Adrian W

Sixty-something one-time software engineer/systems architect, now a trainee blacksmith who still does bits of tech stuff. Also occasional musician.

#nobridge

Born in: England
Lives in: Scotland

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Last Notes

2026-03-12 19:37:49 GMT

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I suspect SNP1/SGP2 will broadly be the way to go in the vast majority of Scotland but I’m still trying to work out the best option for down here in the staunchly Tory (with added leanings towards Reform) deep south west.
I suspect SNP1/SGP2 will still make most sense but I’m still trying to work out if that really is optimal for here. I’m concerned it might not be. Anyone got the numbers for a proper analysis?

2026-02-10 19:02:59 GMT

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Let’s face it, the way things are going Labour won’t be doing anything. It’ll be a Reform/Tory coalition in power and the country will be screwed.
And the stupid buggers who voted for it will still be listening to right-wing bullshit, blaming brown people and won’t have the first clue why everything has got worse. Bloody cretins.

2025-11-22 15:30:57 GMT

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Indeed. The rightward move of the Overton window has dragged everything with it. Or did the rightward move of the media drag the Overton window? Answers on a postcard…

2025-11-22 14:17:59 GMT

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Hmmm…”reasonable if right leaning paper”?
Nowadays, I’d have said it’s more a case of right-wing broadsheet shit-rag being bought by right-wing tabloid shit-rag.

2025-08-17 12:11:10 GMT

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Southerness?

2025-08-07 08:09:24 GMT

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A good question, but one that also raises the question “What is a ‘world-class’ university?”
Does this mean world-class/highly rated in all subjects and areas? World-class/highly rated in a few? Very highly rated or world renowned in one or two?
And is this based on academic attainment in terms of qualifications/degrees awarded? Quality of life for students? Quality of staff?
All in all, it strikes me as a meaningless phrase that just gets bandied about.

2025-08-03 09:24:56 GMT

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Reinventing the wheel?
I think you mean “trying to reinvent the wheel, giving huge amounts of public money to their favourite large IT contract suppliers (for the kickbacks) and then taking several years to fail to produce anything that remotely works because the ministers and MPs in charge (and many of the civil servants) have no fucking clue”. (Pardon my French.)

2025-05-23 21:07:03 GMT

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That whole “you only use 10% of your brain” thing - almost certainly a load of bollocks.

2024-12-28 15:32:43 GMT

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Most of my work was building real-time and fault-tolerant systems, plus general networked/distributed business stuff.
We did come across some systems that needed fixes, but they were often sorted in advance and were mostly low risk/impact. The media panic was, from my experience, largely overblown. But that’s the media for you.
I did have one or two mates who accepted 8-times normal pay (or more!) to sit and watch nothing happen over the New Year, but the rest of us were out partying.

2024-12-28 15:16:13 GMT

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I keep seeing the “it was mainly fixed by hard work” thing about the Millennium bug and I’m not sure I entirely agree.
A huge number of systems - many of them the ones the media were most panic-stricken about - just didn’t need fixing at all. They didn’t suffer from a Y2K date issue. Some others did, but many of those had been fixed well in advance as part of scheduled updates.
I (and most of my colleagues at the time) just enjoyed our Millennium celebrations with very little to do.

2024-12-05 15:09:57 GMT

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Because they're bloody idiots?

2024-11-17 12:03:05 GMT

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Ooh, feeling a little envious right now.
And if $499 is the standard price in the US, also feeling a bit ripped-off. At the current exchange rate, that’s about £400. List price here is £599. Even allowing for the 20% VAT (Sales Tax) that is included in the £599, Apple are still making an extra markup on UK sales.
Mind you, that’s how it’s always been with most products and companies, particularly computer-related stuff. (Still want one though!)

2024-11-12 17:06:48 GMT

The view looking east across Luce Bay from our garden. Slightly chilly, but absolutely beautiful...
Some days it's good just to stand there, look, breathe and appreciate nature for a while.
https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/113/471/056/534/375/165/original/e7deebbaa2f012dd.jpg

2024-11-12 16:16:54 GMT

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They do look and sound like a rather tasty snack…

2024-11-12 13:13:19 GMT

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I didn’t even know sausages had balls…! 🤪

2024-11-10 14:21:26 GMT

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If you try to think about it in terms of root cause analysis, a lot of that list probably just collapses to “stupid people”.
Plus bigots - which is just a special and very distasteful case of stupid.
At some point, all the attempts to come up with politically inoffensive or technical/structural/media explanations has to stop and people have to accept the unpleasant underlying truth that this US election has revealed.

2024-11-09 17:29:18 GMT

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Orange Turnip? Surely that should be Tangerine Turdbucket?

2024-11-09 16:33:19 GMT

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Although I currently run a very (very!) old Mac Pro that’s more or less maxed out with CPU, memory and storage, the new Mac Mini still looks quite tempting as an replacement. Pull the disks from the old machine, put them in an external Thunderbolt/USB-C chassis and connect that to a base model Mini (or maybe one with a slight memory upgrade).
That’ll save me loads of under-desk space and probably serve me well for the foreseeable future. Hmmm…

2024-10-26 17:55:47 GMT

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Yes, I know - before I quit the IT industry, the last major project I worked on was the ill-fated NHS Care Records System for England and Wales.
The technical aspect of conversion between different standards was relatively trivial compared to the political problems of getting lots of different customers (NHS Trusts, Department of Health, etc.) to agree on what they were going to use and then finding suppliers who supported the standard(s) properly!

2024-10-26 17:28:31 GMT

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There are already standards for the interchange of health data. However, as is often the case with standards, there isn’t just one, each has different versions and variants for different purposes and different suppliers/companies support them to different degrees.
A good first step for the NHS (or any large health/medical organisation) would be to pick one that everyone must use, but then you need to have all your systems/suppliers fully supporting it.

2024-10-23 16:02:41 GMT

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Very significant is an understatement. I’ve been a community councillor in the past, worked with community councils (and other local bodies) and had to deal with parish councils in England before.
The best I can say about some of the ones I’ve known is that they were well-intentioned but inept.
The worst have been populated with bigoted, self-aggrandising little Hitlers who shouldn’t be allowed to run a bath, much less any kind of local government organisation.

2024-10-23 13:31:14 GMT

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Seriously? If the community councils that I’ve known are typical, that would be a recipe for disaster. Most of ‘em wouldn’t have a clue what to do with the money or how best to use it for the benefit of the community at large. It would be more likely to be blown on the councillors’ own pet projects (or for whichever local gobshite shouts loudest).
The thought of a community council with significant budget and power pretty much fills me with horror.

2024-10-13 14:55:19 GMT

#silentsunday
https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/113/300/663/673/312/815/original/859d09c251161cef.jpg

2024-10-12 14:17:13 GMT

We said goodbye to this beautiful, sweet girl earlier this week. She was 14 years old and had had thyroid problems for a while. She had a couple of mini-strokes in the last month or two, was coughing and hadn't eaten much this last week.
We took her for her regular checkup and annual shots and the vet found fluid on her lungs and all the signs of thyroid cancer. Aggressive treatment might have bought her another few months, but would have been stressful.
It's a heartbroken #caturday here
https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/113/294/861/676/319/098/original/039dff355b032be7.jpg

2024-09-24 11:59:29 GMT

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To be fair, the Labour Party could make everyone in the UK millionaires and bring about world peace and they’d still get dissed by the columnists and readers of the Torygraph.
Although, given that Labour seems to be trying really hard to be the Continuity Conservative Party, I expect the Telegraph will warm to them as they begin to reach the disgusting levels of self-serving bigotry, corruption and incompetence that their predecessors achieved.

2024-08-18 15:41:50 GMT

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Another vote for the second one. While the first gives a great close-up of the flower and makes it the only star of the show, I prefer the composition and overall look of the second. The flower is still the star, but the background adds further interest and makes the flower pop even more for me.