Matisyahu's Blog

Finished work today at 10pm but I stayed online to finish off some emails to make life easier for the team who come in the morning and have to pick up where I left off. When I worked in fast food (sometimes referred to as ‘quick service restaurant’) one of the rules that was consistent was the idea that you never allowed something to carry over to the next week – always make sure at the end of the week everything is completed so that you start a new week with a clean slate rather than a backlog of things yet to be done. I’m now down to some tins of tomatoes (they’re not my favourite flavour so I am tempted to donate them at the supermarket where they collect tinned goods), I’ll keep the beetroot, chargrilled capsicum and sundried tomatoes since they’ll be good for things like lamb burgers, and two bags (6 bags in each) of frozen steamed vegetables that I can heat up in the microwave.

One thing I am trying is seeing whether I get a good result by soaking chia seeds in milk. Currently I’ve been soaking 1 tablespoon of chia seeds in 120ml of water which really soaks up the water to the point that the greek yoghurt sits on top without sinking into it. I’m going to give it a try with milk because from what I see online it has a pudding like consistency and if that is the case then what I’ll do is buy maybe some flavoured milk then soak the chia seeds in that so then I could have like a chocolate chia pudding.

I’m probably going to stay up tonight because my sleeping pattern is so broken that I think I need to stay up then go to bed at a set time so then my body clock can reset itself. Although I don’t start work until 13:30 I think what I need to do is start pulling back the time that I go to bed at and wake up at so then eventually I can maybe get up at around 11:00-11:30, jump into bed at around 1:30 listening to a podcast and relax for an hour before I go to sleep.

I’ve been looking at the website ‘European Alternatives’ (link) – I’d love to ‘decouple’ myself from Google and the big US based tech players but there are problems. For example, I’d love to switch to The Fairphone (Gen. 6) with /e/OS but the problem is that I don’t want to risk spending something close to NZ$1300 only to find that VoLTE isn’t supported in New Zealand. The other option I guess is to buy a Pixel 9 Pro XL then install grapheneOS on it because I know that the Pixel 9 Pro XL VoLTE works in New Zealand so it isn’t going to be a gamble.

It really is a sad state of affairs that we’ve pretty much got a duopoly of Apple on one side and Google on the other. Oh how I wish for day when there is actually some choice, where services like payments using ones phone divorced from the underlying operating system, where one isn’t forced to sign up for a service just to get the phone setup or if they allow you to set up without an account you quickly realised they’ve deliberately crippled the experience to the point that you eventually give in. I sometimes wonder whether breaking up the big silicon valley companies is the only way to bring about competition and choice. Separate Apple Pay and Google into organisations that are non-profit and work in a neutral way that banks jointly run it like how Payments NZ has members or how in Europe there is the European Payments Initiative being setup an alternative to Visa and Mastercard (in much the same way that there is UnionPay in China. Unfortunately for many people they would sooner sacrifice freedom and choice in the name of convenience and thus the status quo is re-enforced.