I'm still working from home, recording lectures, delivering shiz remotely. Don't think that will change too soon.

Hello Greg.

How's this work for freshers?
Are many starting uni from home? Or moving into halls/wherever and attending minimal lectures?

It differs a bit depending upon what type of students they are, but there is a general expectation that students will move into halls and have some face-to-face teaching during the first term. Face-to-face teaching is obviously a headache now, as big lectures are a no-no. For intro week, we're having 25% of the cohort in on each of 4 days. Rooms that would previously hold 18 students for group work now hold 4. So sessions are going to be repeated multiple times. Teaching will be done pretty safely, I reckon, and I suspect that the risks arise more from just having the students on campus/in halls.

The MASSIVE ELEPHANT in the room is that I think we all know what the outcomes of this will be. We can pretend that freshers will socially distance and be 'responsible' within various bubbles, but I think that reality will hit home at some point. My real concern isn't so much for the freshers, the majority of whom will probably not suffer dramatic consequences. My concern is about what happens when we reach the point in the first term where everyone decides to go home for the weekend (usually around week 5, I reckon). Coinciding with declining temperatures and the predicted start of a real second wave.

Because of who I teach (med students), there are particular reasons to maintain 'business as usual' where possible, so I can understand why my department is taking its approach. Other departments, I'm not sure that the justifications are quite the same.    

I do feel sorry for the freshers missing out on starting first year, freshers week etc. Just absolutely not the same. Though I imagine they'll all go for it with double intensity next September if things are back to normal.

Reading week when everyone heads home asymptomatic and the spread happens. Students blamed for big local Covid spikes, looking forward to the headlines.

I agree. There was a lot of emphasis post-results of 'we look forward to welcoming you to campus', but the campus experience will not be the same. (I also don't think they get the same experience educationally, either, but that's another matter...) If I were a student, and I had something vaguely decent to do for a year and had the resources to do so, I'd have deferred. 

Hello.

I got an odd reminder that I'm listed as the domain owner of this forum (although I don't have it in my 123reg so presume I gave it to someone) so I thought I'd pop in and say hi.

Good to see people still posting after all these years!

As seems to have always been the way, my life has taken many turns, but I think / hope I'm relatively stable now (considering)

I'm now working for burberry as retail IT Service manager, which means I'm service owner of all the sales technologies in the stores. Until this year, it meant I was able to travel, now I'm working in my home office.

I travelled a lot before January, lived in China for a few years, met my now wife and now we're living in sunny Leeds.

Hope everyone is well!

LP! My goodness. How nice to see you again. Sounds like you've been through some stuff! Glad you're sounding happy enough now at least. How does your wife like the Leeds lifestyle?

Hey! Yeah, good to see you too! 
Life is good, for sure. In spite of the macro factors. 

She likes the UK when it's not being a dick

Nb. The rest of my post vanished. Maybe cos I put brackets on? 

Hope you're doing well! 

When there's an intermission in the apocalypse we should meet up for a refreshing beverage, lp.

LP! \o/

> I got an odd reminder that I'm listed as the domain owner of this forum (although I don't have it in my 123reg so presume I gave it to someone) so I thought I'd pop in and say hi.

Yep, that someone was me, but I didn't get any reminders from the useless bastards, and apparently it expired yesterday.

Anyhow, I've just renewed it, so hopefully that goes through before any caches expire, and I'll look into moving it to a better registrar next year.

Did you try updating the contact email?

No, I didn't try to update the contact email that hasn't changed since 2006 when LP transferred the domain to my account and worked just fine when I requested the password reset.

Checking emails, I got multiple renewal notifications in 2008, 2010, 2012.
For 2014 I manually renewed it in June when I was doing another domain.
For 2016 it was auto-renewed. (I don't remember if I asked for that or not.)
2018 was probably auto-renewed, but the email doesn't clarify.

I'm guessing it tried to auto-renew this year, but that failed (since they had an old card saved), and rather than actually notify me about it they decided to tell the person who had it 14 years ago instead.

Had planned to move away from 123-reg after they tried charging every UK domain owner an additional £6 a year per domain for "ownership protection", but I'd forgotten about that. I'll wait a few weeks to make sure the renewal goes through fully and then transfer it to my enom account instead.

Good reminder that I need to move some domains from 123reg. They're so expensive and I always forget after they've autorenewed 

Ay'up LP, good to see you around again. Sounds like you've had an interesting good few years anyway!

D'you need any top-up dosh BP?

*shrug*

I have enough savings to get me comfortably through the pandemic and beyond without needing to worry about it, but if anyone really wants to throw money at me I wont complain.

Defo! 

What's everyone's 'rona update now we're well in to Season 2?

I had returned to the office for 2 days/week, but after next week I will be WFH full time again. We were encouraged to return, so people did. Now we've been told to go on a rota and not be in the office full time.

When I was there I preferred to be there, when I'm at home I feel like I prefer being at home. So I guess overall I'm happy being back in the office or WFH. I think the 2 day balance worked for me.

There's been a number of cases at work where people who have been in close contact with those testing positive being asked to isolate for 2 weeks. Quite a large and important team have just gone in to isolation which could be interesting (in a how do we handle that kind of way since they're a team where the majority of their work is very much on site).

We've not had an "outbreak" yet, which hopefully is because our measures have been good enough. Social distancing (though plenty don't) and face coverings on at all times seem to be working. Though I bet if we mass tested all staff we'd have a load of cases.

 

Our London office is gone, lease expired in September. We plan to get a smaller nicer one at some point, for people who prefer it and then some desks for others to come in once or twice a week or whatever. And meetings I guess. 

I went to our HQ in Slough for a meeting a while back, that lot (print, accounts) had been back since May and it was weird. They're all like "want a cup of tea?" relaxed about everything and I was the weird one saying "erm, no?" and stuff. Just familiarity breeding complacency all over the place.

Anyway, WFH full time still. If they close the schools it's going to be horrible, but as long as the boy's back in we're coping ok. If sport shuts down again (lol I did quite a lot of work for the rugby match not happening tomorrow in Twickenham) then we'll be back to needing furlough to stay afloat but for the time being things are almost normal on that front.

Full time WFH here. Some of our offices have opened again in limited fashion, but as I'm 3 hours drive from the nearest one, I rarely go in anyway except for meetings, and they've all been online for quite some time now. Doubt I'll visit a company office until next year at the earliest.

Cases are fairly low here (north of Aberdeen), hope it stays that way!