Have school-aged kids. Getting up early will become the best part of the day. The silent first coffee before all hell breaks loose.

Cassidy from The Preacher would like to have a word…

I installed Office 97 from 49 floppies on a bunch of office computers. We didn’t have CD-rom drives, so we requested the floppies from Microsoft (this was a free of charge service). Took me a week. Got into graphic novels, as I was waiting for each floppy to load.

My company (130,000 employees) sticks to 24H2. IT wouldn’t approve the 25H2. Don’t know whether the refusal to upgrade hurts Microsoft in any way, but if it does, I think we’re big enough to be on their radar, and perhaps they talk to our IT about concerns and complaints we may have.

I was recently thinking that if I died and went to hell, the greatest torture that could be inflicted on me would be to show me how much productive time I wasted pulling the meat.

I recently did a return trip from Dublin to Boston and back. Each ticket was 1 Euro; rhe rest was airport taxes, government levies, etc.

In the past, pre-covid, 1 Euro tickets were not unusual. Part of the reason why Ryanair became so dominant was that they contracted with secondary airports that had much lower fees, so the final price was below what the competitors could offer.

Mouse jiggler running for third day, volume on max to hear a potential Teams message, and I’m spending my days playing board games with the kids.

6 and 7. For now, I’ll be monitoring their activity, and we’ll see whether they’ll need any locks. Probably internet filtering on the router.

My kids are getting mini PC’s for Christmas, preinstalled with Mint. They use tablets now, but I want to introduce them to the joys of keyboards and mice (and The Secret of Monkey Island). I hope they’ll like it, so that in the future they’ll stick to PC’s and laptops, which offer far more robust control by the end user.

I don’t watch others playing games, either, but someone who likes those streams told me he didn’t see a difference between watching good gamers play games and good football players play football.

On the other hand, Anazon once shipped me a lightbulb for my oven in and envelope. It came nice and flat, in many, many pieces.

I’m in Ireland, shopping mainly in the UK Amazon. I buy there mainly mid-range supplies, and I have a few physical stores in continental Europe where I get the more expensive stuff. But flying with anything liquid or large paper pads is almost as risky as having them shipped from Amazon, with the added bonus of my wife complaining that I take up too much weight in the suitcase with my “useless toys”.

For me, local is improving, but slowly. Living in Ireland, the local market is, well, insular. Until recently, local shops faced very little competition, so their prices were exorbitant and customer service non-existent. This attitude is slowly changing, and my shopping habits are shifting to local, so hopefully in time I’ll stop buying from Amazon, Ali Express, and the likes.

I agree with the quality aspect. We got some solar lights for the garden that are brighter and last longer than those you buy in local stores for a much higher price. That said, I prefer to buy such no-brand items from Ali Express, which charges a third or half the price Amazon does for the same item.

Thanks! That’s actually what I’d be looking for. I’ll check whether they deliver hassle-free to Ireland. Relatively few speciality stores do.

My wife uses Temu for disposable party items, but that’s it. I’m of an age where I unironically ask for socka for Christmas, so I’m already beyond Temu’s target audience.

If I ever find a bag with with an ICQ logo, I’d pay in gold.

I’m not going into such depth (unless it’s technology I don’t understand), but I usually shop on Amazon after I figured out what exactly I wanted, and what price below other stores I was willing to pay. I found that only two categories I still overwhelmingly purchase from Amazon are books and branded art supplies.

I looked them up now, and they look very good, but for my purposes I’d like a bag that costs less than the contents.

It turns out that I was looking at the wrong type of bags. What I really needed (and got) was a thin, lightweight laptop bag, which holds my notebook (of paper variety), a few pens, and some odds and ends. For anything that’s capable of carrying significant bulk and weight, I prefer a backpack.

Haha, no. I was tempted to visit Paddy’s Lunch, but being in Boston I opted for clam chowder, a good burger (where you actually get to specify how you want it made), and some Italian. I was mildly amused when I walked by a pub that advertised a band called The Gobshites. Certainly won’t help to dispell Irish stereotypes.