woodenhead
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Status Updates posted by woodenhead
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Busy day today, what order do I do things:
- Work - pays the bills
- Delivery of a gym quality spin bike (for Mrs W) - needs building
- Shopping - Offers expire today
- Delivery of sound cards for my class 40 and class 50 - need installing and testing
- Delivery of new socks and a jumper for Mrs W - need trying on??
So top is work, has to be, it pays for my trains!!
But after that, I really want to hear my locos, but the food offers expire today and Mrs W also wants her bike built so it looks like last on the list will be the locos, the socks can wait.
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Just heard an Air Raid siren go off in Manchester.
War in Ukraine, Energy problems and inflation - I thought it couldn't get any worse in 2022.
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I feel a need to sell some stock, I hope it's the right decision, time will tell I guess.
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I read your post explaining why you're in this position - my sympathies - but would just say the obvious: Don't rush into it. To avoid accidentally disposing of something you regret later, try following this process:
- List the layouts you plan to build, in order of likelihood from most to least (we're all planning more than one, aren't we?).
- Map all your rolling stock against the layouts.
- Pick out those that are only mapped against one layout and rank them in order of least likely layout to most likely.
- Sell the lowest value items first, as they are probably the easiest to replace if you've made a mistake.
That's probably all blindingly obvious but sometimes I find doing something like this makes it easier to justify a decision to myself.
Rob
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It's going through my head all the time.
The OO stuff has been away since mid 2019 when I moved rooms, I got rid of some at the end of last year which was the easy bit and it funded the foray into DCC sound in N which I am quite happy with.
In OO I have stock covering SR and GWR in the 1930s, it is the SR stock I am thinking of selling and keeping the GWR stuff as a little GWR branch is in my head whereas a similar SR one isn't anymore. I thought I'd regret it when I sold my OO SR tender engines, but I didn't, but I really don't want to part with a GW Bulldog.
What I don't think I will be having is a large OO layout anytime soon, the N gauge takes up half the room, I have space for a small OO layout but even a branch line station terminus needs more space than I have for an OO railway at the moment, certainly with the amount of stock I have.
My thinking is a return to what I was meant to do when I first went and bought some OO gauge - sidings for a bit of shunting and one or two locos.
What I am stuck between is wanting to dabble in North American, but also something in OO that is BR Blue and the solution I have at the moment is a small stabling point at the end of an industrial spur with a couple of sidings for shunting wagons and a line for stabling locos - keeping the scenics basic this could swap out to an NA shortline end of spur.
However, I do recognise that I may regret selling the SR stuff and I could just spend a chunk on diesels and see where it takes me before I sell the other stuff. My days of collecting though I think are behind me, I also have to much N gauge which at some point also needs thinning out tad, the diesels are out at the moment but in the box are ex GW, SR and LMS locos plus stock.
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More space for model railways!!
Some tidying and reorganising of my office come railway room has released space for either a full loop in N or a second railway in OO.
Decisions, decisions, decisions
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it will be an unboxing of the OO stuff event.
If I go with N I have to start the layout over and my wife pointed out I do have an OO itch so why not do that and have both.
How nice of her - now I can buy some of the rather nice Rapido SECR open wagons that are coming too.
So N gauge BR Blue sorted, OO steam sorted, but what to do with the N gauge steam stuff...
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Took my first train ride since early 2020 today - short hop CLC to Styal, train was rammed between Oxford Rd and Piccadilly for Parklife.
Required 5 gin and tonics, a zinfandel and a bottle of Camden Lager, a gammon steak and later a lamb curry to calm myself
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It was administered over 7 hours.
All was good until we had to do Oxford Rd to Piccadilly on a seperate service - people were using the express services and TPE to get to Piccadilly to get the tram to Heaton Park. The train was completely rammed with drunk youth in various states of dress, we had one corner near a door and my wife was considering just getting off the train. I had to reassure her it was just for 2 minutes then they would all get off, which they did, but left the train in a right state, cans everywhere till the airport where a cleaner got on during the reversal.
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Why do I only solve problems between the hours of midnight and 8am?
If ever I have an issue related to work that is frustrating me working after midnight or getting up stupidly early to work on it seems to be the answer.
Had an issue frustrating me all week, get up at 5:30, add in some code to throw out exceptions and then find the source of my issues and a simple ToString() resolves it.
I think my mind is too noisy in the day, it gets distracted and cannot see clearly, but during the wee hours it has clarity and problem solve.
Don't think the wife would appreciate me working from home on nights all the time though.
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i can relate to this - work related problem solving stops me sleeping (not stress per se but rather my mind gets into gear and i come up with some great ideas). Try to distract with thinking about trains and then do layout problem solving instead.... what i have found helps though is putting a Radio 4 comedy on quietly on the iPhone - i have a few faves - and distracts me and gets me back to sleep
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I love cold chicken curry - that is cooked chicken leftovers carefully reheated in a curry - yum.
Today I am experiencing for the first time - cold cold chicken curry, the cold leftover cold chicken curry made carefully from cooked chicken leftovers from the day before yesterday.
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Some weeks are hard and some weeks are just amazing, this week has been the latter.
Not only have I overcome my fear of tech with trains - JMRI installation with Sprog working but I've completed a piece of code development that wasn't even on the radar a week ago and today began processing files for the first few of 50,000 free school meal vouchers that need to go out in the next week or so to parents.
Twelve months ago I was in the early days of an apprenticeship where I was feeling quite negative, but now realise just how valuable my learning from it has been, from requirements gathering, flowcharts, Entity tables to Test Driven Development - all new buzzwords that I now use when planning a piece of work before I even begin typing the code. Who says an old dog can't learn new tricks.
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Another annual fake Christmas successfully completed.
Every year we do Christmas early as it's the best way to get the family together and I can do a full turkey roast and exchange presents.
So convincing is this day that I was driving my son home thinking why are all the pubs overflowing and why are there people with shopping walking around.
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When the toilet on the second floor en-suite decides 3am is a good time to let go of the soil pipe and leak into the bathroom below it!!!
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So after my recent English diagnostic for an apprenticeship I've now completed a math diagnostic and the outcome is yet another blow to my self esteem.
Despite working in computers for the best part of 25 years I apparently need to practice my negative and positive numbers and I am not very good at working out areas, diameters and radii.
I seem to have kept myself gainfully employed for 37 years with these gaps in my skills and with me now in my last decade (if that) of my current line of work I don't think I am suddenly going to be needing to work out the width of a swimming pool when I only know the area, it's height and depth.
I really hope they don't suggest or tell me I have to do some remedial work when I meet up with my course support later this week cos I think I know where will tell them to stick it.
I am having a hard enough time of it at the moment, my job is solitary, I am not getting out of the house, my state of mind is on the edge and I cannot even garner the confidence to buy some baseboards and begin building a new model railway so I would rather someone didn't tell me that I need to improve my basic math and English.
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Hang in there - your long experience will knock spots off these daft tests that are rarely fit for purpose. If it's any consolation, I nearly thumped an HR person once for 'feeding back' that I didn't seem to know much about telecommunications despite having worked in that field for 20 years and the interviewer asking only one daft question. I was livid at the time - it added to other concurrent issues I was having.
You'll win out over it all, try to keep focussed and ignore the noise - you can do it!
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Today, I shall be mostly cutting wood
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Well it got a little more complicated when I remembered I needed to add another track to the baseboard and wire it first.
But all the cutting is done, spot of screwing
after tea and then I can mount the baseboard at it's permanent height.
No blood was spilt cutting the wood and it's all the correct length too so not a bad afternoon.
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In preparedness for lockdown and not being able to go out:
- bought several litres of emulsion to paint the parts of the house that didn't get done in 2019
- bought some wood glue to put my new baseboards together
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New favourite webcam https://www.dawlishbeach.com/cameras/free-cameras/san-remo-cam-sponsored-by-waterside-holiday-lets/
Trains and sea - what's not to like
It's background noise whilst I work from home - reminds me of the outdoors when I am stuck in a little room all day.
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A day of two halves: Morning my new Grainge & Hodder baseboards arrive, Afternoon a tooth snaps
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Got up this morning with plans aplenty, completely blown apart by a failure in some API code I'd written over 12 months ago.
Rather annoyingly, there are six routines using the URL, five have failed and one is still running albeit doing something a little different, even my new sexier code for a client also failed when I tested if it could get around the problem. Yet running the code in other software applications returned data as they should do so the code is sound.
Spent the rest of today proving to myself and to others there is a firewall blocking the connection. Fourteen hours now to prove to myself I am not a numpty and, it's not my fault it's failed despite the overwhelming evidence that this code has been running successfully every 10 seconds 24/7 for the past 14 months.
Impostor syndrome is real.
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Today's take on life: It is what it is, only you can make it better
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I love testing data - NOT
So my colleague has written a new data extract and not only are there hundreds of thousands of records but also a ridiculous number of columns that all sound very similar.
It's a great dataset, a development of an earlier one and before it gets unleashed I am testing it on some known extracts to check the results are the same. Found an issue, very subtle, so subtle I didn't notice at first and thought perhaps it was a naming convention issue in a report.
Anyway got to the bottom of it after searching through a lot of code and a few columns have been misaligned in a derived table.
It reminded me of Andre Previn on Morecambe and Wise and Eric says "I'm playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order" In my case "I've got the right data, but not necessarily in the right order"
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Drinking pina colada under a blue sky being caressed by a gentle breeze
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Casually waiting for a set of Les Mills pump weights and bar to arrive......for the wife.
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Mild Easter panic - oven seemed to be broken - but luckily a Hotpoint F03 error just needs you to go through a reset, as per Hotpoint's own YouTube site.
Rather scarily though, the process invoking what looks like the high temperature clean setting - the doors locked and it began making noises but I got past it and reset the motherboard.
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Bl**dy annoying when your 22 new listings on Ebay are still not showing in searches or your account after 24 hours.
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Woodenhead's photo studio about to open for the afternoon. Ebay offer too good to miss, so more stock going.
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Feeling a little better now - couple of days madness out of my system.
System migration back on track, so time to mask up and head on out to the shops.
I might even take a look at my railway later on
