Yep. I skipped a tech conference in Feb where we announced a major partnership with a Canadian company (I’m from South Africa). I do not want to travel to the US in the current climate.
Mine won’t activate because I have Siri and my iPhone set to different versions of English… according to Apple. Both are set to English (South Africa), but it still thinks they are different and so won’t activate. I am not complaining!
This is exactly what a dentist tried to do to me! My normal dentist wasn’t available so I saw another one (she had great google reviews!). This dentist said I had a tooth that was bad and she would have to do an implant, but then I should do all the teeth around it because otherwise “it will look weird”. She told me it was urgent and had to be done in like a month. Quote was about $10k (I live in South Africa and this amount of money is even more ridiculous here). Then gave me all the info on how I could finance it. I went back to my normal dentist and she said yeah, just need one filling and we’re good. Saw another dentist too, and she also agreed I didn’t need a full set of new teeth.
Anyway, I was chatting to a friend after this experience and it turned out this dentist had sexually harassed him in addition to doing a bunch of unneeded procedures (without telling him what she was doing).
Think of all that time spent commuting that could be used delivering share holder value... Now it's wasted, just so that people can come in to the office. SO MUCH WASTED POTENTIAL SHARE HOLDER VALUE
The best one I got recently was after I pointed out that the method didn’t exist, it proposed another method and said “use this method if it exists” :D
When I started working and was no longer a broke student, I started streaming or renting content. I guess I’m a bit of an outlier in that I rarely buy (or want to buy any content). However, when I can’t find the content on any platforms… what to do? Tbp is my next port of call. I was trying to find Harold and Kumar last week and it actually wasn’t available on any platforms available in my country :(
That’s a bit better than my experience with DHL :) they’ve delivered packages to random people multiple times across the UK, France, Switzerland and South Africa. Important documents they’ve handed over to strangers, like my passport, for example…
One of my biggest frustrations with going to brick and mortar stores is getting all the way there to find that they don't have stock of whatever I'm looking for. Sure, I can call ahead or check their website, but often that is not actually reliable. If I'm already on their website I might as well just order it online.
I work for a large insurance company. We had moved from on-prem to Aurora, but our design strategy did not get updated in the process, and our IO costs were about 80% of our total AWS bill. We just switched to this new IO optimised pricing and we’re seeing huge discounts. I can sleep a bit easier now :) (we still are going to change our DB design to reduce IO anyway)
As a data scientist at a large corporate I find this is often the push… but I resist every time and tell people what they don’t want to hear. Maybe I’m playing this whole corporate ladder thing wrong :/
Yeah this is the approach I’ve taken. From watching YT everyday to now watching maybe one video a week. I find I read much more now… and none of my books have ads in them :)
End of 2020 I had a serious bike accident. I was specifically riding slowly and carefully because I did not want to fall and end up in hospital - in the middle of the second wave in SA and a shortage of hospital space. Even so, I had the most ridiculous and embarrassing crash, whilst hardly moving, and ended up in the ER. I was wearing a helmet and I still got a concussion. My helmet was broken and certainly saved me from a much more serious head injury. Additionally, the peak on the front managed to prevent my nose from smashing into the ground too (it was a weird angle). I would never cycle without a helmet ever.
Our IT dept at work is super strict with everything, to the point that I don’t even bother accessing anything work related on any device other than my work machine. Nor am I allowed to actually (so these tools like Legend are by default unusable). By the same token, I refuse to put any personal info on the work machine. The upside of this is that I’ve been able to go back to using emacs for everything :)