__chrismc

No, his boss isn't stupid, he's exercising the "duty of care" part of being a decent boss. If you're sick, you should stay home and recover, whether you think you can be as productive or not (from personal experience of breaking this rule - you probably won't be).

Same here - in fact, I've had to say this to members of my own team recently. It's strictly forbidden by HR - if you're sick, you take days off until you're better, so you are not putting yourself at risk of getting worse/prolonging the issue by not getting the rest you need. WFH is not there as a handy tool to avoid recording sick leave.

As someone who has to give the news about the review outcome, I can confirm this from my own experience as well. Pretty much only those who come out of it as "top-tier" get any benefit, and no amount of "spin" will cushion the news of anything lesser. Of course, this isn't helped by there being an enforced normalisation curve on the ratings…

We possibly work for the same company, as our system - flaws and all - are identical to what you describe. As someone who has to carry out both sides of the process (reviewing staff/managing them through the process, and getting my own review done), I'm most certainly not a fan! Staff seem to fall into two categories - those who see the whole thing as political nonsense they don't have the time for, or have become so turned off by how bad it is that they just don't care about the outcome any more.

The Accenture news was raised on an internal discussion about the review process almost immediately, as some people are that keen to get rid of the current way of doing things ASAP. Sadly, I can't see anything coming from it, as the word is that Upper Management values the generated metrics too much to change anything.

While I appreciate the work you've put into this, why should I use this over messenger.com?

edit to add: by which I mean "what's your main selling point?"

It's not forced. You can very easily not pay the license fee. I don't, and haven't for ~18 months, with the full knowledge of the TV License authority. You just have to follow a simple rule of not watching or listening to live TV or radio broadcasts.

I met mine on Tinder, 7 months ago. We moved in together last month. Before that I'd done the "normal" chatting up someone in a bar (that's how I met my ex-wife), or meeting through acquaintances.

Online dating can work really well, if you approach it the right way. I still have loads of friends among girls I met through one dating site or another as well, so it can help you find girl friends as well as a girlfriend.

Me and a friend tried it with a (UK) bank note while we were at school, way back in the 90's, and received a warning about not being allowed to print scanned currency on screen when the scan finished. It might not have been Photoshop we used (Paint Shop Pro springs to mind), but similar detection techniques have been around for a long time!

As someone who's travelled 10,000 mile round-trips for final interviews, only to lose out on "culture fit," I find it the most frustrating excuse for not getting a job I have otherwise proven over previous interview rounds that I am capable for. Why? Because it's totally unquantifiable and subjective. Fair enough if you find a hole in my technical ability which would limit my performance in the job you want me to do, but using "culture" as the excuse is a nonsense.

There could be any number of reasons someone might not appear to "fit" on a given interview day, which wouldn't necessarily apply in them in the day-to-day - jet lag, the stress of the interview process, being under the weather and many more...

People and cultures adapt over time, through contact with each other; if you're denying good candidates because of their "fit" in the now, you're artificially limiting yourself for the future.

> Being able to share data plans with phones at nominal cost would be one interesting upgrade driver but that's really in the hands of the carriers and is unlikely

Vodafone in the UK will let you do this (with no extra fee). They've offered me it several times, but I didn't buy an iPad with a SIM slot.

You're not alone. I've been in my current job ~3.5 years - every day I've read through (and sometimes speculatively applied for) many job postings.

I like my job, but that doesn't stop me keeping an eye out for something better.

Location: Aberdeen, Scotland

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Not likely in the short-term

Technologies: ASP.NET (MVC mainly), PHP, HTML/CSS, some JS, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, Windows Server, Linux, Mac

Resume: On Request

Email: chris@hn.pixelmeadow.com

Experience: General web development - PHP in my spare time, .NET for several years at the office. Well over a decade working in the Oil & Gas Enterprise, mostly building and/or supporting a variety of custom applications. Done some sysadmin and light DBA roles as well. 2 years of Staff Management under my belt. My main experience (and passion) is really in technical support. I love solving customers/users problems, and fixing things. I also enjoy tinkering around the edges of new technologies, so I can get a feel for them, and I'm generally able to turn my hand to most things.

This is similar to my experience (iPhone 5S, 8.0.2), though often I don't even need to reboot. Open the Health app; no data; close it; do something else for 1-2 minutes; reopen - data is now visible.

I'd say it's the opposite. Selling radical change is harder than selling the status quo. The Yes campaign has to prove Scotland "has what it takes" and dispel all the fears and uncertainty which comes from big change. All the No campaign has to do is convince enough people things are fine as they are.

What's truly amazing about this referendum is the engagement. It's projected to be an 80% turnout, with many, many people becoming involved in politics for the first time. There were queues to get registered to vote over the last few days. The level of awareness amongst the electorate is staggering compared to previous elections. It's an exciting time to live in Scotland; no matter the result, Scottish politics won't be the same again :)

We have an old Scots phrase: "common weal," meaning both wealth shared in common and for the well-being of all. Sounds fairly close to some definitions of Socialism.

On renationalisation, as noted elsewhere in this thread, the idea of taking Royal Mail back into public control has already been floated and there's support for doing the same with the railways.

It's worth pointing out that the only variance it can make under the existing powers is to _raise_ income taxes - this is why it's never been used. Doing so would be political suicide and see a population drain as those able to would quickly move "next door" to an England with lower taxes.

The Barnett formula determines the size of the block grant, not the spending of it. The Scottish Government spends the grant according to its priorities. At the moment these include: free healthcare (including prescriptions), free higher education, and free care for the elderly.

I've found an increasing number of sites use validation preventing the use of '+' in email addresses (which I used extensively when on Gmail). To get around this, I use a feature of Fastmail to give me something similar - <myname>@<company>.<my.domain>. By putting the unique part in the domain, it's less likely to be stopped by a fussy validator. Combine with some of their auto-filtering and I have an easy way to track who's abusing their ability to mail me, and to take action appropriately.

Moveable Type was the first blog system I used, over 12 years ago. Oh the memories... my first exposure to Perl and setting up sites on a shared host. Slacking off in university labs to tweak the theme files/write posts/work out why site rebuilds were taking a stupidly long amount of time... fun times :)

Have you tried installing the Infiniality bundle? It's a replacement set of libraries that definitely improved the font rendering in Arch, to my eyes at least.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Infinality-bundle+fonts

My heating system's got a proprietary wireless thermostat/control box (I guess what Nest refer to as a "programmer"), but it's a newer combi-boiler, less than 5 years old. The previous heating system had no thermostat, just a timing system. Similarly, my parent's old heating system didn't have a thermostat, and neither did most of the places I rented before buying... so it depends on the age of the system. I could easily believe the "most don't have" claim.

But every radiator I've known to be fitted in the last 20-30 years has had individual valve thermostats.

Good point. I've done this in the past (i.e. back when I was at university) - speed up cooking ramen noodles (or "super noodles") by pouring a boiled kettle into the hot pan.

But these days my kettle is almost solely used as a stand-by "tea making device" :)

I don't even drink tea, and I have an electric kettle. In case any guests want tea. It's the "done thing", as they say.

Yes they are. They changed their surname to Windsor after high anti-German sentiment during WW1. [1]

Prior to that they were the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha's.[2]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Windsor [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saxe-Coburg_and_Gotha#...

Don't forget to account for licensing (after all, this is Oracle), hardware/hosting, software 'maintenance' fees, etc... I'd have thought a significant part of the $40m figure to be in these types of cost alone.

I had my first trip to SF last week. I knew ahead of time there was a problem of large numbers of homeless, and some of the underlying reasons for it. Even though, I was completely unprepared for the sheer scale of the issue - it was way beyond anything I'd ever imagined. It felt like everywhere I looked there was at least 1, and often, if I looked again closer there were 2-3. Walking around some areas of Market Street felt intimidating as there was a virtual "gauntlet" of homeless to walk through.

It didn't really take away from my trip, but it was certainly an eye-opener. The links in this thread will be good further reading in preparation for my next visit!

Why do you rate GitHub's support as "poor"?

Click through to the linked thread - https://svn.reviewboard.kde.org/r/4396/

Yes, I've had that one too. I have a Logitech keyboard case, but if I'm not writing long-form, I find it more comfortable to have the "bare" iPad, and tap out any shorter text. Unless I specifically disconnect the keyboard through the iOS settings panel first, I don't get the software keyboard back.

By contrast, in iOS 6, if the BT keyboard disconnected for any reason, (i.e. power-off/range) the software keyboard would instantly reappear.

Absolutely.

From experience, the global Oil & Gas industry is completely reliant on Excel, and that will not change any time soon. They use it for nearly everything... It's the common UI to bigger, complex systems, and it's the data storage/manipulation tool for more specialized, or "simpler" needs.

Many of the non-Excel applications in this space started out and grew from a monster Excel workbook.

Sounds like the US lags behind on this, but I'm sure the tradeoffs are made up elsewhere - for example, it looks to me like salaries for equivalent roles in IT are often a little higher in the US.

At my current (UK) employer, I get 30 days vacation, 13 days Scottish public holidays which get added to my vacation (so all paid), and paid sick leave of no more than 3 "instances" in a year. An "instance" could be 1 day, or it could be a month... but if it's longer than 5 working days I need to back it up with a letter from my GP.

The downside is that if I don't use up all that vacation, I lose it - it's not converted to salary (although some companies do this). This is something I'm acutely aware of this year, as I'm struggling to find opportunity to take the remaining 15 days leave I still have to use by Dec 31st.