My Mrs. is also fully supportive in unicycling and every other activity I take up. She is concerned about my safety and insists I wear at least a helmet and wrist guards, which I do wear, along with leg armour and elbow pads. When I first started she said not to get hurt because she didn’t want to have to get the winters firewood by herself. She does want to try the unicycle herself this coming spring.
My wife is definitely supportive, though with some misgivings – she supports me, and since I unicycle and it makes me happy, she supports that too. On re-reading my earlier post, I can see why wobblysteve classified us as “neutral”.
Definitely positive comments from my better half
It really makes me sad to hear about yours and others lack of support! Learning to ride can be frustrating enough in the beginning even when you have a good support system, but when you don’t…well I wouldn’t be surprised if some people in such circumstances gave up too soon.
Hang in there!! If it’s truly a passion of yours, don’t let what anyone says deter you in any way. And hopefully once she sees you progress from learning to more accomplished riding she’ll change her mind about it. 
My better half of 18 years has been extremely supportive of my newly discovered passion of only 6 months now. She was very proud of me for pursuing this long time dream of mine and I can hear the pride in her voice whenever she talks about me with friends and family. I’m sure it helps that I always try to be equally supportive of her with her hobbies and new ideas as well.
Now don’t get me wrong, It’s not like I have a limitless amount of money I am allowed spend on unicycles and fill up our garage with them. We also have 5yr old twins, which doesn’t always allow me the time I wish I could spend riding. But as long as I’m spending time with her and the kids she has been incredibly supportive. :D:D
Same here, my wife may not be impressed by some of my adventure choices but she wishes me a good time and ask that i update her when i can. She requested i do not injure myself unicycling, skydiving, backbacking etc because she does not want to give up being a stay at home mom and go get another job to support her dumbass injured husband lol
I must say that it is not only my wife being skeptical about my hobby. Also at work, my manager only allows me to ride unicycle as long as I don’t break my hands or head. I’m a software developer and though I can type pretty quickly, with 1 hand I certainly won’t work as fast.
On the other hand the manager of my manager gave the unicycle a try right in the office when I brought it with me and… he tumbled off. Managers don’t really need hands, only their mouths
You can add me to the list of those with supportive wives. In fact, she just bought me an early Christmas present (thanks to the link shared by forum member Medaceina in another post). As soon as it arrives I’ll be the proud owner of a new UDC Titan 36" Trainer.
In Germany that is against the law. Employer is not allowed to restrict your hobby(no matter what). That is your personal thing. If you break your hand, he has to deal with your illness.
I believe you have similar laws in the Netherlands.
I had a head on collision with a car on my way home from work while riding a unicycle a few months back. Car was on the wrong side of the road coming out of a side street and it was a few weeks before daylight savings started so it was dark. After the incident I emailed my managers about the accident to give them a heads up.
It was pretty minor, I landed on the car bonnet but destroyed the wheel of the uni I was riding. My managers were surprised I went to the office to work the next day!
On the other hand. I have a very unfit colleague. Wednesday of last week there was a building fire drill. Our office is on the building’s 17th floor. The Thursday and Friday, she works from home, complaining that she has stiff knees and leg muscle pain from walking down 17 flights of stairs and cannot move/feeling pain. And my colleague, she’s only about 30 years old… I think she should be in the prime of her life…
You were operating a unicycle on a road between sunset and sunrise. Naughty.
He was prolly only half serious. He is actually New Zealander and works in Denmark. Even though I moved back to NL, I still have the same job that I had in Denmark and same manager. Naturally contract wise, I can do whatever I like. Still, being the lead developer, it would create some complications when I’m out for a while.
It was the intersection before my own house!
System Documentation is needed in case you get hit by the big red bus…
I’m a SQL Developer, and it’s really not easy to pick up what goes on, what is used where, what the code is used for, why the code was written as it is. Before I started there 2 years ago, it was all done by one really smart guys for 8 years but there was no documentation. Now that’s me. The business would be in trouble if I wasn’t around.
Any suggestions on how to make it easy/easier?
So you were crossing the road by the shortest safe path?
I was on the correct side of the street, the driver drove into my path. This was on my own street, 200 meters from my front door. He turned into my street from the side street but because he cut the corner he hit me. Admittedly my headlight wasn’t too bright (my normal one was used on the weekend so I had it packed it elsewhere) and he reckons some tree foliage may have obscured his vision. But, he shouldn’t be driving cutting corners.
Anyway, all ok, and I’m lucky to not have broken anything, except the unicycle wheel.
Me too. I work in a small credit union where we have just three staff in our core IT team. I am assistant network admin as well but have the role of the data specialist. The network admin is a superhero who can provide insights to any aspect of our network. The third staff member is focused on configuration, documentation and training for the web based user interface to our core system.
As a developer it is like heaven because I have total admin power across the entire network and everything in it plus instant direct access to the other stakeholders including the superhero. I have seen stories from so many developers who are almost suffocated and begging for their network admins to cooperate. That is not my burden and it is anything but frustrating or boring.
It is a wonderfully diverse environment with the core system being a Universe database running on IBM AIX (a *nix environment). Universe goes back to the beginning of computing with its roots in PIC. Everything is stored as text in up to a three tiered record with “Attributes”, “MultiValues” and “SubValues” as one did back when every byte had to count.
Universe extracts to MS SQL each night into the most ab-normal database you would ever encounter. I build reports based on this but it doesn’t bring out everything I need from the main system.
So I set up an ODBC connection into Universe. This is awesome. It uses what it calls “Dynamic Normalisation” extracting the multi-tiered structure into tables on the fly and lets me get hold of what doesn’t get exported in the SQL extract. I have set it up as a Linked Server in SQL Server with Views that let me get hold of anything
Most of the reports come out in Excel tables based on connections to Stored Procedures and Views on SQL Server. Lots of VBA to configure the reports. I also build Apps in MS Access.
This year I started writing CLR functions for SQL Server. Oh wow, what it facilitates. The learning curve is surprisingly easy for anyone with C, VB.NET or even VBA programming experience.
I have built couple of web based viewers in ASP and some VB.NET apps.
Challenges everywhere but the opportunity to meet them. I love it.
Now you’re talking my language. I’m been involved with Pick systems since 1986. Pick doesn’t exist any more, but it’s the original “SQL” database using the ACCESS interface. Even the emulations are becoming scarce now. Our current system is jBase, and nice balance of Linux and Pick/Universe etc. Love those multi-valued, hashed databases. Lightening fast to code and develop. Our core systems are still green screen and keyboard based, but most activity is via B2B interfaces, web access and my area mobile apps. People of the other end have no idea the programs behind them started over 30 years ago, and the OS is based on a system created 50 years ago.
My wife is very supportive! She really likes it if I try something new and always tries to stimulate me to search for new challenges. She is the best!:)
Good stuff! I love to get things working, takes problem solving ability and it’s so fulfilling to get something working!
I have 3 people in my small IT team too. Me, “Finance Data Engineer”, the System Admin and the Tester. We’ve just had a restructure so we have some BAs joining us… we’ll see how it goes.
There’s a wider team behind us though for the hardware, infrastructure, compliance, security etc.
Anyway, prior to this job I was working for a teeny tiny banking organisation you may have heard of… it’s called “CBA”… I was a Report Developer at CBA using SSRS, Teradata and SQL Server. Great people there and I had the best manager.
CBA has really great processes for System development, testing to finally deployment. My current company though… I came to a place where things where done on the fly, no separated test system… Now it’s heaps better (I got the separated test system put in).
Anyway, I like what I do, I like where I work (and… we are in a fully refurbished office from Monday!), I like what my company does (Mental health) and the people I work with are, on the whole, good to work with. Everybody in IT is encouraged to work flexibly too. We are pretty blessed. Not everything is perfect, but life would be boring if it was?
I only hope you were not responsible for the AML compliance system at CBA. Could be worse though, AML at Wespac. 
Next week it is NAB’s turn at mea culpa.
Small is good. I actually wrote our original AML monitoring system.