We interact with people from numerous Spanish speaking countries as part of an intern program, and the one thing every new group says is how funny each other’s slang sounds to the rest of the group. She might have a rough month or two, but then I think it would be fairly smooth after that.

Very true. If she’s up for the challenge I really want her to do that. I’d love more reasons to go to Spain.

My daughter is about 2 years from graduating high school, and even before Trump came into office I was urging her to consider non-US colleges. Mostly because she wants to go into medicine and our healthcare system has been broken for much longer than I can remember. But also the rise of Fox News (and others) getting away with stating provable lies as fact, Joe Rogan, et al. showed that there has been an inflection point and the country is being led around by the dumbest of us.

She’s fluent in Spanish, though jumping straight into a medical program would introduce a lot of new specialized words, and might be to much. We’re starting to look into options though.

I honestly don’t remember how pervasive the need for a PIN was on the Pixel Watch, but even if it was only for purchases, it would invariably take 10X as long to switch to the Wallet when I was at checkout, or I would fumble hitting the right numbers on the small screen.

With my phone, if I’m not unlocking it with my finger as I pull it from my pocket, I can do it as part of the payment process very easily.

The whole experience of paying with my watch was lacking. If the phone and watch are connected via BT, then I feel like the wallet on the watch should just work without a PIN. Or at most a voice confirmation.

I just sold my Pixel Watch and bought a Withings Scanwatch.

Daily charging is annoying. I stopped using it to pay because then I’d have to set up a PIN, and then type in the PIN every time I want to use it. I’m not without my phone and it’s more convenient to pay with.

I did like the health monitoring features, but the daily charging made it intrusive and another thing I had to actively monitor.

Scanwatch gives me 30 days of battery, all the health tracking, and some basic notifications, which is fine but I’d get it even without that.

Where are the Teamsters these days? I hear they don’t like people messing with their livelihoods.

I’m not always working in the office, and they’ve asked us to connect to VPN only if we need access to the internal network. Email and Teams work without VPN, but now you want me to log in for web access? A browser blocker is better imo.