I’ve had exactly the same experience. Let me addd one more: when OneDrive decides to back up open files, they ate regularly deleted both from local and cloud. Those are the files I tend to use the most, and I grew so frustrated that I ended recreating my Documents folder steucture in my Downloads folder, which doesn’t get synced. (IT is useless; when I complained abou that, they told me that One Drive was a third-party application, and they didn’t support those. )

I’m always pouring the water into a cup or glass, and the attached cap tands to fall down into the path of the stream, lest I use my other hand to hold it. The plastic connestors don’t bother me.

I can’t complain about them. I just rip them off. There may be a law (EU regulation) for bottle manufacturers to tether the caps, but there’s no law againt ripping the caps off.

This is rsa.ie. The main site works fine, but you have to wait to access the driving test registration portal. Mind you, this is even before you see the login or registration screen. And given Ireland’s small size, there are only about 4000 driving tests per week. That number of users is negligible for a normal scheduling page; it must have taken some serious skill and effort to make it non-performant at this scale.

I’m still on Reddit, and once in a while I manually overwrite all my comments that are older than a month. 95% of my comments don’t have a real value, and whatever I find interesting or insightful ends on my personal Web site. It’s my information, and if I think I brainfart something that would be helpful for someone, I add it to space that I control. This was true even before the whole API fiasco.

I saw it for the first time last summer. Did a little reading, and according to the news articles, it was a EU directive, but it had been heavily lobbied for by Coca Cola. If I remember right, all EU countries should have implemented the necessary legislature by June this year.

I personally just tear the caps off. Can’t get used to them.

I’m inclined to believe it. I worked for a Wall Street firm when the stock market switched from fractional quotations to decimal. Lots of my coworkers printed out a conversion table from fractions to decimals, and even so often had problems figuring out which of two quotations was greater than the other one (in decimals). Those were smart people, but if you work with one system for so long, your brain gets hardwired and difficult to change.

You are indeed well-read, and I’m finding it difficult to give you an entire list, based on your tastes (which are remarkably close to mine). The two authors that come to mind, whom I haven’t seen on your list are

• Greg Bear. Anything from him, but I particularly like the The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars duology. You complained about sad books, and these may be depressing, but it’s some of the best writing that’s still missing from your list.
• China Mielville. Wonderfully weird and inventive books, in particular The City & The City and Perdido Street Station.

And since you mentioned Timothy Zahn, in comparison with Card, I take it you already read his The Icarus Hunt? If not, it’s also highly recommended for its unabashed fun and good plot.

Walking the kids to school, walking to the shop, and an average of 70-80 km of running per week. Life is good when you permanently work from home.

I have tthe benefit of a smart watch, so I know my stats quite well. Over the long term, I average 13 breaths per minute, or 18,720 breaths per day. That translates into $936 per day. When not injured, I average 22,000 steps per day, which would get me $5500 per day (currently injured, so no running, so I’m down to 12,000 steps or $3000 per day). Breathing would win only if I averaged fewer than 3744 steps per day. I think I get more just walking to my corner newsagent and back.

As any Irish mammy will tell you, a flat, warm 7-Up is the cure for all childhood illnesses.

I’m getting these messages occasionally, but usually they make sense, such as when I go to online gaming sites or torrenting portals. Didn’t try porn - don’t want a call from HR. In general, our IT policies are fairly sensible; this is one of the very few outliers.

All other MSM, even some more questionable like The Sun or Fox News, works fine. CNN is the only one blocked.

I found out that the best way to force Google Maps to update is to make the correct edit in Open Street Maps. Google seems to source its local information from there.

Just an anecdotal example: I live at the end of a cul-de-sac, and I’ve seen loads of cars drive up to my house, and then gingerly do a 15-point turn (the road is very narrow), and drive back. I checked Google Maps and found that it lists my street as open. I’ve filled reports with Google several times, and nothing happened. Then, I updated OSM to indicate that at the end of my street there’s just a pedestrian footpath to the next street. Within two weeks, the number of cars turning around decreased drastically. I checked Google Maps, and found that they fixed their map. A few years later, there’s still the odd car making the mistake, but the only map service I could identify that still didn’t update was Apple Maps.

Since then, I’ve done several edits in OSM (I live in a young estate, with loads of construction still going on, so maps are not very reliable), and Google always picked up these edits.

Funny… My company (over 100k employees worldwide) is blocking CNN as a security risk…

This should teach me not to check C&H comics while on a conference call with my camera on…

Wrong question. If they picked me, you ought to ask how screwed the aliens are…

I wish my company did the same, instead of the IT giving out to me for running two virtual machines on my laptop all the time…

Thanks; I’ll try it. I usually get bread and sparkling water there (their produce and meat quality got so bad I switched to Aldi), but I haven’t been looking for baguettes yet.

The meme is also European, from Ireland. That said, I’m more interested which Spar is selling long enough baguettes that they don’t fit in a bag. My local shops don’t.