beardbound

The four noble truths kind of touch on this (which if memory serves are all life is suffering, suffering comes from desire, and the cessation of desire causes the end of suffering, and the fourth one... Cessation of desire leads to nirvanna maybe?), as well as the the three poisons, sometimes called sins (greed, anger, and delusion which when overcome become wisdom, generosity, and compassion).

My capital one card has virtual cards, and I’ve seen it other places. The only issue is that it’s done by a browser add on that has incredibly high permissions. I handle it by using a separate Firefox profile for the rare occasions I need to use them. I start Firefox with that profile, use it, then go back into my normal profile.

I was looking at booking a month or two at the Roam location in Tokyo RIGHT when they went under. I was bummed. It sounded perfect. Although as I age I find that dealing with a 10+ hour time difference a pain. These days I tend to stay in the Western Hemisphere to avoid those issues. Also there's so many places in North, Central, and South America I haven't been.

I buy directly a lot. Shopify has made this easier. For electronics I buy most of my stuff either directly, or through someplace like Best Buy. They aren't always the cheapest, but they at least they don't send me counterfeit products. I mostly order stuff from Amazon stuff that I might get on Alibaba. All I order some music stuff from them. I prefer to order from Sweetwater, but they've been having stock issues due to demand during the pandemic. Although I'm still more likely to order from Guitar Center than Amazon.

I don't buy very much on Amazon anymore. Mostly name brand stuff that isn't often counterfeited. Guitar strings, books, moisturizer and such. It is still very good for grabbing random widgets (I just bought a knob puller for my guitars). Other than that I mostly order from places that I know stock quality product. Sur La Table for cooking stuff comes to mind.

I love Authy and used it for a ton of stuff, but some places started not supporting it. I'm looking at you coinbase. For some reason I have three 2FA apps on my phone now. I purposely didn't have 2FA setup on some accounts while I was living abroad because so many SMS based 2FA for sites don't support international numbers.

I am annoyed. I haven't updated my Facebook in years so most of the data is out of date and I use a separate phone line for personal correspondence, but I do still have a Facebook account for the occasional friend/family that uses messenger. This might be the final nail in the coffin for me and get me to delete my account.

Maybe I can finally get my last couple of friends to switch to Signal.

I think it was an allusion to the tower of Babel.

I also am a very happy customer. I moved as much off of Google as possible last year and even moved my mother to a fastmail domain that I manage as well. She quite likes it. The calendar works great with everything and I like that they use one use app passwords and profiles for devices. It makes device management very straightforward.

A lot of people I knew that used WhatsApp used it because international text used to be prohibitively expensive and it was notoriously unreliable. So most of my friends used it in Europe. Also you can still use it if you aren't on cellular while traveling. Although I'm sure the cross-platform, freeness, and reliability were all pluses.

I read that and it said that it applies to data not processed in the EU. I always interpreted that as applying to data centers and such in something like an was availability zone in the US. It said “ the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union.” I never thought that applied to EU citizens all over the world. EU citizens living in another jurisdiction would be subject to that jurisdictions laws right? For instance GDPR wouldn’t apply to a Spanish expat that lives in Thailand, as far as I understand it.

You might look into drama coaches that give elocution lessons. I imagine that the skills are fairly similar.

I used to do a bit of drama and choir and I found the warmup exercises to be helpful for enunciation and such. A brief warmup before a meeting might be a good idea too. The major downside is that it looks and sounds ridiculous, but it will limber up the muscles in your mouth and face.

"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut will always have a place in my heart. I also quite liked a Ray Bradbury short story that I believe was called "The Homecoming". However I had to look it up. I think that was it.

I used to love short stories, but I don't see as much of them anymore. I think that some of that has been swallowed by the more serial novellas that I see on platforms like kindle unlimited. I've long felt that this is incentivized by the ways that the platform pays writers (percentage of the book read). It encourages writers to write shorter gripping stories. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I've been going through quite a bit of great pulp fiction recently, but it is a bit of a departure from the more traditional novel or short story.

When I was in music school (before the financial crash and I eventually got into software) my friends and I would quite often hang out at Guitar Center and play the guitars and other instruments that we couldn't afford. I have many fond memories of that.

I also bought my last guitar there, and some audio/recording equipment. It's one of my favorite retail places, especially since I don't like shipping acoustic instruments if possible. Although I have started to order more of my stuff online through Sweetwater. With the pandemic I try to avoid brick and mortar stores as much as possible. Although I do still occasionally order from them if they have what I want in stock and other places don't.

I don't order audio gear from Amazon due to the proliferation of counterfeits.

I do the same. I migrated all of my emails over to fastmail a while ago and have been very pleased. There's a web interface, but I mostly use it with the native calendar app on my machine (in my case iCal). A couple of colleagues even switched after I mentioned how much I like it. I've been trying to move all of my stuff off of Google for a while since I don't really approve of their business practices anymore.

Although migrating everything off an old Gmail I used for a decade has been slow. I need to take a weekend to do it at some point.

I completely agree. I'm single and have worked from home for years, minus a brief contracting gig in an office a few years ago. I made sure to make time for seeing people though. I have friends in my neighborhood and we would meet up for lunch or tea during the week and I would always go out on the weekends. With social distancing it's been really challenging.

I'm fortunate that I have friends that are also careful that live close to me that I can still see. It's not as safe as completely isolating, but I also weighed the risk of completely isolating myself from everyone and I decided that I had to be okay with a certain amount of risk of infection. People don't really talk about the death toll of mental health problems, but it's substantive in certain demographics. I keep telling my friends that you can't eliminate risk, just mitigate it to an amount that you're comfortable with, and that amount is different for everyone.

Complete isolation is not a sustainable plan. I've been looking at what my lifestyle is going to be like until we start getting this under control, which doesn't look like it's coming in the short to medium term.

That looks awesome. I’m going to check it out. I’ve never really liked the slack app on Mac. I also like that it’s not a subscription. That’s a breath of fresh air. I wish more developers would just charge me for good software.

I've seen that around. Doesn't yummly require you to install their app to see the actual steps? That was a deal breaker for me. I hate websites that have a page then arbitrarily block content unless you get their app.

I made my own ring tone the other day because I recorded something I wanted to use. It's possible. Monstrous pain, but possible. You have to convert it to AAC, then import it to iTunes then sync it over. It was about the same effort of getting a ringtone on my feature phone in the early/mid 2000s. That seems insane to me these days.

The governor just said that number was inaccurate. Here's a link to the coverage of the press conference. https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2020/09/with-oregonians-... .

Basically the 500,000 people was all the people in any sort of evacuation preparation zone. That includes everyone in a level 1 evacuation zone. That's the be ready level. There have been less than 100,000 people actually evacuated in a level 3 zone according to the press conference. That's still a lot of people, but not as many as had been reported. It's still horrific for everyone that's been displaced.

I live in Portland, and Estacada and Molalla were evacuated. Oregon City is currently on level 2 warning. Level 3 is immediate evacuation. Mostly it's places in Clackamas Couny. Here's the most up to date info you're probably going to find. It's from Oregon Emergency Operations. https://www.oregon.gov/oem/emops/Pages/RAPTOR.aspx . Here's a list of resources that was put up by the office of one of the Oregon state reps https://bonamici.house.gov/media/media/statements/wildfire-r... . I found the Raptor link there.

I wonder if it’s almost like memory compression. Repetitive data gets compressed much more easily than unique data. Looking back on boring tasks and jobs it seems like much shorter amounts of time than long trips even when the jobs were for years and the trips were for weeks.

These days I try to fill my free time with things I consider substantive. Projects, long leisurely meals with friends and family, interesting trips, good books, good food, etc. however at this moment some of those are in short supply so I’m trying to rekindle old hobbies like writing, tinkering, and music.

Fear of that is why I migrated all of my primary stuff off of Google during lockdown while I had more time.I used everything google had too at the time, even google Fi. My services are a bit more spread out now, but they are also more robust and don’t have a single catastrophic point of failure, besides my fragile body.

I completely agree. For all of my big ticket items (e.g. bluetooth headphones, computer parts, phones, recording equipment) I go through places I trust. I end up doing a lot of shopping at Best Buy of all places again. For computer parts I mostly do Newegg and I do Sweetwater or Guitar Center for music stuff. I do still use Amazon for some stuff, but it tends to be connectors/converters and a couple of companies that have dedicated Amazon stores like Anker. I wouldn't trust something large like a TV to Amazon anymore, or something where counterfeiting is an issue like name brand clothes.

Most of the more boutique places I shop at use Shopify anyways so it's still pretty convenient.

I have used hover for years and quite like them. The customer support was awesome when I had an issue with getting a .com.au domain setup for a business. Australia has some extra requirements for domains that I wasn't familiar with. I also like to have my domains separate from everything else so if I move hosts/email providers it's easy.

I have been in the process of moving all of my stuff off of Google services (while I have an excessive amount of free time during Shelter In Place. So I recently moved from Google Analytics to https://usefathom.com . I quite like it. I would like to see how many people read my stuff, but I value my privacy and would like to do the same for others. It's pretty good, and

I have that book on kindle and just checked the contents. You’re correct. The book is split into three sections called books.

I’m a QA engineer and I go back pretty frequently so that I can see when a issue popped up and what might have caused it. It’s super useful for root cause analysis on bugs. also I use it to troubleshoot legacy versions for customers. Although I see less of that since I work on a saas product now.

I worked tech support for years and completely agree with that statement. I work in test automation these days and try to meet regularly with support to figure out what usage patterns are like and what pain points people are actually having in the field. My current company is too small to have a dedicated support team so I just get all the emails for the engineering team, but as we grow I plan on implementing something similar. Good support people are worth their weight in gold and I feel like they get dismissed too often in the field. It seems like that's starting to change though as I see better pay at startups for support positions.

That's an interesting point. I worked in QA for years and was out of the country for a few years. When I returned my old role (QA and process development/project management) didn't exist. The industry had moved on and those roles were handled by SDET/automation engineers and product managers respectively. I had to do a bit of retooling of my skillset.

Every QA person I've worked with that is still in the industry has moved on to almost pure test automation. A few years ago that was more like 30% of the role. Now I rarely do almost any manually testing, except for exploratory purposes and to design the test plan. Also for certain things that don't automate well. These days I do more pure development than I have at any other point in my career. It's been super fun, but still quite a change. I've seen colleagues that were more the business analyst flavor of QA get pushed out of the industry when they couldn't/wouldn't adapt.