Week 146: đź“Ż - Toot toot
June 19, 2021
- In our new house I’ll have an office, and so will Lachie. I haven’t had a room to call my own since we moved in together eight years ago, and I didn’t ever really expect to live in a house that was big enough for such luxury so obviously this is very exciting.
- Up to this point we’ve been sharing peripherals because we’ve never been able to work from home at the same time due to the pandemic and childcare happening. His keyboard has a small gash in the number 9 key where a ceiling tile (including light fitting) fell out of the ceiling and smashed onto the desk. He wasn’t there at the time (lucky). Sometimes in meetings I’ll rub my finger over the sharp edge of it. In exchange for his accessories, he’s been using my desk (from BERG) and office chair (kindly provided by the Financial Times ltd). Now we’re both going to be working, it’s time for me to get my own things. I find this kind of thing shopping tedious, so I just went on wirecutter and picked whatever they recommended at a price I could stomach. This has been a long way of saying:
- I’ve got a mechanical keyboard on the way, please don’t talk to me about it
- I’ve also got a better webcam which will hopefully not wash me out like Casper the friendly middle manager
- And a new microphone which will make me sound a lot smarter, according to the science
- I’ve still got a wired Lenovo mouse from working for IBM which I feel oddly sentimental about. Probably because it reminds me many internships and working with the patient and graceful Darren.
- This week I presented the progress on the tech strategy to the engineering team. As part of it I decided to have a go at describing some other bits of how the FT works to them. My brain short circuits when someone says “we’re going to drive LTV (life time value) through finding new verticals” or “we’re going to look for new propositions in the analysis space where the margins are very high”. That is made up by the way, I don’t recall the things people really say because I immediately become distracted. Anyway, here goes my own horn 📯 - toot toot, unexpected item in the bragging area, but two engineers messaged me after to say “thanks for explaining that, it finally made sense”.