The Story of The Office Space DVD

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Back when I was doing a more operational support role in New York, many years ago, late nights in the office were a regular thing. We’d be doing maintenance on call centre equipment, phone systems, or routers. Later at Thomson Reuters, it might have been after an incident, a big release, or some other late-night work. The difference from today is that back then you were mainly physically in the office. At Partsearch especially, we had to be on site to plug into things and get the work done. At Redcats, we did plenty of late-night releases and I likely had the DVD with me, though I don’t recall ever actually using it there.

When we worked late, it wasn’t all bad. We’d order dinner, build up for the work, and there was a kind of social element to it. Somewhere along the way, I started keeping a DVD or two in my desk. Yes, actual DVDs. No streaming, no downloads. One of them was always Office Space. It just felt appropriate. Not that the movie was really technical, but it resonated. Every now and then, if we had time to kill, we’d put it on and watch together. It became a kind of techie ritual.

When I moved on to Thomson Reuters, the tradition came with me. Office Space lived in my office alongside my work gear. Eventually, we took it a step further and started planning actual movie nights. It wasn’t tied to late-night activities, we planned the movie nights just for the fun of it. We’d grab a conference room, order snacks, and watch something together. For a few months, this became routine: we would wait for those working the shift to finish at 8pm, then we’d grab dinner and head back to watch a movie. The first one, of course, was always Office Space.

Looking back, it was a fun little ritual that made the grind easier. Nowadays, it wouldn’t work the same way. My laptop doesn’t even have a DVD drive, and everything’s streaming so I do not know were that DVD is now.

The Story of Collecting VPS’s

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Back when I was working at Thomson Reuters in New York, maybe eight years ago now, a friend told me about LowEndBox.com and the cheap VPS you could get on subscription. At the time, I was mostly doing my hosting at home, maybe just running this blog, so I filed the info away and didn’t do much with it.

After moving to the UK, I started checking the site periodically, and he wasn’t wrong. They had some wild deals, like a decently powered VPS for under $20 a year if you caught a special. Considering I was used to paying $15 a month for fairly limited hosting, the idea of getting a whole VPS for the cost of one month, but for a full year, was too good to ignore. Most of the big offers came around the holidays such as Black Friday, Christmas, or New Year, but there were deals sprinkled throughout the year too. Eventually, after seeing a Black Friday promotion, I thought: for $20, I waste more on random stuff, why not try this? I grabbed one hosted in the Netherlands and liked it a lot.

That was the start of my little VPS collection. One of them now runs hosting for my blog, set up with YunoHost on Debian. It’s been my favourite self-hosting stack: simple to install WordPress and other apps, stable, easy to back up, restore, and even migrate. I’ve moved my hosting from the Netherlands to Ireland with no real issues.

Since then, I’ve picked up a few more in different places. I’ve got a couple in Texas I’ve been using as VPN endpoints, another one I pay about €8 a month for as a remote node in my backup network with around 2 TB of storage, and a handful of ultra-cheap hosting plans that cost me less than $15 a year. Some of those I don’t even really use anymore, like CPanel hosting for multiple domains, but the VPS setups are still going strong.

At this point I’ve got three or four VPSs running different services, plus a couple of extra hosting plans I may or may not renew when they come up. I’m tempted to add another storage VPS just to play around with Borg backup, though I still keep Resilio running for sync backups. Between the VPN endpoint in the US, my regular hosting, and the backup nodes, I’m definitely collecting VPSs.

Will I pare it down someday? Maybe. But even with all of them, the cost is still half or less than what I used to pay for a single hosting plan ten years ago. Pretty crazy, really.

W Sisters and The Minecraft Experience

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Over the term break before school started, I did a bunch of day trips with the girls. One they were especially excited about was the Minecraft Experience.

They both play Minecraft on their iPads, and one even shares a realm with the other so they can build together. Most of what they do is in creative mode, so this experience was right up their alley. I was curious too. I’ve played Minecraft, but not often. The motion and movement on screen usually gives me a headache, the same way first-person shooters like Halo used to. That’s a whole other story for another time.

The Experience itself is near Canada Water on the Jubilee line. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it turned out to be pretty cool. You’re given these glowing orbs (Bluetooth or NFC, I assume) and as a group you complete tasks to save your village. The first couple of rooms ease you into how the mechanics work. From there, you move through different spaces where the walls and floors themselves are interactive, with lots of projectors, sensors, and some interactive tables thrown in. You use the orb to trigger actions, and it changes colours as you go. The whole thing felt very Minecraft in style.

The girls loved it. It lasted about an hour, which felt a little short given the price, but the experience itself was worth it. The only disappointment was the merchandise shop at the end. Everything was overpriced and nothing really stood out as worth buying. We skipped it and went on to do some shopping, grab lunch, and make a day of it.

Overall, it was a fun trip, something different, and it definitely delivered the Minecraft vibe the girls had hoped for.

Watch Costs are Relative

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I’ve always found it a little funny when people complain about how expensive an Apple Watch is. For me, the cost has never been the barrier to owning one. Right now I’m wearing a Series 10 46mm. It’s not the cheapest watch I own, but it’s close. The actual cheapest is my Seiko SKX007, which I picked up a couple of summers ago as a knock-around watch for the beach.

I bring this up because my Omega Speedmaster X-33 recently needed a battery replacement. While it was at Omega, they called to say it also needed a full service. Not exactly shocking—I bought it in 2006, so it’s pushing 20 years old, and this is only its second service. It’s had a hard life: I wore it daily for years before I started rotating in other watches, and titanium picks up dings easily. At the last two battery changes they even noted “condition poor” on the paperwork, which felt a little insulting if I’m honest.

So yes, I’ll be glad to have it back shiny and refreshed. What I’m less thrilled about is the price of the service. And yet, it’s not surprising. It’s about what I paid the last time I had another Omega serviced. The kicker? The cost of this service was actually more than what I paid for my Apple Watch.

That’s the point, really: watch costs are relative. The X-33 was the most expensive thing I had ever bought when I got it, and I still love it. But the idea that maintaining one watch can cost more than buying a brand-new Apple Watch puts the whole “Apple Watches are too expensive” complaint into perspective. For now, I’ll just be waiting a few weeks while the work gets done and chuckling at the absurdity of it all.

The photo is of a much younger X-33 right after getting a NATO strap for it, since the titanium band was getting beat up too much.

Fast, Cheap, High-quality?

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I’m not sure where I first heard it. One of the high-performance team trainers I worked with back in my implementation days around 2013 must have taught it to me. The saying goes: when you’re delivering something, you can have it fast, cheap, or high-quality. The catch is you only get to pick two. That statement still rings true over 10 years later. I bring it up in conversations all the time, and no one has managed to prove it wrong yet.

The real challenge is that everyone always wants all three. Life is about trade-offs, and this rule makes the trade-offs unavoidable. The hardest part is that people don’t usually want to accept it right away. They only come around once reality sets in.

Maybe someday, maybe even someday soon, AI will make this saying obsolete. But so far, it hasn’t.

W Sister Short on Queen

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Paddington Bear Goggles

A while back, probably just a few years ago, A was in the middle of a tantrum. For reasons only she can explain, M decided the right response was to blast Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Not only that, she sang along at full volume. Somewhere between the guitar and the operatic breakdown, A’s tantrum fizzled out.

Say what you will about parenting techniques, but apparently Freddie Mercury trumps a tantrum. At least A’s taste in music held strong even then.

Building My Own Custom GPTs

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With some downtime on the bank holiday Monday, I finally tackled something I’ve been wanting to do for a while: creating several custom LLMs. I’ve been tinkering with agents for work and figured it was time to apply similar customizations for personal use.

Lately I’ve been bouncing between ChatGPT, Perplexity, Venice.ai, and even the new Proton AI for privacy. ChatGPT now lets you build custom GPTs, so I gave it a try. While we were on holiday, I had jotted down some customization requirements for a handful of GPTs I wanted, and this felt like the right time to build them.

For the past six to eight months, I’ve been planning holidays with different LLMs. The main frustration has been having to restate all my preferences every time I opened a new chat. Starting with a custom GPT just made sense—especially since I’ve got several term breaks to plan for over the next school year. Programming the GPT was straightforward. I haven’t used it to plan a full trip yet, but I’ve got the base built and I’ve started tinkering. High hopes for this one.

I also put together, though haven’t tested, a CISSP study guide helper. I want to sit for the test but don’t have a study buddy, so I figured why not make one?

Then there’s a slightly different use case: a custom GPT for days out with the kids. Same idea as the travel planner, but without flights and hotels—it’s more about what’s going on in London. I’m actively planning a week with the girls now and most of it is set, but I’ll see if this new GPT adds anything useful. The hardest part here was integrating the data I’ve been tracking on a Trello board with all the activities we’ve done or still want to do. I wanted the GPT to be able to use that context, but I’m cautious about sharing too much personal information with ChatGPT. That’s why I also use Venice.ai, which is a privacy-protecting, open-source based AI. Still, I experimented with exporting the Trello data to JSON and importing it into ChatGPT, and after some trial and error I finally got it working. In this case I had to use ChatGPT since I ran into file size limits with Venice.ai.

I’ve got a few more ideas I want to play with, but for now the three or four GPTs I’ve already built will keep me busy. I need to actually use them and see how they perform before I go any further. Early impressions are promising. Even so, as I remind colleagues and my kids, quoting the Doctor from Doctor Who: the AI lies. Don’t ever trust it completely. If you keep questioning it, though, the results can be pretty good.

The Story of T Turning 13

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Today is T’s 13th birthday. She asked for a video from the time she was born. I wasn’t really sure why, but M remembered and we both took videos today at the time that corresponded to when she was born in New York, accounting for the five-hour time difference.

I am not at all ready to be the parent of a teenager. Over the weekend T baked chocolate chip cookies, and as a small reward for making it through the first morning of having a teenager in the house, I had one with my coffee.

W Sister Short and The TV Time Out

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I wrote this one over a year ago in July 2024, however still super cute.

The other day when walking home from school, I reminded the girls that they had less screen time today due to timeout from yesterday. I told them I couldn’t recall the exact quantities so I said let’s call it 10 minutes and 20 minutes respectively. A’s response was yes let’s, and she smiled. She and I both knew that she probably had more time than that, but I didn’t want to guess a much higher number so I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

AMEX Points For A Concord Flight Please

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I’ve had an American Express card since university. My dad used to joke that I was the youngest person he knew with an American Express Gold Card. He gave one to my sister and me for emergencies when he and my mom weren’t around, so we had it pretty young. The only reason it was that card was because that was what he had to supplemental cards to.

After university, I got my own Amex in 1998, and since then, I’ve racked up a lot of Membership Rewards points. Not millions, but hundreds of thousands at least. Back when I was traveling for work, no one cared if you earned points on your personal card for work expences, so I accumulated them pretty quickly.

At first, I didn’t do much with them. But as the balance kept growing, I figured I needed a goal to work toward. A regular plane ticket didn’t seem special enough—though I probably redeemed points for one or two back in the day. Then I saw something in the American Express points catalog that caught my attention: a Concorde flight from New York to London, with a return ticket on British Airways, for 200,000 points.

I’d always wanted to fly the Concorde, but it was way out of reach financially. So, I thought, Why not make that my goal? I was almost there when the Concorde accident happened, and the planes were grounded. With my hopes of flying the Concorde gone, I didn’t know what to do with my points anymore. So, I kept saving them, not realizing that holding onto points is actually one of the worst things you can do. Their value drops over time; you’re better off spending them.

Eventually, I started redeeming points here and there. A few years after the Concorde dream died, I used some to buy M a MacBook. I know merchandise isn’t the best way to redeem points, but I think I got a decent deal on that Apple redemption. Around the same time, we used points to save almost half the cost of our honeymoon. Those two redemptions happened within about a year, but even after that, I still had hundreds of thousands of points—and I kept accumulating more, despite knowing it was a bad idea not to spend them.

Finally, in 2017, I decided to burn through everything I’d built up. Once again, I ignored the “best practices” and spent the points on merchandise. While I could’ve gotten double the value if I’d used them for travel, the item I bought had been on my wishlist for a long time: a really nice watch. So nice, in fact, that the points only covered about half the cost. Even though I didn’t maximize their value, I don’t regret it. The watch was worth it to me.

Since then, I haven’t let points pile up the way I used to.

I’m not sure what triggered the memory of the Concorde, but I made a note to write about it. Taking that flight would have been legendary, but the watch is still a pretty great consolation prize.