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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Corporate “motivational” nonsense. Leave the woodpile higher, write everything in pencil, drink your most expensive wine first. Some companies base - quite literally - everything on these nonsense blurbs.

    That, and the way many [past] jobs tried to cover up the lack of compensation opportunities and bumps by things like basketball courts, restaurants on “campus” (sigh), goat yoga… I can’t feed my family with a basketball court at the office. I guess I could feed them a yoga goat but I surmise it would be frowned upon.

    Thank goodness for WFH. Never going back.











  • It’s a cat and mouse game to achieve “the best” rewards. It’s made this way on purpose and they change monthly/on a cadence (as you most likely all know). I always look around to research and modify our usage per expenses.

    That said:

    • Amex Platinum for travel (hotels, flights)
    • Chase Freedom for gas (rewards are sometimes targeted)
    • Chase Sapphire for streaming, bills and randoms because I like their points incentive(s)
    • Citi Simplicity for balance transfers, since they tend to target my family for generous offers (like when we had to buy a new living room :/)

    Other than the Citi card, we pay our balances. Our rewards points are pretty built up at this point and we’ll use them for things like vacations, or vacation add-ons, rentals or gift cards for the kiddos.









  • Honest comment with a bit of a question buried in here this novella… I use Google devices; Pixel Pro’s, Pixel watches, Nest hubs, Nest thermostats, etc. This is a understood agreement (not symbiotic) between me and the behemoth that is Alphabet: I pay them for hardware, and use their “free services” that are heavily subsidized by pillaging my data. I know the hardware does it too, and I’m paying.

    I’ve switched most of my networking and cameras to UniFi, my browsers are all Firefox… The question is what’s next? I dislike Apple iPhones but like my wife’s MacBook, but I’m a nerd. All of my devices need to “play nice” in their respective ecosystem. I’m tired of having the inbox app, hangouts, etc only to find Google has grown tired or doesn’t care and scraps them.

    When the iPhone 15 comes out, I was getting the wife that and myself the Pixel 8P. Now I struggle. The “ultra” premium phones (we both care most about camera) are few and defined. I don’t want to jump to Apple, it’s the same thing, just packaged differently. Ugh.