You may have read a couple of weeks ago that brain rot was named the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024. The definition read as follows: “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” […]
READ MOREYesterday was, shall we say, a really awful day. Our tabby cat, Musaeus, has not been too well over the past couple of months, losing weight like crazy despite being the one cat in our feline assortment who ate the most every dinner time. He’d also gotten into the habit of suddenly awakening at like four in the morning and then miaowing in the bedroom to make sure everyone was awake and could give him some loving. He’d also decided that having a sleep by the laundry basket was the best thing. Yesterday, he was there, miaowing every now and then until I stroked him and got him to purr. The last time was just after lunch, and I was worried enough to phone our vet to see if I couldn’t bring him in for an emergency checkup. Of course, I’d forgotten that our vet closes on Wednesday afternoons, so I resolved to take him in as soon as I could the next day, snowstorm permitting. But the next time I checked up on him a couple of hours later, he’d passed away and my heart broke. […]
READ MOREEarlier this month, I confirmed, by looking it up in an old diary I’d kept, that it had been exactly 45 years since I started my first job as a programmer after university. 10 September 1979, with CAP Group, at their offices in High Holborn, London. Sure, I’d had previous “manual” type jobs (working on a local farm to my parents over the previous summer I was getting £1.20 per hour!), but they were not career-defining ones like that first one. If memory serves, I think I started at £4,200 per year, plus £600 London weighting. We had two weeks of training on some kind of PDP 11, using MicroCobol as the language, using 8-inch diskettes, before getting some real work. Ah, memories, memories. […]
READ MOREA couple of months ago, I decided that we had to do some work on the house, and also to sort out a couple of loans I had. Easiest way would have been an equity loan for sure, but our lender isn’t doing those at the moment. So next easiest was a mortgage refinance, and I took advantage of the opportunity to also reduce our mortgage period. All fine and dandy, it took a little while, sure, but eventually it was all closed and we moved on. […]
READ MOREImagine my surprise when I got this email late last week. It starts off with: […]
READ MOREBack in November, my Audi A3 finally gave up the ghost. It wouldn’t start, even though the previous evening it was fine in transporting back some boxes and crates from a charitable event we had been involved in. That morning? Nowt. Had it towed to my usual mechanics to see what the issue was, and they said the engine was getting no compression. They quoted some $5K labor just to take said engine apart to see what the issue might be, and then it’d cost more to fix. Alternative? A refurbished engine for some $9K. At which point I decided to scrap it. It was 14 years old and had suffered already from some damaging issues with said engine. […]
READ MOREFor some stupid reason, I’ve not been writing much, apart from work-related stuff. So, as promised many a time before, I should set aside some time regularly to write about … whatever. A friend of mine tries to publish something every day, but I don’t think I’ll manage that. Hence an EOW (end of week) series from yours truly to be published on Friday or the weekend. […]
READ MOREFor me, D-day has a familiar perception. Not because I was there, duh!, but because of what happened when I was young. When I was 7, we as a family moved from Lincolnshire to Le Havre in France. Dad had managed to get promoted to managing a paint factory there (Celomer), a subsidiary of the British company Courtaulds (which is no more) where he worked, and so we all went over there for, as it turned out, three years. For me, it certainly was an adventure for sure. Not only having to learn French, but because we were just over the Seine river from Normandy. This would have been 20 years after D-day. […]
READ MORE