Submit a formal flexible working request to your hr department. As youve already demonstrated that you have the capability to wfh and an established wfh pattern already it should he a cake walk. They have to ‘seriously consider your request’ if they reject it they have to give you a valid reason and you have the right to appeal. From speaking to my hr dept that’s such a massive ball ache they can never be bothered to reject a half reasonable one.

I did this with no problems, although my current boss didn’t mind working from home at all, it was primarily a defensive measure as one person I was doing work under and potentially going to do more work for had a huff about working from home.

I can recommend going 80% time too, what a brilliant fun thing it is to have a day a week looking after your kid!

If it’s grade 2, you’ll quite likely have to replace windows and doors on that converted bit, they stand out like a sore thumb in the photo, which is a whole lot of money (can’t remember what ours were, woman before us did them, but it was in the thousands for 3 windows, and more again for the 2 big doors).

And I bet they didn’t maintain the roof if the rest of it looks like that – that’d be much money to do – ours being in a world heritage site, last owner managed to get a grant to do it, but it was still an awful lot of money.

It looks pretty shonky, the barn bit in particular. If you had to redo much of the extension, do the roof, windows and doors, sort out the walls, that could cost a mass of money. Listed stuff is not cheap to do – for example the rebuild cost on our house is estimated at something like £500,000, for a house costing less than half that money, and that is for something probably not massively bigger than your great big barn.

Oh, and the reason it is cheap is probably because it is massive and shonky. Selling massive old houses even in good condition is silly hard and takes forever. Be aware of that, if circumstances change and you need to move expect a long time to wait before it sells.

Aviva for example ran to 97% in 2012 across all classes they write. So £1000000 in for premium = a pre tax profit of £30k. Obviously their premium income is vastly higher but the profit margin is still very very small.

If they would stop sending me 4 letters every time they think my car insurance is due (on the wrong date, and they should know from the first time they quoted me that I’m a pretty new driver and they don’t cover me, or at least their quote is still well over £1000 more than all the others on the comparison sites), and another 4 letters every time they think my home insurance is due (to a house that they won’t insure because of the listed status, which they should know because I asked them), all just because they gave me 7 free days insurance some years ago, they could perhaps save some money!

If you go the smartphone route get a mapping app with downloadable maps, which apparently means Nokia

or iPhone or Android phone with copilot app for a little money (best) or osmand for free (not so good but free)

For long term anything, you’ll be better off getting fit.

I’ve led tons of group rides in the past, and I’ve always been in the fast group, doing the longest distance, despite my technical skills being pretty useless and me being terrified of anything remotely drop-offy, because at the time I was very fit.

In my experience of riding with technically good but slow and lazy people, it wouldn’t really matter that much either way if you go road or mtb for training, what would matter is that you don’t faff around on your training rides, don’t walk any uphills (if you really can’t ride it in lowest gear, at least run them), don’t stop for 10 minutes at the top of any slight incline, basically don’t pretend that you are going to get fit by doing a slow bimble once a week. If you ride hard every ride, you will get fitter. If you bimble except when you do a massive ride, then the massive rides will hurt.

I would just get out as much as possible – if the road bike means you’d ride more, then do some road rides, but if you can do either from home, then I’d do a good hard mountain bike ride to keep your skills in.

Oh, and travelling with work doesn’t have to mean no exercise – I’m away with work now, and I found a nearby (olympic sized outdoor heated!) pool and did a quick 3K this afternoon, other times I’ve swum in rivers, taken a bike with me, gone for a run. Just skip a few of the late night drinking sessions, don’t waste time in the hotel room, get up early, bring a head torch for a late night run, there’s usually time for something, don’t use it as an excuse.

Basically, you have to start thinking you’re not fit because you choose not to be fit – and if you want to be fit, then choose to go and do some exercise. It isn’t easy, but it is simple.

Hey, it depends on how much of a traditionalist you are, but given it is a speech on behalf of you and wife, we did it together. We just wrote down a list of people who needed thanking, in alphabetical order so as to avoid offending any divorced relatives as to who came first in the list. Then just ad libbed it from the list, half of them each, can’t remember if we split the list in the middle or did one/two, kept it short and didn’t waste valuable drinking time. Jokes went in the thank-yous. We’re both quite confident public speakers though which helped, and it seemed to go well – easy audience, specially if you keep it short. i think i was a bit pissed but not massively so, probably doesn’t help!

As Cougar says you would be better off making sure everyone is using the same SMTP server settings for all outgoing e-mail. Your e-mail providers settings will almost certainly work

Won’t fix it. Sending IP address still in the headers.

Is she using sunraytv for her e-mail? If not, that’s totally irrelevant as the client’s mail server would have no way of telling that her e-mails were being sent via a sunraytv Wifi network. Her e-mails would first have to go via her own e-mail server, which won’t forward on a trace of the route by which they got there. That appears to be a total red herring (unless for some strange reason she does use a local mail server when travelling).

Not true – Looked at any email headers recently? Pretty much all except gmail messages have the IP address of the sending computer (not the server) in the headers. Pretty standard to do that.

So that is why non-gmail webmail is not a solution, but gmail is.

VPN should fix it.

You can (or used to be able to) buy through tickets on the train to Greenwich too, can be cheaper than going train + underground if you don’t need a travelcard / oyster card for later in the day.

Top tip for London travel by the way, is look at what the next furthest away stations are to where you’re going if the journey looks crazy. In your original post, you thought you’d need DLR, whereas you could do Jubilee and overland, both to Greenwich, which is a tiny walk further.

Where would she ride, inside or out?

At that age mine had a simple wooden trike for inside the house (and in the garden when dry), I wouldn’t bother spending on anything else.

At 2, ours was heading down from our house to the park, riding home from child-minders, going to bmx tracks, going for 1.5 mile rides with her best friend to the woods, and even entered a ‘race’* just after her 2nd birthday. If she’d had a trike, she wouldn’t have been able to do all that stuff. If your kid didn’t have a bike, then of course they didn’t ride a bike, you could extend that logic to not buy them any bikes ever.

Joe

* it was a bit of an everyone gets medals complete carnage event in the 2 year old category – also, was the first event I’ve ever been to where the start was delayed as one of the competitors needed a nappy change!

Rose has a strider bike. It was fine from under 2. They are very light, which is a god send when you have to carry it, makes a massive difference compared to big heavy cheap ones. Hers has survived bmx tracks, peak district rocks and roots and mud in shining cliff just fine (a few scratches on the paint after crashes and tyre wear obviously!)

They also have a community of events around them, races, weekly bmx track sessions in a few places, which is nice – google for ‘strider cup UK’.

Assuming you work somewhere where you have a desk, if you want to use every feature of your phone constantly, spare charger on your desk is an easy solution to battery life. I use one for days when i do a few hours of gps, loads of using the web to look things up, push email on all the time etc.

If you have to do any serious editing of word docs etc on your phone, wp8 might be good, but the latest android is very very good and very well supported by developers. Got a nexus 4 and it really is brilliant.

I think smaller usually, as stretchy is better than saggy, I suspect it depends on brand though. If you’re used to surf wetsuits you will find even a correctly fitting one a tight bugger to put on.

The day in lieu thing means that you can take off one of your other normal working days, and you worked the bank holiday instead of that, so you get an extra day off. It is just swapping a day of holiday around, so you don’t get any extra pay for the day swap as such.

However you were on time and a half, so you do actually get the extra half-day of pay, which is what the 4 hours is for.

I would keep quiet if you actually worked 6 hours, as they only really owe you 3 hours overtime.

I’m not sure I was technically at fault

Yeah, you were – opening a door into traffic in a way that endangers someone is an offence. Doing it without actually checking at the time is double naughty. However foolhardy the person in the traffic is being, it’s still careless and wrong to open a door into a lane of traffic without checking (and checking 5 seconds ago is essentially not checking given the tendency of traffic to move).

Going past in the cycle lane while someone is signalling left might be a silly thing to do, assuming they have a chance to get to the left turn before you get there, because they might turn across you. It’s silly because a lot of drivers make exactly the assumption you make in the first post, that the cycle lane is not a proper lane of traffic, so you don’t have to worry about crossing it at all. On the other hand, if you think about it, with a slow moving car, even if it is indicating left, biking at 20mph, you might reasonably think that you’ll be well clear of the car by the time the corner comes up, might have been a perfectly sensible thing to do.

I’ve not been since they replaced the Black Hole with the underground Nemesis, hope it’s good!

Don’t queue too long for it, and don’t expect ‘underground nemesis’. It’s a very different thing. More of a show than a ride.

Weekday outside school term and not in the last few weeks of summer term.

There must be somewhere near you with one to try before you mess around driving hundreds of miles. You might find you don’t like them, or at least not enough to want to queue an hour to ride each one or pay a fortune to do it.

I’ve done quite a lot of work at theme parks mostly putting people on coasters, and had a good few rides cos i didn’t have to queue and it seemed like a waste not to, but for me, they just don’t seem all that scary – nothing like as scary as going fast on a mountain bike ride. They’re just predictable and safe. Kind of fun feeling of zooming, but nothing that special. Not gonna bother paying to go to them till my daughter wants to go and is big enough (I imagine she will as Alton Towers is quite close).

I quite liked saw at thorpe park because it does actually play on the theme of the ride nicely, and it is not too super short, but it is still essentially the same thing.

Drop tower rides still scare me mind, mess with my head they do. And shonky fairground spin rides. That’s where the real fear is at, not in glorified train rides. And you only have to travel to your local waste ground at half term rather than go all the way to a theme park.

Oh, one roller coaster that is scary is the wild mouse / crazy mouse, Brighton Pier has one, so does Flamingoland, few others. Scary because it feels super shonky like it will fall apart, and it does abrupt whiplash inducing turns. Not nice, but definitely a real fear of injury on that one.

Gov advise 28units max to stay in the safe zone, you’re drinking about 36 units. Why don’t you just go for lower alcohol ie ditch the 14%abv bottle of OZ red (15 units a bottle) and drink a few 3.8%abv pale ales/blondes (8 units for 4 x 500ml bottles).

No they don’t, they advise 21 units per week, and no more than 4 units per day. So 4 bottles of beer in a night is double the recommendation. If you drink a whole bottle of wine, that is obviously binge drinking and a bad idea.

My wife had to stop drinking, and in part thanks to that I just don’t really bother drinking any more. I’d never drink a whole bottle of wine by myself. I drink every so often with meals out, and every so often at friends houses on special occasions, and sometimes a single beer at home. I absolutely don’t drink if I’m driving, so no drinks at the pub after hockey or anything.

It isn’t really that hard if you don’t have tons of social occasions that are structured around drinking – if you’re only drinking at home, whilst hanging out with someone who isn’t drinking herself, there’s no real reason to be drinking, it isn’t like doing rounds in the pub.

So all the people who become redundant as the result of new technology can be re-employed designing and making machines ? It seems hardly worth the bother of replacing people with machines if you then have to employ these people to make more machines.

also, even ignoring that the world where someone sacked from ASDA can move straight into chip design, the design involves nowhere near as many people either – look at arm vs asda – financially asda is about 3x the size, but arm has 2000 employees, vs asda’s 175000.

Assuming the reason you don’t want a spreadsheet is because
a)you want it to be branded and nice and not look like they are just hacking some numbers
or
b)you don’t want sales people to be able to mess up the sheet

then you could build an html5 web app, and either wrap it with one of the wrappers which make them into a native app (phonegap etc.), or use html5 offline web app stuff, which makes your web app work even when you aren’t online.

You’d need to know a bit of javascript / html / css, but that is a lot easier than learning proper app development or getting a full custom app. Easy enough to do for someone who knows any javascript (or is willing to google enough javascript to hack it together). How much work it’d be would depend on how complex it was and what other lovely features you decided you needed (product pictures or whatever).

It really would be quite easy, if you can work excel and do cunning stuff in it, you could probably hack something together.

I’ve done car, travel cot (phil and teds sturdy but light one with built in thermarest), sleeping bag in it, fleecy suit for pyjamas, in a big 4 man tent, when she was one.

Also done ready bed and a blanket next to me in my super light 2 man tent, with next to no spare stuff because we’d come on the bike trailer,when she was two. Worked fine too. Kids are resiliant as long as you keep em warm enough and don’t worry too much about strict bedtimes.

Rose is a very warm sleeper like me though, so it hasn’t been that hard with her so far – also she’ll happily fall asleep on the floor in her room and that is way harder than any camping bed.

Going in a couple of weeks so we’ll see how it works with a nearly 3 yr old then. I did mean to take her winter camping earlier this year, but all that snow hit and the campsite was snowed in so we couldn’t. Can’t wait for her first wild camp, maybe later this year!

I would add, don’t believe all the myths that go around about things being safe choices for making tons of money. For example: law degree – can make tons of money if you go to a top ten university (extremely hard to do) and get a 2:1 (extremely hard to do), then get training contracts etc (hard to do). Only a tiny minority get rich. Same with everything – look at plumbers, everyone has heard of the plumber with the fancy mercedes, but if you take the day rate of any local plumber round here, and a reasonable estimate at overheads, tax, time not working etc, they make pretty average pay, especially considering the hours and the seasonal nature of lots of their work. Hairdressers – maybe 1 in 1000 owns a salon, rest are low wage (and freelance so actually probably worse off).

There are so many of these myths, and even people like universities peddling sub-standard courses will push them, so the only sensible option is to do what interests you and what you’re good at. Even if the myths were true, no point wasting your life doing something boring but okay paid. The top salaries in the supposedly easy money sectors will all be taken by people with a talent and a liking for their work anyway. Might as well have fun with life.

It’s nothing to do with the compression.

It’s compression as in dynamic range compression, not mp3 style compression. This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression ). And it’s all to do with it.

And don’t get me started on bloody auto-tune…

Bet you loads of folk and Americana bands use auto-tune nowadays, it’s just they don’t whack it up a to full on Cher vocoder effect like a badly done auto-tune. It’s just that more ‘authentic’ bands don’t like people to know their dirty secrets. If it is done right, you wouldn’t have a clue that it was on – done well it can even let you put in stylistic deviations in pitch whilst keeping the attack of the note bang on, I knew a guy who did sound for various indie bands in the 90s, and he reckoned that a surprisingly high percentage of them had an auto-tuner on their vocals, random ones that you wouldn’t believe it from the sound (I think someone else told me that Republica, or one of those shouty pop-punk bands were heavy users for example).

I only know about stuff down the bottom mostly, so might be a bit far for you.

I read last year that Belper River Gardens were letting people launch to paddle upstream – something like a tenner a boat, limited number of boats on the water, only when the rowing boats are open (summer weekends). I haven’t checked, just saw it on canoe website but it is a lovely bit of water if so (and great for kids, flat water, lots of places to pause for picnics – you’re not officially supposed to get out of the boats onto the banks but people do).

I think most of the big reservoirs (Ladybower, Derwent etc.) don’t allow it, supposedly for ‘health and safety’ reasons – although how it is different from allowing a load of anglers to fish from boats on them I don’t know.

There is a bit of the Derwent at Matlock that is officially accessible and not contested (Poet’s Corner to the Slalom Course), depending on the weather that can be proper white-water in parts though, not what you’re looking for without someone experienced taking you down it. Also there are a bunch of other bits of the Derwent that are paddled (whether the access is legal is an ongoing debate), but again you’d want someone experienced with you (and to know about the weirs and things).

Oh and Cromford Canal – flat boring water, no idea why you’d do it, but a small bit of it is paddleable, again with some kind of complicated access agreement/number limit, not sure of the details.

Joe

We stayed at Lake Annecy also – Camping la Chapelle St Claude in Talloires, right on the lake, swim 50m from the door of the mobile home. Rose (2.5 then) was in the lake swimming at least twice a day – it is 20 degree plus water at that time of year, lovely for swimming, so nice we’re back again later this year.

Tons of road biking (it was a Tour de France stage), and there have to be some good trails round there, were various vtt routes marked on maps. Nice mountain walking. No uplifts there, although i think it isn’t too far from uplift resorts if you have a whole day off.

Talloires is a very small town, couple of normal restaurants, shop, good bakery, couple of fancy pants michelin ones. Annecy is a nice big tourist town for the rest.

We went first week in sep, some things closing, but most still okay, and we rented a static caravan at the campsite which was nice and comfy, and dead cheap in September.

I’ve gone on runs with our local club, and whilst the fast group was seriously fast, the slower group was pretty slow, so I wouldn’t worry about being able to keep up.

We stayed in Dobbiaco / Toblach. It was nice, much quieter than the more Italian bits. Not the same ski-lifts and stuff though – less of a resort place.

Also stopped briefly in Cortina, which is outrageously expensive, everything was fur coat shops and stuff, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re absolutely loaded and like being ripped off, we ended up heading further north after a couple of days. On the other hand, it is set up for mountain biking with the ski lifts and things.

There are first world war battlefields up in the high alps there which are incredible – worth a visit, and obviously they are on via-ferrata routes too.

I saw how they do it in (non heston b) restaurants once. Big pan of water, bring it to boil and simmer on low. Crack eggs and gently lower in, take out 2.5 minutes later.

They do tons of eggs in one pan that way, without messing around, no swirling, no vinegar, no clingfilm.

I think the big trick to poaching eggs is confidence that they will work. You just bung em in and leave it alone, and it will stay together, even if it looks a bit rubbish when you first put it in. It’s only when you start messing around swirling and poking your eggs that it all goes wrong.

I prefer ‘assumptions make an ass out of you and umptions’ personally.

Water is likely to be v cold for a 4 year old, the memorial at Loughrigg Tarn would testify to that

I wasn’t suggesting that the 4 year old would necessarily be up for swimming out to the island in Rydal Water (unless they are one of those super-hard wetsuit kids), but they are hardly going to die by paddling and swimming off the little beaches on the lakes in summer, and while you’re there with them, an island swim is a nice thing for an adult to do. Just make sure you’ve got a towel and warm clothes for afterwards (for you and for the kids splashing at the beach).

All the memorial at Loughrigg Tarn would testify is that when taking large school groups of teenagers swimming in big lakes, a certain level of supervision is a good idea, and has nothing to do with what one does with a 4 year old really.

We used this stuff + weed proof membrane for a playhouse in our garden, which is basically a small shed in disguise. Dead easy to lay, feels rock solid so far (only been down for a year though), and all you need is the base pieces + membrane plus a shovel and a line-level to flatten the ground first.

http://www.ecobase.biz/

Rydal Water is nice. Probably not for the 4 year old, but there is a swim to an island if any of you can swim 200m or so. Would be lovely in June/July/August/September, probably one for experienced cold water swimmers the rest of the year.

The oxygen thing has to be rubbish – water at 100C has already boiled off all the oxygen (http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-solubility-water-d_639.html ). So the oxygen has gone by the point the water reaches 100C the first time you boil it.

If you want to test it properly, you should do a number of samplings of it, see how she guesses and then use Fisher’s Exact Test to detect the statistical likelihood of her being better than chance at guessing which is which. It was developed specifically for such small sample size beverage related statistical challenges (to test if someone could tell the difference between milk in first vs tea in first)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher’s_exact_test

Having said that, the obvious solution is to stop being an idiot and boiling tons of water just for a single mug. Then you remove that argument, because there isn’t any spare water. Kettles have numbers on the side that show you how much they have in, it just takes a minute to pour in cups and see which numbers correspond to a single mug, two mugs, or however many mugs you’re making, then forever after, you can just fill up to the right number. Or if you’re just making one mug, just fill up a mug with water and bung it in the kettle.

I have a nexus 4 and galaxy s3. The s3 is alright and all that, and sd card support is nice if you need that much memory, but the nexus 4 is a nicer phone. Lots of things right about it, and no samsung overlay on top of android.

It isn’t 4g if that makes a difference, but other than that i really like it.

It is also pretty much the only android phone that is any good for music apps (like instruments, synthesizers, effects units and the like, for boring technical reasons, although to be honest if you want music production apps iPhone is currently way ahead of android.

Joe

Viewranger app lets you create tracks in the app itself.

It is brilliant, better than free things, but it isn’t cheap if you want a lot of OS mapping.

I would report it – if someone is going through the drawers to nick food, then what if someone leaves something more valuable in their drawers, could be a pain (we’ve had work mobile phones go missing, and heard of laptops and things going walkies).

If you want to do catch them yourself, just stick a webcam on the computer if there’s one on the desk, and leave it on, running something to detect motion, something like this: http://secure-cam.en.softonic.com/
(or others http://technoloread.com/free-webcam-motion-detection-software/
). Doing surveillance is probably naughty and bad though, I suspect there are laws about what you need to do relating to signs and how you store the video.

I think wearing a helmet is as much about getting them used to wearing one on a bike than offering protection.

Most obvious injury from a bike seat is if you drop the bike somehow (I have a vague memory that I was dropped as a kid once, not sure). That’d be why I’d stick one on a kid on a bike seat.

Once they get on the balance bike and get a bit more daring, they certainly use it as protection – we had one trip down the local jump track and woods with a couple of 2 year olds, and managed one of them falling off the side of a jump, and one of them crash head-first into a tree, getting out of control on a rooty downhill, both of those were proper helmet moments.

I’d hold on off on the wee ride type seats until about 2 years old when there is less chance of spontaneous sleeping

That is a big bonus of the trailer too – you can stick them in it, and when they fall asleep (for Rose it is a real sleep inducing machine when she’s been running about), you can stop and just leave them asleep in it, and have a cup of tea or a sandwich or whatever, whereas with a bike seat on a bike I wasn’t all that comfortable leaving a sleeping but potentially wriggly baby on top of it any time that I wasn’t on the bike.

Oh and it can carry her bike, so we can ride somewhere with the trailer, then she can go bike zooming, and when she gets tired, she can just pop it on the trailer again and have a rest – if you find somewhere with a long and not too steep descent, you can even do balance bike uplifts.

Rose has been in the bike trailer from 6 months, and still uses it every week at just coming up to 3. No helmet needed for a trailer either.

Most bike seats say from a year, our bike trailer has a baby sling bit which is for much younger than that, it was absolutely fine at 6 months, and we did our first 40 miler at about 10 or 11 months (with a couple of picnic stops, a stop at some swings, nappy change stops etc.) We went on our first self-supported camping trip at 16 months, with all the gear in the trailer.

She went in a bike seat once when she was just over one, on a hire bike. Rear mount one. It was absolutely fine, but nothing like as good as the bike trailer. She was perfectly happy pottering round Berlin for a few hours and okay to sleep in it, I think because she was already used to long bike rides in the trailer.

For lightweight tiny helmets, decathlon was the best place I found (I only bought one at 18 months for her to ride her own bike though). A lot of helmets specify that they work for a much wider age range than the decathlon ones, but that means other makes are often bulkier, which given their teeny weeny heads is a pain. We also have a fancy ‘kids stuff’ tiger helmet, which looks awesome, but is too bulky and heavy, I wouldn’t bother with those. Lightest thing you can get. Especially bearing in mind that they’ll be taking some of the weight of it when they go to sleep in some crazy position, even strapped firmly in the bike seat.

If it’s only £1600, it isn’t a solicitor job, it’s a small claims track thing. You aren’t going to come up against complex points of law in small claims court (even points of law which surely have to be rubbish – it is evidence as to how the work that is claimed to be done for you was done). If that was really true, then no one could ever check on their sub-subcontractors, which must be a load of rubbish.

If you can get the specialist to put in writing that he spoke to the guy and said that the ecu wasn’t water damaged, then you should be fine. If possible I’d send him an email checking what you discussed with him, most people will happily send an email saying things whereas writing a signed statement might put some people off

Get that in writing, write down the facts in chronological order. Put it all in a letter to the dodgy mechanic saying you’ll put it into court in 14 days unless he refunds you. Quite likely he will refund you now. In 14 days, put it into county court as a small claim – you don’t need solicitors to do that, and aren’t eligible for much in the way of his costs if you lose, and it costs not much to do. Worst case is that he fights it in court, but if you have him bang to rights, he might well not, or he will lose. Then you get enforcement (for that amount of money, you can get high court enforcement on him, which might be most effective).

It will take a couple of months total, but assuming you are capable of filling in a couple of forms and being vaguely organised, it is a piece of piss, and worked very well for me when I took a case against Derby Car Centre for a similar thing (they’d claimed to have got an engine fault fixed, and instead a piece of tape had been put over the engine warning light inside the dashboard). If they fight it, it also teaches them a lesson not to be such a dodgy geezer, as they end up paying more money (I think close to £3k was paid back total for my £1800 car after fees and costs and things).