Month: September 2025

Watch Costs are Relative

by

I’ve always found it a little funny when people complain about how expensive an Apple Watch is. For me, the cost has never been the barrier to owning one. Right now I’m wearing a Series 10 46mm. It’s not the cheapest watch I own, but it’s close. The actual cheapest is my Seiko SKX007, which I picked up a couple of summers ago as a knock-around watch for the beach.

I bring this up because my Omega Speedmaster X-33 recently needed a battery replacement. While it was at Omega, they called to say it also needed a full service. Not exactly shocking—I bought it in 2006, so it’s pushing 20 years old, and this is only its second service. It’s had a hard life: I wore it daily for years before I started rotating in other watches, and titanium picks up dings easily. At the last two battery changes they even noted “condition poor” on the paperwork, which felt a little insulting if I’m honest.

So yes, I’ll be glad to have it back shiny and refreshed. What I’m less thrilled about is the price of the service. And yet, it’s not surprising. It’s about what I paid the last time I had another Omega serviced. The kicker? The cost of this service was actually more than what I paid for my Apple Watch.

That’s the point, really: watch costs are relative. The X-33 was the most expensive thing I had ever bought when I got it, and I still love it. But the idea that maintaining one watch can cost more than buying a brand-new Apple Watch puts the whole “Apple Watches are too expensive” complaint into perspective. For now, I’ll just be waiting a few weeks while the work gets done and chuckling at the absurdity of it all.

The photo is of a much younger X-33 right after getting a NATO strap for it, since the titanium band was getting beat up too much.

Fast, Cheap, High-quality?

by

I’m not sure where I first heard it. One of the high-performance team trainers I worked with back in my implementation days around 2013 must have taught it to me. The saying goes: when you’re delivering something, you can have it fast, cheap, or high-quality. The catch is you only get to pick two. That statement still rings true over 10 years later. I bring it up in conversations all the time, and no one has managed to prove it wrong yet.

The real challenge is that everyone always wants all three. Life is about trade-offs, and this rule makes the trade-offs unavoidable. The hardest part is that people don’t usually want to accept it right away. They only come around once reality sets in.

Maybe someday, maybe even someday soon, AI will make this saying obsolete. But so far, it hasn’t.

W Sister Short on Queen

by
Paddington Bear Goggles

A while back, probably just a few years ago, A was in the middle of a tantrum. For reasons only she can explain, M decided the right response was to blast Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Not only that, she sang along at full volume. Somewhere between the guitar and the operatic breakdown, A’s tantrum fizzled out.

Say what you will about parenting techniques, but apparently Freddie Mercury trumps a tantrum. At least A’s taste in music held strong even then.

Building My Own Custom GPTs

by

With some downtime on the bank holiday Monday, I finally tackled something I’ve been wanting to do for a while: creating several custom LLMs. I’ve been tinkering with agents for work and figured it was time to apply similar customizations for personal use.

Lately I’ve been bouncing between ChatGPT, Perplexity, Venice.ai, and even the new Proton AI for privacy. ChatGPT now lets you build custom GPTs, so I gave it a try. While we were on holiday, I had jotted down some customization requirements for a handful of GPTs I wanted, and this felt like the right time to build them.

For the past six to eight months, I’ve been planning holidays with different LLMs. The main frustration has been having to restate all my preferences every time I opened a new chat. Starting with a custom GPT just made sense—especially since I’ve got several term breaks to plan for over the next school year. Programming the GPT was straightforward. I haven’t used it to plan a full trip yet, but I’ve got the base built and I’ve started tinkering. High hopes for this one.

I also put together, though haven’t tested, a CISSP study guide helper. I want to sit for the test but don’t have a study buddy, so I figured why not make one?

Then there’s a slightly different use case: a custom GPT for days out with the kids. Same idea as the travel planner, but without flights and hotels—it’s more about what’s going on in London. I’m actively planning a week with the girls now and most of it is set, but I’ll see if this new GPT adds anything useful. The hardest part here was integrating the data I’ve been tracking on a Trello board with all the activities we’ve done or still want to do. I wanted the GPT to be able to use that context, but I’m cautious about sharing too much personal information with ChatGPT. That’s why I also use Venice.ai, which is a privacy-protecting, open-source based AI. Still, I experimented with exporting the Trello data to JSON and importing it into ChatGPT, and after some trial and error I finally got it working. In this case I had to use ChatGPT since I ran into file size limits with Venice.ai.

I’ve got a few more ideas I want to play with, but for now the three or four GPTs I’ve already built will keep me busy. I need to actually use them and see how they perform before I go any further. Early impressions are promising. Even so, as I remind colleagues and my kids, quoting the Doctor from Doctor Who: the AI lies. Don’t ever trust it completely. If you keep questioning it, though, the results can be pretty good.

The Story of T Turning 13

by

Today is T’s 13th birthday. She asked for a video from the time she was born. I wasn’t really sure why, but M remembered and we both took videos today at the time that corresponded to when she was born in New York, accounting for the five-hour time difference.

I am not at all ready to be the parent of a teenager. Over the weekend T baked chocolate chip cookies, and as a small reward for making it through the first morning of having a teenager in the house, I had one with my coffee.

W Sister Short and The TV Time Out

by

I wrote this one over a year ago in July 2024, however still super cute.

The other day when walking home from school, I reminded the girls that they had less screen time today due to timeout from yesterday. I told them I couldn’t recall the exact quantities so I said let’s call it 10 minutes and 20 minutes respectively. A’s response was yes let’s, and she smiled. She and I both knew that she probably had more time than that, but I didn’t want to guess a much higher number so I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

AMEX Points For A Concord Flight Please

by

I’ve had an American Express card since university. My dad used to joke that I was the youngest person he knew with an American Express Gold Card. He gave one to my sister and me for emergencies when he and my mom weren’t around, so we had it pretty young. The only reason it was that card was because that was what he had to supplemental cards to.

After university, I got my own Amex in 1998, and since then, I’ve racked up a lot of Membership Rewards points. Not millions, but hundreds of thousands at least. Back when I was traveling for work, no one cared if you earned points on your personal card for work expences, so I accumulated them pretty quickly.

At first, I didn’t do much with them. But as the balance kept growing, I figured I needed a goal to work toward. A regular plane ticket didn’t seem special enough—though I probably redeemed points for one or two back in the day. Then I saw something in the American Express points catalog that caught my attention: a Concorde flight from New York to London, with a return ticket on British Airways, for 200,000 points.

I’d always wanted to fly the Concorde, but it was way out of reach financially. So, I thought, Why not make that my goal? I was almost there when the Concorde accident happened, and the planes were grounded. With my hopes of flying the Concorde gone, I didn’t know what to do with my points anymore. So, I kept saving them, not realizing that holding onto points is actually one of the worst things you can do. Their value drops over time; you’re better off spending them.

Eventually, I started redeeming points here and there. A few years after the Concorde dream died, I used some to buy M a MacBook. I know merchandise isn’t the best way to redeem points, but I think I got a decent deal on that Apple redemption. Around the same time, we used points to save almost half the cost of our honeymoon. Those two redemptions happened within about a year, but even after that, I still had hundreds of thousands of points—and I kept accumulating more, despite knowing it was a bad idea not to spend them.

Finally, in 2017, I decided to burn through everything I’d built up. Once again, I ignored the “best practices” and spent the points on merchandise. While I could’ve gotten double the value if I’d used them for travel, the item I bought had been on my wishlist for a long time: a really nice watch. So nice, in fact, that the points only covered about half the cost. Even though I didn’t maximize their value, I don’t regret it. The watch was worth it to me.

Since then, I haven’t let points pile up the way I used to.

I’m not sure what triggered the memory of the Concorde, but I made a note to write about it. Taking that flight would have been legendary, but the watch is still a pretty great consolation prize.

17th Workaversary

by

Today marks my 17th work anniversary. I haven’t done a retrospective of the numbers involved in a few years, so it felt like time for an update.

It’s still only been three companies: Thomson Reuters, Refinitiv, and now LSEG. Back in my 2022 update, I mentioned I was moving into a new role. Three years later, I’m still in that role. So here’s how the breakdown looks on this workaversary:

8 offices 2 continents 12 managers (4 of them just in the past 3 years) 7 different groups across those 17 years (though the lines blur a bit, since lately I’ve been helping out in a group outside my own)

The most important part isn’t the numbers, though. Even if it can feel a little discouraging to watch people you’ve known and liked move on, I still find the work exciting, the problems worth solving, and the culture a place I want to show up to every day.

The Story of My First Movie

by

It’s pretty likely that the first movie I ever saw wasn’t actually the one I’m talking about today. What I’m going to talk about is the first movie I remember seeing. I don’t even recall being in the theater for the entire thing, but I know I was there because I have one vivid memory from it. Based on the release date and my approximate age at the time, I must have been pretty young. Looking back, the fact that this movie is the first one I remember says a lot about me.

If you know me, you might have guessed that the first movie I remember seeing in a theater was Star Wars: A New Hope. It came out in May 1977, which would have made me a little over three years old. I’m not sure how long it was in theaters, so I can’t say exactly when I was taken to see it, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume I was about three. Was that a movie a three-year-old should see? The short answer: probably not. And, in full disclosure, before writing that sentence, I looked up when I first took my own daughters to see a Star Wars movie in theaters—it was Solo, the Han Solo film. They were five, so I think it’s safe to say that three was probably a bit young. (I’m not a hypocrite on this!)

I don’t recall if my mom was there. She isn’t in my memory, nor is my sister. That’s why I think my dad might have taken me by himself. All I really remember is getting up—or maybe sitting down—during that scene where Darth Vader is choking the general who, frankly, was being a bit cross with him.

That’s it. That’s all I remember just that one vivid moment. But I have a pretty good feeling that it set the stage for my love of the genre. With me wanting to write more recently this was one of those topics I wanted to write about. It also should come first before me talking about other stuff about me slightly older anyway.

Goodbye Primary, Hello Blazer’s

by

Today was A’s first day of Year Seven. For her, it’s the start of high school, and she’s been excited about it for weeks. For M and me, it’s also a milestone: our youngest is now in high school.

For Americans, the translation is that “high school” here is closer to what would be middle school in the States. But regardless of labels, the feeling is the same. When T started last year, or whenever she reached some other milestone, my quiet consolation was always that A was still little. She hadn’t crossed that threshold yet, so I could still tell myself I had one more kid who wasn’t quite there.

Now that A has made the leap, that excuse is gone. My little baby is officially in high school. It’s a strange mix of pride, nostalgia, and the creeping realization that time really does move too fast.

Hopefully she had a good first day. She certainly looked adorable in the uniform, which feels like its own rite of passage.

Today’s musing is just me trying to catch up emotionally to where she already is: ready, eager, and growing up faster than I’d like.