Dave VR – Page 21

The world around and in you

There are many different ways of looking at the world. All come from within. Your perceptions and how you interpret and react to the world around you determines how you view it and your enjoyment of it.

There’s an example I like to use to illustrate this based on two people I met on my travels.

The first was a lady I met in New Zealand. She was on a package holiday whereas I was winging it going in whatever direction I felt next. We ran into each other on a Maori farm on the north island in an area known as the bay of plenty.

She told me that she had broken her (non dominant) wrist in a sporting accident and couldn’t wait to get home. She was going through the motions living each remaining day of her holiday but enjoying none of it. She hated this country, the people, the food, everything. She just wanted to get back home.

This wasn’t how she had felt before the accident, she was having the time of her life. That all changed however since the accident.

The second was a young man I met in a youth hostel in Sydney Australia. He was on the phone to his mum when we met. She was crying. Afterwards he explained how he and his mates came out here, bought a cheap van, surfboards, and the gear they needed and just travelled the coast surfing and partying. Then that very morning someone had stolen the van and all his possessions including his passport. He told me that everyone couldn’t have been more helpful and he has papers to get back home. He was as happy as can be. “I loved every minute dude” he told me. “It’s been a blast, an amazing holiday”. “Ok so all my stuff is gone and all my photos but they can’t take what’s up here” he said pointing to his head. His mum was upset for him but this guy was so chilled.

Both fellow travellers had suffered a major setback, a traumatic event. Yet while the first had chosen to view everything negatively, the second had chosen the opposite, to remember the fun times. After all it’s just stuff and that can be replaced. He did not let life get him down and he was a better person because of it.

Only you can control how the world around you affects you.

Why Wild Rain

Thoughts and ideas swirl around in my head constantly. I can’t seem to turn it off. I’ve tried meditation, going for long walks, and just listening to music. Yet the noise in my head is ever present, like a wild rain.

I discovered that journaling was a great way to clear my mind. The very act of writing down my thoughts and ideas would instantly bring relief. It felt like an overflowing water butt leaking from the lid and then someone opened up the tap to fill a watering can. The purpose of the butt being realised: to collect and dispense rain water. The pressure relieved.

Wild Rain is my digital journal of thoughts and ideas that swirl around in my head before being poured into this digital repository for me to play with, edit, refine and then.. forget. Returning only when the pressure builds up again.

I’ve learned that if you leave too many thoughts and ideas in your head for too long then new ones don’t happen. It’s like your brain is waiting for you to action them. Saying “Hey I thought of these great ideas, now it’s over to you to do something with them”. Writing them down feels like they’ve been addressed, now the brain is free to think about something new. Content in the knowledge that whatever it thinks about will be processed later.

Retirement is wasted on the old

What would you do if you didn’t need money?

Think about that for a moment. Most of what we do each day is dictated by money. Going to work, shopping, holidays, going for a drive, eating out, etc etc.

If money was no longer an issue, what would you do?

Travel the world, visit family and friends more, write a book just for fun, learn to paint, get fit, sleep more, spend more time in the garden.

I’ve been hanging out with a few retired friends recently and they had faced this very question. They no longer needed to work. They either reached retirement age and had enough saved, or they inherited money or sold a business and decided they were done working for money.

So what did they end up doing?

One learned to paint and spent more time in his garden, joining a few clubs such as a book club, mahjong and scrabble, and a dining club. Another tinkers with old cars in his garage and buys stuff that he couldn’t afford when they were younger just to tinker with or display for no one but themselves to see. Another travels and writes about their adventures.

Thinking about it, there is nothing stopping us non retirees from doing any of this. We can travel, paint, garden, tinker. Why put something off til the tail-end of your life? I mean, there’s no guarantee that you will get there so why put the fun stuff off? Why not have mini retirements? Save up and take breaks throughout your career. Six months here, a year there, and so on.

Retirement is wasted on the old.

Make a list of what you would do if you could and start doing them now.

Fail fast

I often hear “follow your passion”, or “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”. Yet many of us have absolutely no idea what that is. We follow a career path that is dictated to us by circumstance, necessity, our family and friends, or just whatever is available. Some people never find their passion, their “true calling”.

Is that a bad thing? After all, careers are just a vehicle to earn money in order to live. You hire out your time and effort (brains and brawn) in return for remuneration. You earn enough to live on and to squirrel some away for retirement. Maybe a little extra for some nice toys and the occasional holiday. Do we really need to enjoy the work?

It would be nice.

Figuring out what you are good at and enjoy doesn’t come easy to everyone. Some of us can wait years for the inspiration, that spark.

There is a way of finding it faster though, but it does require a certain amount of risk and experimentation. It’s often referred to as the fail fast method. Essentially it involves trying different things and seeing what works and what doesn’t. In this case you would try a particular job or start a business and see if you enjoy it. If not, find something else and move on, failing fast. Maybe parts of the job or business were interesting so incorporate that into your next attempt, refining with each new venture. You didn’t fail at the last five attempts, you just found five career paths that were not right for you.

There’s no harm in trying. Go for it. It beats waiting for something to come to you.

Cancellation

I first came across the TV show and movie cancellation culture in the early 90s. I paid for satellite TV to be installed in my bedroom and started to enjoy shows from the US that were not available on the standard channels here in the UK.

Then it happened.

A sci-fi show I was enjoying named Earth2 was cancelled. There was no ending. There would be no more episodes. Then it happened again with a crime drama and again with more shows I was enjoying.

I had access to the early internet and learned how this was a common thing over the pond. Shows being cancelled due to ratings, budgets, or actor availability.

Then they cancelled Firefly. That was just too much.

I decided that I would no longer watch a show unless there was a second season also available and a good chance more would be made.

That didn’t work.

Shows would be cancelled mid-season in season 2 or 3 etc. Often on cliffhangers leaving questions left unanswered. After all that time you had invested in watching the show you were left hanging with no conclusion, unsatisfied.

It happened to movies too.

Stories told over trilogies where only the first movie was made or the last one was never made leaving the boxset, well, not really a set.

Sometimes the producers knew it was coming and would rush to complete the series. It showed. Storylines and questions quickly tied-up in an unsatisfactory way. It felt rushed and unpolished.

It kept happening.

Decades later and it is accepted as the norm. Anything coming from over the pond will have an expiration date that may come at any time. You can wait to see if it gets finished and wait for the reviews and summaries to let you know if it ends in a satisfactory and complete way. No cliffhangers and no questions left unanswered. Then you can watch it.

If you have the patience.

Or you can take a punt and give a show a try in the hope that it doesn’t get cancelled.

Big faceless organisations

I miss the days before the internet sometimes. Especially when dealing with companies. They think they are being efficient dealing with customers only through the web or an app, using AI agents to deal with enquiries and having complex digital complaints procedures.

Once they have your money and you experience problems with their product or service, good luck reaching an actual human to talk to. Or getting your money back.

If you are an IT geek though you might have a chance. I’ve managed to talk to humans and get my money back on several occasions, but it took a bunch of skills that the average person just doesn’t have such as:

– Understanding how web pages work and reading the page source
– OSINT
– How to hack AI
– Side-channels
– Exploiting software bugs

It shouldn’t require a degree in IT in order to get decent customer service but that’s been my experience.

Windows 10 End-of-Life

It’s Microsoft Windows 10’s End-of-Life (EoL) this October (2025). A lot of people with older machines will be impacted by this as their machines will not be able to run Windows 11, even with hardware upgrades.

Over the years I’ve managed to keep my older machines running for as long as possible with various upgrades and modifications. The best upgrade for your money and the return on investment is moving from a disk-based hard drive (HDD) to a solid state drive (SSD). I have laptops that are 15 years old that are running Windows 10 just fine but fail the Windows 11 compatibility check.

So what are the options for those of us that can’t afford a new computer?

First, backup your computer. I mean, you are already doing this anyway right? This will ensure that you have access to your data should anything happen to your PC going forwards. Backup both the data and take an image of the drive and store two copies in separate safe locations.

Once your data is backed-up, replace the OS with Linux. There are many flavours available. Go peruse distrowatch to see which one best suits you. If you are still unsure then Ubuntu is popular among those new to Linux.

Once you are up and running you can port your data across. There are Linux applications that are alternatives to Windows applications that can still read your files. Instead of Office you can run LibreOffice for example. There are many open source applications that should be able to help.

If you really need to run Windows and your laptop is powerful enough you can run something like Virtualbox and run your Windows 10 in a virtual machine. Or you can containerise your applications and run them in something like Docker. Or look at WINE, the linux Windows emulator.

Just because Microsoft is no longer supporting Windows 10 does not mean that you have to pay for a new machine to use Windows 11. You have options.

Got any other suggestions? Let me know.

Lists 2.0

I’m a big fan of lists. To do lists, checklists, packing lists, you name it I’ve turned it into a list. I recently learned that ChatGPT is great at lists.

Very detailed lists.

Need to plan a vacation? It will generate a list of things you need to take into consideration, in addition to what to pack. Shopping for a new laptop, car, or even a house? It can quickly knock you up a list with indented bullet-points on everything you need. Need to make a plan should a disaster occur, maybe a nuclear war or zombie outbreak? Yep it will create a detailed survival plan complete with supplies list in seconds.

Lists 2.0: create your unique custom lists with AI!

Give me a job

It amazes me how people have specific job titles that they hold on to, especially in IT. For instance they are a Systems Architect, or a .Net Software Developer, or maybe a Project Manager specialising in AWS projects. When out of work they search for jobs using these exact titles.

Who needs a ,Net Software Developer within my area, or remote, paying what I’m asking?

As the markets get worse and roles are thin on the ground and you are competing with hundreds of other applicants for the same roles, they still don’t bend, they remain inflexible, only looking for their particular job title.

In the past we would look for work by seeing who needed help and with what. Did you have the skills to do what was required, and is the pay being offered worth the effort? If the answer to both was yes then you’d apply. The job title didn’t matter. You could figure that out later, as long as you paid me what we both agree I’m worth.

Find someone with a problem that you can solve willing to pay you what you are asking and you have employment. Simple. Yet somehow we seem to have forgotten this basic rule and when finding ourselves out of work we look for job titles not needs. Which companies have a problem that you can help them solve? Forget how they are trying to solve it by advertising for various roles. Look at the bigger picture and see if your skills and experience can help them.

As an example from my own career, I was once asked to meet with a particular client that was advertising for a tester. Several agencies had sent them testers and every one was rejected. One agency asked me if I’d go along and meet with them to find out what was going on. They were based in Cambridge so I took the train figuring out that I could do some shopping and visit a few public houses while I was there. After the usual formalities my very first question was: What are you looking for? It turns out that no one had actually asked them this. They told me that their main software provider issued them with an ultimatum: either fix your system or we will no longer support it. Over the years they had created Frankenstein’s monster. It was a mess of patches and hacks and upgrading it took too long and hit their SLAs hard. They had been told that they should hire a tester and that was what they were attempting. What they actually needed was a consultant to come in and figure things out, not a tester who needs direction and control at the hands of a test manager, which was the type of candidate they were being sent.

Over the course of our meeting I outlined a brief plan for them covering what they needed in terms of skills and experience. I was hired as the consultant overseeing the work.

Look beyond roles. Look at what the company or client actually needs and don’t worry about job titles. You can figure what to call yourself later.