Bay 12 Games Forum

Fwiw, about 5-6 years ago I went through a few mp3 players in that price range before giving up because they all turned out to be pretty flakey - either poor sound quality, odd behaviour/'features', or just plain crashing all the time.  It's maybe improved since then what with tech getting better and cheaper, but I'm not sure how optimistic I'd be.

I ended up buying something quite a bit more expensive, but at the time I saw a lot of recommendations for the Sansa Clip as being one of the best in terms of value for money.  Unfortunately I'm not sure which particular model they were referring to, or whether it was the range as a whole - or whether that's still the best option.  Briefly skimming amazon, it also looks like they're a little outside your budget.  Still, may be worth researching in case there's decent refurbished or second hand options?

It might also be worth looking into cheap smartphones, even if you don't intend to ever use it as a phone.  I'm not sure if there's anything viable at the price range or not, but the market for phones is a lot bigger than the market for standalone mp3 players these days so there might be some decent options there.

Short version: I'm a clerical assistant who over the years has inherited a bunch of slightly more interesting and challenging duties on top of the regular mind numbing stuff.  Also I have good conditions re: freedom, leave, and lack of stress.  I don't so much have a dream job as just want to further alter the ratio of challenging:boring duties in my current job.

Long version:

I work at the local council as a 'support assistant', which is basically a clerical assistant.  The department I work in is responsible for the repair and maintenance of the council's non-domestic properties (schools, libraries, leisure centres, community halls, that sort of thing).  They're also responsible for projects to build new buildings of that type.

I've been in the job something like 8-9 years, during which time I've worked in a few teams within the department - originally I was in a team that was responsible for appointing consultants (architects, quantity surveyors, CDM coordinators, and so forth), then I was providing support to our asbestos team, then working on an emergency repairs helpdesk, then providing admin support to the guy that runs all our maintenance contracts. 

These days I continue to provide support to that last guy while also working closely with the team leader for the repairs helpdesk.  And since we got a new financial system last year, I've been landed with a *lot* of invoicing work.

Generally my day involves a lot of logging maintenance visits, inputting jobs and orders, processing invoices, and doing vaguely complicated things with spreadsheets.  I have some contact with external contractors, usually either to help them resolve unpaid invoices or requesting missing certification.  Although it's not strictly part of my job description, I also do a fair bit of report writing using Crystal and Discoverer, for internal statistics and KPIs and also sometimes for external FOI requests - the team that's actually meant to do that are in another department so it's generally faster and easier for our managers to just ask me to do it.  I've also developed a reputation for my IT literacy (which by internet standards isn't anything special, but by office drone standards is apparently impressive) and my problem solving skills, so again unofficially I'm quite often called on by colleagues to help figure stuff out (why am I getting this error message?  how do I get my spreadsheet to do X?  they're saying the invoice isn't paid but it says on my screen that it is what's going on?  is there a faster way I can do this? we need someone to figure out if this process/system will work for us etc etc).  The official duties are all pretty boring (soul destroying, even), but I kinda enjoy a lot of the stuff I do in a less official capacity. 

Also, while the duties and pay aren't great the conditions are pretty good: ~30 days of leave that I can basically take whenever I want, flexitime with no 'core' hours so I can more or less pick my start/finish times and change them on a whim (if I start to feel fed up on a given day I can just up and go home, so long as I maintain a positive time balance overall), and I'm largely unmanaged/unsupervised and left to my own devices - managers may come to me with tasks and queries, but nobody really monitors my workload or job performance or anything like that.  So I get a lot of freedom and relatively little stress.  And no requirement to work overtime or otherwise take my work home with me. 


As for my dream job, eh, I'm not really sure I have one.  I guess if I could just increase the sorta-interesting unofficial duties of my current job and decrease the tedious ones, that'd be good enough for me.  So more fancy Crystal report creation, more complicated spreadsheets, and more figuring out processes and troubleshooting problems for colleagues, with less/none of the endless logging and filing. And no minute taking.  God I hate minute taking.  It'd be nice if I were paid accordingly too - I've not met anyone else at my pay grade that'd be able to learn all the stuff I do.

(as a kid I wanted to be either an astronaut or 'an inventor', while in high school I assumed I'd be a programmer of some sort, but now that all seems like way too much time and effort)

Not sure if this counts as spoilers, but in case it does:


edit: just loaded an old saved game and yeah, my memory is correct - at least on Normal difficulty it's relatively trivial to make it out of there with a level 4 party.  Obviously can't speak for other character levels or higher difficulty though.

Well shortly after reading the earlier comments my level 9 party met the Master Below and nope.

I dunno about PC druids, but the companion Druid is very nice when shifted - tears through enemies like they're made of paper.  I use it more than I use his spells to be honest - very effective at taking out archers and priests while my tank(s) hold the centre.  And with Wildstrike: Corrosion, he punches through damage reduction nicely too.

I had it in my head that this was releasing on the 27th, so whatever time it actually releases on the 26th is a bonus for me (and it looks like it's releasing right about the time I get home from work, so even better).

I've really been looking forward to this one - Baldur's Gate 2 is one of my favourite games of all time.

I get the nagging feeling I should be vaguely embarrassed about this, but I really enjoy the punchy pop & rock stylings of Icon For Hire