The trial rental scooters in Cambridge are 15 mph on roads, no slower than a bike. They’re pretty nippy as well.

They’re 10mph in Cambridge, aren’t they? They were supposed to up the limit to 25km/h, but I don’t think that has happened yet judging from what I’ve seen recently. They are very much slower than cycling, and pretty unpleasant in places without segregated cycling infrastructure like Mill Road and on the many rat run parked car slaloms.

There is a degree of effectiveness against other variants from the immune system response to the ‘first’ variant encountered. If you get infection variant x, you generate antibodies that are active for so long, and make it harder for another infection to ‘take’ soon after. Omicron is so infectious lots of people generate antobodie, and that makes it a difficult environment for delta, or a.n.other variant to thrive in unless it can dodge said antibodies.

Note that this assumes that antibodies produced in response to Omicron infection prevent infection with Delta.

I don’t think anybody has shown that to be the case yet, and we know that antibodies produced in response to two dose vaccination and/or Delta infection do not provide sufficient protection against Omicron infection to prevent Omicron from spreading.

I hate to point it out, but I think Concern troll is a sadly relevant companion piece to recent pages of this thread.

21 months of living like a f***ing hermit and the 5 year old brings it home from school. She seems to hopefully be on the mend now after a couple of days of fever and a chickenpox like rash which is fading. To say I’m incandescent with fury is an understatement. Positive LFT this morning, but ran 0.5C raised temperature Friday night. Am going to be pissed off when/if my smell/taste goes as I already have other minor neurological things that I’d rather not be worrying about adding to with some more damage.

If 99.99% of poor driving has no consequence, and at random .01% has extreme consequence that we consider intolerable, then clearly it is poor driving we need to stop tolerating instead of demanding extreme sentences for those who are simply unlucky in a system which supports poor driving.

Every speeding ticket should come with a sufficient ban to deter. Every red light transgression. Every close pass of pedestrians or cyclists. Every wander across the lanes while distracted. Every instance of tailgating. Etc. We would rapidly see the mayhem reduce if we stopped casually tolerating the behaviour which leads to tragedy in a tiny fraction of instances.

I see we’ve identified a new variant sweeping across the land: AY.4.2 accounted for 6% of sequenced samples in the week starting September 27 and is “on an increasing trajectory”.

I used to do this regularly with an ultrabook before the era of working from home. I used to put it in a waterproof neoprene sleeve for protection from bashes and humidity and shoved that in a running backpack with my change of clothes for the day. The worst bit was changing back into clammy running kit in the evening to run home again.

Your S21 should be good on battery, to be fair, it’s a new top-of-the-range phone! I’ve had my SE for 5 and a half years of solid heavy use, and the original battery lasted 4 years before being eligible for replacement. It’s good for another 18 months before it stops getting security updates. I have to confess I am planning to trade up to a 13 Pro sometime soon though, mostly for the better camera.

Someone obviously never got over that Raleigh Vektar Santa didn’t bring them in the 80s… Bleurgh.

With a little ambition we would be using the 2030 phasing out of most IC vehicles to also phase out urban and suburban on-street parking. 8 years is plenty of time for people who plan on keeping cars to move to housing which affords their lifestyle choices instead of expecting the public to pay for their storage space. Much of that wasted space could be used for planting trees and providing better walking and cycling infrastructure instead.

The thought that we can endure hundreds of Covid-19 deaths per day without significantly worsening other outcomes in our health system seems somewhat naive to me.

We dug out our urban front lawn 6 years ago and planted a variety of fancy thistles and other flowers. I do a bit of weeding for aesthetics but try to let even those things flower before pulling them out. We cut it back once a year in winter.

There is a precedent for the emergence of a strain which wasn’t picked up by tests: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-16/france-finds-variant-in-brittany-that-evades-standard-tests

Has a delta variant had the same or a similar mutation and then spread successfully? Given PCR tests are a critical part of our epidemic control testing negative would be a definite advantage for a strain of the virus.

I broke three on my back left when I was 29 or so. I was properly winded for a bit and it really hurt like crazy when I did breathe again. Breathing was pretty difficult immediately afterwards (complete with audible crunchiness), but x-rays two hours after didn’t show anything and everything was where it should be. It was roughly a week before sleeping (still very definitely on my right side) got a little easier, and to my considerable surprise I was able to run again with care after four or five weeks. I was prescribed some French prescription painkillers in case I needed them, but I got by without. I didn’t sneeze for five months, and I knew it was that long because I lived in fear of sneezing for a very long time.

See, double crown forks are back.

It’s really beginning to feel more and more like March 2020 all over again now with the simplest and most effective control measures being thrown away and with a long hard lockdown feeling like the most likely outcome sooner or later.

It’s pretty clear that people are going to be passing on Covid-19 everywhere now, and that single- and double-jabbed people will be passing it on with ever higher chances of selecting for vaccine escape.

For the first time in a long time I’m really struggling to feel positive about where things are going.

Part of the fall in Re is going to be down to people modifying their behaviour as they feel the danger has gone up again.

The people elected a government whose primary manifesto promise was this deal. Where is the respect for the will of the people now?

I think this is all a confection for internal consumption anyway. Like Bolsonaro, Trump, Modi, or Orbán, Johnson does best with his electorate by inventing confrontations and culture war fronts to attract attention and have government performance go unscrutinised. If the EU yielded and solved the NI Protocol “problems” (which they almost certainly won’t), the UK would simply invent another confrontation and claim victimhood again.

I’ve noticed people in the areas of Ireland close to the border start to ramp up pressure against denormalisation of the situation along the border, but that currently is almost certainly where this is headed sooner or later.

I think we just need a wing mirror tax. It should apply to harassment, close passes (especially oncoming close passes), common twattery at crossings, and parking on pavements.

One of them once while haranguing my (naive and foreign) housemate, pointed at my car on the drive and told him that we could afford a TV license. We didn’t have anything connected to an aerial in the house. Unfortunately they never called around when I was in for me to practice my finest blue language on the subject of their tactics.

I bought a second hand Toyota from a main dealer a couple of years ago. I parked and walked onto the forecourt, spotting the car I’d seen online though with a £500 higher price in the window. I somehow already knew they’d had it for a couple of months, and would probably be happy to sell it on. When one of the sales guys walked up I said I’d already seen the lower price online, that I could pay cash and would have it if it drove OK, and asked if it could be ready to go that day.

It wasn’t ready, but in the end they took the price of a hotel room off the asking, fitted four new tyres because I wasn’t going to take it with the ones on it, and had it ready the next day.

I still hate buying cars but I think the lesson was to be pushy but straightforward, to convince them you want to buy something they have to sell, and to be lucky.

Other mesh networks definitely support wired and hybrid backhaul (the network connecting the mesh access points). I’d go for one of those anyway.

AZ first dose 9 days ago. 41; male; with no known significant underlying conditions.

The 24 hours after was mostly OK. I felt cold going to bed so I dug out skiing base layers and slept fine. Things then went downhill, but in a pretty vague non-specifically unwell sort of way. It’s been mostly minor headaches, brain fog, joint and muscle aches, and fatigue for the last week. I’m hopeful it has started to clear today, but I’ve felt that a couple of mornings and still been a wreck again by late afternoon.

They do run significant import businesses to be fair.

Outbreak at that school has pushed Erewash to top of the national table apparently – we do need to stay cautious.

What if I offered you a deal? We can “stay cautious” but also stop wearing masks in school classrooms and corridors. How does that sound?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-57059407

Diabetes in particular is going to create more demand for health services given the likelihood of developing it is apparently increased by Covid-19 infection. I suspect the same is true as people who suffered lung damage and heart damage from Covid-19 age. I susect we will actually have more people managing chronic conditions, and more frail people, because of Covid-19.

Why? Coronavirus is at the lowest level it’s ever likely to be again, it’s not going away. So are you suggesting we avoid the gym for the rest of our lives now?

In the general sense, changing behaviour to manage risk is exactly what living with something typically implies.

Looks as though travel to Éire is allowed, which having booked a ferry for is a relief.

1) Ireland, it’s not Éire unless you’re going to put the rest of the sentence in Irish too.
2) I hope you like quarantine.

https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/b4020-travelling-to-ireland-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/#post-arrival-quarantine-requirements-for-all-passengers-arriving-in-ireland

How will the vaccine stop him spreading it? If he touches a surface with covid on, he doesn’t kill the virus. The virus just can’t live on him any longer than an inanimate surface. For example if he shakes hands with 3 people and the first has covid, he could spread it to the other 2.

You’re still singing while you wash your hands, aren’t you? ;-)

It’ll reduce spread because it’s a disease primarily spread through the air, not via surfaces.

RE the Addenbrookes thing: I’ve been there a couple of times since the first lockdown last year and will be back there in a couple of weeks. It’s frankly a terrifying place right now – just as stuffy as ever despite the airborne pandemic. It’s disappointing that a consultant would be getting away with living the kind of lifestyle that put all his/her patients at risk.

I have that Russell Hobbs above. After three years’ use the metal baffles that were tacked to the bottom of the kettle detached and it became less quiet and then the switch snapped off so you have to use a fingertip to turn it on. I wouldn’t buy another.

Any tallies I’ve seen suggest long Covid is much much more likely than death.

I wouldn’t want to pay £190 for £79 bibs though. Le Col look like a marketing confection.

It’s popular with me. Having the armed forces involved would help with compliance with the rules… many people who won’t listen to the police, or the council, will listen to “friendly advice” from “one of our brave boys”.

When you say “friendly advice” is that like the “friendly advice” they liked to give the last time they were deployed into a significant civil emergency in the UK? This is a terrible idea and would end in mayhem, murder, acrimony, and litigation (again).

Ex scrum master here. WRT the OP, that sounds miserable, but it’s not supposed to be like that. In fact it really should be totally unlike that – one of the big benefits of agile methodologies is that it should empower the team (and individuals on the team).

To put it bluntly, I wouldn’t want to work with a scrum master who didn’t have a pretty good grasp of the technical details of the development work. I think they need to be someone who is capable of being a good engineer but with additional interests in team building and software process.

On the mechanics, scrum ceremonies are about what the team gets out of them.
* Standups, for me, need to be quick – 30s per team member is probably a good target – and informality and accessibility of follow-up conversations is important. You’re not agreeing what the team is doing – you did that before the sprint started – you’re just saying what you did yesterday, what you’re going to do today, and whether there is any impediment that can be addressed by the team.
* Planning is a total pain if done meeting-heavy. I found it useful to do sprint planning activities semi-formally with engineers in ones and twos before planning meetings and make those meetings fairly quick and focused on formally committing to items and announcing them to the rest of the team. After planning the next sprint should contain a backlog of tasks for each person on the team for them to work through over that sprint.
* Regular retrospectives are vital and you have to keep improving and adapting to your needs or things stagnate really quickly. These can be really good for picking up what’s working and what isn’t for the team, but that depends on the personality mix on the team.
* Backlog grooming is important too, but I find it tedious beyond measure.

When I see complaints like those in this thread I wonder whether I am too harsh about my several years spent in a split role as scrum master and lead/senior engineer. I found it fundamentally unsatisfying to be honest on both fronts: didn’t feel there was enough work on the team to be a worthwhile full time scrum master; also felt constantly frustrated by my limited time engineering things.

While I was pretty unhappy in that role, my team team were largely positive about the way we ran things, and I think felt about as empowered as they could be in the structures of that company (it was pretty far from agile a couple of rungs higher up the ladder). As usual, we ended up shovelling tech debt frustratedly, but clearly that’s relative because we were putting out four feature releases a year despite it.

Ultimately I don’t think agile is to blame for your predicament but I can totally understand that badly run “agile” is a disturbing new hell. The usual rules of engineering apply to this stuff too – if you think it could be better why not investigate the details and make it better?

I eventually found a torque wrench was a small investment compared to the cost of destroying parts by doing bolts up hard.

“No point being right and dead.”

Somebody please convince me the eventual conclusion of this line of thought isn’t commuting by car instead.

Didn’t part with my cash, but I recall a vibrator vending machine in a nightclub toilet in Leamington Spa circa 1998.

It sounds like a hash where nobody has shown them how much time and effort it saves to knock some holes in the bottom of a tin can and tape it to a broom handle as a trail-laying tool.

You’re only going to upset yourself worrying about hashers and what they do.

Club training session this evening. 6x600m on flat tarmac with 60s recovery. I lazily ran the first two thirds of each interval on a shoulder and then held the pace as they faded. Man it’s nice to be in alright (for me) form.