Posts by agurney 250 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2015
I was a teacher many moons ago and some scrote nicked my keys from my store room on a Friday.
I was able to get into the car and hot wire it (only a MkII Cortina) but had to break into my flat, requiring a new lock.
The brat was identified and reparations and apologies made, but please do be aware of potential unintended consequences of a prank.
Yes, they are great on short pile office carpets, shit on domestic carpets.
The only place I I've seen them being any good is in Travelodge hotels - with short pile carpets and uncluttered rooms and corridors they can do a fairly thorough job freeing up housekeeping staff for other tasks.
Similarly, robotic lawn mowers working 24x7 keeping hotel lawns manicured.
sorry, wrong opus, Pinafore is more apposite:
.. Of legal knowledge I acquired such a grip
That they took me into the partnership.
And that junior partnership, I ween,
Was the only ship that I ever had seen.
Chorus.
Was the only ship that he ever had seen.
But that kind of ship so suited me,
That now I am the ruler of the Queen's Navee!
Often the biggest challenge visiting sensitive customers was simply finding them. They generally don't advertise or have nice signs saying 'Acme Ltd'.
I've had that running training courses; Orange UK only had a tiny orange square on the entrance - and in the US, Verizon Wireless were behind a numbered door in an anonymous building on an anonymous road on the outskirts of a large city (Denver IIRC). Satnav wasn't great in those days so had to rely on hire car maps.
still not a great solution - old embossed dymo labels are still legible after several years, however the adhesion is inconsistent resulting in a pile of perfectly readable labels on the floor (admittedly might be to do with the surface they're being attached to as some are still in place after decades).
Today we consumed 24kWh - north UK, no EV, no AC.
However, our solar panels generated 27kWh, with any excess stored in batteries which keeps us going overnight, so currently NOT "contributing to our current CO2-apocalypse."
"Additionally, I don't think people realize how fast water can rise from flash flooding. "
In the late 1970s we (me & future Mrs. G) went to the Linn of Dee, put a bunch of tinnies in the river to cool and pitched our tent a dozen feet (no metres in those days) above the river; woke up in the morning to the water lapping the edge of the tent and the beer long gone. Eye opening and scary!
...started writing about 50 years ago
I wrote a program that takes Dover HW and LW times and creates tide tables and corrections for a variety of locations on the Scottish west coast for sailors .. I only run it once a year so have never bothered converting it from QBASIC .. hence having a rarely used Windows 98 (or is it '95?) VM. If it ain't broke don't fix it (there be dragons!)
What an odd image to illustrate the article, no doubt AI generated - split down the middle but the edges don't match; T on the left is intact but the right has a shred of T; and amazingly the end of three lines of text has been torn from the left side without the paper it was printed on! ... and those fingers are decidedly odd :(
I think you mean "principles" not "principals", and I seem to remember enjoying "The White Company" when I came across that and the bookshelf of simlar tomes in the local library 60 years ago ... but I've also enjoyed troublesome works such as Peter Wright's Spycatcher and those of Solzhenitsyn (First Circle was stolen from me on a train in Yugoslavia .. but I didn't make a fuss as it was in the days of Tito).
I've had some AI images created that bear a similarity to some of my stuff that's online, but they could probably be fobbed off as "derivative" - maybe that's why ChatGPT and their ilk have a tendency to misspell common words in their graphics renditions.
..run a training course and finding at the last minute it wasn't quite what he was hired to do..
I had something similar to that in Mumbai for a national Telco. I was booked to run a course on SMS fraud and similar stuff for a handful of techs (state of the art at the time). We were squashed into a hot cramped cupboard .. but when I laid out the agenda for the sessions there was a bit of consternation and folk started making apologies and leaving the room. Within a few minutes I was ushered to a lecture theatre and asked if I could do my presentation on the LIVE system in front of a hundred or so folk!
[Yes, everything went well; I knew my stuff, answered all the questions that were thrown at me and did some requests that identified SMS spamming in progress in real time so a good session and a happy customer]
Interestingly, $largeNuclearSite down the road has started doing just this, and is causing a drain of teachers from the area as they're offering much higher salaries and better working conditions..
Similarly, when I was starting out in education (teacher, then industry .. I could do so did!) at the start of the oil boom in Scotland, new science teachers who were being recruited for the northern isles (Orkney/Shetland) were being poached by the oil companies at massively inflated salaries.
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