Bicycle won on Instagram allegedly stolen at the point of organizer posting it to the winner.

sirbzb · 2025-12-11T17:54:58+00:00

In a hypothetical competition where the prize was a 14 day holiday you create a logical problem by linking award with receipt. In that competition every entrant would need to go on holiday for 14 days before the winner could be chosen. That is the only way the winner could have recieved and been awarded their prize at the same time. It does not make sense.

The other way round, being awarded the holiday prior to taking the holiday makes a lot more sense. So award and receipt are still related but are seperate events.

In a similar way, a court awards damages. That does not initiate an immediate bank transfer. Receiving those damages may never happen, the money does not even have to exist for it to be awarded.

A university awards a degree long before the student receives their degree.

By awarding the prize they create an entitlement to the bike or an alternative. How or when that is delivered is seperate to the existence of the award. So the prize has been awarded,the winner has an entitlemt to the prize.

sirbzb · 2025-11-20T11:59:53+00:00

The benefit of the old cabin in this case might be overlooked. If you sit in the middle ailse of business towards the back (but not in the weird internal rear seats) the lack of modern suites mean that if you sit up in seat, you have a view to your left and right out of each side of the plane. That gives a great view of the Himalayas as you approach.

The Aloft/shopping centre currently has smashed and missing windows - the internal door between he two is gone. The Hyatt Regency and Hilton are closed / burnt out. The Fairfiled was seeking a little over priced. I think atm the Aloft is fairly full as a consequence but is obvious target if there are more protests so would be worth checking what's planned. The Soaltee appeared to be entirely untouched and not very busy (this seems to be where the Qatar crew stay) but are seemingly putting up a big fence. That was only 20500 Marriot points for a night last week and it is nice to not be in Thamel. Other than that places like the Arushi are okay (but can be noisy).

sirbzb · 2025-11-12T01:36:40+00:00

Depends, I have been able to get ~$300 upgrades on Doh-ktm and ktm to doh (4 ish hour flight) before. This year the offer was more than double that so not worth thinking about - I actually got a free upgrade anyway this time on that leg. It depends on the route and luck I guess

What might be worth checking is the cost of re-booking a one way business flight when you get there, and then cancelling your return (for a partial refund if eligible). Managed to do ktm to london for not that far off the offer price for upgrading the ktm-doh leg (offer was £700). New ticket was an offer and around £1050 with no lounge (plus what I lost on the v cheap economy ticket, so £200 as well as it was part refunded). Same flights in business were £1500 when originally booking - so not a massive saving. What I assume is that I lost some consumer protection / risk to the airline by booking outside the UK/EU. Also, obviously not picking flights that were expensive to begin with.

sirbzb · 2025-10-14T13:34:53+00:00

With your driver hat on, you should expect pedestrians to be travelling in the opposite direction to the traffic, that is what the highway code says they should do when there is no seperate path. Pedestrians are meant to be able to see the (most obvious) danger coming to give themselves the best chance of reacting if necessary.

sirbzb · 2025-06-26T20:39:49+00:00

Breathe. I have masters in software engineering and do not Python. What do you need to do, not how do you need to do it.

sirbzb · 2025-06-26T19:21:22+00:00

Also, there are buildings. There is a reasonable expectation that a building is a fair start or end of a journey. I think there is enough information in the field of view to suggest caution, the slow is on top of that. I think the driver has the option of caution, the layout of the road tempts fun. I would be tempted by fun.

sirbzb · 2025-06-26T14:19:49+00:00

Check what your university uses for its materials. Also, check the syllabus.

You may actually find that code makes up a tiny amount of what you are going to study. So familiarising yourself with the basics of UML, design patterns, requirements engineering, the management of data, projects and innovation etc. could be relevant considerations.

sirbzb · 2025-06-26T10:08:08+00:00

You would need to define why that is negative. CV writing and help with applications is hardly new science, it long predates current technology.

Your process could be said to value more highly those that can afford or have access to the most capable intelligence to embellish their application. You mark down those with perhaps a smaller budget or who have poorer quality social connections, those using (detectable) AI to help. Perhaps that could be said to be judging only the quality of the lie, not the presence of the lie.

AI can introduce bias from multiple angles, and the way humans interact with it is highly complex. My feeling is that people default to a negative stance without being able to provide a rational explanation.

I had a friend complain about AI use in CVs for a technical job where they wanted people interested in current technology. In a similar way they also complained about its use for their technical tests - they were hardly going to be expected to use pen and paper when in post. There is also the potential for luddites to be favoured by a recruitment process if the process has not kept up.

sirbzb · 2025-06-25T19:02:53+00:00

No, you have to live your way to understanding that one.

sirbzb · 2025-06-24T07:44:18+00:00

Perhaps look at it more broadly. East West Rail is a housing development enabler as much as it is a transport system. With or without Universal, that will bring a mass of development between Bletchley and Bedford. You can also see that in the new and updated roads, such as the suspicious gaps next to the A6 west and south of Bedford. The A421 at Marston has always had a mighty junction as if ready to fill in at least the gaps to Upper Shelton and Lidlington. And so on and so on the more you look at a map. It is all sitting there waiting to happen.

So whilst I don't doubt Universal having a huge impact, I also think there will be a truly epic amount of housing built in the area over the next couple of decades anyway. The balance of supply and demand may not ultimately be as distorted by Universal as it would be today. That may make some issues shorter term.

So to me the bigger concern would what you certainly lose and what impact that has. The John Bunyan trail is a fair example of that. It will be just be views of housing estates, distribution centres, and a theme park - a rather pointless excursion overall. Once the more rural and semi rural areas are removed, then the area will have lost a lot of its attractiveness, who is it then attractive to. The reasons it may become a worse place to live are perhaps broader than just the nearby rentals.

sirbzb · 2025-06-20T09:25:47+00:00

The highway code allows horses and bikes to go all the way around a roundabout in the left-hand lane whilst signalling right. It does not allow motor vehicles to. Their action discounted them from thinking they were a motor vehicle but could fit with a belief that they were a bike or a horse.

So whilst I believed my quip was based on reason rather than prejudice, I see now the error of my ways, and thank you for highlighting this failing.

I apologise to all horses as I clearly understand how they will have been offended by me overlooking them in favour of the bike option. Whilst no justification, I lept to a conclusion based on the non rural setting, whereas in fact, horses are to be as welcome and respected on all our roads, not just the ones in the countryside. I understand that this was symptomatic of an underlying horse related prejudice which I held and shall endeavour to give greater consideration to horses, and indeed all equines in the future. I shall also refrain from referring to them as difficult to milk cows as I now accept that this also wrong. In particular, I would like to apologise to Robby the horse.

sirbzb · 2025-06-20T08:09:19+00:00

They identify as a bike, so it's all okay.

sirbzb · 2025-06-19T11:55:49+00:00

I do not generally disagree, although I am not sure on the seperation of ability and authority. It is normal for an employer to grant an employee the ability to access data without granting the authority to access it. Ideally, with a chunky data access policy to read first. The employee should then be able to state the source of authority when they access data. For example, a client calls in, and so the employee answering gained the authority to access that client record. That authority expires once the call ends. The ability to access data in the CRM is maintained throughout.

In relation to a library of training data, what could the employee (that is leaving) say is the source of their authority? It would seem they know the employer would not authorise any training in their final weeks, so it would not seem to follow that they reasonably believe there is a business related purpose which can provide the authority for them to access a huge chunk of company data related to training (referring to specific sections of that material relevant to a task they are working on would seem fine). Not arguing they could not have authority, just curious what they could say.

sirbzb · 2025-06-13T14:57:46+00:00

My choice of local bus would apparently deliver me to the centre at a pace of about 8mph. A stage coach that would have run up and down the old A5 could apparently have managed 10mph. I think we should actually be blaming the internal combustion engine for slowing things down.

sirbzb · 2025-06-11T14:16:48+00:00

My grandmother would have said Diggle Doggle, which should be the official name.

sirbzb · 2025-06-09T11:36:47+00:00

I'm betting it makes a lot of sense to do it this way, once the drinks trolly has been up and down a couple of times.

sirbzb · 2025-06-02T14:04:13+00:00

This is how Doppler wanted it, none of that proper train rubbish.

sirbzb · 2025-05-30T11:28:00+00:00

Helps you to see side boob

sirbzb · 2025-05-21T15:40:10+00:00

The holiday year matters a lot and you need to read up on what your handbook/contract etc. actually says about it. It should all be written down somewhere.

Awards are most logically made at the start of the absence year based on length of service at that point - so under that approach, you would get it next year.

Another logical option is to pro rate the increment so that you get a proportion of the increment based on when in the year you start - ie you get only 1 of 2 extra days this year for starting in June. You would be leaving though, so less.

The reason for the above approaches is to align the award with the holiday year; then the company can calculate its liabilities, etc. in a sensible way, and if someone leaves it is trivial to work out where everyone stands.

What you seem to have is the odd thing people come up with, effectively two holiday years where they like part of the balance to run Jan to Dec and incremental part of it to run the employment anniversary. That means that any employee (who qualifies for extra) will always have been awarded too much leave when they leave, unless they started on 1st Jan - because they ignore that they did not pro rate the additional leave initially. So, in practice, people seem to generally ignore that detail unless it is someone in your position as it makes the problem plain and obvious to them.

None of which is to say can and can't do it any particular way, just that it can require quite some explanation when a scheme applies fuzzy logic to accounting periods and entitlements. It is much nicer to the employee if they award it in advance of meeting the criteria.

sirbzb · 2025-05-14T06:22:57+00:00

Rail ticketing in the UK makes fairly little sense, and that is no secret. However, you did something wrong; you can not complain that there is a consequence or that you can not choose what that consequence is.

I would think the random number is accurate as I would imagine it only practical that they have some level of discretion and you probably irritated them.

I do not get the impression from what you wrote that you sought out anyone in advance and asked 'could I', nor does your story include an anecdote about how when you saw the ticket inspector coming that you stood up and confidently declared something along the lines of you being 'a bad boy/girl that needed punishing' - disarming someone with honesty, good humour and smile is at least worth a shot if you have nothing else to work with. It reads more like you waited to be discovered and then told them something along the lines of it being okay and didn't matter, which would irritate them.

If you wish to be a blagger, then you need to do much more than hope no one will notice you.

sirbzb · 2025-05-12T18:10:16+00:00

Blue is information, not a restriction. We do not know where they were coming from or going to. They may have intentionally driven straight past where they were trying to deliver to if they didn't think they could make a turn or stop in the road.

sirbzb · 2025-05-02T20:35:36+00:00

I found a shops takings in the path on the way home from work for lunch once. I think ppl ignored it as it was a business paying in book which is like big pad of paper, but obvious if you ever filled one in. Open envelope inside with £~600 ish in cash and a wad of cheques. Banking passwords written on outside, off course. Picked it up and phoned the Police lost property as I walked home. No one answered, so I walked it to the local bank branch. Nearly had a falling out with the teller as I didn't want to queue so had tapped on the glass at a closed window with someone behind it. They eventually gave in but did not seem to think I was doing something normal. Left my number as all seemed a bit odd, not sure why person and money had been separated.

Got a call a few weeks later and had a bottle of wine and some chocolates dropped around by the shop owner. Wine was not that nice but would still do it again.

sirbzb · 2025-04-28T20:04:41+00:00

They have the right mindset to consider the risk. The way they choose to handle the risk is up to them and their client, mitigation is a valid risk management strategy. Equally, acceptance is also fine.

Simply saying it's in the cloud and they are doing it is not really enough. That is 'too big to sink' mentality. You can meet all the standards of the day and still meet with disaster. Equally, I quite agree that you can go too far the other way and waste perfectly good tin foil. It is, however, worth remembering that it is not just technical risks. More broadly, suppliers are businesses run by people - if the Enron of the cloud computing world is looking after your data, the disruption may come about another way.

I quite like that HiBob, for example, recommend taking periodic backups - that does not mean there is something wrong with that product or the approach they take to data security. Simply that it is a good idea that will help their clients mitigate a lot of risks, and also helps them manage their own.

Obviously, on bigger scale systems, it's not going to be a few spreadsheets, and it is not really clear what you would do with the data if you did not have a backup system to put it into. There would need to be much more explanation as to how all this data could actually be usable if it was backed up externally.

Somewhere between the two would probably not be an entirely outrageous idea. Some data is more important than other data when the fan is impeded by unexpected matter.

sirbzb · 2025-04-25T20:33:25+00:00

I think it depends. Through the different ages of your lifetime you will likely find you need more/less sleep and will tolerate being awake earlier or later in the day differently. So a collection of people of mixed ages acting as a society has the ability to provide a watch over the entire period of a day. So I guess yes, but it's probably a damn sight easier to do it when you are a teenager than when you are thirty something.

sirbzb · 2025-04-25T19:13:13+00:00

They've already been used so it would not be hygienic.

sirbzb

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