Week 63: Wordle

A week of Wordle, ideal starting words, kitchen upgrades, bedroom upgrades, worrying about the trial, a slightly different role, and a lot of Minecraft.

Posted on 09 January 2022 by Rowan Manning .
Tagged with Games, House, Work, Health, Sleep, Wordle, Minecraft

I’ve been playing Wordle every day for the last week. It’s pretty addictive and I’ve managed to stay at a 100% solve rate.
- Of course, there’s already a Slack channel for it at the FT.
- I did some research to work out what the ideal starting word is. Previously I was using STALE or STARE. Based on the Wikipedia entry for letter frequency these words aren’t amazing, I just added up the percentage frequencies of each letter (based on dictionary frequency rather than text frequency):
```
STARE = 8.7 + 6.7 + 7.8 + 7.3 + 11 = 41.5
STALE = 8.7 + 6.7 + 7.8 + 5.3 + 11 = 39.5
```
  I wanted something better, the top letters are ESIAR, which isn’t a word. Immediately I thought of RAISE which is pretty good:
```
RAISE = 11 + 8.7 + 8.2 + 7.8 + 7.3 = 43
```
  However, when you look at the frequency of the first letter in a word, it’s S by a pretty huge margin. A quick anagram search and I think SERAI might be the best starting word.
I finally bought a kitchen bin, no more bin sack hanging from the door handle! The kitchen is looking great now. I used a little bit of my bonus to buy new crockery which I didn’t need but it’s so much nicer than the “temporary” IKEA set I’ve had for years.
I also spent a lot of money on a new bed frame and mattress, which is probably the final step in my sleep investment. We’ve upgraded to a king-size (our room won’t quite fit a super king), and got some pillows thrown in with the mattress because of the January sales 🎉
I’m sleeping terribly. I hope the bed helps fix it but maybe I should follow Lee’s lead.
I’m isolating now ahead of being a witness in a trial, I really don’t want to catch COVID and not be able to go to court. It’s gonna be stressful, but I’ll be happy when it’s over – it’s been already been delayed ~2 years which has felt like an eternity.
Next week I’m starting a slightly different role for a while. I’m going to be embedding in our support team and getting more hands-on with the code. I’d like to use the time to help us improve the monitoring and observability of FT.com. I think it’ll be fun and I’m looking forward to a change of pace.
Maybe I’m playing too much Minecraft? It’s just such a nice way to escape from everything. Gallal and I have moved into a Badlands biome and we’re building a slightly Petra-inspired base. I’ve been enjoying terraforming to make some more dramatic rock formations and most of the buildings hide automated farms. Here’s a before/after of my little area: