So with all the nostalgia for Web 1.0 lately I signed up for an account on eternal-september and now I’m trying to remember all the usenet groups I used to be obsessed with oh, about 25 years ago.
So far, the nz.general page is full of posts from a conspiracy nut banging on about who invented covid and other assorted bollocks, and the nz.arts has been taken over by one person posting their poetry.
This lemmy instance is definitely a much better place to hang out.
I’m very experienced with usenet, still using it since around the early 1990’s. Nowadays, the old chat forum style has basically gone, and it is now essentially just binaries used for movies/tv/audio/magazines/xxx
Indexers list the contents, and providers give the access. I get downloads from Europe at 50-60 MBytes/sec. There are automation apps to auto download what you are after as soon as it is posted.
The old text forums are still there, but are mostly just full of spam.
Had a visit to The Warehouse to check out their new grocery section. It’s a “normal” Warehouse not an overly big one. They’ve changed the store layout to now sell fresh fruit and veggies, plus pantry items, cooking oil, flour, dried fruit, yeast etc. The veggies were nice quality and certainly at a lower price than the local supermarkets.
That’s cool. I recently tried out our one, it didn’t have fresh fruit and veggies but it had bread and milk in addition to grocery shelves. I didn’t notice a large price difference though, things seemed to cost about what I’d expect.
Butter was $5 a block but countdown had them at the same price.
Grocer tells me Cowgate is $3 for 2L, compared to $3.70 for the countdown branded milk. The $2 a week we’d save is a drop in the bucket compared to our total spend, not really worth the special trip for us, even if I liked it. We’d have to drink a lot more milk.
Yeah butter is only good on special, they have had $4 specials in the past and you can freeze it. Bit of a treat food. I tend to go through a lot of milk and cheese though because it’s still much cheaper than meat.
I guess it’s all relative. $2p/w = $54 p/y. Whether that’s an attractive savings depends.
Hahaha I’m not telling you to buy it, more explaining why I do that. Sorry!
I really hope it does help break the duopoly, I really don’t like it. Reduced To Clear are good but you can’t really bank on getting any specific thing there.
I honestly have no idea but I’ve tried three different bottles and each one was terrible - coffee and the rest of the milk both ended up down the drain. It’s almost like they leave the bottles in the sun for a bit before delivering them.
Our’s had onions, garlic, which were both very low cost, especially the garlic, compared to the supermarkets, plus oranges, apples and kumaras. Can imagine they’ll have more local produce when it becomes available.
There are lots of keyboard layouts available, including some MessageEase ones. However, I haven’t found a way to customise it, and none of the English layouts seem to have letters with macrons.
They say they take pull requests with keyboard layouts. Maybe we should contribute an en-nz language version that has vowels with macrons in addition to a standard english layout.
So, yesterday was a first for me. I had an online interview scheduled at 8PM (yes, PM because the interviewer was based in the UK), so had my dinner, got all dressed up (ie, put on a business shirt on top of shorts), turned on all the lights in my room (a rare occurrence since I prefer dim or natural lighting), and dialled in. And waited. And waited. And no one turned up. The interviewer was a no-show. An hour later, I received an apology text from their HR and they asked if I was free to do the interview. At 9:30PM? After being stood up already? Uh…no. They rescheduled it for today evening instead. I mulled over it and figured this was a bad omen, a sign of things to come if I were to proceed further, so this morning I declined and withdrew my application.
On the positive side, I got a job offer from my old old workplace. On one hand, it feels nice to be sought out and knowing that my old company still thinks of me, and if I were to accept the offer, the job is almost guaranteed to be in the bag; on the other hand, it’s my old old company and some of the reasons I left are still valid (like the cringy corporate culture). On one hand, it’s a different role to what I did previously, this one is an actual engineering role where I get to design and play with new toys and not deal with BAU stuff; but on the other it’s not the dream Linux job I’ve been after… guess I’ll have to go with whatever pays the bills, again.
If it’s not going to be detrimental to your mental health, then you could take the job. If you don’t like it, try to stick it out for a year then start looking for another job, but this time there’s less pressure, and it’s always easier to find a new job when you already have one. And easier to put up with a not-perfect job if you have an exit plan.
I’ve changed jobs every 1-2 years my whole life. Short stints aren’t really frowned upon anymore.
Thanks! And yeah, that’s true I guess, no reason to stick around for too long. Still don’t know how I’m going to get my dream future Linux job though… maybe I can convince my new boss to bring in some Linux stuff for me to play around with.
It’s cool you have a dream job, one reason I bounce around so much is I get bored too quickly so just try all sorts of different things.
I wonder if you get into a big IT company, if you would have an easier time getting secondments or other work experience in different places in the company to help you find and build towards that job you want.
I actually was in a big IT company, and you’d think that you’d be able to work in different teams and get different experiences, but sadly it’s not that easy in reality. With big companies you typically have too much red tape to wade thru when changing teams, each team acts like their own isolated unit and they don’t really work well together. Also, the higher up you are in your role, the harder it becomes to get secondment opportunities since they may be unable to find someone to take your place. Also, you’re far more siloed in a big company, so say if you’ve been hired as a desktop engineer you won’t get to work with server or networking stuff, whereas in a small companies you typically have broader job descriptions and responsibilities.
Oh man, that sucks. I’ve had many amazing oppourtunities in my career and have seen others struggle for just one, and it’s hard to identify why that is.
I definitely think job hopping has helped, though. It increases your chances of getting a good manager that can line up opportunities, helps you broaden your experience, and builds self-confidence and helps you push back on bullshit because you prove to yourself you can get another job and so don’t have to put up with one you don’t like for too long.
Oh sorry, you’re right, I did beat you! By about 20 seconds. I got mixed up because I edited the title to remove a typo, which happened after your post.
(I can still see posts after they are deleted - yes even when removed I still see all the spam 🥲)
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