A couple of days ago, I finally received a package I had been expecting for about two months. It contains some spare parts to restore and repair a 20-year-old GPU. An ancient piece of E-waste. Why on earth would anyone want to spend their precious time on a project like that? I talked to my wife about it this morning and her instant reply was “Nostalgia”. She is partly correct, but I think there is another driving factor.
Read MoreSome 10-20 years ago, it was standard practice to download games, movies, and music. The reason was simple, it was a lot easier and better than any commercial offer. Personally, I haven’t done any piracy download or torrents the past ten years. And the reason is just as simple; the commercial offerings became so good that it was a no-brainer to go fully legit. That, and the fact that I now had a steady income instead of being a dirt-poor student. But this weekend I got sick and tired when I was trying to buy a movie legit, but it was just not possible. I took me around 30 minutes until I had managed to get the movie to start on my iPad. It would have been way easier to just fire up a Torrent client like back in the days. And that is a bit sad in the year of the Lord 2023. It felt as if I had moved backwards.
Read MoreOutsourcing is fantastic. I do it all of the time for many things both professionally and in private. But there are also things that I spend a lot of time on, even though I could solve a specific problem 10X faster by simply handing it over to someone else. The problem is that I enjoy certain problems, crazy as it may sound. The perfect example for me is to build a new workstation PC. I could solve that problem in minutes by outsourcing it. But to build it myself is something that I enjoy so much that I simply cannot rob myself of that pleasure. Even though it will certainly drive me crazy at times.
Read MoreWe are now (hopefully) in our last two week of renovations. Our houses have been in dire need of not just upkeep, but improvement. On the top of my head, I can think of two reasons why everything seemed to break down at once. Some of the broken stuff should have been fixed last year, but much of the schedule had to be postponed due to a little baby boy. That’s the obvious one. The not so obvious one is that we might have started a momentum of fixing things, that is hard to stop once you get it in motion.
Read MoreWhen I was a kid, I had a Lego semi-trailer truck that must have been one of my very first sets (I was too young to remember). It was released in 1984 when I was two years old. I cannot ever remember this set ever being built. It had some special pieces with stickers, so I knew it was there. Here’s the catch: The instruction manual was shredded (probably by yours truly), and I only had some fragments but not enough to build the set. This has frustrated me sub-consciously for about 37 years. Until now.
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