@scottalanmiller said in So we are leaving..............:

This is exactly what the monarch is for, to protect the country from itself - especially in cases where the voting public just can't know enough about the factors involved. And the queen understands the potential horrors of a divided Europe and what it can bring. That she hasn't acted will likely be the shame that she carries with her for centuries.

The Queen has no power. Her role is purely ceremonial. Queen Anne was the last monarch to block an act of parliament and that was in 1707!

All installed and working. Pretty painless in the end. Now I've just got to start using it and get it configured with Dynamics.

@tonyshowoff said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Just got ready for a lunch meeting I have scheduled for Friday, then I realised it was Wednesday.

At least it wasn't the other way round.

First world? I can't get internet access in about 30% of the UK.

I love text. Fast. Reliable. And I don't get any spam. The whole world e-mails me (well, not quite the whole world, but it sometimes feels like it), but only people who are important to me text me.

@Dashrender said in Binge Watching:

No longer can you go to work the next day and just assume that everyone watched the show the previous night.

We still get this in the UK. Every Thursday morning nearly half the country will be discussing the previous night's "Great British Bake-Off" episode.

But yeah, it is annoying when you desperately want to discuss the finale of Stranger Things and everyone's like "don't tell me, I'm only on episode 7"

The canteen where I work is closing and so we're all going to have to fend for ourselves. I have a consultant come and work with me once a week and he loves his food. He's quite unusual, as I find that pretty much all the IT consultants and engineers that come and work here don't eat during the day - presumably because they'd rather work through and leave early. They sustain themselves on a diet of Mars Bars and Coca-Cola.

Because I've been used to having a canteen providing free meals for visitors for years, I'm not sure what the etiquette is. Do we send consultants out to get their own food (we're not short of vans selling burgers and sandwiches round here)? Do we go and get something for them? Do we tell them to bring their own lunch with them?

This isn't a particularly serious question, I'm mainly interested in what you lot do when you work at clients. I always love a food thread. When I lived in Hong Kong we'd generally go to a restaurant because lunch is a massive thing for Chinese people. In the UK, people generally have very short lunch breaks, or eat at their desks whilst continuing to work. When I was consulting in the UK years ago, I can't actually remember what I did.

@scottalanmiller said in Binge Watching:

So let's use stats. The most watched show in the US right now is BBT with just under 21m viewers. That's not 21m interested viewers, that's not 21m "really like the show" viewers. That's 21m people for whom the television was on in their house. The number of people who like it, are engaged, paid attention, etc. is a fraction of that.

The US population is over 330m. So that means that only 15% of the nation even sees the show, at all,

21m is not 15% of 330, it's 6%. The top show in the UK is Bake Off which gets 14m viewers from a population of 64m, or 21%. That's a huge number of people watching a show. I believe that's only people watching it live as well. We definitely have far more of a shared TV experience here. It's obviously less than it was - over 30m people saw Den serving Angie divorce papers in Eastenders in 1986 - over half the population.

I guess a small country has a less diverse cultural landscape.

Obviously I have no legal obligation to provide food, but whilst I know that some companies treat consultants and engineers like domestic servants to be used and abused, I like to keep them sweet. If keeping them well-fed and happy increases their productivity then I'm all for it.

Looks good. I love Veeam. How much is it, though?

Do you use SIM cards in the US or is it something different? Because I'd just put the SIM into a spare phone and get my texts, assuming the SIM hasn't been damaged. I'm not sure how indestructible they are.

Why not be even more efficient and go to bed in your clothes?

Wish I'd known this when I purchased a new server in January and it makes the cost difference between SSD and traditional drives much closer (since you don't need as many SSD drives for the same useable storage).

This is a real eye opener for me.

So is RAID 5 set to become the de facto choice for the majority of SMBs now?

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Installing a bath tub and working on system documentation.

Impressive multi-tasking there

I absolutely hate taking any kind of test or exam, so they're not for me.

@scottalanmiller Nice. Have fun.

@scottalanmiller said:

No quote, it's 100% free for the helpdesk. It does say that somewhere. There is NO scaling up, it's completely free. The pricing is there, it says free. There is nothing more to know on the helpdesk component.

Ah, yes. So it does. I was flummoxed by the 'Standard', 'Professional' and 'Enterprise' editions, but I can see now that the Helpdesk part is free.

@scottalanmiller said in Is Real Estate Actually a Good Investment on Average?:

Ergo, he's saying he doesn't know anything about business.

That's quite the hot take on Warren Buffet

I like Trello. I currently use a similar self-written system for ticketing and general task management based around scrum and kanban boards (scrumban). The main flaw I've had with it (and the reason for moving to something else) is the management of e-mail "conversations". Our calls often involve several e-mails pinging backwards and forwards between users, and the ability to have this managed inside a ticketing system will be a real benefit.

But the main flaw of ticketing systems is that they're not designed for scrum or kanban. Over 50% of our work is project based, so doesn't fit easily into a standard ticketing systems which is designed around quicker turnaround of calls. I love scrum for project management.

Between my system, Trello, Zendesk and Asana I can picture the perfect solution. However, there doesn't seem to be one single solution that ticks all my boxes. The only way I'll achieve this is by developing my own system, but the time to do that is really time I should be spending on other jobs.

@scottalanmiller said in Is Real Estate Actually a Good Investment on Average?:

Actually, that's not quite how it works. Historic data is actually incredibly telling and ALL evidence tells us that we absolutely can predict the future, within a known cone of uncertainty.

It is how it works. Or if you like, let's just say the "cone of uncertainty" is a really, really big cone

I was hoping for a slightly more hi-tech answer!