Bruce

And still I'm wasting money buying things from my childhood. More Fighting Fantasy books, some Star Trek TNG collectable card games and some Doctor Who New Adventure books. I think I'm in a mid-life crisis!

@Fidelity_UK Please hire more customer service staff to answer secure messages. I asked a very simple query a week ago and still no response, it's really poor given the amount of fees I pay :(

First proper exercise I've done in a year and boy am I feeling it. Regaining fitness is going to take a while.

The weather has become.. interesting. An actual chance of being snowed in for the first time in decades (not that I planned on going out anyway, software developer and all that)

Again I'm spending 15x the cover price on very good condition prints of early Fighting Fantasy books. I couldn't afford many as a kid and at these prices, not sure I can afford many as an adult. It's strangely satisfying though.

This weekend is the first Birmingham Comic-con that I've missed in about 15 years. There's not a lot of shows I have real passion about lately and it tempers my enthusiasm for conventions. It's definitely not because I'm getting older... definitely not! I swear!

The inclusion of "Agentic AI" into Windows 11 taskbar isn't welcome by me. If I can really get my stack working in Linux then I'm going to drop Windows completely. It's tricky as I love using Visual Studio and that's not Linux-compatible (Rider is okay but I prefer VS).

Hey @Brsk_uk , some feedback: give better training to your sales staff. They didn't understand a request to "talk to business sales", they passed me from advisor to advisor, took 5 minutes to understand my postcode then promised to call back and never did. You've lost a sale.

I appear to have reached the age when my deposible income is being used to purchase old Fighting Fantasy books.

I was delighted to see the Insomnia Gaming Festival returning but alas their new location means I won't be attending. The NEC was dead easy to get to, this new location is not great for non-drivers. I wish the event well but I'll not be attending this time.

Third attempt to like Windows 11, third attempt failed. It's just plain slower on my laptop with useful menu items hidden under "Show more" context menus. Back to 10 I go.

Bank of England reduce rates by 0.25%. Coventry Building Society reduce rates by 0.35%. Sad to see Coventry reducing by more than the base rate cut, clearly they are trying to reduce costs in the wake of their recent takeover of Co-op. Takeovers are never good for customers.

I never used to pay too much attention to tax, it was just something inevitable that I had to pay but over the last decade the amount of tax and number of taxes I pay has continued to rise and I've started to notice just how many there are. Theres a lot!

Finally had some free time over the weekend, first time in a very long time so I cracked open some personal projects. It's been so long that one of them is still on .Net 5 and hasn't been touched in almost 4 years! Might have missed the boat on that project.

Taking my nephew to a comic con today. Despite the heat, he's cosplaying but my days of dressing up as the 7th Doctor for these things has long past.

Having experimented with AI a little over the last few months I've found it's a very useful research tool but it's not quite ready to replace developers just yet so I might just get to the end of my career before it swallows my job!

This hot weather does not make me productive. No coding today for me!

My love hate relationship with ElasticSearch continues. Today's mood, I love it.

Just throwing this out into the universe but I really think it's long past time we had a Troughton box set collection for classic Doctor Who.

Another funeral yesterday. Very sad times.