I second that. I travel a lot for work, sometimes a bit obscure places (as in not touristic destinations), and I always try to find the odd tap room or micro brewery. It’s often hit or miss, but stumbling upon the rare gem every once in a while always feels really good. Bonus points if the head brewer is there and it’s a slow day so they have time to chat beer and brewing. And even in the well known areas, it’s fun to sift through the touristy hipster “more-show-than-anything” places to finally arrive at one which has said vibe. Had a week in Portland, OR, and visited about a dozen or so places, and from the over marketed polished hip joint with mediocre beer to the “here’s a bar and some stools thrown into the brewery hall” with absolutely stunning brews it had everything.

I don’t like Mondays from the Boomtown Rats.

Mind, when I first heard it my English was not that good so I really only got the Chorus about not liking Mondays (and who does, eh?). Dismissed the “shoot the whole day down” as an idiom for something which I did not know.

Then at some point much later I realized it’s actually a school shooting.

In a former job, I developed “software” (I clicked together some LabVIEW…) for custom designed scientific experiments, which many other researchers (mostly PhD students) would use. Wrote detailed SOPs for their usage, because everything was wonky and in constant evolution, and in some circumstances, data generated could be wrong. So I put a toggle switch with some cryptic acronym on the panel which was told to be flipped in the SOP when users reached the part where following instructions was really critical. The toggle switch did nothing but to log time and date and what user was logged in. When discussing weird data later on, first thing I did was to check whether that log existed, and if not heavily scrutinized the data with respect to errors that could be induced by not following the SOP.

I guess it shows how out of touch (old) I am that it’s completely bewildering to me that there could be people who do not understand folders … on a computer. Phones, tablets, yeah, I get that, those actively make it harder and harder to access the folder structure. But computers?

Schnutzeplotzepfnitzekatz!

Guess the language…

Part of my work is to evaluate proposals for research topics and their funding, and as soon as “AI” is mentioned, I’m already annoyed. In the vast majority of cases, justifiably so. It’s a buzzword to make things sound cutting edge and very rarely carries any meaning or actually adds anything to the research proposal. A few years ago the buzzword was “machine learning”, and before that “big data”, same story. Those however quickly either went away, or people started to use those properly. With AI, I’m unfortunately not seeing that.

Or whenever using your credit card online. The pro version would be that it turns off functions successively depending on your BAC. At some point the only unblocked function would be to call a cab to go home.

Because WFH has shown that large parts of middle management are useless, and those MM people are pushing upper management for RTO before it becomes evident. It’s what MM has always done, suck up to UM and kick down on the workers, without real benefit to the company.

I googled megging because I thought it was some Family guy reference. I was thoroughly disappointed…

It’s completely wild to me that the default for buying a car comes up to a monthly payment, why not pay cash? Save those 800 for three months, buy a beater for 2400. While driving this into the ground, continue saving the 800, even if that beater craps out after six months, you can upgrade to a 4800 not-so-crappy beater, rinse and repeat, and at some point you saved up the 48000 to get that new car. Financing something that depreciates in value quickly and exponentially at anything above the inflation rate is, financially speaking, complete and utter nonsense to me.

I started with a Santoku brought from a business trip to Japan, don’t think it was a special brand. It was 50 EUR (that was almost 15 years ago), but for me that’s how I got into it. Now I am lucky enough to have a friend who’s a blacksmith to get custom made knives.

I usually recommend the Haiku Chroma series as entry level, or if you are looking for a western style chef’s knife, I’d go with a Wusthoff classic. Both are a bit more than 100 EUR, so I’d always recommend to go to a shop and get a feel for them and what works best for you. Important thing is western or Japanese style handle (shaped vs. round), and a length and weight you feel comfortable with.

A really nice kitchen knife. I use it daily and it makes cooking so much more fun, which translates into eating less junk food and take out, saving a ton of money and being more healthy.

Just the other night my wife commented that I’m turning into Ron Swanson: after spending the day in the workshop making a bookcase for an oddly shaped nook in the house (carpenter quoted me a price so high that just with this project the nice miter saw amortized itself) I fired up the grill to cook a nice porterhouse steak, while nursing a nice dram of lagavulin. I even work for the government

Not just the internet, consumer computing as a whole became a shitshow. You need accounts for everything, Microsoft pushes you hard to use their online service, the default becoming that you to log onto your own computer you need to go through their online Microsoft account, which is terribly unsafe (if your ms account gets hacked, the hacker had access to you system). After “software as a service” more or less has been normalised, I’m just waiting for hardware going down that path, too. I’d say it begins already that I had to create a NVIDIA account to actually update drivers. Soon, this account may not be free anymore.

To most issues like this there are workarounds, but sometimes you have to dig deep. So it’s either you need to spend time to make things work like you want, or accept all this crap. For me, this is fine, because I like the tinkering. But I am also *administrating" most of my elder family members’ computers, which is a nightmare because of that. “So I saved the document, where is it on my computer,?” - “If you used the default OneDrive crap, it just is not on your computer…”