The "where have you been all this time" thread

Rather than post off-topic in the "how to post an email" thread, here's a new one. Lovely board software, by the way, very gentle on my rather slow office connection

I was trying to think back to when we last really spoke, and apart from a small volley of messages when I started my brief flirtation of working with a vendor, I don't think I've really posted since I was in Saudi all those years ago.

So... came back from Saudi at the beginning of 2010. My wife and #1 son returned from China to the UK at about the same time. We got back to our little old house in darkest East Northamptonshire and discovered to nobody's surprise that we hated the place. But I had a bit of time off between returning and resuming my job in the UK, and discovered that I quite like not working.

So I've changed jobs. Twice. One that was a great deal of fun, with a friend as my direct senior and a role that forced me to learn SQL, VB, C# and other bits and pieces in order to nurse a cumbersome piece of software my industry relies on through that project. Unfortunately the overall boss was a micro-manager, and I can't stand to work for those, so when offered the chance to work from home for the same money, off I went. That was probably about the last time I posted on AOA, just after joining the control systems vendor. But... very bad office politics, plus no paid overtime and not enough staff in my particular role meant I found myself working 70 hour weeks (paid for about half that) and losing sleep for no benefit. Plus said company took the view that they owned their staff - people were expected to drop everything, even while on vacation, whenever they called. So when my original employer in MK, who'd since been bought out another company, came knocking, I gladly went back there. And so 2 years in the office in MK, followed by 1 year in China watching all the modules being built.

In the meantime we'd moved from the hovel in East Northamptonshire to a rented hovel in MK. I own that hovel now (well, the bank does, but it's my name on the title docket), but in the meantime, sunk just under two years of evenings and weekends trying to modernise the dilapidated East Northamptonshire hovel, before deciding (when it was ready) to let it instead of sell it, and ending up with a rather unreliable tenant. The whole exercise turned savings into debts - with 20/20 hindsight it would've been cheaper for me to sell the place at a fire-sale price in 2010 and keep the savings invested. However, once the old house was excised from my balance sheet and with a little help from family, honour was restored and we're back in the process of trying to minimise our mandatory working lives by the fastest means possible.

So where have I been. Mostly UK, bit of time in Qatar, bit of time in India, year in China - would quite like more years in China but seems unlikely unless and until I retrain or the price of oil goes back up. So back on a plane we go...

Tech-wise, I tend not to play much in the way of games, and haven't really been keeping up with "the latest" of anything really, so will probably stay mostly in the general chat area rather than polluting the other pages with my ignorance.

Other than that, what did I miss?

Quite an interesting life, excellent. Is "MK" Milton Keynes? Can't find any other geographic explanation for the letters. And if so, where is Milton Keynes located in England? Thanks!

Shucks, don't have a My Kingdom. It might be nice but wouldn't other kings always be plotting against you?
Milton Keynes is about 45 miles or 72 kilometers northwest of London. Hmm, wonder why it's said as "Lundun," yet spelled the official way? Guess that's our English language for you, full of surprises.
52 02N 046W, population roughly 250,000. But we still don't know if Kaitain once resided there. Always something.

I don't quite know how to respond to all these, you guys seem to have had a particularly rough few years! But here goes nothing and in no particular order... Apologies in advance for my English, btw. It's degraded somewhat.

Yeesh, yes, no wonder you were, as you put it, "a little erratic." A lesser man would've gone the full hermit, if between coping with sick people, long-distance commuting, employers reneging on agreements was only the half for public consumption! I trust that the four years since that post was made have been ever less difficult?

@booman - short and to the point Glad to hear life's treating you well.

@D~ - I think you might have been on your first or second bout when last we spoke. At least, you were still calling it shingles and hadn't started talking about opiates in your prescription. What a nasty little virus is varicella zoster - caught usually as a child and never really goes away, hiding out in the one part of the body its immune system fears to tread. But on the plus side, you've probably got a fair crack at claiming that late '90s song by The Verve (or at least its chorus) was written for you

I stumbled across an article a while back suggesting that the antiviral drugs used to suppress HIV were also rather effective against zoster, but whether anything has come out of that particular line of research... no idea.

Let's not talk about Brexit, though - I'd have to ask for a waiver on your board's "no swearing" rule.

@cloasters - Yep MK is Milton Keynes, sorry, forgot to expand the acronym at first. It's... comfortable but rather soulless. I owe you a reply to your other message and will. Just work's come and bitten me - some joker decided that it was a good idea to let all the management quit/go on holiday at the same time, leaving just me and the deputy construction manager minding the shop. So... meetings. Yeah.

You can find the lyrics here but for the love of all that's good and just in the world, don't listen to it! It comes from that part British history where one only had to be an ugly, whining northerner with a guitar to get a recording contract - the ability to sing was optional.

I thought I'd mentioned #2 son? Must've been in an earlier draft. Yes, two boys, now 9 and 6 years old. No more though - two's enough trouble!

He can take #1 son any time he likes - they'd get on well, that one's away with the fairies most of the time as well

My word, I have missed SO much by not actively posting here at GOL! Not only have this most excellent site's members been instrumental in helping me get started in Mint--they are cherished humans whose company I have sorely missed since the active days of AOA!
Thank you all SO much for bringing me back into the fold.

Thank you Dan~ for reminding me of where I should be!

Thanks to all of you here at GamersOnLinux! Watching MS ram unasked for and unwanted Win 10 updates into my Win7 installation(which I liked, I know, where was my shame?) was the final straw. The thing was that I needed to replace the Lenovo i5 box(that ran very well, tbh. But it would NOT accept Mint. Grr) with a Standard Architecture mosheen. I didn't have to sell the farm to acquire it but it was costly.
After that it was smooth sailing. Mint had the unmitigated gall to let me know that I had to search for one, that's 1 driver to complete the installation. In my Linux days of yesteryear (very. At least ten years ago) I think it was more like eight.

MS fades into the past, after I dumped it I read that MS is even more sneaky and underhanded with wounderful Win10. How can so many people just roll over and accept such nasty greed? It's a puzzlement.

No idea, but if it's wings you want, I'll start feeding him Red Bull*

Ah Lenovo... my wife's laptop's a Lenovo. It's got one of those fancy 8 core AMD APUs, huge amounts of memory and fast graphics.

Windows cancer set in early though. It kept blue-screening. One afternoon I stuck Mint 17.1 xfce on there. Mei didn't notice, except to ask why it hadn't crashed yet, and why the Chinese input looked weird. But... my 6 year old core i5 with only half the memory, running KDE rather than xfce beats the pants off it for speed**. I don't know whether that's AMD's fault or Lenovo's fault, but I'm betting on Lenovo's.


*British advert for the awful stuff, strapline, "Red Bull gives you wings"
** ffmpeg movie recode/downscale from full HD to the native resolution of a tablet. Same movie, my antique finished the recode an hour sooner.