While I have no experience of healthcare, I know that office politics and culture can be a nightmare in any workplace. What I also know is that we are or own ‘brands’ and if we want to be good at anything we need to develop ourselves as we see fit. This is part of being professional. You choose to do it in work break hours where you have the time and maybe are less tied. Maybe it gives you access to people who can help when you need it. All this is good, but I think it’s worth noting that you will miss out on some of the office culture (for better or worse). Professionalism is as much about what you know as well as your network, and people make snap judgements about others. You seem to have come off badly this time, these things happen, but are fixable one way of another. What if you (force yourself to) spend one break ‘socialising’ every now and again? You may be able to turn the conversion into something more worthwhile. You may find someone who will become a real asset.

I’m waaaaay along the spectrum and I too would rather learn than idly chat. The above is very hard for me to do, but I have reluctantly found that there are benefits. It’s a bigger picture thing.

Be you and do your thing, but do it strategically. I suspect that your ‘brand’ is very saleable, so if it’s not working where you are, you can always try elsewhere.

Bedtime doesn’t equal sleep time, but is a good discipline to start making ready for bed and putting devices away. Getting ready for bed at 10, asleep by 11 doesn’t sound bad to me.

Battery replacement is an issue, but is easily solved with good design. I don’t need the thinnest phone that’s difficult to hold, a few extra mm won’t affect my life negatively. I’d rather have something usable and maintainable.

My biggest gripe however is the built in obsolesce of software support life. Perfectly good electronics are rendered useless by the system not receiving software / security updates after a couple of years.

Surely the simplest approach is not to use a wifi ssid that you don’t trust. Yes, mobile broadband is slower and more expensive, but is also more under your control, it is however harder for your boss to monitor.

If I was an it manager I’d probably want to keep an eye on WiFi traffic, even on the open ssid, just to see what’s going on. I don’t trust free WiFi.

If you can’t use 4/5g, and can’t find a suitable firewall or VPN, can you set up a different user on your phone? - and be disciplined in is use.

Another vote for scratch. Most kids that age want quick results and not to spend ages debugging something. Funnily enough I’ve seen the same scratch interface used to program industrial robots.

How much time one on one are you committing to spend with the child? This will make the difference.

Alternatively, think about some sort of robotics kit. Doing stuff in software is great but if it changes something in the real world, even better. Have you thought about something arduino?

Just for balance though, make a raft, a treehouse, a tent, make a fire without matches. It’s all problem solving but I bet any kid will remember getting muddy more than writing a neat while loop.

Exactly. Thanks. This is a ‘non-domestic’ application shall we say. Measuring something with any buffer capacity at all should negate the water’s pH, so shouldn’t be a problem, but the manufacturers advice still doesn’t sit comfortably with me. But they should know!

Roller out of a machine for shaping sheet metal?

Has a psion5, brilliant tech. Loved it. The calendar was way ahead of its time, 2AA batteries gave weeks of life and you could just about touch type on the keyboard. If I could get it to synch with office I’d be tempted to dig it out again, it really was the future.

Eyesight started going in mid 40s. Still not happy about it.

That’s nice for them. I’d love an inflationary pay rise once in a while.

Long day!

When I was working in Switzerland briefly, people would speak Swiss, German, French and Italian as well as English all in the same breath. I was told they used whatever word was easiest at the time.

When I was a child we lived in a house in the countryside, so nights were very dark and very quiet. I’d wander around the house in the dark quite often and noticed that as well as peripheral vision, the acoustic of the room gave me information, I could sort of hear the sound of my footsteps change if I was walking towards a closed door rather than an open one. Similarly the air moved differently going from one room to another. None of these senses had enough information to navigate alone, but all added to the model of where I was and what was around me. Of course this was in a place I knew well. When walking outside, I could ‘hear’ the echo of the hedges and walls beside me which kept me in the middle of the path. At the time this didn’t seem unusual. It goes to show that we use all our senses all the time, one helps the other to fill in the gaps.

I’m much older now, the eyesight and hearing are both failing, but it was fun while it lasted.

Allows you to remove power from the plugged in device without unplugging it. This provides convenience to easily and quickly turn things on and off and prevents arcing when unplugging. 240V 13A can arc a bit, particularly if unplugged under load, or on older sockets where the contacts have worn. While a little arcing doesn’t do much damage immediately, over time it will cause pitting and make a high resistance joint that will generate heat.

The switch only disconnects the live terminal, but the neutral terminal should be similar potential to earth (depending on how the building is wired).

Truly the king of plugs and sockets. The plugs are individually fused according to the device needs, ergonomic to use and exciting to stand on.

Phalanopsis?

I barely remember my birthday.

In principle I agree with this. The moon has been up there, relatively unchanged for the history of our species. It’s a meaningful connection to our deep past. It may even have helped life evolve on the planet. Romantically, it’s the only thing that we all can look up at and see so it’s a common shared experience for everyone. I think this is an important piece of our heritage and does need to be looked after. Also, I don’t really understand how morally one person has a right to do things on the moon but I don’t. - who gives them the ownership?

I’m not anti-science, or anti-progress, but some things are more important than, money or individual egos.

You can do anything to Mars, or the asteroids, they’re not culturally important, but the moon is, at least the side facing us.

If it happened frequently enough, the government would find a way to tax it.

I have a couple of setups, one has poe ip cams writing to a surveillance nvr which looks after motion detect etc. The other system relies on the camera software detecting motion and writing to a Nas.

Both systems are on their own subnet and are firewalled from everything else. I VPN as and when required.

I’ve found motion detect with alerts to be difficult to tune to get good detection without false alarms.

Remember that you are also interviewing them. They won’t expect you to know all the answers, but will want someone that they can work with. If you can, answer questions with the STAR method (situation, task, approach, result), but don’t waffle. You can use one piece of experience in a variety of ways: teamwork, research, urgent deadline etc.

It’s ok to say that you are nervous, they should try to put you at ease.

You may be asked ‘trick questions’, these are not usually to to you up but to see how you work an unknown problem. There is no right answer. Not knowing stuff is ok. Not being able to think up a plan is less so.

Remember whatever the outcome, this is really useful experience. See if you can get a site tour, ask about the tech used… You can then add this to your knowledge for later. In my experience, industry is frequently several years ahead of academia so you get a good chance to understand the real world.