My grandmother was born in the late 1890s and when she was a child knew farm workers who had never been more than 10 miles from where they were born. That's incomprehensible to me, and I travel further than that to come to work every day.
My first encounter with this was on a foggy November morning, and I had no idea what was going on.
There's another very similar but smaller one at Heathrow, next to the Hatton Cross tube station. That one has the added attraction of London taxis and Ubers traversing it at high speed.
I registered a ".consulting" domain for my little company when they became available, and it has proved highly problematic ever since. Strangely (or perhaps not) it seems to be the larger players that have the most problems. I would at lest have expected ISPs and comms companies to keep up with this (looking at you, Three)
Some people lived through amazing change. My grandmother was born in the late 1890s in rural Wales, and died at 95. She remembered electricity coming to her village and the visit of the first motor car, the arrival of radio and telephones. She saw men land on the moon and towards the end of her life went to the USA on a 747. Yet when she was a girl she lived with older farm workers who had never been more than ten miles from where they were born.
I have a lot of undeletable old photos on my iPhone. The photos are there, but no photo app shows the trash can icon. They aren't on iCloud or any other current device, so I'm thinking that at some time I must have done something like sync an iPhone I no longer have with a Mac I no longer have. I've usually just cloned one phone to the next, but I reckon that next time I may be in for a manual copying job.
> Do people replace their phones because the battery isn't good anymore
Yes. I'm not bothered about the latest thing, and every phone I've replaced has been because of two things: the battery has degraded until it's unacceptable, or it no longer gets OS updates.
I used to rely on this on the old DEC systems, when editing and saving foo.dat;3 gave you foo.dat;4. It didn't save everything forever - and you could PURGE older versions - but it saved enough to get me out of trouble many times.
Dam' right (he says, still developing at 70). Getting older may be compulsory, but I regularly have to help the youngsters out with tech-related matters.
I got given a small Synology box by a brother-in-law, and have not been impressed by their OS or apps, so I just use rsync. It's OK, but as my needs are simple I'm thinking of using an RPi solution instead.
(What was amusing was that I kept finding it powered off, and spent quite a while trying to find why it could be shutting down. It turned out that, because I kept it on the floor under my desk, the Roomba would occasionally bump into it and hit the power button on the front)
The comparison with mechanical keyboards is spot on! Despite having nothing to do with radio or morse in any way, I was given a Vibroplex and it is quite a piece of kit - solid as a rock and obviously a tool well suited to its one task. It reminds me of some of the old tonearms used on turntables, with many springs, counterweights and possible adjustments.
I currently have three editors open: nvim (because I've been using it since it was vi), VS Code (because that's what work mandates) and Emacs (for org mode only). Horses for courses, and all that.
Years ago we found a large heron with a broken wing on the road outside our house in Wales. It had probably hit a power cable, and was hopping around dragging its wing. It was basically a homicidal needle beak, obviously not in the best of moods.
An elderly lady come out to see what the fuss was about, saw the bird, went back inside and then reappeared holding a block of polystyrene foam. She marched up to the bird, which very soon after found itself with a lump of foam on the end of its beak. That gave others the opportunity to wrap it in a blanket (bit big for a towel) and take it to the vet.
My wife does silverpoint. A couple of bucks worth of fine silver wire in an old mechanical pencil, and you're set for years of drawing. Pretty much the cheapest way to do art (and it looks good, too)
I used to get these two or three times a year, but then I had heart surgery last summer and had five in the first day after I came round from the anesthetic, and two or three every day for weeks after that. They've now settled down to one every few days. Annoying, but they go away fairly quickly and just leave me feeling a bit tired and headachy for a few hours.
I have several Indian coworkers who have a single name. Our company systems insist on first and last names, so they either end up with '.' as a last name, or the same name twice.
The Daresbury Laboratory in the UK had a giant Van de Graaff generator housed in a high concrete tower. I remember staying on site and waking up in the middle of the night with a really creepy feeling that turned out to be caused by that thing operating.
For me it's a bit of both. A programming book that I wrote over 10 years ago - the content is long out of date but the weight reminds me of the effort I put into producing it. Then there's my father's library, all 2000 books of it. I've kept about 50, on a wide variety of topics, and I value them both for the unusual content (Ancient churches of Wales; Jazz record catalogs from the 1940s; English artists from the early 20th century) and for the fact that they remind me of him.
Had this at an ATM recently, and it took a couple of tries at my PIN before I looked at the keypad and realized what was going on. One more wrong PIN and I could have lost my card.
I'm currently in Tokyo and it is the norm to wait for the green man, even if it is a two-lane road there isn't a car in sight. I can understand waiting at one of the mega intersections, where you can barely make out the pedestrians on the other side - definitely waiting for permission to cross there.
It's a very different (and foreign) environment. Job control language, how data is stored... if you come from a typical modern server environment you'd be pretty lost in the mainframe world.
> The people who stay late (but also come in late) are promoted, whereas the early risers like myself are chastised for leaving early.
I had one boss who got fed up with the early risers like me apparently bunking off early, so he instituted signing in and out... and discovered that we worked longer hours than the late arrivals, in some cases a lot longer. The experiment was discontinued after a few weeks.
Several of the stations on my local line (SWR out of Waterloo) have sliding gates that are prominently labelled "Warning! Sliding Gate!!". But they are manually operated, so they're never going to move of their own accord.
The place is a bit overrun with "don't run with scissors" warning notices, but they don't fix the things that are actually dangerous, like the terrazzo flooring that's like a skating rink the moment it gets even slightly damp.
A few years ago I visited a company in New Jersey, in a business park just off the 1 - a bunch of office buildings and a business hotel in a little enclave.
I could see the office across the road from the hotel, but there was no easy way to get there on foot because there were no sidewalks, or indeed any other concessions to pedestrians. I had to walk through the car park, push through a hedge, climb down the grassy bank, and the do the same in reverse on the other side of the road. Reception had seriously recommended that I took a cab about 100 yards.