A Lovely 10C Site!

Dismayed at how expensive meat has become in the UK. Feels like the price of the tougher cuts of beef, and even mince, has more than doubled since I was last here. Prices feel the same as HK, even though HK has to fly everything in….

Might be time to change the way I shop: look for the cheapest in a supermarket and figure out a recipe from that, rather than choosing a recipe first and then going shopping.

One thing UK doesn't have to the same extent, tragically, is the expiring-today discounts, which is how I used to buy 90+% of my meat in HK.

Can't wait for my kitchenware to be shipped so I can actually start cooking efficiently again. The 2 dutch ovens I picked up for cheap are lovely, but I'm too used to dumping dried beans into a pressure cooker.

Also need to buy some induction replacements for the utterly pathetic electric stove in this apartment…the small problem being that any stove I would care to buy would leave me without the funds to buy anything to cook with it. Though, with electricity being so expensive too, the savings would be worth it over time.

@matigo I like the barebones aesthetic. Within the context of my lifetime, I think UI peaked around Windows 2000 (both at the OS and the web level).

matigo.ca.

(It's also quite telling that nice.social loads and functions just fine on the same connection, albeit extremely slowly.)

The big problem with everything being a web-app is that productivity simply becomes impossible in places where infrastructure is barely to developing-country standards…like, apparently, much of the UK. Platforms like Hubspot, with so many assets, just stop functioning completely.

It's quite astonishing that I can get better reception in rural Thailand than on a train passing by the outskirts of Birmingham.

At the same time, it also reflects poorly on those who make their platforms inaccessible to those with slow/unstable connections. Microsoft, for all Excel has that collaborative editing nonsense, is just useless in such conditions; I got kicked off the live version because "changes couldn't be merged" and simply ended up with a local copy, with no way to force it to merge back into live.

@variablepulserate NHS fees upfront…

// @matigo

variablepulserate.10centuries.org.

@matigo Part of the challenge is that I'm using my HK credit cards still — which I intend to keep doing indefinitely for the better rewards. So I can't record expenses as I go, as I normally would: I have to wait for the transaction to post with the currency conversion first.

matigo.ca.

Well, this time it's all different. Last time I moved across the world my finances were so simple. Now I have weekly morning sessions with GnuCash.

@matigo Perhaps I got lucky. Around USD 4k for sea shipment and the rest for visa.

matigo.ca.

@matigo The company paid for most of it as they perceived my relocation as beneficial to business development.

Otherwise yes the visa and shipping costs of something like USD 10k would have been quite a burden.

matigo.ca.

Exactly one week until, once again, I move to another part of the world. And this time I'm taking the desk with me.