Posts by dak 170 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Oct 2010
I used to be a UNIX admin and I had to configure X-windows running on SunOS.
I have been using Linux since Mandrake 5, many years ago.
Nowadays I run Linux MINT and I have not the slightest idea what the window manager is - it just works perfectly to my taste. I think it's Gnome, but it might not be. I suspect I'm fairly representative of most Linux users in that respect.
In a couple of weeks' time I will be starting back at the office I was in when Boris the Power-Crazed shut the country down. As it happens I was in their departure lounge anyway because they had blanket-banned all ex-IR35 contracts. I will be returning still ex-IR35 and on a considerably higher rate.
The point of this comment is that the office is 350 miles from my home and my work cycle will be what I was doing then - 8 days there, six days at home every fortnight. The site itself is a very attractive one, full of interesting and inspirational people, and I have always worked better when stimulated by good competition.
I simply don't see how any company can inculcate its corporate ethos into new hires when they are kept away from existing staff, and in time many companies will lose their corporate identities entirely.
Of course, for many of my former clients this will be a Good Thing.
I wrote a series of articles on just why CEST is a lamentably shoddy piece of work.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/critique-hmrcs-foia-response-1-david-kirkwood-msc-miet?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_pulse_read%3BEFOl1yohSrWKtsjHZcs%2B6A%3D%3D
In the next couple of weeks I will be returning to a client I left because of their IR35 blanket assessment. I will still be outside IR35, and earning more than I had been. The client will be paying a new intermediary about 50% more than in 2020 just to get me back.
Way back last century, the toolroom in the factory where I worked had a god-awful scheduling system and a very enthusiastic tooling engineer, who brought in a copy of Superbase and built his own system. It worked quite well for them and kept entirely under our radar.
We (DP) found out about it 55 weeks after it went live, and about 30 weeks after the engineer went on long-term sick. He had, of course, omitted a full date specification and the previous year's jobs were popping back up again. Could we please, fix it for them, please, please?
Of course, we couldn't, at least not quickly.
Part of the reason that it took a couple of weeks to alert us is that for a while the toolroom was legitimately quoting delivery dates into the factory in week numbers up to 66.
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