I’m a below average height male and on periodic occasion I don’t trigger the motion sensing ones and it’s awkward. Now I typically always just raise my arm and wave instinctively. Not quite jedi gestures, but eh.

In my defense, at least in 2023, I’ve spent more money on donations, paying other people’s medical premiums, holiday and birthday gifts for others, and vet bills than anything directly for myself 🫣

I’m nowhere near Bill Gates money and never will be.

I think amongst my circle of family and friends, I probably net 3-4x more than the highest earner I know. For the most part, I can buy myself whatever gadgets or books or food or things I typically want.

But…I don’t, well, I don’t always.

In fact, oftentimes I find myself putting off buying Book A or B because I just don’t feel like it’s a good use of money right now.

Sometimes I won’t even buy myself new socks until all of mine have been worn down to absolute tatters. I own two pairs of jeans and one pair of shoes and they’re going to go until they completely fall apart.

Other times, I want this new game and I don’t buy it because I can’t really justify it for how much time I might end up having for it.

But if anyone I know gets me any of the above or similar, I’d honestly be super happy. It removes that mental battle for me and I get something I actually want / need.

I have no movies, photos, or video games. I do have a lot of work-related things like cloned repos and stuff like Visual Studio and SQL Server.

You want hoarder…my friend has over 120 TB in rack mount storage in his garage across multiple systems and NAS devices. It’s insane.

HAHAHA.

Wait, how? I have zero games installed on my 1TB laptop and still only have like 300GB free.

For me it’s…

• Visual Studio Enterprise (VS Code with a hundred plugins still doesn’t come close)
• SQL Server Management Studio (though with extensions, Azure Data Studio has gotten me pretty damn close)
• Full-featured Office 365 software (Edge web versions are somewhat sufficient, but not quite there)
• Teams with multi-tenant. The desktop Windows app lets me quickly switch between the 6 orgs I need to, unfortunately on Linux I have to have 6 different browser profiles and use the web version which just doesn’t fly.
• More responsive RDP. Unfortunately for server management I’m juggling 3-4 RDP instances daily and I’m not typically allowed to install AnyDesk or VNC or anything. I’ve tried a couple RDP alternatives and there were just all sorts of problems from keyboard issues to rendering issues to general sluggishness.
• There is one weird VPN program a job forces me to run and unfortunately it isn’t available on Linux.

But! All the above said, I run Linux and have a Windows VM. And I also run Windows and have a Linux VM - so it’s almost there for me. If work & clients all ditched Microsoft’s ecosystem, it’d be a lot easier for me to but, unfortunately, they pay my bills.

I have a 2TB SSD and a 1TB SSD. My Windows VM is allocated 100GB, so it really isn’t bad at all. I use VirtualBox and it starts up basically instantly.

I just realized I have an oldish laptop with Windows on it though so I’m thinking maybe I should just remote into that instead…derp

For Visual Studio Enterprise, Adobe PDF editing, native Office apps, SSMS, and RDP thin clients, I use a Windows VM.

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Seconding Molly, based on Signal’s (lack of response), they seem to have zero plans to ever add Android tablet linking. Much to my own dismay.

I’m a recent Molly convert and so far so good. I really hope they don’t shut it down or block it somehow. For how much I love Signal, I don’t understand why they won’t focus on much needed additions that Molly implemented.

I’ve been looking at options for leaving the country. It would be a massive task, significant uprooting, certain things I’m part of would have to be completely dropped or divested.

Problem is finding work and satisfying citizenship requirements in other countries. Other problem is that it isn’t like my US debts magically go away and as best as I can tell, no other country would pay me the same for what I do (Software Engineering).