Week of 12th October, 2015

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Monday, 12th October

New fortnight starts today. Should be an early shift, but due to colleagues wanting earlies rather than the 10s/12s they have, I get to swap. This is good.

Later: Micro$oft, we need to talk. I told you that I DO NOT want Window$ 10. Not yet, if ever. So what do you do? Push it at me again. I can see that I'm going to have to do this by the day. And it's seriously p*ssing me off.

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Tuesday, 13th October

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Wednesday, 14th October

Well, after hiding KB3035583 - the "Get Windows 10" update - it hasn't reappeared. Yet. I make no doubt M$ will try again, but for the moment all is well.

On this day (or thereabouts) in past years, world speed records have been set for supersonic movement. The first of these, in 1947, was Chuck Yeager's first supersonic flight in the Bell X-1. Almost exactly 50 years later, Wing Commander Andy Green drove the Thrust SSC car to set a world record of 763 mile/h, a record that still stands. And then, in 2012, Felix Baumgartner jumped from a helium balloon at 39,000 metres, and set a record of 843 mile/h in a freefall descent, before opening his parachute at just over 8,000 feet.

Of course, speed records of this type are made to be broken, but these 3 men will be forever known as the first to set such records. Congratulations to all.

See here, at Ars Technica, for a better, more extensive discussion.

14:30 I've just received notification that the Invizbox Go, a wifi connected TOR/VPN privacy box, has been funded on Kickstarter - by the skin of their teeth. 101,420 Euros of a 100,000 Euro goal, which means 30,000+ euros were pledged in the last 4 days of the campaign. This is good news - extra privacy options on the public Internet are never unwelcome. I joined this campaign early on, at the 89 euro Early Bird level, which will get me one Invizbox Go next February. I'm reasonably confident that this will work, after all Invizbox' previous effort is available via their website, and I have one of it. But if it's a month or so late, I'll not be surprised.

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Thursday, 15th October

This morning, Jane had a dentist's appointment, to fix a lost filling. The appointment was early enough that parking was restricted outside the dentist's surgery, so I got volunteered to play chauffeur. And after that we planned to go and install Mum's new TV.

Of course, muggins made a wrong choice of route, and we were stuck in traffic for nigh-on half-an-hour. Which meant Jane missed her appointment, and had to settle for a delayed appointment with a different dentist at the practice - a dentist she hadn't seen before. And it turns out that the tooth will need crowning, so she has a temporary filling until next week, followed by a temporary crown to tide her over until after the Switzerland trip over half-term. Followed by a full fix on her return.

So, as usual, my name is mud.

But at least the TV installation went well - after a bit of a battle with the table stand for the new Samsung LE32E310. This was all due to the fact that Mum's bedroom TV had blown its zap. So the old downstairs TV moved up to the bedroom, and the new Sammy was installed downstairs. All tuned in and working, although Mum complained that she "couldn't see the people's faces". This was due to reflected sunlight bouncing off the screen - glossy, of course. The only fix for that is to draw the curtains, but the curtain rail is bust, and falling off the wall. It needs to be replaced, which will involve ladder climbing - and after my recent fall, I'm not doing that.

And that 32 inch set is physically smaller than the old 26 inch - it's thinner, due to the LED backlight - and has narrower bezels, so the active screen is a bigger percentage of the frontal area. Picture quality appears good.

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Friday, 16th October

My first personal consultation meeting, as part of the redundancy process. And everything I've heard seems confirmed. I asked for a consultation with our outside pensions adviser, which I'll hear about next week - Thursday.

And then later, I got a phone call from someone at the outside careers advisor company that $EMPLOYER have instructed on our behalf. My first consultation with them is next Friday.

Other than that, nothing much happened. The media management system hung for a while, resulting in a late delivery of about a dozen items, including 3 programmes. And I had to reject most of the short-form items, due to inconsistent labelling - not helped by the fact that they were all in a language I'm not very familiar with. Even though I've been seeing this sort of material for at least a year.

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Saturday, 17th October

Today, of course, it being the weekend, we had the usual District Line omnishambles. Due to partial closures elsewhere on the line, service was disrupted and infrequent. Add to that a World Cup Rugby match at Twickenham, and all hell was let loose. I couldn't get on to a train, after waiting 20+ minutes for it. Luckily, this was the last stage, from Turnham Green to Gunnersbury, which is walkable in about 20 minutes.

And having got to work, there wasn't much to do. My ration turned out to be 3 commercil half-hours, all of American provenance, so 21 minutes each. No great problem with any of them, except that I made a silly mistake with 2 of the 3, which meant I had to completely redo them. Never mind, recovery is easy enough, albeit more complex than with the old system, so I managed to fix everything before packing up. More of the same tomorrow, except probably more of it. And there's a quick-turn-around line feed around dinner time, for transmission later in the evening.

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Sunday, 18th October

London Underground caused no problems today, so the commute was easy. As was the work - all completed with few problems.

I have to admit, though, that now the list of who's staying and who's going has been revealed, the working atmosphere has become a little strained. At least one of my colleagues (one of the enforced leavers) seems to have developed a case of resentment against one of the retainees - "Why him, not me?". I suspect this will only get worse, to the detriment of the congenial working atmosphere we've been able to maintain thus far.

 
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