Nice People Thread Part 9 - and so it continues

Spirit_2

On topicish. A member of the wider family rang today to ask if we could lend them some money towards their first house purchase.

Few properties come on the market in their price range even though they are looking a few miles outside of their 'home' location. They have had a large sum gifted to them to help with a deposit however they still do not have quite enough.

We have said yes, 50% as a gift, 50% as a loan, no interest and a longish repayment period. It was a no brainer, which I think they knew, that we love them enough to gift some of it they did not.

If they do not make it onto the housing ladder now we feel it will run away from them. Relative has aquired a ready made family and they need a family sized home.

PasturesNew

fc123 wrote: »

:rotfl:

We are out of practise as haven't really eaten out much at all recently and have spent the last 6 months living in the garden.

In fact we realised we had picked up some bad habits once we moved back to eating off a small temporary table indoors.

An example would be just clearing the plates straight onto the grass by leaning over then taking dirty plate indoors, eating meat off a bone and just chucking it over one shoulder, never wiped the table as it had holes in it and we just swept crumbs off onto patio...you get the idea.

It was all very Medieval.

A table? You're ahead of me!



But I'd not touch cutlery that had been on the floor .... let alone a public floor. I'd not want to touch my plate/cutlery or eat a meal knowing my fingers had brushed with the floor and touched the cutlery I'd picked up.

Post-meal, if it were still on the floor and they were clearing the plates, I might pick it up and add it to the stack then.

michaels

I remain available for adoption into any loaded families who will have me....

Any sign on the horizon of DD wanting to make a similar move (the home owning bit rather than taking on a ready made family)?

PasturesNew

michaels wrote: »

I remain available for adoption into any loaded families who will have me....

You were born into one, stop being so s0ddin' greedy.

SingleSue

michaels wrote: »

No one was able to help on the toilet seat question so I'll try you lot on a data presentation queston instead.

WE display monthly expenditure data broken down by category in a pie chart as a quick way for users to see proportions. Occasionally for accounting reasons for some categories in some months expenditure may be negative. What is the best grapihical way to display the data?

I'm lost when it comes to loo seats...trying to work out how to replace mine at the moment. It's far too scary to contemplate, so it has gone on the back burner until the present one falls off completely :rotfl:

Spirit_2

michaels wrote: »

I remain available for adoption into any loaded families who will have me....

Any sign on the horizon of DD wanting to make a similar move (the home owning bit rather than taking on a ready made family)?

No. Miles away from thinking / aspiring to such things. Probably just as well as some two bedroomed new builds about 4 miles away were snapped up between £225K and 250K.

She started working fulltime this month and has taken on a share of a horse, so that is all good.

michaels

I knew some farmers in a not far village starting with a W, they got permission to build on one of their fields on the edge of town and even though this was 25 or more years ago think they made more from that than they ever did from farming...

zagubov

Trying to catch up!

Wish I could have been there last night. I'd always assumed all NPs knew who everybody was already (until the summer meeting when I realised I wasn't the only one who hadn't met other regular posters).

I wonder if the geographical heart of the NP empire's Randstadt would be somewhere like Oxford/Berks/Bucks. We did all get located on a map sometime ago didn't we? When was that? Maybe there's somewhere like Reading that's close to everybody but I bet nobody would know the area well or have easy travel options.

Regarding job interviews I hope people don't get hired because they're like the interviewers. My mate got hired by this guy. :eek:

In the public sector, job interviews are pretty much entirely run on very strict lines. Didn't used to be so much, but very much are now. Fellow-workers of the successful candidate have limited input, to put it mildly.

zagubov

PasturesNew wrote: »

Re algebra ... in about 1996 I was part of some new experiment with the OU to understand Algebra in a different way .... I can remember a one off special lesson (lessons were unusual!) where the new system was explained.

It did seem a LOT easier than previous ways of teaching it ....

Wonder if that took off or not.

I'm intrigued by PN's comment on an easier way of teaching algebra tried by the OU. I can imagine it dying a death in this country as things seem to change almost arbitraily without any general direction of improvement. I'm not surprised we never went metric here; I can just imagine some of the resistance it would face despite the fact the pre-Norman system here was metric anyway. It took an invasion to change it.

The New Scientist once described an alternative number system which would make simple arithmetic much simpler to do by hand. It wasn't really revolutionary (nobody's discovered a new number between 1 and 10!:D) but a denary / decimal system where numbers 0 to 5 were written as normal but 6-9 were written as bar numbers (bar-4, bar-3, bar 2 and bar-1) Those who remember log tables should remember what I mean.

The article went through worked examples showing how elegantly it made simple (and even quite complex) arithmetic much much easier. Don't ask me to explain how it worked; I haven't seen a single item about it ever since so it never made it to the internet era AFAIK.

Almost immediately the electronic calculator came along and that was the last we ever saw of this system.

Edit: does anyone with access to library systems have good (legal) access to the New Scientist archives.

LydiaJ

Generali wrote: »

We're not selecting based on a whim. We're selecting on several defined criteria including Excel skills which we are measuring in a way that is good enough for us.

I don't see what writing an exam paper does to help me. I don't really give a shut what it does to help the candidates TBH. I've spent hours on this process and I'm not going to waste even more time to meet some spurious definition of fair.

It's going to be a hot day in Sydney today, 33C, and my air con has broken down .

Oh Gen! How frustrating about the air con.

And then just when you're having a trying day, along comes my comment which must have felt like criticism of you. I'm sorry.

It really truly wasn't meant as a dig at you. I know business works completely differently from education and that I would never be able to adapt to the mindset. I also know that just because it's different, or even just because I don't like it, that doesn't mean it's wrong.

I was wrong, though, to say you were appointing on a whim. I did know, actually, that there were plenty of elements of your selection proceedure that aren't whim-like at all. It's just the thing of ruling people out on the holiday question that doesn't sit well with me. But that's OK, because probably a lot of what goes on in my world wouldn't sit well with you or other people who belong in the business world. We frequently observe admin/HR/finance people who come to work in education after being in business just don't get a lot of things about "the way things are done".

Also... not caring whether it's fair to the candidates as long as you appoint a reasonably competent one - I get it that that's expedient in your world, and how things have to be. I imagine you can understand why assessing everybody fairly is a huge deal in my world - not only when I am assessing my students myself, but even more so when the exam boards are assessing them and I am to be judged on the outcome.

zagubov wrote: »

Wish I could have been there last night. I'd always assumed all NPs knew who everybody was already (until the summer meeting when I realised I wasn't the only one who hadn't met other regular posters).

I was an absolute idiot about that last night. I met GDB, greeted him and asked him who he was. He told me his real name and explained that he was GDB. I thanked him and moved on to greet Mr FC, without stopping to realise that GDB wouldn't know who I was and I ought to tell him.