People do silly things. We have a department at work which pulls data from our ERP system to excel. They’re pulling 10’s of thousands of rows to return only a few bits of detail like product descriptions for a handful of items. I’ve offered to help them but they really don’t want help. They seem to be happy with this monster.

There’s another department which runs reports from our BI system, exports it to Excel, adds some calculations, then builds reports from that. They literally just need to ask the BI analyst to build them a report to their requirements.

I’m convinced people like screwing around in excel because it gives them something creative to do in an otherwise bland job.

I remember that sale and annoyed I didn’t buy one. At the time I thought I’d never use it. Fast forward a few years and I occasionally use Steam Link on a Raspberry Pi, so I would have used it. Oh well.

Ive had lag once using the Raspberry Pi variant and that was due to using a poor quality usb cable, it was under powering the unit. Aside from that it’s been surprisingly fast on ethernet and WiFi.

The fishing thing is a good example of how Brexit was handled. Fishing has been stirred up by the media for decades causing some strong feelings against the French and Europe. While fishing is pretty meaningless for the average person it became important because people who read certain newspapers thought it was important. That, to me, seems like the backbone of Brexit. Shite from newspapers.

I’m convinced all the talk about fishing was to stir up these feelings in the public and use it to the politicians will. Raising it with the EU was a message to the people that their concerns are being addressed. Illusion of the people having power.

Speaking to people who voted to leave I had answers like fishing given. Other answers were that people didn’t like talking orders from Brussels, that was more common than fishing. Some racist comments (some REALLY racist). And one person claiming after Brexit he will get gold capped milk back (apparently the EU banned his favourite milk, and that alone was worth leaving the EU…). I know a few people who didn’t know what to vote for so went with the “default” to leave. I’m assuming they meant they just followed the crap in the news and didn’t apply proper thought.

This media bollocks is still happening now. I saw the other day an article about being able to buy wine in pints. Sigh.

It really was a shit show and still is!

I maintain a Linux server at work which has our ERP on it (I wouldn’t say I’m great at it but know the basics). I use Linux at home for a few projects and things like routers, etc. My daily PC at home is Windows. I like Linux but the issues I’ve had in the past, while they can be resolved, generally take up more time that I’m willing to put in. I don’t want a hobby just to keep my PC working.

Hey Garth.

And Ceefax.

I’m responsible for our databases and work with our BI guy a lot. Changing from 13 to 12 periods was a right pain. We had snapshots, budgets and loads of forecasting data, all of which needed to be updated to reflect the new calendar. It wasn’t as easy as dumping a new calendar in, well it perhaps could have been if we were given ample time to plan it.

In regards to week, period, year, quarter, etc that’s all easy for the user to switch to their preferred view in the BI system. The ERP system will use the financial calendar but reporting is done against whatever the user sees fit.

I work for a company which used to have 13 financial periods. It was great. Then they switched to 12 and we now have a couple of 5 week periods thrown in to balance the year out. I don’t know why they decided that but it’s not as good now.

I’ve never gone for in game achievements. The most memorable personal achievement was as a kid completing Sonic 1 with all emeralds without using cheats.

Was it a lucky trade?

I used Relay too for about 10 years. The dev is trying hard to keep it going and talking about subscription costs. Realistically I can’t imagine anybody will be paying for a 3rd party app even if the option is there.

That might have been it. It was a long time ago.

They tried years ago to copyright the use of the letter ‘i’ and failed.

I’ve lost count of the amount of times my terminal has been referenced as being the matrix. Hasn’t happened much since WFH though.