thorin

What I remember reading to my kids aged 5-10

The Hobbit

The Fellowship of the Ring (more for me but they liked to snuggle up and fall asleep to it)

Harry Potter 1-5 (the hardback versions with lots of pictures)

Eric the Viking - Terry Jones - a personal fav of mine

Various compendiums of Greek and Norse Myths

Dr Seuss books

What do people do all day - Richard Scarry

My son started reading the Beastquest books very early by himself and was happy to read independently from there. After that at around 8 he started reading diary of a wimpy kid and the 13 storey treehouse type books.

Real ale has plenty of lower alcohol percentage options:

My faves are Harvest Pale 3.8% and Our House 3.4%

I also like mild which is often <=3%

0% Guinness is the only beer I would say that matches the taste of alcohol based beer. The others can be ok, but taste too malty, the flavour is off somehow. Also having 2 or more none alcohol beers seems to also make me feel "hungover" in a way, maybe due to additives.

How will they know if you're using AI or not?

I would say as a developer you absolutely need to be comfortable using the tools and understanding the possibilities but how much you use it should be up to you within any token / licensing limits.

I remember back in the 90s when people were starting to use IDEs and other developers would use vi or emacs for everything. There was always a suspicion that each camp wasn't doing it properly! Management didn't care as long as the work got done.

I'm interested in how addiction is so much more likely in some people than others. For over 20 years I loved to drink all sorts of different things. Once I had kids and hit 40+ it was so unpleasant in the morning so I decided to massively reduce. In the UK drinking is so pervasive. I limited my intake to <=2 drinks per night and never had an issue and would only break that maybe once a year. Recently I decided to reduce it even more. I will have a pint of ale in a pub if I go, but hardly anything else. It really didn't feel that hard.

Again at uni I found lots of people smoked cigs and mj and so I did it too a little bit, but decided after a year or 2 to stop and I've never really done it since. My dad was the same.

I've had the same realisation with certain foods recently and coffee, massively cutting down on sugar, salt and coffee.

Probably my only addiction at the moment is too much scrolling on my phone.

I totally accept this is a huge issue for many people, but no real idea why...

My primary motivation for work has always been to earn money for myself and my family. This enables me to do things that I want to do outside of work time. I have tried to align this with work that I find interesting or working with people I like, but this is not always the case.

If this is not an issue for you, then by all means find something else to do. Maybe look to move into a business domain you already provide IT/software for, or retrain to something else.

It's highly likely that many domains currently will be looking to maximise use of AI e.g. medical professionals, accountants, lawyers will not escape completely. Moving to something practical may be a better short term bet.

Would you rather fight one chicken sized robot or 100 robot sized chickens?

This is interesting? Do you have any other sources of caffeine in your diet? For instance I would have a regular can of coke maybe once a week and English breakfast tea at least once a day. Only coffee seems to really affect me though. I don't really need the affect but I do like the taste and now probably have 3 or 4 coffees a week rather than 2 a day and it seems to be helping.

Also Frank Beard

It was both, however where I lived, a few years before fathers would get up at 6am and go and work down a mine all day, or a shipyard or factory. They might get home at 6pm but after dinner they'd quickly go for a pint or go fishing or go to the football. Women often didn't work, or worked part-time so they could take the kids to school so saw a lot more of the kids and managed the household more.

Now women have the freedom to work, so both sexes can choose to avoid seeing their children if they want to. Bleak indeed.

They might talk about it, but gambling is a huge industry in the US and many different types of gambling are possible and have been for decades/centuries. It is far less restrictive than many other major countries on gambling I would say e.g. US, China, Australia etc.

Barclays use both the physical hardware code generator in the UK as well as a virtual version in the app. The Bank staff also use the same physical hardware in the branch so I guess it will stay around for a while.

I was at a graduate recruitment event in the UK for Unilever around 1998 when he speaker told us about the Magnum story. The premise was that someone might pay £1 for an ice cream to eat at home which seemed ridiculous at the time, given that people were probably expecting to pay 25-50p per choc ice/lolly, and that it might be something that would appeal more to adults than children. The Magnum was a big success and drove the way to flashier and more expensive ice creams!

Not really, at least in the UK ( where "apparently" everyone is being jailed for free speech violations). I've moved to the position where I wouldn't post anything online that I wouldn't say in person, and I very rarely post anything work related.

My father worked in signals, first in the armed forces and then railway signals and telephone lines for his whole life. When I was young I was interested in Electronics, but not too great with them. I did study a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering but preferred the computer parts of the course and have since then been working in IT for nearly 30 years. I can understand how your fathers advice is important, but you also need to do something you can enjoy and succeed at.

I would say with your background don't worry too much about which technologies to learn. Things are changing fast so try and instead develop an engineering mindset, which will serve you well whatever you do.

He will guide you, but you also need to make your own path. Good luck in your journey.

Tell him you'll make sure to turn it off at exactly 5pm (or whenever you're supposed to finish). And that you'll turn it on at 9am and can't join any meetings till it's started.

I know they were pushing cloud very hard, and it was nice to see they were offering a lot of free tier to developers. What has been a surprise to me this year is working in the UK with certain enormous clients that they are still choosing Oracle products for new implementations which I was not expecting.

Oracle is still mostly generating income from an old school model, a bit like IBM and SAP used to. They have huge contracts with mega-corps bringing in millions per year for a license. The have been pivoting to other things like consulting, cloud, AI for years but I still feel most of the income comes from these original db and product licenses. As someone who worked with Oracle since 1998 I'm kind of amazed they've kept at it for so long major Healthcare, Utilities, Banks still locked in and in some cases buying new contracts.

Spain is a pretty big country in terms of space. It's been full of British expats for years a lot of whom had to leave due to Brexit so can probably stand to have a few more influencers move over.

I seem to remember some pirate copies of art packages (maybe Photon paint) on the Amiga coming with a similar set of images that would be of interest to some teenagers...

It's a lot easier to go part time in a job you already have than find a new part time job. If you are already successful in your job start by asking to move to having every Friday off or even every second Friday. This is very popular in UK/Europe. If this is working maybe you can drop another day after some time.

Alternatively a lot of companies let you take as much unpaid leave as you want (as long as you don't miss anything critical). This amounts to the same thing but gives you a lot of flexibility.

Probably Manic Miner!

I used to use Soundtrackers a lot on Amiga in the 90s. I'm also pretty ok with using Reaper as a DAW playing all the instruments. I would have no idea how to get into remixing though. How would you suggest starting that? Do you tend to start with isolated tracks or just the whole mp3 and take sections and move around and add parts>

Curious how you've treated your adhd, do you mean medication?

For me the next 10 years will be consolidating my kids development as they'll both be working or at finishing uni by then.

What are the "best of breed" tools in your opinion?

In the enterprise world, dotnet with c# is one of the best choices, although recently I've been doing a lot of logic just with python running on serverless functions.

I'm not sure if you've done much of an investigation into these but:

1. Parcel deliveries - unless you work for the main carrier e.g. Royal Mail in the UK I don't think you can expect to make more than minimum wage and will effectively be on a zero hours contract with no benefits. I don't think this is going to be better that software.

2. Train driver (or bus driver, lorry driver), this might be ok and once you are in does pay well in the UK (but probably half what you get paid as a developer). It's definitely going to be a candidate for automation in the next 5-10 years though.

3. Electrician / plumber - you could add to this painter, builder, plasterer etc . This is decent if you have the skills, work hard and are physically up to doing it for an extended number of years. You'll likely have to manage your own work load though. May pay the same as software if you really work on it.

4. Mechanic - I don't think the pay will be amazing, what you say about cars not being repairable really isn't true especially for none EV. You still have brakes, oil change, servicing, tyre changes and alignments and lots of other things that people pay for throughout the lifespan of the car. Garages near me are always busy (as are cycle repair shops).

Can you expand on the Scaleway comment? Would be interested in the details.

Also aren't their data centres all in the Paris area? Do they have any geo-redundancy?

It's the German / European version of unions. For instance when I joined an ex-public company 25 years ago unions were very active in the UK still, but they are even more active in Germany etc.

Interested, in the US if you want to go on holiday will companies be ok with you taking unpaid time off? For instance in the UK I get 25 days paid, then the bank holidays we have (8 days I think) but when I asked they were ok for me to take some unpaid leave if required as well. The biggest problem I have is that if you don't take the paid days you tend to lose them at the end of the year.

There are quite a few protest bands but they don't have the level of popularity as Rage against the machine, Bob Dylan or Public Enemy. Pop music is more of a commodity now.

I see Billy Bragg had something to share on FB about recent events as do many older artists.

Maybe you saw what happened at Glastonbury this year with Kneecap and Bob Vylan.

Personally I enjoy Idles, I went to see them last year and they had good energy and try to be politically active while spreading "the love".

One of my all time favourite bands New Model Army are still going and releasing music. I don't think they ever made it big after effectively being cancelled before it was popular releasing the single 51st State of America.

Cows and sheep in the UK (and I guess much of Europe) wander round outside all year round and I guess are eating almost entirely grass. You can't go for a walk in the countryside without coming across them constantly. Most of the beef you buy in the shops (not talking about processed foods) is produced in the UK.