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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I am not a dog lover. I find them needy, melodramatic and hierarchical: some of the features that I try to avoid in humans.

    I work in an office around one day a week which often has more dogs than humans - since one of the regular staff has two dogs. In general, however, they aren’t much of a problem. One frequently nudges people’s elbows to get attention and howls whenever a phone rings. Another gets in the way of the door an awful lot - resulting in the owner installing a child gate at an inner doorway, and another has been traumatised in the past and needs to be taken out whenever a fire alarm test is due. However, this is not more that the needs and quirks of other people, really, and is fairly easy to work around.

    I am glad that I do not have to work in that office all the time, but overall it is not a big deal.






  • From an outsider’s perspective it would be the places that I work - which I am not going to reveal in any detail to avoid doxing myself, but include nationally and internationally important historical and archaeological sites.

    From my perspective, although they are certainly interesting and I love working at them, it doesn’t play a particularly prominent role in what I do day-to-day, so it would be the wide range of problem solving involved: I lead a team dealing with maintenance, compliance and health & safety for a national charity.



  • It was when the third or fourth thing ended up persistently broken after an update and the whole system became too much of a pain to use. I honestly don’t recall if it was XP or Win 7.

    I had used a couple of Linux flavours before for a short periods and originally planned to dual boot, but this time, just never got around to putting a new Win partition on and found that I had no need for it anyway.



  • It was a Sinclair ZX81, which I built from a kit with my brother. I was astonished when it actually worked.

    It came with a tape which included about 6 games in BASIC - all extremely simple since they had to fit in 1k of memory, of course. I can’t actually recall what they were exactly though.


  • My dad would frequently trot out “You’ll eat a peck o’ dirt before you die.” - where peck would be the UK version of the volumetric measure: a little over 9 ltrs.

    He had a very laid back approach to contamination due to his old-school farming background. I had a rather more strict approach when young but, with age, I have become much more relaxed and do use the phrase myself at times.


  • Werewolf of London (1935) - a solid werewolf movie for the period, but with no surprises in the plot - and without a lot of the ‘standard’ lore that developed around the time.

    Chiefly notable, I thought though, in showing a surprisingly independent woman in a failing marriage (failing due to her husband being a werewolf…) and in portraying a drunken upper-middle class woman (and contrasting that with fairly stereotypical drunken working class women). Warner Oland features in one of his many bizarre yellow-face roles too.

    Just prior to that I went to a 50th anniversary screening of The Wicker Man (1973), which was as great as ever.