realaether

Off-topic: just one look at that homepage, the icons in particular, brought back such fond memories of the pre-flat design time. Those halcyon days when it was normal for buttons to look like buttons. (Maybe I'm just using the wrong apps these days.)

This reminds me of Dense Discovery (https://www.densediscovery.com/) and Tom Scott's newsletter (https://pad26.aweb.page/subscribe).

Perhaps they thought such a clever person wouldn't be suitable for a cat, since cats like to have "owners" they can actually train.

Nowadays they're just called data visualisation engineers.

Is "Trung Nguyen" the same company as "Trung Nguyen Legend"? Dropped by their cafe in Hanoi (old quarter) and loved the no. 5 blend (at least I think that's what I got — memory is fuzzy).

Extremely fragrant Torrefacto-style roasting. Chocolate, butter, caramel notes. I had it black there — no condensed milk or sugar — and bought a bag to brew in the Aeropress at home, also to drink black.

There is almost no complexity in the cup — it's just a very comforting, full-bodied chocolatey flavour. Enjoyable in its own way.

Context: I still drink, but significantly less than I used to; I don't think I ever qualified for an alcoholism diagnosis. I'm also very much into coffee, tea, and good food: everything that involves olfactory pleasure, basically. (Caffeine addiction is also something I'm acutely aware of.)

I got into alcohol originally for the taste — the same reason I got into coffee and tea — and realised early on I simply didn't enjoy the hangover/morning after, and since my personality is such that I have expectations of myself in terms of productivity in a day and I usually get my best work done in the morning, I realised that was highly detrimental to my emotional well-being: I would end up disappointed and frustrated the day after firstly because I wasn't processing things as fast as I knew I could, and secondly because a pounding headache tends to make people cranky.

So I started analysing why it is that I often ended up drinking more than I "should" at night and came up with a big reason: boredom. My olfaction needs stimulation. Since I can't sleep after consuming caffeine (my hard cut-off for coffee/tea is 4pm) and I don't know of any drinks that are both non-alcoholic and caffeine-free that have the same complexity of flavour, I go for fermented stuff.

I found supporting evidence for this when I realised that, if I had a project I'd started in the morning that somehow hadn't drained my brain by lunchtime and that I was determined to continue into the evening, I would basically forget to drink, even if there was a glass right in front of me. The same has happened to me with forgetting to drink coffee in the morning or even eat all day on those occasions when I've gotten into The Zone shortly after waking up.

Since I drink alcohol for the flavour first, and don't even like most of the effects of ethanol, I also don't drink when I'm tired, because I don't have the cognitive capacity to process the flavours: it becomes a waste of money, a waste of time, and a needless toll on my body. Being tired enough to forego the evening drink often comes from doing exercise during the day; by contrast, if I go to the gym after dinner, I often end up in a situation where I (can) drink a lot, because I'm so energetic after the exercise that I need something to do.

So for me, reducing the amount of alcohol I consumed came down to: - Making sure I had other things to do (whether projects or obligations) - Getting a suitable amount of physical activity into my day - Constantly reminding myself that olfactory pleasure was the original reason for spending so much money on good wine, and that I can't afford, financially, to get addicted to alcohol.

In your case, it sounds like peer pressure also plays a role; I can't offer much on that because I long ago embraced the grumpy introvert side of me and stopped caring so much about that (which I appreciate isn't going to work for everyone).

Two things make Google Sheets infinitely more useful than Excel to me on a daily basis:

- Regex support in find & replace and regexextract(). - FX rates as a formula instead of as a data type. IIRC Excel requires 2 columns to display a FX rate (one to specify the pair, one to print the number); Google Sheets specifies the pair inside the formula.

When you purchase Bitwig, is it a one-off, rather than working on a subscription model?

Sad to say that's rather refreshing if so.

I had a long conversation about this a week ago. My worry is that "hacking" things — in the sense of "finding a way to use a program in a way that the developer didn't directly intend" — is getting harder every year and that this may have implications for the next generations of developers and indeed power users.

"View source" is not only virtually useless on many pages, but also unreasonably difficult to access in the first place (if not completely impossible) on systems like iOS.

UX, generally, seems so rigid now that, especially if it's on a more locked-down platform or a web-app, it seems there's often almost no way to use an app in any way other than the developer intended. The barrier to entry for hacking seems incredibly high now.

I don't know when the concepts of batch processing and scripting — or even keyboard shortcuts — came to be seen as a hindrance to UX, but I have a feeling it developed in parallel with touchscreens and the ever-increasing incentive to make apps addictive. In that respect it seems like we haven't really evolved in the last 10 years (at least), but actually regressed to some pre-computer, pre-automation age.

Perhaps everything I've just written is a load of rambling nostalgia. These thoughts come to me almost on a daily basis though.

Could it be the [Forgotten Employee: The American Dream](https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/)?

After 30 days, I became convinced that I was a forgotten, non digestible entity in the corporate stomach. No man ever comes over to ask me for anything - although I am but a Manager, and Directors roam the hallways like rabid hyenas, I am much too senior to all of them for them to attempt an attack. Every once in a while, the phone will ring, and an old acquantance will ask for help solving a problem - I gladly comply. Sometimes, I let the phone ring... but the voicemail light never comes on. They move on to the next target, under the false assumption that I am much too busy to be bothered.

Google Docs does this.

Any pointers on getting started with the postfix/dovecot method?

Absolutely agree. This is why my closest friends today are those I met in primary and secondary school: we were all there, though we didn't always want to be; we all had homework that we didn't want to do; we all had teachers we didn't like; and we were forced to a full 5 days per week together.

In a way — strange though it seems — one of the things I miss most about school is just being in a group of people forced to do things that we really don't want to do and that give us no pleasure, because one of the magnificent side effects of this rather masochistic endeavor is that it forms bonds with your peers.

Strongly disagree. I'm Canadian-Hong Kong, grew up in Hong Kong, and have family in China. Chinese citizens (by which I mean only mainland China, and excluding Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) need exit visas to leave the country and they're not necessarily easy to acquire; anecdotally, those in my extended family who work for the Chinese government are able to get it quite easily (having shown loyalty, willingness to serve, etc.) but those who don't won't get a visa so easily. Consequently we've had vacations where half the family had to cancel at the last minute: even though everyone had the same itinerary and tickets, and were clearly related to each other, some weren't authorised to leave.

I believe it's not a matter of "voting with your feet" so much as "if you don't have a good standing with the government, you aren't getting out in the first place". Anyway, even if you got out and couldn't get back in, the government would probably send people to "escort you back home".

In [the link that GuiA gives below](http://www.slate.fr/grand-format/touristes-chinois-europe-je...), the last slide tells of how the tourists have to surrender their passports; I wonder if the high number of tourists is because going through a tourist agency (all of which are state approved) is the easiest way to get an exit visa. I wouldn't be surprised if the agencies were held accountable for any bad behaviour or runaway attempts.

À leur arrivée en Europe, les touristes donnent leurs passeports au guide, on leur dit que c'est plus sûr. Ils les récupèrent au moment de partir mais doivent les rendre au guide une fois en Chine pour dix jours à deux semaines afin de vérifier qu'ils sont bien rentrés. Il y a même un code de bonne conduite et les touristes sont encouragés à dénoncer les autres touristes qui se sont mal comportés en Europe.

My translation:

On their arrival in Europe, the tourists give their passports to the tour guide — they're told it's safer that way. They get them back the moment they leave, but must give them to the guide again for 10–14 days once landed in China so it can be verified that they did indeed return from their trip. There's even a code of good conduct and the tourists are encouraged to denounce other tourists who behaved badly in Europe.

It's also worth noting that China doesn't recognise dual citizenship, and that Hong Kong citizens (not sure about Macau and Taiwan, but I wouldn't be surprised if this applied to them too) are considered mainland citizens once in the mainland. So I, for example, wouldn't be able to appeal to the Canadian embassy if anything happened.

Given that, even if someone stayed abroad long enough to gain a second citizenship, they'd have to give up their Chinese citizenship in order to avoid risking being "escorted home".