2

There are 2 posts tagged 2 (this is page 1 of 1).

Weeknotes #256 — 2^8

A ‘flying by the seat of my pants’ kind of week. There’s so much going on. Work needed to be regularly prioritised so that we didn’t miss the next deadline or scheduled event. At points it felt almost overwhelming. But I’ve been loving it. It’s been a very long time since we’ve had such important hard external deadlines to meet. They act as a forcing function, making it easier to separate the most important or urgent things from everything else. Out of necessity, my delegation instinct has also come to the fore. It feels very good to decisively hand things over to colleagues who probably should have had the work on their plate long ago; hopefully it feels the same for them.

Next week we have the three Johannesburg-based colleagues from our management team joining us for an offsite. We’ve been preparing for weeks, so I have my fingers crossed that Storm Isha doesn’t disrupt our plans.

I had to spend some time at the weekend catching up with work in order to release some of the pressure next week.

Hitting weeknote ^8 feels like a beautifully geeky milestone. Sometimes it has felt like work, but overall it’s been fun.

This was a week in which I:

  • Put together a proposed programme structure for the real estate/facilities work that we are doing over the next couple of years. Submitted the proposal as well as a high-level project plan to two of our senior governance committees for approval. Once this is in place, I can start to convene a steering committee and get into the critical decisions that we need to make.
  • Created a slide showing all of the organisations that are involved with the programme. It’s incredibly complex.
  • Put together an initial draft list of all of the income and expenditure for our office refurbishment project.
  • Met with our vendor who specialise in meeting room technology design and agreed to schedule a workshop for next week.
  • Updated and issued an RFP for real estate/facilities project management capability.
  • Reviewed the high-level plan for moving office in one of our cities, along with the remaining outstanding points that need to be resolved before we can sign the new lease.
  • Finalised details for our offsite meeting with the venue, including putting time aside for two sets of guest speakers.
  • Took a look at some spare office space that we might utilise while we carry out some invasive works in our regular office later in the year. Met with our Marketing and Communications team along with our Company Secretary to discuss what this process might look like.
  • Started to discuss an alternative approach to one of our office upgrades, future-proofing ourselves so that we are able to take advantage of any core building changes as and when they happen.
  • Was presented with the idea of taking ownership of the technical aspects of our shared meeting room spaces.
  • Met with our Legal team to discuss how we manage requests for Teams meeting recordings from external participants.
  • Spent time with my product management and development team, agreeing both our immediate focus and the approach we will take to any major initiatives.
  • Reviewed the team’s progress with a new tool that we hope will help to surface issues (and impending issues) across our end-user endpoints. Agreed to roll it out to a pilot group of users.
  • Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour on the topic of an internal women’s accelerator and networking programme.
  • Had an excellent Random Coffee with a colleague based in our Global Markets team in Johannesburg. He’s an expert in foreign exchange, and was able to give me an education in what it means for there to be ‘a shortage of dollars’ in a particular country. We agreed that he’d come and talk to our team at a future Learning Hour.
  • Found a way to tweak my Obsidian query to surface any open tasks from my meeting notes, grouping them by note but sorting the notes in descending ‘last modified’ order, so my most recently captured tasks appear at the top. Some would argue that this is back to front, but that’s not really how I work. If something is really important and I haven’t done it yet, I’m likely to capture it more than once; doing so will mean it is near the top.
  • Discussed that when a conversation gets tricky, it is always best to jump to the highest-fidelity medium to resolve things. Speaking in person beats a video call, which beats an audio call, which beats text messages.
  • Had a lovely call with my parents after work one evening. Despite them having a lot going on, it was so lovely to feel how much they are there for me and my family.
  • Renewed my Learned League membership for another year. I’m rubbish at it, but it doesn’t stop it being a lot of fun. I’m so grateful that Matt Haughey and Jessamyn West introduced me to it.
  • Got by without buying lunch for a whole week. I’m trying to pull the reins in on spending after having been out a few times in December. I’m not sure how long it will last, as man cannot live on protein and cereal bars alone.
  • Was blown away by watching Queen Rock Montreal in IMAX. Of course the images were amazing, but the sound — THE SOUND. It was so loud. I loved it.
  • Had the insides of our two roof lanterns professionally cleaned. It was long overdue. They look lovely and sparkly now.
  • Designed and ordered a custom stamp for labelling the cross-section end of books that I want to give away via Bookcrossing. I’m a lapsed Bookcrosser, having started in 2006, but for some reason I’ve now got the itch again.
  • Went out for a Saturday night curry in Chertsey with my lovely old friends.
  • Had a satisfying week on the bike trainer, completing some rides that made me feel like I had stretched myself.

Media

Podcasts

Articles

Video

  • Caught the Algeria vs Angola match in the Africa Cup of Nations.
  • Continued watching Grange Hill series 14. Just a few episodes to go.
  • Was brought to tears by The Orville S3E5. I think it’s my favourite show. Absolutely beautiful storytelling with such incredible characters. I didn’t expect this when I first started watching it.

Music

  • I’d never realised that the lyrics to Shake, Rattle and Roll are so obscene.
  • Enjoyed a wonderful online Album Club listening to Bass Culture by Linton Kwesi Johnson. I’ve struggled to get into reggae as I couldn’t find my way in, but this album is super accessible. Loved it.
  • Learned that Seal’s Kiss From A Rose is ‘33% sharp’. Amazing.

Next week: Keeping my fingers crossed that the trains are running despite the storms, so that I can make it into London five days in a row.

Die Da!?! Memories of MTV Europe

Satellite TV arrived in my life in 1988 when I was eleven years old, and it felt like I sudden leap into the future. My dad had seen a ‘you can’t afford not to’ offer in the newspaper that got us a dish and 16-channel decoder supplied and fitted for next to nothing. Turning it on for the first time was a big event — we were the first people I know to get a dish and I remember having lots of friends and neighbours over to see it. We were all falling over each other in the lounge as we looked with wonder at the new channels.

An Amstrad Fidelity decoder. Look at all the buttons! (Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
An Amstrad Fidelity satellite TV decoder, circa 1988. Look at all the buttons! Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Dishes all over Western Europe pointed skyward to the Astra satellite, and we all received the same programming. There were only 16 channels on the service, but this was a crazy amount compared to the four that we got through our terrestrial aerial. Only a few of the new channels were British — Sky One, followed eventually by Sky Movies and Sky News — with a significant number of others in German. The most fun were those that were aimed at everyone over Europe, typically in English, such as Eurosport and Screensport. The king of them all was MTV Europe, the channel that was probably the reason we got the dish in the first place. From that point on, when I wasn’t in front of my home computer you could usually find me in front of the TV.

Music was a big deal in our house when I was growing up. The radio, a tape or CD were playing all the time, whether we were at home or in the car. As it was for millions of others, for me Friday at school was spent talking about all of the bands that we’d seen on Top Of The Pops the night before. Having MTV Europe in the house meant that I no longer had to wait for Thursday. Back then, the ‘M’ in MTV meant something, and music was front and centre in the programming. When a specialist show such as 120 Minutes, Most Wanted or Yo! MTV Raps wasn’t showing, we would get a stream of videos from the MTV playlist one after the other. It was brilliant.

One of the big benefits of having a pan-European station was that the songs on heavy rotation often hadn’t gone far up the charts in the UK. They even had a specific chart programme, the MTV European Top 20 countdown, hosted by Pip Dann. Compared to our national chart, this one seemed to change at a glacial pace, and Dann must have been challenged to keep her commentary fresh every week.

Over the years I’ve noticed that there are a whole bunch of songs that I remember from those days that my friends don’t seem to be aware of. With the help of a wonderfully old-school-looking website, I’ve scoured my memories to pick out the weird and wonderful songs that got tons of airplay on MTV Europe but are relatively unknown here in the UK.

Lambada — Kaoma (1989)

People seem to know this song but aren’t aware of the band that made it big. A video filled with Latin dancing, revealing clothes, Orangina, a silent angst between children who want to dance with each other, and an angry adult who slaps a young girl.

Got to Get — Rob ‘n’ Raz featuring Leila K (1990)

I could never make my mind up as to whether this was ‘so bad it’s good’ or actually good. One thing I do know is that it burrowed into my brain very, very deeply. I’ve never met anyone else who has heard of Leila K, “a Swedish Eurodance singer and rapper of Moroccan descent.”

Heading for a Fall — Vaya Con Dios (1992)

Not the sort of thing I would have gone out and bought, but it had something about that I enjoyed. Everything seemed vaguely ‘adult’ about the music. Listening again now, the vocals are superb. I have no idea what the video’s all about though.

Still Got The Blues — Gary Moore (1990)

Always had my dad playing air guitar within half a second of appearing on TV. People seem to have heard about Gary Moore, formerly of Thin Lizzy and Skid Row, but this song only made it to number 31 in the UK. The Belgians (#1), Dutch (#2), Norwegians (#3), Swedes (#4), and Finns and Poles (both ) must have driven the amount of airplay that this got on MTV.

Die Da!?! — Die Fantastischen Vier (1992)

This could have so nearly been the first song to have an interrobang in it’s title. To this day I have no idea what they are singing about (“that one!?!”), but the fantastic four showed me that German rap is fun!

Tag am Meer — Die Fantastischen Vier (1994)

A totally different vibe with this one. Like the Beastie Boys moving on from their (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party) phase, the band seem to have matured, got serious, and increased the video budget. Chilled out rapping in front of a video that reminds me of Neneh Cherry’s Manchild. Weird. Great.

Cose Della Vita — Eros Ramazzotti (1993)

Italian power pop, complete with a truck driver’s gear change. Apparently Ramazzotti is massive in Europe, and this song made it to in Belgium, in Spain and in Italy. I bought a tape copy (quite literally) of the album on a family holiday in Bulgaria in 1994. This is the best song on there.

Bakerman — Laid Back (1989)

Fancy dress sky diving to Danish electro-pop with Prince-style backing vocals in a video directed by Lars von Trier. What could be better? Made it to in the UK chart, but the Austrians took it all the way to .

Wind of Change — Scorpions (1991)

“I followed them on squark, down to gonky park.” Those immortal misheard opening lines from this German metal band were seemingly played every few minutes on MTV Europe in 1991. Despite the video being a montage of recent news footage, I had no idea at the time that this was such an important song with associations to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, with viewers of the German ZDF network in 1999 choosing this as ‘the song of the century’. 14 million copies sold. Made it to in the UK, but you never hear of it here now.

(I Wanna Give You) Devotion — Nomad featuring MC Mikee Freedom (1991)

I love this song, a one-hit wonder from Nomad. The video is super low-budget but completely memorable. And I saw it a lot. Much, much better than other songs of the time that ‘featured’ a rapper. Take-it-a-down-now-Mikee!

Go For It — Joey B Ellis featuring Tynetta Hare (1990)

The first three CDs I ever bought were George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, a Do The Bartman single and the Rocky V soundtrack. This was the lead song from the somewhat patchy soundtrack and for a short time I thought it was superb. These days Joey B Ellis is known as MC Breeze.

Crucified — Army Of Lovers (1991)

The only other person I know who has ever heard of Army of Lovers was a young Russian chap I worked with over a decade ago. They had a dark-haired male singer that looked like Paul King, and everyone seemed to flounce around in revealing underwear. Swedish euro pop was all a bit too much for me at 13 years old.

From looking at the charts, as the 1990s progressed it seems as though the number of big European Top 20 hits that were unknown in the UK seemed to diminish. We were all listening to the same songs. As the number of available satellite channels grew, MTV Europe was replaced with regional broadcasts, which further reduced exposure to massive hits from the continent. I drifted away from MTV as studying, exams and going out with friends replaced the time I had spent at home on the couch. But these tunes are still with me.