mingusrude

No spanking. Ever.

Yes, this is very true. My experience is that as you get older you make fewer new contacts. It's not illogical, at first there is school, then university, then kids. All of these are excellent at making new friends but once the kids get old enough you stop naturally meet people outside of work, at least you have to put in some work for it to happen. I realized the other week that if I would not have my wife, it would easily be weeks between having a somewhat deep discussion with anyone outside of work. It's a terrifying thought.

We had a party this summer, my wife turned 50 and we wanted to host a party in our house for all our friends. We thought it would be a blast but there were problems.

First problem, we don't really have that many friends. Back in the day, it felt natural to invite anyone you remotely knew but today, not so much. So, only those that we had some kind of deeper relationship got on the list, in total maybe 30 people or so, almost all couples.

Second problem, we have moved around so a fair number of those we wanted to invite do not live in the same city as us. This meant travelling for them but many were fine to do it, however it gave rise to two other problems.

Third problem. Back in the day when there were parties, people could drop by and so it didn't feel it had to be so ambitious, but now since people were travelling, we have to have a proper dinner party. Lots of cost, lots of arrangements, not something that I want to do very often.

Fourth problem. Back in the day, there wasn't a day tomorrow. At the age of 50. there's always a day tomorrow. We had bought alcohol as if we were 20 but with the economy of two DINKs (they've moved out). Maybe 20% was consumed because "there's a day tomorrow as well", and frankly quite a few were travelling so they did indeed have to be able to drive reasonably early.

It's just very different having parties at the age of 50 compared to 20, it can't be the same thing, at least not in our circle and I'm quite sad for it.

Maintaining tests that only test that things haven't changed can be a nightmare if you actually want things to change (like when you're making a change to the logic of a system). They can also be a real pain to maintain since if they fail you almost never know why they failed, just that they failed. This gives you (or the future maintainer) very little help in figuring out what's going on.

In the last three years, I have lost my dad and my mother and father in law. Don't worry, you will leave puzzles behind you whether you want it or not. Taking care of the administrative remains of a modern human being is a big big puzzle.

I think it becomes even more obvious with team sports. Among males, Sweden is a top-tier ice hockey-nation but an absolutely disgrace in rugby while the opposite is true for New Zealand. There's a significant overlap in the talent pool for ice hockey players and rugby players so there's no reason why Sweden and New Zealand would be equals in ice hockey and rugby. Access to the sport makes all the difference.

Started IF, not sure if it paid off but it's pretty cool knowing that I can go without food for a longer period of time.

When we had kids I realized that I had to get new hobbies because I wouldn't be able to keep doing the old ones. I pretty much decided that cooking and looking after house plants were going to be be my new hobbies since I knew that I would actually have time for it because of necessity (well maybe not the plants). It worked out OK, I still enjoy cooking a lot.

When I interviewed for my current job, I had to take psychology test and I'm very skeptical to those kind of tests. The guy that ran the test explained that this wasn't about putting me into a colored box but trying to figure out what I naturally preferred to do in a work situation with the idea being that things that I enjoy are probably things that I'm good at because it takes less energy to perform. I don't know if it works but it's an interesting idea, things that takes less energy, you do more and you're probably more proficient at it.

We bought a number of Carbons (Gen 9) to the office and all of them (5) have had some kind of technical problems. It's been malfunctioning fans, a motherboard that stopped working, a screen where colors were awful etc. We might have gotten a bad batch but it was not at all what I expected from Thinkpads. Lenovo's support has been great though.

In the book "A year without pants" by Scott Berkun where he spends a year with Wordpress and their then somewhat unique remote model, he emphasizes that it's still important for many to meet, it's just not necessary every day. I've worked remotely for almost 20 years and I believe quite strongly that remote companies often underestimate the importance of actually meeting occasionally, maybe every 3-6 months. Maybe importance is too strong, maybe it's just fun to meet up every now and then and share some adventures.

We've had some mishaps with Azure billing and they did call for a couple of days before they switched things off.

My sister has a small farm and in addition to cows and horses she also has rabbits. Every spring, parents show up to buy a rabbit to have at home. When the deal is done my sister takes the parents aside and tell them that if they plan or feel by the end of the summer that they want to let the rabbit loose, they can return it for free.

What she does not tell is that our brother-in-law is a chef and happily makes rabbit stew of the returned rabbits. If there was ever a win-win situation, this is it.

I love this old video from their "weekly search meeting": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtRJXnXgE-A

Something similar worked for us, even when the kids were young. Both my wife and I enjoy cooking (side story, when we got kids, I realized that I'd be spending a lot of time cooking and so I decided to make it an interest of mine since I was going to spend a lot of time doing) and rather than planning what to make everyday we make sure to have interesting ingredients at home and then when it's mealtime we do what we have time for and what we like. When the kids were younger they were also part of the decision, it was a fun chat to have before dinner. This means that when shopping, we try to do a weekly shopping run, we pick up stuff that we think we can make something of and then some weeks we just decide to empty the fridge/freezer of whatever we haven't cooket yet.

I recently switched Twitter to strictly timeline and that pretty much fixed Twitter for me. I still use it but it no more doom-scrolling.

How does this save me a google search? Either it can swim (someone's seen it swimming) or it can't (nobody has seen it swim). If it maybe can swim, I have to google it.

> Tell them that the are right to be mad, disappointed, and even to hate you for choosing their head to roll.

This is OK.

> Tell them that you are upset. Tell them that you haven't slept.

No, no, no. Never talk about your own difficulties when you lay someone off, this is one particular time when it's not about you but 100% about the person that you are laying off.

For Swedish employees it's not as easy as calling someone into an office and lay them off. You can of course tell someone that you want to lay them off but from there to actually doing it you have to negotiate with the union and/or the employee.

There can be, laying off people in Sweden is hard and one of the ways to do it is to claim that there is no work for an employee and so doing a reorganization can make it easier to claim that. Sweden's also got fairly strict last-in-first-out rules when firing. The way the company is organized affects whether two employees are in the same "circle" and compare to one another.

As commented above, you have to do it this way in Sweden, you have to announce in public that you are going to lay off people and then from there on you negotiate with the union if you plan to not do stack-based firing (last-in-first-out).

I too came back to chess. The weird thing is that now at age 48 I'm obsessed with it while when I was young (I played from very young until approx 15) I never really liked it. It was something that you were just supposed to do. I played in a club and played regional and national tournaments with varying results but it was never enjoyable. Had i known the word then, I would've said it was a grind.

I taught the kids as soon as they were old enough (age 4-5) but they never liked it back then either, it was something I think they did because I wanted to do it and I only wanted to do it because it was something my dad and grand fathers did with me.

And then, booom! When my son was approx. 15 a couple of years ago he met a few friends at school and chess became something highly competitive and I was drawn into it again and suddenly, it was so much fun and I was completely engulfed by it. And my kids were also drawn into it (I have a daughter too).

I used to study openings as a kid but hated it and now, it's the best way to spend an evening. Now I play almost daily with the kids (one daughter that is also playing) and after my son moved off to uni it's how we keep in touch (but he's effing killing me with the London System).

Youtube channels? No day is complete with out a game from agadmator's channel.

There's a general election in Sweden in September. If you are correct then I suppose the outcome of the election will show massive losses for the parties that stand behind this decision and so democracy will win.

Swede here, it is a different world in the US. Firing is easy, two weeks at the most to get someone out. The other way holds true though, it is equally difficult to find replacements but usually once you do, they can join sooner than in Scandinavia since employees too can leave within a days or at most 1-2 weeks.

I am not denying that there are problems for truckers in Sweden caused by open borders to other EU-countries and that those problems should be fixed. However, without EU there would probably be a lot less stuff to truck around.

> Saying that fixing a bad hire is easy is a very USA-centric view of the world. In some European countries it would be very hard to get rid of such people, so the cost is hire.

Most EU countries have laws around probationary periods at the beginning of an employment that can extend up to six months. Once that period has passed it can be difficult to get rid of an employee but until then it's easy.

Last autumn there was a podcast done with chess world champion Magnus Carlsen (in Norwegian) and one interesting thing he says is that he practices a lot but only when he wants to otherwise it's meaningless. Of course there is a difference with skating and memorizing chess lines but the take-away is still there, if it's going to work you have to enjoy it.

I worked as a consultant with a phone operator who were insourcing their inhouse sales (telemarketing) after having it outsourced. What they had discovered was that by outsourcing that function they had lost a large chunk of their overall talent pool that they could recruit from to almost any other function (especially sales of course).

On that page, I clicked on your name (http://dario.im/) for what I suppose was going to get me to a page generated by zas. You may want to take another look at it :-)

Of course country roads are plowed too if need be. Every small city where there are roads that needs to be plowed are plowing their roads. Depending on where in the country you are and how common it is with snow, roads may be plowed sooner or later. It's definitely not only the big cities.