My things

One of the interesting things about renovating a small house is that every time one problem begins to disappear, another decision immediately moves to the front of the queue. For the last few weeks, most of our attention has been concentrated on the kitchen. It is now almost finished. The cabinets are in, the worktops are in place, the appliances are being integrated, and what remains is largely dependent on the electrician completing the final connections and electrical work. That is an important milestone for us because this first little house is gradually ceasing to look like a construction project and beginning to look like somewhere we can actually live. And that means it is time to move to the next room. The bedroom. From kitchen cabinets to bedroom cabinets The immediate bedroom project is the wardrobe. We have now received the first sketch of what it could look like, and I find this stage of the process surprisingly interesting. At f...

Business concept: This article is associated with my business idea for a Autonomous Revenue Intelligence. For decades, companies have been building increasingly sophisticated systems to answer a deceptively simple question: Where will our next euro of revenue come from? We started with spreadsheets. Then came Customer Relationship Management systems. CRM gave organisations a structured place to record accounts, contacts, opportunities, activities and forecasts. Marketing automation added another layer. Instead of waiting for a salesperson to discover a potential customer, companies could observe digital engagement, nurture prospects, score leads and orchestrate campaigns at enormous scale. Business intelligence then gave management increasingly sophisticated dashboards. More recently, machine learning began predicting which opportunities might close, which accounts deserved attention and whether the quarterly forecast was realistic. And now generative AI is entering the same en...

 

 

Now that my residency in Moldova has been approved, one of the things I can finally begin thinking about differently is our property in central Chișinău. Until recently, so much of life here still felt temporary. There were documents to obtain, administrative questions to resolve and the inevitable uncertainty that comes with moving permanently from one country to another. We were already building a life in Moldova, but there was always something still waiting for official confirmation. That has now changed. And with that change, this property increasingly feels less like another renovation project and more like what it is supposed to become: our home and the physical centre of the next part of our life. I am deliberately not publishing its address. It is in central Chișinău, and that is enough. What makes it interesting to me is not the street name anyway, but its rather unusual structure. I have started describing it, somewhat jokingly but also increasingly ac...

Today the family-tree project moved away from documents, archives and computer screens. We went to the cemetery in Trușeni , just outside Chișinău, with a fairly specific objective: to try to find the burial places of some of Viorica's relatives and see what additional information we could collect directly from their graves. We did find some of them, including several of her uncles. But, predictably, genealogy did what genealogy usually does. We went there looking for answers and came back with considerably more questions. Finding relatives — and then finding Grozavs everywhere Locating known family members was already useful. A grave can confirm dates, identify spouses, reveal naming variations and occasionally provide information that has never appeared in the documents already available to the family. Then we started noticing the surname Grozav . Again. And again. And again. By the time we had walked through a significant part of the c...