It all started with The Rundown. Before that, it was all desert, but I guess he didn’t like the sand.

I think this is just for fun. However, I did work for a company where we did everything in-house from scratch, down to our own font face, because we couldn’t afford the legal costs associated with deciphering license agreements.

You guessed right with the economic migrants. Americans aren’t the only ones doing it, though. In Europe, it’s primarily the British moving to Spain and Portugal, but others do it, too.

In terms of trying to influence local customs: this ranges from very blatant (canvassing or campaigning in favour of socially conservative causes) to seemingly innocent, but so common that people are annoyed about them even more (trying to introduce American tipping culture to pubs and restaurants). Usually the best people in this regard are well-traveled Americans who already lived abroad. Of those, by far the best adjusted are children of former military personnel stationed abroad.

Let me start by saying that some of my best coworkers are American immigrants. They are hard working, humble, and always willing to learn local customs. However, these are highly skilled workers who secured a job ahead of time, and they contribute to the local economy.

Then we have loads of economic migrants from the US. They distort the local market, especially housing, and instead of assimilating to the local culture they try to impose their norms on us.

I always welcome the first group of migrants and vehemently oppose the second group. So, if you are coming to work and in exchange enjoy the benefits of a more humanistic and social system, you’re welcome. Otherwise the locals will try to make your stay quite unpleasant.

The English football team. Especially when they start talking about how “it’s coming home.”

This is indeed Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Hamilton had really cool use of portals in the Salvation series, though. Among other things, they could:

• Make people travel (and indeed have distributed houses as well),
• Source of free energy by placing one end of the portal close to the sun,
• Solution for garbage by placing one end of the portal into outer space,
• Geoengineering, for example, by placing one end of the portal above the Australian desert, and feeding it icebergs from the other end.

My favourite use was a protagonist placing one end of a portal on Earth, and smuggling the other onto a penal colony to rescue a prisoner.

Batteries can get quickly depleted when the wifi connection is unstable. My camera had to be recharged every month until I got a dedicated wifi extender in the hallway by the front door. Since then the battery lasts about half a year.

Leaving on the street is so 1980s… Nowadays it’s enough to threaten them with changing the wifi password, and they’ll clean up after themselves.

I had a Slack chat with my developers today. Towards the end of the discussion, one of the developers, who had been active throughout the discussion, asked Claude to summarize it for her. I’m now looking for ways to replace her…

Dual-wield book and back pain sword. My back hurts from hunching over too many books.

Nothing, other than the joke that England is responsible for more independence days than any other country.

At my age, wrinkles.

1. Political activism. Voting and canvassing. I live in a country where it usually takes fewer than 10,000 first preference votes to elect someone to the Dail (parliament), so each of my votes, and each person I convince, counts.
2. Retirement savings. In order to enjoy your retirement savings, you need a safe place to enjoy them. So, I match my contributions to my retirement savings plan with donations to groups that in my opinion are trying to make the world a better place.
3. Self-sufficiency. I’m not cutting myself out, but I am improving my independence on the rest of the economy: renewable power sources, vegetable garden, picking up skills to fix my stuff instead of replacing it, etc.
4. Hobbies. Mainly running and art, two hobbies where I can turn off my brain.
5. Data blocks. Removal of most of the social media from my life, filtering news sources.
6. Leading by example. Teaching my kids to be decent human beings with strong moral compass, who think for themselves. Wish me luck with that one.

I saw this quote on the desk of a proctologist I once visited.

I work for a tech company. A decade ago we got rid of user acceptance testing (and our entire QA team) and invested in a bigger service desk department. We only do unit testing, but actual customer facing bugs are discovered and reported by customers. AI, if we actually invested in it, could improve our quality if we used it for UI regression testing.

I can’t think of any food or drink (save for alcohol, but I cut down to one drink per week) that I’d buy because of the brand. The majority of what I’m buying is from store private labels. Living in Europe, however, I do pay close attention to country of origin, and try to buy as close to home as possible.

So, sort of like Washington D.C. urbanities and tourists vs. much of the overflight country.

I think about getting this contraption once my balls start poking out of my shorts.

Two of my favourite game franchises are Civilization and The Elder Scrolls. I played them since the first game, and I still play them. The original Civ and Daggerfall are always with me on a USB stick, in case I feel like playing them, even when the computer doesn’t have them installed.

The last games from the franchises I played were Civ IV and Oblivion. The next games required a download, and to this day I refuse to pay for a digital copy only. I have a huge backlog of older games on discs, so I don’t mind that my recent game purchases are largely limited to collector editions on Kickstarter.

Are webcams that ubiquitous nowadays? My monitors never had one, and I could never be arsed to buy an external one, but perhaps I’m the weird outlier here.