Other What Makes Your Life, Meh?

Is happy 60th birthday in order?

 

The way I read that is that the horses that finished 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th were all trained by O'Brien?

 

Mother in law...

We're currently saving for a mortgage and my rough financial projections suggest worst case around August/September time we'll have what we need and be ready to actively look. Before that, we're getting married so theres a ton of stress and financial juggling to be done in order to pay everything off and still keep to our plan.

I really don't want to mortgage myself up to the eyeballs when we can get a perfectly respectable house for around £250k that would suit our needs but she (MIL) insists on showing my partner houses that are £30k-£50k over budget. Given I'm the one paying for it you can see my predicament.

Anyway, the other day she came up with the wonderful idea of her lending us £10k so we could get the mortgage right now. "That's nice!" you may think... but the reality is if she can get us on the property ladder pre-wedding then she's got a lovely anecdote she can bore people with the whole day "I gave them money to get a house..." like we're complete imbeciles.. Money is simply a means of control for her and I won't be falling into the trap. The money is also in a bond so theres the added complexity of potential capital gains owing or penalties for releasing the money (granted no expert in this field)

Problem I have now is getting the Mrs to understand the maths (not easy when I handle all monthly bills excluding food shop).

Expensive mortgage = Less disposable income + Money owed = No nice things for 12-18 months + Overbearing controlling Mother In-Law throwing weight around about how we essentially "owe her" = Life will be insufferable

I just don't want to do it when I can do it perfectly well on my own. Not to mention the likelihood of this actively going against us in a potential mortgage application....

We're now viewing a house apparently next week, 30k over budget, not enough deposit and no agreement in principle. So we'll almost certainly revisit this conversation 10 times.

 

Old b@stard

 

Ha, I just so heavily parsed that I didn't notice

 

Went on a date with a girl we got along great, sent her lots of pictures, and FaceTimed beforehand, she comes out with “you don’t look like the guy in the pictures, it’s like literally me, we even FaceTimed for about 3 hours.

Like how in the world can that not be me? Bonkers.

 

Grandad unexpectedly passed yesterday at 86. Was fine at Christmas and then broke his hand beginning of January, it snow balled from there.

The year that keeps on giving

 

Yet another rant about the terrible state of pay for properly trained engineers in the UK...

It is genuinely depressing to see, as I scour the job market, how poorly paid technical engineering jobs are. I'm going to make a clear distinction here: when I say "engineer", I mean someone who has been trained to a degree level in one or more disciplines. Some of the jobs I've seen are demanding some pretty clever requirements, yet are offering wages not much above technician pay rates. In fact, plumbers and electricians are earning a wage on par with these technical positions, and if I were to chose a career path again, I might have to go down this route because at least I would have the ability to do my own plumbing or electrics!

Actually, if I could do it all again, I would LEARN TO CODE. Software engineer pay is a jump above other disciplines. I just wish that back in school that for A Levels, I'd been told that there was such thing as a course in IT and programming. I would've done that instead of Chemistry which, in turn, I did instead of Design and Technology because I didn't get on with the teacher.

And don't get me started on lawyer/solicitor or HR pay scales...

 

Replaced the power shower with a new, more powerful one (old one was over 9 years old).

1 1/2 hours to fit and test for leaks, going great.

Then another 1 1/2 hours to fit the cover, damn temperature dial spindle would NOT line up, worst design ever.

 

Speaking as someone who’s had input into which software dev candidate gets hired…

I don’t care what degrees or education you had in the dim and distant past. What I care about is:

• Can you demonstrate a basic level of competence?
• Can you demonstrate that you’ve filled gaps in your skillset by learning new stuff?
• Are you a total bellend that no one on my team will want to work with?

I also don’t necessarily care how many years experience you have in a particular discipline or language, so long as you can demonstrate competence. Languages, standards, best practice, etc, are constantly moving goalposts; it’s far more important that you’re prepared to be flexible, learn new stuff, and challenge yourself to keep improving.

Not having any experience or formal education isn’t a barrier to working as a software dev. It’ll definitely make it harder for you, and you’ll be looking at junior/entry-level positions, but all you need is to get a foot in the door and build from there.

Someone who has, say, a computer science degree might have a better understanding of translating problems into software algorithms. But programming in the real world isn’t about writing the most highly optimised code: it’s about Getting Stuff Done in a way that’s maintainable and without unnecessary fluff or complexity. The real litmus test is: can I figure it out at three in the morning after being woken up by an on-call alert. Writing the most perfect and beautiful code is useless if I can’t quickly understand it; code like will be ripped out and replaced with something that can actually be read and understood on three hours sleep.

If you’re starting from scratch, one of the best things you can do is to start building a portfolio. Start learning something relatively simple like Python* and publish stuff on GitHub. Or, even better, contribute to open source projects on GitHub: you’ll learn an awful lot about key processes like code reviews, testing, pull requests, branching, etc.

Honestly, if you’re interested in jumping in - or even just learning programming for fun - then drop me a note. I’m more than happy to help you get started.

*Other languages are available. I’m biased because Python is the lingua franca of my discipline, Data Engineering, but I do think it’s a very good place to get started.

 

Competent... no
Learning... no...
Total bellend... OO YEAH!

One out of three ain't bad... oh wait.

 

Been going through some boxes of overclocking stuff and found a bunch of stuff including a couple of fluke 52s which brought a smile to my face, swifly followed by a frown as neither seemed to power on when I put batteries in. I remember hjaving issues with one but the other was working flawlessly and have been stored without batteries in etc

Will have a proper look another time but potentially gutted I didn't sell them on earlier!

 

Sorry to hear that

 

I had a court date for custody with my ex because we couldn't get on the same page about a couple things. My ex has a free lawyer through work (unlimited hours for everything not related to family law. 100hrs lifetime for family law), so she's not been super motivated to settle and is happy to just waste time and (my) money on dragging the divorce out.

I was able to reach out yesterday via email, ask her what she really wants, negotiate a few points, and come to an agreement. Unless she changes her mind, we have a custody stipulation and will both sign it instead of going to court.

This doesn't make my life awesome, but it certainly makes it less bad, so I'm counting it as a big win.

 

That shed is now gonna be called 'The Bunker' for all of its days. It's your own fault.

 

My partner recently moved to a new role in care. She’s been working in care for nearly ten years now, and despite the incredibly poor pay and ongoing staffing shortages, she remains determined to continue because she loves it.

So far, she’s enjoyed the new role. However, there have been a few "incidents" she’s mentioned recently where she or others have been spoken to or treated in a way that really doesn’t sit well with me. She’s always been quite nonchalant about how she’s treated like that's how things are managed, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard about those in care being on the receiving end of unfair treatment for no good reason. Had those things taken place in my workplace/management chain it simply wouldn't have been tolerated. If not me personally, then someone above me would come down like a ton of bricks.

I just find it incredibly frustrating to see her upset because she genuinely cares for her residents but I do see a time she walks away for her own wellbeing. While I understand that issues like pay and staffing are difficult to resolve quickly, team culture and mutual respect are well within a manager’s control here and sometimes it sounds as if that role is abused or not taken as seriously as it should.

Would love to go bang some heads together.

 

Yesterday, I got a surprise "Renew your password" email from IT (We usually get daily ones for 2 weeks before it needs doing).
IT said to "not worry about it", so I didn't.
Today, I got a "change your password NOW!" when I logged in, so attempted to do so.
Any new password I try falls foul of their new secret password requirements, even up to 128-character randomly generated ones!
So, I'm now locked out of all work-related comms and drive shares on my work PC, meaning I can't even contact IT for help.
I doubt I'll even be able to log into my PC if I have to restart it today.
Still, same pay-rate.