People who follow my tweets may have already heard my moaning about Littlewoods on Friday, but I’m still hacked off about it enough to post about it here too.
I have written them a letter (in the perhaps misguided belief that paper letters get more attention than emails). The contents are posted below to share my ranting and whining more widely.
Comments are very welcome… am I being too ranty and unreasonable? How much responsibility do we consumers have for reading small-print?
Warning: If you’re squeamish or easily offended, this post is probably not for you!
If you are reading this on dalelane.co.uk rather than an RSS reader, the header and photos on the right are probably a small clue that I have two small girls: a nearly-four-year-old whirling dervish of gobby bossiness, and a six-month old monster determined to be the loudest thing within miles.
I am an insufferable bore when it comes to my girls. They are awesome, and barely a conversation or a twitter goes past without me mentioning them (sorry about that, by the way).
But as much as I love them both to bits, two is enough, thanks 🙂
The plan was always to have two kids. Not sure exactly why.
I guess it’s partly because it’s what we are used to – both my wife and I each have a single sibling, so that’s what feels right.
It’s partly financial – kids are not cheap. Even with economies of scale and all, the amount of stuff you need to get for a kid is staggering, and we couldn’t afford another! And that’s just the day to day stuff – with bills like monthly day care fees for Grace that were higher than our mortgage for a long while, I can only wonder how people with big families afford it.
The difference from two kids to three kids feels bigger than the difference from one to two. For example, it’d mean needing a new car (I couldn’t fit three kids in the back of my little Fiesta). It’d probably mean a bigger house (would be difficult to squeeze a bigger family into our mid-terrace).
It’s partly time, energy and a desperate need for sleep. One child is exhausting. A second makes exhaustion a dim, fond memory. A third? There just isn’t enough caffeine in the world.
In short, a third kid would be a game-changer, and not one that we’re ready for.
This, combined with knowing that you can’t rely 100% on contraception, is all a roundabout way of explaining why we decided for me to go for a vasectomy.
Weird choice of topic for a blog post? Perhaps. But going on the philosophy of sharing experiences that might be new or interesting to others, I figured “why not?” So if you are curious to find out how you go about getting yourself neutered, read on 😉
Five years ago today: 6 August 2003, 9am. I turned up at main reception in IBM Hursley Park for my first day. I was excited, dressed far smarter than I have for work since, and had absolutely no idea what I was going to be doing.
Five years later, today is the (official!) start of my new job in IBM, and a shift in my career: I’ve joined the “Emerging Technology Services” team.
I tried to find a good description of ETS on the interwebs that I could link to, but not had any luck. I found a description on a few intranet pages, which I’ve managed to mangle below:
Part of IBM Software Group’s Strategy and Technology Division, ETS focuses on emerging technologies and how they can be used to meet business needs. They work on customer problems to create innovative, bespoke technical solutions, which can include “architectural consultancy, technical solutions, demos, proof of concepts, pilot systems, and reference architectures” combining experience of working with customers with first-of-a-kind technologies.
I’m rubbish at choosing books to read, so recommendations from friends who are better read than I am are very useful. I enjoy using last.fm as a way to discover new music that I might like, so thought I’d look to see if you could get the same for books.
I’ve found two sites that I quite like:
goodreads
This is a lovely site. Track the different books you have read, and are reading. Sort them into different “bookshelves” if you want to group them.
It’s got a ton of RSS feeds, and it’s focus absolutely seems to be to make it easier to track what your friends have read and are reading, what they like and don’t like.
I’ll write a proper post about Mashed08 once I’ve caught up with work, but in the meantime I wanted to quickly share a couple of pics.
Sylvester McCoy was on stage as compere for the presentation of our hacks, and each of us who presented got to meet him briefly for a pic. This was actually the second time I’ve met him – fourteen years ago, I got to meet him with a couple of others from my school when we won an award for an environmental project at school.
There’s a nice symmetry there… meeting him aged 14 to collect a prize for a environmental project, then aged 28 to collect a prize for a project to help people reduce home electricity usage. Wonder what will happen when I’m 42? 🙂
Before (December 1994)
After (June 2008)
I started a new project at work this week. I can’t say too much about it publicly, but wanted to write a quick post mainly because I’m quite excited, and also to mention why I’m not gonna have time to play with many other things for the next month or so!
I’ve been seconded to one of our Services teams, so it’s a short break from my normal life of product development. It’s a secondment for a specific project – developing a messaging library for a customer that will run on their own real-time embedded operating system.
I spent most of this week trying to finish or handover my WPS work, so I’ve hardly started on the new project. But it’s already fascinating. Working in C on a customer’s proprietary platform with some extreme resource constraints (in both memory and operating system functions!) is a fun holiday from my life in development of an application written mostly in Java that runs on mainframes. And it’s definitely closer to the sort of work I want to do in my career, so the opportunity to do this as my day job for a couple of months is awesome.
Disclaimer: This is not a medical post. I’ve not referred to anything to write it, and I only vaguely understand what I’m talking about… if you are looking for medical advice, please look elsewhere.
My twitters for the past few days have mainly been moaning about my back hurting. I injured it last week, and have been out-of-action since.
I’ve been diagnosed today, so thought I’d share the full scale of my pain and woe with the world.
I have an annular tear in my lumbar region.
I’m trying to resist the temptation to google for this (seriously – that way madness lies!) but from what I remember of the doc’s description, one of the discs between the vertebrae in my spine has torn, causing the jelly (?!) inside to leak out. The jelly is what caused the muscles around the disc to inflame and spasm – a big cause of the pain I’ve been having since last week.
It’s ridiculously early. And I’m awake. And on a train.
Unusually, I don’t mind too much, because I’m heading to ‘Over The Air‘ – a mobile development event in London. Yay 🙂
Looking at the schedule, there are lots of interesting talks that I want to go to. Too many… in several places there are two or three talks I want to go to at the same time. 🙁
Also on the agenda is a development competition. It’ll probably work out to somewhere between 8 and 12 hours to hack something together (depending on how many talks I go to and how much sleep I want to get!)
Between paternity leave and the joys of coming back to work after a five week break, I’ve not had time to think about what I might create.
So I’m using the train journey to come up with a few ideas – and this is as good a place as any to ideastorm.
Here we go… Bear in mind that it’s early and I’ve not had any coffee yet!