E. T.

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

Victory in my ass. I like it…

I have the body and mind of a god. Bacchus.

My smart scale estimates my physical age at 20 years less than my actual age. That just proves the scale is smart enough to know how to keep away from the recycling bin.

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.

Am I the only one who thought this would be a GitLab meme?

Fun fact: when I was doing the Landmark Education courses, loads of people there were working for Lululemon. The company paid for it. Either they are big into mindfullness, or they hire people who need counseling.

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.

No idea who that is, but I’d love to be her chiropractor. Talk about a repeat customer for life…

Preach on, brother. Just came back from my physio. He did some dry needling on my lower back because it ain’t what it used to be when I was still Wired for Sound.

This otherwise insightful chart suffers from the lack of NOFX.

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 laughed at the picture, showed it to my wife, she laughed, and then I checked the comments and realised that we’re too old for the Internet…

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.

I have https://nohello.net/en/ in my Teams status. People who don’t bother reading it don’t deserve my answer anyway.

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.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

• Isaac Asimov, 1980

There were people warning against the glorification of ignorance in the US nearly half a century ago. It’s nothing new; it just reached critical mass (also thanks to social media where ignorant people can self-organise).

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.