Paul Brownjohn @Paulos_the_fog@qoto.org

@lyndamerry484

I live in Luxembourg, I refuse to buy anything that is labelled as produce of the UK (the UK farming communities voted overwhelmingly for Brexit so fück them!), likewise with anything American and the same with anything from Israel. I may not have the vote in the USA or Israel but I can still vote with my wallet!

@JackTheCat

As they quite rightly should be!

Britain decided in its collective wisdom to leave and should therefore be denied access to all EU resources - tell the Brits to fück off!

Some years back now, I had a mini stroke during which I lost completely the ability to write my mother tongue or rather to type my mother tongue which is English. Whilst in the throes of this stroke, I would write a word like “difficult” with four or five ‘i’s and half a dozen ‘f’s then stare at it knowing that wasn’t right but being unable to work out what was wrong with the way I had spelled it!
The neurologist that I eventually saw said that I'd had a transitory ischemic attack in the area of my brain that deals with my mother tongue to stop I asked him whether, had I been typing in French, my second language, if I would have been similarly impacted. He said no apparently one's mother tongue functionality resides in one area of the brain and any other languages that one learns after the first one forms a new language area in another part of the brain altogether. This is one of the advantages of learning languages other than one's mother tongue; it opens up pathways and areas in the brain that would not otherwise be present. This is also allegedly why every language after the first foreign language one learns is easier to learn because the foreign language learning department of the brain and it's necessary links to the rest of your brain have already been installed, as it were

It is edifying to see that countries across the world like Canada and Australia acknowledge the threat from the worthless, incompetent 'trump' and deliver unexpected landslide victories to parties opposed to the orange turd's disgusting policies!

@munificent

I switched from being a carpenter & builder to computer programming due to injuries preventing me from doing what is a pretty strenuous job.

Did I regret it - never! I thoroughly enjoyed programming and I was paid at least 3 times as much as I ever earned as a carpenter and often 4 or 5 times as much!

I'm now retired but I still love doing a bit of programming! I started off my programming career learning 'C' and it's still my favourite language. Since then I have also worked in Visual Basic, Java, SQL & PL/SQL and more recently C# - so full circle in some ways.

All my retirement projects are written in C# these days and although I'm not a great fan of OO languages, it works!

Add age about 38, I morphed my career from being a builder into being a software engineer.
For 16 or 17 years I was a full time IT contractor and therefore moved fairly regularly from company to company. From the client's point of view, taking on computer contractors is a phenomenally expensive exercise, and it is therefore only the largest and most well-heeled companies who can afford to do that!
In my time as a contractor, I worked for some of the biggest names in British, Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourgish industry and commerce. Based on that experience, I think I can safely say that most companies are pretty appallingly badly managed however some stand out as examples of just how excruciatingly poor management decisions can be.
I'm not going to mention any names except to say that the company I'm talking about are a household name in the United Kingdom. They employed a director responsible for IT who was an enormous enthusiast for Unix; preferring it to windows even as a desktop client. At the time the company in question was using a mainframe for data crunching operations and this IT director thought that an outmoded platform. He decided pretty much unilaterally the the way forward was to port all the code that currently ran on the mainframe to Unix server boxes and to replace all the PC's that currently sat on the hundreds of desks throughout the company's offices with some workstations running Unix.
At a cost of £ millions, he ordered the purchase of the necessary hardware and recruited a team of analysts and programmers to port the mainframe codebase to a programming language that would run on Unix servers. The job was estimated to take a couple of years after which the mainframe could be finally shut down. Three years later, the work was nowhere near finished and after five years serious questions were being asked! At around this time, The IT director responsible decided that it was time for a career move and left the company for a similar position in another company. This debacle had already cost the company £ millions and the board of directors together with the new IT director decided that it was a lost cause and cancelled the entire project. The Sun workstations that had been purchased to replace the windows PC's on every single desk in the company were sold off at a massive loss to the staff themselves.

@auschwitzmuseum

It leads to the exact same destination as the USA is on course to visit very soon and the destination that, horrifically, Israel has chosen for it's people too!