A few weeks ago Amazon changed the game in remote work. It announced that, effective 1 Jan 2025, all workers would have to report to the office 5 days a week. It's a major change from the company's previous 3-day-a-week RTO policy. Employees are unsurprisingly unhappy about it. Various surveys show they gave it a satisfaction rating of 1.3 on a 1-5 ( Read more... )

After being exposed to Covid-19 last week I took an at-home test on Saturday. It was negative, thankfully. But I didn't stop there. Guidance is to test again 5-7 days after exposure even if no symptoms have appeared.

But did symptoms appear?

Part of the New Normal of living in the post-pandemic world- more accurately, the Covid endemic world- is ( Read more... )

It's been about a year since I've written about my dining-out habits. A year ago I observed that, post-Covid, I'd returned to eating restaurant meals (dining there or taking it home) 8x per week. That was a big drop from dining out basically every day for lunch and dinner before Covid. During Covid I dined out way less. In fact at the start of the ( Read more... )

I've been sick all week. Starting Sunday night I had a sore throat and slept poorly. Then other symptoms started to develop. Monday evening I had feverish chills. I think that was the worst of it. But that wasn't the end of it. I've had various cold symptoms all week. I think the most annoying is sticky phlegm in my lungs that I can't seem to cough ( Read more... )

Some weekends are busy, others are slow. This weekend brought some of each. Sunday was the slow day when I finally had time to relax. Among other things I caught up (mostly) on my blog backlog. The things I posted Sunday tell the story:

• Playing my D&D game on Friday night
• Having our joint 102nd birthday party on Saturday
• My 2023 retrospective- which ( Read more... )

Every year around the new year I do a variety of retrospectives about the year just finished. Several of those are about travel, as that's the main theme of this blog. My travel for 2023 ran right up to within 12 hours of the New Year... when I returned from a phenomenal trip to Australia on midday December 31 ( Read more... )

West Virginia / North Carolina Travelog #Ω
Back home - Sun, 24 Sep 2023. 10pmIt's a good news/bad news evening. Good news: We're home. Our flights were mostly on time, nothing went wrong, and we walked through our front door just before 9pm local time. We're already mostly unpacked and I've showered up. Getting to bed at a reasonable hour tonight ( Read more... )

I'm leaving after lunch today on a business trip. I'm writing about that here because business travel is so uncommon now, after the pandemic. I'm down to generally 1-2 trade shows and 1-2 internal business meetings a year. That's down from a peak of over 50% travel a decade ago.

In a way I had a business trip last Thursday. I approached my day in ( Read more... )

Today I had a business trip to San Francisco. ...Okay, it's not a business trip so much as a business drive. Downtown SF is 40 miles from my home in Silicon Valley. But as little as I travel for business anymore compared to years ago, driving to SF for a 3 hour long customer meeting felt like a bit of a work adventure.
Drive or Transit?
Initially I ( Read more... )

I picked up a cold, or something like it, in New Orleans.

I could tell at the time the air conditioner in our room was giving me trouble. Our Room of Seven Gables was nice for having lots of windows, but none of the 6 windows opened, only the door. The AC provided relief from hot, humid weather- but it also circulated air that choked me as I ( Read more... )