rhubarbcustard

I, like probably most other people, tend to start a habit and then it quickly fades away, not necessarily due to lack of wanting. I find that I might want to start, for example, strecthing my hamstrings regularly, I do them for some days/weeks and then I forget some days, then forget some more, and then after a while I realise I haven't done any for months.

So I wrote a webapp that I usually myself constantly now, it's very basic. I enter a habit I want to keep up and then visit the site everyday and click the "done" button when its done. It also has a calendar so I can see how often I've been doing it because not every habit is to be done every day.

I started this for exercising but i'm not using it for very basic/stupid things. One example is cleaning my glasses. I would never remember to clean them and I'd occasionally realise I'm viewing the world through a layer of grime. I now click "done" every day and the world looks crystal clear.

I guess it's just gamified habits a little bit and its working really well for me. There's a ton of habit trackers out that but I never found anything simple and quick to use.

I got my first job out of college 29 years ago. For the first 10 years or so, the process was I guess you could say agile-like in that we certainly didn't do waterfall, we just talked about stuff, built stuff and banged it straight into production. Testing was not an official thing at all, somebody had a quick look-see if they felt like it.

My first 10 years on the job was Turbo Pascal and Delphi for various shops. Working in that old DOS-based Turbo IDE felt like magic, I remember plumping for a shocking blue, yellow and pink colour scheme - I miss Pascal. The move to Delphi was a huge change, OOP, native strings over 255 long and some truly unbelievable drag-and-drop GUI building functionality.

We had no source control until we started using Delphi, I think it was Subversion but there might have been something before that. Prior to SVN it was a case of baggsying report.pas for the day.

Thinking back, and maybe I've forgotten, but I don't think we shipped anything that was particularly worse than stuff I see getting shipped today. Yeah, stuff went wrong, but it still does. Without reviews, Git, CI, etc we still shipped something that largely worked and kept customers happy.

Code quality was bad. No standards were followed across the team, so files all had different styles. It wasn't uncommon to see procedures that were 100s, maybe 1000s, of lines long. Turbo Pascal's integrated debugging was a life-saver.

Unit testing was not a thing.

I think we wrote far more stuff ourselves, whereas today there's a lot more libraries and systems to use instead of building.

Obviously there was no Stack Overflow, I signed up to that when it first came online, it has been a game-changer. I read a lot more programming books back then, you had to. I think there was a lot more try-it-and-see work going on, I used to write many small apps just to work out how some thing needed to work before touching the main codebase, that's something I still do a lot today, I'm not sure the new-bloods do?

Work-life balance was absolutely fine, there was no pressure to work extra hours but I don't find that there has ever been. I've always prioritised family-time over work, I put in full effort for my contracted hours, the second they are up, I am gone.

I certainly enjoyed programming a lot more back then, it felt closer to the metal, it felt like a voyage of discovery, I couldn't just Google to find out how to pack a file down to 50k whilst keeping read-time quick, I mostly had to work it out myself, read a book or ask colleagues. You had to work harder to learn stuff, and I don't know, it felt like that hard-won knowledge stayed with me more than something I googled last week.

Moden languages have abstracted away a lot of the complexities and that is of course a good thing but I kind of miss the pain!

In my opinion the Oticon OPN hearing aid is the best on the market, I have been wearing it for 2 years or more and have zero complaints. I have tried aids from all manufacturers over the 40 years I've been wearing them, Oticon wins. GN ReSound are also very good. Phonak is the most popular but overrated IMO, havibng said that, Costco repackage Phonak aids and are almost certainly the cheapest place you will pick up top of the range aids.

It is important to test the aid during the trial period. They are never "pop them in and go" you will find some things too loud and others too quiet, a first fitting is rarely correct and certainly not the for the first time wearer. Check wind noise, background noise in bars and pubs, check what people sound like behind you and to the side. Do all the normal things you do everyday and see how the aids perform in those situations, many are not perfect everywhere, so what it sounds liek at home may be different to the office, etc.

Bluetooth connectivity has been a solved problem for many years. Most new-ish aids will work amazingly with iPhones and most with Android.

Check the apps. GN ReSound app is briliiant, Phonak's is too. Interestingly, Oticon have very little custom tuning in their app whereas other brands do (ie. you can move the bass/mid/treble etc) I thought this was a terrible mistake when I first got the OPNs but it was not, the aids are so good I never needed to fine tune them myself.

The "OTC" (over the counter) act is happening right now, which means hearing aids will be available to buy off the shelf and online. Some places are already doing this, Gn ReSound have a reseller online (I forget the name, Amplify?). But other brands like Oticon and Widex are still only available by going to a practioner and getting a fit from them.

If you do go and see a professional and get a hearing test and a fit, be very choosy, ask a LOT of questions. Just like any other profession, there's a human element and not all audiologists and registered hearing aid fitters are equal. Some will do a hearing test, fir the aids to the defaults settings and kick you out the door, you want someone who will tweak them based on your feedback.

I haven't posted much of late but check out our hearing aid info site at www dot hearingaidknow dot com.

It is but, for me anyway, it's a world away from Facebook, Insta and similar sites in terms of quality and usefulness. I do find myself opening my phone and having a quick look down the HN homepage listing but I'm fairly safe in the knowledge that anything I do read will of decent quality and have some benefit.

The other big difference is that HN doesn't got out of its way to make you consume more or want to constantly come back, that's not their business model.

I travelled a fair distance to sign a contract with a third-party that I was contracting though for a major bank. They handed me a bunch of documents to sign and left me in a room for a while, I read them all thoroughly (took hours) and flagged up several things that were just plain wrong, stuff that made no sense and, similar to the OP, some clauses that suggested they wanted my first-born.

They were happy to change the details to fit what I wanted and we all went away happy. The thing that surprised me was when their intiial response was, "No-one has ever mentioned these before and we've been using these for years". I mean, the wording of the contracts could have gone very badly for me if things had gone south and we ended up in court.

Kind of makes me wonder if anyone actually bothers to read what they are signing.

Thanks for sharing that, its got some amazingly deep articles on audiology. It's really hard though, to find out what Crescendo actually is and how to buy it!