dennmart

As a gamer, my issue is that the same graphics cards are much more expensive than just a couple of months ago, if you even find them.

I live in Japan, and last year I bought a GTX 1060 (6GB) for around 32000 Yen (a little under $300). This past weekend I was browsing around some computer shops and I found one shop with the same card I bought less than 12 months ago for 55000 Yen (~$510). They also had a GTX 1070 Ti for 77000 Yen (~$710), which is significantly above MSRP.

Every other shop I visited were sold out of everything above the GTX 1050. Those cards haven't had their prices affected by much during the last few months. There's also no AMD cards in sight besides the super low-end cards.

As someone who worked in Manhattan and San Francisco and currently lives in Japan, San Francisco wages for tech workers are definitely the highest and most competitive that I've seen. You can argue that the cost of living offsets the higher wages, but that's not what Basecamp or its employees need to deal with.

I think what you're referring to was a South Korean actress and her ex-husband filmmaker being abducted back in the '70s. There's a book titled A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power about this story, pretty fascinating.

I thought it was a troll, but this account posted this a day ago: "About to turn 60, been a daily hardcore drug user for most of my life". So it seems like they're pretty used to this lifestyle.

When I moved to the Bay Area (Berkeley), I had to take the bus to work, and I hated it because it was so unreliable. The AC Transit bus was never on time. A bus was supposed to arrive at my stop at around 8:15 AM, but instead it arrived anywhere between 8:00 AM and 8:30 AM. It also was supposed to pass once every 30 minutes but oftentimes I waited a full hour before another bus came. The last straw came when AC Transit went on strike in August 2010 - that's when I decided to buy a car.

When I had to commute into San Francisco from Berkeley a few years later, I took BART into the city, and didn't fare much better. While the trains were on time more often than not, there were way too many delays when we were en route. Since the underwater tunnel between Oakland and SF is a choke point - just two tracks - whenever there's a delay in there and you were behind it, it would take at least an extra 15 minutes to get us moving again. The BART strike from 2013 was also pretty bad for commuters.

I lived in New York and have been to Osaka, Japan many times, and I don't mind public transportation at all in those cities - they cover a lot more ground than the Bay Area, have plenty of trains and buses and aren't too affected by delays when it happens.

I started to feel like this when I got to my 30s, especially when moving to San Francisco, where these issues you mention are much more pervasive than other places I used to live.

There were two things that helped me clear my head a bit - going to the gym and focusing on my well-being (a.k.a. actually going to a gym 3-4 times a week) and learning something outside of computers (in my case, learning the Japanese language). I think just focusing for a bit on something more than computers can help you take a step back and gain some of that lost energy back, at least it did for me.

I recently started taking L-Theanine and caffeine (mostly via coffee, but I occasionally use caffeine powder). It seems to give me some solid focus for a few hours, but to be honest I'm not sure if it's a placebo effect.

Seems like it's only free if you have Kindle Unlimited.

While it's fine to not upgrade, especially if you already have a stable setup, not giving Windows 8 a chance based on YouTube reviews seems to be a bit unfair. Most conversations I've had with Windows users who I've spoken to that haven't moved to Windows 8 can be summed up like this:

  Me: Do you plan to upgrade to Windows 8?
  Them: No way. Windows 8 is horrible!
  Me: Oh, so when did you use it?
  Them: Not yet... I read a lot of people bitching about it online, though.

Some of my Facebook friends actually went to Facebook to mention that Twitter was down. I wonder what would happen if both Twitter and Facebook were down simultaneously...

Rebooting my iPhone stopped the errors, and is currently downloading the update.

I've spent a good chunk of the past ten years using almost every moment reading up and learning about all things tech. This year, I decided to hold back on the tech stuff and started to read up and learn a foreign language instead (Japanese). It's been extremely refreshing to be able to do something completely new for a change. And it's had a bonus side-effect for me that I really didn't anticipate: it's actually helped me to do more quality work during the week because of these two-day sabbaticals. My mind works so much better on Monday mornings.