disparate_dan

I have a woodworking setup in my garage and in summer I work with the doors open. The local crows know me and come by in small groups and I’ll throw a few peanuts for them.

One time recently, my shop vac’s 20-foot hose got clogged so I took it out into the back yard to unclog with a broom pole. Took me a while, and I had to shake it vigorously quite a bit before I was done. When I looked up there were more than a dozen crows quietly perched in the tree above me, watching closely. I realize that to them it might have looked like I was fighting a huge snake to the death! Afterwards I’m sure they all took turns to come check on me (or maybe get more peanuts, but they were definitely more attentive that day).

Well that’s not strictly true because of the effects of fragmentation. A few years ago I could get practically anything I wanted to watch from Netflix; today I’d have to manage subscriptions and search and watch queues and UX across seven or eight different accounts just to get the same size catalog. I really hope that doesn’t happen with App stores too - but it seems to me that Epic is trying to do to gaming what Disney+ did to video content.

I’ve unfairly disregarded Safari on MacOS for years because it didn’t have parity with chrome/FF in terms of extensions. There’s uBlock of course, but I spend a lot of time on Reddit, and I can’t bear it without the RES extension. So now there’s hope.

I came to similar conclusions for similar reasons. For one thing I often spend some ‘work’ time dealing with personal stuff so it’s a fair turnaround to think about work (or even work) over the weekend.

Before covid, I was reaching my office around 7am and most of my team would drift in around 10am - and I’d be leaving around 4pm... Now that I’ve been working from home I still start at 7am but it’s much easier to take a multi-hour break (usually spent on some hobbies or chores, or just chilling) and then go back to work later on for a couple more hours. So I’m getting more sleep and putting more work hours in, but getting a lot more personal projects done. And yes, it feels liberating, so I guess I’m lucky. (And very lucky to have a great manager at work!).

Isn’t it about time we moved away from the one-charger-per-device model? For the last few devices I’ve bought, I’ve only charged them from a multi-port Anker USB hub and the dedicated chargers have remained unused in the packaging. Which is great for resale value but bad for e-waste!

You had me at 100% agreement until you said “mussel” :). But you hit the nail on the head when you said “runaway train”, and no one is in control. These problems definitely exist in other western counties, but there is something about US society that seems to amplify the process massively, where European counties for example seem to apply a dampening effect on the worst extremes.

I deleted mine a couple years ago and I haven’t regretted it or missed it at all, though I agonized over the decision for a long time because of fomo.