There is a good reason Mint is recommended as the no nonsense beginner distro. For someone more technical and willing to learn I might recommend Fedora.

One you get past those two distros you are pretty much in the realm where someone should be technical enough to choose their own distro and know what that means.

I’d poach them. Salt the water and get it boiling, turn off the heat and put them in the water until they are just no longer translucent, like 3 minutes depending on how big they are.

Pull them out and season them however.

For a soup just add them at the very end similar to the poaching instructions.

For me, it is meeting the people on the team where they are to support them. Some people need me to just get out of their way and let them do their job while being there for the occasional time they need some guidance, while others need some more attention because they seek out my guidance more often, or need a bit more steering to ensure they are making the right decisions.

I also try to be clear about my overall expectations. They should never be surprised by my reactions to anything, they know where I tend to be a stickler about doing something a specific way, and they should know where I’m willing to be a bit more relaxed. I show appreciation when someone does well, and provide coaching in private when something doesn’t go well. They know that I accept that mistakes happen, but my expectation is that they learn from it and avoid it happening from then on.

People consistently vote against proportional voting systems it seems. We have had 3 referendums on the topic in my area and it failed each time.

No, assuming it isn’t someone that I otherwise have a personal relationship with, they owe me nothing. The significant other is the one that has broken the social contract of the relationship and shoulders the blame.

In North America and Europe, tap to pay was implemented prior to smartphones that could scan QR codes being ubiquitous. Most of us have had cards that support NFC payments for longer than we have had a phone that can read QR codes so it made sense for phones to pick up the technology that worked with the terminals businesses already had than try to implement a new system.

The QR code thing is primarily a Chinese solution to the payment problem (all other Asian countries I’ve been to have widespread NFC acceptance). Payment cards were never widespread within China the way they are in other places, until AliPay and WeChat Pay became a thing people still primarily used cash for their daily communications. If businesses don’t already have credit card terminals but people have smartphones then the QR code starts to make more sense.

One interesting thing about this is that even before North America was widely using NFC payments, people in Hong Kong were using their Octopus transit cards as contactless payment at all kinds of businesses throughout the city. Yet that technology didn’t seems to make it into Mainland China.

I unfortunately have to use Chrome at work and uBlock origin light seems to work well enough. When I’m at home the pihole does most of the heavy lifting for the adblocking.

The whole TV streaming space is just super depressing. Even though I try to self host as much as I can, nothing I’ve found comes close to the experience of Android TV even with the ads (though you can replace the launcher to fix that problem).

I’m a big fan of spicy food, but I rarely use hot sauce and am not a fan of buffalo wings. For me I like foods that have chiles where the spice is part of the flavour that makes the dish taste good.

If you have network issues generally best practice is to unplug everything for 30 seconds and then turn the devoces on one by one from where the internet comes into the house and let each connect before moving up the chain. So typically modem then router then computer.

A big problem is that most denim people buy these days is “stretch” which massively reduces durability of the material. It has gotten way too hard to find classic denim in most stores.

I work closely with a company that uses Teams and every time I’m in a meeting that they organize I’m constantly shocked at how horrible that software is. Like I thought Google Meet wasn’t great but everything from sharing screens to the audio quality is leaps and bounds better than Teams.

I’ve always thought that BotW was a good game, but a terrible Zelda game.

This is especially frustrating as a Canadian where our market isn’t big enough to have options for a lot of specific goods. I’ll look to buy something and pick what I want only to find that the choices are Amazon or a US retailer with insane shipping costs plus potential customs charges to Canada. Even if I do find a Canadian retailer that sells it, shipping is often more than the product itself.

I’ve started ordering a bit more from Aliexpress, especially for things less than $20 since shipping is usually free or a couple dollars. Otherwise larger stores in my area like Best Buy, London Drugs and Canadian Tire.

This is effectively impossible. Time in the market beats trying to time the market because it is hard to identify the dip until you have already exited it.

When, no matter how long it has been since you saw each other last it is like you saw them yesterday.

I’ve become fed up with a job I’ve had for a long time. I’m confused about what I even want to do because the changes and decisions that management keeps making has me burnt out at even the concept of my job.

I’ve known for well over a year that it is time to make a change, but that has gotten much more urgent recently. The problem is that it’s really haste to leave a well paying job for another I doubt will pay as well.

Dual booting is easy as long as you have a second drive or can shrink your Windows partition to provide space for your Linux install (this can be done within Windows). Your distro installer should have a couple options during install, one of which should allow you to install it on a specific partition without touching your Windows partition. After you select that option it should install everything including a bootloader like GRUB or systemdboot that will allow you to select Windows or Linux on startup.

A warning about dual booting though, Windows doesn’t like to be installed alongside another OS, it may realize this and fuck with your bootloader resulting in a system that won’t boot into your linux install. You need to boot up a live CD and do something called “chroot” into your sytem to reinstall your bootloader. Its not actually that difficult but can be a pain to figure out the first time. https://discovery.endeavouros.com/system-rescue/arch-chroot/2022/12/

I made the change about a year ago now. I saw the end of Windows 10 coming up and decided to install linux in a dual boot and try my best to use it exclusively for a couple months until I properly got used to it. You will need to accept that not every program you use on Windows will be available and you may have to try out a couple replacements before you find something that works for you. But most things have decent alternatives. Especially considering how much is done in a web browser these days, there aren’t too many programs I really miss from Windows (mostly 3D CAD and RAW image processing).

Also, note that the differences between distros is way overblown when it comes to compatibility, it is mostly just a case of whether your package manager has the packages you want available and how bleeding edge the packages your distro uses are. Debian based distros (e.g. Ubuntu and Mint) tend to use slightly older packages than ones that are rolling release like Arch which should theoretically be a bit more stable.

Yup, also while prices may have gone up across the board the spread of prices seems to have reduced. At this point eating out is a bad value but I feel like spending $30 on a good meal gives me better value than a nearly $20 fast food meal.