Ukraine and Venezuela are exactly why countries like North Korea and Iran are chasing nuclear weapons. In today’s world if you are a decently big country, not investing in nuclear deterrance and not having a mutually assured destruction strategy is basically a recipe for disaster. I am so happy India never signed on to the NPT and CTBT treaty nonsense.
Macro
Currently my photo backup solution is three fold: 1/iCloud 2TB plan which I treat as extension to my phone backup. 2/Google photos 200GB which serves as the primary sharing mechanism coz everyone uses google and I love google photos experience and 3/Amazon Photos as my primary backup solution with 1TB space – Amazon only considers video as storage and offers unlimited photo experience. All put together I still have only 1.1TB in Amazon. I have now decided to consolidate Amazon Photos into Google Photos. I was misinformed that Google Photos requires you to also have the same copy on your device. In fact it doesn’t it seems – once you backup to google, you can in fact remove copies from your phone. Amazon Photos is woefully stuck in 2000s with horrible Ux, horrible 3P support and just horrible catalog management. I am in the process of moving photos from Amazon photos as well to Google Photos and turns out there is absolutely no easy way to do so, so it’s gonna be a painful couple of weeks. With Gemini Pro giving 2TB storage, at 9.99$ a month it seems like a no brainer to go for this instead of this combination of Google photos and Amazon photos. I can finally just use one storage solution plus get all Google photos benefit.
Apple said it would take between 3-7 days to transfer photos and media from iCloud to Google Photos. It’s day 6 and not one extra gigabyte of space has been consumed on Google Photos so I can only assume that the transfer has not even started. I wonder how many days does it really take?
This year I am trying to determine if there is any value in tracking my fidelity account with Monarch. Fidelity and Monarch is a mess and I constantly have to keep creating rules for 100s of journal entries that Fidelity keeps creating for no reason each month. Thanks to gemini I have been able to figure out most of them to create rules but now I am wondering why am I even doing it? Shouldn’t I just use monarch to track spending and that’s it? Why am I using it for multiple purposes – why should I not just use fidelity to track investments and just monarch for spending only? I am rethinking my monarch strategy for this year entirely.
As I prepare to leave the company I removed the device management certificates and apps from my phone immediately to avoid any last minute IT surprises. I mostly care about my photos and videos. Removing those apps did in fact screw up my contact list. Half my contacts have just lost their names and they are just numbers. Thanks to history I know who most of them are, but I am still finding contacts with no names. Sigh…
The 60s through 90s provided such a unique time & settings for stories like The Wonder Years and Stranger Things to be told through growing up years of kids. Of course nostalgia factor and music is a huge reason why these series succeed in first place, but I wonder post 2000s what kind of “growing up” stories can really be told anymore? I feel like the 90s provide maybe another opportunity for a growing-up show to be made with a bunch of kids, but I am hard pressed to imagine what might such stories look like in a post 2000 world. Like can you imagine a growing-up show in future about today’s teenagers? What might it be about? Roblox? Video games? 6-7? Tiger parenting? Organized sports & schedules? All of it sounds so depressing… is this what our kids are going through?
📺 Stranger Things (2016) – ★★★★★
Absolutely landed the ending IMO even though a few episodes were meandering. This show has been such an integral part of our TV watching last decade – R was 5 when it first aired, to her becoming a fan when she stated watching it two years ago, to now all of us sitting and watching the finale as R as in high school feels like a journey. There won’t be a show like this again for a while for sure.
Told my manager today who was very supportive of the move, which I appreciated. Told my team later who as I had guessed were quite gutted. Even if I say so myself, I was rather popular as a manager not just within my team, but within the org as well. I am gonna have to do detailed 1:1s with each of my team mates to make them feel better about it. It’s always the people that matters at end of the day.
My biggest accomplishment of today is that I finally finished a home improvement project that I had promised A 3 years ago. When our first floor renovation was done, the guys left all our ceiling recess lights at daylight white while we wanted them warm. It only took me 3 years do this 1 hour task :D.
A part of what makes Stranger Things so much fun is the collective nostalgia we 80s kids had, no matter which part of the world we grew up in – of unbridled freedom and staying out and doing random things as long as we could. Sure the settings are different, but my childhood in late 80s early 90s was no different – staying out all day, riding on cycles everywhere and coming home only after dark. Parents really didn’t give a shit – it’s funny to see how my teen does not relate to any of that and constantly asks us how could this be possible. And I am like yep, the world was much more nicer without the Internet.