Interview tips (part 1)

Interview the Interviewer (part1)

For the prelude to this 3 part post please go back to the prologue .

band practice night

I usually blog about things that I do not want to forget, but since I have to login to Linked-in every day while job-hunting anyway, I have decided to write roughly 1 article per week. I know that I can sustain this, because a few years back I made almost 100 blog posts over 2 years. I later switched to writing game reviews and managed to meet my goal of 1 per fortnight over the same period. Lately, however when I review or blog, I'm actually practicing my communication skills as well as doing a regular brain-dump. Practicing a thing you suck at is a great way to improve it purely through wrote learning or to overcome a personal barrier to the skill. Rome, was also not built in a day. at-sxsw-bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-pokes-fun-at-mark-zuckerberg-with-latin-phrase-t-shirt

No I'm not on Blue Sky, but let's stay on topic here. 

Job interview notes to self.

1. Practice your interview technique. 

You will often find you can get 2 job interviews booked in close together. For maximum effect you will want to book the job you want most, as the last interview. You will be able to reflect on the 1st interview and not make the same mistakes when it comes to the job you really want. It is common to step out after an interview and say to yourself, "I wish I had". At least if you have ADHD tendencies you will, apparently the brain likes to not only pre-rehearse conversations, but it also records them. For example in my recent article about Motivation, I spoke about the one question I got wrong interview-tips-prologue .

2. Interview the interviewer

The way I see it, I'm never going to be a 10X developer, that engineer who is 10x more productive than the average, but I can get that extra 20% productivity that happy workers give, just by making sure I am working at a place that I can love. And that's a extra 20% that extends to every minute of the day and every situation, not just your strengths. Which brings me to Career goals

3. Have Career Goals

You are always going to be asked a hard question in an interview, my favourite one is not:

 - "If you were an animal which animal would you be and why?"

Better questions are:

 - "Why did you leave your last job?"

 - "Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?"

And to be brutally honest my answer usually has been, 'with a paid up mortgage?'. That is everybody else's goal too, and so to rise above anyone's estimation of you, you have to articulate more inner spark or energy. A clear desire to grow in value and brightness almost. To me this was never in my nature. Every year when career goals came up in a one-to-one I just made up something vague that lined up with what I thought my boss wanted to hear.

I think the big reason I have never held myself accountable on a career goal, is that, well I've had 8 different jobs over my career, and some of those jobs have even changed tack unpredictably. But accountability can be a big motivator, as I already hinted at, in the my post linked above. So for accountability I am going to put security down as a career goal. More specifically code security, static analysis and code quality security, not penetration security. I'd like to learn how to pen-test, but a rotation back to being almost pedantic about clean code is probably my next goal. expect more on this in future.

4. Listen

When I step into an interview, my brain goes into overdrive a bit. I want to answer every question as quickly as possible. You cannot do that with words. most often to me, time wasted with a conversation pause feels like money wasted, it's not. In the real world, that's not how I write code, I write something, then review and rewrite it. Sometimes taking a moment to double-think before you speak has 3 advantages:

A: People think that you are wise because you didn't just blurt out a pre-made answer, you actually solved the problem in real time, as a brand new problem.

B: You calm things down and take the "rush" out of things

C: You can file away for later any extra information the interviewer just gave you. People are super impressed when you can recall a minor point they made hidden in a much longer exchange because you just listened.

5. Relax

Probably linked to the listening skill, relaxing requires my being super prepared. Most people do not know how to prep for an interview. I don't. Lately the way I get myself ready for an interview is my getting a mental image of each person I will meet in the interview. I look up things like how long they have been there, which uni they went to and any notable companies they have worked at in the past. Having some common base in a company you both worked at before is often a good culture clue, for engineering jobs at least, it often is.

Interview tips (prologue)

First of a 3 part series

Communication Styles

Last night I was in an online chat about communication styles and a young lady (I say this rather glibly because I was twice the age of the youngest person there) was moaning about people miss-understanding her. I struggle to read the room well, and I suspect it causes a lot of my interview impressions to be bad. I just have to accept that people who do not know me will probably not get, how dedicated and full of energy I truly am, from the job interview setting. 

Mistakes

I recently made 3 mistakes in a job interview which gave the impression that I'm someone who takes short cuts or is lazy, which jars with anyone who knows me. But that was the feedback, sent over, so I wanted to somehow call them back and explain the error, but. I had perhaps given that impression at least in 3 different instances, one of which I was tricked into. You can kick yourself, but it's their loss. I do kick myself though anyway. I still recall my first interview screw-up. It was admittedly my first ever interview, probably 30 years ago now. But a big thing I failed on was the practicality that the job was about 15 miles away and I had no car of my own. (This was Africa where busses do not really exist.) I did in fact have use of a car, but it was not my own, and yes I could easily afford to buy a car, but that had not occurred to me. They wanted someone who could work extra time on occasion, it was an IT job after all, so they asked, "do you have a car?" I said no, stupidly, but I was being honest.

Wins

Have answers for their possible questions and prepare well, this will boost your level of calm. Being nervous is not an interview excuse at all. Aside from predicting some of the questions you might get, the winner interviews were all ones where I stuck to my technical knowledge and did not try drift into being "mister nice". My first win was a referral, which I got almost entirely on the basis of being a friend with someone while on a full time training course. They offered to pay for my plane-ticket if I was successful. I met 2 directors and briefly the CEO too. I was sat in a room with a computer, internet and an IDE, and had to solve a linked-list problem from scratch in C/C++. The job would involve me porting Pascal and "C" code to C++, and I somehow did impress. That afternoon I flew home with a large manila envelope. My dad still gave me a bollocking for not signing and accepting the job offer right there on the spot. Ha ha! I packed my life into a station wagon a month later and drove from Cape Town to Johannesburg, and stayed there for 14 years. I only left to relocate once more, to the UK this time. 

Be prepared for the coding interview segment, most of all. I always freeze up when coding. Even though I am pretty ace at coding, my flaw is not reading the question properly. Something one rarely encounters in real life where the question is often really obvious. I panicked, until I read the question a second time and realized, the solution was far simpler than the one I had in mind. I did an online code test recently, for the same company that I had ducked out of their process on a few years ago, because I just feared the coding test. Pathetic. This time, I gritted my teeth and aced it. I believe the word for it is imposter syndrome.

You can often, only get a job, if you had one in the past, that proves you have the skills already. Employers don't want unskilled people. But they cannot spot people who learn quickly anyway in an interview, so my CV and covering letter writing skills have probably played a bigger part than they did in the past too. I used to majorly suck at writing, even though I write documentation copiously at work. Yes, my writing was, until 3 years ago, unreadable. But that's another story for later, for now I practice a lot.

3 Motives

My usual motive for applying for a job, is because the company does something which I think is useful or cool, not because I want the money. I recall getting a long-service award once, it was a sweet amount of money, in cash. I did not even open it to look, I handed it to my wife. She had a spa experience and full hairdo off of it with change. The money pays a mortgage, but money does not motivate me at all on a Monday morning at 8am. I once, took a job for the good money and ended up hating it overall for other reasons in the end.

My youngest son finishes a CS degree this summer, and as he starts hunting for work soon, I have had to quell his fears about not getting a job. I probably need to learn what it is he is looking for in a job now as well. Notwithstanding his lack of job experience, but these days it's harder than ever to even enter the market. So aside from my own job-hunt some of this post, is me formulating how to give my son some pointers.

I know nobody reads these articles, but I've never written on my blog about my early interview experiences, and this place feels more relevant than my blog does. It's also writing practice.

How I test Games

If you want a career as a Tester, this is for You

I don't test computer games, well, I do, but I'm not paid to. I will hopefully never work in a game software house, but it's not a bad way to start at all. I decided testing games was not for me after a interview at Sony in London. 

In a gray part of London in 2006 (much of London is gray looking once the heat of summer kicks in mind-you), I went to a round building, full of kids. Don't get me wrong, I've been to the Jagex (Runescape) HQ too and those kids are having the same kind of fun, but the pay. So yeah, not for the pay and the hours at all, but I do test games. I started writing games reviews over 3 years ago. and that has attracted attention from small indies who want to get positive reviews written around the time of their launches. Pushing the socials kind of stuff, so they often send out free pre-release copies. When I get a copy I write a review, but I also give defect feedback for any that are in beta, and here is gets tricky.

Games are easy to test and a good start for learning for to file defect reports.

How to write a bug report without any requirements

Well, you do have 2 requirements, the game has to be "playable" and has to make someone money eventually. 

Requirement #3 You have the game description, so when reporting an issue with the game, you want to see where the game description deviates from what your experience is. If the game is aimed at children, it has to use suitable language. Not too cutesy, because kids know when they are being spoken down to, but not too adulty, or else mum won't let her 7 year old play the game. So the smallest bugs you can raise are for things like grammar and spelling, and believe me, these are really easy to screenshot and get corrected. Easy bugs also help you get the developers attention. build relationship, ask them questions about what they hope the game will become or do. And be genuine but kind and build connection. In a real job, bugs are not just a thing you write up once and forget, they are a conversation than can go back and forth. In the industry we call it "bug tennis", where an issue goes back to you because you left out something or explained it poorly. This costs time.

What

Where/When

Why

1. Think small, but think big.

The best time to write a well supported bug for a computer game, is when the code is still very changeable. It's amazing how badly architected games code can be and how hard to change it often can be. Games are usually monolithic and not component-based at all. They are supposed to do one thing, and not have components that make any code changes easy to do in the way applications might be modified. So any suggestions that require a big change are usually far more work than you think.

Above is a screenshot of a game on the left with my suggested "accessibility" change on the right as a mocked up image, to make the text pop more. There are other issues in this screenshot, and my version on the right is not perfect, but it's a 5 minute defect. Always describe what you "expected" things to end up in your bug report. Not what you wanted to happen.

2. Smol QOL changes, bigger wins.

QOL (Quality Of Life) are one step bigger than the smaller (SMOL #slang) cosmetic bugs like fixing spelling, fixing the colour of something or the positioning of something. I see a lot of games get bad reviews not based on the enjoyability of the game, but on it's playability. For example any interaction menu like when clicking on something or responding to an event the user has to perform a repetitive mouse gesture or series of clicks. These break immersion because they waste time. Gamers call these QOL issues.

3. Classification

When writing a bug report, don't write like people do on the forums, come up with a classification system that makes sense for the product, and use the class of defect in the defect title. This will grab a developers attention when they are fishing for defects to fix in the backlog tool whatever that might be. good defect titles make you not only write a good bug report, but also mean you bug will get seen if at all in the flood of emails a developer might see.

I prefer to spend a minute and write a one liner bug title before I start writing up the bug itself. Bug titles should fit in one line in your screen. Example:

"Cosmetic: When catching a butterfly the camera briefly goes fuzzy"

Now this bug might not be a simple one to fix in the end, but it's not a critical bug like a crash or other data loss bug. Hangs, Crashes, Data loss, all of these are what we sometimes call showstoppers. which brings me to another point about bug reports.

Having a good bug title/description will also force you to write the bug report about one item and one issue only. Never lump 2 bugs into one unless they are tightly related.

4. Priority versus risk

Do not ever try to give a bug priority, that is the product owner's job. Lots of the bugs you report will never be fixed, often because the issue you found does not really impact the core mission. Or worse is a hard to reproduce defect, or just a defect that does not do much damage to the end quality. People who post on forums have a habit of making their complaint about a game or an app, the most important. They forget that 90% of people playing the game will not ever notice the thing that they do. Yes, most bugs, tend to only impact a very small number of users. The ones that impact all users are ones that tend to get fixed. Given the choice of 2 defects I might find, I'm always going to raise the one that will impact more. So the tester's job is to describe the impact or risk of a bug impacting a user, not it's priority in the work queue.

Finally: Screenshots Screenshots Screenshots

Before you hit send on your beautiful bug description make sure you have evidence, and are laying out your bug report with the 3 key elements. What, where/when and Why.

I love testing all kinds of software, and hope to improve my written communication, so expect to see more of these. Let me know in the comments are you a paid games tester, I really would love to hear from you.

3 Dreams

 Number, Number, Weight, Division , or so goes the famous Pharos's dream. Mine are rarely that dramatic.

Virus, Parking, Fire ? Hardly going to make this one ground breaking. But as in the past I like to sometimes use my dream as a sounding board. It was unusual to recall 3 dreams in one night, so this is a little unpack. It probably means I awoke at least twice. although I feel I slept poorly, my head does hurt today after lying awake a long stretch before the alarm went off.

1. The Computer Virus

This one is strange, the kids have a new animatronic toy, it's a Rube Goldberg type puzzle in a large plastic tube with wires, and a remote control. But while the kids are playing with this thing, I notice my computer saying "you have been infected" every 2 minutes, as I investigate the screen opens a million browsers, and I turn the power off.

2. The Parking Nightmare

I arrive at the same office park where I work, but on a gray Saturday afternoon, for a charity event held in the conference facilities, only to find the entire parking lot covered in a heavy plastic sheeting. Bizarre. So I park on the street and as I walk I notice the sheeting has been moved to make space for a retired friends car, because he is a blue badge holder I think, and has to get a wheelchair for his wife.

3. The Fire

This one starts with a shit, literally. I open the bathroom door and it's obvious the loo has backed up. I start recriminating myself for not paying attention to the warning signs of this event and open the front door to go and verify with the neighbours, only to find what looks like someone's chimney producing loads of smoke. It's coming from near my friend's house, so I walk briskly down the block , where the smoke is not so thick it's hard to see. Then I notice that it looks like it has been snowing. Which is actually fire supressing foam, not snow, and that a large fire has destroyed businesses and homes on the opposite side of the road, to top it off, the road has collapsed really scarily. Fire crews are in attendance. As I cautiously jog back home thinking "hey I can grab my phone and take some cool photos of all this", I might go viral! Then I see a white SUV, and 2 guys one of them is going door to door asking for donations, while the homeowner tries to fob the beggar off. I approach valiantly and try intervene because there are bigger things going on than collecting for charity today.

That last one was weird, I had to work out what to say to the beggar, something like "If you are not helping here now, you are part of the problem". I did say my dreams are detailed, what do I make of this? Well I really would like to be able to be helpful in getting rid of unwanted door-knocker types. But that desire to take photos of the disaster, has me reconsidering my motives.

I have had trouble parking at that office park a few times, but what the significance of my friend in the parking dream is, is unclear, because his wife is not disabled, but it was definitely him and his green/aqua coloured Suzuki car, and he is a really capital fellow.

The computer Virus is definitely the angry side of me. We see computer viruses everywhere today, and in many different forms, I've not had virus problems to speak of, so it's definitely about my anger and trying to point fingers as to who allowed the computer to get infected this dream.

True, the dreams mean nothing, but it's nice to imagine that they do. It's far more fun than doomscrolling for half an hour with a cup of tea in one hand.

Discipline=Freedom

" Discipline equals freedom" Jocko Willink.

Last year I started a course to learn strategies and tools for coping with ADHD tendencies. The previous Christmases had been very unhappy times, and I wanted to break, which I did. I have no ADHD diagnosis, I just find the tools help me deal with imposter syndrome, and seasonal depression. I mapped my highs and lows in detail for 2 months last year. I uncovered symptoms which are, as far I can work out, caused by anxieties. Like the FOMO (Fear of missing out) from my last post https://zaphodikusrealm.blogspot.com/2025/01/gently-curious.html .

Anyway, one of the typical ADHD'er tendencies is a desire to optimise everything, and free up "CPU cycles" and so when someone says discipline equals freedom , everybody's brain just melts. That just sounds like a juxtaposition, not a truth. But my next two weeks are about routine establishment. By having routines, you can take guesswork out of small tasks that waste the cognitive and risk assessing part of the brain. We execute about 10 mini risk assessments every single day without knowing, what if you could roll just some of those into a practised routine? What if we could batch chores up, and do it in a way that ensures we don't forget any of them, in itself , that's a stress source. As someone with very little routine, because I am constantly guarding against my OCD tendency, I think I'm achieving a goal. Yes there will be a blog post about goals, I'm working through some of the course material backwards, Can you tell I'm a rebel?

Gently Curious

  If you are a bit ADHD, you will find yourself often getting into trouble with people. I say often and I mean often but for differing reasons, one of them is when a thing someone does just grinds you because it's just inefficient to do it that way.

Big triggers of grumpiness (anxiety) like lack of sleep, stress, technology that glitches, over-loading or even a food change are more general ones that we have some amount of control of. But some you have no control over. Like when a friend takes 20 minutes to eat lunch and you know it takes you 10-15 minutes and the train will be arriving exactly then. It grinds you, if the train runs early, you want to be on it early too dammit! I have always had FOMO (fear of missing out) which means I love to arrive early to every meeting. My FOMO however had started to drive my wife mad. I needed to teach myself to be less anxious about time itself. Last week I twice managed to actually run a few minutes late getting somewhere and a miracle happened, I did not end up driving faster. And I missed out on nothing at all.

Gently Curious

What grinds me, is not just people who eat slowly. I had to realise that my FOMO and wanting to get to every single meeting 5 minutes early was also stressing other people. This works two ways a lot, much more than I had realised. And just like my totally irrational desire to never miss things was not understood by my family, I often don't understand their quirks too. I very often fail to accommodate others, I mean why can't they just do things my way, the better way? Well, that's because everyone has different goals and different things they get out of the habits they might have. So how do I satisfy my unhappiness with the choices of others to do things wrong?

I used to just tell any person straight out, that that is not the best way! And when you turn it in it's head, and instead ask, what they are doing first, then ask why they do it that way, but without asking the why question, ask the how does this activity meet a need, for example how often do we all do "X" in a day for example? Almost in a reflective way, as if you are asking yourself, and then even though you will then learn why they do it the wrong way, and you will not be able to change them, you will understand the person better. Ever since I started being more gently, I have been building my own list of annoying things that I do, which I now work on, to minimise. It goes two ways.

2017

Dec 2017 : This year I tried to fix everything. Everything. I bought a house. Found 2 boys. Found a handbag. Lost my job. Prayed. Found a job. Made fire... a lot. Got sick and wobbly just before Xmas. (twitter.com)

Stop reading now if introspections offend you.
Everything?
I probably set out thinking anything can be fixed, the physical or built things that break often that-is. I mean in the old days they made stuff to last. I still recall the old SONY set my mum had, it looked a lot like this one, and lasted for years and years, just like her refrigerator. 

So why does so much break, and what can I do about it? Fix it faster than it breaks? Just get on top of it, it requires loads of tools today, just to be able to work on stuff, but why all the throwaway stuff? Youtube is great for teardowns on almost anything you want fixed, and guides to fix it. So give google a try first. Anyway, my solution is superglue, the good superglue. Get it here http://softcircuitry.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/how-to-repair-stuff.html

Bought a House
This was the painful part.
I at one point started making a mental list of things to fix, while we were in the buying process (which was drawn out and clearly shows also that property law in the UK needs fixing.) Basic things we knew, like the roof neede re-tiling, and the kitchen floor, the kitchen splash-backs, and the bathroom,... anyway the list went ape.  I stopped after hitting about 30. New things kept on coming up. however once we got moved in, I had already learned to put in a floor. Thanks to Peder Peterson (a Belgian who plies me with great imported beers) and his reciprocating saw, I got trained up in chipboard flooring. 3 slow days, one room, many plasters and scrapes.

The house buying was something I prayed about a lot to be sure, it was a long drawn out process, the owners were not divorcing themselves of each other and the house very well. At one point I was about to walk away. In retrospect, I should have put in an offer 5K lower, possibly 10. This is the part about life where I wonder if I have short-changed myself. l always assume that if I am good to someone, that they will return the favor, not this time. I am probably too trusting.

Found 2 boys
It is easier than you think to loose contact with teenagers, they go through a stage where day is no longer cool, and that will hurt, trust me it will happen. 
http://zaphodikusrealm.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/proud-of-my-son.html . More on this, as we go along.

Found a handbag
I found a handbag, belonging to M it turns out, it was really strange, I got home one afternoon, early for some reason, and just a few yards from the front door, on a pretty quiet high street was a holdall. It is on an A road, but that just means that more cars use it than makes sense. I left a message at the post office, and left it at a nearby respite center and at and the next day, we got a thank you note. Samaritans +1

Lost my Job
I'm not allowed to talk about this, but despite the process being painless, it was stressful to me. I got demotivated during the process, despite telling myself over and over, that it's not my fault.

Prayed
Well, not me, I want to send out thank you to Esther and Rosemary. It was always going to be a worry, a worry that nobody wants to hire you, or that you get hired by the wrong crowd for any reason. But having someone on your case with the Big Guy is just a guarantee that it's going to work out if not to my own plan, at least to a better plan.

Found a Job
This required a bit of examtime cramming to start off.

(post updated in Dec '24)

new job started, new bathroom

updated Dec '24

New job started at arm

That's with a small "a", something all the hip tech companies are doing. But that's not all that is new once you start working for one of the most invisible yet totally huge tech companies in the world. Apart from being very cool to work at a place that had almost invisible products everywhere, is the "in" jokes around 3 letters, a r m . I'll not spoil it, you have to work here to hear them all, and even understand them all. It's a very creative and hard working crowd.

New bathroom

Almost done , it looks brilliant, but some small things I did not expect.
- the grout colour gray needed to be a little bit lighter gray
- the towel rail radiator starts quite near the ground, which means it's less of a towel rail, but it should be fine
- the towel rail is bigger than thought, so the basin kinda lines up or does not centre well in the remaining space
The missus is wondering about where to put the toilet roll, so I'll have to sort that out pretty pronto myself. I had fun getting downlighters onto a string of lights this weekend, just hope I can get holes into the ceiling without cutting anything by mistake under the flat roof. Limited space and other cables in there too.

Boiler instruction manuals http://www.greenbrook.co.uk/eshop/files/files/T205-Ins-June-18.pdf

Updated - that job lasted a whole year, I think I struggled a lot with the traveling and being a bit lonely.

Singing rehearsal pieces

Nobody will know:

A note I made back in April of '23, long before I had to start takign singing seriously, but this is jsut a note, so here goes.

A Gaelic Blessing Deep Peace to You - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lF56VahTa0gn2JqLnJcUiK4lU2R-5Z6g/view?usp=sharing

Bridge over Troubled Water - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e0D6ul5nZ_wsfvUDGI8D005DxnZcOlGs/view?usp=sharing

BQQ recipe update

A note for future me (I write this in summer of 2023, and it's almost 2025 now)

I have said this before, I hate recipe websites. So I like to write up my version of a recipe and stow it someplace. I suppose that's a bit old fashioned. Almost like a circular technology shift.

Anyway, going to do a repeat of the BBQ with fish soon. I'm going to be adding aubergine and plantain.

A History linkup

(Wrote this during the great shutdown - but never published this at the time, so the date is wrong, but it needs sharing now.)

I'll have to find an old picture or two of us. This is a history lesson, it's not long in terms of years, but it's long in terms of miles. I'm sitting here writing this today, crying. My good friend Marinus has lost his best friend this week.

Marinus van Zyl

Marinus actually has many middle-names, he once recited them for us, there is a family tradition of giving each son and daughter in the family, successive names from the fathers middle names. A way of holding your family names which curiously would mean that sometimes your grandfather would have the same name as you. Marinus son, Manie holds this privilege, I hold the benefit of having met both of them. But let's start at the beginning. A bit of this is my history, just in my writing.

1991

Johannesburg city center. I'm pretty sure it was raining as I queued up to register for a programming course. I was a bit self-taught at programming at that time, but since I'm not university material, a practical course run by a certain company called "Van Zyl and Pritchard" was my way into the industry. It was a Cobol Programming Foundation certificate and going to be my ticket into programming. One of the training company directors was, Marinus father. A short course, co-incidentally also attended by one of his children, Marinus. I made one other friendship in that course in between lectures on a large yet packed second floor room. Craig Austin now lives in London. After lectures we would walk across town, run really most often to catch a train back home, and after that, a bus.

Nobody reads these

It occurred to me, that some people blog as a self-branding or portfolio building activity.

I probably should have started writing more of these personal signposts a bit more regularly, since there are very few landmarks here, marks I'm leaving for future me, almost like a diary, because nobody reads these, but almost like a personal wiki or a self-help guide. I tried making my own wikimedia wiki once to store all the info I had about transistors and odd electronics I collected, it was a lot more work to write up than I originally hoped. But it did teach me to be super comfortable with writing markdown. glad that this blog does not require markdown.

Interestingly the saying goes, that "our future is written in our past". And that's largely true, as knowing what you did before, lets you know more about what you will do next, but. Big but, when truly looking for change, honest change we might too often use the past to beat ourselves into a kind of submission to all of our past wrongs. 2 years ago, as parto f a change I wanted to drive, I started a bit of a writing exercise. Now this blog was always an inspiration outlet, but I was writing about computer games, and the audience and context did not fit, but the goal, was to start writing more clearly and purposefully. So I wrote my creative pieces as game reviews on Steam, and grew to 99 followers over a year, and am now at 150 followers. I wanted to learn to "Write-like-you-are-paid-to-write". And so now I am hoping that my writing style becomes more deliberate, because next up is a bit of blogging with more purpose than usual. So do stay tuned.

Let's see if this becomes another one of those new year resolutions.

Ringing Association web changes

1.  find all dead links
2.  find all and add missing images
3.  update any blurry images
4.  make page headings more consistent (banner redesign)
5.  get people to send updated content in
6.  get events data from someone?
7.  make homepage more inviting and cleaner
8.  catalogue all embedded pdf and google docs (use pdf)
9.  write up some guidance : this document

Guidance

• Spelling is to be English UK, not US.
  Examples: colour, centre
• Note any change when you make it so people can be included and review after.
• Decide on a font style and sizes : TODO
• Decide on consistent image sizes to make things look more pleasing : TODO

(1) Dead Links

The Huntingdon website is moving/moved - find best new page, then fix any links : TODO

The quick links page on EDA page and on the Ely EDA page differ un-necessarily (somehow I cannot find both pages now.)

elyda.org.uk "A" record needs to point to ely.elyda.org.uk someone with the mythicbeasts DNS record hosting needs to do that bit. : TODO

Telegraph lines to our Past

 A few summers ago, I heard a chiming, a ringing, and a connection started to form faintly. Faintly because the great lockdown of 2020 hit us. So it was not until the first lifting occurred and a lot of people connecting and messaging happened that I got started.

Ringing bells that is. And it has taken some time to get schooled in the art. but we are finally guild members the missus and I. My interest has been about history and the old buildings, and as a hobby ringing lets you touch a lot of those bases in a very tactile way.

Anyway. It's Sunday and I have a lot to do, so . Yes loads to do. I'll use this space for notes I think.

StPeters Wilburton : Part of a quarter-peal attempt.

2 minutes

Ringing down at St Peters Wilburton
Ringing Down

Where did you run to in Lockdown

so i quit all my normal clubs

For me, the digital world has often inhabited a subliminal space around the real world. That's because it's a construct of what is essentially our physical world but with vastly different constraints. Constraints that are easy to ignore and are often ignored and grotesquely twisted by users of our digital worlds. So when lockdown pretty much jailed everyone who did not open the door into the digital, I could always see the "construct" of the digital space for what it is, a lie. But everyone was online now, to communicate, to share, and to work and to socialise, you have to open that door into the slightly twisted, but the only world that remains.

It started with the uncanny valley of zoom meetings. People compose books on the shelves behind them on camera and aim the camera just so. People use backgrounds and then the camera portrays the other party up close, really close, just 50 cm away from you. That inside your comfort zone visually, and the mind boggles. So we all try different online meeting solutions and mix up the online meeting screen with backgrounds and so on, to try and make it feel less personal-space invasion-like, less home privacy invasion-like and try get on with it. But apart from the way the camera lens lies and the fact that only 2 people in the meeting can speak at a time, (which is a really dumb problem.) There is the drift into doing everything digitally, which is of course meaningless. You cannot feed someone digitally, or even less check that they really have taken their daily meds. You cannot help them get to the bathroom (there is a famous discussion on how the simple stranger entering a place asking for directions to the bathroom is in fact a bigger introduction to deeper communication, but that's part of the pain.) Yes, lacking physical touch, but for me, digital has always been fake.

Digital will always be fake, it conveys very low trust, and is unable to transport any goods or provide really useful services, and still cannot make tea. And for those who could not work remotely the "imposter" and fake of my cushy life made me trip out on guilt early on. I had a security of my little personal zone, a luxury, which very few had, many were jobless. For someone who abhors luxury, this was very hard to process.

So I ran away.

Why?

Well because it's a complete waste of time and effort. Mental effort which has now been frustrated for some people who don't normally hold it together anyway. There was no point in going to online club meetings; meetings where you cannot give someone a lift back home afterwards; meetings where you cannot have a side conversation and meet for coffee afterwards (some exceptions exist). Meetings devoid of cookies, and meeting with no beer involved. Nobody seemed to care that this was a problem, which for me further eroded trust in the people meeting because everyone else was happy to forego one of the things I really felt was key to me. I have always felt I trusted the smart people I admire who built the communities and ran meetings. Lockdown undermined that trust. All the clever people had no answers. I quit a number of clubs, some clubs I quit frivolously, others more out of general overload. Generally nobody cares about the "person" in a digital club.

Overload

An Olympic athlete pulled out of one of her events this last week, she was not confident she could focus and complete the slightly dangerous techniques. Too much at once, in fact some clubs I abandoned were abandoned just because my bandwidth dried up. Not only do I not pay attention to postal paper mail anymore, I don't pay attention to spammers like YouTube who spam me with totally pointless content, making me feel even more isolated by the "actor" on a soap box with a fake smile that their "algorithm" forces into the foreground. Just let me be quiet, let me go back to basics, and let me do physical things, things that really do matter. This lockdown reset has prompted a lot of us to take up hobbies in cooking, crafting, gardening and more. It has even forced a lot of us to start cycling more, walking more, and make some better life choices. some of these good habits which I hope people decide to keep after this all blows over, and blow over it will. Lockdown has cut down air travel, which might be good for the re-calibration of our waste culture too.

I read this week about a few people recalling vivid dreams they have which are like the Truman Show, being in a fake world where everyone else is really a robot, and you are the only human left alive. A feeling of being continuously observed, but not in a move star kind of way observed. Guinea pig kind of observed. I used to have these thoughts once, and lockdown has triggered them again, but making me feel liked a trapped or jailed mouse. I often wonder if pets feel like they are jailed. I'm a cat lover myself, so sometimes I just wish I was a cat. Okay, forget that cat reincarnation idea, it's not that appealing unless you are a cat in a good home anyway.

Casualty

The casualties are many, and I'm not yet ready to take responsibility for ones I've created, sorry, just, sorry if this is you, find someone who is responsible to blame please.

Blame

As someone who struggles to follow even a basic math formula, I was never going to be the one who solves this blame thing. However my faith in smart people to make good choice dissolved in early 2019. A lack of honesty and even a desire to have prevented this are my foremost reasons for miss-trust of the system and of my betters. I can see how some anti-vaxers use this same line of argument against the establishment of medical professionals. It's however blindingly clear, just how weak willed politicians are, to address the real causes by minimising encroachment on wildlife and minimising climate change which is the leading cause of the encroachment problem. I'm sure that's not the only thing we would do if we could wind back time to November 2019, but now that it seems a lifetime away, it's too late. The fact that clever people give up too easily worries me. That weakness underlies a lot of anti-vax argument, which sadly is illogical.

Return

So, sadly I'll not be coming back soon. I'll come back when I'm allowed to sing and dance indoors without a mask, when I'm allowed to grab cookies from the same jar as everyone else, and without individual wrappers on foods. I'll be back when I can do physical things that make a difference, like buying you a beer, or giving you a lift. I'll be back when the people have dispensed with the bullshit and have stopped playing. Playing is fine, but just not when it's at someone else expense.

I know that nobody will ever read this, but that's fine, it's digital, so it's fake anyway.

Every time I see an advert, a puppy dies

Ads, advert or advertisement? If the contractions introduced over time were not hint enough. Please tell me I'm not the only human who has spent the last 20 years teaching myself to ignore advertisements. It used to be that television adverts were entertaining back in the 80's. Billboards and newspaper advertisements glossy magazines with great artwork were setting the standard gradually higher and higher. Culminating in an entire book worth of advertising of homes, that you can buy every Sunday at the newsagent. Yes, there used to be a time when adverts targeting specific people would actually be all in one specific place.

Mutually Assured Destruction, simply by having a bigger banner Ad.

1. MAD

Digital changed all of that, advertisers can now follow you around and target you. Companies have always had more money that sense when it comes to advertising spend. That's because brand awareness and influencing peoples buying habits, is big big money. Brand loyalty is such big money that companies prostitute themselves to the advert companies, who happily ask for more money in order to promote their client above all the competitors. Creating a MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) cycle which sees ever more bizarre advertisement spending in order to emerge on top. Being seen becomes so important that brand awareness surveys and number of impressions become a metric to chase after, yet another lie to pile onto the ill in that industry. To the consumer, advertisements become a bombardment, which frankly comes across as increasingly desperate, and often insensitive.

The impact of advertisements on customer in many ways however is harder to ignore. An impact that goes beyond a datacenter carbon footprint, a datacenter built just to store gigabytes of data about you to target you. Because targeted adverts are coming under pressure with new privacy controls possibly coming to Apple. Apple are bizarrely not a player in the advertising game, even though their entire raison d'etre is about image, and suddenly Google and their free portable-device OS don't look so stupid anymore. I get that Apple are all about what will make them more money, so pandering to privacy is a song they have sung for a while, and will continue to sing new cover versions of. I can respect that, someone who sticks to their guns and gives me a service, worth the money I fork over to them. If only I did not have other problems with Apple, I would be mucking in down at the Macintosh farm instantly. but I digress, because privacy and the impact AI has on it is key, even if fans of the platforms cannot see that.

2. Privacy

So, lets get back to this anonymous user problem. Apple use a special "advertiser id" generated for each device, that allows you some privacy, because an advertiser gets a unique ID for you, but that ID is not tied to "you"... which is complete bullshit as a concept. But for now I'll let it stand.

The vast majority of us have nothing to loose by being tracked, until... Well let's understand privacy better here. Privacy is about protecting the vulnerable as well as about preventing identity theft. And you will be surprised at how many vulnerable people are online. Activists online who are tracked by state actors are just the very tip of this iceberg. "State level" actors are powerful enough to drop tracker pixels into social networks, and sniff metadata directly off the wire to find and start profiling the contacts of anyone the activist connects with. Apple's clever little "ID" can do nothing to protect these people, because the privacy metadata at risk is your links, to other people. And even if those people are anonymous, someone with enough metadata will quickly map your habits and location using ML. The only defense against being tracked is to change your identity regularly, or to use ML itself to randomly make you appear to behave differently or randomly. Humans are creatures of habit through their timing and their connections (sites they visit). Internet activists are more vulnerable than we think. Advertising has created a huge industry to enable tracking people, often for the wrong reasons. Don't even start me on the very very bad health biases that advertisers willfully create.

I'm not even going to start on how advertising trackers get misused to sell health related items to you, another landfill contributor. If you start visiting baby websites while trying to have a baby, and then your wife has a miscarriage, they keep on bombing you with misery for years without ceasing. I'm not even going to describe the trivial effort to research buying one toilet seat of the correct size, then going to buy a replacement toilet seat in a real store. For the next month I got toilet seat adverts, even though I only have 1 toilet in my house. What a waste. The other day I bought a special kind of bolt online, I never buy any similar finds of things, but just that one experience saw my stream flooded with all manner of metallurgical products. Products I could often not even identify, and less likely even ever buy. The waste is dangerous, but the creepy thing is that this data, me buying a bolt, asking a friend a bolt related question allowed the advertisers to link me with my friends. Soon we all see the same bolt adverts. I kid you not. Imagine if I was researching a sexual health related product, something very private? Suddenly my friends will know.

The thing that pisses me off most about this is that this has a huge impact not, on men.

So you think you are anonymous out there, let me tell you a story about a big games console company. They had a huge problem, their console could not advertise new games to users because not only did the console not really know who the gamers friends really really were. But they had no way of knowing how to push relevant adverts to a gamer and their friends, because the console had no web social network linkup. And we all know that the web and most especially the mobile platform gets the most "conversions", or actual purchases. On our mobiles, a device we carry everywhere and has our attention 24/7, the console game publisher had no way to touch it's users. So the console company went to a cloud company and agreed to combine basic user metadata with whatever data their own website tracking could provide. Suddenly using ML alone, an algorithm if you like, was able to use terabytes of metadata, not about the users, but about their activity alone. And successfully build customer journey patterns that now save the console company millions in advert budget. Watch this landscape. It's about to change.

3. Waste

The ad industry is a huge waster, not just in terms of the MAD stacking and compounding problem, but because a lot of us cannot resist adverts. I've gotten into the habit of hating adverts and on a platform I block advertisers when possible, set preferences and enable trackers as often as I can to prevent adverts that are really more a waste of my time and a waste of money for the person placing them. Advertisers may want to start paying me, there's actually a browser that tries to do that, but that's another topic altogether. Adverts waste my bandwidth, which I pay for, and they just assume is free. Adverts waste my time. By lacking any kind of real targeting adverts force me to wait longer for pages to load and get in the way of me doing the things I love. Basically imagine you are about to kiss a beautiful girl, and a guy wizzes up on a bike and suddenly offers to sell you a condom. You buy one, she runs off anyway at this point, so you toss it into the landfill. 

Image showing the "Golden Girls" Maude not being rude.

Most commonly advertised products are the cheapest products and hence more likely to be impulse purchases, that get binned. Advertisers are often wasting their time because I've not bought a single product off of an advert, ever. I know this because I only buy items off of a researched wishlist which I keep in various ways. It's not hard to prevent landfill.

Bebo Inspired (sic)

 What the heck is Bebo? I mean, like what was it?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55908193

Right now people are closing their Facebook accounts and Whatsapp accounts in droves, this happened about 5 years ago, but this year looks more like a single solid departing wave for many. I am perplexed by this, and so I'm writing now to clear up my thinking and also to poke fun at the fearmongers.

Exodus

My biggest fear with the social media exoduses that things like Parler which got killed off by AWS creates, merely cause new networks like the Bebo re-imagined service will undoubtedly bring the same broken services in the same way the google youtube algorithm would show you content to drag viewers in and thus was automatically showing them more and more extreme content just to see advert revenue. The fact that humans have failed to develop an allergic reaction to digital advertising and it's blatant waste culture distresses me. But even more distressing is the possibility that network fragmentation may split people farther apart. What am I talking about? Stuff nobody wants to talk about to be honest, but primarily the failure to inoculate against advert revenue is behind the Facebook screw-up. Because people don't want to pay for services, and even if we did, providers can make more money off of our data than they would off of a subscription. Even a Youtube ad-free subscription has very little take-up. The service probably costs more to run in that model to be fair. Why? I'm definitely no buying add-free youtube, not unless it comes with a fully add-free experience on the other platforms that touch it. It's a bit pointless. Like swimming in the goldfish bowl that is the internet. My big underlying fear is that the polarization that these social networks drive and thrive on is only now becoming evident and it's too late to stop a freight train that has been running down the track for decades. I have very little faith in the internet repairing itself. I keep seeing people on Twitter who think otherwise, and that old men cannot fix this thing, and that our youth will re-imagine the internet. Clearly the rose tinted spectacle wearers are prepared to wait for as long as their followers keep on promoting their bubble.

You could not make this up

As if 2020 was not an amazing yet humbling year, we not have 2021, it's over now for captain Tom. It's the movie script you could never write. I'm thinking of chucking out the TV set and youtube today, I keep seeing adverts for Netflix and other pointless entertainment services, sure I watch some non-broadcast TV, but not enough to warrant paying for Amazon Prime, the kids watch it for the most part, but if someone stole my TV, and blocked youtube.com on my internet, I would not cry. Just the captain Tom movie alone would be like the titanic movie that I have never seen and never will see, depressingly kitch.

And all because a spineless Prime minister could not be bothered to lock down the UK, and to actually stop all air travel in February when we all knew what was coming already. Your prevarication mister Johnson Sir, is costing 1000 lives per day, equivalent to about 5 lockerbie bombings every day. Chew on that one.

Lockdown loo

How to sort out a loose toilet seat, if you have one of those concealed models. Ours was loose and wiggling about after > a year of usage.

My google skills are terrible, because a search for how to install one like this turned up no useful results. In fact it wasted a lot of time. So I'm sharing my experience repairing a soft-close model. The newer soft-close models are not covered in a lot of the tutorials in the same way the concealed bolts is glossed over too.

For the entire job, you will need a tape measure if you have bought a new toilet seat, something I almost did in desperation. You don't need a saw; many guides want you to just cut the bolts. You will need some penetrating oil and a flat head screwdriver. The cross-head driver was specific to the bolts on mine, your may vary.
Lastly, if doing a replacement, there is a nail, you will need a thin poking thing for getting the various plastic shims out.

1. Grab some soapy water in a spray bottle, and wipe down the working area well with disposable wipes. As seen in the right on top photo, use a sharp object to get the two plastic stoppers out. These will let you shift things back and forth now. It's a good time to add some penetrating oil into the areas we want to get into later.

2. Use the flat screwdriver to pop the chrome screw covers up. You will need to wiggle things around at this stage.

3. Now get to the screws and undo them a few turns to get more freedom. At this point give the throne a second good cleaning with the squirting bottle of soapy water. Using gloves is not necessary if you wash your hands well after, and the loss of agility gloves add is not worth it.

4. I dissembled and cleaned out the soft close mechanism at this point. It's rather fiddly to do, but if all you want to do is tighten the bolts, you can do so now, pop the plastic stoppers in again, and be done. NOTE! Do not over tighten the bolts, if you chip or crack the toilet, you will need to call out a professional. A straight-arm twist with no elbow action is enough.

New seat, if you are ordering a new seat, measure the distance between the bolt hole centres. also measure the pan depth (not height), we have a short pan for an smaller space, and seats that are shorter are not that common at all.

5. If you are still reading, you are where I went, installing the new bolts.

The nuts on the old bolts as installed by the plumber will fall off into the void. I ordered a set which come with an unusual rubber flange on the nut which actually stops the nut falling down. A plastic guide was also supplied, I binned that.

6. Gently push the new bolts into the holes.

Next up, we re-assemble, I'll share a few pictures that show the soft-close mechanism innards more clearly so that it might make it easier to take them apart (or put them together.) Remember, do NOT OVER TIGHTEN, or you may crack the porcelain.

Over here we can see the final assembly step. you want to rotate the bolting plate and covers in such a way that it becomes convenient to tighten them in the right final seat position. Depending on the distance between the pan and the cistern, that might be from behind, or, from the front.
Before tightening up, test the seat position (not by using, test by opening and closing it dummy) and check the alignment of the seat. Also go and stand a few feet back and check that it looks like it's aligned correctly over the toilet bowl.

Use a straight arm, and no "elbow grease" when tightening the bolts, and then use the flat head screwdriver to manoeuvre or force the screw covers back into place. Lastly, wash hands well, use a nailbrush as well, and rinse and apply hand cream. If you did the process correctly, buy are an amateur like me, it may have taken an hour and at least one tea break and multiple hand washes. Which means your hands will be quite dried out from all the soap action.

Viola!
I'm sharing this how-to mainly because Google was not showing me anyone taking you through these steps to repair a loose concealed bolt toilet seat. I personally abhor the hundreds of DIY sites that post facile descriptions of a DIY task that only works if you use the exact same materials and suppliers or even in the case of electrical how-to's, live in the same country. I have actually left nasty correction remarks about bad electrical how-to-instructions on some sites, in an attempt to warn of future visitors from creating a fire hazard or worse. The web is full of bad tutorial websites that pay non professionals to upload stock photos of DIY jobs they never did in order to generate advert revenue.

Anyway, that's enough of my "I hate the crap on the people waste time posting internet", my crapper is now fixed!

What to sell in a thunderstorm

I have been putting off writing about this topic for some time now, probably for too long.
The current context for most of us is coronavirus and working from home. A sudden reliance on remote working tools and the internet has been surprising. Surprising mainly in that the tools work better than we imagined they would under strain. I work at a company that provides such a tool. I tend to never write about my workplace online much. I mean you can google it and find my CV online and find out for yourself. But we all sign non defamatory clauses in one way or another, and to be fair, I've never worked for long at any company that I did not like or thought any evil of at all. but, my point, is that to blow the trumpet requires timing.

This is the corporate logo, as it looked about 3 years ago. Before I joined a great team. I'm going to share a communique from a guy who is amongst the best bosses I have ever had, on the topic of marketing your product at what feels like the worst possible time.

Somebody said this week “There’s a thunderstorm and we’re selling umbrellas!”. What does that mean for how we show up in sales conversations or marketing media? How do we be empathic and sensitive to the gravity of the situation, but at the same time take the opportunity to seize the moment? If we want to be part of a movement that effects positive change within the world, the time is now. If we want to make a name for ourselves, the time is now. If we want to differentiate ourselves, the time is now. Ethos and empathy can be differentiating.

Anyway, there you have it, I think RealVNC and their new Connect product have a winner solution. It's the most secure and simultaneously simple to set up remote desktop access tool. No VPN, just use our cloud, and add a 2FA token of the favourite type, and get back to business.

My input in all of this? Well I love working here, as I have in every job I have held down. I feel that since I am a Test lead on this, while, I'm not able to support you on the product, I can vouch for it's quality.

Give our sales team a ring, you get a free demo (home user mode.) And you can carry on using the demo mode alongside the extra corporate subscription once you sign on. https://www.realvnc.com/en/connect/home/ <== Link to the hard-to-find free account setup page.

Dump cake recipe Advertisement free

Mainly because the internet is full of broken recipe sites that start with a story about fairies or want you firstborn child's identity.  

1. Dump 2 cans of fruit into the bottom of a 9×13 pan.
2. Dump the cake mix on top of the fruit.
3. Add thin sliced of butter over top of the cake mix.
4. Bake @ 325 degrees F (165 degrees C) for 40 minutes  or until golden brown.

Interested, okay, here come the ingredients and pics.

This is a template, change it up or down, remember the idea is not to do any real work, and keep the liquid in there, since the liquid is what makes these stop drying out.

    1 (21 ounce) can cherry pie filling
    1 (20 ounce) can crushed pineapple, drained
    1 (18.25 ounce) package yellow cake mix
    1 cup margarine, melted
    1 cup flaked coconut
    1/2 cup chopped walnuts
My variation is to swap the melted margarine (a time consumer) with 1/2 a block of butter, just chop into slices of grease and lay on top ; and sub the nuttytoppings with chocolate chip buttons.