Thought Bricks

I guess online meetings just aren’t good enough. Even Zoom is requiring people to go back to the office. You would think that Zoom would stick to remote work just to eat their own dogfood but I guess not. The bit in the article from an economics professor at Stanford is strange, especially from an economics professor. He says that “If you are paying for office space and high Bay Area salaries it makes sense to operate on a hybrid schedule.

I read a few days ago that Bram Moolenaar has passed away. I didn’t know him but I use his work almost everyday. Bram was the main author of vim which is an excellent and flexible text editor. A truly great piece of software. It is also remarkable that vim is charityware to raise money to help children in Uganda. He was very dedicated to this cause and made a big difference in peoples lives beyond software.

I haven’t used LXD much recently but it’s a very nice container and virtual machine management system. I’ve done a few things with it in the past and it works really well. I noticed the other day through some web browsing that Canonical was withdrawing LXD from the Linux Container project and would be developing it in-house. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. This piece in The Register outlines why that is.

I just sold an ancient but working iPhone 6 on eBay for $22.50. I got a new-to-me iPhone SE (2nd generation) to replace it for $89 from Gazelle, so my net to move from a phone first released in 2014 to one that was first released in 2020 was $67. My daily driver is an iPhone 14 but there isn’t much that I would miss by using the SE in that capacity.

I used to travel quite a bit for work. I’d been in the top tier of an airline frequent flier program for years. Until now. The pandemic changed my work travel habits indelibly. It really isn’t necessary to travel for work when most of the meetings you attend in person have somebody attending remotely. Why not spare yourself the hassle of travel and also attend remotely? I’m less into personal travel as well.

“We talkin’ about practice?”In the case of yoga, I guess that’s all you talk about. I’ve been getting into it this year and do a session every day on Apple Fitness+. They have some nice and easy slow flow sessions that work really well for me. Since it’s right there on my phone and the sessions are as little as ten minutes, there is no excuse not to. I don’t have a before and after measure for it, but I feel like it’s helped my flexibility and balance.

Since we moved to Charlottesville, I’ve been riding with the Charlottesville Bicycle Club. It’s very motivational to have a group to ride with and they schedule rides for different lengths and speeds on Saturday and Sunday. I’m certainly more inclined to do a longer ride with other people than I’ll do by myself. I get out with the club every weekend I can. The best thing about the club is the people involved.

After about 5 years with my Apple Watch 3, I upgraded to the Apple Watch Ultra. The old watch was still functional but I was intrigued by the longer battery life and the bigger face. The Watch 3 is just about out of support so that was a reason as well. The battery life is noticeably better. With the old watch, I had to make sure I charged it to full daily or else it would run out within 24 hours.

This article on alcohol consumption trends is really interesting. My take away from it is that people used to be drunk all the time. According to some of the data cited in the article, people in Northern Europe used to drink about a liter of beer a day and about a liter of wine a day in Southern Europe. That is a ton of drinking. Of course, water was basically poison, so it makes sense.

I found this section to be useful today: Concentrate every minute like a Roman - like a man - on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can - if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.