Other What Makes Your Life, Meh?

My ex and I finally have a custody agreement in place.

We've been separated two years. To get divorced, we need two things; a custody stipulation and equitable distribution. I've wanted to focus on one thing at a time because when my ex doesn't get exactly what she wants in one place, she'll often try to use it as leverage somewhere else: "I agreed to 50/50 custody, so I should get more money in equitable distribution."

That's not what "fair" or equal looks like. I'm actually a pretty good person. I want things to be fair and equal. My ex is extremely emotionally immature and thinks "fair" is her getting her way. When I insist on something that's actually fair, actually equal, she treats it like I'm being unreasonable. And then I look stubborn because instead of asking for more than half and settling toward the middle, I ask for what's fair from the beginning and then hold my ground and repeat my reasoning over and over again.

Usually, I end up having to say something like, "Well, if you think this is equal, then you can have my half and I'll take yours." She really hates this because it reveals how deeply unfair her offers actually are.

Anyway, after practically a year of negotiation, two court dates, one of which got pushed back, and me having to spell out exactly what I thought was going to happen if it went to court, she agreed to the custody stipulation we had practically a year ago, except for one minor edit to the language to bring it into alignment with the plain-English document we had agreed to prior to sending it to the lawyers to draft up. Yes. One year to fix a tiny part of the wording of the legal document so that it reflected what we had already agreed to.

I'm saying it's "meh" and not "amazing" because my ex is already making it extremely difficult for me to be equally involved in our children's healthcare. This is in opposition to the custody stipulation we just signed. So, I'm already in evidence-gathering mode. This will inevitably end with me suing her for contempt of court. She'll lose as long as I can gather enough evidence. She'll have to pay my legal fees and a fine to the state. If she doesn't shape up after that, I'll have to sue again and will probably ask to be given sole decision making power.

 

I believe the realtor I chose may have committed a GDPR breach (in my favour slightly). I did everything I could to secure a property we viewed locally which we both loved. My partner and I scheduled separate appointments to see it, which gave us a 30-minute slot to talk with the owners and build some rapport. Interestingly, their kids attended the same school where my partner's aunt is the headteacher, and I was able to chat with the guy about football, chatty folks. They mentioned how much they liked their realtor, so I reached out to them and had them come out to do the sale of our house. The guy that came was quite chatty and let slip that they were the ones who outbid us on the last house, though he didn’t say by how much. He did mention it was more than 20k over our offer (the house needed a good bit of work). I chatted to him a bit about how it was on their recommendation we asked them to come value and list our home, hoping it would help us when it came time to close the deal (Put in a good word and that). The house was listed for 100k, with a home report at 110k, and I offered 127k, was out bid.

What was odd was that I received a call from the realtor about the unsuccessful offer instead of my lawyer which is who i normally get the call from, they let me know that it went for 130k. I’m not sure which is more frustrating, knowing I was outbid by a small amount or realizing I was significantly outbid (last time). It’s a cruel system.

The home report for my house is scheduled for tomorrow, and I’ve spent the last two weeks preparing it to be move-in ready to attract first-time buyers, just as it was for us when we had our first kid and needed a place pronto. From the realtor's perspective, the value has increased a good bit, we bought it for 55k, and it’s now worth at least 80k. We’ve been here for seven years and still have about 45k left on the mortgage, which gives us some flexibility if the numbers align for a new house. I’m worried about overpaying for a mediocre area or underpaying for a bad one. I really dislike this balancing act, not something I think I am ever going to master, but I have my fingers and toes crossed something comes up soon, houses round our way are going really quick, so the likely hood is we will go on the market, and it will be up for a few weeks, ending with a closing date.

 

It's WSBK season, and I'd forgotten that Eurosport was being canned, so no more free M-Cycle racing, and I'll be buggered six ways till sunday if I'm paying 30 quid a month to watch it

 

Oof, that’s steep…

 

About the norm for sports subscriptions, and with TNT you would also get MotoGP, but nah it's a slippery slope I'm not even contemplating.

 

Picked up my auction winnings this morning—took a shortcut, slipped on a wet embankment, and ended up covered in mud before work. My fault but not the morning I had planned!

To top it off, the box I was most excited about collecting contained a Powershot G9 and two Ricoh GX100s, no batteries in sight and just one Ricoh charger. Maybe the previous owner (likely deceased) stored them separately for charging, or they were removed deliberately by a vendor to avoid testing, meaning they’re all likely faulty. My money’s safe in parts, but would have been nicer to come away with an opportunity to test them later. Will need to order from Amazon and hope they arrive in good time tomorrow.

All I have now is a sore back...

 

Went on a Teams meeting, to be greeted by another colleague and a customer,

...and one of the Commercial Team's note taking AI.

I don't like that last part. Seems rude.

 

Speaking of deliveries…



No, Yodel. No, I will not download yet another half arsed and badly made app just so I have the privilege of you telling me the vague 2hr window when something might be delivered.

Take your app and shove it where the sun don’t shine. And that goes for everyone ****ing else who intentionally cripples their web functionality in order to railroad me into another ****ing app. You only do it so that you can slither your tendrils right throughout my phone and slime your way over as much of my data as you possibly can. It’s blatantly ****ing transparent and it’s blatantly ****ing ********.

I. do. not. ****ing. need. your. shitty. app.

 

It’s sad to have to say you’re right, about the way the internet has gone downhill. I remember that feeling of having a world of knowledge at your fingertips, when I bought my first PC in 1999 and, got online with a Freeserve disk from Dixons.

 

@Gareth Halfacree, after reading your post above I had a look in settings on DuckDuckGo, my preferred search engine. Helpfully, there is a specific section for AI Features, which I have just turned off. I suspect you are already aware of them...

 

Beware if you clear all cookies on browser exit, the setting won't be saved (unless you have a DDG account and login each time).

 

I don't clear all cookies every exit, the setting is being retained. So far...

 

First anniversary of losing my kitty.

 

On the whole, you're not wrong, and I don't disagree.

But there's a problem here:

I know you're talking in the wider context of "AI", but my problem when it comes to search engines is: they’re all ****.

When it comes to search engines, I've been voting with my wallet (metaphorically speaking) for what feels like many years now. It isn't working, they're just getting worse, and I can't keep pouring time and energy into the fight.

I used DDG for the longest time, but over the last year or so it just hasn’t been finding what I’m looking for despite how many variations of search terms I tried.

I tried Bing… no, I’m sorry, I tried to say that with a straight face without any hint of sarcasm, and.... I just… can’t... . I know, in a way I am using Bing because it’s the back-end for DDG, but "plain" Bing is garbage, always has been.

I tried Kagi, the paid-for search engine. But it gives me either: more AI generated slop than any other search engine I’ve tried, or just plain useless & irrelevant results. I don’t know if it makes a difference that I’m using a “free” account (limited to 100 searches per month) but I’m not going to pay money to them if their free offering can’t entice me.

There’s Brave Search, but with the shady tactics they employ in their browser, there isn’t a hope in hell I’ll use their search engine.

I’ve never used Ecosia, but it’s is a front-end for Google, Bing, and Yahoo! as far as I can tell. Which is ironic considering that Yahoo! these days uses Bing as a back-end. Plus their planet-friendly claims of planting trees don’t hold up to scrutiny: they only "paid for trees to be planted" when you clicked through to their ads (though that might have changed since).

There is a self-hosted project called Whoogle that acts as a front-end to Google and filters out the garbage for you. But Google made changes at the start of this year (blocking non-JavaScript searches or something that I really don't understand the detail of) that basically crippled it. There are some workarounds that seem to be working so far, but the project will always be subject to Google's whims.

There are other projects out there that do a similar thing to Whoogle - which still apparently work - but see the point about Google idly swinging the sword of damocles around.

I can rarely find what I need with DDG these days, so more often than than not I find myself using Google. And while there might be tricks I don’t know about to stop Google shoving their Gemini-powered AI slop in my face, they’re still going to invest billions upon billions into AI hardware (aka Nvidia) whether I use it or not. That hardware is still going to consume an unimaginable amount of power whether I use any of those services or not.