Tonight was music night! A night to sit down in front of the piano and computer and get some real work done.

Unfortunately, tonight was also sort out the laundry and do the ironing night – so that we all have paired socks and flat shirts to wear.

Sadly the extreme volume of the latter meant the former didn’t happen.

Consoled myself with ten minutes of improvising lightly-widdly minimoog solos over one of a friend’s prog-rock tracks, before admitting defeat and heading to bed.

Tomorrow, we try again.

There’s a reverence for analogue gear in the music industry that I can understand but also find slightly self-deceiving.

Firstly, it’s not just the cachet of price. If you want to buy yourself a proper digital legend – the PPG Wave I mentioned yesterday, for example, eBay can currently do you one for just over four and a half grand. It’s beautiful and sounds amazing, but bloody hell.

Even my hybrid synths are starting to get expensive again – the JX10 now goes for more than I paid for it second-hand in 1992, and I might even make a profit on my Poly800 from 1985 soon.

But, after a really lovely evening playing with ProTools – which like so much other software is layer upon layer of glue, tape and string – I think it’s worth noting that the ‘variability’ of analogue is no longer exclusive. Plugins going missing, distortion effects spontaneously coming from nowhere, countless routing options within a soft synth that don’t quite do what the manual says they should.

These days, software is so large, it can give analogue a pretty good run for its money on the serendipity stakes. And I find that quite exciting really.

There are days when you need to remember to show up. And days when you need to show up to do the right thing.

After some fine advice by a friend, I’ve installed a nice bit of software on the Mac to fix one of my quandaries from about ten days ago. Blue Cat Audio’s Patchwork allows me to get a whole load of old-skool music plugins working within my rather more modern Pro Tools setup. For less than a hundred quid, my PT setup was reunited with ImpOSCaR, Oddity and the Korg Legacy Collection. The first two of these are particular favourites as they are a bit weird and so you get taken in a different direction from Native Instruments’ Kontakt or Arturia’s Jupiter-8V, which loads of people already have.

But then I got thinking.

What about my Waldorf Collection DVD up in the loft? The one with the PPG Wave virtual instrument? Wouldn’t it be great to get that up and running – having the amazing sounds of Propaganda and Frankie (and yes I’m looking at you too Roisin Murphy!) back under my fingertips.

[fade to black, the bits about 32-bit compatibility and java updates and licensing rabbit holes never made the final cut. I was there and they were boring for me, even with the dopamine rush.]

Suffice to say, I pulled away from this challenge after less than an hour – without having spent any more money or installed any new operating systems. I went to play with Milo instead.

I nearly fell down the rabbit-hole again this evening, but somehow managed to pull back after about twenty minutes.

Instead of yet more displacement activity, there was some tentative progress. A new sound led to some poking around with a new effect, that led to a little exercise in how to play around that sound’s challenges, which sort of led to some interesting chords…

There are always more yaks to shave. And sometimes that’s fine – you can only be nearby the things you’re supposed to be doing, because you’re really not ready to actually start. But it’s also good to know that – just occasionally – you can Do The Work as well.

Today started with aches and pains. I fought off a slight hangover and headed out to Parkrun, down at Wanstead flats.

Normally I do parkrun with Milo. When we started this was a fairly leisurely activity – physically at least. But, as he’s slowly come down from 39 minutes towards 32, it’s got progressively more challenging – even if some of the early emotional trauma has gone for us both.

Today, however, I was on my own. I didn’t have an alibi. I had to run Like A Grownup Would. Liberating in some ways, but bloody horrible in others. Mainly all the ones after the first kilometre.

The last time I did this I slightly surprised myself and went quite quickly. There was someone I’d managed to follow quite closely back then, so I decided to latch onto them again. This proved to be a very very bad idea. They were younger, fitter, and had clearly been spending all the intervening time, well,  running Like A Grownup Would. (They eventually finished three minutes ahead of me).

But somehow, despite massively peaking way too soon and dealing with the aftermath of said hangover, I got round faster than before. Odd what bodies can do, isn’t it?

Musically, there’s been a few little bits today. I think I finally understand the Prophet VS synth in a way I hadn’t really before. Ooooh, it can sound proper nasty – but it’s very very different from a traditional wave table synth like the PPG Wave2.3 or Native Instruments’ Massive. And I’ve started to tackle my very rusty singing as well – ‘finding my voice’ in more ways than one. Bit of work to do tomorrow but I’m hoping for some proper practice at some point soon.

But the delight of the day has been some family time with the Playstation VR. Particularly the game “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes”. It’s been around for over a year as a Steam game/PDF pair, but it turns out to be absolutely perfect for VR.

In my VR goggles, I get to see this:

The rest of the family get to read manifold pages of this:

…and it’s only by talking to eachother like mad that we can stop the bomb going off before five minutes are up. I had a go, Daisy had a go, Vicky had a go. Milo was an expert manual-navigator throughout. Can’t recommend this highly enough.

In other PSVR news: Tumble VR remains good fun, if a bit heavy on the non-skippable tutorials. Bought it though – and it does get a lot harder quite quickly. And I tried Eve: Valkyrie but got really bad motion sickness from it. I think it’s the inverted controls for the spaceship that just push me over the edge.

I got proper cross at the Today programme yesterday morning.

John Humphrys was interviewing experts on maths learning, pointing out that we need to get better at thinking mathematically.

17 million adults have primary-school levels of maths. John was almost proudly adding himself to the 17 million. “Does everyone need to be a mathematician? I don’t have any problems, I can get along” he says.

He’s then presented with OECD data – good numeracy is best protection against unemployment, low wages and poor health; numeracy has a 26% premium on salary, and is a good indicator of lower mortgage default.

And yet he carries on being a contrary bugger. (God bless Mishal Hussein for pointing out all the statistical stories they have to work their way through).

Unemployment is as much about skills shortage and skills fit, and while software carries on eating the jobs of yesteryear it’s just irresponsible to carry on acting as though this doesn’t matter. The media genuinely is talking down the economy here, and it doesn’t even understand it’s doing so.

Have a listen – fifty minutes in.

So I didn’t post last night. I just got in too late after too many glasses of wine a bit too tired and – well, sod it it’s only a blog.

I was feeling full of thinks though.

There’s a wonderful mini-conference series called ProductTank, and I try to go whenever I can. Sometimes it’s to see friends, sometimes it’s to refresh what I know, sometimes it’s to be reminded how far I’ve come in my adopted career. My latest adopted career.

Last night there was a session on AI and machine learning. Which I genuinely know nothing about. Well nothing recent. I watched some Horizons on the subject in the 80s and 90s and know what Wired can tell you about Google’s latest statistical magic – the latter of which will be about 50% dubious anyway. So I thought it was about time I learned.

I’ve recently become a subscriber to New Scientist, and it’s made me realise how much I’d started to slip into the mindset that the world was largely fixed and most of what could be solved had been solved. There is a continual trickle of crazy amazing near-magic happening all the time, redefining the world for our children, and we don’t hear enough about it because the media don’t really do science and lots of this work will eventually just be one cog in someone else’s product.

So yes, machine learning and AI. That should be good.

The talks were amazing. Azeem Azhar (ironically even his name turns into a veritable battle with autocorrect) framed the work going on around the world, and talked of some of the ethical concerns in this area – particularly reminding us that a) all of our assumptions and features are inherently political, b) beware of your machine learning “normal” from early users who will be ‘a sea of dudes’. I’ve followed him on twitter for ages, and we’ve been one degree of separation from each other for probably sixteen years, but it’s the first time I’ve ever seen him speaking in the flesh.

Shaona Ghosh was amazing on the techniques behind machine learning and I think everyone came away realising that there are no quick and easy solutions here. Not one. It’s a long time since there’s been a ProductTank talk where the slides contained sigma signs – and I bloody loved it. Little long-unused corners of my brain started fizzing slightly – I think it’s an area to carry on looking at, although I also know enough to understand I’ll be forever an amateur.

Finally Chris Auer-Welsbach from IBM Watson talked about interface, and on the idea that AI should be part of serving the user (and I think a there was some stuff about GPUs in there too).

But these three talks together all gave me a slight sense of unease. This is a really hard area with ethical troubles even if you are acting in good faith. But, and this is my big worry, I don’t think most startups truly want to serve their users. I think the temptation to abuse and exploit users is far too strong. I was reminded of the early days of interactive drama when one of my pleas when I gave talks was “for all of our sakes, if any of you do get that massive commission, please don’t take the easy route. Don’t blow it. This medium only has so many chances, and every failed project is another of the nine lives lost. Try to remember the greater good!”

And this is my worry about AI and machine learning – that it only takes a tiny number of bad actors to completely discredit the whole movement, for government to introduce legislation “for the good of consumers” that cuts off whole avenues of potential benefit forever.

And, while I’m often an optimist and believe the best of people, on this occasion I’ve got a feeling of dull inevitability. Someone somewhere Just Won’t Be Able To Help Themselves. Or there will be boardroom pressure and a few shortcuts will be taken.

But please don’t let it be you.

Nothing to see here tonight. Have been too busy doing things like this.

See you in the morning, assuming I haven’t died of hyperglycaemia.

Tomorrow I know I’m going to be slightly useless at work. Well, not useless, more…silent. As a reluctant extrovert, over the course of four meetings I rather used all of my words up today.

So tomorrow will be largely spent with headphones on, avoiding speaking to people, so that I can – well – avoid speaking.

I didn’t much fancy heading to the piano this evening, but knew I needed to do something. Similarly, turning on that big music computer just to do payroll for our chold minder felt like a wasted opportunity. That I really wouldn’t have been that bothered about wasting.

Rather surprised then to have got an unexpectedly nice evolving melodic chord sequence out of the piano and a viciously nice sync lead out of G-Force Oddity.

I then quit – while I was still ahead.

Today was another day of wearing very many hats. Delivery manager, product manager, crap DBA, salesman, user researcher, copywriter, reluctant show off.

@tomskerous asking for help, from X-Gov Product Managers, in pulling together a list of login systems that could become "single sign-on" pic.twitter.com/FTS2t34ET9

— Damian Gilkes (@Damiangilkes) October 17, 2016

With a bigger team, as we are starting to be, this is better than being paralysed and unable to move, but there’s a lot to do. And a lot to get myself and the whole team better at on every front. The context switching comes at a cost.

Tonight that cost is “everything else”.

Sod payroll, music, social media, ironing, even sod the brand new PlayStation VR. Tomorrow is a new day, and I want to be up and awake to enjoy it.

I’m in bed with a small glass of red and a copy of New Scientist. While my eyes very very slowly close. Creation can happen tomorrow.

Short one tonight.

In all the pressure to be great at work and be amazing parents – either will take all the energy they can get from you – I can’t stress how important it is to take some time away from both.

There will be guilt.

There will be things undone.

But there’s also perspective. And renewal. The chance to do the things that you only do when you’re not doing those other things.

We’ve just finished a trip to Sheffield and back, where Vicky and I could

• talk about things we were interested in without having to make space for those sitting just behind us
• listen to the music we liked, without having a faint grumble of “when can we put something else on”
• eat what we wanted without having to worry about coordinating the meals and entertainment for anyone else.

And as a result, the next time we have to do…well…the second half of those sentences, we’ll have more energy, ideas, patience. We’ll just be more interested, and more interesting.

In work and at home, you can only run so long on empty.

[Thanks again to mum for making it possible]