This is the last thing I’m doing before I go to a doctor’s appointment is recording this very episode.

Your Daily Lex So you have a dermatologist appointment today.

And I was thinking about how when you go to the dentist, like typically you brush your teeth, maybe you’re going to do mouthwash, whatever, because you want to go to the dentist with the cleanest teeth you can.

And I remember years ago, an internet funny person who still exists named Rob Cockerham.

His name only came into my head as I said it, but he, I at least associated with him.

I could be wrong.

It could be somebody else.

But I associate Rob with this tweet where he’s like, when I’m going to go to the dentist, I like to eat a bunch of Oreos and really make them work for it.

So I’ve never done that.

But yeah, I am going to the dermatologist.

I’m like, well, what am I supposed to do before I go there?

Like, do I rub lotion all over my body?

Do I specifically not rub lotion?

I’m doing none of those things, but it made me laugh.

I hate going to the dermatologist for a couple reasons.

One, I haven’t found one that I’d like in years.

There was one that I liked okay in Manhattan, but that made sense when I worked in Manhattan every day.

It doesn’t make sense when I don’t go to Manhattan.

I don’t like the local dermatologist options.

I feel like they don’t have enough skin in the game.

Just kidding.

But I don’t know.

None of them have really felt awesome to me.

But also, typically, they want me to get completely undressed, and then they give me a gown, and the gown makes you feel truly ridiculous.

At least I feel that way.

You know, the paper thing that does not cover anything on me.

I’m six foot million when I’m in those things.

They make me taller, I think, putting on those paper gowns.

But then you’re just sitting in the room naked, and then they bring in like 800 people, and they leave the door open.

They just do not care about the fact that you’re a giant naked man standing there.

We’re sitting there on the elegant medical table, exam table, whatever you call that.

So anyway, I hate going.

But, man, oh man, this armpit rash situation of mine, I can keep it under control, but I can’t get it to go away.

So I figure it’s worth having it checked out.

Plus, I got other weird skin things.

Would you like an enumeration of all my weird skin things?

Sorry, not going to do it.

Thought about it, but no, not going to happen.

Nothing that I’m concerned about, just stuff I want to see if I can get them to remove it.

So anyway, that’s my big afternoon.

This morning was spent presenting.

I had a variety of different meetings, a couple different hour-long meetings, back to back to back.

The first one of which, right at 9 o’clock in the morning, was a presentation that I was giving to a pretty large team.

It was somewhere around 70, 80 people, I think.

And I’ve presented to this team before.

I’ve presented to them a few times a year now.

And the first talk, I had a bunch of slides.

And when you’re doing a talk on Zoom and have a bunch of slides, it means that the slides are the big thing and your face is teeny tiny.

And people can tweak the relative sizes a little bit, but the screen share is going to be the thing that people see large.

And I didn’t really like that because I was trying to create a human connection with people over Zoom.

So I ended up going with no slides this time and just presenting.

And so as I was thinking about that, I’m like, how am I going to do this?

And I thought about different teleprompter approaches because this is an all-new talk.

And I have it memorized when I’m talking about something that I’ve written custom for this team and this company.

So I actually ordered a teleprompter, which works very well.

It’s really nice.

You put your phone in it as the thing.

There’s a variety of great phone apps for teleconferencing.

And I was actually working with one that advances based on speech.

It listens to you.

And when you say the words on the screen, that’s when it scrolls.

In the end, I ended up not using that stuff this time around because it doesn’t work with my current monitor setup and my webcam.

It works better with a built-in webcam or a slightly thinner monitor than what I have.

I knew that going in.

I wasn’t I wasn’t terrified.

And there are ways I could use tape and jerry-rigging to get it to to work for my needs.

But I experimented also with web-based teleprompter software and just positioning the mini teleprompter screen right under my webcam.

And I thought that gave a pretty good eye line, too, because I have a webcam that’s well designed for that purpose.

So I ended up not using the actual hardware teleprompter, but still using a prompter.

And I went pretty well.

I to do that one.

I had my hands on my keyboard and trackpad, which were off screen.

And then, you know, my torso and above were on screen.

At least some of my torso wasn’t a full torso experience.

They didn’t pay enough for that.

But so I could advance, rewind, pause when needed if I wanted to go off on a rant or a tangent or if somebody wanted to chime in with a question.

So I could I could pause things and then keep going.

No, whatever.

So we’re doing pretty well.

But man, any time you’re doing one of those hour long presentations on Zoom, which we all do all the time.

But we’re doing whenever you’re presenting on Zoom and everybody else is muted out of respect.

Right.

And out of, you know, convenience for all the others.

So you don’t hear things.

It is so weird to talk to a completely dead room, right, to have no auditory feedback.

And in this case, they spotlighted my video, made me huge.

So you couldn’t even really see anybody else.

Man, it’s a weird feeling.

Like I’ve talked about before.

It’s a lot like podcasting.

Happy Wednesday, Lex.