Category: random

When you last resigned from a job, when did you decide to leave? Can you identify a point in time, whether it was a flash of realisation or a slow dawning, when your relationship with your employer shifted from ‘attached’ to ‘it’s complicated’?

‘Shields Down‘, an excellent piece from Michael Lopp’s blog Rands in Repose, suggests that this often happens when an unexpected opportunity presents itself: you agree to go and have a chat at another outfit, and in that instant your shields are down. In the moments that follow, you weigh your current job with an envisioned alternative future, and ultimately make a calculated decision: should I stay or should I go?

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In 2013 I attended the wonderful DevOpsDays in London. On the first day there were a series of Ignite talks: a terrifying ordeal where the speaker gets five minutes to talk about something while their slides advance tyrannically every 15 seconds. I always watch them with a mixture of awe, angst, and terror that someone will eventually force me to do one. They range from the mundane through the muddled via the baffling to the fascinating. On that day, Mike Preston gave a talk called ‘Burnout—the elephant in the room’. The audience was silent and in thrall.

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My mail client of choice is Thunderbird. It’s always served me well, but recently I’ve noticed that my laptop’s battery life is abysmal when it’s running. A bit of poking reveals that it’s a real CPU hog if you have large mail folders (and I never delete anything!). Finally I found this bug report which has a working solution. It makes Thunderbird 17.0.2 much more gentle on the CPU, and according to the report, should work from version 15 onwards. Perhaps they’ll fix this by default eventually, but for now here’s a quick step-by-step on how to fix the problem yourself.

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The story of Jewish migration in the last 150 years is amply documented. It is a seemingly endless trail of persecution, destitution, and desperate flight from home. Its legacy is written across the world, and is etched into the modern Jewish character: many older Jews will wear expensive jewellery as an instinctive hedge against the possibility that one day they might have to flee. Ultimately—at least from a popular modern perspective—it was a story with a happy ending: those that escaped worked hard and eventually built successful lives elsewhere, securing a bright future for their children. Of course this is saccharine. Like the refugees of today, many migrants remained desperate and obscure, leaving little for history to record. From the fragments that remain, I have reconstructed the life of one unremarkable man.

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This grainy image is the only picture I have ever seen of my maternal grandfather David Samuel Richards, known to his friends as Don. He worked for a family in Theydon Bois in the 1930s, as an engineer at Martin-Baker during and after the war, and was also an amateur wrestler. My grandmother divorced him in 1960, shortly before destroying every piece of evidence that he ever existed. All contact was subsequently lost. This may be the only surviving image.

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A few weeks ago I dug out two bulging ring-binders full of brochures, letters, leaflets and books that I received in the late 80s and early 90s from radio stations all over the world. I scanned a fascinatingly po-faced bit of propaganda from communist Albania, before (possibly foolishly) deciding to scan the lot and make it all available. I figured that some of this stuff must be pretty rare, and possibly of interest to someone or other. Then again, maybe not 🙂

It’s a huge task: I’m no archivist, and I don’t have a big fancy scanner like they do at work, so it’ll be a while before it’s all available.

Have a look at what I’ve done so far (at the time of writing I’m only half-way through ‘C’!).