Posts by Outski 462 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2017
So how is that different from geographically dispersed teams? For example, on my team of 5 (plus two managers), I'm in Blighy, two are in New Jersey and one each in California and Chicago, with the two managers in NJ and Pittsburgh. We still have a pretty good team atmosphere particularly among us three older hands, yet all our communication is via phone, email, IM & VC, so it's not that different for us.
I think the new £100bn in QE is for commercial banks to use for loans to assist the economy where the COVID-19 specific schemes aren't applicable. BoE has already extended the govt's contingency fund (its overdraft facility, if you will), which is different to normal government borrowing.
Which gives us the acre: a chain by a furlong, or what a man could reasonably be expected to plough in a day with a plough drawn by one horse, leaving one chain unploughed, but instead, mowed & rolled for a the village cricket team :o)
Side note: at my school, kicking someone in the swingers was known as making them a landowner - giving them two acres
DAOS really is your friend there, only storing one (encrypted, unidentifiable from the OS) copy of identical attachments per server, so a, say 55GB mail file only takes about 9GB on disk, plus the space for attachments it shares with other mailboxes. Vastly superior to the old SCOS in use up to v7, which was a nightmare to maintain.
"loggers, produce haulers, photographers, musicians and various other people who own their own equipment and hire out on a per gig basis"
But @jake, these are all jobs that are more appropriately described as freelance. Most session musicians and photographers I've known work on a similar basis: use their own gear & get paid for the gig, with possibly a cut for an agent if they use one. With Uber/Lyft, and delivery firms like UK firms Hermes or Yodel, the drivers are under massive pressure wrt number of fares or deliveries completed, they get charged by the companies for the privilege of working, frequently have to lease the vehicle from the firm or have to take an expensive loan, and are sometimes responsible for finding their own replacement if they take a day sick, at risk of a fine from the company if they can't, not to mention the lost income, on top of the company taking a large cut of the income they do garner.
These are not similar circumstances. (I was going to say they're not comparable, but they obviously are, I've just compared them.)
I met Frank Dobson (RIP) three times. The first time was when he'd just been installed as SoS Health, so was my Minister, and he came on a walkabout of Quarry House in Leeds.
However, the second time was when he was sat next to me in the Bobby Moore Upper at Upton Park (West Ham's old ground, for non-football fans) - couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, swore like a trooper, no doubting his fervour for the club :o). I think he was running for the Labour nomination for the first London Mayoral election.
Third time, on the Tube on the way to another West Ham game, by which time he was the Labour candidate for Mayor, and had a couple of Met Police minders as a result. It was a mid-week game, so a bit rowdy, but he took all the questions with really good grace, wit, and swears.
Not all politicians in Blighty are unapproachable arses.
RIP Frank, one for you, this one's Yorkshire ale ---->
"This is an awful man, waving a book he hasn’t read, in front of a church he doesn’t attend, invoking laws he doesn’t understand, against fellow Americans he sees as enemies, wielding a military he dodged serving, to protect power he gained via accepting foreign interference, exploiting fear and anger he loves to stoke, after failing to address a pandemic he was warned about, and building it all on a bed of constant lies and childish inanity. This is not partisan. It is simply about recognizing the moral vacuum that is now pretending to lead."
https://twitter.com/FrRHendrickson/status/1267619991869779968
Fr Robert Hendrickson
And when the Water Boards were privatised (and I think most people would agree that water is a fairly essential commodity), one of the first things that happened was the laying off of the hill-workers who kept the drainage culverts clear, which resulted in empty reservoirs the next warm summer - cue hospipe bans and water rationing (while still not fixing leaky mains supplies).
Never privatise national infrastructure is a very useful maxim for good governance.
It's not general expenses, like taxis, meals in restaurants, etc. The extra £10k is specifically to equip their parliamentary office staff and researchers to work at home, if they weren't already equipped. Constituency staff costs are not included, as that's normally paid for by the party.
Back in the old days, I used to use a railway line called Aitchesswan, which was pretty damn fast, and reliable too. And it meant that there were more services just between the small villages (Tonbridge, Orpington and the like).
It's all grass nowadays, but I'm told you can still hear the trains in the middle of the night, if you listen hard and the moon's right...
"Some of the sprays can be fed via the toilet cistern"
In Malaysia, toilets have a hose with a trigger nozzle attached to the pipe supplying the cistern, ie, not from the cistern itself, which gives you a pretty good clean-up before applying paper. If I ever have the wherewithall to buy a place here in Blighty, that's the first mod.
Ah yes - at university in the early 90s, I'd somehow manage to wangle 24 hour access to the computer rooms (row upon row of PCs), which was unusual for a humanities undergrad. So of course, I made full use of said access by playing DOOM, in black and white, with the lights off, wired on coffee and Scotland's finest after the unions bar kicked out. After a while playing, every slight creak of the door, or footsteps outside would send my heart leaping out of chest like John Hurt's little friend... Fun times!
Halfway through TLJ, I went outside for a smoke; throughout this one, the wish for a cigarette disappeared about ten seconds after the "ooh, hold on, what's happening here" moment.
Sod all the naysayers, I thoroughly loved it, having seen the original on first UK release as a 7 year old.
For the sith-heads---->
Don't mention Shepherd Neame in a conversation about good beer. Not only is theirs mostly rubbish, they took out a protected designation of Kentish ale as requiring water from an artesian well, such as they have within their Faversham brewery. And which no other east Kent brewery has, meaning that a brewery in say, Ramsgate, or Cantebury, can't describe their beer as Kentish.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/271161/pfn-kentish-ale.pdf
(Re-posted with a " 't" included)
Ironically, at the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, colonialists/ex-pats in Malaya were raising funds to pay for squadrons in Blighty: my grandfather's squadron was 38 (Straits Settlement) Squadron, the Straits Settlement referring at the time to Penang, Malacca and Singapore (38 was part of bomber command).
The best description I heard was rancid custard flavoured with cat vomit...
Icon: the only way to get rid of the smell from discarded durian husks in the car park/bin storage yard just down from Jalan Alor in KL, which was opposite our apartment building and hence was the quickest way to the pub for the football on a Saturday night
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