I started a touch before this in London. I recall before Blaze and git5 - every morning we had a ritual of checking out google3 and making sure we could get some sort of build working for the day so that we could then attempt to write some software on top of it. The builds in play were “Mach” and “quickie” or something like that. It was so painful we used to agree that we wouldn’t grab food or coffee or anything until we’d worked out what CL we should sync to for the day to do some work on.
Pair programming was very in vogue and I used to get in a little later than some which was a great excuse to just hop on someone else’s machine who’d already gone through that pain
The cycling fans among us were quite bashed around over the past few years getting access to cycling coverage in Europe. The were the glory years where GCN Plus was extremely cheap (it was too cheap) and the coverage was ad-free and excellent. Then we got bashed around to Eurosport which was fine, more expensive but still ad-free. Then we got moved to Discovery+. They weaseled out of their ad-free coverage for a bunch of races and jacked up the price because they bundled the cycling in with football and we suffered a price hike from $3-5 per month to $30+ a month, yes a 1000% hike, over the past 5 years.
There is also a conflation of a slowing metabolism and low energy availability, which can reduce the amount of energy expended during the day (because you feel tired and do less). It can be quite subtle but when I've done some extended periods in a calorie deficit I start to notice subtle things, like a propensity to sit a bit longer, or to reduce my overall body movements. My resting metabolism is the same (I've had it measured a few times) but my body looks for ways to expend less energy.
Sorry to say I'm in almost an identical seat. I broke my thumb and have a gnarly but closed tuft fracture - after 4 weeks I saw a specialist who said there wasn't much healing or bone growth yet, and so decided to do a more aggressive splinting and lock down the whole thumb for another 4 weeks.
Oddly enough I had a similar injury 10 years prior on a different finger and that healed up in 6 weeks as if nothing ever happened to it.
I'm generally interested if people here think that to a 14-15 year old, do those companies sound tremendously cool and does the premise of their value stir exciting thoughts and motivations? My slightly younger kids don't really what Google, Apple or Facebook/Meta means. If I explained this essay to them, I'd at least say "the iPad", "YouTube", "the Oculus" to make it more relatable.
To my mind, to immediately relate to kids in the UK, I would need to say TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Oculus, iPhone, iPad, and such, and not the company name.
When I was 15 I had to move high school after the death of my mother. I started to socialise at school and joined the investment club. It was a tough time for me and I desperately wanted to make friends and fit in. I wasn’t really into investing but a young man by the name of Chris Seaton was building their website and I loved computers so I wanted to help. Chris taught me how to program, first HTML websites, then PHP based apps, then C# and VBA native apps. Im pretty sure Chris invented the password manager before it was a thing too.
I spent the next few years at high school and sixth form trying to sit near Chris in lessons and talking to him on MSN Messenger and ICQ incessantly about programming, he taught me a lot and set me on a path to choosing computer science as my degree, I just copied him to be honest.
Like many others on here have noted, there are some really nice Seikos and Casios that look great, keep fantastic time and won't break the bank.
I am not a completely reformed addict though in this regard, as I do have a handful of Seikos and Casios, and recently picked up a Serica 4512 as my dressy / special occasions watch.
One thing I've realised about this world and "collecting" in general is there is nothing wrong with trying things out and refining your collection / process as you learn more about yourself and what you get out of it all.
I've learned that the more traditional expensive time pieces are just more of a headache then I care to bare. A Rolex or Patek sitting in a safe because you're stressed about using it, scratching it or getting robbed just isn't worth it for me personally. No judgement passed on what other people do or don't do with their stuff though! If a Patek in a safe brings you joy, all power to you!
I also found that being able to always reach to my wrist for the time has become a habit and when I tried an Apple watch that was scuppered by the off wrist charging so like you say, I treat that right wrist as the "data collection" wrist, which for the last few years has been home to a heart rate and HRV monitor.
I've been wearing a Casio F-91W for a number of years now and it really is a joy. It's always there, and it always works.
I've gone down the rabbit hole with expensive time pieces but they become a burden / obligation rather than a tool - especially as the prices of certain pieces in the secondary market have gone so high - so over time I've reverted back to much cheaper watches and find myself getting more joy out of the cheaper & much better value for money brands.
Very occasionally I'll take it off in favour of a dress watch for a special event but otherwise I just wear it all the time, knowing that if it finally fails I'm looking at $10 to replace.
There's a screenshot of the Google Buzz "Bullhorn", as we used to call it, which was fun to reminisce about, I'd forgotten about it.
This was a small widget right on www.google.com, you clicked it and could post a tweet (let's call a spade a spade) right from the homepage. I always thought that was a pretty gutsy move.
One of my favorite ideas that was kicked around by Brett Lider during these days was the ability to double like something, and perhaps even let people give as many likes as they wanted! It sounds silly, but if you have a product where you might be able to sneak in a "double like" button I say do it!
Every evening I look at my calendar and I set an alarm clock entry on my phone for 1 minute before each meeting. I have found this to be the most robust method for never being late to a meeting.
I think it's naive to assume that Google's investments are always a couple of steps away from making money via ad impressions. Listening to Larry Page speak never leaves me with that impression, it usually leaves me inspired and of the opinion that Google truly wants to improve the human race, and the world, through technology.
A large number of bitcoin businesses are exchanges of some sort - ones where people are looking to exchange dollars to/from BTC. Going BTC all the way down is going to take a long time.
Pair programming was very in vogue and I used to get in a little later than some which was a great excuse to just hop on someone else’s machine who’d already gone through that pain