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Week 197: Teams player

I started a new contract. So far, I have spent almost all my time on calls, which is absolutely my least favourite part of work in the modern age. In-person meetings could be bad enough, but it’s so much harder to have a conversation over dodgy, high latency connections with people talking over each other. It’s just really hard work.

And then you add Microsoft Teams. I should have known. I was warned. I had heard that it was bad, but it’s really so much worse than that. The audio quality is terrible, on a device where competitor products work fine. Basic stuff like echo cancellation seems to be missing. Sometimes it freezes. Once, it arbitrarily and spontaneously changed audio device halfway through the call so no one could hear me. It signs me out in the middle of a call and invites me to sign in again (a trap, as this will terminate the call and deposit me on a home screen far away). Sometimes, even when I’m signed in, it forgets and asks me to type in my name. It spontaneously stops showing a shared screen halfway through a call. It’s hard to be on time when it takes a full minute for the rickety jenga tower of an interface to load.

And that’s only my first week.

I hope I’ll get a chance to do something that isn’t Teams meetings soon.

I was talking to someone about web hosting over lunch and I realised: young people these days don’t even know that GoDaddy used to be notorious for its sexist marketing and that time its CEO shot an elephant.

Even the most egregious organisations can redeem themselves, with a bit of hard work, and I think that’s a good thing.

We have paid off the last of the work on the house. That’s everything that was planned – at least until something else goes wrong or needs fixing. It feels good to be out on this side of it.

A few links:

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  • Week 196: Plumb forgot

    Have you ever seen the inside of your own stomach? I got to see mine, live when I had a capsule endoscopy on Wednesday. You swallow a little capsule, about 20 mm long, with a camera and some LEDs at each end, and a couple of coils around the middle, and it sends a video feed out to a recorder box via some antennae wrapped around your trunk.

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  • Week 195: Bristol

    We saw The Book of Mormon on Tuesday, my third musical in six days. I don’t think I usually manage more than one a year at most.

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  • Week 194: Pre-overdue

    It was a relaxing week. L— had the week off, I don’t have any work at the moment. It was a novelty to be able to relax in a home that isn’t a construction site for the first time in many months.

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  • Week 193: Small toe

    L— was away for most of the week at a conference in Vienna and then taking a long route back on trains via Zurich and Paris. I entertained myself by cooking unreasonably spicy food and attempting to render some of Bashō’s haiku into English while still being haiku (according to an English concept of syllables). Some were more successful than others.

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Older entries can be found in the archive.