Discovery Plus. Reality show garbage; not worth even those five quid per month. I subscribed when they acquired streaming rights for Eurosport, and tried to find anything that would be at least marginally entertaining without rotting my brain. I failed. When they lost Eurosport, I immediately cancelled my subscription.

I’m a Product Owner, and my job literally is to participate in meetings, so that my engineers don’t have to. You want to talk to one of them? Sorry, you have to talk to me, and I’ll talk to them on their own time.

In the past, however, there was one time I almost quit. We had an engineering lead with a serious case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. Good with Javascript, which made him think he was an expert in everything, from c# to aws, and especially in system architecture. He could sell himself and his work really well, though, so the management always took his word for gospel. Got two developers, who had the audacity to tell him how stupid his architecture was, fired. Tried to get me fired, and it turned into a competition of who can outlast whom. Eventually it became too much for me, so I started interviewing elsewhere, when suddenly he was reassigned elsewhere within the company. I decided to stay mainly due to career growth (and to pay my mortgage), and I hear that he’s been doing his usual mess in his new position, while my team is now far happier and more productive.

E-cards. I got at least some cards for my birthday…

To switch to the timeline where Harambe was not killed.

Still have an account, but haven’t been of FB for over 2 years. Once I did some stats and found that only something like 4% of top 100 posts were updates from friends; rest was ads or suggested videos. So, I stopped checking it out and gradually forgot about it, and I found I wasn’t missing out on anything.

Dodged by no fault of mine. She dumped me because I made fun of her beliefs in astrology. From the little I keep hearing about her, she makes all her decisions according to horoscopes, pendulums, some kind of wooden sticks, etc. Because of that she eventually left a very successful career, her husband, moved across the country to a place she has no ties to, etc. I keep hearing gradually less about her, as she keeps cutting off all our mutual friends.

I’m aging myself here, but WoW used to stand for “Winds of War”, an expansion for Heroes of Might and Magic IV. Then, World of Warcraft was released…

E. T.

Honorable mention: The Neverending Story. Cried during one scene in the movie, not the end.

I don’t regret it, but some people say I should. A full-width back tattoo of the US Confederacy leadership. The last place I lived in the US was Georgia, very close to Stone Mountain. I spent nearly every weekebd there: running, hiking, fishing, or just enjoying the sun with a book. So, when I decided to leave the US, I wanted to take my best memory with me and got the Stone Mountain carving on my back.

When I lived in and apartment, I used a WRT wifi router as my bridge, for the sole purpose to boost the signal strength to the maximum, just to power through the interference from other apartments. My house came prewired with Cat-6 cables, so now I have small wifi hubs at minimum strength on each floor for my phone and home automation.

I only have experience with European countries, and from those I pick Austria. Very self-centered people; even service staff is very unfriendly (in the rare occasions where the staff is actually Austrian). Pet peeve of mine: I’ve never seen people skipping the queue as often as in Austria.

My old FR 110 is still working. Since then:

• Vivoactive HR - 2 years in, the casing broke at one of the points where the wristband is attached. Material fatigue. Out of warranty.
• Vivoactive 3 - 2 years in, altimeter went haywire. Also, battery life decreased to one day. Just out of warranty.
• Fenix 6 - 1.5 years in, GPS got really bad. As in, drift of over 200m from route. Within warranty, so I contacted them and they sent me a replacement watch. That one is still working, and I hope it will for a long time.

By now, I developed a certain expectation of the life of Garmin watches. I divided their price with expected lifetime, and compared that with similar data for Coros. Coros is simply better value for money.

I just saw DC Rainmaker’s video on this, and I’m not impressed. In any case, I’ve bern using my Garmin watch mainly for running, and I’ve been more interested in spot data than history on Connect. Still, I’m on my last Garmin watch. The hardware itself seems to last for only 18-24 months before problems start piling up, so I decided that my next watch will be Coros. I’m under no illusions that the hardware would be more reliable, but it costs half of what I’ve paid for my Garmin.

Last time I travelled to the US, I brought my old phone. It had plenty of text messages, a few photos of family and nature, and nothing else. They didn’t check it, but I guessed it would pass the “not a burner” vibe. Now I’m wondering, though, how people would react to me having no social media presence (other than Reddit at that time, which I accessed via browser). Not that I’m planning to travel to the US ever again, but I wonder whether there’s a market for perfectly inoffensive fake social media accounts.

We often gave high winds and rain. Last month, a wind storm damaged loads of roofs in my neighbouhood, and some people only noticed after the leaks started.

In addition, construction in Ireland is notoriously bad, and one of the first things we did was to fly over a family member who has decades of roofing experience, and he fixed potential leaks. Just as well, as we have neighbours who already had to change some of their timber supports that started rotting. We are still pretty paranoid about the roof quality, though.

I live in Ireland. I’ll probably have my heating on during the colder nights, and I’ll check the roof for leaks once per week or so.

About once every 3-4 weeks. It is costly, but I get them off Anazon at a reasonable price. The box of bags also comes with two sets of filters that need to be replaced regularly.

For people with pets, the Cat & Dog version. Just be aware that the brushes in the hoover head tend to wear out in 4-5 years, depending on the frequency of hoovering and amount of hardfloors. A genuine replacement head can get a bit pricy; for the Cat & Dog head even more so.

There are large companies, many of them in Germany, who are owned by foundations. Perhaps the best known is Bosch, which is almost entirely owned by a charitable foundation. Another very large one is ZF Friedrichshaven, owned by the Zeppelin Foundation. They don’t do any consumer products, but are one of the world’s largest players in the automotive industry.

I did so last week, when the amount of posts where Sync wouldn’t show me the comments became annoying. I switched to Boost, and after some tinkering got it to a state where the UI was adequate for me.