Mr_Odwin

Our constituency has been Conservative since 1918 (often getting more than 50% of the vote). Flipped to Labour today. Absolutely magic.

I'm feeling a bit burned out tbh. I've got nostalgia for when I joined the company and there was about 50 employees, and there was so little bureaucracy. Now there's like 300 employees, and we're owned by a megacorp, and everything involves so much paperwork and there's a committee for everything, and the overlord company just seems to send down edicts that make the company I work for worse. I keep looking at part time jobs and dreaming about something mentally easy like delivery work or working on reception.

I really enjoyed the latest episode of Acolyte. Seems the whole season getting hate from certain quarters of the internet (IMDB review scores are well bombed) but that last episode was some of the best star wars TV we've seen in years.

I'm full on envious of that. I'm itching to get a foldable, but I've been on Chinese phones for so many years paying out max of about £400-£500 per phone that a foldable just feels like too much of an expense.

I think it's just so that people keep up their disney plus subscriptions. I only buy it when there's a series that I want to see but it seems like with Marvel and Star Wars I've been subbed for the last 6-8 months straight, and I really didn't mean/want to be. (I cancel it recurring as soon as I've renewed it.)

It's all about the multiverse isn't it? Like that's the consistent theme through everything at the moment. Spiderman, Dr Strange, Loki, What If, Ms Marvel .... all giving us knowledge about the multiverse.

I did a bit of MatLab at uni, dabbled in VB.NET around that time (if you google "FAVC DVD" I wrote that!), but for the last 16 years I've been using a stats package at work called Stata that uses a simple scripting language you can write "programs" in that Stata can interpret. I found transitioning from one package to another okay back then but now my brain is old and brittle so I'd probably struggle. In stats the popular software packages are SAS (big industry - rubbish syntax), R (opensource, supported in academia, not very intuitive language) and Python (hot in data science, but I've not used it). The "color" thing is pretty prevalent for me as I'm always having to change colours in charts/figures.

Which Children's hospital are you with? My son has an issue that means he has regular surgery and he's with Manchester Children's hospital. They are amazing and a slick machine. Good luck, hope it all goes well.

Finished Ms Marvel last night and overall I think it was terrible. Worst marvel TV series easily. I'm not wordy enough to say why in a convincing way, but it was just bad. Wife thought it was okay, if that means anything.

There's a proof in maths/statistics that shows the probability of any two people in a group sharing a birthday reaches 0.5, or 1/2, when there are just 23 members of the group. Feels nutty when you first hear it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

He is very good in sex education so if he brings some of that same energy he'll be great. I'm looking forward to it.

I bought a pressure washer recently. It's satisfying to use but, if anyone else cares, you should wear waterproofs when operating one.

We had new staff photos taken at work and the photographer, who made everyone else look great, has made my forehead even bigger than it is in real life. Very disappointing. Or maybe I have a distorted sense of my own fivehead.

I've had the Pfizer jab three times now, and each time I've had a sore arm. Maybe a bit of a headache too, but I'm having issues with my glasses at the moment so it's difficult to say whether it's my glasses or the jab.

Can't they just let Jurassic Park die? Does anyone even like them anymore?

The LCD screen on our thermostat just died over time. I did this weird thing (following a youtube tutorial!) where I dismantled it and heated it over the toaster, which revived it for a few months, but it's died again and the toaster method borked it more. Bought a smart thermostat and it's all set up to be controlled with an app or the google minis around the house.

As we get older, the proportional difference between our ages tends to 0. :-D

Teenwolf vibe to me!

Currently looking into getting mine reupholstered, because all the pandemic WFH has not been kind to it.

Not quite as useful these days as it used to be, but I always have a USB thumb drive on my keyring. And my second suggestion might not be techy enough, but I often have a philips head screwdriver and two Allen keys with me (the two sizes I have seem to fit nearly everything).

Nah, it's not quite to that extent, but it's just a kinda gulf mentally.

"Just" a few grand over a couple of months.

You managed to get a GPU from somewhere? Crazy times for graphics cards. It's almost okay if you're upgrading because your old card will also sell for more than it's worth. I was subscribed to all sorts of stock notification places and managed to grab a 3070 at the start of the year.

Did you persist with Cobra Kai? I thought the first couple episodes were weak, but it got so much better. Wife and I blitzed it in a couple of weeks. Lots of nostalgia if you liked the movies, and it's great TV if you're willing to dismiss that thought in the back of your head about how unbelievable all the karate fighting really is.

Dragging this back up from the depths of page 2. Professionally? I like my job most days. The work can be interesting and varied. Most of the time that I come across something new that I don't know about I can figure it out. (My most work related recent google history was: "sample size negative binomial regression stata" and that turned out to be fine.) I'm pretty fairly compensated for what I do. Now that my wife is working, in an admin role at the local school, it feels like we're kinda raking it in. I know in the future kids will probably head to uni and that might be a hit. I'm trying to convince them to go to Manchester though - train tickets are cheaper than flats. Personally, my immediate family is great. There are two things making that worse. First, my boy has a huge health issue where his throat closes up over time (scarring from excess stomach acid) and he has to have an op, under general, to stretch it open every few months. The day of each op is just a worry from the start to when he comes out of the op. Second, there's an underlying tension because I'm not really mormon anymore in my heart (though I'm not fully out so keep it on the DL), and that causes differences in opinion between me and my wife. It's kinda a full-on religion so ... My not so immediate family is a bit of a disaster on my side because my dad got catfished two years ago and left his wife (my mother) of 40+ years to go live with a younger woman in America (that he'd been sending money to). Of course she didn't really exist, but the family is broken now, and that has just been awkward ever since. He was literally at the easy bit of life - state pension, private pension, just chilling out with my mum. But he threw it away, and now lives in a caravan park/little flat depending on whether or not he can rent out his caravan.