Weeknote 2025-44

I am sick, again. At the start of last week I developed some kind of upper respiratory infection and it sucks.

It’s nothing that Paracetamol, decongenstant and a lot of expectorating can’t shift, but it’s bloody annoying. I’m struggling to keep up with the kids, my running shoes are judging me every time I stumble past them, and I can barely get upstairs without wheezing.

I’m on the mend, thankfully, but I feel like I’ve been almost constantly ill since the beginning of September and it’s incredibly draining. I know it’s probably just the stream of child-illnesses picked up from various childcare settings, but I swear it’s taking longer each time to shift them. Getting old sucks.

Continuing the sickness vibes. Eddie has chicken pox, as does his childminder’s 1 year old son, which is fantastic, because in addition to being ill, Liz and I also have a sick child and no-childcare to juggle this week, squeezing in 2 working adults around the edges.

In brighter news, Phoebe had her birthday, and I cannot believe where the time has gone. She really wanted her ears pierced, so we took her into town to get that done, and I was surprised to see that even piercing has had some pretty nice quality of life upgrades since I got mine done back in the day.

No more turning every day (which apparently, was BS advice anyway), and no more spiked studs with the butterfly that digs into your head when you sleep. They all screw on from the front these days and just have a flat plate on the back! Turns out progress is great.

Elliot and Phoebe’s joint birthday party will be this coming weekend, assuming we’re not all still ill. I am exceptionally nervous about how it’s going to go considering we’ve invited everyone in each of their classes to it. Probably 1/4 of the school will attend, plus parents!

I wrote last week about needing a new phone and wanting to investigate the OnePlus 15. Since then they released their “early bird” offers, which involves paying a refundable deposit, that secures you some extra discounts and a free gift if you then purchase the phone in the launch week. The caveat is that they haven’t announced how much the phone is actually going to cost yet.

I am someone who’s very used to the Apple upgrade cycle; which can basically be simplified to: You don’t really care, you just want your current phone but faster and with more battery.

I don’t mean to denigrate Apple by that either. The consumer iPhone upgrade cycle of: “buy an iPhone, use it until it’s almost dead, buy another iPhone” has served me very well thus far. The lack of choice paralysis is pretty liberating, and it’s comforting to know that you’re going to be able to migrate data and settings to a new phone and it’ll just work, and be as recognisable and familiar as the phone you’re leaving.

But looking around at alternatives for the first time in years, it is absolutely fascinating to me to see the contorted shapes that Smartphone vendors (including Apple) are willing to throw themselves into to try and convince you that they make the greatest phones at any price point. And they’re not just competing against each other, their own other models too.

Anyway, for now, consider me engagment farmed! I dropped £99 and “committed” to buy one of these phones on November 13th when they’re launched, and apparently they’re going to give me £50 off and a free smart watch for my troubles.

I am quite salty at the inherant bias in charging £99 for access to a decent launch offer. Especially as it’s refundable if you choose not to purchase.

I do appreciate that the venn diagram of people with disposable income to spare and people researching flagship phones pre-launch day is probably almost a circle (and probably overlaps considerably with the set of people who consider YouTube a full-time job).

But I don’t like that you’re only allowed access to good offers if you can afford to tie up basically £100 for at least a few weeks.

This whole phone shopping thing has made me realise just how much I actively hate the current place we’re in with technology life cycles.

The amount of human effort that is wasted trying to convince people that small, almost unnoticeable spec bumps are actually life-changing upgrades that justify dropping £1k+ every year, just to increase value for shareholders is truly dystopian. Planned Obsolescence, non-replaceable batteries, the deliberate evading of right to repair, so many tools that are being used to try and force unnecesary spending and waste.

And that’s before we start to think about the environmental catastrophe of all of this. It’s miserable.

I hope I don’t run out of things to weeknote about when I finally buy a new Phone!