Mockery for beginners

We've started.....
I hope to make many mistakes. However I'll call them learnings which I'm sure is common corporate speak for "don't know what I'm doing". We are debating the style of blog to adopt on the public blog. So my "Hello World" post is a bit naff. The biggest thing for me yesterday about the start of ProjectRedStripe.com is that we only have six months. I never thought it was a long time but now I think it's a very short time.... My first day felt more like a course than a job. Or perhaps a corporate away day. One thing that occurred to me was how long it took for us to simply get sorted. It took me five minutes to find a suitable spoon to stir my tea. My laptop took a while to set-up and the printer longer. Essentially you forget, when you're used to the corporate IT team fixing everything, how hard PC's are to basically get running smooth. Economist Group IT support are actually pretty damn good. I just never thought about it. We all had problems with stupid password e.t.c and getting access. My mistake, pictured, is actually a post I wasn't sure would succeed.

Labels: IT, starting

Maturing the Economist Groups's web IT infrastructure will have to wait for me at least.

I've been accepted to an elite super group of corporate paratroopers. We will be incubating our very own digital divide skipping child. It will have 6 parents. Arnie and Danny had 7, I think, in Twins (the movie)

We will be planting seeds for The Economist's newest venture. M&A's aren't easy money so every so often I guess you have to try doing something yourself. I wonder whether our competitor to myspace/youtube/google/breathing/talking/communicating will work. Why am I picturing the baby from Charmed who scares off dates for Mommy with a white light in his mouth?

I have to say my application to join was terrible, really terrible. I wrote about software instead of innovation. It's because I'm crap, and a little because I was in the middle of the JoelOnSoftware book. However I did muck about and make my blog inaccessible and break the up and down arrow keys in the process. The css is nice, the first time you load it and you get your posts in a viewport. I basically think I got in because I lent a playstation 2 eyetoy to Mike Seery for the web cast. Mum, I told you gaming would get me somewhere.

Forget the application however, the interview was a joke. I interview a few people in my existing role. I sat with Mike in a Pret and proceeded to answer "Yes I can do that" and "That won't be a problem" without any justification. To be fair to me a little bit, as I already work for Mike albeit through the onion of management I didn't realise I would be interviewed in such a real way. It clearly must be the eyetoy, or perhaps it was the eyetoy drivers that make it work so well on a pc

I join a cast of superstars from the Economist. We are redstripe. Tom, a superstar, has a blog at http://fedoralreserve.wordpress.com/

Labels: innovation, IT, team