blackbeard

.Net 50-60k.

We have a billion applicants but they're all shit.

FFS. I think they have no idea how few people we can get locally in London who don't need a visa...

Ok you're lucky to be on Azure PaaS!

That works for simple deployments but when you start having to deal with signing, licensed components and stuff like ours (55 deployable packages) then it gets hairy. Also managing windows infrastructure is hell.

You're 100% right about discipline. I work for a very undisciplined and border-line incompetent company that decided to roll out a microservices architecture, continuous delivery and devops culture into a behemoth enterprise product. This has simply been a disaster because the incumbent methodology has been hack it until it mostly works.

However, with respect to technology, some technologies do not lend themselves to these processes. .Net I'm looking at you here; you're a tangled build nightmare, a deployment clusterfuck, require too many resources to lift light tasks and most of your core as API is a mess of obsolete ideas,impossible to test abstractions and a bunch of dubious hand grenades (ReaderWriterLockSlim for example which has deadlocked on me numerous times and is the basis for concurrent collections).

Possibly but you can get unlocked handsets with monthly payments from giffgaff for example. Or you can just save up like we used to have to do. Or sling it on a credit card like its 1990 again...

I use a Lumia 640. Paid £105 for it on a deal day. Never had a problem with apps; most of what I do is built in. Only use HERE drive and adobe reader. That and giffgaff £15/month gives me 4Gb of 4G tethering, 1000 mins and free texts.

Amazon only fucked up one delivery for me in the last 10 years. They left a 512Gb SSD on my doorstep and it got nicked. They sent out a new one instantly.

TBH you can nail a Moto G for not much now. My wife uses one. I can't stand the lag on android though after using WP. And iOS just isn't very flexible. I mean I can't download an mp3 from something without buggering around with itunes.

Just buy your handset from amazon and use a SIM only deal. Don't have to go out then :)

....going forth and only because the ICO fined their arses.

We gave greasy cafes in the UK. They are the equivalent.

I used to get breakfast every Thursday with a one legged motorcycle courier (still have no idea how that worked) who fought in the gulf war, an HSBC executive and a fishmonger. I miss that.

I have kids now and other parents are horrible people.

You should pass a test to transmit but there's a ton of pirate activity out there. I have some respect for rule breakers on that front because the barrier to breaking the rules is pretty high.

If I had the inclination I'd build a QRP station and learn Morse. My days of burning fingers on a soldering iron and climbing up trees is gone now.

Working smart is letting someone else take the risks and work less. If you're taking risks or working more something is broken.

Sipping cold water in the garden with my feet in an inflatable swimming pool and my face in a book sending the odd email while my hordes of scripts do the legwork is working smart :-)

Yes 100% this. This sounds like my mother.

She followed every nutritional fad that appeared on the table. I can remember nothing but horrors for dinner for the best part of 10 years of my life. She was scared of eating things in case it affected mortality in some way. In fact I ended up getting quite ill on occasion, now to what I know was simply malnutrition. This affected my schooling, my physical condition and my mental health at the time. The latter was quite devastating for a bit to be honest.

It wasn't until I got a shit job stacking shelves in a supermarket and moved out that I started eating properly and literally after a month I felt like a different person.

Now the cruel result; she had a heart attack and a stroke a couple of years ago due to what they reckon is 60 years of poor dieting.

What you're asking demands science in a field of marketing, journalism and baseless opinion. Good luck.

Then there's the almost cult-like religious aspects of fad diets to consider which almost drive the above.

Ugh.

This is why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFr5T85F9Zw

Yep that's about it! :)

My wife has a phobia of snakes and worms. This isn't going well for my Model X sales pitch to her...

It appears their strategy is now "embrace everything".

That sort of design scares me. I've got a circa 2010 lenovo X201 and a keyboard replacement on that is a 5 minute job max and costs $20 and it's all a small philips driver (I use a swiss army knife). I'm on my third keyboard.

Yes definitely. I have a floor lamp from them as well and the metal was so thin it folded the first time it was moved so now it's a metal and duct tape lamp :)

I've stopped buying IKEA products for this reason. They are never durable. The unit surfaces get pitted and discoloured easily and things warp over time. It's crap basically. I have to replace it all every 4-5 years.

The last cycle I threw some cash at some quality solid wood products. They're a better investment.

Good question but not necessarily. I worked for a company who did this with SQL CE in the integration environment and normal SQL server in production with NHibernate as an ORM. Turns out there are some subtle differences that can creep through the ORM abstraction including the extensive dialect abstraction in NH.

They have made at least two attempts to do that in the past as well with dropping the cheap versions of visual c# 2003 and then trying to yank the desktop version of visual studio 2013 express so a fair observation.

Plus I think you have to sign in now to maintain your license in community edition and the SDK is no longer standalone.

It's more that my customers are using it so I have to meet them half way. If I have a greenfield, I'll probably do it in tcl/tk or python/wx but I'm stick maintaining old win32 and winforms stuff for people.

My win32 stuff worked in wine about 7-8 years ago now which was nice.

Windows is not really open, has never has been and never will be. In fact it is getting worse. There's always a black box at the bottom of every stack trace, a secret in every corner and a cost to every solution be it time or money.

Users, myself included, use it because we're stuck.

First post here. I've been lurking for a few months. So, hello.

I'm ashamed of myself for exactly this reason. It's no better than smoking. I know it's not good for me but I keep doing it out of apathy and convenience. I know my way around a Linux machine well and have a few production nodes under my command but they never make it to the desktop. There's always some proprietary protocol in the way be it a VPN, remote desktop connection or product I have to integrate with. I'd really love to just shake it tomorrow.

It's harder to walk away than not to get into this situation in the first place. Now it's a burden.