AndrewC

De bier is lekker.

In Canada and the US brisket (point and flat) was and I stress was about the cheapest cut of meat available. Usually quite fatty compared to grass fed UK beef. It was used mostly for things like salt beef, pastrami, and corned beef. These days of course us BBQ nuts have discovered that it is the best cut for low and slow smoked beef due to its high fat content compared to many other cuts. The flat can still be used for curing but mostly cooked for sliced brisket. The point makes amazing burnt ends. This has driven the cost of brisket through the roof everywhere. The per kg cost in the UK has almost doubled in the past few years far higher than other cuts. I've got a "small" one of 3.5kg that will be cured and slow smoked to make a large batch of pastrami in the coming weeks. In other news, good moaning from the boring borough, It is Friday, or in our corporate lingo Fri-Yay. Today I shall be mostly writing pre-workshop documents. <sigh> We had a great 5 days with the offspring and his lady. Pizza night, sea creature feast, darts, games, and a day trip to Brighton. Enjoy the weekend.

We've tried Nutella, M&M chocolate spread, peanut butter, even the cliché cheese. The little blighter just doesn't want to cooperate. It is possible that he/she has grown a bit and now can't get through some of the holes in the joists for the pipework and is trapped where it isn't possible to get into any of the rooms. We shall see. When the building renovations were done, the dropped ceiling in the bathroom was removed and there were 2 skeletons discovered. Likely been there since the bathroom was rebuilt in the 80s as there was no way in or out.

Possibly the funniest thing I've read this week. The boring borough's council is beyond crap. They offer f*ck all in the way of pest control or really any other service for our rather expensive council tax. Our bin collection is at less than 50% for example. They once famously refused to clean up a dead fox as more than half the carcass was on Network Rail property. (I sh*t thee not, although Serco is long gone now) Even once we get rid there is going to have to be some major floorboard lifting and blocking of entrance routes. Steel wool & silicone sealant is apparently the weapon of choice for that. I watched about half an episode of the Apprentice once. None of that lot would get a job guarding a bollard never mind working in a real business. Either the whole thing is staged (likely) or the show runners deliberately find the most dysfunctional wannabe celebs available. (very likely) Same with crap like big brother. The first series was actually quite interesting with the concept of putting strangers in to a house. After that it descended into how extreme can we get with a group of circus freaks to make the biggest car crash faux melodrama possible. <meh> edit: bloody typo

Greetings from the boring borough, where the urban foxes thrive and nary a rat to be found. (except at the local MP's office) We seem to have an unwanted lodger in the form of a mouse. Now we've long had mice hanging around the greenhouse looking for nibbles, especially hoovering up the spillage from the bird feeders. This one however has moved in. Traps set, peanut butter to tempt but to no avail so far. It seems that the schitty builder we had 4 years ago didn't put any sort of blockage on the pipe runs. That means the little b*gger has a mousey motorway from under the house in the front room direct via the central heating pipe runs upstairs, along under the bathroom floor, and then down to the boiler and from there under the kitchen cabinets. A costly pest control call is in my future I expect. The cats have been given a warning to get to work if one is seen daring to pop out into any room. A 4 day weekend is soon to be at hand. Enjoy the day.

That's been my experience in the past. This, however is very different. Work is less like work and more like a social club at times. Weekly breakfast social meeting, virtual pub quizzes, a non-business Whatsapp group, Friday social meeting. Business meetings that contain yay and nay shout outs from people for their week's experience. Weekly worship shout outs to people who have gone above and beyond. After 40+ years in the workplace, this is such a departure of olde time norms that it is quite an adjustment. We have also adopted the new fangled American trend of no set number of annual leave days. If I want to take 6 or 7 weeks off, I can. It is self regulated and the expectation is to not extract the urine. There is no "office" but we do have a hub which anyone can use if they feel the need to get together physically with another team member or just to get out of the house. There are also quarterly work together days for each region. The last one was in a pub. A bit different sitting there with a dozen people all with a glass of something next to their laptops. No silliness, just mature adults with a drink while working.

I have to say yes. After 11 1/2 years with redacted I finally made a move last summer. From a big corporation to a small upstart. Bit more money even taking in to account the loss of the car allowance. Better hours, better benefits, better life/work balance. Still home based. No more government projects. I've gone from a 70s vintage management by ledger structure to one of the most progressive business models in the country. (ceo is up for a bucket of awards this year) The biggest challenge with adapting to this new way of working has been getting used to the blurred lines between work and personal life. I'm hoping this job will take me through until retirement now. In the IT world the number of people jumping around at the moment is staggering. One only has to look around in LinkedIn for the signs. Recruiters desperate to find qualified bodies. Every third posting seems to be "my last day at xxx, looking forward to new adventures at yyy". My former product specific practice within redacted has lost about 50% of their staff since the beginning of covid. There are several that came and went within their 6 month probation. Not because they weren't good enough but because the company wasn't. People tired of being treated like crap for no reward. The biggest danger to the industry is so many of these are leaving IT altogether for their "dream" jobs. One lady I worked with has now given up 20+ years of project management to run her own coffee & cake cart. The UK now has a very large shortfall of good & competent IT people across most of the disciplines. 3435 calendar days until retirement.

Just being a bit lot facetious this morning. My month of no social media is at an end and I'm in a bit of a p1ssy mood after looking at all the bozo <another word belongs here> on twitter. boo hiss: the site censored bollards (or another similar word)

<bog standard greeting></bog standard greeting> <usual dull text that nobody gives a sh*t about></usual dull text that nobody gives a sh*t about> <predictable sign off text> </predictable sign off text>

Depends on your budget. You can pay just as much for a gamer as an office. However, I did mention all this in a missive around home working a couple of weeks ago on this very thread. In general you can expect to pay about 30% - 60% less for a good gaming chair as compared to an office chair. GT-Player are a decent brand and have chairs for most budgets. I paid about £120 for mine and it is far more comfortable than the one my previous employer supplied for home use. (they paid over £600 for those) Ikea do an ok range but I've found they don't last as long.

As @regme suggested. Take a look at either the NMRA or other modular standards. If not for the actual track plan or implementation of the module interconnectivity, but for construction and other tips around working with them. I went totally modular several years ago. It leaves me with the ability to add, subtract, and update the "layout" by swapping in and out individual boards. The first thing to remember is a module isn't just a single baseboard. It is a collection of 1 to many boards. One other place to look is Model Railroad Hobbyist and the publisher's TOMA concept. He's doing almost exactly what you described. https://forum.mrhmag.com/post/toma-bringing-it-all-together-12209553 Bsaically building a whole series of scenes together one at a time. Build one, then move to the next and bolt them together. I can promise you, once you assemble a board, lay track, and do the wiring on a table top without crawling on the floor, your life will change. I've seen some people build a construction frame for their TOMA boards. That lets them work on top or bottom just by spinning the board by 180 degrees. <shameless plug> link to one of my modules in my signature </shameless plug>

Really getting fed up with the sh1t performance of the site. Sorry Mr Y but it is becoming a bit of a sad joke. If I’d pushed something this poor onto a paying client, or a public paid subscription I’d be looking for work. Someone wake me when the situation improves.

Or their Swedish cousin, Bjørn Idle.

Moaning all from the boring borough. Decided to take another "personal" day today. Nothing in my calendar, no project work this week, and I have 5 built up that have to be used by the end of March, so it is a perfect storm of nuffin' to do so take the day off. More re-wiring of the adopted Freemo module will take place. (hit me with that awl) @BoD Hang in there. We are all here even if just for a virtual spleen venting. Like many others I'm reaching my frustration limit with the site. (I know shut up or eff off) Some studies from a few years back found that a casual user will move on or cancel a page load after 2 seconds. A user looking for information on a specific page will wait about 4-5 seconds before giving up. I'd love to see the traffic analytics on RMw for the past week. For me, if the forum hasn't loaded a page in about 5 seconds, I give up and come back later. The downside of this is yesterday I ended up ordering a pair of 27" computer monitors as SWMBO is going to be remote working for a while, and they were on sale so I got one for myself as well. If the forum had been working properly, my bank balance would be around £500 better off. <insert smiling emoji here, as the f*cking link isn't working> Like @BR60103 (bloody page won't tag anymore) I grew up in the middle of the change from imperial to metric. However, out west when the pumps changed I was paying 18.9 cents/l which was around 86 cents a gallon. I passed my driving test in Aug 77 and less than 3 weeks later all the distance and speed limit signs changed to metric. I had an old crappy Datsun and ended up putting stickers on the speedometer. They were crap and fell off after the first cold snap. To this day I can convert road speeds and distances in my head almost instantly. Just to keep my brain occupied in traffic, the Land Rover has all the instrumentation set in metric. Good to see Mr Tiger's vision has a good prognosis. On that note, a day late haggis for breakfast awaits, as does more coffee. Time to go. Enjoy the day.

Greetings all from the boring borough. I see once again the site is trying to drive Mr Y into an early grave. Can't see this being a good look for Warner's at all. If you were a newer subscriber to "gold" (not having empathy towards the poor b*gger trying to keep it online, nor the history of the forum) wanting the forum more than the other bits, would you keep subscribing? Likely not. I think it is reaching the point where the accountants have to either properly fund the tin & string behind the scenes, or flog it off. The half arsed attempts of the advertising intrusions must also be driving people away and leaving a poor impression of Warners. In other news, I used to use David Clulow for my specs. Bloody pricy but the shop in Canary Wharf & the staff were great. I still have my original set of specs that are usable for reading. Considering I've spent the past 41 1/2 years in front of a computer monitor, my distance vision is only just out of range of being able to drive without, and I only use glasses otherwise for close up reading and playing darts. I moved on as the previous employer had a vision benefit which originally allowed me to go to any participating optician (not Clulow sadly) and pick from a very limited range with limited options. After many complaints about the lack of quality, they changed to a SpecSavers package. That meant every 2 years I got a free basic test, a comprehensive test for £5 extra and most other things included. My last visit would have cost over £600 for everything but I only paid out £95 in the end. (transitions + varifocal + better quality lens) Sadly my new employer doesn't have anything, so I'm dreading the next visit. Like others, I wish they could/would refit existing frames. Today I've decided to take a flex day and I'm off to the shed for the next 8 or so hours. Coffee at hand and bbq lamb steaks tonight. Enjoy the day.

Warning. Bears of a cake addicted persuasion should look away now. https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=2367099&jwsource=cl Edit: Oh for fork sake. Bloody thing won't embed.

I'm so sorry to read this BoD. Thoughts with you and your family.

Moaning all from the boring borough. Another Moanday is upon us. Wish I'd stayed in bed. Another night of flopping about like a freshly landed salmon and little actual sleep. All this talk of working from home again. I'll just stick my 2p worth in as I wrote the guide and best practices for my former employer. (now being used globally) There are 3 main types of work remote people. Those who excel at being left alone to get on with the job, those who have to be watched constantly (needing a formal working structure), and those who like a mix of the 2 with some office exposure and some remote working. If you are at total social butterfly and have to have an office environment as part of your lifestyle, then remote working shouldn't be considered. I've been fully remote for 12 years now, apart from client projects where they insisted on having a body onsite. I can say that being very minimally-social I don't miss the office. One of the biggest issues I had when moving to London was the loss of the cubical. Working in Canada and the US the cube was a far better environment than the awful open plan offices prevalent in the UK. One of my first purchases here was a set of good headphones and an mp3 player to drown out the office noise. So here is a very condensed guide. 1: If you are working from home but miss the social aspect, then try to balance time in the office or if not possible arrange face to face events. This works too if you are working on remote sites away from co-workers. A pub quiz, dinner, karaoke night, etc. My current employer arranges regional group working days. Our last one was in a pub near Clapham Junction. If you are going to be remote for any length of time a dedicated home office is essential. Trying to work on a kitchen table is ok for a few days or weeks but not long term. The office needs to be treated as an office. This is your new professional space. Get a good chair and desk. Save a bundle by buying a gamer's chair instead of from an office furniture supplier. They are in general better ergonomically designed and usually about 40% cheaper. Make sure the lighting is adequate. If there are others in the home, stress that closed door = do not disturb. Have a home buddy. A co-worker that you have a daily "water cooler" chat with online. That way you both have a check and balance towards your work and mental health. Exercise (pot kettle black) is essential. Even if it is just a stretch and a couple of sets of stairs. There are now several models of desk cycles available. Pedal while you work. There are also very expensive adjustable desks that allow you to stand while working for part of the day. Combine these with a treadmill and you could walk several km while trying not to die of PowerPoint poisoning. Avoid home or work creep. That means set your "office" hours and stick to them. Make sure you have the ability to get up and walk around at least once every hour to 90 minutes. Take a full lunch break AWAY from the office. No eating al-desko. Don't work out of hours unless the current project requires it and then ensure you balance the time. Consequently, don't be tempted to take advantage of being at home to do little chores or watch TV instead of working. ('not a problem, I'll just make up the time later') Set a strict schedule and work to it. If you are in your office, you are working. If you aren't it is your personal time. Never the twain shall meet. To start with a good idea is to put all of your day into your calendar. If you are using something like Teams and/or MS Word, it makes it easier to stick with a schedule. 09:00 "bing" start, 10:30 "bing" stretch break ... 13:00 "bing" lunch .... 17:00 "bing" close your computer and leave your office space until tomorrow. When setting your schedule make sure you set your lunch break to be either out of office or unavailable in order to prevent others slipping a meeting into your calendar. The same applies with your "work day" hours. Set them to auto-reject meeting requests that are outside of your working hours. Since I'm rambling, a thought to Mr Y with regards to the site. He took a hobby, dare I say amateur forum site and rolled it into a commercial venture through Warners. The danger of this is that with subscriptions and Warner's branding, people expect a commercial grade product with a near 100% uptime. Sadly, there is no sufficient operational resilience nor is there any visible service level. While I can't see what is actually happening under the covers, it is apparent the current platform is no longer stable or adequate for the current demands on the server/software/database. The fact that it needs almost a whole day to re-index the forum after an outage says this isn't a commercial grade platform. Load balancing, DB replication & log shipping, or DB clustering ain't cheap but it would increase the uptime of the site. I can't see this improving without a re-platforming and architecture redesign, Oh well we carry on as best we can. Grumble when needed and forget to thank Mr Y for juggling several lumps of turd while trying to apply lipstick to them. Thanks Andy for a thankless job. Coffee consumed, Dutch lesson for the morning done. Back to my scheduled Monday standup meeting. Enjoy the day,

Saw him on the Bat out of Hell tour way back when I was still in high school. (august 78) What a performance. I think my ears didn't stop ringing until October.

Moaning all from the boring borough. Sunny but cool this morning. First batch of home made bacon tested and the reset vac sealed & frozen for future use. Turned out quite good if I do say so myself. Far less salty than store bought and no white goo when cooking. The excrement has intersected with the rotary oscillation device at SWMBO's place of employment. (accountants) 3 years ago the company was bought by a bigger fish, which in turn was swallowed by an even bigger fish. The equity holding partners stuck around for the minimum 24 months from purchase and then burgered off to spend their new found millions. (~£34m) The remaining partners were shafted a bit and as part of their "payout" had to stay for 24 months after the final transition. That happened this week. 5 of the 6 remaining partners all handed in their notice at once. As SWMBO described it, "lemming Tuesday". She's had to go into the office this morning where all the corporate poobahs have shown up en mass for some sort of damage control. She has no idea if her job will remain or not since 90% of her work was doing admin for those partners who have now escaped. The other 10% of her work disappeared when they merged the offices last year. Oh well, she is sort of hoping for a nice payout with a 3 month notice and 15 weeks of full redundancy pay plus a new very sought after technical skill as they've just trained her on SalesForce. Talk of caboose hotels brings me to the Izaak Walton in Montana. We've stayed there several times. Apart from the hotel itself there are 4 caboose rooms on the hill overlooking the BNSF main line. There is also a luxury converted F45 loco suite available. Wet in the shed the other day. Not sure if the roof has started to leak (13 year old felt) or if there is a puncture in the roof's vapour barrier and I've got condensation issues. I'll be taking down part of the insulation etc for an inspection as this weekend's "more bloody maintenance" task. Ik heb geen koffie. Time to refill. Enjoy the day.

It is the classic Dr Who techno-babble that has been used since John Pertwee's day. It does work with Daleks and Kamados.

In his case he was doing point of contact for an insurance company that will remain nameless for now. The issue is he has a heart and empathy. Despite their adverts saying how often and fast they settle claims, the opposite is actually true. After starting the truth came out and he was basically told to be rather ruthless in trying to find a way to deny a claim. As he said, it wasn't the job he was promised, and he had a hard time telling some sobbing granny they weren't going to pay for her leaking roof to be fixed. (or similar) I think he is well out of it, but it shows they treat their minions with the same contempt they show their customers. I had a policy with them for several years with the car. One year they just went and more than doubled the premium. The Meerkat came along and together we gave "that" company the 2 finger salute.

All part of my cunning plan. By reversing the polarity of the neutron flow I am now able to captive breed them. (as seen by Jr in the picture) I will soon have an army and be unstoppable. <insert maniacal laughter here> Moaning all from a frosty boring borough. The offspring called to say he was let go from work. He'd only been through 8 weeks of training & 6 weeks of actual work but they decided he was "too nice" to his customers. He is now hoping the company he actually works for will find him another customer service assignment but isn't too confident. I fear the bank of dad will be called upon once again in the coming weeks. Today is day 9 of the diet. No carb, no booze, no fun. Just 800 cals of protein & veggies. Another 12 to go before a plateau rest and a pint. Meh. Knee review with a new guy tomorrow. Different hospital, hopefully a better action plan. Covid basically f*cked up my physio & cortisone regime from 2 years ago, so now it is a case of trying to play catch up. I'm still predicting a new knee (or 2) in the next couple of years. Latte awaits, enjoy the day

I may have to start delivering. The big downside to my newish hobby of proper BBQ* is you have to cook a fairly large amount for it to be worthwhile and the cuts of meat have to be pretty big or they just dry out and turn to shoe leather. With just the 2 of us now, it means a lot less cooking but a lot more sealing & storage. For example doing a batch of pulled pork means cooking at least 5kg of shoulder. Even after trimming & shrinkage it leaves us with more than a dozen servings. We had 10 days of turkey leftovers from Christmas as well. Cooked the bird over chestnut wood. * as in wood fired and/or cold smoked. No schitty little single use bits of chemical laden briquets in a tin tray, or cremated sausages.

Greetings all from the boring borough. There is some bright thing to the east attempting to poke above the house tops. It's been a long time. A quiet puttering weekend was had. Don't tell anyone but I actually managed to get a fair amount of muddling done in the shed. about 16 months ago I bought a set of modules from a fellow Freemo enthusiast. Sadly he is a fan of control panels and I hate the things with a passion. With that in mind I'm having to do a full rewire of the 4 boards i've managed to finish off the rewiring of the first board. <<< now awaits the awl of justice to descent. Today will see more MS Teams meetings with an offshore client and a schlep on SouthEastern to have some spinal origami performed. Tonight the next phase of my first attempts at curing/smoking bacon will commence. 12 hours of cold smoking overnight tonight. If this works well I've got a 5kg brisket that is just begging to become pastrami, as well as a side of salmon to be cured and oak smoked. That's about it. Enjoy the day.