> Do people have the memory of a goldfish or what? "I can't remember what's in my fridge" is not a problem I've ever had in my entire life.
I have no problem remembering what's in the fridge. It doesn't do me any good because my wife and daughter also know what's in the fridge and they eat those things too.
Knowing I might need to pick something up while I'm out, particularly when nobody is home to check the remaining stock, would be handy.
Having said that, I don't want anything to do with the modern conception of a "smart fridge". If there was a self-hostable fridge camera I could install I might be into that. Otherwise, no thanks. I like my "dumb" fridge UI the way it is.
I have a similar thing here, albeit not tied to as vivid a memory of a day or of people-- just a memory of food.
I've been chasing a "white whale" bacon / egg / cheddar on grilled Texas toast sandwich I made 20-ish years ago that I've never been able to replicate. I didn't keep track of the particular bacon or cheddar I used, and I don't recall if the eggs were the farm co-op eggs we used to get or plain old grocery eggs. I should have taken notes but didn't.
It's probably a silly thing to do, but I keep fairly meticulous notes about food I make now (including weighing-out ingredients on a kitchen scale). I don't want to have another experience like my mythical sandwich.
My wife has a good point about my quest: I can't replicate my hunger level that day. That got me paying attention to how hunger effects food enjoyment. I now make a point of planning my eating ahead of special meals to maximize enjoyment. It's shocking, to me, how much a little hunger makes food better.
>That got me paying attention to how hunger effects food enjoyment.
I cured my lifelong pickiness thanks to an excessively long diet. The pickiness had tempered itself somewhat over the years, but my food choices were still quite limited compared to your average person.
On that diet, I lost about 50 pounds over 8 months and got to the leanest I've ever been, probably under 15% bodyfat. I knew better than to diet that long and the negative effects of diet fatigue, but dammit, I was determined and had to keep going!
The last few months I was constantly ravenous, tired, having trouble sleeping and absolutely obsessed with food. A few weeks later was Xmas dinner with the family, and when I arrived, I was shocked to discover that EVERYTHING on the table looked absolutely delicious to me. Foods I wouldn't have even imagined trying before. My pickiness was so severe, even attempting a bite would have previously caused a vomit response. I ate everything on that table that year and enjoyed nearly all of it. My family was stunned! It was like a dam broke, and now I am willing to try just about anything. It's been a great increase to my quality of life.
As an aside, I always hated hearing "What would you do if you were starving?" growing up. My contention was that if I were truly starving, any pickiness would disappear quite quickly. I mean people have resorted to cannibalism during times of famine! This experience completely validated my theory.
> It's probably a silly thing to do, but I keep fairly meticulous notes about food I make now (including weighing-out ingredients on a kitchen scale). I don't want to have another experience like my mythical sandwich.
Perhaps you do want those experiences, actually. Would your memory of this sandwich be as sweet if you were able to replicate whenever you want? How much of the seasoning here comes from its rarity?
There are things in my life I carefully mete out because I don't want to "burn out" then novelty. I'd like to think I could do that in this case, but I don't know how it would change the memory.
I feel strongly that our memories are a "lossy destructive read" type of mechanism (core memory that "forgets" to write-after-read sometimes). I often think about how I'm permuting memories I recall, even as I'm enjoying recalling them.
I find some freeze dried noodles and sauce in a mylar pouch are amazing after a long alpine hike, same with music; you have some luminous time in your life and the music you discovered around this time stays with you. God speed to your sandwich journey!
In college I did an apple fast twice. Only eat apples and drink water for 3 days. You have to be careful doing this because you can end up very dehydrated. Whatever you eat after the 3rd day is the best meal of your life even though it's typically very simple. I would usually have something like a soup or very basic sandwich, it was still usually the most tasty thing I had ever eaten.
That reminds me of a day almost 30 years ago where I spent my last money and had a big pizza gyros. I went from starving to completely
satiated. It was absolutely
glorius. I’m still a big fan of pizza Gyros thanks to this special memorable occasion.
If you've ever done an extended fast (at least 36 hours, but ideally 60+) you'll know how rich your senses of smell and taste can be. In something as basic as a baked potato you can taste all sorts of nuances of sweetness, nuttiness and savoriness. Something like a steak explodes with such flavor as to border on a psychedelic experience.
Our daughter turned thirteen this year. Counting the number of remaining family summer vacations, Christmases, etc, remaining really hit home for me this year.
Some of the days have been very, very long. The weeks, months, and years have been so short.
I've visited San Francsico a few times but haven't been since 2007.
At one point, back in about 2013 or 2014, I got a little bit obsessed with the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct. It started innocently enough (reading an article about the Pulgas Water Temple), and I ended up spending many evenings in bed using Google Earth and Google Maps street view to trace the route of the aqueduct and look at the things around it. Where the pipes run under cities it's easy to see their "mark" on the land (since no permanent structures are permitted to be built above them). Following them up into the mountains was fun, too.
A few years later I got into looking at abandoned rail lines in the Midwest and spent evenings "flying" the routes of old railroads. They're similar to the aqueduct insofar as you can see the "scar" they've left on the (and in the oddly-shaped parcels of land left after they were sold-off).
I do the same thing with streams and other wetlands in my area. Another interesting Google Maps curiosity is the 'overpass to nowhere'[1] over I-84 in Farmington, CT.
I want apps to use the default widgets because I want theming and color selection in the OS to work again. That's about the extent I care about look and feel. Microsoft has ruined that on current Windows versions anyway-- making me resort to registry modifications to get the colors I want. Every time I see an application with a "dark mode", which should be an OS-wide theme function, I get a little sad at the wasted developer time.
Beyond the now-denied choice of UI color scheme I do not expect (or even desire) deriving any joy or pleasure from the look and feel of software I use. Most of my computing is for "work"-- be that my job, or paying bills, shopping, etc. I want the UI to get out of my way and, most of all, not to insult my 30+ years of muscle memory and visual intuition. I derive joy and pleasure from software that allows me to quickly accomplish my tasks with minimal thought or friction on my part.
I experience massive frustration with software using UI widgets that don't work like the native OS. Not having the standard keyboard shortcuts, for example, is a great way to make me hate your software. It's an immediate "tell" that I'm going to be disappointed if a program has bad tab order on its UI elements, for example.
Moreover, eschewing the time-tested and battle-hardened native UI widgets speaks to arrogance. It feels like an ego trip and it's almost certainly unearned. Random developers probably can't pull off a widget replacement that replicates all the nuance of the native. Good luck pulling off accessibility and internationalization, too. Even if they can how is reinventing that wheel a good use of their time?
My rage is amplified when I find bugs in software with non-native widgets. They had time to dick around with the widgets-- something already done for them in a vastly more competent and comprehensive manner for free-- but not to ship bug-free code for the software's actual purpose?
The same goes for animations, fades, gradients, etc. The vast majority of software I use is not special or dear to me. It's a tool. I don't want to, in a manner of speaking, look at pictures of the developers kids or vacations as a "toll" for using the software. Making software "pretty" is only self-serving and egotistical.
Fred Dibnah's steeplejacking videos are awe-inspiring and a little bit horrifying. Fred seems like he was quite a character. I definitely recommend watching any videos he was involved with.
I remember being so confused, as a 10 y/o kid, trying to follow examples from an Apple II-era book on my public library's Apple IIe computers. I didn't understand why I couldn't get the mini assembler to work. The idea that features would be removed on future machines simply didn't occur to me. I guess I really didn't even understand that the IIe was a different machine than what the book was written for since most everything else worked as-expected.
It makes sense that I didn't find it. Integer BASIC didn't make sense to 10 y/o me, either. I'd started with Applesoft, since it was in ROM, and Integer BASIC seemed needless and strange. I also didn't understand why "FP" was the command to get into Applesoft.
(These are yet more examples of situations where, if I'd had a mentor, I think I would have gone much further at a younger age.)
> Access works best when combined with a bunch of VBS/macro scripts...
You're thinking of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which is interpreted inside of Access. The standalone Visual Basic Scripting (VBScript) is a completely different thing, and eliminating VBScript doesn't have any ramifications for Access.
My daughter loves foxes. When I made a desktop shortcut to allow her to easily hibernate her school laptop I knew right where to go to get an icon she'd like.
I have no problem remembering what's in the fridge. It doesn't do me any good because my wife and daughter also know what's in the fridge and they eat those things too.
Knowing I might need to pick something up while I'm out, particularly when nobody is home to check the remaining stock, would be handy.
Having said that, I don't want anything to do with the modern conception of a "smart fridge". If there was a self-hostable fridge camera I could install I might be into that. Otherwise, no thanks. I like my "dumb" fridge UI the way it is.
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