Ryan Holiday is a good guy. I've followed his content for a while. Yes, he is marketing essentially "free" philosophy, but he does a good job adapting it to modern life.
I was finishing up engineering school around this time. I just remember handing out my resume at various career fairs and not getting any interest. Most of my friends and I took very low paying jobs that were not directly related to our chosen fields and scraped by for a few years. By 2004 or so things picked up and I was so excited to get my first programming job.
Yeah, I bought past versions of the Surface and the Surface Book. They would often never wake up from sleep or the battery would be dead unexpectedly. Hard for me to trust them after feeling like I wasted money multiple times.
Even on an old, well-understood, and revered[0] laptop (the ThinkPad T530), I was having an unexpectedly-dead battery when running Windows.
It's a work laptop, and it is pretty much only used for occasional actually-portable computing work like programming of other devices in the field. It spends most of its time in the work truck, hibernated and unplugged -- sometimes, for weeks at a stretch.
I began to accept its increasingly-poor apparent battery health and started to explain it to myself as "Well, it is pretty old."
Or so I thought, anyway: One day it was sitting there on a table, unplugged, and I noticed that it came to life by itself and then hibernated again a few minutes later.
WTF?
Waaaay too much investigation later, I found that a part of an HP printer driver was forcing it to wake every couple of hours...for reasons that I don't care to explore, since none of those reasons could possibly have any positive merit.
Waaaay too much poking-and-prodding after that, I was able to disable the offending thing using powercfg on the command line.
And now, it seems fine. The battery life is not particularly good and never will be, but at least it's not "Surprise! I'm completely dead!!!" anymore.
This kind of sloppiness in software seems to be considered normal in the Windows space, and an abusive HP printer driver doesn't care if it is running on a 9-year-old ThinkPad or a 9-day-old Surface: It will abuse all of them just the same.
[0]: I hate numeric keypads, and gamer laptops, and computers that are built down to a budget as a primary design criteria. The T530 is approximately the last 15" PC laptop that lacks a numeric keypad, and that does not have stupid gamer-glam functions or styling, and that isn't built down to a budget price. It is stoic and plain and black, and both the keyboad and the touchpad are centered on the screen.
I lived in Seattle for 4 years (2014-2017) and moved to SF in 2017.
1. Over time the weather in Seattle got to me and I became depressed. I've gotten more sunshine in the Bay Area and that has made all of the difference to me. People complain about the fog in SF but after living in Seattle and Portland I find SF weather to be almost perfect year round. The things I don't like about SF are well documented in the news and social media, just look it up on YouTube or Twitter and you'll see footage from Market St. / Tenderloin areas.
However, most of my time is spent between Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, which is just beautiful and pretty chill. The neighborhoods are walkable, have natural beauty, great food, and various venues where I enjoy hanging. So while I often see SF described as a "hellscape" and a "warzone", much of my daily life feels like a pretty postcard and is fairly quiet and peaceful.
2. I owned a 3 bedroom townhouse in Seattle but rent a 2 bedroom flat in San Francisco. I saved a lot in taxes and had a low mortgage in Seattle. SF is definitely more expensive, but the added cost was worth it for me since I've personally been happier. YMMV, some people seem to hate it here.
3. My pay went up in SF and I have had a variety of opportunities that I might not have had elsewhere.
4. Yes, I have been better at making friends in San Francisco. I never had much of a social circle in Seattle and failed in my efforts there. I do feel like SF has become a bit worse socially since the pandemic. I made quite a few new friends pre-2020, but not as many since. Also some of my favorite music venues and hangouts closed down in recently years.
5. I don't know anything about schools, day care, etc.
I see that you live in San Francisco. We're looking into Bay Area (between Menlo Park, Palo Alto and Mountain View), mainly because of the kids and the schools. But we might even consider SF itself. Do you have experience of those areas?
With the AI revolution looks like a lot of companies are flocking to the city, so really curious what's the situation like in the Valley (other than the already established giants presence).
