PhobosAnomaly

I'm not suicidal, but I have considered how nice it would be to diary in a date where I think "yep, i've had a titsful of life now, time to fuck off to sto'vo'kor" or whatever.

The only thing that stops me taking it seriously is the prospect that it may be subjecting others to criminal investigation or court process.

I love computing in general, it's just fascinating that we put electric into a bit of sand and people can be as creative as making immersive worlds, or be as positive as making lifesaving machinery, or just make Fortnite porn.

I started my post-secondary school study at college, fucking about on a particular study topic with Visual C++ as it was at the time on a winter evening. The kind of evening where it got dark early, you got up in darkness and went home in darkness.

It was towards the end of a particular day, sat at a terminal on such an evening, and the lights were so bright that you couldn't see out of the window but only your own reflection. I saw myself in the window, and honestly thought "fuck, do I really want to be doing this for another fifty years?"

...so I wrapped it that term, banked whatever qualifications I could, and fucked off into a different field where I'm out of the office at different locations most days. I get the benefit of both having a varied career and meeting people from vastly different backgrounds, while getting to go home and enjoy the nerdy tech life.

Admittedly, I have gone back to distance learning to tie off that loose end of working towards a degree in the field.

COBOL has entered the chat

e: good for legacy employment though. A relative of mine is a Z80 programmer by trade, and he can effectively walk into a job because the talent pool is so small now. Granted - the wages are never great but never poor, and the role is maintenance and troubleshooting rather than being on the leading edge of development - but it's a job for life.

I have not, though I'll try anything twice 😊

A colleague of mine at a different office that I went to visit asked me if I wanted tea or coffee. "Surprise me", I said.

I got earl grey tea, with milk.

I was certainly surprised, and it wasn't terrible by any means, quite refreshing actually. I did feel like I was violating a handful of international tea-drinking etiquette treaties at the time mind.

magic cheers

Are these three instances of great tits, or one set of great tits, Total Recall style?

Funnily enough, my mind jumped to Martin Brundle as a classic example of a good analyst - or at least he was in the 90s and 2000s. He's still good, but it just isn't as new or exciting anymore - he was a fantastic counterpoint to Murray Walker's boundless enthusiasm with a lot of sensible chatter and in depth knowledge.

Another guy I quite like is Jimmy Bullard, particularly on Sky Sports News or Soccer AM - no bullshit, everything in layman's terms, and has a laugh with it.

It does - if you choose to have kids, then you can sit them down and watch the same shit that you did and get that mahoosive nostalgia hit over again!

I used to love John Virgo's trick shots, they were almost as awesome as his magnificent beard!

It was quite lenient with my error-prone French.

That said, Duo is well known for A/B testing so no doubt we were just using different feature sets.

Yeah, I did a good three-quarters of the French course too. I distinctly remember the lessons about plays and stage work being an absolute bastard, not that I'd ever use it in my line of work.

I've started watching a bit more French media with the French equivalent of "received pronunciation" - such as watching the FR edition of Euronews or France24, plus watching kids shows like Hey Duggee or Paw Patrol is unusually handy, though it does give you some funny looks if you don't already have kids!

Unfortunately, there's no substitute for immersion - even on a short break to Paris, my confidence in using the language shot up from being able to just about converse in the language - but more importantly, getting utterly stuck and failing at something where you have to think a bit faster and get your point across anyway.

I should get back into it really.

I used Duo pretty solid for two or three years - ended up subscribing to it.

The benefits were negligible - the biggest thing for me was offline play. I used to do a lot of air travel, so the ability to cover a subject or two was super helpful.

The streak freeze was the only other real "bonus" for those who game a shit about it. I started to get quite protective of it when it reached four figures, but I kicked it into touch when I wasn't learning much more than vocabulary. Duo is fantastic for getting a foothold on a language, but it only gets you through the first two or three exchanges of a conversation.

I enjoyed my time with the owl though.