Bruncvik

My Zip discs. Kids today barely recognise floppies; they'd be completely stumped with those fat floppies that don't seem to fit anywhere.

Time flies. I was in the industry, working for one of the first companies to install electronic tachographs into trucks. When I left in 2011, our customers were largely hazardous materials transporters, with a sprinkling of companies that were caught with so many HOS violations that the DOT ordered them to use devices like hours. That was indeed more than a decade ago, but it feels like yesterday.

I met him a few times. He was a student of Ben Graham, and his life's joy has been investment analysis and investing. Weatlh has been almost incidental to him. He lives relatively humbly, and still works because he likes it, not because he needs it.

There is a whole class of people like him. My mentor, when I was still in investing, is nowhere as rich as Buffet, but can live comfortably in one of his estates around the US. Yet, he's still doing investment analysis in his 90s. I met quite a few others who have been working on Wall Street since the 1970s, and many of them still work past their retirement because they like it. It's almost like a psychosis. They aren't inherently evil; they are just more comfortable with numbers and business processes rather than human beings (which is ultimately why I switched careers). Buffet has simply been more successful than the others, but it could have been anybody.

I'm old enough to remember when the World Wide Web was so new it had to use the full URL to differentiate itself from established services like Telnet and Gopher.

That's why local networks are beginning to pop up. We're working on a scaled-down version of Internet for the kids in our estate. So far, it's to control what they have access to, and to provide them with a safe social network. But I can see this growing to localised "Internet" instances for everybody.

First thing I thought of was Roko's Basilisk as well. If nothing else, it's the modern version of Pascal's Wager.

Running a marathon, participating in a fighting competition or climbing a mountain is the reward for months or years of grinding, which isn't necessarily fun. If you want to go with your analogy, compare running a marathon with getting paid, and training for a marathon with working.

Finally a good reason to brush up on my Irish.

Z wasn't available in my country. And it was mainly about saving space. Having grown up in an apartment, N still fit with a bit of planning. H0 was simply too big to build around.

H0 is for people with really big attics or basements, and thick fingers who couldn't do landscape modelling properly. I was part of the vastly superior N crew.

1492: Conquest of Paradise. Very few people remember the movie (I still do and rewatch it regularly), but the soundtrack by Vangelis is an absolute banger.

In general, his soundtracks tend to be better than the movies. Alexander is another great example. Chariots of Fire and Bounty are fine movies, but still greatly enhanced by his soundtracks. Perhaps the only movie that stood on its own against a soundtrack by Vangelis was Blade Runner.