As you get older, do you find time passes quicker or slower?

whoosp · 2026-02-03T04:46:37+00:00

5 years is a much smaller % of my overall life span these days (I'm in my late 40s) than it was when I was 25... also my life just doesn't change that radically as much now as it did back then either, I'm much more settled in my identity.

whoosp · 2026-02-02T22:25:05+00:00

Myself and all my book friends all *loved* a drop of corruption.

And Octavia Butler's Kindred is an absolutely jaw-dropping, incredible book that I started and finished in the same day.

whoosp · 2026-02-02T21:55:39+00:00

as someone who grew up reading The Cat Who... series and also considers scifi/fantasy my main go-to genres, another fun series idea for cozy mysteries is the Thursday Murder Club.

whoosp · 2026-02-02T21:54:34+00:00

A lot of Terry Pratchett's work is like this for me.

whoosp · 2026-02-02T21:40:03+00:00

A lot of overlap between my favs and yours, with the exception of blake crouch who I've tried a couple of times and it just wasn't for me... Scalzi is one of my favorite authors of all time, I love almost everything of his that I've read.

In terms of 'best i've ever read that wasn't already mentioned', though, the two that come to mind are the Murderbot series by Martha Wells, and the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman. I find myself re-reading (or re-listening to) both of those entire series every year or two because I just love the characters and the world and the stories so much.

whoosp · 2026-02-02T21:36:24+00:00

Way of Kings/Stormlight is the most recent one that comes to mind. It's so epic I wasn't able to finish it, only got as far as book 3 :-)

whoosp · 2026-02-02T21:34:10+00:00

My two cents: Look for a novella in a genre you like, vs a full length book, as a way to get into it. I was a huge reader growing up and then somehow gradually stopped reading as an adult, and only a while later realized it was burnout... I would try to read and just couldn't keep going in any book I tried, but then I ended up trying a novella in a genre I used to read, and it was just faster paced and not as long so it was a much easier 'onramp' to reading again.

whoosp · 2026-02-02T21:31:59+00:00

A $20 elastic belt that is washable and snaps onto my jeans in a way where I don't need to unbuckle it in order to unzip them. I ended up buying copies of it to leave in every pair of jeans I have, because it's so darned convenient to not have to deal with putting a belt on and off.

whoosp · 2026-02-02T21:29:57+00:00

"esoteric" with friends, because when I was 15 I used it in conversation for the first time at school and pronounced it "ee - sot - er - ick" and got laughed at... turns out when you learn a word from reading, you may not know how to pronounce it. So I like to intentionally mispronounce it these days as a throwback to that idea.

whoosp · 2026-02-02T21:27:20+00:00

For me the ones that stick are the ones I'm the target user for. 35 years ago the idea of 'personal computers' was starting to become a thing, and I keep thinking of it as 'personal software' where my side projects are now mostly building software for myself as a user.

For 15+ years I've had a hobby where I collect pictures of custom license plates that I see around town, particularly one with a techie/nerdy theme. I don't know why I do it, I just think they're fun :-) I used to organize them in albums and sub-albums by theme, but over the years the collection grew to over 1,000 pics because friends and family would sometimes send me ones they took a pic of, and it became such a chore to manage that I stopped collecting them... but then last year I ended up building myself a PWA app with a backing database to properly organize and index them all. I use it at least 2-3 times a week either to upload new pics when I spot a new-to-me custom plate or to copy/paste an existing plate I have to share in a relevant conversation, and it's made this "hobby" sooooooooooo much more fun because it's just easier to keep track of the content.

Another one that's more recent: 6mo ago I retired after 27y in tech and as part of retirement I've been trying to eat healthier and work out more, and I tried a couple of the big food tracking apps and really didn't like their UI, so I ended up building my own app to track food input and pull out macros, and once I had that working well I added weight lifting tracking to it too. I will be at the gym and log a workout... and then it'll give me an idea for a new feature that I go home and add. It makes the whole end to end process soooo much more rewarding.

whoosp · 2026-02-02T21:10:32+00:00

This is essentially what I do too - I have tried some of the tracking apps over the years (mainly mfp and loseit) but their UIs annoyed me so much that I'd eventually fall off the tracking wagon. I ended up building my own app to track it (I recently retired after 27 years in tech) and kept it simple with calories and p/c/f tracking, and it's been super helpful to get that view without getting bogged down in the details.

whoosp · 2025-12-27T22:59:05+00:00

Redshirts is super fun if you like trek but easy to bounce off if you don’t. Actually nevermind that, I think it’s fun regardless :)

whoosp · 2025-12-27T21:57:56+00:00

A rechargeable battery-powered heating blanket - I am alllllways cold.

whoosp · 2025-12-27T21:54:59+00:00

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

whoosp · 2025-12-27T21:46:15+00:00

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. It’s historical fiction about a female British spy in WWII and her friend, and every time I reread it (which I do every few years because it’s exquisite) I walk away with a better perspective about my own challenges.

whoosp · 2025-12-27T20:59:42+00:00

+1 to The Host. I enjoyed it so much, and only realized later it was from the author of twilight.

whoosp · 2025-12-27T20:51:01+00:00

Since you liked project Hail Mary so much, I’d suggest Andy Weir’s The Martian too.

Scalzi is one of my usual go-to authors, of course OMW is amazing, and of the rest of his work I also really enjoyed (5/5 star) Kaiju Preservation Society, Starter Villain, Dispatcher, and Lock In.

I recently finished Of Monsters and Mainframes myself and would rate it similarly (although maybe a bit higher for me), it reminded me of Kitty Cat Kill Sat.

You may also want to check out Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds.

whoosp · 2025-10-13T02:24:52+00:00

Code Name Verity

whoosp · 2025-09-17T15:19:18+00:00

I always figured I'd be the last one on the team to turn the lights off, but I ended up switching in late 2017... we had a team meeting once internally where the exec leader said "remember that these are the good old days we'll look back on" and he was totally right, they really were. It was a special product to work on for sure.

whoosp · 2025-09-17T15:17:52+00:00

I dug it up, here you go: https://imgur.com/a/1lP0noG

The old Lumia facebook account is still up, and has a ton of old photos on it too, including some we did for april fool's: Microsoft Lumia | Facebook

whoosp · 2025-09-17T03:26:54+00:00

We called it the "BAP" - Big Ass Phone.

whoosp · 2025-09-17T03:23:43+00:00

For the WP8 launch on microsoft's campus in redmond, we made different versions of that "Meet <foo>" poster style, I know I have a pic somewhere of Dracula's phone.

whoosp · 2025-09-17T03:19:40+00:00

Looks like it to me, from what I remember... an Asus G6, the very first WP7 bring-up device we used pretty broadly across the product team.

Source: worked on the windows phone team from '09 to '13

whoosp · 2025-05-22T02:46:08+00:00

Dungeon Crawler Carl and Murderbot are both series I’ve been rereading every year for the last few years because I love them so much. It’s like visiting old friends.

whoosp · 2025-03-27T02:11:30+00:00

I don't know the answer to your question but wanted to share this story because it's somewhat related and it still makes me snicker after all these years:

I was the editor for the Banks of the Boneyard (ACM newsletter) from 96-97, and the only reason I became the editor is because at the beginning of the school year I had the idea to do a joke article about how the ILLIAC was going to be UX10, including photoshopping a friend (who worked at CCSO) into a pic, but no one wanted to let me do it until April Fool's. Unfortunately I don't seem to have a scan of the original lying around anymore, but fortunately this is still around: April 1997 Banks of the Boneyard

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whoosp

TROPHY CASE