Posts by Already?

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

Re: Thunderbolts and lightning

Spare him his life from these pork sausages, surely?

Don’t call me Shirley etc…

Windows profanity filter finally gets a ******* off switch

Posted before but it still raises a smile…

Late 90s iirc, we may still have been on Lotus Notes or maybe on Microsoft's finest, regardless I sent a humorous mail to m'boss with a slightly risqué word in it and by return got a Failed To Deliver due to profanity response, which contained a list giving examples of unacceptable words. Halfway down was the C bomb. Seriously?

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Re: "built to survive minor accidents"

2028. Whoops.

Re: "built to survive minor accidents"

My understanding is that PSUs & power amps are the bigger beneficiaries of a good service as caps tend to dry out over time causing a gradual degradation in sound, and when they come back with renewed internals they sound like new. I don’t know, never owned any of their kit long enough to need a service but instead have chopped boxes in as p/x during a steady upgrade process. Ask me in 2018 when my amp becomes due.

The underlying point using Naim as an example is that cutting corners to encourage component failure might be an attractive business model in some cases; in this case going the other way gives owners a little bit of security buying their black boxes knowing that they have a good 10 years' use in them and beyond that can effectively be renewed so it’s either a sound long-term purchase, or builds in decent residual values.

Anyway. Speaking of hand-built - I recently lost my job building custom hand-made clocks. I’m gutted, especially considering all the extra hours I put in.

(c) Mr Keaveny on his CGR show the other week :)

Re: "built to survive minor accidents"

Naim Audio (UK based hifi manufacturer) build a mix of relatively high volume production line audio - Muso, Unity, Nova - and primarily hand built black box gear - pre-amps, power amps, PSUs, streamers. Their claim is that they will service any bit of equipment that they’ve sold since they began in 1973, and recommend the low volume black box gear is serviced every ~10 years. Servicing is usually replacing caps and updating other items that have a shelf life.

And on a different tack Mend It Mark on YT does a sterling job of coaxing failed electronic gear back to life by methodically tracing faults and replacing failed components. Definitely a YT rabbit hole worth disappearing down.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Windows dev tools

I’m too far invested in a Windows dev env - VS and SQL Server for the db hosted elsewhere for my domain. As a retired dev who likes to update the ASPX web app and has no desire to rewrite 20+ years worth of improvements what are my best options? WINE? Dual boot and keep Win xx anyway?

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

Re: Smart meters, but not so smart.

£20 a month? £5 when it started a couple of years ago chief and with inflation busting increases now sits at £7.60 a month. Unlimited calls & texts & 4GB of data which I barely make a dent in most months. Look around.

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

“It's baffling how many people just go for the first name that pops up in the auto-suggested list.”

I work p/t in the school my wife teaches in; emails are surname initial @<school>.net. Since p/t staff were given email accounts I now occasionally receive emails that begin “Hello miss. Regarding the homework you set…”. As we’re [correctly] expected not to interact with students it’s easier to fwd them onto her at the other end of the settee, tempting though it is to reply directly with a sarcastic comment.

Re: Mental image

By a loose coincidence Ade Edmonson who played Vivyan in TYO has also been in The Doodahs. He tells the story on Desert Island Discs (repeated recently, BBC Sounds…) and probably in his book Berserker which I have but am yet to read.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Re: Those were the days

My moments of greatest clarity were cycling into work, going over whatever problem might be most prominent for the day ahead. An hour and a bit cycling on quiet near-deserted country lanes was a great source of inspiration and often led to a resolution being ready in my head by the time the office loomed into view. Riding home was never as productive - maybe it was end of day so work is over till tomorrow, with the morning ride in being the opposite.

One bank's brilliant upgrade was another bank's crash

Re: Breaking [physical] windows

The warm water thing, been doing that since I learnt to drive in the late 70s, never caused the slightest problem and has the added bonus of putting warmth into the screen so it doesn’t mist up the moment you get in and breathe out. But the number of times I’ve done it on a cold wintry morn whilst various neighbours faff with de-icer and scrapers makes me smile. Even when I’ve explained - lukewarm, never more than you can comfortably put your fist in - their response is always to claim to prefer to spray and scrape. Their loss I suppose.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

My niece was born into a techie household; she'll go far. By the age of about 2 she was trying to resize printed magazine pictures with thumb & forefinger gestures. I expect the current generation of kids aged about 15 & below are all pretty similar.

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

Email. That's the answer

Having been in a similar situation, this time needing to get a production system running the day before going on hols, I sent an email to my boss and myself stating something like 'working, will be okay but needs tidying and improving. Priority on return.'

Everybody’s happy, it’s in the open and two weeks later I’m not struggling to remember what was going on last time I was here. Thinking about it I did a similar email to myself every holiday, reminding me of what was going on.

Lost your luggage? That's nothing – we just lost your whole flight!

Re: Day 2?

Most places won’t have found you a laptop or sorted logon credentials by Day 2. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Sounds similar to my experience - see the post a few above yours. Like another comment says, paranoia is a useful character attribute in these situations, hence me running it with Select instead of Delete first to check that it’s doing what it should do, then running it inside a txn to roll it back and check that it’s good to go, then leaving it - coffee or whatever - and come back to it with just one thing left to do, which is run it in full. One job, one action. And have it all ready to go. Personally, and having learned by experience, it’s almost always better to know that you don’t have to do any specific other action such as highlight all of the statement to get it right. The distraction of a manager waiting for confirmation that it’s all resolved and a client already pissed off that their data has been found wanting was enough of a distraction; I preferred to know that it was tested, checked and ready, and that there was nothing by now to go wrong.

Neat that you worked somewhere that had a whoe office. That could excuse any distractions.

Re: This one command you must not enter

SQL Server Manglement Studio allows for different coloured highlighting by server, but defaults to MS-preferred bland. It would be better for it to automatically allocate a different colour scheme for each server it connects to, with the usual options to change it manually and perhaps one to disable automatic colour selection to keep everybody happy.

There’s nothing like a bright red colour scheme to remind you that this is the !!!!!!LIVE!!!!!! server, and the yellow one isn’t.

Deletes eh?

I had to intentionally delete a large number of records from a production db, and very nearly messed up. How? Stay with me…

Inherited a system where a new database was created for each new client, each one linked back to a master db. One client reported problems; an investigation showed the daily data file that they supply to us to load into the client db was the cause, and had been wrong for a week or so. Fixing that was pretty straightforward with a few minutes faffing in UltraEdit, correcting it in the db was a bit more involved. Rolling it back would put it out of step with the master; rolling that back would put all other clients’ dbs out of step. A carefully crafted delete across this one client db and the relevant data in its master db would fix it though, so I set about it.

The delete statement in the test db was fine. Dropping that into the live system and swapping delete for select to eyeball it and confirm that it was good showed all was well, as did wrapping it inside a transaction to roll it back on completion. It was safe, so instead of diving in I went for a coffee first, knowing that it just needed one last sanity check before running it. Which I did, but as I reached across the kb to hit F5 in SQL Server Studio my wrist caught the mouse and did a perfect click drag of the cursor across the delete statement, omitting the Where clause. As any fule know SSMS runs whatever’s highlighted, and it did, happily setting off to delete everything instead of the required few hundred thousand records from the client db. I clocked it almost immediately and hit stop, then silently prayed that SQL Server would live up to its ATOM promise of all or nothing. After an age of watching the rolling back message, it succeeded. Blimey.

I’ve tried to recreate that mishap but could never get a syntactically correct statement - Where what?, invalid table name, incomplete where clause etc. Good job there was enough data there to require a long enough execution time.

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

Re: Could be worse, of course

All 4 sides of Tales From Topographic Oceans would see off more than half a day’s work.

Could have used Telephone Line by ELO - that starts with a ring tone, albeit the US one so there’s at least a stab at getting it right. Downside is Jeff Lynne warbling through the remaining 4 minutes of a quite good 70s hit. Ok once in a while but not every time the phone rings.

But but but

Some seriously shonky coding going on there if it plays the ringtone to its end even though the call has been answered. Forget the jolly jape of It's Raining Men playing to a conclusion on every call, it means that any call will be answered with the chosen ringtone still playing unless the recipient knows to answer it as the ringtone is about to finish.

Hmmm. Not sure if the developers thought this through and tested it to any degree of sanity, or if we’re being misled a little with this Who Me.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Re: More money in music these days and far fewer groups

Whispering Grass is superb. Don Estelle had a magical voice and had been a singer in an earlier life. It’s also from a time when records were made to sound great. I was playing this the other night on the hifi - Don and Windsor Davies' voices have a brilliant presence. Don’t knock it. :)

Re: Maybe not.

“Yes, the ones with systems which they can afford and enjoy using for the music.“

That’ll be most of us then. Very few ‘audiophiles' sink themselves into debt to buy a decent system, more often (from forums I’ve been on) it’s a combination of getting to the stage where the kids have left, mortgage is paid and the career has gone well enough to provide a comfortable existence, and the desire to improve the music system meets a surplus of cash. What else should we spend it on? My sister (also nr retirement age) is away on her 3rd holiday this year tomorrow, on top of their numerous weekend breaks. Who’s right? Her doing that with [apparently] nothing to show for it, or me with a little stack of Naim boxes on Fraim shelves and nice speakers sitting in the living room? It’s taken a few years of part ex, pre-owned and the simple ‘what’s your best price?' deals to get here and I wouldn’t care to guess the actual cost, but I f I walked into a dealers tomorrow to buy it all again it’d be the cost of a very a decent car to do it. But the enjoyment factor? Off the scale esp when the house is empty and you get into a flow picking and ordering tracks to build a mood, in awesome quality. I’d recommend it.

I’ve seen pics of such an upgrade for the speaker bases. The owner cut a roughly 1 sq metre hole in his floor and removed the concrete below as a column down to a depth. Not sure where he stopped, DPC maybe. Then with something in place to separate the existing concrete base from the new he poured in a column of concrete back up to just below floorboard level, and fixed a custom plinth of steel base with granite upper to the top of that new support. Full credit, it looked magnificent, and sat with a small gap between the floorboards and the granite. Plonking the speakers on that gave him the requisite results; speakers on a very solid base instead of wooden flooring, effectively isolated from the house.

Mains cables

Thought this item had died a death but a couple of days later it’s still prominent, and I see a couple of posts busily dismissing mains cable upgrades in response to my late night views.

You’re probably right in what you say about the wire not making any difference. I have Naim gear and their mains cable upgrade is called the Powerline. It uses bog standard 3 core cable, but Naim don’t make claims for the wire, their claims are for the mechanical properties of the mains plug at one end - for which they don’t claim much at all tbh - and their own version of the kettle plug at the other. The two key claims are the firm mechanical clamping action of its prongs onto the pins in the socket on the back of the receiving box, and the isolation of vibration incurred by 240V AC. Naim are big into mains power with most of their top line kit being two boxes; a separate power supply and the main unit - streamer, pre amp, power amp.

The biggest upgrade most Naim owners find is installing a separate mains for it, taking a parallel feed from the meter to a new CU running to dedicated wall sockets avoiding the radial that feeds fridges, freezers, the boiler and everything else. That’s next for mine, given how much it improves late at night when the house is asleep.

Just to add, a huge amount of the comments on this thread confirm what I suggested in my first post - that too many people have never experienced sitting in front of a decent stereo and don’t grasp a) how absolutely magnificent top-line hifi can sound, and b) how apparently tiny differences can have such an impact on the sound, differences that with the best will in the world a £299 one-box stereo from Curry’s with its flimsy 3” drivers in a stapled together box but described as 'hifi', isn’t going to deliver.

To the guy laughing at changes in soundstage, it’s where the speakers effectively disappear and the music becomes a 3D image with height depth and width. That’s what can change with different speaker cables and different combinations of source and amplification where the one constant is the choice of speakers.

Well. I chanced on this article looking for a Who Me.

It’s a given that anything that vaguely references audio will attract the snide and the sarky, and lo - all are here. Dismissive posts about mains, about anything over £1k being wasted, how digital files aren’t up to it. And so on.

If you want to brag about how you’ve never sat in front of a serious hifi this is your chance. And not just sat for 5 minutes through half of Comfortably Numb and got bored before you wandered off. Maybe you should have made it a hobby. Wife apart and Leicester unexpectedly winning the Premier League the other year, there’s not much to beat being left alone with a serious stereo and a NAS full of your own favourite music plus a Qobuz hi-res account. And a bottle of nice wine.

Flac files beat any vinyl. Mains cables do make a difference. Better interconnects and speaker cables change the sound. Directional? Maybe not…

But being in front of a seriously good streamer that goes into a magnificent preamp then a chuffing excellent power amp and out into a pair of tremendous speakers isn’t to be sniffed at, especially when the upgraded mains cables improved things for each box. Honestly, the sound is magnificent. Not just quite good or 'nice bass', but genuinely fabulous. It’s why I’m still up at quarter to three.

If your baseline is £899 worth of Richer Sounds' finest, fill yer boots. If you’ve arrived at the top end of a specialist audio manufacturer’s range, it all looks (and sounds) a bit different. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

Re: At least you fixed the problem.

Not the cliché MK is dull response surely?

I moved there for a couple of years 30 years ago, am still here. It’s great: drive at NSL speeds and get across town on the grid roads in < 15 minutes unlike the peak time crawl whenever I go back to what I still call home. As mentioned in other replies it’s got Bletchley Park, MK museum (fab), the theatre, The Gallery with its well worth a visit cafe too. Everywhere is within walking distance of huge green open spaces and linear parks, the same time in any direction is a great bike ride in open countryside. Pubs, nightlife, cafes, decent shopping centre, kart track, ye olde villages within and close by outside, as well as the old towns, and London 40 minutes away. Etc etc etc. Quality of life here is great.

But yeah - roundabouts and concrete cows. Yawn.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: Keyboard Confusion

Having semi retired from this lark I’ve quickly forgotten the less used kb s/cuts, but this morning trying to position two windows equally across the screen I thought Win + < or > did the job, but found that that (or one of them) brings up the emojis panel.

As any fule know, Win + R or L arrow places a window across half the screen.

Excel's comedy of errors needs a new script, not new scripting

Re: Clueless users

Like he says, get a a refund, and stop paying.

It’s been years since a licence was needing simply for owning receiving apparatus. You need a licence in the UK to watch or record any tv channel either live or as live, regardless of where it comes from, or to watch anything on the BBC iPlayer.

You can watch all other streaming services content without a licence, unless you’re watching a live or as live broadcast - e.g. tennis or Premier League football on Amazon.

Live or as live allows for the inherent delays in broadcasting, including the short delays added to allow for cutting away if something untoward occurs.

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Timesing? I hate that word, it’s multiply(ing).

On the odd occasion I see Countdown on the box and a contestant instructs Rachel to 'times that by' it bugs me almost as much as the moron-central habit of starting a sentence with So.

This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

Adults Only

Probably told this before on here, but it’s a fact that filtering and blocking works both ways.

My wife likes her camper van, me not so much but we or sometimes just she will go off in it for a weekend. We’re both old enough not to want to share these jaunts with squawking kids and toddlers so she searches for campsites that don’t accept children. That’s quite normal given the demograph of motorhomers and camper van enthusiasts.

But she’s a teacher, and her school IT bods regularly get an alarm from her laptop that yet again she’s triggered the adult-only alert. Even at home. So far no consequences of any worth. Yet.

Whatever you do, don't show initiative if you value your job

Taking it on yourself to delete a load of files without first having the knowledge of what they’re there for, is bonkers. James decided that he knows better than the teams of developers who created the system, and worse that deleting files was bound to be ok. Wrong wrong wrong. What a chuffing numpty.

IT advice fuelled by beer is the best IT advice of all, right?

Back stabber...

Reminds me of Y2K days, when we were getting to the end of a major UK financial institution's source code renovation. The project had gone well; the bank was where I'd worked until 18 months previously and had outsourced the work to an outside company, and I'd landed a job with them - easiest interview ever, which was mostly me pointing out flaws in their planned process and referring to code that I'd written a couple of years earlier. Having a number of good contacts on the client site was also deemed to be v useful for those times when an informal quick question can shortcut 3 days of written requests etc, esp when some of said contacts were drinking buddies and members of our then football team. I still played, even though I'd long since left.

Very close to the end of the Y2K thing we were obviously reallocating our people to new projects - these things don't just end with a bang, they wind down as the last of the work is completed. Over a beer one night one of my 'chums' (let's regomise him as 'Steve') casually asked what was next for me; in all innocence I joked that I'd lost interest now that the last few bits that were nothing to do with me were going through and that a new project was lined up, away from 'bloody y2k renovations'. Then we got onto football and Leicester having another good season under Martin O'Neill, and that was it until Monday morning when I was hauled into our highest level manager's office to explain why I'd told the client that we'd 'lost interest and were now going through the motions till it finishes'. It transpired that Steve had gone straight to his boss - also one of our fellow footballers - to report what I'd said, with added flourishes, out of context twists and and a couple of completely made-up facts to embellish his 'insider knowledge'. A terse phone call a few minutes after the internal bollocking didn't do much to clear things up and Steve & I fell out over it. I think we've only spoken once since when we bumped into each other in a shop.

A good life lesson though - best to be never fully off duty when dealing with clients, even if you still see yourself as still one of them that's gone to the other side.

Your app deleted all my files. And my wallpaper too!

Good spot. I’ve awarded myself a thumbs down for not reading the previous post properly.

Defensive is fine but in your scenario you’re asking the user to confirm what he believes to be the correct selection, or that he/she won’t really understand what’s being asked, or more likely that he’ll just hit Okay as quickly as possible to get on with it. A mix & match approach always worked best IME, esp when inviting users to interact with file operations.

We have some sad news about Facebook. It has returned to the internet after six-hour mega outage

Re: All their tools were down as well...

I find it hard to take seriously anyone who uses the phrase “I could of…”

There is no verb To of. Of has no business existing in that sentence.

Oh! A surprise tour of the data centre! You shouldn't have. No, you really shouldn't have

Re: Regomiser requires an update!

Jo is traditionally feminine; Joe is masculine.

My son is a Joe, his mother aka my wife cannot bear seeing birthday and Christmas cards to him as 'Jo'.

Updating in production, like a boss

"...all it takes is to miss a line in the part of your query you highlight before pressing F5."

I once did that, after doing all the careful checking etc. I was happy, everything was right, the delete affected only the required rows and then as I reached over to hit F5 I caught the mouse with my sleeve and in doing so highlighted just the delete clause leaving the all-important Where excluded. I could sit there and try to repeat that trick a million times and fail every time, but not this one.

As soon as I realised I hit the Stop button and prayed for MSSMS to halt execution, hoping the much vaunted Atomic All or Nothing promise would in fact work. It did, but it was only due to the production db having many millions of rows that there was time to catch it before it completed.

Surely anyone faced with doing updates on a live box will run the query first as a Select instead of an update to check that an expected quantity of rows are updated and repeat that a couple of times, and then run the Update inside a transaction with a Select immediately after on the expected updates to confirm which then finishes with a Rollback after the check to undo it? Then do that again, and again to check and then once more to make sure. Then step away, have a coffee and then check again. And get someone else to eyeball the script that you're about to run.

We've all been there, I certainly have. The sense of trepidation as you're about to hit Execute is enough to want to be absolutely sure that you're happy with what you're about to inflict on the database.

Thanks, boss. The accidental creation of a lights-out data centre – what a fun surprise

Re: A&E light switch

Trouble is that doors with electrical locks in that situation are an invitation for that sort of mistake.

For a start you're in a hospital which by definition is a place you wouldn't be at unless somethings bad has happened. You're either relieved to be fixed or stressed, if you have kids with you that's additional stress, and the last thing you want is a door that doesn't just open but also has an instruction just of out of eyeline and a choice of switches probably a bit further out of eyeline. And you've already made yourself look a bit of a numpty by walking into a door that didn't open so you're even more enthusiastic now about just getting out. You scan the environment for clues, see the words Switch, Exit and Press and hit the first one you see.

The people who fit these things aren't ergonomics experts or sociology graduates, they're electrical fitters who have a practical plan and approach to doing it. As everyone knows (on here at least ) if there's more than one option and one of them has an undesirable outcome, it's better to make the desirable outcome the default that would be hard to get wrong. Don't rely on people in unfamiliar situations having the time or the wherewithal to weigh up all the options and to carefully consider the various options and outcomes before executing the default or - to their eyes - the easiest action. Sod's Law still applies.

Protip: If Joe Public reports that your kit is broken, maybe check that it is actually broken

Re: PC Upgrade

A manager of my acquaintance managed to have laptops stolen 3 times from restaurants when entertaining clients. Odd how each coincided with when we techie chaps were going through the upgrade cycle.

For one of them I discovered by chance that she'd requested the laptop assigned to me as it was a better spec than her replacement, and her needs for a higher spec unit were greater than mine. At times like that having a boss fully onside is a big help.

Oops, says Manchester City Council after thousands of number plates exposed in parking ticket spreadsheet

You're in town, you misjudge a junction or a roundabout and some oik gives you the V's so you respond in kind and drive off. 100 yards later you've forgotten it ever happened. Later that evening you find your car has been keyed outside your house and the windows stoved in.

Or..

You've escaped your abusive ex's clutches and moved somewhere else and not told him where. He gets on to DVLA and finds where the car is now registered...

I'm sure there are other just as obvious reasons, if I could be bothered to spend any more time to think of them.

Gummy bears as a unit of measure? The Reg Standards Soviet will not stand for this sort of silliness

Re: Football Fields

No. Square pitches are explicitly not allowed in the laws of the game. Pitches are also different sizes for different age groups, but the aspect ratio has to be maintained regardless of size.

https://www.football-stadiums.co.uk/articles/are-all-football-pitches-the-same-size/

Re: Football Fields

Clearly it's a zero-based index of lanes, where Lane[0] and Lane[9] set Lane.IsEmptyOrNull() = true by default.

Two clichés, one headline: 'No good deed goes unpunished' and 'It's always DNS'

Re: My Manager!

When I was bogged down with a particularly tough problem that I just couldn't suss my excellent boss stuck a note on my now closed door stating that I had the plague so zero visitors pls - we were a fun relaxed site with plenty of time for social chat & coffee etc so a note saying Keep Out was a massive blessing. He backed it up with more formal email to all involved requesting No Disturbances for the time being.

On top of this he also took all the flak that came from other sites until deciding who would deal with it. He retired a few years ago and I'm two jobs down the line now, but he was a top boss.

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

Re: The extra pair of eyes don't even have to see the problem.

That was our regular thing - if something doesn't make sense or a bit of code just won't do what it's meant to do the answer was to go and explain why to whoever was handy, even if it was the receptionist (she was a lovely woman so any excuse...).

It evolved into explaining problems to The Big Cardboard Ear, as salient life within wasn't necessary for the obvious to land squarely between the eyes before too long.

Running joke: That fitness gadget? It's, er, run out

Re: why?

Ian Marshall was a half decent footballer, played for Leicester, then Bolton. He was excused going all the way to Bolton to train when he still lived in Leicester, but had to wear a training app for his runs round the park etc. You can guess the rest - he got a bit bored with it but kept sending his numbers, in till Sam Alladyce phoned him one day to check why they were off the scale. He had to confess that he'd fitted the gear to his dog. Busted...

Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters?

The major US-based systems and services supplier I worked for 20 years ago had for a while a filter that correctly blocked emails containing profanities and strong language. The fun part was that it helpfully appended to the bounced email a list of words that could have caused the block, hence the sender was helpfully presented with that same list of the worst (best? hardest? strongest... yh) words that weren't allowed. Yes - c**t was in there, in full.

My OH is a big fan of camping and caravanning but at our age prefers to book sites where children aren’t allowed. It’s quite normal; these sites tend to use the phrase Adults Only to identify themselves as child-free. She's a teacher, it took a couple of visits to the school IT gurus to explain why her evening web searches kept triggering their alerts.

Micropayments company Coil distributes new privacy policy with email that puts users' addresses in the ‘To:’ field

A County Council planning dept did the same to me and 40+ others, emailing an apparently random group with a change to planning policy. The culprit's response to having it flagged up was basically 'meh', until the analogy that it was akin to me standing in the middle of town handing our her mobile phone number to 40 passing strangers lodged in her head. A meaningless and too-late apology followed.

Capita still wants to offload education software unit, sale talks ongoing

Re: quite confused

There was a split relatively recently, it may have been 2018 but could have been a year or 2 before that. Regardless in the last few years Capita certainly issued a split that halved the price & doubled the holding.

In my time working there from around 2007 the price was considered low if it was below £7 a pop. The Sharesave scheme in 2010(?) opened at £7.62 and matured 3 years later at ~£12, I kept mine until they reached what I thought was a peak of about £13, then watched as they floated a bit higher. It paid for a decent hifi upgrade.