PhobosAnomaly

Awesome. I am - at best, out of the loop in entertainment news: and at worst, culturally retarded - so I was sat at LCY with a colleague and he was pointing out famous chefs, golfers, public figures every five minutes.

I was still trying to figure out how anyone affords either to eat or drink at the airport without being on business expenses.

For celeb-spotting and transit links: London City Airport. It’s nice being able to check your bags and fuck off into Stratford for a few hours. It’s super expensive though.

For a chill experience: London Southend Airport. Not in London, but loads of seating, decent views across the tarmac, and loooaaads of room.

For getting lost: Washington Dulles. Christ that place was designed by Stevie Wonder in a house fire. The sheer number of destinations is wonderous though fair play, a great place to feel like a tiny cog in a huge machine.

Edinburgh is a banger. Great support for families, spacious, and generally chill - decent transport links too.

The departures lounge is starting to sprawl with retail now though, but can’t have everything I suppose.

what about now bruv?

déja vu intensifies

On the topic of sharpeners, those battery powered pressure sharpeners are satisfying as fuck. They’re shit and invariably snap the nib, but they’re the sharpening equivalent of shoving a Q-tip in your ear and having a good rake about.

Or if you’re all about the procrastination, spending a few minutes every lesson at the classroom sharpener like this one brings back the nostalgia:

Every day’s a school day.

In fairness, it’s nothing short of sheer voodoo what they managed to do with the simple copper loop. As usual though, it was the rural communities that felt the pinch (and the gains) more than most though.

Yeah, people using mobile phones to contact businesses wasn’t really a thing, partly because mobile usage was still taking off when I was in the biz, but mainly because calls to freephone numbers weren’t actually free (or included in package minutes) at the time.

The chances of it being the filter were stupidly low, and I don’t think I ever had a case of the filter being at fault - but it was one of those potential issues that would make a customer look stupid (and £120 lighter) if BT tipped up and declared it a customer equipment fault.

In newer homes (at the time), there were NTE faceplates that had a filter built it, with individual ports for telephone and for data telephony cables. They didn’t last long though. Maybe they were stupidly expensive in comparison, maybe BT could see the fibre future and stopped producing them.

When I did tech support for a UK telecoms firm, that was the easy way to fuck off an awkward customer with any kind of connectivity problem - stability, speed, whatever. Generally, people’s routers were connected to the same NTE as the landline.

“So what we’re going to do, is replace the ADSL filter, see if it’s a gubbed filter, it’s a nice cheap and easy fix. Can you remove the filter from the wall socket please?”

click

Beautiful.

It was a crude way to express an “era” for when it was released, because I couldn’t be arsed googling for a release date.

It appears as though Fallout is an early 1997 game. Windows 3.x seemed to still be the dominant OS (or at least MS-DOS) at 52% of the market with Win95 accounting for 32%, so I would imagine that the game would still be built with 16-bit architectures in mind.

It looks like a dialogue tree from the 16bit Fallout games.

brb, off to get a GECK from Poland.

I was talking to my primary-school age kids about their teachers, and one of them says their next teacher will be Mr Smith.

“He’s old,” they said, “he must be at least fifty”.

I said “nah man. Mr Smith is probably only a few years older than me, early forties I reckon”.

They had me with “no he’s like really old. He reads a newspaper”

I miss those toolbars. Static, everything in it’s place, easy to remember.

These dynamic “ribbons” do my head in. Thankfully, I only really have to use Office in… well, the office.

Yeah I’ve still got my headsets from boxes with Skype For Business branding that have “Compatible with Microsoft Lync” stickers on them.

It’s probably closer in UI to Skype from the 2000s that the “real” Skype never really recaptured. Not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.

My org used Skype For Business and it worked remarkably well. Much more lightweight, though somehow still a little less responsive than it should have been.

It has that “it just works” factor for video calling, whereas Teams almost needs a fucking checklist to rattle through if someone’s audio or video feed isn’t working.

That’s a wingman and a half.

ARE YOU THREATENING ME???

I AM CORNHOLIO!

I NEED TP FOR MY BUNGHOLE

Here to represent Summit.

Positive development cycle, nice dev, and decent features on Android.

Oh I don’t know, he’s already in Newport hiyoooooooooooo