWitis. I think I said the other day I wasn't really ready to go back at all. And I had a particularly early start today, which didn't help. However, using ChatGPT REALLY helped with the minutes from my 9am meeting. It doesn't do the whole job - eg, it doesn't write directly into my template - but it condenses the conversation into a few bullet points, which is at least half of the job.

I then took an early lunch and popped into the super-ethical Lush for some Sweet Wild Orange hand cream (it smells AMAZING) and the rather less ethical Primark for new slippers (although they are made with 50% recycled polyester). Then it was back to the office for a webinar on building the perfect PMO and the monthly cascade meeting. Our CIO's boss did a presentation on how our department supports the work of the whole uni (because apparently some of my colleagues don't understand their contribution... but it was actually really interesting), and talked about how we've pivoted in the last year from trying to stop students from using AI to finding ways to use it as a 'force for good'.

I've also joined an online community that is all about learning more about AI. Having pretty much ignored it up until about a month ago, I'm suddenly in it up to my neck! It's one of those things where it's just impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. We have to find ways of working with it or it really will overwhelm us.

And I managed to make some progress with Sea of Stars, which I haven't touched in two whole days! My chat buddy who started playing before me is waaay behind me, now :D

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