Oh, yes... handpan flight from China landed yesterday, it's cleared customs and it headed to USPS this morning. 🎉

Looking forward to watching lesson videos with an actual instrument in my lap.

I have a cold. I am not happy. At least it's not covid.

Plane ride! It's happening!

> CHINA, Flight has taken off

It's getting to that point where if I stopped using every tool I've depended on for the last decade because they added some AI feature, I would have no tools left to use.

:(

> SHENZHEN, Departed Facility in China

My handpan is going on a boat ride!

I still stand that ceramic tile on a kitchen floor is just dumb. Kitchen floors should be a soft, bouncy material, that large glass measuring cups don't shatter on.

This message brought to you by 20 minutes of combing the floor with a flashlight, looking for tiny bits... finding shards 3 feet into the dining room, all the way to the back door. 🤦

Sending email to our corporate Microsoft email platform from Thunderbird is criminally slow.

Like, "go post to fedi while I wait for the mail to send" slow.

Picking a gutter cleaner by seeing someone cleaning the neighbor's gutters putting his ladder into his truck and asking him if he can clean my gutters.

Picked my lawn guy the same way.

It occurs to me that my new Indian boss may have never had non-Indian reports before. And I'm not sure he's ever managed manages before either.

That may be why he keeps doing it wrong.

I can't believe my Polish employees have to have mandatory periodic physicals, otherwise they get put on unpaid medical leave as "unfit for work" until they have the physical done.

_Office workers_.

It's so weird.

I love the naivete of employees, thinking that signing US$12B in contracts is going to translate to larger raises. My brother in tech, hell no... it means hiring more people, keeping our operating margin under 30%, and putting more bonuses in executive pockets.

These contracts just means more stress for you, not more money.

I got a tracking number!!!

The package hasn't been received by the carrier yet, and it's coming from China (I expected that), so it'll still be a week or so. But this means they've done the final tuning, inspection and boxing.

Now I can quit reloading the page multiple times a day to see if it shipped, and switch to reloading multiple times a day to see where it's at. 😆

I find this annoying in part because my last two directors rescheduled almost _every_ 1:1. It'd be on the calendar for 9am every Wednesday, and I could almost count on it _not_ happening at that time.

Me to new director: I don't like it when my boss reschedules our 1:1s all the time to make room for other meetings. I find it disrespectful and it sends the signal that I am not that important.

New director: I understand that.

First event in the series of newly scheduled 1:1s: director reschedules it without comment.

Yep, disrespected and unimportant, that's me. When I have to reschedule a report's 1:1, I apologize.

I find it weirdly... discriminatory? that HR knows my start date based on when I started working for Linode, before Akamai acquired us. But all ex-Linode employees start date displayed to others in the directory is the acquisition date. So to others I look like I started in 2022, when I started working in this infrastructure in 2015.

The _anniversary celebration app_ knows how long I've really worked here, so it'll announce my anniversaries to the company. But looking me up you don't.

Ugh. Someone talking about how long they've been at the company, and I realized I've spent 20% of my life working here.

Now I'm thinking about how much of our lives are spent working and it's just depressing.

Lovely, new firefox has put round borders the active tab, taking up even more tab realestate, so I get a _single letter_ showing me the name of the active tab now. (Yes, I have too many tabs open at all times, despite using tab groups.)

I do like how it's more visible.

But I just wish apps would stop changing my experience. I didn't ask for a color gradient in my top bar, or a rainbow around my active tab.

(This brought to you by the changes in service agreement, where they moved meetup under a different division, but billing comes from a separate division. That's always good.)

meetup.com was really awesome until they went all corporate. Now they're owned by...

"Bending Spoons S.p.A. is an Italian technology conglomerate founded in 2013. Based in Milan, the company acquires products (such as Airtable, AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo) with existing product‑market fit and manages them for long-term ownership."

And they went public this year.

I kept complaining about the $30 copay for every session of my wife's physical therapy after knee surgeries. I didn't think we were supposed to have a copay.

Got a refund check for $720 today.