I have read many productivity books and been to several training sessions. I'm not convinced they've made a massive difference to how much or what I get done, but they are diverting. Better than real work ( Read more... )

I was musing about getting a NAS for backups, inter alia. Thanks all for input. I'm now completely convinced that's a mistake. What was I thinking? Running a high-availability/reliability service yourself is impossible to do at the rate someone can sell you the service these days, thanks to economies of scale ( Read more... )

Most of the stories I hear about insurance are, to a greater or lesser degree, stories about how difficult or impossible it was to get the insurer to pay out. It ranges from dragging their feet and requiring lots of paperwork through to complete refusal to cover something you were pretty sure was covered and leaving you on the hook not just for the ( Read more... )

This story ("Bitcoin’s real-world problem: Virtual currency facing bank backlash in Canada" prompts me to post quickly to log a prediction I've had in my head for ages: I think Bitcoin, the virtual currency, is very likely to become effectively worthless at some point in the not too distant future (say within ten years) or if not, to remain a very ( Read more... )

My prediction about peak Apple is holding up well, though it is early days and I only posted after the peak. (Tho I had thought that for a good while ( Read more... )

Recently I've become entranced with the idea of polyphyletic and paraphyletic groups. Sadly, this is nothing to do with polyamory (or paraphilia), and has a much more direct and necessary connection to reproduction.

( Long and geeky taxonomic ramblings. Contains monkeys and dinosaurs, which are, it turns out, fish. )

I'm starting to suspect that, over the last 10-15 years or so, I've had an increasingly better idea of what the weather is going to be, but an increasingly bad understanding of why ( Read more... )

How much is my time worth? I've been thinking about this after a conversation with
( Read more... )

Feeling sorry for myself in bed today with a cold brought on by my own bad planning. On the upside, it's a chance to write down something that's been in my head for ages: all this talk about 'peak Apple' doing the rounds online at the moment is almost certainly right, if a year or so late, IMO ( Read more... )

Necessity has driven me to partially develop the habit "always find specs *before* taking contact lenses out". It's not a perfect habit - the trouble is that most of the time, my glasses are where I think they should be, so if I just whip the lenses out, I can find the specs easily. But if I (or the kids) have put them somewhere other than that, I ( Read more... )